And she must have slept, because when she awoke, the cave was dark, and the fire was only embers. She blew on the embers and stoked them until the flame reignited. Then she added more wood. She wondered how long the fire had been out, and she recognized how warm the cave had remained. She had found a good shelter. The snow in the bags had melted. She would need to get more. But she was so tired, and she was weak. She lay back again. This time she did not close her eyes. She watched the fire’s glow dance across the four-foot-high ceiling above her, dance around the cave walls. She sat up and added a larger piece of wood to the flame so that it would burn brighter, so that she could see better. There was something on the walls. She inched her way the few feet toward the wall in front of her. Painted in white and some red were pictographs. Other people had been here before her, and she felt comfort in that. Across the wall were swooping curves that resembled white birds. Another picture looked to be of a bighorn sheep with an oversized rectangular body. On the back wall of the cave were four prints of small hands, as if made by children, and Amy Raye wondered if a family had occupied this site. The dirt floor was softer toward the back of the cave, and the walls were warm from the fire.
Though her legs remained outstretched because of her ankle, she curled her body into a fetal position and laid her head on the fine sand beneath her. She thought of her children, of Julia’s hands and Trevor’s. She pressed her palm against the small prints on the wall beside her, imagined crawling on the bed with her sweet boy, Trevor, wrapping her arms around him while he slept. Imagined smoothing his soft brown hair and kissing his forehead, damp with sweat and the Dove soap from his bath. She’d pick up Chomper, his stuffed tiger, whom Trevor would bring to bed each night and inevitably push away as he slept. She’d reposition the tiger beside him. Then she’d go to Julia’s room, her lively, spirited stepdaughter, who slept on top of the covers, because even at twelve years old, she hated for anything to confine her. She’d be on her stomach, sprawled on top of the bed, arms spread out, her dark blond hair falling in waves over her shoulders and across her face. Amy Raye would kneel against Julia’s bed, careful not to wake her, hold her small hand, kiss her fingers, the sparkly purple polish on her nails having chipped away at the ends, her oversized T-shirt from one of the concerts Julia had gone to with her dad pushed up above her knees. Amy Raye would close the book Julia would have been reading, would reach over and turn off the small clip-on light on the corner of Julia’s headboard. She’d kiss her stepdaughter good night. She’d tell her she loved her. And she’d tell her to be brave. She’d tell her that when the right man comes along—someone as good and decent and caring as her father, the kind of man who would hold her when she called out in her sleep because she’d dreamed of dark places and dangerous people, who would look into her eyes when he said hello and tell her he loved her when he said good-bye, who would kiss her good morning and kiss her good night, and tell her she was brave when she felt weak—to have the courage to love that man, and to go on loving him for the rest of her life.
PRU
I met Colm and Hank Ruckman, and the government trapper Breton Davies, at the compressor station. It was a Sunday morning, two days after the search had been called off. The snow had stopped falling sometime in the early hours. The sun was out and the roads were clear. But the clear skies had also brought on colder temperatures with a windchill near zero. Colm left his vehicle at the compressor station and rode with me. Hank and Breton followed.
“CBI report came back,” Colm told me. “The hat was hers, just as we figured. The hair and the blood matched. But the blood wasn’t from a gunshot. There were tree fibers along the tear. She had to have hit her head. Could have been running from something. Could have fallen down.”
“Any traces of saliva? Anything that could connect the hat to a lion?”
“Fortunately, no,” Colm said.
“And the gun?” I asked.
“We’re still waiting. Should have something in a day or two.”
Because of the snow, we didn’t get far. We stopped our vehicles a little over a mile into the canyon and hiked the rest of the way. We’d each brought snowshoes. We fastened them onto our boots and climbed the hill in front of us. But the terrain soon became too rocky, and we took off our snowshoes and strapped them to our packs. I’d worked up a good sweat. I knew the others had as well; Hank had said something about needing to get in better shape. At least two hours passed before we made it to the clearing where we’d found the gun, and over the course of those two hours, we’d all fallen several times; the snow was up to our waists in spots where the accumulation hadn’t packed down. Breton found lion tracks and claw marks on the trees. From the size of the tracks, almost five inches wide, Breton said we were looking at a big tom, probably seven feet long, maybe one hundred fifty pounds. I’d brought Kona with us and had reacquainted him with Amy Raye’s scent, again using the mittens, which Colm had brought with him. But Kona didn’t pick up anything this time.
Then late that afternoon in a rocky outcropping, a good seventy feet or more from where we’d found the hat, Breton came across what he thought looked like a cache. “Over here,” he said.
Hidden in the rocks were some loose branches mixed in with snow. Breton cleared away some of the debris and brushed away the snow, and as he did, he exposed an elk leg.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Colm said.
Hank and Breton examined the bone. I removed my phone from the cargo pocket on my pants and took a couple of pictures. “How did we miss this?” I said.
“The same way we almost missed it,” Breton said. “A cougar camouflages its cache well. And then there was all the snow you had to contend with.”