Though my fieldwork slowed down in the winter months, I still checked on as many sites as I could, particularly those with rock art, which could be vandalized at any time of year. I’d also make sure whatever cameras we had in place were working and had not been knocked down by wind or covered with snow. At present, we had several surveillance cameras positioned in the Douglas Creek area, including one I had installed at the recently discovered Coos shelter, situated in the southeastern corner of East Douglas Creek Canyon. A two-week excavation of the site was scheduled for the upcoming summer, just enough time for all of the permits to be obtained.
After Joseph and I returned from Boulder, where we’d spent Thanksgiving with my brother and his wife, I decided to spend most of December canvassing some of the areas where a fairly high volume of hunting tags had been sold. This was routine following a hunting season. I’d check on some of the sites in those locations by assessing for damage that might have occurred as a result of foot traffic and off-road vehicles. That first week after Thanksgiving, I was checking out some hunting ground in the West Douglas Creek territory, where over the years the BLM had surveyed several prehistoric astronomical drill hole sites, as well as an ancient lookout tower. The West Douglas range was situated on the western side of Highway 139, an approximately fifty-mile expanse of dry, rocky terrain. Even though the land had less drainage and forests than where we’d searched for Amy Raye, there was still a healthy population of wild game, including antelope, mule deer, and some elk.
The weather was clear that day, and I was enjoying the time away from the office, when Kona and I came across an elk carcass that I guessed to be a couple of years old. The bones had been scattered and broken. I didn’t think much of the whole thing at first. It wasn’t unusual to find the remains of an animal that a hunter had shot and field-dressed. And if the head had been severed, I could be sure the animal had been a bull elk, and that his head was mounted on somebody’s wall. Kona and I walked on a little farther, and about thirty or forty yards west of the carcass, Kona sniffed out a skull that had been dragged beneath the branches of a large serviceberry shrub. My first thought was that the elk had been a female. Cow elks weren’t trophy worthy. But in recent years, a lot of hunters had been taking the heads to the DOW to be tested for chronic wasting disease, a form of mad cow syndrome, which led me to wonder if this carcass was a case of poaching. I knelt to look at the skull. It was definitely weathered enough to be a couple of years old, and CWD inspection wasn’t mandatory these days. Just beneath the left eye socket was a bullet hole. And that was when I got to thinking about our missing hunter. Her number one arrow wasn’t slotted in her quiver. Everything in me believed she had to have gotten a shot the morning she went missing, and if she got a shot, she had to have been tracking the elk when she set down her quiver and bow. Her gun had fired one round. It seemed likely that she’d found the elk she was tracking and put a bullet in him to put him down. I felt certain a carcass was up there, and if we could find the skull, we could match it with the bullet. None of this would bring Amy Raye back, but it would help in giving us a better picture of what might have happened to her. If she had indeed gotten a shot and successfully tracked an elk, she wouldn’t have been able to pack the animal out on her own. She would have gone for help, and as thick into the woods as she was, she could easily have become disoriented and gotten lost. Then if I factored in the harsh weather and her not having her compass with her, I didn’t see any way she could have found her way out of there. I also didn’t see any way she would have made it through the night. And without any body heat, none of the search’s thermal detection devices would have worked.
Before returning to the house, I stopped by the office. It was dark by the time I’d made the hour drive back to town, and most everyone at the BLM had already left for the day. I turned on my computer and opened up my file for the search. I’d made copies of my files and given them to Colm, and I couldn’t be sure what I was looking for, but something was gnawing at me, as if I just needed to be certain I hadn’t missed anything. Throughout the search I had taken pictures of the area as well as of the items and tracks we’d discovered. There were close to sixty photos. I knew I was going to open and zoom in on each one and that could take hours. I walked into the small kitchen, filled a bowl of water for Kona, and made a pot of coffee. Then I called Joseph.
“I think there’s some lasagna in the freezer,” I told him. “I may be a while.”
One by one, I pulled up photos from the search. I zoomed in closely on each image, looked for marking tape, a footprint, anything out of the ordinary. I was tired and both Kona and I were hungry. I’d gone through about twenty-five photos. The rest of the employees had long since left. Kona was lying on his bed by my desk. He raised his head and a moan started up in the back of his throat. Someone was at the front door.
I stood up. Kona followed me to the lobby. There was Joseph standing at the glass door with that grin of his and a plate wrapped in aluminum foil.
I unlocked the door and let him in.