Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds (9 page)

He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and focused on doing his job.

Seaver still knelt on the ground in the same position. The only tracks in the snow around him belonged to the dog. Outside of the heaps of snow that had fallen from the branches and the chunks of bark, the accumulation around the blood was pristine.

Dayton walked slowly forward, alternately shining the light up into the trees and onto the ground. It was immediately obvious that something had been up there. He’d seen bear cubs leave the branches similarly broken and stripped of bark, but he’d never heard of bears, regardless of their size, leaving a mess like this in their wake. The boughs were smeared with blood and there were several high-velocity spatters, the kind produced by a projectile or a fist thrown with considerable force.

Something caught his eye on the trunk, near the bifurcation of the largest branch, maybe eight feet above the ground. There were deep, parallel gouges in the bark. Closer inspection revealed they were rimmed with blood. He held up his own hand. The grooves nearly aligned with his fingertips. They were carved in an upward direction, though, and the only way he could imagine that happening was if Crowell had been hauled up into the tree by her feet and had clawed at the trunk to slow her momentum.

“We got any mountain lions up here this time of year?” he said.

It was the only option that made sense. The trees throughout these mountains were scarred with their claw marks. While he hadn’t known them to hunt from the trees, he’d certainly heard plenty of stories about them dragging their kill up into the canopy so they could eat uninterrupted. And every few years there were reports of mountain lions attacking people.

“We would have been notified if any tracked animals made it this far north.”

“But not if they weren’t tagged?”

Dayton continued to the west. Every few feet he encountered a pattern of droplets already vanishing under the snow.

“Tell me what you know about how they hunt.”

“They’re more active during the winter than the summer months. Their paws are designed to distribute their weight on top of the snow so they can run across it, unlike deer and elk, which stomp through it with their hooves and have a much more difficult time moving. All the lions have to do is follow their tracks and run them down.”

“So you say they can run across the snow?”

“They still leave tracks.”

“But they can move through the trees, right? I haven’t seen many deer or elk up here this season, either. And considering what happened to your bighorn…”

“While you guys are debating this, that woman could be bleeding to death,” Avery said.

“I’m acutely aware of that fact, son.”

“Then why am I the only one willing to do something about it?”

Avery shouldered past the sheriff and tromped through the accumulation beside the dog’s tracks.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” Dayton said.

“Wait!” Seaver shouted.

Both men stopped and turned to face him.

Seaver slowly stood on unsteady legs and wiped at the blood on his face with the backs of his hands.

“Imagine a two-hundred-pound cat with two-inch canines and retractable claws that can run nearly fifty miles an hour, jump twenty feet straight up, and pounce forty feet horizontally. If that’s what’s out there, then you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

* * *

Seaver’s father had taught him to hunt in the Longfellow Mountains on Maine’s western border with Canada. The deep woods and wetlands made the physical act of tracking less a skill than a science. The earth was hard and rocky and remained frozen six months out of the year, while during thaws the water ran high and fast and washed away prints nearly as soon as they were made. It was a different kind of snow, too, the kind that absorbed the humidity from the Atlantic Ocean and fell as ice, which formed a nearly impenetrable crust glazed by the biting wind. The snow in Colorado accumulated at a fantastic rate, only to melt back down to the snowpack when the sun reappeared. The depth willingly accepted prints, although the wind and falling snow contrived to erase them within minutes during a storm like this, so behavior needed to be taken into account. And what became increasingly apparent with every step he took was that they weren’t dealing with a mountain lion.

There wasn’t a single print to be found, and while big cats were capable of moving from one tree to another, they weren’t known to travel any kind of distance in such a manner. As he’d told the sheriff, their paws were uniquely designed to travel across the snow. Taking the route of most resistance, especially while potentially burdened with Crowell’s weight, simply didn’t make sense. The only reason to do so would be in an effort not to leave any tracks to follow, which required a higher level of cognitive ability than was typically ascribed to predatory species, even of the apex variety.

Zeke’s trail had become an indistinct trench in the snow, nearly smoothed over by the wind. They occasionally heard him barking in the distance, but never got close enough to see him. Not that they would have been able to anyway with the way the snow was blowing. At least not until they were right on top of him.

The buzz of static followed him. Dayton had cranked up the volume on his transceiver in hopes that he’d hear the moment it got a signal. Every so often he stepped out into a clearing or climbed to the top of a hill in an effort to get reception. He was off to the left now, a silhouette through the driving snow, shouting into the two-way.

Seaver tried not to think about the passage of time. With as much blood as Crowell had lost, and considering there was only a finite amount…

He chased away the mental image. Maybe the blood wasn’t all hers. She was as tough as they came. She would have put up a good fight.

The missing girl’s boyfriend walked behind him. He could feel the man’s eyes over his shoulder, watching the monitor and the signal that appeared with decreasing frequency now that the antenna was mangled. He thought about how the transmitter in the collar worked. The only way the signal could have appeared exactly where they were was if it had been up in the trees, mere feet above their heads and completely concealed by the shadows.

He’d ruled out a malfunction based on the consistency of the signal, which meant that if the beacon was still broadcasting as designed, it had to have been removed from the ram’s carcass. The collar itself was essentially a wide leather belt that cinched around the animal’s neck. Its electrical components were housed in a box roughly two inches wide and an inch tall. Inside was a battery with an operational life of three years, a sensor that registered heart rate in beats per minute, and both GPS and VHF transponders. By itself it weighed a mere forty grams, approximately the weight of the sugar in a can of Pepsi, and was affixed to the collar by a leather pouch and metal screws. Surely whatever animal it monitored wasn’t still in possession of the ram’s forequarters and couldn’t possibly have put it on by accident, so how was it carrying it in such a way that it was still transmitting a viable signal?

For the first time he considered the notion that it wasn’t an animal at all. Only man was capable of that kind of deception, but there was no way any man could move through the canopy with such speed and fluidity.

“You were the one who found the camera?” Avery said from behind him.

Seaver answered without turning around.

“Yes.”

The wind arose from the north with a howl and assailed them with snowflakes. There already had to be close to six inches on the ground inside the dense forest, and Lord only knew how much outside of it.

“You saw her. You saw Michelle.”

Seaver hoped his silence communicated that he didn’t want to talk about it.

“I just need to know how you knew to contact me.”

The pain in the man’s voice was palpable. Seaver felt a pang of remorse when he answered.

“You should talk to the sheriff.”

A full minute passed before the man spoke again.

“I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to find out what happened to her. I’ve lost everything in the process. Look, I know…I know there’s a good chance she’s dead, but I can’t give up until I know for sure. Put yourself in my place. What would you do?”

The sound of static grew louder. Seaver glanced uphill and briefly saw Dayton through the snow before it hid him once more.

“She said to tell her parents she loved them. And she said to find you and tell you she loved you to eternity and back.”

There was no response from behind him, so he continued walking. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut.

The ground sloped downward toward the bottom of a deep ravine. Even Zeke had been forced to take a zigzagging course to keep from losing his footing. He heard the faint sound of water flowing somewhere beneath the ice at the bottom.

“She knew, didn’t she?” Avery said from behind him. “She knew she was going to die.”

There was nothing Seaver could say.

Dayton caught up with them near the bottom of the valley, where the trees opened onto a narrow meadow, through the middle of which Devil’s Creek flowed sluggishly beneath the ice. The wind battered them from the side as they abandoned the cover of the trees. The dog’s trail was nearly swept flat. All that remained was a shallow trench and beside it—

Seaver stopped and stared from one side of the snow-covered meadow to the other. There had to be a dozen other trails that looked just like Zeke’s, only wider and far fainter. They appeared to start at the edge of the forest, beyond which there wasn’t so much as a dimple in the accumulation.

There was a point where the dog’s trail veered sharply toward one of the others. He knelt beside the point of intersection, set down the antenna, and brushed aside the snow in incremental layers until a faint pink pattern appeared against the white.

A red light bloomed from his right hand. The beacon had reappeared on his monitor, maybe a quarter mile to the southwest. He looked up toward the distant ridgeline and the crown of trees, little more than shadows through the storm.

Again, he returned his attention to the trails and wondered what in the name of God was out here with them.

* * *

Avery wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He hadn’t dressed for this kind of weather. His winter jacket was thick enough, but he was only wearing jeans and a pair of hiking boots. His feet were frozen and his toes had passed from the point of numbness to throbbing with each step. His ears and the tip of his nose stung, and he couldn’t seem to sniff enough to hold back the flood of mucus. He’d been able to concentrate on anything other than the cold beneath the cover of the trees, but out here in the open, with the wind lancing right through him and the snow striking his bare face, he couldn’t think about anything else. It had to be well below zero with the wind chill, and now that the sun had set, the temperature was going to fall even faster.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been caught out in a storm like this, but he was generally better prepared. He’d been in such a hurry he’d forgotten to bring what he thought of as his survival kit—a backpack full of odds and ends he’d accumulated out of necessity through the years—so he had no means of making a fire and nothing to eat or drink. All he had was his cell phone, which had lost its signal before he even turned off the highway, and his car keys, neither of which was any use to him now.

She loved you ‘to eternity and back
.
’

The ranger’s words haunted him. He remembered the first time he’d said those words to her. It was the first time he’d told her he loved her. They’d been just kids back then, a lifetime ago now, lying on the hood of his car and staring up into the night sky. He hadn’t known he was going to say it; the words just kind of slipped out, but they’d felt so right, so natural, that he hadn’t regretted saying them for a single moment.

Her response had been playful.

“How much?”

“More than the moon and the stars.”

“That’s not really very much if you think about it. They’re up there every night, but how often do you take the time to appreciate them. You wouldn’t even have said that if you weren’t looking right at them.” She’d smiled and kissed him. “Try again.”

“I love you to eternity and back. How’s that?”

“It’s a start.”

They’d made love on the grass after that, and, being a teenage boy, he’d repeated the phrase as often as he could in the hopes of achieving the same results, until it became something he said to her because he meant it with all of his heart.

The barking of a dog roused him from his memories. It was a distant, forlorn sound. A monotonous
woof
…
woof
…
woof
…
woof
…Not the frenzied barking from earlier, but what he remembered the dog’s handler calling his “alert bark.” The others stood from where they knelt over another pattern of frozen blood beneath the accumulation and together they stared up into the storm, toward the top of the hill and a leveled section where—