Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  “Command. Go ahead, Alpha One.”

  “We’ve found a Hoyt compound bow and a camouflage quiver. There’s an arrow missing. It could be that she got a shot and was tracking the elk. You may want to check with the other hunters to see if she’d taken a shot earlier in the week.”

  “They didn’t mention it, but I’ll check in with them again,” Colm said. “And we’ve got the pilot on his way. He should be at your location shortly. One of the volunteers from Mesa County is with him. They’ll be canvassing the whole area using the electronic device.”

  I went on to describe the impressions in the snow and gave Colm the site’s GPS coordinates. “And, Colm, Kona’s picking up something. We’ve got a trail.”

  “I’m going to send all other teams in your direction. Let Kona keep working the area. Report back if you see any other sign of the subject.”

  “We’re on it,” I said.

  AMY RAYE

  Cold danced up and down Amy Raye’s skin. She sat on her hands, bounced her legs, wiggled her stiff toes. Then rain, light splatters at first, barely finding the ground through the trees. She felt certain it was still too early to track the elk, but she couldn’t risk losing the blood trail. She lowered her bow with the nylon rope, fastened her pack over her shoulders, and climbed down. Then she stepped out of the tree stand harness, stored it, and repositioned her pack.

  She walked to the exposed rock that she’d sighted, the air settling over her with the color of steel wool. She searched the tall, wet grass for traces of blood. Finding nothing, she extended her radius from the rock, her back bent over the ground, her fingers combing the long blades. Still nothing.

  She replayed the sound in her head, the whack of the arrow. Had it indeed made impact? Could it have struck a tree? A limb? Perhaps she hadn’t cleared the opening in the branches. Maybe the arrow had ricocheted. She walked back to the tree stand, searched the pinyons and junipers that stood in front of it, looked through their branches for the red fletchings of her arrow, inspected the surrounding ground. She had to have made impact. But the longer she went without sighting any blood, the more baffled she became. She returned to the rock. The rain fell harder. Cold water leaked through her clothes, dripped from the edge of her hat. She’d left her rain gear back at the camp, so she moved on, extending her search eastward into the timber and across a shallow creek bed, cratered by fresh elk prints both coming and going. She followed the receding tracks.

  The rain continued to fall, seeping through the trees. Amy Raye kept going. Farther from the creek, fresh croppings of Gambel oak had taken hold, sprouts of tiny leaves still holding their autumn color, dabs of red that resembled blood. She inspected each one, surveyed the area around her. She spotted red, wedged on a branch of a pinyon. As she approached it, she recognized the fletching. The arrow had collided with the tree and dislodged from the elk, as so often happened when an elk charged through the woods. The broadhead had made impact, was fully expanded. A good six inches or more of the arrow shaft was covered in pink, frothy blood. The arrow had punctured a lung. Maybe two. With only one lung punctured, an elk could run so far that he would be difficult or impossible to recover.

  —

  Only one time before had she not recovered the animal, a two-point buck. And sometimes even now she let herself wonder how her life might have worked itself out had she and her grandfather found the animal on that October afternoon and made the hike back down to the farm before supper, before darkness fell and bad things happened. She was just shy of thirteen.

  Both her parents worked on the weekends—her mother as a librarian assistant, and her father as a state patrolman. Every Saturday he would drop Amy Raye off for the weekend at her grandparents’ farm, about three miles south from the downtown of Lynchburg, Tennessee, where they lived. She would help with the chores, anything that needed getting done, from shoveling out the manure in the barn to pulling weeds in the driveway and gardens. She’d hike the game trails on the Highland Rim, swim in the pond. And on a lot of those weekends, her cousins Nan and Lionel would be there. Nan was a year older than Amy Raye. Lionel, Nan’s brother, was two years older than Nan. These three had grown up together, working hard in the heat, skinny-dipping at the end of the day, riding bareback and laughing about the way it made them feel between the legs. Behind the barn was a basketball hoop. When the girls were too small to make a basket on their own, they’d take turns climbing onto Lionel’s shoulders, and would see which one could make the most hoops. Lionel was always a foot taller than Nan. By the time Nan was fourteen, Lionel was well over six feet and playing varsity.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. Amy Raye’s grandfather had said he’d been watching a young buck feeding up on the plateau. “He’s just the right size for you,” her grandfather had told her. Amy Raye had been given a .243 Winchester that past Christmas, enough caliber for her to take down a small deer. With her rifle slung over her shoulder, she and her grandfather hiked up to the plateau to settle into their blind, a small shelter made with plywood and two-by-four posts and painted brown and green.

  By four thirty, they’d spotted the buck, and Amy Raye took the shot. But she’d gotten nervous and had jerked the rifle. She’d hit the buck at close range, about sixty yards, but he didn’t fall. She’d missed his vitals. Instead of hauling the deer down the hill and hanging him in the barn to process, she and her grandfather tracked the animal well into the night with high-beam flashlights her grandfather had carried in. It was close to midnight by the time they got back to the farm.

  “Is he going to die?” Amy Raye wanted to know. “Is he going to rot out there?”

  “You learned a hard lesson,” her grandfather said.

  He was tired, ready to turn in. “Could be that he’s crippled up, that’s all. Take this stuff into the barn. Maybe we’ll have another go of it in the morning.”

  He handed her his flashlight and his pack.

  “I’m sorry,” Amy Raye said.

  Her grandfather nodded in that deliberate way of his, holding his chin down over his chest and looking at her for a second or two. “Get some sleep,” he said.

  He was a tall man, big-boned. He carried the weight of himself into the house. Amy Raye didn’t move. She wanted him to make her feel better. She wanted to cry. She imagined her own fists pushing down the ache that was rising up in her throat. He left the kitchen light on for her. After a few more minutes, the light to the bathroom turned on. Amy Raye could see it from the small window to the left of the bathroom sink. Then the light turned out. Amy Raye was fully awake.

  Amy Raye turned away from the house and began walking toward the barn. Heat still cloaked the air, heavy in her lungs and on her shoulders. The barn doors were open, as they always were. At the back of the barn were a tack room and a large stall where a handful of sheep stayed. To the right were bales of hay, stacked ten to twelve feet high. To the left were four stalls. Van Gogh and Princeton were in the first two stalls. In the third stall was a Clydesdale that Grandpa Tomlin was keeping for a neighbor. Amy Raye had thought of Van Gogh, a light brown paint with white ankles and markings on his torso, as hers. She was seven when her grandfather had bought him, and she’d been the first to ride him.

  Amy Raye hung the pack on a peg just inside the barn and leaned the rifle alongside the wall. Van Gogh pushed against his stall door and whinnied. He knows it’s me, she thought. “Hey, boy,” she said, walking over to him. She wanted to cry into his mane, and tell him how sorry she was for shooting the buck. Van Gogh nuzzled her shoulder, whinnied again. She climbed the stall door and wrapped her arms around his neck, her face pressed into his warm hide, and that was when she saw them, in the fourth stall.

  Though the barn was dark, she could make out their shadows, Lionel’s long legs and broad torso, Nan’s thick red hair that bunched in curls down her back. She gasped, and as she did, Nan giggled.

  “Hey, cousin,” Lionel said.
>
  “What are you doing?” Amy Raye said. “You’re naked.”

  But Amy Raye knew what they were doing, as if something deep in her belly that fluttered and burned sudden like hot bubbles scratching to get out recognized it before her mind understood. She’d seen them naked before, when the three of them would go swimming in the pond, even after Lionel’s penis had grown fuller and longer, and dark hairs had sprouted around it, and Nan’s breasts had budded into smooth, round mounds of flesh as large as softballs. They didn’t pay each other any mind then. Their bodies had felt as natural as the cool water against their skin.

  “Come here,” Lionel said.

  PRU

  After reporting in to Colm, I took pictures of the prints and items. Then Jeff and I continued to work Kona on the trail. “In town you can hear a car a mile away,” I told him. “Even at my house, which is outside of town, I can make out the sounds of trucks on the highway. But here, it’s like we’re in some big void. Amy Raye’s not going to hear us unless we’re fifty yards in front of her, maybe even less.”

  Jeff and I followed Kona away from the shelter, where the trail made a couple of switchbacks, eventually heading due south and continuing to descend in elevation. For the most part, Kona’s head remained near the ground, except for an occasional lift to clear snowflakes from his snout, at which time he’d blow hard, shake his head, even sneeze.

  —

  We were stepping over small juniper saplings and deadfall as we kept making our way downhill. Up ahead a thick patch of mature juniper appeared. It was there that Kona stopped and lifted his head for a few seconds, his ears alert, his tail still. He would do that sometimes when he’d lost a trail, raise his head as if trying to ride the wind and pick up a scent.

  “What is it, boy?” I said.

  He gave me only a second’s notice before taking off and weaving his way in and out of the trees in front of us.

  Jeff and I stepped into the timber. The ground looked much like that underneath the bough, with only a dusting of snow and a smattering of leaves from the sparse Gambel oak, which allowed us to identify prints that appeared to have been made by a woman. Colm had given the search team a description of Amy Raye’s boots—Merrell, rectangular tread, size seven.

  “She was definitely here,” I said. My pace quickened behind Kona’s, and my eyes remained alert for broken twigs and depressions.

  Our downward descent was leading us to a clearing at the hem of the timber where ashen light filtered through the dark branches. Kona glanced over his shoulder at me, then moved forward, his steps even, his body appearing stiff like it would get when he was fixed on something.

  “What is it?” I said, my voice not much more than a whisper.

  Kona neared the edge of the timber. Then he stopped, his head alert, his tail slightly raised. Jeff and I caught up to him. The terrain opened to a creek about fifty yards down from us. On the other side of the creek were five cow elk and three calves leisurely feeding.

  A snapping of branches sounded from the woods beyond the elk. A small four-point bull emerged from the green shadows and began grazing with the others.

  “She’s not here,” I said, my voice still a whisper. “The elk would know. They’d smell her scent. They wouldn’t be grazing so freely.”

  “We’re here,” Jeff reminded me, his voice not much louder than mine had been.

  Jeff was right. I recognized that we were downwind from the elk. Perhaps Amy Raye was also. “Go find,” I commanded Kona again, hoping he hadn’t lost the trail.

  Once more, Kona glanced at me over his shoulder. He looked back at the elk, trotted forward a few steps, and let out a yip. The elk raised their heads, hesitated a few seconds, then turned their broad shoulders and lunged into the trees on the far side of them.

  “Kona, no,” I commanded, knowing he was up for a good chase. I reached inside my coat for the bag containing Amy Raye’s mittens. I held the mittens to Kona’s nose.

  “Go find,” I said again.

  Kona’s playful distraction was over. He was back to work. He turned his head slowly as if he were trying to pick up an air scent.

  His stance tightened. He was onto something. Kona backtracked a few yards and then, with his snout close to the ground, made a turn to the right, following the inside edge of the timber. I identified a footprint here and there that the wind had not disturbed.

  “We should alert Colm,” Jeff said.

  I reached for my radio. “Command, Alpha One. Kona’s definitely on. We’re in the woods just south of the marker, maybe eighty yards. There are footprints. We’re now moving southeast along the edge of the timber.”

  “Alpha One, this is Command. We’ve got teams heading there now. Keep reporting back to me. Proceed forward. Make noise. Let the subject know you’re there.”

  I photographed the prints as well as the surrounding area and moved on.

  “Amy Raye!” Jeff yelled, his hands cupped around his mouth. He kept yelling out Amy Raye’s name as he and I followed Kona. I continued to identify the boot prints that had been mostly protected by tree growth, the toe of the prints pointing in the direction Kona was moving.

  Kona left the edge of the timber and began trotting southward through an open meadow or gulch, with his snout still to the ground. Jeff and I were about fifty feet behind him, searching the area for more prints, but we didn’t find any. The snow was too thick. Kona began barking and wagging his tail. He was just on the other side of a large boulder. He’d been trained to sit when he came upon a search object. He didn’t always mind. This time his front paws were prancing in place.

  Jeff and I ran toward him. The weight of our gear pounded heavily on our backs.

  A brown patch of fabric lay partially exposed. Kona pawed at the fabric again. “Kona, no,” I said.

  I crouched in the snow and brushed away the accumulation. Kona had discovered a brown fleece hat. When I picked up the hat, I saw the bloodstains and the tear down the back.

  “Dear, Lord,” Jeff said.

  I reached for my radio and took a deep breath. “Command, Alpha One.” I went on to report what we had found.

  “How much blood?” Colm asked.

  “A couple of inches in diameter,” I said.

  “Give me the points of your location. I’ll have another team move in to assist. I want you and Jeff to keep working the area.”

  Kona began to whine. He was now about six feet from us and had picked up another scent.

  “Hold on,” I said to Colm.

  I stood and stepped toward Kona. Then Jeff uncovered something with the toe of his boot. He bent down and brushed the rest of the snow off with his gloved hands.

  “Command, we just uncovered another item,” I said. “Looks like a .357 revolver. And, Colm, it’s hers. It’s got scent all over it.”

  I picked up the gun and opened its chamber.

  Jeff and I made eye contact and looked at each other for a couple of seconds without saying anything.

  Static broke over the radio. “Alpha One, Command, come back.”

  “Command, Alpha One, there’s a missing round in the chamber,” I said. I reported the coordinates for the items.

  “Keep working the area. See what else you can find,” Colm said.

  I bagged the items and placed them in my pack. The hat could have been torn when she fell, I tried to tell myself, or the tear might have been made by a predator after she’d fallen. Forensics would have a better idea. I thought of Amy Raye’s children. I thought of Joseph. The implications were all around us, and yet I just couldn’t imagine a mother taking her life.

  “It doesn’t look good, Jeff,” I said.

  “No, ma’am, it doesn’t look good at all.”

  We moved out twenty feet, and then fifty feet, searching for prints and seeing if Kona might pick up anything else, but the only tracks we w
ere able to identify were those made by coyote or deer. I also continued to take photographs of the terrain to record the area we had covered.

  “Let’s check out the other side of the gulch,” I said. If Amy Raye had indeed taken her life, her body would have been dragged off or scattered by coyotes or lion. We crossed a shallow and rocky creek bed. On the other side the snow deepened, maybe by three or four inches. We were heading into a basin.

  “We should have brought snowshoes,” I said.

  “If we get any more snowfall, we’re going to have to.”

  Kona wasn’t walking in any particular direction. He hadn’t picked up a scent. “We’ve been heading downwind,” I said. “That’s why Kona’s been able to pick up a trail. Before we found the hat, I was thinking maybe the tracks were fresh, but I don’t think that’s the case. If we’re in a drainage area, the scent will stay,” I said.

  I radioed back to Colm. “We’re not picking up anything,” I said.

  “Team Three is approaching the new PLS. We’ll get all efforts in the area and see what we can find. Go ahead and continue to work Kona.”

  The new PLS was now Amy Raye’s hat and the gun, even though no one had officially identified the items as hers yet.

  Between the breaking sounds of the radio, I began to make out the faint chug, chug, chug of the chopper.

  “According to the coordinates, how far are we from the subject’s truck?” I asked Colm.

  “Looks like about three miles. Maybe a little more.”

  “Damn,” I said, my voice as quiet as the wind that had stalled out on us sometime earlier in the morning. I held the radio down to my side. Colm had been right to extend the search area.

  “Long way for a woman alone,” Jeff said. “You got your cell phone with you?” he asked. “Want to see if you’re picking up a signal?”

  I removed my glove, unbuttoned the cargo pocket on my pants, and reached for my phone. I saw that I had a missed call from Joseph. He had been staying at Corey’s ever since the search began. The call must have come in before I’d left the command station.