I removed my glove, unbuttoned the cargo pocket on my pants, and reached for my phone. I saw that I had a missed call from Joseph. He had been staying at Corey’s ever since the search began. The call must have come in before I’d left the command station.
“I’m not getting anything,” I said.
“You work this area a lot,” Jeff said. “You ever get a signal?”
“Sometimes up on the bluffs I’ll get a bar or two. Usually I have to drive back to the road and start heading out of the canyons.”
The sound of the helicopter was getting stronger, though as low as we were I still couldn’t spot it.
“We should have checked the pocket on her quiver,” I said. “Looked for her cell phone or a camera.”
I was thinking that if a cell phone or camera hadn’t been in the zipper pocket of the quiver, then there’d be a good chance she had one of the two on her body. Even if they were in her backpack, hopefully the pack was still strapped to her back. The new detection device Colm had mentioned the night before would only be able to identify the subject if she was under snow and if she had some kind of electronic equipment on her that used diodes. Most hunters didn’t wear watches. Didn’t want the unnecessary sound. The experienced hunters would judge the time of day by the angle of light.
“Command, Alpha One,” I said, holding the radio close to my mouth. “Is there a cell phone or digital camera in the subject’s quiver?”
I waited and listened as Colm radioed back and forth with Terry Peterson, the leader of Team Three.
“Negative on a cell phone,” Terry said.
Team Four had been ordered to return the quiver and bow to the command station. Team Three would be proceeding in the direction of Jeff and me.
“You okay?” Jeff asked.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe they’ll find something in this clearing,” he said.
“That’s just it. I’m afraid we won’t like what we find.”
Jeff rolled his chapped lips together. His bushy mustache was flecked with ice. “Answers are better than nothing,” he said.
I thought back to a warm day in early June, when a cool wind from the hills dipped into the valley, and the bed linens, white with patterns of purple lilac, snapped on a clothesline and swelled like a sail. I was eighteen years old. I was lying on the floor of the front porch, staring up at a spiderweb, listening to the sheets, listening to the breeze in the cottonwood trees, watching a struggling fly that was caught in the elegant weave of gossamer. Earlier that day my mother and father had taken off together to get the mail, to pick up grain at the co-op, to check out a parcel of land that was for sale.
A two-hundred-foot dirt driveway wound up to the house, gravel-patched and gullied on the sides. Usually the sound of a vehicle approaching our house was that of an engine gearing down mixed with the subtle crunch of gritty-packed earth and an occasional rock-ping. I smelled the stirred dust almost immediately as my father’s truck sped toward the house. I jackknifed to a sitting position and shielded my eyes.
The truck came to a stop, the engine still running. Dad opened the driver’s-side door, stepped down with his left leg. His right hand gripped the top of the steering wheel. “Prudence, honey, there’s been an accident. There’s been a bad accident. You need to come quick.”
I ran down the steps. I got into the truck, the vinyl seat hot and sticky beneath my palms. “Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“She’s there now. Sweetheart, it’s bad. It’s real bad.”
“Dad, what is it?”
“It’s Brody, sweetheart. Something’s happened to Brody.”
AMY RAYE
Amy Raye spotted drops of blood on saplings within inches of where she had found the arrow. Careful not to step on any recent tracks, she moved forward in an eastward direction as if connecting the dots. Sometimes the blood ran in a thick rivulet down a blade of grass. Other times it filled tiny pools in the ground. The trail led Amy Raye to a steep decline. Elk typically ran downhill to die. Even so, this elk wasn’t giving up.