I walked back to the bathroom and filled two cups. When I returned, Colm was sitting on the foot of the bed next to Kona. I handed Colm a coffee and sat on top of the desk, facing him.
“We need to go out farther, expand our probability of area,” I said.
“I was thinking a couple more miles.”
My face settled into a slow smile of acknowledgment. “You didn’t sleep much either.”
“No.”
“Your light was out.”
“So was yours.”
“So, what are your thoughts?”
Colm didn’t waste any time. “We found the truck. We know she is there. We should have a hundred percent probability of area. So, one, she couldn’t find her way back to the truck, panicked, and wandered off in the wrong direction. Two, she spotted an elk, maybe got a shot, traveled too far away from her base and wound up lost. Except if she was an experienced hunter and she was on a blood trail, she would have left marking tape. So she probably didn’t get a shot, or else we haven’t spotted the tape. Three, she got cold.”
“But she had matches.”
“Doesn’t mean she was able to get a fire going. If she got caught up in that rain yesterday, she would have been soaked down to the bone. And that kind of cold can make a person stop thinking straight. People should learn from the animals,” Colm said. “Find a warm spot and hunker down for the night.”
“Maybe she did. Maybe we just didn’t look in the right places.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you give any more thought to the lion?”
“Thought about it,” he said.
“And?”
“That’s another reason I want to expand the search. If a lion got her, Kona should still be able to pick up her scent.”
Colm held his right hand over the top of the cup and was tapping the rim lightly, a gesture I’d seen him do before when he was thinking about something. “I put in a call to Glade,” Colm said. Glade Caswell had spent the summer before surveying the canyon for cliff dwellings. “I wanted to know if he’d seen any old cache sites in the area,” Colm said.
“What’d he say?”
“Said he found a cache northeast of Coal Draw on the top of the bluff, though he thinks it’s pretty old. Found some cattle bones in there. A cow probably wandered off on open range. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were other cache sites. He gave me some coordinates of some other areas to check out.”
“Jeff and I were just up there.”
“I know you were.”
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Suppose our missing hunter isn’t lost. Suppose we got a cougar out there who got to her. I’m thinking we ought to be looking for areas where there might be a cache.”
“Jeff and I can do that,” I said.
“If there’s anything up there, it’s going to be hidden in some pretty steep terrain.”
I moved over to the foot of the bed and sat down, with Kona stretched out between Colm and me. “I’m not one of the volunteers. This is what I do. And Jeff knows this country and has hunted lion on his ranch for years. He’s better than any of the deputies you have.”
Colm’s heavy hand braced my knee for just a second. “I want you to be careful,” he said. “And I want you both to have guns with you. If there’s a fresh cache up there, that cougar’s not going to like you coming around.”
I kept a .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol in my glove compartment. I also had a Ruger Mini-14 patrol rifle and a 12-gauge Remington shotgun in the backseat of my vehicle, and I knew Jeff had a rifle in his truck.
“We’ll bring our guns,” I said.
AMY RAYE
Twenty long minutes passed. Daylight could seem like an eternity away, especially in the cold. Amy Raye’s body began to stiffen. She had to go to the bathroom. She shouldn’t have drunk so much coffee. The morning would probably be long, another four hours in the tree stand if she didn’t get a shot. This was the part she hated. Men had it easy. She slung her bow over a branch, took an empty water bottle with a wide opening from her pack, and lowered her pants to her knees. Supported by the harness, she leaned away from the trunk. She’d done this enough times, and for the most part was good at it, catching the urine in the bottle so as not to mark her spot. She shivered from the cold against her bare skin and the dampness of her clothes. The warm liquid ran onto her hand. She stopped midstream, not wanting to drip onto the stand, all the while cursing her mishap, mouthing the words silently. She screwed the lid onto the bottle, buried it in her pack, and sopped and lathered her hands in elk estrus, the pungent, sweet scent burning her nostrils and lingering in her throat like the residue of a bad taste.