by Bart Paul
“What’re you thinking?” he said.
“Maybe you could take the string to the Forest Service camp, and I’ll ride back to the pack station, get my pickup, and drive these ginks to the sheriff’s office. The trail crew’ll help you unload. I don’t see any other way.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for the kid and holler and stuff,” he said. “And I’ll keep watch on the crick—you know—just in case.”
“Yeah. Just in case.” I looked to the woman. “What’s her name?”
The man and woman looked at each other.
“Kay …” the woman said. “Kay … leeana.”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “Kayleeana.”
I told the folks to head down the canyon and always stay on the trail. I told them what Harvey and I would be doing and to look sharp for my truck. I tied my string in behind Harvey’s, and he headed off up the trail. I got on my horse and saw the dad flick his cigarette into the saplings.
“Best pick that up.”
“Sorry, mister,” he said. “I wasn’t thinkin’.”
“Just stick to the trail and keep shouting her name. I’ll be back up before you know it.”
“Will you be bringing one of them dogs?” he said.
“I don’t think we’re there yet.”
I broke my horse into a high trot winding through the aspen, listening to the man and woman behind me shouting for a girl they couldn’t see, their voices fading as I rode. I didn’t dare take a backward look. As scared as they must’ve been, those two just chapped my hide. I cleared the trees then really busted that horse loose, but I couldn’t get that kid out of my mind.
CHAPTER TWO
This was sure as hell not how I wanted to start my first season as a wilderness outfitting tycoon.
“How could they just lose a little girl?” Sarah said. She was sitting in the sun outside the cabin nursing and watching me carry my saddle up from the corral. She looked golden. Lorena looked amped and happy to see me.
“They’re a pretty shaky-looking pair.” I stood close and let Lorena take my finger for a second, then get back to nursing. “These little rascals are so damn fragile …”
“When you get the parents here, I can drive them into town if you want to head back up the canyon and keep looking,” Sarah said. “In case they haven’t found the child yet.”
“I’d feel better doing that. And I gotta catch up with Harvey if I can. Don’t want to let him do all the work. I’d never hear the end of it.”
She held a hand out and I took it. “It’ll be okay, babe. That child can’t have gone far.”
“Unless she fell into the creek or busted something.”
Sarah gave kind of a shudder. I kissed both my beauties and climbed into my pickup and rolled on up the canyon. The Forest Service didn’t want motor vehicles past the pack station, so they didn’t maintain the old wagon road. Washouts from heavy runoff over the years had me in four-wheel drive pretty quick. Once the road separated from the creek, the track flattened out and was easy traveling for a time, but dusty. Finally, ahead in the distance I could see the couple sitting under some tamarack by the creek at the bottom of the first meadow. They stood up when they heard me. They hadn’t come all that far and looked like they didn’t know a care in this world. I stopped about twenty feet from them and opened the cab door.
“No sign?”
“No,” the woman said, “I’m just beside myself.”
The man watched my truck as I turned it around. I’d had that old Dodge Ram almost as long as I’d had a driver’s license, but maybe he was expecting something more high-end. The woman climbed in and scooted over close to me, panting. Her breath was hot and rotten, and I moved to give her more room. I obviously hadn’t thought this part through. The guy touched a couple of spots on the front panel before he followed her into the cab.
“I’m Tommy Smith.”
“Chrystal Dawn,” the woman said. She grabbed my hand and shook it. Hers was sticky and damp. “We just can’t thank you enough.”
“We haven’t found her yet—but we will.” I turned to the guy. “So, you’d be Mister Dawn?”
He gave me a sour look but stuck out his hand. “Cody Davis,” he said. “Are those bullet holes? Under the bondo and primer it looks like you got some bullet holes.”
His hand was skinny and cold.
“Yeah. I need to get it painted.”
“Was it somebody shooting at you?” he said.
“Nope.”
I wasn’t about to explain that my wife’s ex-husband had tried to kill me the year before, and had come damn close.
“Probably just some kids or drunks when I left it untended for a couple of days up at the trailhead. It’s so beat-up, they probably thought it was abandoned.”
The guy asked a lot of questions. Some of them were about the ins-and-outs of the whole search and rescue thing. Some weren’t.
“That where you folks parked? The trailhead?”
“We parked by a bridge below the campground,” he said.
“You’ve had a hell of a walk.”
The guy only nodded and off we went. I waited a few seconds just to be polite, then fired up the AC and rolled down my window, both.
After a bit the woman gave a big sigh. “Our poor little girl.”
“She ever disappear before?”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “The kid don’t mind real good. And she’s got a mouth on her.”
“That when you give her the hot sauce?”
The woman laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “That stuff shuts her up quick.”
We pulled into the pack station in another thirty minutes.
“What’s going on?” the guy said.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s with the sheriffs?” he said. He leaned his face close to the windshield, watching Sarah trot down the cabin steps toward her truck. She was in uniform.
“That’s my wife. She’s a Frémont County deputy. She’ll be driving you guys into Paiute Meadows, and she’ll start the ball with County Search and Rescue. The quicker you do that, the better outcome this thing’ll have.”
“Is she the one who gets the dog?” he said. “The search dog?”
“Nope.”
The woman started sniffling. Sarah gave me a wave as she trotted back up the steps into the cabin. I pulled up next to my mom’s Mustang.
“Nice ride,” the guy said.
“It’s my mother’s. She’s here to babysit while my wife takes you folks to town.”
The woman fiddled with her phone. “I don’t get no service. How could she—”
“Sheriff’s radio.”
“What’ll you be doing, then?” the guy said, “when we’re at the sheriff’s?”
“Looking for your girl, I expect.”
I left the pair of them and jogged up to the house to say hi to Mom and brief Sarah about the two drifters standing out by my truck. Mom started to tell me all about her boyfriend, Burt, and Sarah’s dad, Dave, and their trip to the stock sale in Fallon the day before, and how content she and Burt were to be living and working on Dave’s ranch in Shoshone Valley, and how crazy she was about the whole new grandmother business, and how the turn all our lives had taken in the last year was just meant to be. I broke in to talk about the missing kid.
“I just can’t imagine what they must be feeling,” Mom said. “Where are the parents from?”
“Hunger.”
“Tommy,” she said, sharp as could be. “Those people must be going through hell. You be kind.”
We stepped back outside, and I introduced the pair to Sarah. The woman asked for a bathroom. Before Sarah could point her to our cabin, I directed her to the outhouse along the corral fence. She came out a couple of minutes later making a face. Sarah piled them into her new Silverado, and off they went through the trees and down the canyon toward town. Mom carried Lorena and some sandwiches and followed me over to the corral while I caught another horse. I picked a young sorrel gel
ding I’d started for Dave Cathcart before I signed up for my third tour. It’d been Dave’s surprise for Sarah. Then she’d given him to me when we got married, and now he was my go-to guy. My saddle pockets were full of sandwiches, jerky, a riflescope, and a flask. I snapped on a cantlebag with a sheriff’s radio and a good army flashlight and a first-aid kit, then buckled on my chinks with my skinning knife hanging on the belt. I didn’t know what I’d find or how long I’d be.
I broke the sorrel into a long trot over the first rough ground, then hit an easy lope for big stretches when the road was good, raising a fair bit of dust as I went. I was crossing the lower meadow for the fifth time that day, and it was barely past noon. I checked for tracks in the ditch crossings and the seeps from artesian springs. The day was just as pretty as when Harvey and I’d passed earlier, but now when I scanned the green grass and patches of yellow monkey flower it was for something hidden in the low spots that didn’t belong.
The trail through the aspen between the meadows was damp and the black earth soft. Before there were years of drought, there were years of floods. The rains came and changed the course of the small streams running off the canyonsides, and the floods they caused took down stands of aspen and left them tangled in the bogs and mud and left the mud impossible to pass. The ranchers and the Forest Service worked to gather the streams and put them back in their beds, but the rocks and brush and downed aspen trunks snarled the trail from meadow to meadow and waited for the shovel and the chainsaw.
Picking my way through the flood debris, I could see the horse tracks and mule tracks Harvey had left that morning after he and I split up. I could see tracks of cheap shoes not made for hiking, heading down-canyon, too, but nothing of the girl until I was almost to the drift fence at the bottom of the second meadow. There, where she must have stepped away from the trail to examine something on the dry ground, I saw a single print from her ratty high-tops. The track was clear and crisp, and I could see every cut and contour of that little shoe in the dust. An afternoon wind would scatter that print soon enough, so for now I was looking at all that the child had left behind.
I got off my horse and hunkered low for a closer look. Then I led the horse through the drift fence gate, got back on, and kept riding. I should be seeing Harvey soon enough.
There’s a stand of tamarack that sits like an island in the middle of the upper meadow of Aspen Canyon. I rode to its edge and circled it. I knew from memory that a person could sit under those trees where little grass grew and look out at the meadow and see somebody riding by on the trail but not be seen by the rider if they were still enough and quiet enough. I rode into the trees and looked back out from where I’d come. A bird circled, but this time it was no eagle. It was a buzzard, two of them actually, and they were cruising a spot nearer the creek where it flowed through thick pine along the south side of the canyon. All morning I’d been thinking how a person could get lost in that deep timber. I rode slow out of that island of trees and across the meadow grass to where the buzzards dipped and flapped in the shifting currents. I rode a bit more, then stopped and watched, letting the sorrel stand. I could see a dark patch on the grass, and movement. I let my eyes focus on the spot and could tell pretty soon it was more birds, ravens it looked like, and they were making the buzzards keep their distance. I rode closer, ready for the worst, my eyes on a lone buzzard watching the ravens from the ground, its wings spread motionless, cooling them in the afternoon air. When I got about sixty feet off, I could see the birds were working on a dead calf, one belonging to my parents’ old friend Becky Tyree who ran cattle here on a Forest Service permit. I rode close then, shouting the birds away, and checked the brand and ear tag number so I could let Becky and her son, Dan, know which cow had lost this calf. It was the least I could do for that woman. She was the one who’d deeded Sarah and me the forty acres of the pack station site as a wedding present, giving me my past and my future both at once.
I got a whiff of Harvey’s cigarette before I saw him coming towards me out of the aspen. I rode past the island of trees and waited for him, relieved as hell I didn’t have to tend to the body of a child.
I got off to stretch, looking at something Harvey had draped over his saddle fork. When he got closer, he held it up. It was the girl’s jacket, the one with the worn-out Little Mermaid smiling on the back.
“This belong to that kid?” he said.
“Yeah. Where’d you find it?”
“Up past the Roughs in them boggy trees.”
He described a place I recognized well, where the trail narrowed close against a vertical granite wall on the right and a scattering of boggy deadfall tamarack on the left, and where a stunted tamarack grew out of a cleft in the granite and hung over the trail.
“How the hell did that little girl get so far so fast?”
“I just don’t see it,” Harvey said. “The Roughs’d be a bitch for a kid to cross on foot. All that damn loose shale?”
I asked him how the drop went with the Forest Service. I said if he could get down-canyon with our string and wait for Sarah to come back and direct the search and rescue folks, I’d stay up-canyon and poke around looking for the girl. I told myself I knew Aspen Canyon as well as anybody, so the best use of my time would be to stay and search. Truth be told, I didn’t much want to be around the parents, as I was already blaming them for being so careless. Harvey held up the kid’s jacket.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he said.
“Give it to Sarah and don’t let the parents mess with it. If we don’t find that girl by dark …”
Harvey waited for me to finish. I didn’t say anything more.
“You were gonna say you want to let Jack Harney’s search dog take a crack at it?” he said.
“I wasn’t going to say anything. We’ll have done all we can do. It’s none of my affair.”
I gave Harvey one of my mom’s sandwiches, and we went our separate ways.
Above the second meadow but before the Roughs, there was a small stretch of grass, some springs, and a big broken granite outcrop with aspen around the foot. Locals called it the Blue Rock. I got off my horse there and hobbled him to graze while I ate a sandwich and had a pull from my flask. Then I poked around. The creek was close, so I could cover the ground from rock to water pretty carefully but there was no trace of that kid’s little high-tops. Beaver dams and drowned trees along the creek below Blue Rock had turned the ground there boggy and pretty much impassable. I didn’t figure even a city kid would be crazy enough to wander into all that. What I did see along the trail was the knobby tread of a dirt bike. The tracks probably had nothing to do with the girl vanishing, except that motorized vehicles were supposed to be as scarce in the canyon as missing kids.
I got mounted and rode over that canyon again, somehow knowing I wasn’t seeing what I needed to see. I picked my way on the trail that led through the granite scattered at the foot of the slope, then over the Roughs, going slow on the loose shale I’d ridden over a hundred times, the sound those broken sheets of rock make as it shifts and slides under your horse’s hooves always a surprise when you haven’t heard it for a while. When I was a kid working for Harvey and first led strings of mules over, I was proud of how careful I was and happy to be paid like a grownup doing a man’s work. That seemed like a lifetime ago, just prideful bullshit on my part when a scared girl was lost with evening coming on. I rode as far as the narrow trail and the cleft rock, then a bit farther, almost as far as the Forest Service trail camp. Sarah would be radioing them soon about the child if she hadn’t already, so they’d be the western perimeter of the search. Without the jacket that Harvey found there, that child would have a bitter night. I told myself again that the spot those drifters got themselves in was their lookout and none of mine. Still, the talk of a search and rescue dog didn’t seem so crazy.
The first chopper circled overhead in the midafternoon. I’d heard it down the canyon, probably dropping search crew volunteers. I was riding back
down-trail on the Roughs when it passed over. I waved my hat and shook my head. That the searchers were fanning out told me that none of us was having any luck.
I ran into half a dozen folks by the time I got to the meadows, mostly people I recognized—volunteers who knew that canyon well. This early in the hunt they were still optimistic, but we all knew we were racing sundown.
I crossed and recrossed the canyon. Meadow and aspen and tamarack, boulders and willows and creek shallows, they gave me no sign at all. In another hour, my horse and I had picked our way up through rock and sage to a spot high on the north slope. I loosened my cinch, hung my bridle on the saddle horn, and parked myself in the crushed granite. The horse munched the ricegrass tufts that grew amongst the sage, switching his tail at the deer flies while I studied the stretch of canyon bottom, both bare-eyed and through my riflescope. It was an intricate landscape that never looked the same way twice, and it told me nothing. Just sitting there, I could see long stretches of thick brush and timber and tumbles of granite that could hide a thousand kids. It made me think of Harvey’s cockamamie story of the dead Spaniard in the cave. If there was such a place, those lonesome brushy stretches could hide it well enough. Cowboys for a hundred fifty years, myself included, had hunted stock through there, but only for a couple dozen days each summer and fall, and usually just nibbling at the edges of the hard-to-get-to places. One way or another, most folks stay close to the trail or in open country.
I heard the far-off four-wheelers of the county search crews. I saw a pair of volunteers, all shorts and water bottles, pushing their way through wild currant bushes and armpit-high aspen saplings and could hear them talking as they passed up-canyon not more than thirty yards below me. These two hadn’t found any sign, but then they hadn’t noticed me and my big red horse, either. I went back to studying the canyon bottoms one more time.
I got back to the pack station well after dark, riding the last few miles under a setting quarter moon and passing the shouts and flashlights of searchers on foot. I avoided them so I wouldn’t have to talk about the child and the odds she had of surviving. Sarah was back from town but still on the county’s time. I watched her checking with each of the remaining volunteers, the stragglers passing by the corrals in the dark, her calm face lit by their headlamps. My mom had her hands full quieting a cranky baby. Harvey and May cooked us all a tri-tip with potatoes and onions at the fire pit. Dinner was quiet and glum. Sarah joined us after a bit.