Colm knew what I was saying. If Amy Raye fired the gun, she would have held it in her left hand, and if she had been wearing gloves, she would have smudged any of Kenny’s prints from when he’d given it to her with his right hand. Because Kenny’s hand would be larger than Amy Raye’s, a print of his little finger showing up toward the bottom of the left grip panel would make sense.
But Colm wasn’t convinced. “We’ve gotten our search warrants for the computer and the phone records. Dean’s driving over to Evergreen today to pick up the computer. We should have the phone records by the end of the day tomorrow.”
“You’re still thinking foul play.”
“Foul play. Suicide. I’m not sure what I think, but like I said, from that bloody tear on her hat, either she was running from something, or she fell down, and if she fell, she would have fallen backward. She could have been shot. She could have been pushed. I’m speculating, of course.”
“Or she was walking through the woods and hit her head. I do it all the time.”
—
That night, Joseph and I were sitting on the sofa with our legs stretched out over a wicker trunk that we used for a coffee table. We had a bowl of popcorn between us and were watching the Steelers play the Broncos.
Joseph’s legs were long, and I felt certain he would grow a couple more inches before he was finished with high school. He might even grow to be as tall as his father.
Brody had been gone for almost five years before I met Todd, and though I’d become friends with a couple of guys during that time, I’d yet to date anyone. I worked for the BLM during the week, and at seasonal jobs on the weekends. That particular fall I was helping out at a small meatpacking plant. The plant catered to the out-of-town hunters, turned elk and venison into sausage and hamburger, teriyaki steaks and jerky. The company packed the meat in dry ice and shipped it all over the country. It was on one of those weekends that Todd introduced himself to me. He was a guide for an outfitter upriver and had brought in an elk kill with one of his clients, a man out of Oklahoma. The client was in the office talking to the owner of the plant. Todd had remained in the back next to the freezer block where I was working.
“You must be new,” he said. “I’m Todd.”
“I’d shake your hand, but under the circumstances—”
“What’s a woman like you doing up to her elbows in this stuff?”
“Just trying to pay the bills.”
I was wearing a bloody apron that hung down to my knees and was making clean slices through the backstrap of an elk that belonged to another client, turning the meat into nice-sized filets. The elk that had just been brought in by Todd was hanging on a meat hook in the freezer. I wouldn’t be able to get to it until the next day.
“Have you been working here long?” he asked.
“A couple of months.”
“How come I haven’t seen you around?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” I said.
“Only with a beautiful woman.” He adjusted his cap by placing his palm over his head, and I noticed how large his hands were, perhaps as large as Brody’s.
“Maybe I’ll see you around sometime,” he said. He turned and began walking away.
I made another slice and set the meat aside.
“You want to go out sometime?” Todd had turned back around.
He was tall, several inches over six feet. His brown hair hung down to his shoulders and was tucked behind his ears. He wore a green cap with a fly shop logo. He was heavy-boned, with deep-set brown eyes, an angular face that was in need of a good shave.
“How do you know I’m not married?”
“You’re not wearing a ring.”
“I’ve got gloves on.”
“They’re transparent.”
“They’re covered in blood,” I said.
“So do you want to go out?”
And in that moment perhaps my motions faltered, a hesitation as I made another slice, as I remembered Brody all over again.
“There’s something very sexy about a woman holding a knife,” Todd said.
I pointed the knife at him. “Watch it,” I said.
“So will you go out with me?”
I didn’t agree to go out with Todd at first. But two weeks later when he stopped in, I drank a beer with him at his truck before I drove home from work. And the week after that I took a walk with him on top of Hay Flats. Slowly, I let Todd into my life, let myself once again feel the arms of a man. Then there was the night when I was cooking spaghetti and Todd was sitting in the living room. I looked at him through the doorway. He was watching TV. I felt nothing. I knew then I didn’t love him. I knew I never would. Todd had moved on before I’d found out I was pregnant. Last I’d heard he was with an outfitter in Montana. I tried to locate him once. Thought he had a right to know he had a son. But he’d moved on again, and after a while, I gave up looking.
“What are you thinking about?” Joseph asked.
“Nothing really. Why?”
“Are you watching the game?”
“Yeah. Sorry,” I said.
And while I watched the Broncos make a field goal, and Joseph cheered beside me, I wondered why I was thinking about Todd after all these years, remembering how my body had felt, and what it had been like to try to love someone again.
AMY RAYE
Sometime in the morning the snow had stopped falling. Gray light shone directly into the cave, and Amy Raye wondered about that. How could she be facing east? The truck had been west of where she’d shot the elk and quartered him. She tried to recall the map she had stared at for days, as well as the direction in which she had tracked the animal. To be facing east would mean she had been heading away from the direction in which she’d set out. And she could not help but wonder, given the look of the terrain, if she was as far east as Big Ridge and Cathedral Bluffs, dense terrain full of rocky crevices. How had she veered so far off course, and how would anyone ever find her? At a good pace, she could hike almost three miles per hour. She tried to remember how long she had tracked the elk. Had he moved in a straightforward direction, or had his path been erratic? The only thing she could be certain of was that she had tracked him moving downhill, which would have accelerated her pace. If the elk had been moving in a straight path, she could very well have covered six to eight miles, despite her slowing down to follow the blood trail. If she had been moving east, she would be thick into the bluffs. Even if a search party was looking for her, she doubted anyone would venture that far into the area, and with the snow, she wasn’t sure they’d be able to even if they tried. And then there was the trek she’d made after quartering the elk, after he’d gone downhill to die. By that point she’d lost her visibility because of the snow. Instead of moving northwest back to the truck, she could have hiked southward. Again, she tried to recall the map, but without knowing exactly at what point she’d come upon the elk, there was no way to be sure of her location, except to know she was miles and miles out of any reasonable search radius. And again the thought that she would not be found. She was alone, and she was lost. “Help! Someone help me!” But her voice echoed back at her as it had earlier in the night, and her breathing quickened with the sheer terror of what she knew.
Maybe her path had been erratic, or circular. Maybe the path of the elk had been erratic as well. Maybe she was not as far away from the truck as she feared. She would keep the fire burning. She would continue to hope that someone would see the smoke.
Her appetite burned in her stomach. This was a good sign, as the nausea seemed to be subsiding. The fire was strong. She held the skewer with the elk liver and heart over the flame. Despite everything, Amy Raye considered how lucky she had been. She had shelter; she had this warm fire and plenty of wood. She had food to eat. Yes, her left leg was useless, and her left hip battered with bruises, but her body was strong; no other bones had been
broken. These were her thoughts as she cooked her first meal in this place and the aroma filled the cave and filled her lungs.
The fire crackled, and the pitch from the soft wood popped, and a strange peace settled over her. It was beautiful, really, this place, an anesthetic of sorts. She ate the heart first, and as she did, she thought of the animal whose life she’d taken, and who was now giving her food to eat. She remembered the sound of his last breaths, imagined his spirit moving on, imagined him running in a place without hunters and tags and ammo.
Her thoughts were startled when she heard a snapping of wood outside the cave, a small animal perhaps. She became still, slowed her breathing. The sound grew louder. Something larger than one of the squirrels or rodents was out there. And instantly she remembered the rest of the elk meat, her only source of survival should she not be found right away. “No!” She crawled closer to the entrance, wrapped her hand around a rock, threw the rock and screamed. She did not see the animal, but she heard him, another branch snapping, footfall moving away. Daylight streamed through the clouds. She was now outside the cave. She checked the elk quarter. It was undisturbed. Then she saw the cougar prints. She had lured him to her. He had smelled the meal she had cooked. He was hungry, also. She would lure him to her again when she cooked her next meal. She had to be smarter.
She scrambled as best she could back to the cave. She felt pleased with the splint she had prepared, as she was able to move a degree more easily than the day before. She emptied her pack onto the cave floor and found the stainless-steel water bottle she had caught her urine in maybe twenty-six hours before. It was still full. Cougar in these parts were afraid of humans. She could not let the lion become aware of her weakened condition. She would stake out and mark her territory. She would create the boundaries. And so using the urine, she dribbled it around the periphery of the cave, and then around the elk meat she had stored away from her shelter. She would continue to do this, she decided, until she was found, or until she made her way out of this place. Her own estrus would keep the lion away.
She also knew she would need more water, and the stainless-steel bottle would be her only means for heating the water and purifying it. And so she filled the eighteen-ounce bottle with snow. She would set it in the embers of the fire until the water boiled. After it cooled, she would store the water in the one-and-a-half-liter bladder from her pack. She would have to alternate between peeing in the bottle and using the bottle to heat the snow. She would also continue to collect snow with the three plastic bags she had. And then she thought of the elk meat. A front shoulder, not considering the bone, weighed approximately sixty to seventy pounds. As long as she could keep the meat cool and protected, she could ration it out, and should she not be found, she could keep herself fed. If she remembered correctly, one pound of meat would provide approximately eight hundred calories. But elk meat was leaner than other meat and might only provide her with a little more than half that amount in calories. To maintain her strength, she would need to consume no less than a thousand calories a day. A healthy intake would be closer to fourteen hundred calories. If she was not found right away, with at least thirty-two thousand calories, she could give her leg over four weeks to heal. Even then, without her leg having been set and immobilized with a cast, walking would be painful, and she would need some kind of crutch for assistance. If only she could set the bone, but there was no doubt the break had been clear through. There was no way she was going to be able to straighten out the bone. And too much movement could be dangerous. Hadn’t she read about that? Yes, she knew she had. In a novel by John Knowles. She recalled the character Finny, recalled him falling down marble stairs and breaking his leg a second time, and he had died from the break. When doctors had tried to set the bone, the marrow had spread through Finny’s bloodstream and gone straight to his heart. The whole story had fascinated her, because she hadn’t known someone could die from a broken leg.
Thankful for food and water and firewood within easy reach, she returned to the cave. She organized the belongings she had and took inventory: an eight-inch hunting knife, a bone saw, over two hundred feet of parachute cord, webbing that she was now using for her splint, a stainless-steel water bottle, one quart-size zip-top bag, one gallon-size zip-top bag, a sandwich bag, a burned-out headlamp with no extra batteries, four waterproof matches, an elk bugle, an elk cow call, a small block of flint, a one-and-a-half-liter bladder, and a forty-five-liter-capacity backpack. For clothing she had a lightweight Thinsulate jacket, pants, a long-sleeve thermal shirt, a layer of silk long underwear, cotton gloves, one pair of ragg wool socks, and her green hiking boots.
She finished eating the heart, ate the liver, and washed both down with the remaining water she’d carried in her pack. She boiled the snow in the bottle. After it cooled, she poured it into the bladder. Then she boiled the water from the snowmelt that she’d collected in the bags and used as ice packs. She elevated her leg on her pack and lay back to rest. The day would pass slowly, and each day after that. How many days would she be in here? She picked up a piece of charred wood, reached for the wall behind her, and wrote her full name. Beside her name, she wrote the prior day’s date, and beneath the date, she made a mark. She would keep track of her days, and God forbid, should she not make it out of here alive, should someone come upon her bones one day, she could be identified. But she would be found. Aaron and Kenny would be looking for her. She need only keep herself fed and warm until then. Maybe another day or night. It wouldn’t be long.
She curled up beside the fire, determined to keep it lit, determined for someone to see the smoke, and as she listened to the flames crackle, as she fought sleep, she heard other sounds, branches outside the cave from the juniper and pinyon that had grown through crevasses in the rock, limbs bending with the wind and snow, and small animals somewhere outside the cave that in the thin night air sounded like larger ones. She thought of the rats that might have been living in her shelter; she’d seen their droppings. And with all of these thoughts and each sound that amplified in her mind, her breathing shortened into small clutches of air. She tried to regain her calm. She exhaled more slowly. She focused on the flames.
—
Sometime in the night Amy Raye awoke to the chugging of an engine in the distance and arose in a panic. Though the fire had died down, it was still burning. She grabbed one of the boughs beside it and lit the needles that had begun to dry, and all the while she was yelling, “I’m here, I’m here!” Surely this was the search crew that had come looking for her, and already she wanted to say she was sorry for causing such a commotion, wanted to apologize for not having been more careful, but that would come later. “Yes, I’m here!” she screamed, and she scrambled out of the cave, dragged her broken leg behind her, waved the burning bough above her. “Help!” she shouted. The sound of an engine was indeed drawing closer. She sat in a foot of snow, waved the bough, waved her other arm, looked to the sky. And why had she refused to wear orange, why had she left the orange cap back at the truck, and if only they could see the smoke, and yes, there it was, a helicopter flying above her. “Over here! Over here!” The helicopter continued past her. Surely someone had seen her, seen the smoke, would recognize the smoke as a signal. Surely the helicopter was simply turning around. It would pass over her again. She continued to yell. She continued to wave the bough and her arms, and the sound drifted farther away. She waited. It did not return. “I’m here! I’m here! Come back!” Why hadn’t they seen her? But she knew; the fire she’d built was hidden inside the cave. And whatever smoke might have been seen from the helicopter would have appeared as no more than a cloud of vapor. And she wasn’t wearing orange. She blended seamlessly into the terrain. If she could go unnoticed by an elk grazing within thirty yards of her, why would she think someone in a helicopter that was flying more than a thousand feet above her would be able to spot her on the side of this bluff? Yet the helicopter would return. Surely it would return. She waited until s
he began to feel too cold. She reentered the cave but remained close to its entrance. She wrapped her arms around one of the rocks that lay just outside the cave’s opening, pressed the side of her face against the rock’s smooth wet surface. Dear God, please let them find me. She would wait for the helicopter to circle back. People were looking for her. That was a good sign. She would stay awake. She would be ready when the helicopter returned. She looked to the sky, noticed how clear it was. There were so many stars, and she thought about that, thought about just how many stars there were.
“We think we are seeing too many to count. But we could count them,” she had told Farrell one night. “We could map out the stars and count each one.”
They had gone camping in Red Rock Canyon. Julia and Trevor were already asleep in the tent. Amy Raye and Farrell had remained by the fire.
“I love that about you,” Farrell had said. “I love how you know all these weird things that others rarely think about.”
“Knowing about stars isn’t weird,” Amy Raye said.
“Knowing how many there are is kind of weird. Weird in a good way. I probably have your mom to thank for that,” Farrell said.
Amy Raye had already told Farrell about her mother’s job at the library, and how when Amy Raye was young, she’d wait for her mother there after school. And during the summer, if Amy Raye wasn’t at the farm, she’d accompany her mother to work. It was there that Amy Raye had fallen in love with books. If she wasn’t reading, she was finding answers to the questions her mom would ask her: How are the clouds formed? How cold is the top of Mount Everest? How many stars are in the sky? Amy Raye would get paid a quarter for each answer that she found.
Farrell pulled Amy Raye against him and lay down so that they were looking directly up at the sky. “Tell me about her,” he said. “What was she like?”
Amy Raye lay quiet for a moment as Farrell’s fingers rubbed circles over her shoulders and gently traced the strands of her hair.
Breaking Wild Page 16