False Trail

Chapter One: Ten Days Out

Cash Norberg came down off the shoulder of Sheep Mountain in the last hour of daylight, moving the way a man moves when he has been alone long enough to forget he has a voice.

Ten days in, ten days of the same rhythm: up before the light, snowfields hardening under his boots, then the long grind through boulder gardens to the run poles he had wired into the whitebark pine. Each pole had a beaver-castor lure nailed to the high end and a stiff brush of gun-cleaning wire under it, so a wolverine climbing to the bait left a few hairs behind. Each pole had a motion camera strapped to a tree eight feet away. That was the whole science of it. Bait, hair, photographs, and enough patience to bore a stone.

In the last ten days he had gathered forty-one hair samples, three thousand images of empty forest, one very insulted pine marten, and eleven frames of a female wolverine he had been following for four years. The state's paperwork called her F208. Cash called her the Kettle female, because she denned above a basin where the wind ran in circles all winter. She had a white throat blaze shaped like a spilled cup. In the last frame she was looking straight into the camera lens with the flat, unimpressed expression of an animal that had never once needed a person.

That photograph was the best thing that had happened to him all year, and there was no one to show it to.

He hit the Yellowtail trailhead at ten minutes to eight, his pack riding low and rank, his shoulders raw. The parking lot was a gravel loop with a wooden kiosk, a pit toilet, and his truck, a 2004 Ford with a cracked windshield and a Fish and Wildlife decal peeling off the door. Aspen along the creek had gone the yellow of old brass. The air had that first hard edge in it, the September edge, the smell of frost that hasn't arrived yet but has bought its ticket.

He was already thinking about the drive to Pray, the cafe that stayed open till nine, a cheeseburger and two cups of coffee and eleven hours of sleep in a bed. He didn't see the paper until he had the tailgate down.

It was folded twice and tucked under the wiper blade on the driver's side, the way a parking ticket gets left. His first thought was that some hiker had scraped his bumper. His second thought, arriving while his hand was still reaching, was that the paper had been rained on and dried again, and it hadn't rained since the fourth.

He unfolded it.

The handwriting stopped his breathing.

He knew it the way you know a face. The letters leaned hard left, which had driven their mother crazy. The sevens were crossed, because Carly had gone through a phase at fourteen of thinking that made her look European. At the bottom she had drawn the small circled C she had used on birthday cards since she was nine years old.

Dad is with us. He's hurt. Don't call anyone — not the sheriff, not the Forest Service, nobody. Ridgeline camp, upper Yellowtail drainage, the bench above the third fork. Come alone or they'll move him and you will never find him. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Come.

And then the circled C.

Cash stood in the gravel with the paper in both hands and read it four times. The words did not improve.

Three years. Three years since his sister had walked out of their father's kitchen in Livingston with her jaw set and her eyes wet, saying that she was done, that she couldn't watch it anymore, that Cash could keep pretending the old man was fine if pretending was what got him through the night. Three years since the last phone call, which had lasted ninety seconds and ended when she hung up. She'd sent one postcard from Missoula the first winter, with nothing on it but the circled C and the words don't come looking.

He had not come looking. He had told himself that was respect. Some nights he was honest enough to call it what it was.

Now: Dad is with us. He's hurt.

Us.

Cash got out his phone and turned it on. It took forty seconds to boot and another minute to find one flickering bar of signal off the ridge to the north. Nine voicemails. He thumbed through the list with a thumb that wasn't steady.

Three from work. One from the dentist. Four from a number he didn't recognize, all from a 406 exchange. And one from his father's landline, eight days old.

He played it.

Cliff Norberg's voice came out of the speaker thin and scratchy, an old man's voice, which was still a shock every time, because the man in Cash's head was six foot two in a green Forest Service shirt with a Pulaski over his shoulder.

"Cash. It's your dad." A pause, and the small wet sound of a man swallowing. "I heard something about your sister. Mack heard it, from a fella. I'm going to drive up and take a look. Don't get worked up about it. I know that country better than you do, I patrolled it for twenty-six years." Another pause, longer. In the background the dog whined. "I've got Dutch with me. I'll call you Thursday."

Thursday had been six days ago.

Cash sat down on the tailgate. The metal was cold through his pants. Around him the trailhead did its evening business — the creek working, a nutcracker complaining somewhere upslope, the light going violet on the peaks — all of it precisely as beautiful and as indifferent as it had been ninety seconds earlier.

He made himself think.

The note had been rained on. That meant it had been left before the storm on the third or fourth, which meant it had sat under his wiper for as much as a week. Whoever put it there knew his truck and knew he'd be gone a while. Carly knew both, or she'd learned both.

Us. Come alone. They'll move him.

He read the note a fifth time, and this time he read it as a professional reads sign, not as a brother. And what he read was a person writing under supervision, or writing fast, or writing with someone else's rules in her head. Don't call anyone was not a sentence Carly Steed would have written by choice. She had taken their mother's maiden name the year she left — he'd found that out from a court notice forwarded to the cabin — and she had never in her life been the kind of person who told anyone else not to call for help. At sixteen she'd called the ambulance for a boy with a broken wrist before the kid had finished falling.

There were two ways to go. He could drive to Livingston and put this in the hands of the Park County Sheriff and the Forest Service law enforcement officers, and by tomorrow noon there would be a plan, and radios, and men in vests who had never set foot above nine thousand feet in their lives.

Or he could go and look first.

He threw the pack in the bed of the truck and shut the tailgate, and the sound of it cracked off the timber like a shot.

The road out of the Yellowtail was eleven miles of washboard gravel. He drove it at fifty and felt every rock. At the pavement he turned north toward Livingston with the Absarokas going black in his mirror, and he did the arithmetic he had been avoiding.

His father was seventy-one years old. He had congestive heart failure, a bad hip, and a prescription list as long as a grocery receipt. He also had, on his best day, more mountain sense than anyone Cash had ever worked with, and on his worst day a pint of Canadian whiskey in the door pocket of his pickup.

He's hurt.

He went through Pray at nine, past the dark cafe. He crossed the river at Carter's Bridge with the moon coming up gray behind the Crazies, and turned off the highway onto the county road that ran east into the hills to his father's place, and he knew before he got out of the truck that it was bad, because the porch light was on and the front door was standing open into the night.