Another hour passed, and then another. She would walk through the entire night if she had to. She had food to eat. She still had water in her reservoir on her pack, and there was plenty of snow to melt to replenish her supply. Again she thought of the barking dog and the coyote. Once more she wondered if she had been wrong. She fought back the weariness creeping into her bones. She continued to call out. The cold air slapped her awake and squeezed the tears from her eyes. And then she recognized the bluffs ahead, the rocky ridge, and on the other side of this cliff was the cave, and she couldn’t believe she had come so far. “Hello! Hello!” Every muscle in her body quivered with fatigue. She could not make it much farther. But the rest of her course would be around this butte and downhill toward the ledge that led into the cave. And then in the moonlight, in that glance of blue light over the white snow, she saw the tracks, the paw prints of a large dog, and beside those, footprints made from the treads of hiking boots.
“Hello! I’m here. Come back.” And as she called out, she followed the tracks that had crossed in front of her path, that looked no different than hers and Saddle’s might have years before, or hers and Moab’s, the Alsatian and husky mix that she and Farrell had adopted. The tracks led around the butte, traveled within two hundred feet of the cave, and then abruptly led away from the shelter, moved in a southwestern direction from the ledge, and disappeared into a copse of pinyon and juniper and serviceberry. “No!” Amy Raye fell to her knees. She stared up toward the entrance of the cave, the opening barely noticeable with the rocks and boughs she had used for protection from the wind and cold, her tracks from the previous day no longer visible, the wind and the snowfall from the early morning hours having removed every trace of her. Moonlight shone upon the cave. There it was. There it had been all along, a silent precipice, as if the heavens had led her to this point to see what might have been, to see every shadow that had become her life. This was her hell, her perfect understanding of how close she had come, of how everything had always existed within her reach. How many times had she bargained and resolved herself to come clean, and yet always there was something larger in her, an absence so powerful, a room so big and vacant, and she would take to the stage in that room, she would seduce the men. She would fill the big, vacant space by acting the part of someone clever or passionate, bold or interesting. And each man she would conquer, each role she would play out, would become her new narrative, and then she would reinvent herself all over again, never really knowing who she had ever been, until the only thing staring back at her was the person she had become. And now the stage had changed, and there were no more supporting cast members. This was it. This was all it had ever been. And her heart cried out in an agonizing wail of pure animal lament. “Come back!” But she didn’t know whether she was crying out to the dog that had led her once more to the cave or to the phantom person whose tracks she had seen, or to herself, or to God. “Come back!” she cried again, her knees sinking deeper into the snow-covered ledge.
PRU