“Sara, check your pack,” I whispered again, and my daughter was already unbuckling the top flap with fingers stiff from the cold. Under the lining, wedged between her water bottle and a spare glove, she found it: a gray plastic box the size of a matchbook, with a tiny green light blinking at one corner. She held it up, and her face went white. “Mom, it is in mine too, is it not?” I felt along my own pack. It was sewn into the shoulder strap, where I would never have looked. Mark had given me the backpack on Christmas morning, with a bow on it.
I did not smash the trackers. I thought of Pete, who never wasted anything useful. I carried both boxes to the woodstove and set them inside the cold iron, and shut the door. Then I looked at my daughter. “He knows where we are,” I told her, “and he knows it will take him ninety minutes on the snowmobile. We have an hour.” Sara nodded, her jaw set like her father. On the wall by the window, I saw something I had walked past a hundred times as a girl: the old Forest Service radio, in its green steel box, with a hand crank.
Pete had taught me to use it, summers ago, on a picnic. I wiped the frost from the dial, cranked the handle until my arm burned, and keyed the microphone. “This is Jennifer Olsen at the Elk Pass cabin,” I said, in as clear a voice as I could manage. “I need the district ranger.” Static roared. I said it again. On the fourth call, a woman answered, crisp and astonished, the first live voice on that channel in perhaps ten years. She said her name was Ranger Dolores Whitaker. I told her my husband had been murdered.
A compass kept a ranger direction long after the mountain had closed over him.
I read to her from the notebook of Pete, standing at the window with the radio mike in my fist and Sara cranking the generator beside me. I read her the dates, the coordinates, the name of the ridge. The hiker who had been reported missing three years ago, I told her, was not a hiker. He was a federal wildlife agent named Tyler Reese, investigating a mining claim fraud that involved illegal blasting on public land. Pete had found out, the morning of the search. He had recorded it in pencil. Someone set charges on the ridge. Ranger Whitaker was silent a long moment. Then she said, “Mrs. Olsen, stay on this channel. A helicopter is coming.”
We heard the snowmobile before we saw it. It was a high, angry whine, rising and falling as it climbed through the trees, and then it broke into the clearing and stopped at the edge of the cabin yard. Mark swung off the seat. He was in his orange search and rescue jacket, with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and a rifle slung across his back. For a moment he stood in the snow like a stranger, and then he lifted his hand and waved at us, as he had done a thousand times at the end of a long day, and my heart broke all over again.
He walked to the porch, his boots crunching in the drifts. “Jen,” he called, in the voice he used for a spooked horse. “Sara. I know you are scared. Let us talk about this inside.” I opened the cabin door and stepped out onto the porch, and Sara stood close at my back. I held the notebook in both hands. “Mark, the radio is on,” I said. “Ranger Whitaker has been listening for four minutes. She heard you say that you were here. She has heard everything since we reached the pass.” Mark stopped on the second step. His face did not change, but his shoulders did.
“Pete was going to ruin everything,” he said, and the words came out flat, as if he had practiced them in the shower. “The claim was worth eleven million dollars. I had a partner, a buyer in Spokane. Then the agent came sniffing around, and Pete found my caps in the shed, and he asked me to turn myself in. He said he would stand beside me.” He shut his eyes. “I loved him. I did not mean the whole slope. I only meant to bury the agent. Pete went in after him, like he always did. You know he would.”
There was a thudding in the sky, faint at first, like a far off drum, then swelling until the pines shook. A red helicopter dropped over the ridge and hovered above the clearing, whipping the snow into a white storm, and a voice boomed from a loudspeaker. Mark lifted his face to it. He did not reach for the rifle. He unslung it, slowly, and laid it in the snow, and then he knelt beside it with his hands on his head. The men who climbed down from the skids were Forest Service agents, big and calm, and they treated him as gently as a child.
Mark was sentenced to life without parole, and the buyer in Spokane to twenty years. The investigation closed eleven years of illegal blasting across three national forests, and the agent Tyler Reese, found at last in a crevasse, was buried with honors at Arlington. A memorial service for the two men was held on the pass in July, with a hundred rangers in green and gray and a lone bagpiper. Sara had the brass compass engraved with a single line, under the glass, in the small neat printing of her father. I always find my way back.
She graduated that spring and joined the Forest Service as a ranger, with a posting at the very district office that had answered our radio call. On her first morning I stood in the doorway of the little house at the foot of the mountain and watched her walk to her truck, in a gray uniform, with a compass at her belt. She turned at the gate and waved. I waved back. Behind her, the white peaks rose against the pale sky, and somewhere up on the pass, I swear, the wind sounded like a man humming.
