Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  Trip’s property contained the original Soldier Creek homestead and was located just past Tommys Draw on the south end of Cathedral Bluffs. From the Coos rock shelter, one could look out over Bowman Canyon and spot the ranch, and in the summer recognize the irrigated pastures. On the cliff above the rock shelter was a large expanse of exposed rock, with a significant flat-surface area. I’d taken Joseph camping there the summer before to show him the shelter. He’d been impressed with the rock art, the white birds, as Glade and I called them because the pictographs looked like silhouettes of white wings against the sky, and the trapezoid figures that Joseph said looked like guardians. We talked about that as we sat around our campfire on the bluff.

  “What makes you think they are guardians?” I’d asked him.

  “Their bodies look like shields,” he’d said. “And some of them are holding spears.”

  I told Joseph how the Fremonts had lived in the western Colorado Plateau and the eastern Great Basin area for almost a thousand years, flourishing as hunters and gatherers in communities of up to several hundred people. But within a hundred and fifty years, they had disappeared from Utah, and though they had begun showing up in western Colorado, their communities had dwindled down to no more than isolated farmsteads and cliff dwellings large enough to contain four or five families. Then, by 1400 A.D., they had disappeared from Colorado as well. They’d been called the vanishing people, because none of the artifacts from their culture had shown up in any other Native American cultures, meaning it wasn’t likely they’d been assimilated into other groups. Joseph and I were camping in the last area where the Fremonts had lived.

  And as Joseph and I sat around the campfire that night, we talked about what might have happened to the family that had lived at this particular site. The ledge that had once sheltered this group appeared as if it had been deliberately made to fall. The edges of the ledge, and the rock face it had been broken from, were sheer. There was no evidence of erosion. “There could have been disease and someone wanted to stop the disease from spreading,” I told Joseph. “The Utes could have come upon the bones and decided to cover them up.”

  “Could the Fremonts have starved to death?” Joseph asked.

  “It’s possible, but it’s unlikely.” I told him about the middens we’d found and the evidence of a healthy diet. And we’d found granaries with corn.

  “What do you think?” Joseph asked.

  “I think it was disease or warfare,” I said.

  And then we sat quiet for a while longer.

  “It’s kind of unsettling,” Joseph said.

  “It is.”

  “Do you ever get scared out here?”

  “No.” I picked up a stick and stoked the fire. I was sitting a few feet from Joseph. “You know, when I first came out here, I really didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t know what lay ahead for me. I didn’t know I was going to have you. I suppose I was just trying to understand it all. When I’m out here, I feel like I’m as close as I’ll ever be to finding the answers.”

  Joseph remained quiet.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

  “Did you love my dad?”

  Joseph had asked this question before, and I’d answered it before, as well. “I thought I loved him,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” Joseph’s voice was subdued. He was staring straight ahead at the flames.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Another minute passed. The fire popped and the wood shifted.

  Then I told him about something Glade had once said, how archaeology was the purest study of man. “We want to find out who we are,” I said. “After Brody died, I lost my fulcrum. I guess in coming out here I was trying to find out what my new fulcrum was. Your father was a part of that.”

  —

  About a half mile from the shelter, Kona and I came across cougar tracks, as well as lion scat. The tracks were fresh. Only two weeks before, the photo of what was probably the same lion had been triggered and sent to my computer. I remembered what Breton had said about lion only staying in the same area when protecting kittens or a cache, and that lion could breed anytime during the year. He’d also said that a cougar didn’t wean her kittens until after the first three to four weeks, and the only time she’d leave her kittens during that time was to hunt and feed from her cache. I was probably dealing with a female cougar.

  Once I’d checked the camera and made sure it was secure, I decided to explore the area further while I still had good daylight. Having accompanied Breton and Hank into the search area, I had a better idea of what to look for when exploring a lion’s territory. Maybe it was instinct, or pure curiosity, but I found myself heading in the direction I’d mapped out after talking with Jeff. I’d covered several miles and had checked out a number of potential cache sites, when I came upon about seven magpies cleaning up the remains of what looked like a fairly recent deer carcass. I flailed my arms when I approached and made a ruckus. The birds squawked at an obnoxious volume, making a louder ruckus than I, and a couple flew after me. I yelled that much louder and waved them away. As I examined the carcass, the birds continued to screech and fly directly above me. They were an aggressive breed, but given the threat to their food supply, I didn’t blame them.

  I knelt beside what was left of the deer. Even though most of the flesh was gone, there were still some cartilage and tendons holding the larger bones together. The smaller bones, including the ribs, had already been broken open for the marrow. Despite some strewn branches, the area hardly looked like a cache site. But when I observed the bones more closely, there was no doubt a cougar had killed the deer.

  I was examining one of the ribs when the sun’s rays reflected off something on the ground a couple of feet in front of me from the carcass and almost hidden beneath a branch. Within seconds I was holding a gold wedding band in the palm of my right hand and staring at that ring with all of the disbelief in the world.

  WILD SPACES

  Joseph had already left for the founder’s day concert in Rangely. I’d just come in from taking Kona on a run when Colm called.

  “He’s driving over first thing in the morning,” Colm said.

  “Did you tell him why you wanted to see him?”

  “I told him we might have some new evidence. That it would help if we could talk to him.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “He sounded hopeful, and I hate to think of what it’s going to do to him when he sees that ring.”

  Colm and I had met with Hank and Breton that morning. Breton talked about how lion leave scratch piles for the purpose of marking their territory, particularly around a den or a cache site. Using her hind feet, the cougar will scrape the ground, creating a small mound of dirt or snow and debris. Then the lion will defecate on the scratch pile, creating a territorial marker.

  I hadn’t remembered seeing scat. There was snow and a collection of branches, and scavengers had already gotten to the carcass and disturbed the area. But Breton pointed to a scratch pile in one of the photos. He believed the cougar had recently come upon Amy Raye’s remains, which could have been preserved in the snow. As the layer of snow began to melt, her body would have been exposed, he’d said. The ring would have passed through the lion. Breton believed if we were to return to the site of the deer carcass and examine the scat, we’d probably find more human evidence. It was a sobering morning. Colm congratulated me on my work. So did Breton.

  When Colm got in touch with me, he said he would be at the office for a couple more hours. He told me he was going to be on call that night, as well.

  Then Colm said, “Pru, I don’t know how you did it. I know you’re not feeling real good right now, but you’ve done one hell of a job, and I respect you for it. If you need anything—”

  “I’ll be okay. Let me know how tomorrow goes?”

 
“I will.”

  —

  It was sometime after ten o’clock when Colm called me back. I was sitting by the fire reading.

  “Guess who I spent the past hour talking with?” Colm said.

  “Don’t make me guess,” I said.

  “Farrell Latour stopped in to see me. He just left with Darlene to get some coffee.”

  Darlene was one of the dispatchers. “I thought he was driving over in the morning.”

  “His sister said she could watch the kids, so he decided to head over tonight.”

  “Except he couldn’t find a room.” I set the book I’d been reading aside. “How is he?”

  “It’s tough,” Colm said. “They haven’t had a service for her. Just a couple of prayer vigils. He took a soldering iron and melted his wedding band after we’d brought him in for questioning. But I got to tell you, Pru, he still loves her. Carries that bead of silver around in his pocket.”

  I was stretched out on the sofa with Kona at the other end by my feet. “So, tell me, Colm, what did you do with your ring?” I asked.

  “It’s lying in an ashtray at my house. I haven’t decided what to do with it.”

  “I didn’t think you smoked.”

  “I don’t. She did.”

  Colm told me to hold on. Someone had come into his office. “Who do we have responding?” I heard Colm say. And then, “Who called it in?”

  Colm got back on the phone. “A call just came in of multiple gunshots being fired near the Rangely Loop Trail.”

  The Rangely Loop Trail was in East Douglas Creek Canyon, near the Coos site. “Dean was the first one to respond,” Colm told me. “He’s got about a twenty-minute travel time. I think I’ll see if Farrell’s up for a ride. I’d like to have a look and make sure Dean has some backup.”

  —

  Amy Raye lay beneath the stars and wept. She’d reached for her ring, as she did each night before falling asleep, and when it wasn’t there, and she did not know when she had lost it, she feared she had lost Farrell, as well. When she had finished crying, she rekindled the fire and warmed her spent body. “Enough,” she said. And though she did not sleep well, she slept some, and upon first light, she ate enough venison until she was full. She thanked God and the cougar and the deer for the food. She packed up her things, and with the aid of her crutch and the dry air and clear sky, she walked. And for the next four days she continued to do the same, until the fifth day about midafternoon, when the land seemed to drop off as if the earth were flat and she had reached its end. Beneath her was a rocky expanse of canyon floor, appearing to exist in another dimension, because she had no idea how she would reach it. And so she made a camp on the edge of that cliff and looked out over the land and rested her feet and thought upon what she should do. To her right and left was more of the same. She was on a table, and she needed to get down to the floor. And as she thought about her situation, and the hours passed, and the sky turned orange, her eyes recognized far below her what she was sure was one of the oil waste disposal pits she’d seen at different locations on the map. From where she sat, the pit looked like a small, dark, rectangular pond with some kind of fencing. Then she heard the scurrying of an animal behind her, and a squirrel perched itself on a rock to her left. She smiled because she had plenty to eat and she did not need to take anything from him. He squeaked and whistled and a bird squawked overhead, and she thought it was a raven. The patches of snow across the canyon floor looked like the spots on a row of dominoes, and the smattering of pinyon and juniper looked like green bristle pads.

  She lay back against the rock where enough sand had deposited into a shallow crater, offering her an even layer of cushion that could fit all of her. She closed her eyes to rest for a short while. And if the answers did not come after she rested that short while, she would decide what to do in the morning. Surely the answers would come to her then. She slept longer than she thought she would. When she awoke, a breeze had blown in and extinguished her fire. The sky had turned navy blue and was full of stars and some thin clouds and a crescent moon. And though the air was cold, she still felt warm, and she thought it had something to do with her having experienced a metabolic adjustment to the climate. Hadn’t she read that somewhere? Instead of rekindling the fire, she fell back to sleep, and when she was partially awake, with her face pressed against the surface of the smoothed-out rock, and her eyes staring over the southeastern edge of the ledge where an outcropping of boulders climbed upward, she saw a larger shadow and two smaller ones perched upon the highest point. And in a moment just as brief, the cougar and her kittens moved on, and the shadows disappeared. Amy Raye closed her eyes. My mountain sister.

  —

  I’d fallen asleep on the sofa when my cell phone rang again. “Pru, it’s Colm. I hate to call you like this, but I think Joseph might be involved in something.”

  “Colm, what’s going on?” I had already sat up and was reaching for my boots.

  “Can you meet me out at Bowman Canyon? Joseph and his friend Corey may have gotten themselves into a situation.”

  “They were supposed to be at the concert. What kind of situation?”

  Colm went on to tell me about Dean responding to the scene in East Douglas Creek. He’d found a truck parked along one of the roads that led off the Rangely Loop Trail, but no passengers. He was going to leave his vehicle and head in on foot. He called in the license plate for a red and silver GMC pickup. The truck was registered under my name.

  “What’s Joseph’s cell phone number?” Colm asked. “I’m going to try to give him a call.”

  “If he’s up there, he won’t have a signal,” I said. “Can you give me an exact location of the pickup?”

  “BLM Route 23-Bravo off County Road Quebec-38,” Colm said. “Dispatch has the coordinates. I’m heading there now. I’m about forty minutes en route. I’ll let you know if anything changes. And, Pru, I’ve got Farrell with me.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said. “I’ll have my radio and cell phone.”

  The area Colm had described was close to the Coos shelter where Joseph and I had camped. They’d probably headed out there after the concert and brought their guns with them. I’d warned both of them about shooting their guns after dark, and I hoped they hadn’t been drinking.

  As soon as I got off the phone with Colm, I tried calling Joseph, but there was no answer. I sent him a text: Call me.

  —

  The darkness below her looked like the sea. She could be on a bluff in Scotland or New Brunswick or Vancouver, even though she had never visited those places. She was kneeling on the ridge, imagining these things, when a burst of fireworks exploded from what must have been another ridge across the canyon floor. She scrambled to her feet. “Over here! Over here!” But as much as her body had weakened and diminished, so had her voice. As with lightning and thunder, Amy Raye tried to determine the distance by timing the seconds between the sound and light, but she could not be sure. Maybe a mile. She fumbled around for the matches in her pack. She had only two left. She placed the canister in the side pocket of her pants. Her emergency fire-starter kit would take too long. She still had her elk call. She blew into the tube, but her faint puff of breath was not strong enough to emanate a bugle or make a louder noise.

  She didn’t have time to question her decision. She removed her tree harness from her pack, pulled it up over her legs, and readjusted the buckles and straps to fit her smaller size. She had more than two hundred feet of parachute cord. She doubled the cord and tied two figure-eight knots that she looped through the carabiner on the front of her harness. Then she brought the rope around the trunk of the closest pinyon that grew about ten feet away from the rock face on the northwestern side of the ledge. She had not rappelled since her earliest years in Colorado when a man she had worked with had a second job on the weekends as a canyoneering guide and would sometimes ask her to come along, and
they would climb up rock walls and rappel over rock ledges.

  A new burst of light lit up the sky, comets and aerials, and with the next set of flares, she gleaned her surroundings. She slid her crutch through the back side of her harness. Then she set both her feet as close to the edge as possible and leaned back so that she was almost at a near perpendicular angle. She lightly pushed herself out, her right foot feeling its way for a place to land, and once it was steady, she pushed off again, using her left foot much like a stabilizer on a bow. Another push-off and step, another landing, and she had descended a couple of feet. Instead of focusing on the height and the shadows, or the muscles in her legs that had long since atrophied and now quivered beneath her weight, she focused on her feet and the rhythm of her steps and push-offs, and counted the distance by approximately two feet for each push-off and landing that she made—ten feet and then twenty-five, until she was at almost seventy-eight feet—and her right foot landed on the ground. She removed the figure eight from the carabiner and pulled the rope from the tree at the top of the ridge, until the entire length had slid down the rock face and was lying by her feet. But when she gathered the rope and went to add it to her pack, she realized that in her haste she had left the pack on the ridge next to the tree. She coiled the rope and slung it over her right arm, not knowing if she might need it again, and positioned her crutch so that it supported her left side and leg. If she remembered correctly, the oil pit should be no more than sixty yards directly in front of her. Earlier that afternoon, before falling asleep, she had memorized the different landmarks as if drawing diagrams on a map. She had been gauging the distances as she would when spotting a deer or an elk on a hunt, when she did not have a range finder and would have to rely on her natural vision. To get to the oil pit, she would cross between a rock that jutted out like a wedge of concrete and a crooked juniper, and beyond that there would be two pinyons that grew directly adjacent from each other with no other trees around. In ten more yards, she would be at the fence enclosure for the pit.