Wes had the boy by the back of the jacket.
Dana saw it from the fire. Adam was standing at the very edge of the light with one foot already in the dark, and Wes had come up behind him without a sound and taken a fistful of nylon. Adam didn't fight. He stood there leaning toward the trees, the way a dog leans on a leash.
Then Hassan came out of the tent in his socks and had his son by both arms.
"She was right there," Adam said. He blinked at his father as if he'd just come into a bright room. "I wasn't going anywhere. I was just standing up."
"You were at the trees."
"I was in my bag."
Up the slope the voices were going. Dana had heard them every night for four nights and it did not get easier. A woman's smoker's alto called Kurt in to supper by a boy's name, and Kurt sat by the fire with the rifle across his knees and did not look up. Her own father called her the Polish way, "Danusia," from somewhere behind the cottonwoods. He had been dead for three years.
Hassan sat Adam down on the log by the fire and washed at the creek in the dark with Wes holding a flashlight on him. Then he stood facing up the valley and prayed the night prayer out loud.
The slope went quiet.
Dana noticed it the way you notice a refrigerator stop. The creek. The fire. Hassan's low voice in a language she didn't have. Nothing from the trees for as long as he prayed. When he turned his head right, then left, for the greeting of peace, her father said "Danusia" again, patiently, as if he had only paused for breath.
Wes was looking at his wristwatch. Then he looked at Hassan. "How long's that one take?" he said.
"Ten minutes. Less."
Wes nodded and said nothing else. He fed the fire.
The voices wore out a little after eleven. Hassan took Adam back into the tent and zipped it, and Dana heard him say something low in Arabic and Adam say "Okay. Okay." Wes lay down by the fire on top of his bag with his boots still laced. Kurt stayed sitting up against a log with the rifle, and told everyone he wasn't tired.
Theo had the watch until two. He clipped the recorder to the log beside his camp chair and pressed the button. "Room tone," he said, and smiled at her.
"Wake me at two."
"Copy. Night, boss."
She had found Theo four years ago through an ad for a sound engineer, a kid out of film school with a shoebox of recordings. When her father died he drove to Chicago and sat with her in a hospital cafeteria for two days, recording nothing. She fell asleep thinking she should give him a raise.
She woke because she was cold.
Her watch said 3:04. Theo hadn't woken her.
She lay listening. The creek. The fire, still crackling through the nylon, and that was wrong, because Theo was lazy about fires. No voice. No footsteps.
She got out in her socks.
The fire was burning well. Theo's camp chair stood beside it, empty, angled toward the creek. His thermos stood upright on the ground. The recorder was still clipped to the log with its red light on. Kurt had fallen asleep sitting up, his chin on his chest and his hand on the rifle. Wes lay on his side in his boots. Beyond the firelight there was the kind of dark that has no edges.
"Theo," she said. Then, "Theo!"
Kurt came up off the log with the rifle. The tent zipper went and Hassan came out fast with a headlamp. He looked at the empty chair and then at her, and she saw him understand everything at once.
"How long?"
"I don't know. I was asleep."
He swept the beam across the creek and up the slope. Nothing. He went to the edge of the light and stood there with the beam pointing into the trees, and he did not step past it.
Her eyes found the recorder.
She sat on the log with Theo's headphones on and scrubbed back through the file. Fire. Theo coughing. Theo humming a Frank Ocean song, badly. The long hiss of the creek.
At 1:12, by the counter, she heard her own voice.
"Theo." It was faint, from the direction of the creek. "Theo. I'm down here. I slipped."
It was her voice. The rasp she had in the mornings. The Chicago flatness in the vowels that three years in Portland hadn't touched. "I think I hurt my ankle. Can you come?"
On the recording Theo's chair creaked.
"Dana?" he said, close to the mic, puzzled. "Yeah. Hang on. I'm coming."
His footsteps going away on the gravel, getting smaller. Then, very close to the mic, so close she flinched, a long, soft breath out, slow and contented. Then the fire, for two hours, recording an empty chair.
She took the headphones off and put her hands between her knees to stop them.
"That was me," she said. "I was in the tent the whole time."
"I know," Hassan said.
They searched at first light, all of them, Adam refusing to stay in the tent alone.
"Lion," Kurt said at the fire ring. "Took him at the water. That's what they do."
Hassan crouched by the chair. "Look," he said, the way Dana imagined he had explained doses across a counter. "The chair is standing. The thermos is standing. The ash at the edge of the ring isn't touched. No blood. No drag marks. No cat prints anywhere. He wasn't taken from the fire, Kurt. He got up and walked."
Kurt opened his mouth. He shut it again and looked at the creek.
The creek bed was gravel and held nothing. Fifty yards down, on a willow root at the water's edge, they found Theo's gray beanie. It was dry.
Wes found the tracks. He went past the willows to a patch of mud under the bank and stopped and waved them over without a word.
Theo's boots, Dana knew the tread. Beside them, very close, two rows of small split prints, each the size of a teacup. They went together up the bank for thirty feet. Then the boots stopped. The small prints went on alone in long strides.
"Elk," Wes said. He put two fingers into one of the prints. They went in to the second knuckle. "Cow, by the size. But a cow doesn't sink like that. That's an elk carrying something." He wiped his fingers on his pants and didn't look at anybody.
The tracks went up into the rocks and stopped.
Dana stood with the beanie in her hand. "Somebody's doing this," she said. "Somebody in that town. Episode nineteen. The Uintas, 2009. A man named Lyle Dawes hid in the timber with a tape recorder playing a woman crying for help. Hikers left the trail to find her. Two of them never came out. It's a lure, Hassan. It's a person with a recorder."
"He played a real woman crying," Hassan said. "Something she had said."
"So?"
"So when did you say 'Theo, I slipped, I hurt my ankle'?"
She had no answer. She had spent four days talking into microphones and she had never said it.
Kurt had sat down on a rock and was cleaning the rifle, the bolt out, wiping parts that were already clean. Dana had watched him do the same thing at midnight, by the fire, while the voices called him in to supper. Wes stood behind him watching the slope.
They walked back to camp without talking. Hassan went straight to his tent to pack Adam's bag, and stopped.
Behind the tent, where the frost still lay white in the shade of the cottonwoods, there were two small split prints standing side by side. They were shallow. Whatever made them carried nothing now. They were pressed into the frost, on top of it, and they faced the tent wall at the spot where Adam's head had lain all night.