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He started flipping again. Then he came to a picture looking down into a narrow gulch from high above. “I think that’s Katie’s Gulch.” He pointed to the stream on the map.
“You can tell fromthat?”
“I think so.” Feeling encouraged, he went back to his photos, but Hiker Jan was back to leaves, berries, and blurry butterflies.
He finished his stack of photos and reached into the box for another.
Wynona’s watching was making him feel pressured. Or maybe he was feeling it from the hundreds of hunters whoweren’tthere watching him. Either way, he felt pressure. He rubbed the back of his neck and leaned his head back to stretch. He’d only gone through about a fifth of the photos. They might be here for a while.
This would be so much easier if we had the digital versions.Then he could make the pictures bigger and put them on a screen in front of him instead of staring down at small four-by-six cards in his hands. “Why doesn’t she have digital backup again?”
“She said she had to delete some photos to make room so she wouldn’t have to pay for storage.”
“That’s too bad. I would have given her the two bucks.”
Wynona laughed, and he flinched. He wasn’t used to making people laugh, let alone women.
He kept flipping. And flipping. Another blurry butterfly. A picture of the hiker’s sock. And then he recognized an outcropping. He’d always thought it looked like Noah’s Ark with a sinking stern. “There. I know where that is too.” He drew a line on the map. The line intersected Katie’s Gulch Trail. “Shewason Katie’s Gulch Trail. For a while anyway.”
Wynona’s eyes grew wide.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s a long trail.” He chewed his lips, thinking. “Are the photos in the order that she took them?”
“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“Like I said, it’s a long trail. I’m wondering which end we should start on, or should we head for somewhere in the middle ... Where’s the toad photo?”
Wynona reached into the box. “I have no idea.” She started flipping rapidly.
The longer it took her to find the photo, the more discouraged he became. “We know she was on Katie’s Gulch Trail at some point, but we don’t know if the toad was ever there. She could have been anywhere when she saw it, anywhere within a five-day walk.”
“It still gives us somewhere to start, which is more than we had a few minutes ago.” She continued her high-speed flipping, and Tucker gave his neck a break.
But then she finished and looked at him with defeat in her eyes. “It’s not here. She must have taken it out. Or someone did.”
He sighed. “Okay, let me go through the rest of them, see if there’s anything else I recognize.” She slid the photos across the table. He perused them, but he didn’t see anything else familiar.
Nor did he see anything to suggest that their hiker had ever been on a different trail.
He put the photos down and looked up. “I guess we go with Katie’s Gulch, then.”
“Thank you.” Wynona sounded genuinely grateful. “I wanted you to keep us from getting lost in the woods. I didn’t expect you to glean so much from these photos. In fact, I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t think to try that myself.”
“They are mostly photos of blurry green things. I can see why you thought they wouldn’t give you coordinates.”
She smiled sheepishly. She was a pretty woman. “Thank you, anyway.”
“Thank me once we’ve found the toad.”
