Beneath the Trees

by Laurel Saville

  Colden asked Sally if she went out there herself. Sally shivered.

  “No, not with all those bad memories. Pretty much wish someone would burn the whole thing down, finish the job, be done with it.”

  Colden looked away. Dix looked at Sally with raised eyebrows.

  “Sorry,” Sally said.

  “Don’t be,” Colden replied.

  “Colden, would you like to go out there? Would you like to see . . .” Sally left the thought unfinished.

  Colden turned the question over in her mind. What would she see? An ancient, abandoned farmhouse, in a damp patch of ground, with a few falling-over outbuildings, just like so many others that dotted these hills. Only this one had history. Heavy, personal history. The property had been in Sally’s family, belonged to her grandmother. After the old woman died out there, apparently while chopping firewood, with ax in hand, Sally couldn’t sell it. That is, until the guy who eventually started the Source came along. He gave her some promise money, began fixing the place up, and started collecting his band of lost souls—all women, it seemed, including, eventually, her mother. His project didn’t last for long. Maybe a year or so, from what Colden could tell. There were drug issues. Her mother died out there a few days after giving birth, prematurely, to Colden. They did some sort of home cremation and tried to keep the fact of Colden’s birth a secret. They wanted to raise her in some back-to-nature, away-from-modern-society way. They wanted her to be a kind of new-age science experiment.

  Sally had been living out there herself, not as part of the commune, but to keep an eye on things. She knew Miranda. They had talked about Dix. Sally had hoped Miranda would return to him. With the baby that he thought was the product of a relationship between Miranda and the commune leader. Then Sally went away to a conference, and when she returned, Miranda was dead. Sally found Dix. They alerted the authorities. The place was shut down; Colden went to foster care until paternity could be proved; and Darius, the self-styled cult leader, was sent back to his parents in Connecticut and ordered to complete a lot of community service.

  All of this was Colden’s personal backstory. But none of it felt like it had anything to do with her. Her life was here, with Sally and Dix, with her work. There was nothing more she wanted to understand about that place. She didn’t believe it had anything to tell her that she didn’t already know.

  She shook her head. Sally nodded acknowledgment. Dix stirred onions and garlic. The air around them was filled with a damp and bitter fragrance.

  Colden wanted to return the conversation to where it began. She also wanted to change the mood. Asking for her father’s help was, she knew, a good way to achieve both.

  “So, Dad. I wanted to ask your advice on something.”

  Dix looked up from the stove and smiled at her. Relief and anticipation lightly animated the typically serene composition of his features.

  “The money I took from the account? The trust?” She looked at Sally here to include her and catch her up. “It’s for a side project I want to do.”

  “Do tell!” Sally said.

  “It’s very speculative,” Colden said. “And I want to keep it quiet. I don’t want other scientists or my colleagues to know.”

  “Why all the cloak and daggers?” Sally asked. “Aren’t scientists supposed to keep everything open?”

  “Yes. But . . .” Colden struggled to explain. “It’s just that. The moose and beaver project is great. Truly. But it’s so conventional. It’s so basic.”

  “Flying in helicopters with a bunch of dudes and shooting nets to capture moose is conventional?” Dix said.

  “Ugh. No. Of course not. It’s amazing. It’s a great opportunity. It’s important research. I know it sounds weird. Ungrateful even. But the helicopter stuff? That’s just a tool. That’s just a few days. The rest is the grind of collecting and analyzing data. Data. Data. Data.”

  “Much of which comes from poop, right?” Sally said, smirking.

  “I want to actually discover something,” Colden said quietly, embarrassed by her own ambition.

  The room fell silent other than the sound of Dix’s knife, methodically scraping against a chopping block as he sliced some green peppers. They sizzled as they hit the hot oil in the pan.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you propose to find?”

  Colden went into a long disquisition that took them all the way through dinner and into cups of tea on the sofa following the meal. Everyone knew there were coyotes in the Adirondacks. Coyotes were everywhere. Even though the government had spent millions of dollars over decades trying to eradicate them, they continued to breed and spread into every nook and cranny of the United States and beyond, from downtown Manhattan to the desiccated deserts of the Southwest, from remote mountains to suburban golf courses. They were amazingly adaptable creatures that could hunt, scavenge, work in packs, or be perfectly successful as individuals. Wolves, in comparison, were much more fragile. Apex hunters, reliant on big game and strong pack structures, which were easily disrupted by human activity and indiscriminate killing. They had been long gone from the Adirondack Mountains and many other landscapes, as well.

  Dix and Sally listened carefully. Colden knew none of this information was exactly news to them, but she was offering a great deal of detail and nuance. She wanted them to understand both her thoughts and hopes thoroughly.

  She told them she’d been hearing stories from hunters, trappers, and farmers complaining a lot more about coyotes. Not just the normal coyote, but what they claimed were much larger, bolder, and yet even more elusive coyotes. Colden had mostly taken the gripes in stride. These people were always complaining about predators, and no amount of her explaining that the bulk of their diets consisted of rats and gophers and other small animals, which the farmers and hunters hated equally, would sway them to the benefits of having at least this one predator still in their midst.

  But then she read some reports from eastern Canada that described the same sort of coyote. These were in the scientific literature. There had been scattered sightings of a canid that was larger than a coyote but smaller than a wolf. A creature that seemed comfortable in both wooded and open settings and that had the long legs and larger skull of a wolf but the litheness and elusiveness of a coyote. Some scientists wondered if wolves and coyotes were crossbreeding. Others scoffed at the notion. Wolves had a long-documented history of despising and killing their smaller cousins. Coyotes avoided wolves assiduously, scavenging their kills only after they’d been safely abandoned. Yet, the theory persisted. Some posited that severely depressed populations had driven some wolves to mate with coyotes simply because that was their only option.

  “And you tend to agree?” Dix asked.

  “I tend to not know,” said Colden. “But I also tend to want to find out.”

  “Is this your way of telling us you are relocating to Canada?” Sally asked.

  Colden shook her head. “No, I want to study them here. Well, I mean to say, I want to find them here. See if they’re here. Then study them.”

  “Are you suggesting wolves have returned to the Adirondacks?” Dix asked.

  “No, I doubt that,” Colden said. “The terrain is not right for them. But maybe some of these hybrids, what they’re calling a coywolf, came down from Canada. They could live comfortably in these dense woods. Maybe what these hunters and trappers are seeing is real, but it’s just that it’s not a coyote; it’s a coyote hybrid.”

  Sally asked again why this needed to be kept quiet.

  Colden squirmed and hesitated. She explained that she wanted to protect the animal from hunters. Dix looked at her quizzically. She knew he was thinking that the hunters didn’t care what it was called or how it was made—to them it was just a big varmint. Colden withered under his scrutiny.

  “And I want to keep it quiet because if it is out there, I want to be the one to discover it. That’s all. It’s selfish. It could be a career-making find, though.”

  “Making your own car
eer isn’t necessarily selfish if it does something very good for the environment, as well,” Dix said.

  Colden was embarrassed by his generosity.

  “If I do find it, I won’t keep the information to myself. It’s too important not to share.”

  Dix and Sally nodded at her.

  “So, that’s what the money is for. I want to buy a bunch of game cameras and tracking equipment, a better computer of my own, not the one the university gave me, and maybe an ATV, so I can get deeper into the woods more quickly, and see if I can find them. I’d like your help, Dad. Picking out the equipment. Maybe finding spots to set the cameras.”

  Dix stared into his teacup. Sally and Colden stared at him. They were waiting for him, as if for a benediction.

  “I don’t think this is exactly what you want to hear, Colden,” he said. “But your mother would be very happy to see the money used this way. She’d be very proud of you.”

  It wasn’t what Colden wanted to hear. But she knew it was what her father needed to say. And that by offering her mother’s blessing to the project, he was also offering his own.

  Colden and her father went online and picked out equipment to create camera traps. He made a few calls, and one of his customers happily sold them an almost-new ATV that had been sitting in his garage, unused, for several years because his kids had grown into teenagers who now preferred city pursuits over spending vacations and weekends in the mountains. They laid out detailed topographical maps and tried to imagine the type of terrain this hybrid canid might prefer. They picked several areas that would be accessible to Colden yet inaccessible to most hunters, tourists, and hikers.

  “There are a few locations I’d really like you to avoid,” Dix said, somewhat ominously.

  “With six million acres of Adirondack Park and only ten cameras at my disposal, I think I can cross off a few spots without jeopardizing my research,” Colden replied. “But may I ask why?”

  Dix pointed to several places on the map, without marking them. He didn’t need to. Colden recognized them immediately as locations where there had been reports of vandalism and break-ins. Most were at deer camps. There had been a few at a set of vacation homes around a small lake. The one at Sally’s grandmother’s abandoned house. One was near Gene’s home. Which reminded her that it had been a while since she’d seen him.

  “Have you been over to Gene’s recently?” she asked her father.

  Dix nodded slowly.

  “How is he?”

  “Same as ever,” he said. “Seems to be holding up OK.”

  Good, Colden thought. Her dad had covered this. Gene was now a line item in a mental checklist that could be ticked off. The suggestion of these petty crimes reminded Colden of her conversation with Drew. The damage he had described was different than the bulk of the thefts they’d heard about. Mostly it had been someone taking a bit of camping equipment or food from a poorly secured garage or pantry, the kind of stuff spoiled teenagers or people in deep need might be expected to do. The stuff Drew had mentioned was more intentional. She had promised to look into it.

  “Dad, the stuff that happened here.” Her finger hovered over the map at a spot not far from where Gene lived. “Do you know anything about all that?”

  Dix shrugged.

  “Seemed an attempt at some sort of sabotage,” he said. “But then again, it could just be testosterone-poisoned boys or whacked-out tweakers. They seem to love destroying other people’s property.”

  “Just seems different from the other stuff we’ve been hearing about.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Something more, more like someone was making a point, trying to send a message.”

  “I have a”—Colden hesitated, unsure what word to use—“I have a friend in Albany who was asking me about it.”

  “In Albany?”

  Colden wasn’t sure what aspect of her sentence Dix was surprised by: that she had a friend in Albany or that someone in Albany knew of the problem.

  “Yes,” she continued. “He works for the paper company whose equipment got destroyed. He asked me if I could ask around. Without making a fuss.”

  “And you’re now asking me to do the asking around?”

  Dix’s ability to zero right in on the crux of a situation or request was sometimes discomfiting.

  “Yes,” Colden allowed. “I guess I am. You’re better at it than I am.”

  “How would you know that if you don’t try it yourself first?” he asked.

  “Dad,” she pleaded. “C’mon. You know everyone and everyone knows you, and they trust you. And you’re a guy. Guys hate talking to women about stuff like this.”

  Dix gave her an indulgent smile.

  “Of course, I will,” he said. “Because you asked. Because it’s for a friend of yours. And also because I’d be happy to help avoid some sort of confrontation or a lawsuit with the Park Authority or a paper company. We seem to have enough of those around here these days.”

  Spring was starting to creep into those few spots that were warmed by the reluctant sun. Maple trees were hazed with red buds. Lawns were giving way to green fuzz. Daybreak was marked by intermittent birdsong. Fat robins were beginning to appear, flitting in open areas, tilting their heads as they listened for the movement of insects tentatively exploring the new season. Then there was a cold snap, a wet snowfall, and the ground gripped in on itself again—the last gasp of a dying season.

  Colden was glad for the change in temperature and conditions. The frozen ground would be easier to drive and hike through, while the fresh layer of white, which wouldn’t last long, might reveal tracks. She quickly packed up for a few days of camping, loaded the ATV, and set out with her first set of wildlife cameras. She rode for about an hour, first on the shoulder of two-lane streets, then on gravel roads that turned and meandered into areas marked by the increasing absence of human habitation, then through several former farm fields that were reverting to scrub, and finally onto trails just wide enough for her vehicle to lurch and twist between tree trunks. She finally came to an impasse marked with a large outcropping of rock and a couple of old blowdowns.

  She turned the ATV off, dismounted, and shoved the vehicle in under the granite overhang. She then took an ax from her pack, hacked at a few evergreen boughs, and placed them strategically to camouflage the machine. It was highly unlikely any other human would pass this way, but just in case, she saw no reason to draw attention to herself or her work. She tightened her boots, adjusted her gaiters, shouldered her pack, and headed north through dense, unmarked woods. Every step was an exercise in caution. One slight miscalculation and she might slip on a rock and end up with a twisted ankle, or catch her leg in between a couple of pieces of deadfall, and possibly break a bone. People had disappeared out here. Even experienced people. Even after weeks and months of being searched for. You could not be too careful. After two hours, she figured she had made it a little more than three miles.

  The days were still short, and the light began to fail. Colden started scanning the land for a flat space that would fit her tent. There was plenty of leftover winter snow around. The whisper of spring warmth that had been in the air earlier in the day was quickly giving way before a distinct chill. The sweat against her skin began to feel clammy. She saw a likely location just beyond a small ridge. There was a rivulet that would give her water. A smooth area just big enough for her tent. A large erratic that would provide some protection from wind.

  She dropped her pack and began to brush the snow away with an evergreen bough. The light, new snow dissipated quickly, like confectioners’ sugar off a donut. Beneath was a thick layer of crystalline slush. Colden started to kick it out of the way. Her boot encountered some hard, icy spots. She stopped. The breaks in the old snow were regular in shape and spacing. They were familiar and unlikely, at the same time. The only explanation was improbable enough that her brain resisted understanding. But there it was: she was staring at the blurry edges of footprints. Well, hiking-boot prints. They mu
st have passed this way a few days ago. Curious. Odd. Not necessarily alarming, but very unusual for anyone to be this deep in the backcountry.

  Colden wondered who and why. Her immediate concern was that someone might be lost and in need of help. But there was nothing she could do for them now. She was losing the light and had a tent to set up, and she was, of course, not the only person who knew what they were doing in the backcountry.

  That night, Colden slept deeply, as she always did when camping. The physical exhaustion of hiking and the almost total silence of the woods were an instant soporific. She became vaguely alert a few times in the night but never passed out of the liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. She woke to a haze of snow covering everything. She recalled vague dreams of creatures passing her tent, sniffing at the door, curious about this interloper, then moving on. She packed quickly, eating an apple and granola bar for breakfast instead of bothering with the camp stove. She drank her instant coffee cold. As she sipped, she followed some of the human footprints a bit, puzzling over what this person, a tall man, judging by the boot size, was doing out here and where he might have been headed. Some looked older, others fresh. But it was so difficult to tell. The spring thaw-and-freeze cycle, the heaving and settling of the ground, the mix of fresh and old snow, and her own movements as she had worked at the site muddied things. These were not the tracks she’d been hoping to find. In any case, they were quickly lost to the variable terrain. She packed her tent, checked her bearings, and set out to find the spots she and her father had marked on the map.

  One by one, over the next two breezy, balmy days, Colden set up camera traps and bait scent over as wide an area as she could cover. She’d seen deer droppings. She expected fawns to drop soon, as well. There were potential denning sites for coyotes. Or coywolves. In a few weeks, she’d come back, pull the data cards, and find additional places to set up cameras. Even with as much care as she and Dix had put into selecting the sites, she was aware that luck would play the largest role in this project. She knew most science started with guesswork overlaid with a thin veneer of education and experience. She chose sites by intellect as well as instinct. She made notes about their distinguishing characteristics. She reminded herself that things would change fast from day to day as the spring thaws competed with the remnants of winter for supremacy over the landscape.