In the morning there was frost on the tent fly and the creek ran loud with it.
Hassan went up into the pines before Adam woke. The ground was soft under the needles and the tracks were easy to find, because nothing else had walked there. Two rows of small split prints, each one the size of a teacup, sunk deep, as if something heavy had stood on very little. They came down to within six feet of the tent wall. They stopped there, side by side, where it had stood listening. Then they went back up the slope in long strides and ended at a slab of granite, and did not start again on the other side.
He stood looking at the granite for a while. Then he went back down and made coffee.
Adam crawled out with his hair flat on one side and sat on the log with his hands around the cup Hassan gave him. He didn't drink. He looked at the pines.
"What was it?"
"Elk, probably," Hassan said. "They come down at night for the water. There are tracks."
"Elk don't know my name."
Hassan had nothing ready for that. He had told himself the word in the dark and he had told himself the word again at the granite, and neither time had it held. Jinn, his grandmother would have said, without lowering her voice, as if naming the weather. The ones who live where people don't. But Teta's jinn were strangers. What came down through the pines had known the vowel in his name and the accent in Rania's throat. He could not make that fit anything.
"It did Mom," Adam said. "It did her voice. And then it did mine."
"I know."
"So what was it?"
"I don't know what it was," Hassan said. "I know we stay together, and we don't answer."
Adam looked at him for a long second, then nodded once. He drank the coffee, made a face at it, and drank the rest.
The other campers came to them.
A woman in a red down jacket walked up the creek trail at nine with a steel thermos under her arm. A young man came behind her carrying a shotgun microphone in a fluffy gray windscreen, the kind television people use. "Morning!" she called from twenty yards off, the way people call to strangers in the backcountry so nobody gets startled. "We saw your smoke. Dana. This is Theo. We're down at the cottonwoods."
Dana was in her thirties, sharp-faced and friendly. She asked how the night had been and didn't wait for the answer. She asked how long they were in for, and whether that was their Corolla at the trailhead, because Theo had bet her nobody would drive a Corolla up that road. Then she unscrewed the thermos, sat down on the log across from Adam without being asked, and poured.
"Real coffee," she said. "Not the instant stuff. I'm a snob about one thing."
Theo was younger, Korean American, with a soft voice and a gray beanie. He had a small black recorder clipped to his jacket with its red light on. He asked Adam if this was his first time out. Adam said yes, and Theo said his own first trip had been with his uncle in the Cascades and it had rained four days straight and he'd cried in the car. Adam laughed. Hassan liked Theo for that.
They drank Dana's coffee. It was much better than his. She told them she hosted a podcast, *Missing West*, about disappearances on public land. A Swedish couple, Erik and Marit Lindqvist, had walked into this valley three weeks ago. Their rental car was still at the trailhead. The county had searched for two days and called it exposure. "Six people in eleven years," she said. "One drainage. Six explanations. Two of the six were out here looking for the others."
Then she set her cup down on the log.
"Can I ask you something?" she said. "Did you hear anything last night? Voices?"
Adam went still.
"A lady," he said, before Hassan could decide. "In the trees. She knew our names."
Dana and Theo looked at each other. Something went out of Dana's face. It was relief, Hassan thought later, and something worse under it.
"We came in four days ago," she said. "Every night since. Mine sounds like my dad. He's been dead three years." She turned the cup a quarter turn on the log. "And we've tried to walk out three times. Every trail brings us back to the creek."
"Back," Hassan said.
"Back," said Theo. "Like a loop in a tape."
Hassan didn't believe it. He saw that Dana could see he didn't, and that she didn't blame him. She took out her phone. "Episode four," she said. "A retired ranger. I interviewed him in Ely in August."
The recording was an old man's voice, dry, slow. "Folks hear things up there. I always told people, you hear your name at night, you stay in your bag. Don't go looking." "Why's that?" Dana's voice asked on the recording. "Because the ones who went looking," the old man said, "are the ones I was looking for."
The hunters found the elk in the early afternoon.
Hassan and Adam heard the dog first, a deep, rolling bay from the next draw over, and then a man shouting. Adam was on his feet and running before Hassan could stop him. They came over the low rise and down through the aspens and found two men and a red hound in a clearing beside something big and brown on the ground.
It was a bull elk, six points on each side. It lay with its legs folded under it as if it had lain down to sleep.
"Kid. Stay back," the bigger man said.
He was in his forties, heavy through the shoulders, in orange and camouflage, a scoped rifle slung across his back. The other one was leaner and younger with a compound bow and a beard. He was holding the hound by its collar, and the hound was making a thin, high sound in its throat and trying to back away.
"Kurt Brandt," the big man said. "That's my brother Wes. You hear anything last night?"
People kept asking him that.
Kurt stepped aside so they could see.
The elk was hollow. There was an opening at its belly no bigger than two hands, and through the opening there was nothing. No organs, no meat on the inside of the ribs, the cavity scraped down to pale bone. The hide was almost whole. The eyes were still in the head. Whatever had eaten it had gone in through one door and taken everything and left the house standing.
Adam made a sound. Hassan put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there.
"Lion," Kurt said. "They'll open a belly and feed from the inside. I've seen it in Idaho."
"Like this?" Wes said, low.
Wes was looking at the ground. Hassan looked too, because he'd been looking at ground all morning. No drag marks. A lion would have dragged its kill under cover; even Hassan knew that much. No prints in the soft dirt by the creek, not lion, not bear. Only the elk's own, coming down to drink.
"No blood," Wes said.
"They lap it."
"All of it?"
Kurt gave his brother the old older-brother look, the one that ended arguments before they began. Wes looked away first.
"We've been trying to get back to the truck since Thursday," Wes said, to Hassan, as if it followed. "Every trail we take comes down into this draw."
"Map's wrong," Kurt said.
"Three different trails."
"Then three trails are wrong."
Duke had pressed himself against Wes's legs with his tail tucked flat against his belly. He was looking south down the valley, toward the white playa, with his lip trembling off his teeth.
"You hear voices at night?" Hassan asked.
Kurt didn't answer right away. He unslung the rifle and checked the chamber, which didn't need checking. "Somebody's been hollering round our camp," he said. "Kids from that town. Drunks. First night I hollered back. Thought it was Wes, down at the creek, wanting a hand."
Wes turned and looked at his brother. His face had gone the color of the aspen bark.
"Kurt," he said. "I was in the tent. I was lying right next to you."