“It’s good for me to get back into the hills. Maybe it will help me tame some old demons.”
“I guess it is just like old times, then,” Gary said. “We’ll catch up, don’t worry. I wouldn’t have much time today anyway.”
“You sure you don’t need me?” Drake asked, stepping closer to the car.
“No. It’s nothing,” Gary said. “Cheryl didn’t make it home last night. Her parents called us pretty late. You know how this goes. She’s probably shacked up at a boyfriend’s somewhere.” He nodded back toward Patrick and said, “You just watch out for your father, Bobby. I don’t want anyone else going missing around here.”
Drake nodded, watching as a thin smile slipped across Gary’s face.
“I don’t want it to be anything like old times out here,” Gary said. “Make sure your father doesn’t step out from behind a tree with a couple sacks of BC bud under each of his arms.” Gary laughed. “See you both in a day or so, okay? Pat, let’s grab that drink when you get back.”
“Okay,” Patrick said, stone-faced and impossible to read. “You and the boys.” He moved back from the door and straightened up.
Gary laughed once more. “Happy hunting.” Then he pulled away down the road and they watched him take the turn and head north toward Silver Lake.
SOMETIME AROUND NOON they lost the trail. No tracks in the moist ground. No broken branch, or scat, or tuft of hair. Nothing to go on. The forest all around them, dense and black with shadow. Sword fern and moss all across the forest floor. The large trunks of fir and hemlock stretching down from above and the sky only visible through slim blue cracks in the canopy.
Ellie stood and marked their location on the map. She was holding a GPS in her hand and as she looked around at the forest, she measured their bearings against the map. Drake found an old deadfall. The bark beneath his fingertips, grown thick with rough moss, felt spongy to the touch. He put his full weight to it and sat, the log buckling slightly as the rot compressed.
On his knee he wore a metal brace, with Velcro ties and padded fittings. The material beneath wet with his own sweat. For nearly five miles they’d been making a straight line upward through the mountain, veering often before coming back on path, heading almost parallel to the lake below, but always climbing.
Next to him, Patrick swayed on his feet, his hands tucked under the straps of his pack and a half circle of sweat stained into the shirt below his neck. “So what’s the plan here?” he said, raising his eyes to Ellie. “We’re just going to track this girl, shoot her, and then put a collar on her?”
“You make my job seem so easy,” Ellie said.
“Well, there is the hiking part.”
Ellie grinned and studied her map. When she looked back up, searching the hillside above, she said, “And the finding her part.”
Drake worked the muscles beneath the brace, feeling the familiar pain. He knew this was good for him, all of it, pushing himself till the new muscles formed over the old, cutting out the scar tissue. He carried with him his old .270 hunting rifle, the gun strapped to the side of his pack, and a scope zipped into one of the pockets. He wasn’t expecting to use it, but he was nervous about this whole thing and had packed it that morning, thinking about stories he knew were myths, but that somehow had worked their way into his reality. When he looked back up at Ellie she had walked off a ways and then come back, GPS in one hand and her own rifle in the other.
“How long since the last wolf sign?” she asked.
“It’s been a while now,” Drake said.
Ellie turned and looked to Patrick. “You see anything?”
Patrick had produced a water bottle from his pack and stood drinking. When he was done he passed it along to Drake and said, “What did you think? This wolf was just going to pop out of the woods so we could shoot her?”
“That wasn’t exactly it,” Ellie said.
“You bring any kind of bait?”
“This one seems to be attracted to dead bodies.”
“That why you had us come along?” Drake said. “Human sacrifices?”
“The way you’re both breathing it’ll probably turn into something like that,” Ellie said. “I brought along some urine from a male wolf, and a distressed-elk call. I figure between the two we can hope to get her coming our way.”
“Where to now?” Patrick asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ellie said. She ran the back of her palm along her hairline to wipe the sweat away. “You got any hideouts for us to hole up in?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Two years smuggling drugs over these mountains and you got nothing, huh?”
“Well, the idea was not to leave a trail.”
“Makes sense,” Ellie said. “I’m just starting to think about how it took them two years to find a guy in these mountains and we’re looking for one wolf who’s only been here a few weeks.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly howling at the moon, either,” Patrick said.
Drake finished drinking from the water and then offered it to Ellie. When she turned it down he handed it back to his father. “Still,” Drake said. “You did get caught.”
OUT IN THE darkness they heard the wolf call.
Drake and his father sat around a small fire Ellie had allowed them to make on Forestry land. The two tents they’d set up just beyond the light in the shadowed forest. Ellie already asleep in her tent and only Drake and Patrick sitting up with the fire. No words spoken between the two of them in thirty minutes or more as they sat looking inward. Transfixed by the dance of the flames while out in the forest the wolf called and called without response.
The feeling Drake had carried with him through the day brimming at the edge. The simple question he feared to ask. He felt it all circling around them in the night. The threat out there and all it held with it. His father returned to the valley for only a few days and already Drake’s life felt more tenuous than perhaps it had ever felt. But still he wouldn’t say a thing, fearful of what response might come, of what truths might be revealed. Miles from home in the middle of the woods it was either the best or the worst place to confront his father.
From the pile by his feet Drake grabbed a piece of wood and threw it into the fire, the sparks dancing for a moment and then settling again. The fire small but strong where the coals burned bright and iridescent in the belly. Nothing to be said. In the morning they would bury the black coals in the ground and move on.
The wolf called again and Drake raised his head, trying to fix a location. The night all around them now and the cold that came with it. A bright half-moon above in the sky and the pathways of moonlight visible on the ground in all directions. The flicker of the fire reaching only so far into the forest, where the blue-black light began and the ferns feathered out of the shadows. No idea how far or close the wolf might be. Only the lonely rise and fall of the howl trailing through the trees.
DRAKE WOKE IN the morning with the air thick around him. The tent he’d packed for his father and him zipped up and stale with the smell of their breath. In the night he’d dreamed about Ellie. The two of them sitting up in her truck on another night, waiting, not for poachers this time but for something else, something that had gone—like most dreams—painfully unnamed. What they’d said to each other and how they’d acted as indistinct as fresh ink smeared on paper. Words only half-legible. His hand at one time during the night held toward her.
Rolling over, remembering it all, he brought his arm up and lay looking at his hand as if it had acted alone in some brutal conspiracy that implicated them all. Above, through the thin tent walls, a pale light came streaming down. A slight hiccup to his breathing as he tried to calm whatever thoughts had been churning inside him. It was a full minute before he realized his father was missing.