The hurting of him had tired her out, too. She’d begun to think of leaving him, of doing the most decent and honorable thing she’d ever done. She’d agreed to go on this trip, not because of Kenny, but to give herself time. Kenny had simply been another option.
Then she and Farrell had taken a day to themselves, had hiked Ypsilon Mountain, and when she saw him, really saw him, an aching love for him stirred, as if it had awakened from a long slumber and was bringing her to a precipice. Nostalgia churned beneath her skin, and at that moment, she’d thought of Saddle, who’d come to her in the night and led her to this loving man. She thought of her faithful dog, who was at least four or five when she took him in, who knew her better than any person, and had loved her just the same. He’d developed arthritis as he’d gotten older, and eventually developed cancer in his hip. The day she had to put him down, a beautiful, clear-sky morning in May, the vet met her in a field. She’d held Saddle in her arms until his eyes glazed over into a cloudy shade of blue. She had not told Farrell she was taking Saddle that day, and when Farrell called and found out, he came home from work, stayed with her, and held her when she cried. And that night when she couldn’t sleep and went outside to search for Saddle in the stars, Farrell woke and found her. He wrapped Saddle’s blanket around her shoulders and stayed with her until sunrise. And while Farrell had held her, she’d wanted to tell him everything; she’d wanted to come clean. She wanted to believe that he, like Saddle, could love her unconditionally, might even help her find her way back to the person she should have been.
PRU
Colm had reassigned the search teams. They would now cover quadrants from the point of the hat and gun. The area was teeming with operations. In addition to the air search and the electronic frequency detector, another volunteer from Mesa County had brought an infrared scanner to the site. The scanner had proven critical in a search during the summer when a hiker went missing in the Black Canyon near Gunnison. The scanner, being used from a helicopter, had picked up the flicking of a lighter from about a hundred yards away. The hiker had fallen down a ragged incline, sprained his wrist, broken an ankle, and suffered minor scrapes and bruises. But he was alive.
“Alpha One, Command,” Colm called over the radio.
“Command, go ahead,” I said.
“It might be time you looked for a cache,” Colm said.
I asked him to relay some of the coordinates that Glade had given him.
“Heading there now,” I said.
If Amy Raye had shot herself, her body could very well have been dragged off by a lion and concealed. Jeff and I made our way back up to the top of the ridge and then began climbing north. Glade had said the old cache was about twenty yards from the edge of the butte. Within another hour we were in the area.
“You see any feline prints?” I asked Jeff.
“Negative,” he said.
And then maybe a hundred feet from one of the suggested coordinates Glade had given us, we found a cache in a grove of pinyons that backed up to a rocky overhang. After a lion fed on his kill, he’d cover it in a secluded spot, where he could return to feed on the prey for several days.
The cache looked old, maybe a couple of years. The trees and the overhang had buffered the area from the snow.
Jeff knelt and began removing some of the branches and debris the lion had used to cover his kill. I commanded Kona to sit, and then Jeff and I began inspecting the bones. There were a number of large rib bones, a femur, part of a spine.
“They go for the head,” Jeff said. “Or the windpipe.”
I walked around the edge of the cache, my eyes searching the timber every so often for any trace of movement. I knew with a cache this old the lion would have long since moved on to a different area in his home range, but I also knew lion were territorial. Once they’d established themselves as residents of an area, they’d fight other lion to death to protect it.
And then I stopped. “Jeff, over here,” I said.
Jeff stood and walked toward me. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
We were both looking at the leg of a horse, the hoof intact.
“We’re a long way from any of the ranches,” I told him.
“That’s not a ranch horse,” he said. “There’s no iron on the hoof.”
We were looking at the leg of one of the wild horses. “Maybe that’s why I never see the band around here,” I said. “Maybe they got spooked.”
“If there’s a lion around, there’s another cache,” Jeff said.
“Don’t know that we’re going to be able to find it in this weather. Hard to believe we found this one.” And then, “Jeff, what do you think the odds are of a cougar attacking Amy Raye? I don’t know that I can ever recall a lion attacking a person anywhere near these parts,” I said.
“They don’t usually attack horses either,” Jeff said.