Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  She did not have her backpack with her. She did not have her knife. And she would barely have enough strength and daylight to make it back to the cave, much less return again that evening to pilfer the cache. But where the lion’s teeth had bored into the deer, Amy Raye was able to tear away at least a couple of pounds of meat. She was tempted to eat the meat raw; she was that hungry, and she thought of the minerals that the deer’s blood would provide. But she didn’t eat the meat raw. Instead she stretched out the tail of her thermal shirt and laid the meat against the fabric. With her left hand, she held the game close to her stomach. She would carry the meat in the same way she used to carry Matchbox cars and Legos when she was picking up after Trevor. She did not look for the lion. She thought only of getting back to the cave, and so with the crutch tucked beneath her left arm, she began making the slow ascent to her shelter. She stopped a couple of times to rest, and by the time she was inside the cave’s walls, the sky was mostly dark. She cooked the meat but was only able to eat a small portion before she became full.

  With her stomach satisfied and the fire now a slow flame and the cave warm, her thoughts settled around Farrell and home and the children and a second chance to find her way out. Despite her weakened state, she knew she could not postpone another attempt. She also knew that with her depleted state, it could take her days to travel even a mile. And she would need food to sustain her. She would have to return to the cache site, and this time she would bring her pack. She would prepare her things before she left: water, her metal bottle, parachute cord, fire starter, emergency matches. She would also make sure her left foot was properly insulated. Though she had not experienced complete frostbite, her toes had blistered and peeled after her last attempt. When she returned, she’d cut a V out of the right side of her boot and made slits down the other side as well. She had found that she could wear the boot this way, and that it allowed her to put some weight onto her broken foot. She would leave at sunrise and stop first at the cache site, where she would take as much meat as she could manage to carry, maybe twenty pounds, maybe only ten. Though she would be working her way down the mountain in snow cover, more and more patches of land were becoming visible in the distance. She had already thought of taking a different route than the one before. Instead of heading directly west, where she knew there were steep drop-offs and where there might be drifts, she would make her way southwest, moving in the same direction as the tracks made by the large dog and the set of boots. And she remembered having seen a road toward the southwest corner of the map. The road could be ten miles away, but without knowing her exact location, it might be closer, and she felt certain the descent would be more gradual and eventually would put her at a lower elevation, which would mean less snow.

  She would need her rest, but her eyes danced with anticipation. The cougar no doubt had already returned to the cache, would have consumed more of the carcass. But the deer was a large animal, and the kill was fresh, with plenty of meat, as if the lion had barely fed on it at all. The vultures had not taken to it yet, and the carrion beetles were still underground. Amy Raye gave thanks for the deer. She gave thanks for her full stomach. Then she realized the lion would have already known she’d been at the site. Perhaps he would be waiting for her return. She’d known about making herself seem large should she come upon a lion on a trail, about throwing rocks and making noise. She would tie her jacket to her crutch and wave her crutch in the air. She would sing the songs that had played in her head. And she thought of Farrell and all the songs he had sung to her, and that clear winter night they placed their lawn chairs in the snow and Farrell had set his turntable on the stone porch, and they’d drunk from a bottle of Glenlivet and listened to Victoria Williams sing, You are loved, you are loved, you are really loved.

  As she lay in the cave, as she waited for sleep, she dragged the index finger of her right hand along the soft sand of the cave floor, and with her eyes closed, she wrote Farrell’s name beside her.

  —

  She was nineteen the first time she saw the wild horses. She’d taken a job working the night shift at the front desk of a privately owned hotel in Grand Junction. She was paid minimum wage and a room to stay in that came with a small refrigerator and cooktop stove. In the afternoons, after getting some sleep, she would climb in her truck and explore the terrain looking for the bands of mustangs in the Book Cliffs. She never found the band outside Grand Junction, but one day she headed north to Moffat County, and off Highway 318 in the Sand Wash Basin northwest of the small town of Maybell, she saw a beautiful sorrel stallion cresting the hill, and soon to follow were at least a dozen mustangs. She pulled her truck off to the side of the road and got out. The horses ignored her at first and began grazing on the hill about a hundred yards in front of her. Then another truck pulled over, shut off its engine, and a middle-aged woman joined her.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” The woman’s voice was calm, almost a whisper.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this. I can’t believe I’m here.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The woman’s face was tanned from the wind. A long black braid hung over her shoulder. She was wearing overalls and a man’s white T-shirt. “He’s watching us,” the woman said.

  The stallion was standing alert, as if paying attention to every move Amy Raye and the woman made. “See that one up there?” The woman pointed to a gray roan. “That’s the boss mare.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just watch.”

  Despite the distance, Amy Raye was sure she could hear the stallion snorting. He lifted his head toward the roan.

  “He’s communicating to the head mama,” the woman said.

  The mare lifted her head. She moved around the other horses as if trying to get their attention and then began trotting toward the stallion. Within seconds, all of the horses were running at a strong gallop, and the stallion closed in behind them.

  “He’s protecting the others. That’s why they band together,” the woman told Amy Raye. “For companionship and protection. In a healthy band, the lead stallion and the mare will usually stay together for life, and the mare will never abandon her foals.”

  “Kind of like people,” Amy Raye said.

  But the woman didn’t miss Amy Raye’s sarcasm. “Don’t we wish.”

  They watched the horses until they were gone from sight.

  “Well, I best be feeding my own horses,” the woman said. “You got a place to stay?”

  “I’m working in Grand Junction.”

  “You been there long?”

  “About a month. I have a job at a hotel.”

  “I manage a big stable operation in Steamboat Springs. I can always use an extra set of strong hands. My name’s A.J. If you’re ever interested, give me a call. I’m listed under equine trainers.”

  “I’ll do that,” Amy Raye said. “I really will.”

  “What’s your name? So I’ll know who you are when you call.”

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

  After the woman drove away, Amy Raye walked up the hill to where the horses had been. She looked out over the horizon, trying to see if she could see them, but they had moved on. Then she sat on the hill and pressed her palms against the soil where the horses had stood as if she could feel the movement of their hooves. She stayed out there till dusk, when the coyotes began to yip and she knew she needed to get back for her shift. She grabbed a fistful of the dirt and continued to hold it in her hand, even as she drove to the hotel. She thought about the soil she’d put in her pocket the last time she’d stopped by her grandparents’ farm, and she wondered if losing it was some kind of omen or an act of pure carelessness. She’d stopped overnight in Oakley, Kansas, and had washed her clothes at a Laundromat.
She’d forgotten about the contents of her shorts pocket until she’d taken the shorts out of the dryer.

  Back in her room in Grand Junction, she sifted the soil from the wild horses into a sandwich bag, and set the bag on the nightstand beside her bed. Just a month later, Amy Raye finished her last day at the hotel and moved to Steamboat Springs. And all those years later, she still had the dirt from where the wild horses had stood. She kept it in a jar next to her and Farrell’s bed, and beside Saddle’s ashes.

  PRU

  Just last week when I was on my way home from town, I drove by Colm’s place, a small cabin he’d lived in ever since he’d moved to Rio Mesa. And in the lot across from his property, I saw a doe and a fawn feeding in that soft glow of dusk. I slowed my vehicle just to watch the whole thing, and then I realized that the For Sale sign was gone.

  Tom Moyer had owned a number of lots around town, including the one across from Colm. One night after dinner, when Joseph and I were straightening up the kitchen, I got a call from Tom. He said a contracting company that wanted to run a pipeline through the property he owned south of town had approached him. I knew the property he was talking about, a hundred-acre parcel abutting the Grand Hogback, and full of artifacts we had yet to map and explore. When Joseph was young, Tom would let me take Joseph down to that property, and we’d spend hours splitting open shale and discovering fossils. Tom knew I had a vested interest in his parcel for all of its historical implications and wanted to know how I thought he should proceed. We talked the matter over, including him contracting a private archaeological consultant. I gave him a couple of names to follow up with. But before we got off the phone, I asked him about the lot across from Colm’s property. “What about that lot you own over on Third?” I said. “I thought you had that piece on the market.”

  “I did have it on the market,” Tom told me. “I was asking thirty thousand. Colm paid me twenty-eight thousand in cash.”

  “Colm bought it? I had no idea,” I said.

  When I got off the phone, Joseph had already put the rest of the dishes away. He was sitting at the kitchen table with the sweetest damn smile on his face.

  “What?” I said.

  He slouched down in his chair and leaned his shoulders against the paneled wall. “He likes you,” Joseph said.

  “Who likes me?” I said.

  “Sheriff McCormac,” Joseph said.

  I leaned my backside against the kitchen counter and folded my arms. “Why would you say that?” I said.

  “The way you two act with each other, like you two like each other or something.”

  “I wasn’t on the phone with Sheriff McCormac,” I said.

  “I know you weren’t on the phone with Sheriff McCormac,” he said.

  “Then what made you say that?” I asked.

  “Because you were talking about him, and you wanted to know about that lot. He likes you, Mom. That’s why he doesn’t have anyone else.”

  “He just got divorced.”

  “That was like a year ago. You should go out with him. You’re practically going out with him anyway.”

  I walked over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “How did I get so lucky?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just look at you. All grown up and giving me advice. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I hope you know that,” I said.

  He looked bashful all of a sudden.

  “I’m serious, Joseph. I’m real proud of you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Then I said something about Joseph having homework to finish. I told him I was going to be out in the field all the next day and should probably turn in soon. He leaned over and gave me a hug. “Love you, Mom.”

  “Love you, too, son.”

  I stayed at the table a while longer after Joseph went back to his room to study. I thought about what he’d said about Colm. I was twenty-six when I had Joseph. Aside from Brody, Todd was the only other man I’d ever been in a relationship with. And yet, maybe Joseph was right.

  I packed a lunch and gathered my things for my trip out in the morning. I was going to be heading into the Coos shelter area. I wanted to check on the camera that I’d placed at the site earlier that fall, and I had something else turning around in my head that I needed to sort out, as well. The camera was triggered by motions and would send digital photos to my computer. Usually those photos didn’t amount to much. They could be triggered by all kinds of small animals. But early one morning a month back, I’d gotten a clear image of an adult cougar. I hadn’t thought too much about it. The East Douglas area was prime territory for a lion. The rock outcroppings, canyons, and thick brush provided excellent stalking cover. And with the healthy population of deer and elk, the area provided the lion with available prey. Though deer tended to flourish where there was thicker escape cover, their diets also consisted of vegetation such as bitterbrush and Gambel oak that was abundant in these parts. Then I got to thinking about the tom we’d taken down nearly ten miles north of the Coos shelter area. Cougars were solitary predators. Recent studies of winter territories showed that a male cougar could occupy an area of up to twenty-five square miles. A female’s territory was smaller, between five and twenty square miles. According to Breton Davies, the sharing of ranges typically only occurred between males and females. He’d explained that males established areas that would overlap with as many female ranges as possible for mating purposes. I could assume that the lion I’d seen at the shelter was either a transient lion, still looking to establish its territory, or a female whose range had overlapped with that of the male Breton had shot.

  None of these things mattered a whole lot to me, until one night when Jeff called. He wanted to know if anything else had come of the search. I told him about the elk skull I’d come across and the bullet matching the one Amy Raye would have fired. Then he brought up something he’d been thinking about the past couple of days. Said when he was a kid, he and his brother would visit their uncle in Olathe. Olathe was a farming town in Montrose County, south of Rio Mesa. His uncle had grown corn and in October each year would open a maze where he would charge admission.

  “One fall my brother and I took off in one direction of that maze while two of our cousins set out in another. But all Tucker and I seemed to be doing was going in circles. Our uncle had to come in and find us. He said the two of us had kept ending up back at the same spot on account of us both being right-handed. Said people who are right-handed tend to veer right when they are lost, whether in the woods or a big corn maze, ending up in the same area as where they had started.”

  After Jeff and I got off the phone, I pulled up a map of East Douglas Creek Canyon on the computer. Amy Raye’s compound bow was for a left-handed person. The elk skull was southeast of the tree stand and the truck. If Amy Raye had been trying to make it back to the truck where she’d left her packing frame, and had veered left, she would have been heading in the direction of a number of some of the pipeline roads and areas of lower elevation. We’d covered that area extensively and should have found some evidence of her. But then I remembered something my dad had brought up when we were visiting over Christmas. Without the direction of the sun as a compass, a person’s natural instinct is to think that if she is heading downhill, she is moving southward, and if she is climbing uphill, she’s moving northward on the map. “Think about it,” Dad had said. “We consider south as low and north as high.”

  “It’s true,” Greg said. “It’s conditioned in our brains. We see it on every map we look at.”

  I told them that according to weather reports, the cloud cover had been thick that day with heavy winds and snowfall late in the afternoon. Amy Raye could very well have been in a whiteout for all we knew.

  She had tracked the elk downhill, traveling northeast and moving into a gulch toward Big Ridge. With a snowstorm, she could easily have gotte
n turned around. I thought of the area where I’d found the elk skull and rib bones. If she’d continued east, or if she’d traveled directly south, she would have been climbing in elevation. She could have thought she was heading back to the truck. Then, if I added the dominant-handed theory, she would have been far out of our search radius and thick in the middle of Cathedral Bluffs. I’d hiked into the Bluffs just before Christmas to check out a couple of sites we planned to survey sometime that spring, but I hadn’t seen any disturbance. However, I came across cougar rakings on a tree. And at one point on the hike, something had gotten Kona going. I’d thought he’d seen a deer or a coyote and was getting himself worked up for a good chase. Looking back, I wondered if maybe he’d picked up on the cougar, if maybe we were being watched.

  When Breton took down the big tom, Colm and I had thought we could rule out a lion from contributing to Amy Raye’s disappearance. Now I wasn’t so sure. Though I knew it wasn’t unlikely that a lion might have discovered Amy Raye’s remains, I was cautious to think one would have attacked her. Still, I couldn’t shake what Aaron and Kenny had told Colm about Amy Raye covering herself in elk estrus before a hunt, and more than once Breton had reminded us of lion relying on their scent rather than their vision.

  —

  It was a Thursday when I headed out to the Coos shelter. The weather for that day and the upcoming weekend looked mild, with daytime highs in the low forties and clear skies. We couldn’t have asked for a better forecast. Soldier Creek Cattle Company was having its centennial founder’s day celebration that would kick off Friday evening and last into the afternoon on Sunday. Already the one hotel in Rangely was full, as were the two hotels in Rio Mesa. Old Crow Medicine Show was scheduled to play at Rangely High School on Friday night, followed by a barbecue with a four-hundred-pound spit roast at Trip Mortenson’s ranch. These kinds of events drew in crowds from several counties over, as well as folks from Wyoming and along the eastern border of Utah. The concert alone was expecting a crowd of a couple of thousand, and the barbecue would no doubt go on well into the night. Only two nights before, Colm had been called to break up a pre-celebration party that had gotten out of hand. One of the local cattle ranchers had roasted a couple of lambs, a mock commemoration of the sheep wars that used to go on about the same time the Soldier Creek Cattle Company was founded. Cattlemen didn’t like their public grazing lands being taken over by the sheepherders. During those years, close to a hundred thousand sheep were killed, many having been run off the edge of steep, rocky cliffs.