FINDING THE LOST, Jeanne Tody Beroza [reading tree txt] 📗

out here. Folks living in the middle of nowhere don’t like interference from the law, or from anyone for that matter. They’re normally here to get away from rules and regulations. They don’t welcome us sticking our noses in their business.”

“She called us,” Deb said.

“Yeah, but her husband didn’t.”

As it was, when he knocked on the door, a harried young woman opened it immediately. He thought she must have been standing behind it, waiting for them and when she ushered the deputies inside Jim saw the house consisted of only one big room, sparsely furnished with a threadbare sofa and chair pulled up near a wood stove made from an old, cracked oil drum that spilled broken streams of light into the area. Off in one corner he could see a tiny kitchen with a dilapidated stove and refrigerator, a few dishes exposed on shelves and a fiberglass laundry tub serving as a sink with a nearby counter holding a five-gallon container of water. A table and benches of rough sawn lumber served as a room divider. He wondered if the refrigerator held anything since he couldn’t hear a generator running. Must put food outside when it’s this cold, he thought. Other corners of the room were partitioned-off with cloth curtains, probably the bedrooms. A few toys were stuffed into a cardboard box near one curtain. Coats and hats hung on pegs by the door.

As he continued to survey the contents of the room, he noticed Deb was doing the same, her right hand hanging loosely beside the firearm on her hip. “I, I, I, we didn’t do anything wrong.” The nervous woman was rather frail looking, white as a sheet, and was shaking as she backed away from the deputies to sit on a bench by the table. Jim thought two uniformed officers bundled in coats and hats with full duty belts, guns and radios walking stiffly into her tiny house probably did seem to her as if she had been invaded by the Gestapo so he relaxed his stance and signaled Deb to so the same.

They gathered information from the frantic mother and asked her if she needed help for her family, from the food bank maybe, or from social services. “No, we’re all-right, I go to the food bank already and got the kids warm clothes from Goodwill. Things aren’t easy but we’re getting by. Duane tries to do things legal-like; he was brung up that way. He don’t poach but we need all the deer meat he can get so this year he took Davie out with him; that way they can get two deer during gun season.”

“Isn’t Davie a little young?” Jim asked.

“Yeah, but there’s a mentoring program, you know. A pa can take his kid out on the mentoring program. Davie made the age cut this year cause he turned ten. He can shoot any deer including a doe or young-un and the license is only five bucks. They’d been practicing shootin’ so’s Davie could hit one and if he didn’t Duane probably woulda just shot another but at least Davie went along and learned how and was there with his license. Duane says he got cold, Davie did. He just couldn’t stay out so his pa sent him back to the truck where there was blankets he could crawl under. Duane assumed he was there, staying warm, but when he went back after dark, Davie weren’t inside.

Its been getting colder and it started snowin’ soon after Davie headed back. Oh God, there’s mountain lions out there and he coulda fallen in the rocks and broke a leg. Duane’s still huntin’ him. He’s got Davie’s dog with him. I’d go hunt too but I can’t leave the baby alone. Are the searchers gonna look for Davie?”

Jim wanted to see where Davie normally slept and asked for a piece of clothing the boy had worn recently. “For the search dogs,” he said. That seemed to calm the woman.

“You’re gonna use dogs to look for ‘em? Oh that’s good, I’m so glad ya got dogs, they’ll find ‘em even in this snow. They can find his trail, right?”

“They’ll sure try, Mrs. Freeman,” Jim said quietly as the woman handed him a balled-up, faded shirt and Deb checked to see if, in fact, her daughter was in bed and her son was not. The deputies reported Davie a verified lost child by 0100 and requested that search and rescue be paged. Jim left Deb with Mrs. Freeman in case Davie or the husband showed up at home. Her instructions were to sit tight, monitor the radio and call if anything changed on her end. He drove back to Highway 16 to wait for search and rescue vehicles.


CHAPTER TWO:

Jana Stein and her husband were sound asleep when the pager wailed its undulating SAR call signal. Her husband, Dave, worked a day job to which he had an hour commute each morning so he answered very few pages though he did volunteer as a local fire fighter. He sleepily groused at the radio’s ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo, “That’s SAR, not Argyle Fire. You get to go out in the cold. I’ll feed the dogs in the morning if you’re not back before I leave.” An artist, Jana worked from a studio in her home. She owned, hiked with, and sledded several Alaskan malamutes and had a couple trained for search and rescue. A slender, leggy, forty-year-old blue-eyed blonde, hiking with her dogs served as her form of exercise and was her very favorite pastime. Even well-trained dogs like hers needed on-going ‘mock searches’ in order to retain their skills so she combined a hike with a trail for Sky to run and another outing as an air scent problem for Tahoe at least once a week.

“It sounds like there isn’t going to be a trail to follow for this little boy,” she said after listening to the information the dispatcher relayed over the radio. “It’s too cold for scent to stick to the ground and Custer Highlands has four new inches of snow. We should probably work a grid pattern from where he was last seen and have Tahoe search for his scent on the wind. I’ll take Sky too, just in case. Might as well be prepared.”

“And if he’s dead?” her husband asked. “With these temperatures it’s not unlikely.”

“I can’t think that way,” she replied. “I assume he’s alive until we prove otherwise, but Tahoe’s trained for human remains detection and Sky’s been coming along with her cadaver work. We’re good to go. See you later you lucky devil.”

Alaskan malamutes weren’t a common breed used for SAR work but Jana had owned several when she decided to get into search and rescue, so that’s who she’d trained. And they had excelled, besting the German sheppards and traditional SAR hunting dog breeds at the training seminars. Both dogs specialized in wilderness search and rescue. Broken ground, rocky crags, tall grass, wildlife, and in this case, extreme cold was not a problem for the malamutes. Tahoe had been successfully searching for three years. A big boy, he liked to work independently, casting for air currents that might carry scent, checking out dead spots, and if he crossed a track, he’d put his nose to ground and follow it directly. Plus, he wasn’t put off the smell of human remains like a lot of dogs. He liked finding people, pure and simple. He was never so happy as to be working in the wilderness with Jana. And he never missed. Tahoe would detect any person in an area he was searching and report their presence to Jana. You couldn’t hide if Tahoe was working the woods.

Sky was Tahoe’s two-year-old daughter. She worked with a harness and twenty-foot lead and was a trailing fiend. Give her a scent item, say go Find Em’ and she was off, nose to ground or nose at its normal cruising level if the scent was blowing up off the ground into the air. Jana often had to jog to keep up with her.


CHAPTER THREE:

SAR volunteers with trucks, trailers full of ATV’s, and a communications van met Jim Davis as he sat in his cruiser, lights flashing on Highway 16, west of Jewel Cave. They followed him to where Lisa Freeman had told him her husband parked his truck.

Lisa had relayed to the deputies what Duane had told her late last night. She said that while previously scouting the area he had found a small herd of mule deer frequenting a secluded draw and near-by, wind-scoured ridges. The clearing, surrounded by thick pines and large outcroppings of rock, prevented him from reaching it by vehicle so he and Davie had hiked in during the late afternoon wanting to be in place before the band’s usual ‘show time’ of dusk.

Twice before he’s seen a big five-by-five buck with seven or eight does accompanied by this and last year’s fawns, a spike buck and a good-sized two-by-two. Duane wanted the big guy. He meant more meat for the table.

Lisa had bundled Davie in virtually all the clothing the kid had with several pairs of pants, a long underwear top, shirt and sweatshirt under his jacket, a hat under his hood, gloves, and several pairs of socks in his still too big lace up, leather boots. It hadn’t been enough.

Duane had told her Davie’s fingers had gone numb as the temperature started dropping towards dusk. His dad had told him to put his hands under his armpits to warm them but he kept getting colder. He’d had to stamp his feet in order to feel them. Deer could hear someone stampin’ their feet a long ways off and the poor kids’ stiff fingers probably wouldn’t be able to pull a trigger anyway so Duane had told him to head back to the truck and take his gun with him. The snow started soon after Davie left.

Duane had then waited patiently, and silently, his own fingers growing numb when finally, the deer had moved into sight and then into range. The does nibbled bits of sage sticking up out of the snow. They bullied the young spike-horn when he got too close. One doe held her tail up while she grazed and the two-by-two sniffed her rear. She drove him away. Not ready yet, Duane had thought.

He waited, hoping the five-by-five would come into sight. Wasn’t he traveling with this herd tonight? Maybe he’d found a doe more ready for breeding in some other band. They needed the meat. He’d promised Lisa a buck tonight and the two-by-two was pretty big for his age so Duane had taken the shot. He’d rather have given the young buck more time to grow but nothing said the big boy would give himself to Duane’s gun this season. As the herd scattered he’d known he’d have to come back another day to fill Davie’s license.

Duane had quickly gutted the buck at the edge of the clearing, wrapped a rope around his rear legs, put a loop of the rope over his own shoulder and dragged the carcass back to the truck. He’d told Lisa he thought Davie must have been asleep since he didn’t see him peering out the window. He threw the buck into the back of the truck, opened the driver’s door, looked inside and – no Davie! The kid wasn’t there! Now what? How could he find him in the dark?

Grabbing a flashlight from behind the seat he’d turned it on to see if the batteries were still any good. It flickered,