I packed a lunch and gathered my things for my trip out in the morning. I was going to be heading into the Coos shelter area. I wanted to check on the camera that I’d placed at the site earlier that fall, and I had something else turning around in my head that I needed to sort out, as well. The camera was triggered by motions and would send digital photos to my computer. Usually those photos didn’t amount to much. They could be triggered by all kinds of small animals. But early one morning a month back, I’d gotten a clear image of an adult cougar. I hadn’t thought too much about it. The East Douglas area was prime territory for a lion. The rock outcroppings, canyons, and thick brush provided excellent stalking cover. And with the healthy population of deer and elk, the area provided the lion with available prey. Though deer tended to flourish where there was thicker escape cover, their diets also consisted of vegetation such as bitterbrush and Gambel oak that was abundant in these parts. Then I got to thinking about the tom we’d taken down nearly ten miles north of the Coos shelter area. Cougars were solitary predators. Recent studies of winter territories showed that a male cougar could occupy an area of up to twenty-five square miles. A female’s territory was smaller, between five and twenty square miles. According to Breton Davies, the sharing of ranges typically only occurred between males and females. He’d explained that males established areas that would overlap with as many female ranges as possible for mating purposes. I could assume that the lion I’d seen at the shelter was either a transient lion, still looking to establish its territory, or a female whose range had overlapped with that of the male Breton had shot.
None of these things mattered a whole lot to me, until one night when Jeff called. He wanted to know if anything else had come of the search. I told him about the elk skull I’d come across and the bullet matching the one Amy Raye would have fired. Then he brought up something he’d been thinking about the past couple of days. Said when he was a kid, he and his brother would visit their uncle in Olathe. Olathe was a farming town in Montrose County, south of Rio Mesa. His uncle had grown corn and in October each year would open a maze where he would charge admission.
“One fall my brother and I took off in one direction of that maze while two of our cousins set out in another. But all Tucker and I seemed to be doing was going in circles. Our uncle had to come in and find us. He said the two of us had kept ending up back at the same spot on account of us both being right-handed. Said people who are right-handed tend to veer right when they are lost, whether in the woods or a big corn maze, ending up in the same area as where they had started.”
After Jeff and I got off the phone, I pulled up a map of East Douglas Creek Canyon on the computer. Amy Raye’s compound bow was for a left-handed person. The elk skull was southeast of the tree stand and the truck. If Amy Raye had been trying to make it back to the truck where she’d left her packing frame, and had veered left, she would have been heading in the direction of a number of some of the pipeline roads and areas of lower elevation. We’d covered that area extensively and should have found some evidence of her. But then I remembered something my dad had brought up when we were visiting over Christmas. Without the direction of the sun as a compass, a person’s natural instinct is to think that if she is heading downhill, she is moving southward, and if she is climbing uphill, she’s moving northward on the map. “Think about it,” Dad had said. “We consider south as low and north as high.”
“It’s true,” Greg said. “It’s conditioned in our brains. We see it on every map we look at.”
I told them that according to weather reports, the cloud cover had been thick that day with heavy winds and snowfall late in the afternoon. Amy Raye could very well have been in a whiteout for all we knew.
She had tracked the elk downhill, traveling northeast and moving into a gulch toward Big Ridge. With a snowstorm, she could easily have gotten turned around. I thought of the area where I’d found the elk skull and rib bones. If she’d continued east, or if she’d traveled directly south, she would have been climbing in elevation. She could have thought she was heading back to the truck. Then, if I added the dominant-handed theory, she would have been far out of our search radius and thick in the middle of Cathedral Bluffs. I’d hiked into the Bluffs just before Christmas to check out a couple of sites we planned to survey sometime that spring, but I hadn’t seen any disturbance. However, I came across cougar rakings on a tree. And at one point on the hike, something had gotten Kona going. I’d thought he’d seen a deer or a coyote and was getting himself worked up for a good chase. Looking back, I wondered if maybe he’d picked up on the cougar, if maybe we were being watched.
When Breton took down the big tom, Colm and I had thought we could rule out a lion from contributing to Amy Raye’s disappearance. Now I wasn’t so sure. Though I knew it wasn’t unlikely that a lion might have discovered Amy Raye’s remains, I was cautious to think one would have attacked her. Still, I couldn’t shake what Aaron and Kenny had told Colm about Amy Raye covering herself in elk estrus before a hunt, and more than once Breton had reminded us of lion relying on their scent rather than their vision.