A crashing sound behind him.
Seaver spun around to see the branches of the scrub oak shaking. He glanced down at the monitor, but again, the beacon was gone.
He was getting jumpy. That was all. He hadn’t realized until now how much darker it was. He’d been distracted by the tracker and forgotten his goal of getting back to his truck before sunset. As it was, he’d have a hard enough time following his tracks back, let alone in the pitch-black. A part of him wanted nothing more than to head back now, but he feared if the sporadic signal was a consequence of a dying battery or a malfunction of some kind, he might never find it again.
The trees shivered back into place.
He stared at them a moment longer, watching the snow accumulating on the skeletal branches, before turning back to the southwest once more and fixing his route through the forest in his mind. When the beacon returned, he wanted to be able to cover as much ground as possible before it disappeared again.
More crashing sounds behind him.
The scrub oak shook violently.
He stumbled backward, caught his heels, and hit the ground on his rear end. Before he could rise to his feet again, a dark shape exploded from the thicket and closed the distance between them in the time it took him to draw the breath to shout.
Zeke pounced on his chest and licked his face until he managed to get his arms between them.
“Christ Almighty, boy. You scared the bejeezus out of me.”
Crowell emerged from behind a stand of pines.
“What did I tell you about touching him while he’s working?”
“I’m not the one you need to tell.”
Zeke darted away into the darkness, leaving behind a trail in the snow nearly indistinguishable from the shadows.
“You saw that tape?” Crowell whispered.
“I saw enough to know I didn’t want to see anymore.”
“So you think her body’s out here somewhere?”
“Either here or somewhere else.” Seaver sighed. “Look. I feel terrible for that girl. I really do. But I’m no longer involved. I’m just here to figure out what killed my ram.”
“You and I both know there’s nothing out here capable of tearing apart an animal like that.”
“All evidence to the contrary aside?”
“Funny. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. And there’s nothing funny about it.”
A light blossomed behind them and cast their shadows across the snow.
Seaver held up his hand to keep the beam out of his eyes. Three silhouettes materialized behind it as they stepped out into the clearing.
More crashing sounds to his left.
He glanced over and through the branches saw a dark shape, moving fast and low to the ground. Blasted dog was going to be the death of him.
“Looks like we’re heading in the same direction,” Dayton said.
Seaver was about to say something he hoped would make it sound like he hadn’t deliberately abandoned them, but lost his train of thought when the beacon reappeared on the monitor with a crackle of static.
It was much closer this time.
He slapped the side of the unit and turned the antenna. At first he thought it must have been an aberrant reading, but there was no doubt about it, the beacon couldn’t have been more than a quarter-mile straight ahead through the forest.
More crashing sounds from the thicket to his left.
The wind screamed down from the high country. Seaver ducked his head and tried to raise his shoulder high enough to cover his frozen ears.
The beacon once more blinked out and he nearly threw the antenna in frustration. It had to be the storm, wreaking havoc on the signal.
“What was that?” Thom said.
“What?” Dayton said.
Thom had to raise his voice to be heard over the wind, which blew as much snow from the ground as it did from the sky.
“There it is again.”
Seaver couldn’t hear anything over the wind tearing through the canopy.
“That’s just the dog barking,” Dayton said.
Crowell closed her eyes, cocked her head, and turned toward the sound. Her eyes snapped open and she took off at a sprint.
“That’s his alert bark!”
She barreled into a thicket of pines and vanished behind the branches.
Seaver hurried after her, if only to get out of the blizzard. In these mountains, storms could descend with such speed and ferocity that entire parties had been known to vanish into them and never reappear again. Sometimes their corpses were found, frozen and emaciated. Other times, the survivors appeared some time later, having used the bodies of their companions to keep themselves alive, like that doctor a couple of years ago.
He’d always assumed those were people who had no business being out here in the first place. He’d never for a second considered the prospect that it could happen to him. Sure, he knew where he was and how to get back to his truck, but for the first time he could clearly see just how easy it would be to lose his bearings.
The beacon lit up the moment he ducked into the windbreak. It was even closer now, maybe an eighth of a mile. Six hundred feet. At the rate it was closing, it wouldn’t be much longer before—
An eruption of barking.
Deep.
Frenetic.
Seaver looked in that direction and caught a glimpse of a reflective orange jacket. He picked his way through the forest toward where he could now clearly see Zeke, his legs braced, head lowered, and teeth bared.
“Easy, boy.”
He approached slowly, hands held out to his sides.
Zeke burst into motion. He streaked toward a lodgepole pine, leapt up, and braced his front paws against the trunk. He barked and snapped and jumped at the heavily needled branches.
A crackle of static.
Seaver looked down at the monitor. The beacon was right on top of him.
Something warm struck his cheek. The sensation was so incongruous with his situation that he let it run all the way down to his jaw before wiping it off. He rubbed it between his fingertips until it became sticky.
“What the hell?”
He looked up and another drop struck him directly in the eye. He barely had time to close it before something heavy struck him on the head and shoulders, driving him to the ground.
He tasted something salty and vile a heartbeat before the back of his skull struck the ground and the shouting commenced.
* * *
Avery shielded his face with his arms and ran toward the commotion. Branches and needles raked at his forearms and snow fell down the back of his jacket. He barely even noticed as he weaved through the forest and toward the aura of light, which grew brighter and brighter until he burst from the trees mere feet away from where the sheriff stood, flashlight in hand.
The ground was red. That’s all he noticed at first. Spatters radiating outward from the center of the clearing. Then he saw the bodies and the dog hurling itself over and over against the trunk of a tree and comprehension struck him like a fist to the gut.
It was blood.
The sheriff’s beam spotlighted the ranger. His eyes stood out from a mask of blood and he held out his arms as though uncertain what to do with them. Beside him on the ground was what at first glance Avery had mistaken for another person, but was actually just a tattered orange jacket, covered with blood.
“Did you see anything?” Dayton shouted.
The ranger looked up at him, his mouth hanging open, but didn’t respond.
“Damn it, Seaver. Tell me what you saw!”
The blank expression on the ranger’s face never faltered. He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.
“What in the name of God happened here?” Avery said.
The dog pushed off from the tree and nearly knocked him over in its hurry to leap up against the trunk behind him, where it again barked up into the canopy.
Avery followed its line of si
ght, but couldn’t see a blasted thing through all of the needles and snow, a clump of which streaked down and struck the ground beside the dog. He turned around and looked at the ranger again. There were small mounds of snow all around him amid a scattering of pine needles and bark chips.
“Show yourselves!” Dayton aligned his flashlight beam with the sightline of his pistol. He whirled from one direction to another so quickly that the snowflakes looked like white comets streaking through his beam.
The kid with the sheriff stood stock-still, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his face pale. Droplets of blood fell from the trees and struck his Gore-Tex jacket with a clapping sound.
Avery again looked up and saw branches with large sections of exposed wood, presumably the source of the bark all around the ranger. He heard a loud snap. A branch as long as his arm cartwheeled through the canopy and struck the ground at his feet.
“There’s something up there,” Thom whispered.
If there was, Avery couldn’t see it. With the way the wind bowed the branches and made the shadows take on a life of their own, he probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize it anyway.
A crackle of static and the ranger held up his monitor. The antenna was bent and poked out from beneath the Search & Rescue jacket. He turned it so Avery could see the red dot in the dead center.
“It’s right on top of us,” Seaver said, and looked up just as the sheriff fired up into the canopy.
The report was deafening. Avery hit the ground and covered his head with his hands. He heard another shot over the ringing in his ears, and then shouted words he couldn’t comprehend.
* * *
“Can anyone hear me?” Dayton shouted into his two-way. The only response was a hiss of static. The infernal transceivers were billed as being able to retain a signal anywhere in these mountains, but they’d learned in a hurry that wasn’t the case. There were all sorts of pockets of dead air up here, and the weather only made it worse. “Damn it!”
He grabbed Thom by the sleeve and pulled him closer.
“Listen to me. Here’s what I need you to…”
His words trailed off. Thom didn’t so much as acknowledge the sound of his voice.
“Snap out of it!” Dayton shook him by the shoulders until he finally looked down from the trees and into his eyes. “Can you find your way back to my truck?”
Thom stared at him as though he hadn’t heard. Dayton shook him hard enough to make his teeth chatter.
“I need to know if you can find your way back to my truck.”
Thom shook his head, but said “I…I think so.”
“There’s no time for indecision. Either you can or you can’t.”
“Yeah…I think I can find it.”
“Then I need you to head back there as fast as you can. Here. Take these.”
Dayton placed his keys in Thom’s hand and closed it tightly around them.
“There’s a radio under the dashboard. Stay with me, Thom. There’s a radio. All you have to do is pick it up, press the button, and start talking. Can you do that?”
Thom drew a deep breath and nodded.
“Judy’s working dispatch. I want you to tell her exactly what happened. She’ll know what to do.” He cupped the sides of Thom’s face and looked him directly in the eyes. “Can you do this?”
“You sure that’s the best idea?” Avery said. “Sending him off on his own like that?”
Dayton clapped Thom on the cheek and rounded on Avery.
“Where the hell were you, huh?”
“You don’t possibly think—”
“We came up here to find a missing girl and now my deputy’s gone. You tell me how this looks.”
“Sheriff?” Thom said.
“For Christ’s sake, son. Get the hell out of here already.”
Thom turned without another word and ran. He barely made it twenty feet before he disappeared into the blowing snow.
“Look around you,” Avery said. “You think I could do this?”
“Guys,” the ranger said.
“Thom was right by my side and I could see Seaver the entire time. That leaves just you.”
“Guys!” Seaver shouted.
They both turned and looked at him.
“It’s moving away from us.”
He held up the monitor and Dayton saw a brief flicker of red before the beacon vanished.
Zeke darted past his legs and charged deeper into the forest.
The wind died and the rustling in the trees ceased. Dayton’s breath hung in front of his face in the preternatural stillness.
He walked over to where Crowell’s jacket lay and carefully straightened it out on the snow. The blood on the fabric was already starting to freeze. There were no bullet holes or punctures suggestive of penetrating trauma. The seam was ripped at the shoulder and the lining was torn over the left breast, but there was no indication of what might have happened. All he knew with any kind of certainty was there was an awful lot of blood, and if it was Crowell’s, she was in really bad shape.
The flakes fell steadily around him, alighting silently upon his Stetson and the shoulders of his jacket. If there was a chance she was still alive, then he had to go after her, which, presumably, her dog had already done.
He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and focused on doing his job.
Seaver still knelt on the ground in the same position. The only tracks in the snow around him belonged to the dog. Outside of the heaps of snow that had fallen from the branches and the chunks of bark, the accumulation around the blood was pristine.
Dayton walked slowly forward, alternately shining the light up into the trees and onto the ground. It was immediately obvious that something had been up there. He’d seen bear cubs leave the branches similarly broken and stripped of bark, but he’d never heard of bears, regardless of their size, leaving a mess like this in their wake. The boughs were smeared with blood and there were several high-velocity spatters, the kind produced by a projectile or a fist thrown with considerable force.
Something caught his eye on the trunk, near the bifurcation of the largest branch, maybe eight feet above the ground. There were deep, parallel gouges in the bark. Closer inspection revealed they were rimmed with blood. He held up his own hand. The grooves nearly aligned with his fingertips. They were carved in an upward direction, though, and the only way he could imagine that happening was if Crowell had been hauled up into the tree by her feet and had clawed at the trunk to slow her momentum.
“We got any mountain lions up here this time of year?” he said.
It was the only option that made sense. The trees throughout these mountains were scarred with their claw marks. While he hadn’t known them to hunt from the trees, he’d certainly heard plenty of stories about them dragging their kill up into the canopy so they could eat uninterrupted. And every few years there were reports of mountain lions attacking people.
“We would have been notified if any tracked animals made it this far north.”
“But not if they weren’t tagged?”
Dayton continued to the west. Every few feet he encountered a pattern of droplets already vanishing under the snow.
“Tell me what you know about how they hunt.”
“They’re more active during the winter than the summer months. Their paws are designed to distribute their weight on top of the snow so they can run across it, unlike deer and elk, which stomp through it with their hooves and have a much more difficult time moving. All the lions have to do is follow their tracks and run them down.”
“So you say they can run across the snow?”
“They still leave tracks.”
“But they can move through the trees, right? I haven’t seen many deer or elk up here this season, either. And considering what happened to your bighorn…”
“While you guys are debating this, that woman could be bleeding to death,” Avery said.
“I’m acutely aware of that fact, son.”
“Then why am I the only one willing to do something about it?”
Avery shouldered past the sheriff and tromped through the accumulation beside the dog’s tracks.
“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Dayton said.
“Wait!” Seaver shouted.
Both men stopped and turned to face him.
Seaver slowly stood on unsteady legs and wiped at the blood on his face with the backs of his hands.
“Imagine a two-hundred-pound cat with two-inch canines and retractable claws that can run nearly fifty miles an hour, jump twenty feet straight up, and pounce forty feet horizontally. If that’s what’s out there, then you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
* * *
Seaver’s father had taught him to hunt in the Longfellow Mountains on Maine’s western border with Canada. The deep woods and wetlands made the physical act of tracking less a skill than a science. The earth was hard and rocky and remained frozen six months out of the year, while during thaws the water ran high and fast and washed away prints nearly as soon as they were made. It was a different kind of snow, too, the kind that absorbed the humidity from the Atlantic Ocean and fell as ice, which formed a nearly impenetrable crust glazed by the biting wind. The snow in Colorado accumulated at a fantastic rate, only to melt back down to the snowpack when the sun reappeared. The depth willingly accepted prints, although the wind and falling snow contrived to erase them within minutes during a storm like this, so behavior needed to be taken into account. And what became increasingly apparent with every step he took was that they weren’t dealing with a mountain lion.
There wasn’t a single print to be found, and while big cats were capable of moving from one tree to another, they weren’t known to travel any kind of distance in such a manner. As he’d told the sheriff, their paws were uniquely designed to travel across the snow. Taking the route of most resistance, especially while potentially burdened with Crowell’s weight, simply didn’t make sense. The only reason to do so would be in an effort not to leave any tracks to follow, which required a higher level of cognitive ability than was typically ascribed to predatory species, even of the apex variety.
Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds Page 6