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“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. Except for 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.
If Bruno went off-path, he had to either follow a creek or chop his way through.
“Your call,” Dalton says.
Do we follow Penny’s trail or go back and find Bruno’s? I weigh the options. Two people went missing on the same night. It’s unlikely these two tripsaren’tconnected.
The obvious answer is a romantic liaison. The uglier answer is a stalking situation—or a luring one. Another possibility is that they were meeting for a non-romantic purpose, maybe a job-related discussion they didn’t want others overhearing.
All that boils down to one thing: it is almost certain that they went into the forest for a shared purpose. Even if Bruno’s trail isn’t here, he would have met up with Penny.
“We’ll track Penny,” I say.
* * *
Before I cameto the Yukon, I presumed one section of forest was the same as another. Oh, I knew there were different types of forest—though in my vocabulary, that’d have been “evergreen, hardwood, and jungle.” But if you were in the same geographic zone, unless you had specific landmarks—like lakes or mountains—it’d all look alike. Even with those landmarks, well, a lake is a lake, and a mountain is a mountain.
I came to understand that areas of forest are like urban neighborhoods. If you aren’t from the city, they all look like endless rows of houses. Even if you are, one neighborhood built in the same era looks like the next. Butyourneighborhood is always different. Your neighborhood is unique. There’s the fire hydrant you tripped over as a kid and needed three stitches. There’s that house with the garden gnomes that always gives out full-size chocolate bars at Halloween. There’s the perfect climbing tree in the Millers’ backyard—just don’t get caught on their property. Dozens of markers and memories that make that neighborhood yours, and when you move, you need to start the process over as you’re plunked down in a neighborhood that looks like all those other soulless replicas.
The forest is the same. I knew Rockton’s forest, in a way that I don’t think I realized until I left it. I knew the trails Storm liked best. The trails where my horse—Cricket—could break into a gallop. The trails with just the right hills for my dirt bike to launch airborne. I knew the best spots to hunt or fish or gather, and I could find them without trails. The tree where Dalton first kissed me. The cave systems I’d crawl through with our deputy, Will Anders. The places where people I cared about laughed and lived. The places where people I cared about had died. And the places where they’d betrayed us.
I miss Rockton, but I think I missourforest more. And if I ache for it, I cannot imagine how Dalton grieves. Compared to him, I was a newcomer to the neighborhood. He was born there, grew up there, lived there his entire life.
Now we are in a new forest. We’ve been here many times as we scoped out the area, but it isn’t ours yet. We haven’t memorized landmarks, and certainly haven’t made memories. As Storm follows the trail, Dalton and I are both quiet, looking around, taking it in, excited by the promise of this new home but, deep down, feeling like children who’ve been moved, scuffing around the new neighborhood, grumbling that it’s not the same, not the same at all.
We will make this forest ours. It’s not the same as being tossed into a new neighborhood. We chose this one. Painstakingly chose it to have everything we loved about Rockton’s environment and everything Dalton would have done differently. We border a lake now—one with fresh water and fish. Underground springs provide fresh water. We’re perfectly positioned to have access to mountains for hunting, while being in the sun’s southern path all day for better solar power.
We will love this place as much, if not more, than Rockton. It’s just going to take some time.
The official town path ended after a kilometer or so. Dalton had rolled his eyes at it. Yolanda’s idea of a trail was apparently a straight line into the woods and then you turn around and march back to town. The path didn’t wend around the lake or pass by a beaver dam or head up an incline for a lookout. You could get the same experience walking into a patch of forest inside a city.
When the trail ended, Penny kept going, through a section of sparse trees and brush. Had she not realized the path ended? There’s safety tape marking a tree, but she’d been out at night and might not have seen it.
According to Storm, Bruno didn’t join Penny at any point on the official path, which seems to make it unlikely they were meeting up. A thousand meters isn’t far in the city, but it’s a thirty-minute hike through dense forest. If it was a rendezvous, they’d have united by then.
So what was Penny doing in here at night without her penlight? If she left at dusk, she might not have thought she needed one. Maybe ventured in the forest, not for the forest itself, but for the privacy it afforded. Working through a problem and needing some peace and quiet. She’s walking and thinking, and doesn’t realize she went beyond the path until it’s dark and she tries to get back ... and the path is gone.
Where is Bruno in that scenario? I have no idea, and I can’t worry about it. We have Penny’s trail. Once we find her, we can focus on Bruno.
We’ve gone about a half kilometer past the end of the trail when Penny seems to realize she’s no longer on the path. She hit a patch of snow. It’s May, and there are shaded hollows where the snow hasn’t yet melted. She stepped into one of these, her boot prints clear. Another thing is clear too: wolf tracks.
