“I thought you might want some dinner,” he said.
I said something to him about how thoughtful he was, and that, yes, I was starving. He walked with me to my desk and pulled up a chair beside me. I showed him what I was working on. He scrolled through some of the photos while I ate. I asked him about his day.
“Good,” he said.
I kept eating. Then, feeling bad for Kona, I fed him my last couple of bites.
Joseph was studying one of the pictures. “Did you see this?” he asked. His fingers tapped away at the keyboard. He copied a corner of the photo onto the desktop and enlarged the picture. “Is this anything?” He pointed at an image in the upper right corner of the monitor.
I leaned in to have a better look. “I’m not sure. Can you zoom in any closer?”
“This is as good as I can get it,” he said.
Joseph had been able to enlarge the photo enough to capture the upper half of a pinyon and zoom in on what looked like something man-made.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Looks like something metal.”
“Could be a tree stand,” I said. “It’s hard to tell. Might be worth checking out.”
I went back to my notes on the photos and found the location for where the image had been taken, which was less than a mile from where we’d found the truck. “You could be onto something,” I told him.
AMY RAYE
Sometimes as minutes turned to hours and hours turned to days, Amy Raye would think about how simple life could be. She found pleasure in her routines, in the gathering of wood, the collection of snow for her water supply, her daily trek to her cache for meat, and the slow cooking of the meat over the fire. And she found pleasure in the beauty of things, the slant of light at different times throughout the day, the mountain air, the sound of the wind and the sifting snow. Perhaps this was all a preparation for how she would die, up here in this place. There was something almost peaceful in that. Her body would become fodder for the animals. She thought especially of the lion whose tracks she had seen from time to time around the vicinity of the cave, and whose tufts of fur she’d once found snagged on branches when she’d ventured farther from the cave in search for wood and the scarce pinyon nuts and juniper berries.
But nighttime was a different animal. And the lines between death and life blurred, each second stretching out for what felt like eternity as she waited through the darkness for sunlight. And the realization that they had stopped looking for her, that she would never be found, settled into her like a slow encroaching death. And as she stared into the blackness, imagining a drop of water or the wind or a small animal into a family of rats or a lion, as she felt that she was being watched, or that she had seen something—yes, she’d feel certain she had—the stink of her fear and madness would be suffocating, and she’d want to scream and run out of the cave and into the night, but she was not mad enough to do so, and eventually morning would come.
Other times during the day Amy Raye was seized with distress. Though she could now stand and hobble around by relying on a limb that she’d fashioned into a crutch, certain movements or pressures on her left leg still overwhelmed her. Worse were the muscle spasms that had set in. Without any salt or minerals, her electrolytes had dropped fearfully low, and the cramping in her leg sent such intense waves of pain that she thought she would surely black out.
And her supply of food was diminishing. She had been living out of this cave now for six weeks. She had rationed the elk meat as best she could, consuming a little more than a pound each day. She’d found Mormon grass and made tea. She’d gathered small portions of pinyon nuts and had tried to tolerate the bitter juniper berries. But she was sorely feeling the nutritional deficits, and she was losing weight. Already she had tightened her belt a notch and would soon be tightening it another. Her wedding band had become too loose, and so she had switched it to her middle finger. Her left leg had atrophied. More and more she began to fear for her future. At different intervals throughout each day, she would sit at the opening of the cave and call out for help, already knowing there was no one to answer her. She had done the best she could with her misshapen leg, and despite not having enough variety in her diet, she was thankful for the protein the elk had provided her. She’d created her own form of physical therapy to strengthen her arms and her right leg. Using the wall of the cave for support, she would extend her left leg in front of her and perform leg squats. She’d strengthen her triceps by planting her hands behind her and lifting her hips.