Part 4
At four-thirty the next morning, Maribel clipped Huck’s lead to his harness. Tessa watched from the kitchen doorway while he leaned into the familiar pressure, ready to follow.
“He stays,” she said.
Maribel straightened. “He found the scent.”
“And he got you to look. That was his job.” Tessa glanced at Huck’s stiff hind legs. “This part is ours.”
The dog stood with his weight pitched forward, and Maribel could see how easily love could be made to look like willingness. She unfastened the lead.
“Not this time,” she told him.
Huck nosed her glove, then lay across the mudroom threshold. Maribel set his water beside him and closed the inner door. He did not bark when the trucks left.
The search team consisted of Tessa, Lena Ortiz, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent Sam Calder, and Dr. Amara Wells, a wildlife veterinarian who had driven through the night from Helena. Rowan remained at the clinic with the kits. Because the unmarked ranch roads could cost them hours, Sam approved Maribel as their local route guide on one condition: at the first sign of a live animal, she would stop where they told her.
Burke’s tire tracks cut through the mud beyond the north gate. They ended at a pullout where the grade became too steep for a pickup. Above it, the country narrowed into spruce and subalpine fir, the ground covered by old snow strong enough to hold a person in one step and collapse to the knee in the next.
The route began as an old logging skid, two pale ruts divided by young lodgepole pine. Eli had taken survey crews this way in winter because the ridge above it held snow long after the valley went brown. Maribel had come with him once, before the ranch absorbed all of her Saturdays. She remembered Huck wearing orange booties he hated and Eli warming a frozen sample tube inside his shirt.
At the first fork, Maribel chose the left branch. It was the route Eli had marked most heavily, and she recognized a split granite outcrop from one of his sketches. Thirty yards in, Lena stopped.
“No recent traffic.”
The old trail held deer slots and the round melt holes left by fallen snow, but no boot edges, chain marks, or broken crust. They returned to the fork. On the right-hand branch, Lena found the heel of a fresh print where runoff had softened the trail.
Maribel looked down at Eli’s map. His boldest arrow had been wrong for the day they were standing in.
They climbed toward Cottonwood Draw.
Above the fork, the grade steepened and the sunrise reached only the tops of the firs. Twice Maribel moved ahead when she recognized a bend. Twice Lena stopped her so the untouched snow could be read before boots crossed it.
Near a fire-scarred tamarack stood the remains of one of Eli’s old survey stations: a rusted strand of wire, a numbered aluminum tag, and a branch worn smooth where a scent canister had once hung. Maribel could picture Huck sitting ten feet away, refusing to move until Eli noticed him.
“The pack carried lure from the trap line into the stall,” she said. “That’s what Huck recognized.”
“Most likely,” Tessa said.
“So he didn’t know what they were.”
“He flagged a field scent,” Tessa said. “That’s all we can say.”
Maribel looked back down the trail. The ranch roofs were hidden below the trees, and Huck was miles away behind a closed mudroom door. Leaving him there no longer felt like refusing his help. It felt like having heard it.
The bitter trapping scent reached them before the first set did. At the survey stations, biologists used a pungent lure above barbed wire to collect hair without restraining an animal. Burke had used something similar along the game trail, strong enough that even Maribel caught it when the wind shifted.
Still inside Maribel’s north section, the first trap lay beneath a wind-thrown fir. It had been bedded along a game trail and anchored out of sight. The jaws were open, the set carried no identification, and Burke’s grazing lease gave him no permission to trap there. Lena photographed it, rendered it safe, and tagged it for seizure.
Fifty yards farther on, a second set had been torn from the ground. The snow around it was churned with broad, five-toed tracks and flecked with old blood. A drag chain had cut a furrow downslope.
Amara crouched over the sign. “She pulled the anchor.”
“Then Burke didn’t see her die,” Maribel said.
No one answered. There was no need.
They followed the drag mark downslope. It crossed exposed rock, disappeared beneath fresh crust, and reappeared where bark had been stripped from a young spruce. Sam moved ahead, scanning for a den entrance and warning everyone to keep their voices down.
The trail divided at the bottom of the draw. One branch of disturbed snow led toward a creek choked with alder. The other vanished into a tangle of root plates left by last year’s windstorm.
Lena pointed toward the creek. “Chain scrape on that rock.”
Tessa studied the ground. “Maybe. Or she crossed there before she was caught.”
Amara raised one hand. Everyone stopped. A dark smear marked the snow beside the root plates, and a length of chain disappeared beneath an overturned spruce. At first Maribel heard only water moving under ice. Then something inside the root hollow took a shallow breath, paused too long, and dragged another one in. Two amber eyes opened in the dark…
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