In an hour, they’d lost the track five times and spent just about as much time going back over their own footprints as they’d done following the original. After a mile and a half they came to a small creek where Drake saw the track pause, the boot prints in several places as if the person they followed had stopped to drink from the stream. While Ellie surveyed the map, Drake circled the area, coming across a second track. The boots about the same size but the tread slightly different, and this close to the stream the indentations clear in the wet earth.
He came back up the stream and found Ellie. “I don’t think this person stopped here just for the water.”
Ellie rested with one thigh supported on an egg-shaped rock. She looked up as soon as Drake came back and didn’t break eye contact till he was finished. She was holding the map in her hands still and Drake wondered if she knew where they were, because he certainly didn’t.
“Whoever was out here came to meet someone else.”
“Do the two tracks go on together?”
Drake looked behind him. The second track came on about fifty yards farther down, followed the first for a time, and then broke off again. He couldn’t be sure without following one or the other but he didn’t think they had traveled more than a few hundred feet together.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I’m not sure what to,” Drake said. He was looking up the stream, listening to the wind high up as the trees swayed above. A yellow finch flitted out of the brush, catching the light and then disappearing back within the forest shadows. “What size boot have we been following?”
“I don’t know.” Ellie placed her own foot next to one of the prints and then looked up at Drake. “I can’t be sure. What do you make of it? It looks like a woman’s eleven or twelve.”
“What’s that in men’s?”
“A nine,” Ellie said. “Maybe a ten. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about what the size difference is between men and women.” She was waiting for Drake to say something and when he didn’t, she said, “What are you getting at?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking about something Gary said to me last night.”
“Gary?”
“Yeah,” Drake said. “It’s nothing, really. I wear a size ten. I can’t make any more of this than you can.”
Ellie brought the map over so that they could both see. She laid it out on a rock and marked their position with her finger. “This stream runs back down to the lake eventually. It looks far away but that’s just because it follows the back side of the ridge. It really isn’t too far—less than a day’s walk really.”
Drake looked it over. “But like you said, there’s nothing out here.”
“How does that second track look to you?”
“It looks the same as the first,” Drake said. He was getting frustrated with it all. They were out in the middle of nowhere and he was having a hard time putting two and two together.
“Does it double around on itself?”
Drake looked up from the map. He thought back. The trail had come up the stream and met the first and then after a while peeled off. It could have but he wasn’t sure.
“But they do split apart?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got the map,” Ellie said. “I’m going to keep on with the first. I want you to follow the second and see where it goes. You can use the stream as a guide. It runs into the southern part of the lake in about four miles.”
Drake looked back at her in complete disbelief. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ellie said. “This is the job. Mostly we work alone, you know that.”
Drake shook his head. “If you find someone I don’t want you doing anything.”
She smiled back at him. “I’ll use caution,” she said. “I’ll radio you every thirty minutes. How does that sound?”
“Better.”
She took out her water and drank a quarter of it and then put it back in her bag. “Four miles,” she said. And then she put the map away and lifted the backpack onto her shoulders and went on across the creek. Drake watched her for a time as she picked the tracks out of the soft forest detritus.
When she was gone from sight he lifted his own bag and cinched the straps down over his chest and waist. Twenty minutes later he was still following the creek, the boot prints heading southeast toward the lake.
At thirty minutes he stopped beneath a ledge of rock cut away from the mountains by the creek. A deadfall straddled a pool of water where he could see trout skimming the surface for mosquitoes, bits of twig and pine bark collected on the down-creek side of the pool.
He rested and got out some of his water. When thirty-five minutes had passed he tried the radio and got only static. He waited and tried it again. Ellie came through sounding breathless.
“You okay?”
“It doubled back across the creek,” she said. There was static for a moment and then her voice came through clear. “The trail is headed back up the ridge, right back to the clearing where we found the wolf.”
He thought that over. “Back toward town?”
“Exactly,” she said. Her voice sounded a little stronger and Drake imagined her a couple miles up the stream, and probably a thousand feet higher than he was. “You keep going,” she said. “I might lose you when I come over the ridge. I’ll follow my trail and if it just leads me back to the truck I’ll swing around and get you when you come out at the southern part of the lake.”
“Okay,” he said. “It’s just leading me that way as it is.”
“Radio again in thirty minutes.”
He replaced the radio in his bag and then stood with the backpack in one hand. He put one strap over his shoulder, removed the rifle from his other shoulder, and then put the other backpack strap on. For a long moment he stood looking out on the forest as it climbed gradually away from him and the mountain farther on. Besides the wind and the gurgle of the stream there was absolute silence and he felt a shiver travel up his spine and wring itself out on the fine hairs at the back of his neck.
He strapped the rifle up over his shoulder again and began to walk. Two hundred feet on he came to a wet boot print still dripping down one of the rocks.
The rifle was off his shoulder and in his hands before he knew it and for what felt like ten minutes he crouched next to a large boulder with his breath shallow in his lungs and his ears tuned to every swaying tree branch above.
He tried the radio again and got only static. He didn’t know what that meant but he guessed maybe Ellie had made her way up over the ridge and was headed to the truck. With his heart thumping he looked down at the boot print again, the water evaporating where the speckled light of the sun came in from the canopy above. He leaned out from around the boulder and looked up the slight grade at the shadowed forest beyond. Nothing at all to see.
When he turned back the print was just a wet dot on the rock. It could have been anything and this is what he tried to tell himself. The rifle in his hands and the knowledge that whoever had stepped across the creek had done so only a few minutes before.
He came out from behind the boulder in a sweep of the forest. The rifle held to his shoulder and the sight magnifying the far shadows. There was nothing to see but the dense growth of the forest.
Careful with his feet, he made his way up out of the creek bed and followed the fresh trail over the floor of pine needles. He moved with the gun in his hand, resting as he came to each new trunk and then waiting, listening to the blank silence of the surrounding wood. Somewhere far off a chipmunk beat a series of strained calls, chattering in a harsh cacophony before going silent again.