Bishop did not go straight to the cage. He angled downslope, completely skirting the obvious tracks that Nolan had noticed. He chose instead a faint, barely visible depression between two fir trees where the snow lay thinner. Cade watched the dog’s head dip and lift, his nose working in short, powerful pulls, dissecting the air.
Bishop paused at a bent sapling where a length of frayed cable had once rubbed the bark raw, exposing the pale wood beneath. Then he continued, weaving through a stand of firs to a place that felt deliberately unremarkable. There were no flags, no fresh cuts, no obvious markers—just a shallow hollow that the wind had filled unevenly with drift. Bishop stopped and sat, his gaze fixed intensely on the ground.
Cade knelt and brushed the snow aside with his forearm, digging until he hit resistance. The top of a heavy-duty plastic lid emerged, gray and scarred from rough handling. Nolan exhaled sharply through his nose, a cloud of steam escaping.
They dug together, careful and methodical, uncovering a large storage bin buried hastily in the frozen earth. Cade popped the latches. Inside lay a tangled hoard of evidence: steel traps with their jaws taped shut to prevent noise during transport, coils of aircraft cable slick with preserving oil, work gloves stiff with pine resin, and a bundle of fuel receipts from out-of-the-way gas stations.
At the bottom, sealed in a zip-top bag, was a small notebook.
The notebook’s pages were filled with codes, dates, weights, and initials, written in a narrow, cramped hand that studiously avoided writing out full names. Nolan flipped through it, his eyes narrowing as he decoded the shorthand.
“This isn’t a hobbyist,” Nolan said, the realization grim. “This is inventory.”
Cade scanned the receipts, noting the pattern of stops along secondary roads that cut across protected state land. He felt the shape of the operation forming in his mind, not as a story, but as a workflow: move in quiet, set traps to clear the wildlife, cut the timber fast, and move out before anyone noticed the silence.
Bishop watched them, his head cocked slightly to the side, as if listening to something beyond the scrape of plastic and the rustle of paper—a sound only he could hear.
Bishop turned away from the open bin and padded softly toward a nearby outcrop of granite, his paws making no sound on the frozen moss. He stopped at a narrow fissure in the rock, pawing at it once, then twice—a gesture that was almost impatient. Cade followed, crouching low to pry at something wedged deep inside the crevice.
From the darkness of the stone, he pulled a collar. It was old leather, darkened almost to black by grease and use, matted with tufts of fur that didn’t match Bishop’s coat. The metal buckle was nicked and rusted shut, fused by time and elements.
Cade turned it over in his hands. Along the inner edge, the leather was stiff and flaking. Dried blood. Old and brittle, but unmistakable.