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I poke him in the ribs, hard enough to make him yelp.
“You deserved that,” I say.
“Just trying to be helpful.”
“You know what would be really helpful? Picking up the damn trail and finding these two before they become bear chow.”
“Nah, wrong time of year for that. Grizzlies have been out of hibernation long enough not to be starving, and it’s too far from autumn for the old ones to get desperate. While we could be getting some sows with cubs, the biggest danger these two are going to face is their own foolishness.”
“By which you mean ‘lack of wilderness survival skills.’”
I get a hard look for that, which I accept. Dalton might have little patience for fools, but he understands the difference between being careless and being clueless, and he excuses the latter as a lack of opportunity. He really does mean foolishness—the issues that come when peoplethinkthey know what to do in the forest, because they read survival tips in an online article once.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s hope they didn’t do anythingtoofoolish.”
“They went into the Yukon wilderness at night. That suggests we’re starting at foolish, and just hoping we don’t work our way down.”
I shake my head and lift two bags, each containing a sample of clothing. “Let’s give Storm a sniff of these and then we’ll circle the perimeter and try to figure out where they went into the forest.”
Dalton points down. I frown at him.
He gestures at the faint trail we’ve been following. “They went this way. At least one of them did.”
“Someone went this way,” I say. “Multiple someones, it seems. They’ve been using this when they need to go into the forest.”
“Yep. And someone used it last night.”
I look along the path. Like a game trail, it’s lightly trodden,with the undergrowth parted, leading the way deeper into the forest.
I glance down at the ground. Shoe prints and boot marks, mostly scuffs, from multiple treads.
“Nope,” he says. “The ground’s been dry for days, so those don’t mean anything except that it’s been used.”
I peer at broken twigs.
“Nope,” he says. “Those are old breaks, at least a week ago.”
“So how can you tell the trail was used last night? By one of our targets?”
“Lucky guess?”
I shake my head and open the bag with one of Penny’s shirts. Storm takes a good sniff, and then lowers her head to the ground and looks back up at me.
“Seems I’m a good guesser,” Dalton says.
When I narrow my eyes, he says, “You want a clue?”
“What’s it going to cost me?”
“The temporary irritation of realizing, as the detective in this duo, you should have figured it out yourself.”
I ignore him and take out the second piece of clothing—the shirt belonging to Bruno. Storm sniffs it, and this time, she gives the trail a harder sniff, walking along it and then back to me before lying down, which means she doesn’t smell Bruno on this particular trail.
“Huh,” Dalton says. “That’s not what I expected.”
I understand then that he was making an educated guess when he said they took this trail… because there aren’t going to be many trails from Haven’s Rock into the forest. This isn’t Rockton, where we organized hunting and fishing and logging trips as well as recreational hikes. These people are here to work and work fast. Everything they need has been flown in. Exceptfor those hikes, they have no reason to enter the forest. They’ll have carved out this one trail, and anyone who ventures in will use it, knowing that otherwise they take the very real risk of getting lost.
I peer around. It’s thick woods and brush here. That’s part of the reason we chose the building site—it’s in part of the forest that won’t attract visitors. The Yukon might be a popular tourist spot, but it’s hardly the Appalachian Trail. In over fifty years, no more than a dozen people—hunters and miners mostly—stumbled onto Rockton.
