When she was finished with the splints, she untied her left boot and removed the laces. She winced at the thought of taking off her boot, which was already too tight because of the swelling, though she felt certain the compression had been a good thing. As if jumping into a cold pool, she counted to three, and then worked the boot off from the heel, and when she did, she yelled out in pain, her breathing shallow, like the panting of a wary dog. She picked up her knife and made a cut through the hem of her pants and along the inseam up to her knee. She put down the knife and, using both hands, ripped the tear the rest of the way up her thigh. She pulled the fabric aside and, still wearing her long underwear, placed the splints on each side of her leg. And the sight of just how badly broken her ankle was, how misaligned it was with the two pieces of wood, caused a deep intake of air that she held in her lungs. She ran her hand over the area where her leg should have been straight, then realized she should be thankful that the bone had not penetrated the skin, otherwise placing her at risk of infection.
She winced at the thought of running the webbing around the bottom of her foot and securing it to the splints. The pain was too severe for her to manage any leverage, and yet she knew she had no choice. She held the webbing on both sides, looped it over the bottom of her foot, pulled the webbing as tightly as she could manage, yelling out as she did so and fighting the nausea that clung to her skin in a cold film of sweat. She wrapped the webbing securely around the splints. When she was finished, she pulled down her pant leg and tucked the loose fabric beneath the edges of the nylon strapping. She was breathing too rapidly. She knew she was hyperventilating. She lay back and imagined labor, tried to remember how she had gotten through it. Tried to remember the focus. She looked at the cave wall, stared at the perfectly drawn claw markings of a bear’s paw, fixed her eyes and thoughts so intently on that paw print as if her mind was no longer a part of her body. And in that moment she was there, in the hot bathwater where the nurses had left her, her back pressed against the white tub, her toes pressed against the porcelain at the other end, her eyes penetrating the tiny crack in the tile above the spout, looking deeply into that crack. And somewhere there was Farrell, his voice saying things she could not comprehend, his breath smelling of onions and milk that had expired. And hadn’t it all been worth it, when the nurses returned and one of them said Amy Raye was ready, and the two nurses and Farrell carried Amy Raye into the delivery room and laid her on a table and told her to push. And from there everything went quickly, because she pushed two more times and then she heard her son’s cries, and Farrell was beside her, and his breath smelled of warm milk and honey. She kissed Farrell deeply. She kissed the soft spot on Trevor’s head, and she cried from the sheer joy of it all because she believed she had been given a second chance.
PRU
Three days after taking Hank Ruckman and Breton to the lion cache, Colm called. Joseph and I had just finished dinner and were clearing the table.
“We got him,” Colm said.
I set a plate down on the counter.
“What is it?” Joseph asked. But I shook my head as I waited for Colm to continue.
Breton had tracked the lion all day Monday. Late in the afternoon on Tuesday, the dogs treed the big tom in a pinyon about a mile from the old cache. Breton made a clean shot, strapped the lion onto his mule, and brought it in. The DOW had the animal. Colm said a technician with the department would be running tests on the lion’s stomach contents.
The next morning, I met Colm at the DOW. The technician had found traces of elk and deer in the lion’s stomach and intestinal tract.
“What about any human cells, or any clothing?” Colm asked.
“That’s where it gets interesting.” The technician wanted to show us something, and so we followed her to the lab, a large room behind some partitioned offices. She had Colm and me take turns looking through a microscope at a slide.
“Looks like threads of clothing,” I said.
She removed the slide and inserted another. On the second slide, we weren’t just looking at threads, but a small piece of fabric, the color of dark crimson.
“It’s not human,” the technician said. “The blood on the fabric matches the traces of blood from the elk matter.” She went on to tell us that the fabric was synthetic. “It looks like cotton, but it’s actually stronger and lighter than cotton.”
“Could it be from a game bag?” I asked.
“I think so,” the technician said. “I have to run some more tests to be sure.”
I looked at Colm. “Kenny and Aaron packed all of their meat out of there,” I said.
“How fresh are these samples?” Colm asked the woman.
“They’re fresh. No more than five days.”
“There could have been other hunting parties,” Colm said to me, no doubt reading my mind.
“Not since the search,” I reminded him. “We found her bow. We found her quiver. There was an arrow missing. What if she got a shot?”
“And bagged this thing alone? Goddamn elk weighs over eight hundred pounds.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time a woman quartered an elk by herself,” I said.
“And how did she plan on hauling it out of there?”
I knew Colm was right. An elk quarter could weigh up to eighty pounds, and Amy Raye didn’t have a horse or a mule to pack it out. And then that sinking feeling. In my eight years working search and rescue, this was the first time we hadn’t found the missing person, or at least found the subject’s remains within a week of the initial report.
Colm walked me out to my vehicle.
“It’s weird, you know. I feel disappointed. That’s wrong, Colm. It’s like I’d rather have answers than the hope that she’s alive.”