Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  I didn’t know if the meat had helped, but the way Kona moved in and out from the rock, traveling farther away each time, I could tell he knew we were there to work. I tried to think strategically, to imagine where a lion or coyote might drag an elk’s remains, especially an elk’s skull, which a lion could easily sever from the spine. Lion, and coyote for that matter, wanted to protect any cache they had found. They’d no doubt drag it to a grove of trees or tall shrubs. And when different animals were involved, the remains of a carcass might be spread up to a hundred yards in any direction. We’d covered at least a fifty-yard radius and come up with nothing. I’d have to cover a greater area. About sixty yards out, Kona uncovered a rib bone that could have been a couple of months old. I wasn’t sure if it had belonged to a young elk or a large deer, as the bone had been broken in half, and the marrow had been cleaned out. I knew that within one to two days of Amy Raye taking down an elk, even with that early snowfall, crows, ravens, magpies, vultures, and coyotes would have been all over whatever was left of the carcass. They could have cleaned it up long before we got to this location, and before the heavy snow accumulation. The past winter I’d come upon a deer carcass, and just as I did, a whole flock of ravens lifted off it. They’d been holding back approximately twelve to fifteen magpies that then clambered over and into the carcass.

  I looked at Kona. He was lying in the snow and chewing happily on the bone. He rolled onto his back as if to expose his belly to the warm sun. Even if the rib belonged to an elk, it wouldn’t tell us anything without us finding the skull. And though we needed to make use of our time, I’d worked up a good sweat and wanted to replenish. I removed my pack and my fleece layer. Using my snowshoe and moving my leg in a sweeping motion, I smoothed out a space on the ground and sat with my snowshoes propped in front of me. I ate a handful of jerky and some trail mix, and drank from my hydration reservoir. And then there was quiet. Kona had stopped chewing on the bone. His eyes were closed and he was resting peacefully in a bright patch of sunlight. And in that quiet, I could hear the faint thrumming of the oil jack pumps from far off to the west of me. I thought back to the past summer’s field school at the Weatherman Draw site. In addition to Glade and me, the team had consisted of six college students and Martin, the field crew supervisor. During those two weeks, we’d spent our days with trowels and line levels and dustpans and brushes excavating the cliff dwelling. In the evenings we built a fire on one of the bald cliffs and waited for nightfall, and as our voices settled into not much more than a whisper, we heard the faint rhythm of the pumps. Martin told the students they were nighthawks, but Glade said they were the drums of the Fremonts, and the students believed him. We hadn’t seen any oil drills in the canyon. We hadn’t seen any sign of civilization. To those six students, the drums felt spiritual. I imagined these things as I sat in the snow that day. Imagined the ancestors of this land all around me. “Where is she?” I said.

  Kona raised his head and looked at me.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said. But then I stood, pulled my fleece back over my head, and secured my pack onto my shoulders.

  We worked the area for at least another hour and had moved close to seventy yards northeast of the rock. And then Kona was onto something in a cluster of scrub oak. He wagged his tail and blew air quickly in and out of his snout. Jutting from the ground into the branches were the tips of elk tines. I began to clear more snow from around the base of the shrublike trees. My shovel hit upon a hard surface. I cleared more snow and removed a rock. Then my shovel struck something else, and that was when we found the skull. It had been chewed on and the soft matter had already decomposed, but the skin still remained, having been freeze-dried. Overall the skull was in good condition, with the small, four-point horns still intact, and a bullet hole just below the right eye socket. We’d found it, and I knew it was hers, knew it in the way my pulse shimmied over my skin. I thought I would feel exhilarated if we found the skull, but instead I felt a soft sadness take hold, and something akin to admiration and awe for this woman whom we’d been looking for. She’d wanted to fill her tag before she and her friends headed back to Evergreen. That was all. And there was something pure and simple and courageous about that intention. She’d gone into this area alone, brought down a bull elk with a bow during the third rifle season, successfully tracked him over this complicated terrain. Amy Raye wasn’t a large woman. To take down an elk, she’d have to have pulled a draw weight of at least forty-five to fifty pounds, and done so within close range of the elk, no more than twenty yards, thirty yards at most if it was a perfectly placed shot. I’d never heard of a bow hunter taking down an elk in rifle season before. The elk were too spooked by all the guns going off to get that close. In Amy Raye’s tent, Dean had found a book on that, on how to hunt an elk with a bow during rifle season, and another book on the history of the Continental Divide.

  I took pictures and recorded the coordinates. Then I placed the skull in a large trash bag that I had brought with me. I reorganized some of the items in my pack, placed the skull inside, and secured the pack, with the elk’s tines poking out the sides of the top pocket lid. My pack now weighed at least thirty to thirty-five pounds more than when I’d set out. Though I considered myself strong, I rarely carried more than forty pounds. Now I was up to around fifty. A direct route to the location where the photo had been taken would be another six miles moving uphill, and taking me into dusk if I was lucky. I opted to hike back to my vehicle, unload the skull, and then look for a closer entry point.

  After I reached the truck, I drove south on 139 until I reached Route 128. From there I took a left along Philadelphia Creek, and another left onto a switchback that led me into the southeast side of State Bridge Draw. I parked the truck. Kona and I were now no more than a mile northwest of the area where the photo had been taken, a much easier hike, even though we would still be moving uphill. It was a little after one o’clock. We had plenty of afternoon light. And so we began our hike.

  I enjoyed the freedom without so much weight on my back and was eager to see if what Joseph had identified was indeed a stand. At first the ascent was steady, but the last half mile began to climb drastically. I wore my crampons for the most traction. Then one more step and my left foot slipped on some slick-packed snow. I fell face forward. I kicked my crampons out behind me as my body began to gain momentum down the hill. My ice axe was within easy reach. I wrapped my right hand over the top of the axe and covered the spike of the axe with my left. As my knees bounced against the snow and my hip grazed a rock, I locked my elbows to my sides, looked over my left shoulder, and pressed the axe into the embankment. It carved into the ice and snow, slowing me until I stopped just before reaching a thick wall of pinyon. And all I could think about was the day Amy Raye went missing, the rain and the wind and the cold, and the freezing rain and the snow. I imagined myself as her, without crampons and snowshoes and a pack full of gear. I thought of the autopsy on the lion that Breton Davies had tracked. At some point after Amy Raye had shot the elk, dressed it, and bagged it, something had gone terribly wrong.

  And though this wasn’t avalanche country, drifts were known to accumulate up to ten feet or more. I knew the risk I was taking in being out here alone, and for maybe a minute or more I realized how fool-headed that decision had been, and wondered at what point Amy Raye had felt the same.

  Kona, who had bounded back down the hill when I’d fallen, was now by my side and licking my face. I pulled myself to an upright position and decided on another route up the hill. Kona took off ahead of me once again. Occasionally he would stop and look over his shoulder to make sure I was still trailing behind him.

  A little farther and we were in thick timber. And that was when I saw the marking tape tied to a low-hanging pinyon branch. From there, I spotted the red fletching of an arrow. I couldn’t get to the arrow fast enough. She had been here, in these woods. She had released this arrow. And I felt transfixed, knowing that the memory of he
r lay in everything around me. I reached the arrow, photographed it, and then removed it from the branches of the tree. The elk’s blood, the consistency of dried paint, was still on the shaft. The arrow must have dislodged from the elk after he’d been shot. I imagined the elk’s surprise at the sudden impact of the arrow, imagined him charging through the trees. With the arrow in my hand, I checked the coordinates for the tree from the photo. I was heading in the right direction. I continued a little farther, maybe a hundred yards. I walked across a small clearing, the snow up to my knees.

  And there was the stand, about fifteen feet from the ground, tucked into the boughs of a pinyon. “Thank you, Joseph,” I said. I removed my pack and set it at the base of the tree. I retrieved my phone and took pictures, then grabbed hold of the tree steps and climbed up to the small platform. Kenny had been right. The stand had been in place for some time, probably more than five years. It was weathered from moisture and sap and was showing some rust.

  Unlike other platforms that used climbing sticks or ladders, this kind of stand hung from the tree. The hunter had screwed four-inch-long pegs a foot or so apart at a ninety-degree angle from one another. The platform was metal mesh, and the seat no more than twelve inches by eight inches. The apparatus was secured to the tree with ratchet straps. The climbing belt Amy Raye had no doubt used to attach to her harness was still intact, as was the green parachute cord she would have tied for hoisting her bow to the stand. I also found a gear hook slightly above the stand and to my right, where she would have hung her pack.

  I’d helped Todd take down a number of stands similar to this one at the end of the final rifle season the year we had dated. Because many of the men Todd guided were from out of state, he would set six or seven of these small platform blinds before he guided folks out. Then at the end of the final season, he’d have to bring all the stands in.

  After Todd and I had broken up, I saw him one other time, though I could never be sure. Joseph was three years old. We were on our way to Boulder and had stopped at a gas station in Silverthorne. After I had filled up my tank, I parked off to the side of the convenience store. I held Joseph’s hand and he and I walked toward the door. Then I saw a man get out of an old Montero next to one of the pumps, and in those two seconds I could have sworn the man was Todd. The man had not seen me. I picked Joseph up in my arms as if any moment he would be taken away. We entered the store and headed straight for the restroom. And after we had washed up and I had calmed down, I knew what I had to do. We walked out of the store, but the man was gone.

  I never told anyone about that day, but always it was in the back of my mind, as if I had deprived Joseph of his father. Perhaps I was depriving him now.

  It was a beautiful day, really, as I sat in the tree stand, with the kind of blue sky Colorado is known for stretched vast above me. And only eight weeks before, Amy Raye had sat in this exact place. She had been right here. I tried to piece together her morning, the direction in which she had released her arrow, the distance of the shot, how the elk had appeared to her. Had she been cold? What had the air felt like? The sun would have risen from behind her, and I imagined that also. And with all these thoughts I wept quietly for the woman I didn’t know. She would have died alone, as had Brody. No one would ever know her last thoughts. And I hoped she had seen something beautiful, maybe the falling snow, or the sculpted rocks that defined so much of this area. It would have been only this great wilderness that would have been witness to her passing.

  I’d had similar thoughts when Brody died. No one had seen him fall. People could only speculate what had happened to him. It was those same people who would not let me see his body. When my father drove me to the scene, the field Brody’s parents had leased about five miles from his house, a field I would pass on my long weekend runs, there were already many people standing around the scene of the accident. He had fallen from the combine, and I did not know why. Was he reaching for something? Had the machine struck something in the field? No one was sure, but he had fallen, and there was a lot of blood. I screamed, but I don’t remember screaming. People told me they had to restrain me. They thought they were protecting me. They thought I couldn’t handle what I would see. But I know if I was screaming, it was because they wouldn’t let me through. Brody was mine, in the same way that I was his.

  There had not been a viewing at the funeral home.

  “Dad, what happened to him? Please tell me,” I had asked my father.

  “They think something got caught on the wheel and he had reached down, but he lost his footing.”

  “And then what happened?” I wanted to know.

  “The machine ran over him. Pru, he was unrecognizable,” my father told me.

  “I would have recognized him,” I said.

  —

  I climbed down from the stand and retrieved my knife from my pack. Then I walked to the tree from where I’d found the arrow and removed the orange marking tape. I cut several small boughs, some with pinecones, a few with juniper berries, and tied their ends together with the nylon tape. With the swag beneath my arm, I climbed back into the stand. Using the climbing rope, I secured the swag just above the seat of the stand. “There were people who loved you,” I said. “I hope you know that. I hope you are at rest.”

  DEER

  AMY RAYE

  Three weeks had passed since the night she had returned to the cave. She had stopped talking out loud to the cross or to the trees or to the wind. She had stopped talking to herself. But at night songs would come to her, lines from ballads Farrell had played, or music she’d listened to on the radio, or hymns that had been sung in church when she was a young girl. And without any books to read, she would repeat those lines in her head throughout the day. A song by David Gray, or Nanci Griffith, Eva Cassidy, or Johnny Cash, another by Doc Watson, or Arlo Guthrie, a hymn about walking with Jesus. She still used the crutch, and at times she was certain she would not wake up to see another morning, and then the sun would rise, and she would get up as she had done the day before, and the day before that. She would heat her water. Sometimes she would have something to eat. She had rationed the coyote meat, twelve pounds at best, for almost ten days. She’d continued to supplement her diet with the scarce pinyon nuts and juniper berries. Twice she’d killed a rabbit, and another time she’d killed a squirrel, using rocks she had thrown, and during the day when she was trying to pass the time, she would practice her aim. Once she had injured a bird, a young magpie, but she could not make herself eat it. She had carried the bird to a grove of serviceberry and left it there. She had thought about trying to nurse the bird back to health, but she had nothing with which to nurse it, and so she prayed for the bird instead, and asked for God’s forgiveness. Three days later she was certain she saw the bird again. She was fifty feet from the cave and was collecting snow for water when a magpie flew above her.

  The days were getting longer, and though storms had continued to blow in from the north and from the west, the accumulation was less, and each storm would be followed by days of warm sunshine. Amy Raye would climb along the ledge to the top of the cave and look out over the canyon where she was sure she could see patches of land around the rocks. But even that small attempt would fatigue her, and her weakened limbs would quiver beneath her weight as she made her way back to the cave. And the muscle cramping had become worse. She needed salt. She needed electrolytes. She thought of the Irish Republican Army strikers who had existed for over sixty days without food, consuming only water and salt. She had gone on this hunt weighing close to one hundred thirty pounds. She had always been lean. She also knew once she had lost more than eighteen percent of her body weight, all hope of surviving would be lost. She chewed on the roots of young pinyons, even sprinkled dirt into her water, hoping to absorb some of the minerals. Still, she was growing weaker by the day.

  And then during the first week of February, the temperatures had felt warmer than usual, and the sun r
ose full-bodied in a cloudless sky. She removed her clothes and stretched her body out on one of the large boulders about forty yards to the east of the cave, so that she could reap the full benefit of the vitamins from the sun. Her hips and elbows had become prominent, and her knees knobby. For the first time she noticed just how much her muscles had atrophied, and she knew she was entering starvation mode. Her metabolism had slowed down; her fat stores had been depleted. Her body was feeding off her muscles for energy and would soon be feeding off her vital organs as well. And in that moment with the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the rock and the mountains and cedar all around her, she knew she would be okay with whatever happened to her. And with that thought, never before had she felt so free.

  For a couple of hours she slept underneath the big sun, and when she awoke she found herself curled into a fetal position, shivering against the cool air. She sat up and pulled on her clothes. She hugged her right knee to her chest and massaged the aching bones and muscles of her left leg. Her thoughts turned over the lyrics to a Billy Bragg and Wilco song. And as she watched the trees, she was still hearing those lyrics in her head—We walked down by the Buckeye Creek. To see the frog eat the google-eyed bee. To hear the west wind whistle to the east. There ain’t nobody that can sing like me, ain’t nobody that can sing like me. Inside the grove of trees was an opening, and inside that opening she could swear she saw the hide of an animal. She slid down from the rock, reached for her crutch, and made her way to the small clearing. Lying in front of her, and scantily covered with snow and broken branches, was the carcass of a deer, and next to the carcass, the rakings and prints of a cougar. She had discovered another cache.