Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  “They don’t usually attack horses either,” Jeff said.

  I’d read the reports of lion attacks, but those attacks hadn’t taken place in remote areas such as this where the lion had plenty of hunting ground. Lion were typically wary of people.

  “She was wearing camouflage,” Jeff said. “She’d probably taken great pains to get rid of her human scent, sprayed herself with some estrus. Maybe she knelt down to tie her boot. She could have been crouched low while she was following the elk. I’ve always heard lion don’t see too good.”

  Jeff was right. Amy Raye could have been an easy target.

  “Two more dogs trained in avalanche searches are being deployed tomorrow. They’re heading up from Garfield County,” I told him.

  “There’s more snow in the forecast.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Be like wading through heavy water,” Jeff said.

  —

  After the gun and hat were found, Colm told reporters, “We are in the phase of realizing the worst.” Eighteen inches of snow were expected to fall over the next two days with gusts up to forty miles per hour. With the new evidence and weather forecasts, the search had officially moved into recovery mode.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Colm said to me. “We’re going to end up losing one of our own. We caught a small break in the weather today. We’re not going to be so lucky the rest of the week.”

  Giovanni’s in Rangely had delivered pizzas for the search crew. I brought Colm a plate with two slices of cold pizza and sat down beside him. A reporter was sleeping on the floor next to the stove. The other reporters had gone.

  “What is it? Two in the morning?” Colm asked.

  “Something like that.”

  Colm took a bite of the pizza and then offered it to me.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “I did.”

  “You heading back to town?” Colm asked.

  “Yeah, in a few minutes.”

  Amy Raye’s quiver and bow were on the table. In front of the quiver, laid out evenly, were its contents: an Allen wrench, a wrist-strap bow release, a bottle of Zephyr spray, an eight-by-eleven-inch topo map that had been creased and folded, and a Suunto directional compass.

  “The husband identified the quiver and the bow. Nice work.”

  “And the compass?” A wave of defeat grabbed hold of me. “At least there isn’t a suicide note.”

  “Not that we found. Dean’s clearing out her camp now, gathering her things.”

  “What about the missing arrow?” I asked.

  “We talked to her friends. They didn’t know what to make of it. All they knew was that she didn’t take the shot when she was with them.”

  “Are you thinking the arrow was part of a suicide plan?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking it might be. She marked the spot where she left her quiver and bow. She knew someone would eventually come upon them. With the arrow missing, we could assume she was tracking an elk. Without her compass and map, we’d think she became lost, died of natural causes.”

  “Have you thought any more about the lion?”

  “I’m not sure what to make of that, but I’m not ruling it out.”

  “Where is the husband now?” I asked.

  “His sister’s with him. She got in a couple of hours ago. Had someone else watch the kids.”

  Static broke over the radio. Another team was reporting in. Still negative on any more findings.

  “Was the husband here when I made the call about the hat?”

  “Sitting right where you are. You’ve seen the families before. I don’t have to tell you what it did to him.”

  In all of my eight years working Kona as a search-and-rescue dog, I’d only been on four searches where the subject wasn’t found alive, and each of those times, the subject’s body was recovered. The last time was the previous winter when a young man had been snowmobiling with his father. The boy had gotten trapped in an avalanche. The father saw the whole thing happen. The boy was only seventeen. Kona was the one who discovered the body.

  “So the gun was hers?” I asked.

  “The husband said she didn’t own a gun. They didn’t allow guns in the house on account of the kids. He thought the gun belonged to one of the guys she was with. We got a confirmation from the two friends when they got back in. Said she had borrowed the gun from Kenny, the younger of the two. Forensics will be able to confirm with us whether the gun was fired.”

  “And the hat?”

  “We’ll look for traces of gunshot. But I don’t think there’s any question the blood is hers.”

  Colm finished the slice of pizza.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I’m all right. Thanks.” Then he pushed the plate away. “There’s something else. I made a couple of calls tonight. Thought Amy Raye must have some family that should know what was going on.”

  “Wouldn’t that be the husband’s job?”

  “You’d think so. He said she hadn’t had contact with her family since she was young. Said he’d written to them once, to an address in Tennessee, but he hadn’t gotten a response. I had some folks at the office do a little checking around. I gave them a call. Father said he didn’t have a daughter. A half hour or so later, the wife calls me back. She wants to know if their daughter is all right.”

  “How long had it been since the mother had talked to her?”

  “Fourteen years. The woman was scared and she was torn up. Scared about her husband finding out she’d called, and torn up as hell about her daughter.”

  “Fourteen years is a long time,” I said.

  There were people waiting to talk to Colm. I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’ll catch up with you later,” I said.

  Jeff and I would be getting a few hours of sleep back at the hotel and then heading out again before the next storm picked up momentum. We decided to ride together and leave Jeff’s truck at the station. The gun and the hat had already been sent to CBI for forensic testing. But Colm felt certain the items belonged to Amy Raye. There were strands of dark blond hair with blood on them inside the hat.

  “What if she was tracking an elk? What if she did get lost?” I said to Jeff as we made our way back to Rangely.

  “What would you make of the gun, then?”

  I knew Jeff was right. “If only we’d found her body,” I said.

  Back at the hotel, Jeff checked in at the front desk. I went on up to my room with Kona. I sent Joseph a text, told him I’d call him in the morning, told him I loved him.

  He should have been asleep. He texted back. Love you, too, Mom.

  AMY RAYE

  Hidden beneath the boughs of the tree, the rain dripping from the branches around her, she heard a rustle in the timber to her right, a lumbering sound, and immediately she thought of the elk. She turned slowly and reached for her bow. At close range she could put another arrow through the elk. To go for her gun in her pack would create too much noise. These were her thoughts when the large animal appeared no more than thirty yards in front of her. A bear’s sense of smell was seven times that of bloodhounds. He would have known she was there. And it was late in the season. Most of the bears had hibernated by now. At first Amy Raye startled. The animal was brown, and larger than most black bears, resembling a young grizzly, and if it was a young grizzly, there would be an angry mother somewhere close by. But Amy Raye knew there were no grizzlies in these parts. She was looking at a cinnamon bear, a color phase of the black bear. And though she’d never seen a cinnamon bear before, she’d heard of them and knew their habitat was in the drier climates of the western states, usually northeastern Utah and Wyoming. The animal lifted his head and looked at her, as if curious, and she wondered if he would come any closer. Instead he just stood there
and watched her. She knew she should probably stand up and back away, make noise.

  And yet she didn’t stand up and back away. She remained calm and watched the bear. She thought of the time she’d seen the grizzly. She could have returned to her small bunkhouse, cooked her dinner, kept Saddle safe.

  And as she thought these things, the cinnamon bear walked on, crossed the meadow, and disappeared into the copse of Gambel oak and potentilla to Amy Raye’s left.

  Almost six years had passed since that time she’d left Farrell. She remembered the people whom she’d met along the way, the cottonwoods that only grew along a riverbank, the hills dotted with ranches, the sandy ridges. She’d moved to Palisade that spring, on the Western Slope, where she’d found work on a peach orchard, and Saddle made friends with a border collie with a banged-up hip. She worked from sunup to early afternoon pruning trees, planting younger trees that had been grafted two years before, and operating the flail mower—mulching the smaller branches that had been pruned. And when she’d finish her work on the peach orchard, she’d drive her twelve-year-old white Chevy pickup to Delta, where she burned ditches with a cattle rancher named Lew who was too old to care if she was a woman or a man, but in the end, they’d both come to enjoy each other’s company. She slept in her truck, and bathed from the spigot and garden hose behind his barn. And once a week he treated her to dinner because he said she’d gotten too thin. He told her she was as capable as any man he’d ever known, and that comment alone made her like him more than most. He didn’t ask her too much about herself. He didn’t talk about himself either. Instead he talked about cattle and life and politics and the economy. He’d served in World War II, he’d sold carpet, he’d sold real estate, he’d been married three times, his middle name was Elwood. She learned these things from one of the other hires.

  Her body grew lean and strong that spring, and while she was planting peach trees or burning ditches, she imagined driving somewhere as remote as Deadhorse, Alaska, a place she’d only heard about from a man in passing who’d worked in the oil field there. So when the ditches were burned and the trees had all been planted, she gathered the rest of her pay, and she and Saddle packed up and headed north.

  After more than three days of driving, and spending two days in Helena, Montana, to have a faulty fuel line on her truck repaired, she and Saddle made it to Tok, the first town in Alaska after leaving Yukon territory. She stopped for fuel and then parked at the Border City Café to get something to eat. It was the middle of May, and there was a migratory bird festival going on, she was told by the couple sitting at the table beside her. They looked to be in their midforties. The woman wore a brim cap that read Birdwatching Chick. A pair of camouflage earmuffs hung around her neck.

  “Where are you headed?” the man asked Amy Raye.

  Amy Raye’s hands were red from the spring cold. She wrapped them around a ceramic coffee mug for warmth. “I’m heading up to Deadhorse,” Amy Raye told them.

  “Up at Prudhoe Bay,” the woman said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You got work in the oil field?” the man asked.

  “No.”

  The couple had mostly empty plates in front of them—a few French fries on one, a slice of tomato on another. Amy Raye had just ordered a cheeseburger and potato salad.

  “That’s a good two-day drive from here, and not a whole lot of anything between. You ever been up that way before?”

  “No. Never been to Alaska before either.”

  “Well, there’s a lot of places to see other than Prudhoe Bay. All the docks and roads up there are restricted to oil field workers,” the man said.

  “I didn’t know that,” Amy Raye told him.

  “My name’s Ian, by the way.”

  Amy Raye shook the man’s hand and introduced herself.

  “And I’m Gina,” the woman said. “We’ve just come back from the Arctic Preserve. A group of us were up there watching the loons and Arctic terns. Are you interested in birds?” she asked.

  “No,” Amy Raye said.

  The man and the woman exchanged glances. “Where are you from?” Gina asked.

  “Colorado. While I was working down there I met a man who’d just spent the winter at Deadhorse.”

  “Was probably exploring drill sites,” Ian said.

  “I think so. He said it was the farthest place in the United States. I thought I’d like to know what it was like to be at the farthest place in the United States.”

  “I guess that all depends on how you look at it. Farthest from what? You see what I’m saying?”

  “I think so,” Amy Raye said.

  “If you were working in Deadhorse, you might say Key West, Florida, was the farthest place in the United States,” Ian went on.

  Gina leaned over the table. She pushed her plate away and folded her arms in front of her. “Why not drive down a little ways to some place like McCarthy or Kennecott? If I was from Colorado, I might think one of those towns was the farthest place.”

  “Gina’s got a point,” Ian said. “We stayed in McCarthy a couple of years back. It’s remote, hardly populated at all. And Kennecott’s a ghost town. But you can at least get food and supplies. And you can buy yourself a drink.”

  “How far is McCarthy from here?” Amy Raye asked.

  “Not nearly as far as Deadhorse,” Gina said.

  “It’s probably about seven hours from here. Some of the driving will be on unpaved roads, but it shouldn’t be too bad. Just make sure you have a spare tire,” Ian said. Gina smiled when Ian said this, and the two of them chuckled lightly. Then Ian looked away as if remembering, and laughed a little more. Ian laid his hand on Gina’s back and rubbed her shoulders, and when he did, Gina leaned her body toward his.

  They went on to tell Amy Raye about McCarthy, how it was situated in the heart of the Wrangell Mountains. They told her the town was surrounded by the largest protected wilderness on earth.

  And as they talked, as Amy Raye watched the easiness pass between them, she decided she’d check out McCarthy. The area was considered endangered. Amy Raye wanted to know what that meant. She wanted to experience it herself. She decided that being in the largest protected wilderness on earth was more alluring to her than being in the farthest place in the United States.

  The couple lived in Fairbanks. They would be heading in a different direction. They walked Amy Raye to her truck, were delighted to see she had a dog. They even gave Amy Raye hugs good-bye, and in those hugs, she missed Farrell. She thought about how he would have liked these people. She almost told them about him, but she and Farrell had gone their separate ways. She had not checked in with Farrell since she had left, and she wondered about that as she saw this couple who almost seemed cartoonish in their bliss. There was a simple sweetness to them that Amy Raye wanted to believe was real.

  It was close to eight that night when she got to McCarthy. She parked at the footbridge and grabbed her small duffel bag, and she and Saddle walked across the bridge and the half mile to town. She stopped at Lancaster’s Hotel and checked into the one vacancy, a small room with a twin bed and thin mattress, and a corridor bathroom shared by other guests. She was hungry, not having stopped to eat dinner, so she walked next door to the Golden Saloon, found a quiet corner among the revelry, ordered a beer and a steak. She did not own a cell phone, though most everyone did, so she was glad when she saw a pay phone beside the restrooms, because as she ate alone, she missed Farrell, and without thinking too long about it, she found the coin change in her jeans pocket and stood up to call him. But when she pulled out the handful of coins, she found the small piece of paper with Lew’s telephone number, so she called him instead. Lew did not pick up, and she wondered if he was outside doing a chore or putting tools away, or perhaps he’d driven to town and wasn’t back yet. Before leaving Delta, she’d pulled up beside Lew in the yard. With his arms folded, he’d
leaned on the rolled-down window of her truck. He’d asked her what she was running away from, and she told him she wasn’t, that she just liked to get out there and see different things. He asked her if she’d gotten traveler’s checks because he didn’t like to see a woman alone on the road with all that cash, and he knew she didn’t own a credit card. She didn’t want him to worry, so she told him she’d gotten traveler’s checks earlier that day, though the truth was, almost all of her cash, about twenty-eight hundred dollars, was in a side pocket in her small duffel bag. She carried another two hundred dollars in her wallet.

  “Well, all right, then,” Lew said. And he walked away, and Amy Raye felt a lump knot up in her throat because she’d seen his eyes get a little misty, and she knew hers were getting misty also.

  Amy Raye hung up the phone and walked back to her table, the mood to call Farrell having passed.

  The next morning after taking care of Saddle, who’d slept in the room with her, she returned to the Golden Saloon for breakfast. The manager was there and talked with her for a while. He asked her if she was going to have enough money to get back home. She told him she’d already spent a good two thirds of her money getting to Alaska and fixing her truck, and that she was going to have to stay for a while and hoped to find work. He told her about a friend of his who was looking for seasonal help.

  “What kind of help?” Amy Raye asked.

  “He’s got some cabins about a mile up the road past the footbridge. You would have passed them on your way in. He wants someone to do the housekeeping and help take care of the grounds.”

  “I could do that,” Amy Raye said.

  “Might have a bunk you could sleep on also.”

  “What about my dog?” Amy Raye asked.

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  He wrote down his friend’s number. Told Amy Raye to give him a call.

  The friend ended up hiring Amy Raye and giving her a place to stay, a bunk in an eight-by-eight shed at the back of the property. The cabins had been newly built and had a full house of reservations for the summer—backpackers and fishing groups and families. “We’ve got to be able to turn the rooms over fast,” the owner told Amy Raye.