Thirteen inches of fresh powder and no signs of a letup.
The conditions were horrible for an organized search, but, statistically, the probability of the missing young man surviving exposure went from bad to worse after the first four hours. They were now well into hour six, so awaiting first light wasn’t an option.
Walt saw a flicker of headlights and turned to watch a pickup truck make the hairpin turn in a wheel-spinning ascent and pull into the turnout, parking with the other vehicles. Dogs barked from crates lashed to the bed of the arriving truck, which prompted the other canines to compete. Walt couldn’t hear himself think. After another minute, and a lot of peeing, the dogs settled down. Local vet Mark Aker, and his younger brother, Randy, came out of the truck, arguing.
“This coat stinks!” Randy complained, zipping up a winter jacket. “I mean it smells bad, bro-amoxicillin mixed with stale beer.”
“It takes a moron to forget a coat on a night like this,” Mark said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. By now, the others had climbed out of their vehicles.
“No, it takes a moron to be out on a night like this!” Randy replied.
Walt and the Aker brothers went back years. Walt had first met Mark as a teenager, when his family had spent summers and Christmas breaks with his grandparents in Sun Valley. They’d been in a summer camp together, had raised some hell as teenagers on the Sun Valley ski slopes. Now with three dogs at home, Walt basically lived at the vet’s. It felt as if he might as well sign his paychecks over to the Aker brothers. Randy’s specialty was large animals, horses and cattle; Mark’s, primarily cats and dogs. In the glitzy, celebrity-studded Sun Valley community, it was Mark’s practice that had soared. With working ranches giving way to showy estates and ranchettes, Randy’s large animal practice had nearly vanished in the last ten years, causing some envy and friction between the brothers. Things had gotten more cozy between Walt and Mark when Mark had volunteered his services to Search and Rescue, developing an effective K9 unit. Walt felt more like the third brother than a good friend. Hearing that Randy-the wilder of the two-had forgotten his coat came as no big surprise. He’d probably done it on purpose just to frustrate his more responsible brother. If anything, Randy was a professional thorn in his brother’s side. Like most brothers.
Walt and Mark divided up the K9 teams into four pairs. Randy, the odd man out and the most experienced backcountry skier, would work solo, head higher up the road and find his way out to the Drop, from where he would ski the face of the mountain in search of the missing skier. The plan was for him to rendezvous with his brother and Walt midmountain.
The teams headed off without a pep talk or sermon-just a check of avalanche peeps, the radios, and GPSs. Radio checks would be made every fifteen minutes. If the radios failed-and they often did in the mountains-then communicate by flares if the young man was discovered; orange, if you got yourself lost.
Six hours twenty-five minutes.
The ache in the pit of Walt’s stomach had nothing to do with the rope tied around his waist, pulling the evac sled.
Now it was all up to the dogs. Mark released Tango, his bitch German shepherd and the best scent dog he’d ever trained. She would go ahead of them searching for anything human, dead or alive.
Fifteen minutes rolled into twenty. A walkie-talkie check produced reports from everyone but Randy Aker, already out of range.
The terrain proved slow and difficult. Walt was in a full sweat, his parka hanging open. It was twenty-eight degrees out. Snow fell in flakes the size of nickels. Steam rose from his neck and swirled around his headlamp like a halo.
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Mark Aker said breathlessly. The falling snow deadened all sound.
“Good a time as any,” Walt said. He knew what Mark was up to: he was trying to keep Walt’s worry at a manageable level.
“We never talk… politics,” Aker said, testing Walt in a way that made him pay closer attention.
“I run for office every four years. That’s enough politics for me.”
“Not those kinds of politics.”
“I don’t pay too much attention to Washington or Boise, if that’s what you mean,” Walt said. “You ever hear that story-true story, by the way-about some budget committee hearing where the congressman from back east had found a line item listing thirty-five hundred cattle guards and made the recommendation to take them off the federal payroll? Someone had to explain to the idiot that a cattle guard is a couple pipes welded together to prevent cows from crossing a fence line on a road, not a person on a payroll.”
“That’s the point, I guess.”
“What’s the point?” Walt asked. “That congressmen are ignorant?”
Mark didn’t answer.
At this temperature, over this amount of time, the batteries in the missing man’s peep-an electronic device used to help searchers locate someone in the backcountry trapped by snow-would fail sometime soon.
It was a human life, and his survival weighed on Walt’s every step in the cumbersome snowshoes.
“We’re going to lose his peep soon,” Walt said, “if we haven’t already.”
“Hypothermia’s the enemy, not the Energizer Bunny.”
“Point taken.” They continued for a few more difficult yards. “Are you going to explain what you mean by ‘politics’?”
But before Aker could answer, both men stopped at the exact same moment.
“Did you hear that?” Mark asked.
“A branch snapping under the weight of the snow.” Walt moved his headlamp around. A badly bent and sagging pine bough shed some snow and sprang up. Others seemed to bend lower with each flake of fallen snow.
The two men moved on, Mark Aker with less grace than Walt. He’d spent too much time in the clinic. He rocked forward and back on the snowshoes, wasting energy. But Walt knew better than to try to tell him anything. Mark was a doctor, after all.
“You’re thinking it was a gunshot,” Walt said. “A rifle. Light gauge: twenty-two-power load or an AR- 15.”
“It didn’t sound like a tree branch to me. Too far away,” Aker said breathlessly, winded by the climb. “But you’re the expert.”
A few nearby branches snapped, surrendering to the snow load.
Hearing this, both men turned their attention uphill. Then Aker trained his headlight directly on Walt, blinding him.
“You’re right,” Walt said, raising his glove to shield his eyes. “That was a gunshot.”
Walt reached for his radio.
3
TANGO BOUNDED TOWARD HIM, THROWING UP THE SNOW all around her.
Mark Aker praised the dog and signaled Walt to stop and be still. In the shifting light from their headlamps, Tango circled Aker, tripping over the rear spines of his snowshoes, and sat down excitedly on his left side. Soaking wet and panting, she sank into the snowdrift up to her chest, her whole attention fixed on Aker.
She’d returned only once, forty minutes earlier. On that visit, she had circled Aker twice and then charged back into the dark, following the dull impressions of prior skiers and her own fresh tracks. This was her message to her handler that she’d found nothing.
At that time, Aker had made a point of asking Walt to bump the location into his GPS, knowing it might prove useful later.
But now, with Tango’s second return, Mark stood perfectly still, waiting to see what the dog had in mind. Tango stabbed her wet nose into his left glove. She sat back down, then stood up and stabbed his glove again.