But she had underestimated the effects of the cold. After a couple of hours, she could no longer feel the toes of her left foot. With only a wool sock, she feared that frostbite would set in, especially given her foot’s poor circulation and immobility. And her hunger had gotten the best of her, and she’d already had to stop more than once because of a muscle cramp in her left calf and another in her left hip that had sent such pain through the nerves of her broken leg that she’d dug her fingers into the muscles of that leg and yelled out in pain. And so she shoveled out a divot in the snow so that, despite the wind, she’d be able to get a fire going. She warmed her hands and feet but became even more worried about her left foot. Despite the heat from the fire, she still had difficulty moving her toes, and the skin was covered in patches of white.
She removed her fleece jacket and, with her knife, cut out both pockets. She then cut away the left sleeve of the jacket. She’d had plenty of blood flow in her left arm from managing the crutch and was still wearing her thermal layer. She covered her toes with the two pockets, then slipped on the sleeve and doubled it over. She could only hope this extra covering would be enough to protect her injured foot from further frostbite. She stayed by the fire another half hour to warm herself and to rest and to eat. Perhaps she should have stayed in the cave. Her body was much weaker than she’d anticipated, and she felt unusually tired. She thought about hypothermia. Her body had no doubt chilled from the sweat on her skin. She’d have to be more careful, stop more frequently, build another fire if necessary.
And so she moved on, and everywhere she listened, to the wind, to branches, to the silence as it pounded in her ears. But within a short distance, the ground began to descend more sharply and the wind speed had picked up to maybe twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. She planted her crutch downhill, and as she began to shift her weight, the crutch slipped out from beneath her. She fell onto her left side, landing on both rock and snow, and slid a good seventy feet or more until she had sunk into a drift at the bottom of the decline. All around her was snow, the drift having been more than ten feet deep, and because it lay at the base of this western-facing slope where it had received the full effect of the sun, the drift had softened to the consistency of mashed potatoes. She tried to kick-step into the sides of snow around her, but each time, her foot sank deeper, and her body became more spent from the effort. She’d been foolish to think she could find her way out of this vast place. Her calorie intake had not been enough for her to maintain her strength. Her body was malnourished. She was crippled at best. And now she was cold and stranded with no wood within reach for her to build a fire. Even if she could make it out of this drift, there would be other sink spots, more soft snow, and more ground to cover than she had the strength for, given her lack of food. She felt emptied out of anything good and hopeful. She fell back against the snow, sank to the ground. Oh, God, what have I done? And though it had not been the first time, she cried until there were no tears left in her. Her stomach felt small and tight like a baby’s fist. She took out the remaining juniper berries from her pack, but when she bit into their bitterness, this time her body heaved. She had only a pound or a little less of meat left, and it was frozen, and there was no way to heat it. She removed one of the four-ounce cuts, held it in her gloved hand until the outer layer of frost had melted from the small portion, and then sucked on the meat, and chewed on it, like an animal from the wild. So this was it. This would be how it would all end, and she wondered if her remains would ever be found. She tried to recall the precise core temperature at which a human body would die from the cold, and thought it to be somewhere around seventy-seven degrees. She thought of her swims in Echo Lake and Evergreen Lake, where the water had been well below that temperature, sometimes only fifty degrees in June, and she wondered about that. Why had she been able to swim in those lakes? But when she swam, she had kept her arms and legs moving. She had continued to generate heat. She would have to keep moving now. But she was so weary. Perhaps if she could rest for a while she might have the strength to find a way out of here.
Meltwater trickled down her neck. Her hands and feet ached and tingled with cold. She curled up into a fetal position. Still holding on to the piece of meat, she tucked her hands beneath her head. She thought of the cave and how warm its walls had felt. She thought of the fires she had built there. Perhaps she should remove her fleece jacket and tie it over her head. Though she had kept her ears warm with the strip of fleece, she knew she was losing at least fifty percent of her body heat from her exposed head. But she was so tired, and even her thoughts felt fatiguing. The muscles in her neck and shoulders contracted, and her body shivered, and she closed her eyes, if only for a few minutes. And she dreamed of coyotes, of young pups playing and wrestling in the snow, and she heard the adult coyote bark from somewhere far off in the trees. The adult barked again, but it did not sound like a coyote. Perhaps it was a wolf and these pups weren’t coyotes at all, but baby wolves. She opened her eyes. She heard the bark again, but her mind felt foggy, and she was so cold, the air like ice against the layers of her damp clothing and skin. And she wondered if she was experiencing hypothermia, if she had imagined the sounds. She pushed herself to a sitting position, her hands and feet both numb. But her body was still shivering, which she knew was a good sign. She was still getting enough oxygen to the brain. Though her mind felt dull, she knew she wasn’t hallucinating. She had indeed heard the barking of an animal. She wouldn’t have heard coyotes. It was the middle of the day. Coyotes did not come out until dusk. There were no wolves in the area, none that she knew of. “I’m here,” she said, but her voice was weak, and a thick wall of snow surrounded her. And perhaps it was a wild dog that she had heard. But she had not seen any wild dogs in the area. She had not heard any wild dogs in all of her nights in the cave. Her legs were stiff and her muscles tight, but she forced herself to a standing position. She removed her shovel from the straps on her pack, the small shovel she had made from the elk’s shoulder blade, and she began to dig, and as she dug away at the snow, the blood moved back into her fingers and into her toes and her feet. She dug faster, surprised at the adrenaline in her body. “I’m here,” she cried out again, her voice raspy and weak. She was making progress, and her body was warming, and she was certain she had heard a dog, and if she had heard a dog, there was someone out there. She continued to work, packing the snow down with the shovel and her right foot as she dug a path through the drift, as she created a stretch of compacted snow at almost a forty-degree angle. Using both the crutch and the shovel as poles, she was able to plant them into the incline and pull herself forward, then step, replant the poles, and pull herself forward again until she was out of the drift and standing on frozen rock, her body drenched in perspiration and hope.
She moved in an eastward direction from where she had heard the barking sounds, returning along the same path that she had trekked earlier that day. She continued for a couple of hours, stopping only long enough to drink a few swallows of water and to call out. But the wind seemed to carry her voice back to her, as it had carried the sounds of the barking dog. Dusk was approaching. Still, she pushed on. She had maybe a half hour at best of sunlight left. She had already passed the area where she had camped the night before, and she wondered how much farther she had to go until she would be back at the cave. The adrenaline that had sped her on was quickly waning. “Please,” she cried out to the barking dog and to whoever was out there. “Come back. I’m here.”
She surveyed the ground, determining the course of each step, and saw a mound of snow and boughs. After a few more steps, she identified the leg of a coyote protruding from beneath the branches of the small heap. She had come upon a cache site and felt certain it belonged to the cougar whose tracks she had seen that morning. The lion had been within ten feet of her. She thought of the boughs of juniper she had covered herself with. The cougar had mistaken her for another lion’s cache. Though cougars were wary of people, they had no p
roblem scavenging another lion’s kill.
This kill was fresh. Despite the fading daylight, she could make out the blood trail from where the cougar had dragged the coyote and fed off the carcass, and all the while she realized how easily this carcass could have been her. Amy Raye lifted the boughs. There was plenty of meat left. One of the hindquarters was still intact. There was meat left along the spine and on one of the shoulders. The cougar would be back, and in that instant she wondered if he was watching her, as if she could feel his stare lifting the hair on her flesh. She looked around her. But lion could be as invisible as the breeze. She removed her knife from her pack. She knelt beside the carcass. What was left of it probably weighed no more than twenty pounds. It would take less time to strap the animal to her pack than it would take to cut away the remaining meat. And yet she worried that carrying the carcass on her pack would make her more of a target for the lion. Amy Raye understood enough about lion to know that the two things a cougar would fight to protect were its kittens and a cached kill. Instead of scavenging her that morning, the lion had moved on and taken down this coyote. And then it occurred to her that perhaps there had never been a dog. Perhaps it was this coyote that she had heard. But she did not have time for these thoughts. She cut through the tendons that connected the right hindquarter. She removed a front shoulder as well. The other shoulder and the upper abdomen were already gone. Then she placed the meat in her pack and covered the remaining carcass with the boughs. She wondered if the lion would return for his kill once he’d picked up her scent. Perhaps she should have taken the entire carcass. But the decision had already been made. Each second pounded in her ears. She felt certain of the lion’s imminent return.
She secured her pack onto her back and moved away from the cache site. The whole affair had taken no more than five minutes. Her heart thumped wildly. Though she remained careful with her steps, she moved quickly, glad for the rush of energy. As the rest of the daylight was extinguished, the moon rose higher. The sky had remained clear, and her eyes had adjusted to the new light. She felt amazed at the clarity of her path, the speed with which she was able to move. With the pound of elk meat she had left, and the meat from the coyote carcass, she could survive a couple of weeks, maybe more. And there was the hope that someone had found the cave where she had been staying. Perhaps the person was still somewhere close by. The barking sounds she had heard had come from that same direction. And if someone had found the cave, the person might be able to determine that all this time Amy Raye had been alive. She gave thanks for the moon and the clear sky. She thought of Christmas and Julia and Trevor and Farrell, as if all of it were in her reach. She thought of her childhood and the crèche her father would set up in their front yard, the ceramic figures arranged around bales of hay. And for a moment she imagined her father finding her. She imagined him calling to her and asking her to come home.
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
After Joseph and I returned from Boulder, I brought Kona out to the search site. Far too much time had passed for him to be of any use tracking Amy Raye’s scent, but his canine instincts might prove beneficial in him uncovering any animal bones, and of course, in the back of my mind, I knew he might uncover Amy Raye’s remains, as well. The forecast was to our advantage, with clear skies and mild temperatures, somewhere in the thirties, a welcome break after the heavy snowfall and single digits we’d experienced the past week.
It was still dark when I left the house. I made the hour-and-a-half drive to the Canyon Pintado National Historic District along Highway 139 and then turned left into State Bridge Draw. I was heading north of Cow Canyon, where we’d first found the Ford pickup. I’d decided to backtrack. I’d start at the point where Kona had found the hat and the gun, over six miles north from the tree Joseph had identified in the photo. I’d worn my Salomon snow hikers with their sawlike tread, plenty of layers, and a tall pair of gaiters that I’d tied just above my knees. And I’d brought my fifty-five-liter pack, so that in addition to food and water, crampons, and my regular supplies, I’d have plenty of room for any evidence we might come across. I stored a folding shovel inside the outer pocket of my pack, strapped my snowshoes to the pack, and slipped an ice axe into the side loop. It would be a long day, and I was prepared to work the area until sundown. I’d entered the latest PLS from the search—the location of the hat and gun—into my GPS. I’d been able to get the Tahoe within three miles of that point before what was left of the old four-by-four road became impassable. I was about a mile east of Big Ridge and was heading south. The snow would deepen the closer I got to the bluffs, but for the first mile in, I was able to get enough traction with my boots. I was moving along the southwestern slope of the ridge where the sun had created melt-off that had frozen to slick-packed snow during the evenings and on overcast days and had left the rockier ground partially covered in ice. Hiking with crampons required more exertion but also provided more traction. I stopped to hydrate and to add the crampons. Within another two hours, I approached the b
asin where Kona had tracked Amy Raye’s hat. Here, the snow deepened significantly. Another foot of accumulation had fallen over the past few days and was mostly unconsolidated. I knew Kona and I might have to cover at least a fifty-yard radius to search for any possible elk remains, as any obvious remains close to the site would have been found during the initial search. I also knew this would mean using my shovel to remove the snow cover. I leaned against the rock where we had found the gun, removed my crampons, and strapped on my snowshoes to allow for greater flotation over the surface area.
My goal at this point was to find some evidence that Amy Raye had indeed taken down an elk, that perhaps there had been something pure about her disappearance. We were approaching our eighth week since she had gone missing. Even the best-trained search dogs working in optimal scent conditions—cool, damp areas, with heavy vegetation and little wind—could follow a scent trail no more than three to four weeks old. And yet I had to at least try. A number of friends would stock my freezer each fall with elk meat, anything from steak to chili meat to sausage and teriyaki sticks. The night before, I’d thawed a pound of elk steak. I’d brought it with me in a plastic bag to use as a scent item. With my hand firmly wrapped around Kona’s jaw so that he wouldn’t take a bite out of the meat, I brought it up to his nose. He whimpered and wagged his tail. He was confused, no doubt, and salivating. “Kona, go find,” I said. He pranced around a bit but mostly wagged his tail and stared at the meat. I put the steak away. Then I fed him a handful of treats that I’d packed in the zipper pocket of my fleece jacket. “Go find,” I said again.
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