Kurt crouched over the prints behind the tent for a long time.
"Lion," he said at last. "Circled back. They'll do that. They'll come back to see what else. . ."
He stopped. He was a hunter, and he was looking at what was in the frost. Two crescents to each print, pointed at the front. No pad. No claws. Nothing round. He had shot elk for twenty years and he knew exactly what had stood there.
"A lion's got four toes and a heel pad," he said, mostly to himself. "This is a cloven hoof. This is. . ." He stood up. "I don't know what this is."
Wes stared at his brother. Hassan guessed it was the first time he had heard Kurt say it about anything.
They walked back to the fire ring. Wes stopped his brother by the arm, out of earshot of the others, but Hassan was coiling a rope by the cottonwoods and heard it anyway.
"Kurt. Are we getting out of here?"
Kurt didn't answer at once. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, we are."
Wes nodded as if that settled it, and went to get the dog.
Theo's tracks ended in the rocks above the creek, and that was where Wes took Duke.
At the place where the split prints went up onto the stone, the hound stopped dead and sat down. Wes didn't pull him. He walked the dog the long way round the outcrop, a hundred yards, talking to him low the whole time, and on the far side, where the rock gave way to sage and dirt again, Duke put his nose down and froze.
Then he started to bay.
It was his working voice, deep and sure. Wes knelt in the dirt and showed Hassan without a word. The small split prints came down off the rock here and went on, south and east, down the valley. They were still deep. Whatever made them was still carrying its load.
They followed. Five of them and the dog, spread across the slope the way Kurt said search parties did it, calling Theo's name. Hassan walked with Adam beside him and one hand on the strap of his son's pack. Dana called first, hands cupped. "Theo!" Then Kurt, from higher on the slope, a flat bellow. "Theo!" The name went out across the valley and came back off the far ridge, small and late. Each time, Hassan thought about what else might be listening for names.
Kurt walked with the rifle off his shoulder now, his thumb on the safety. Twice he stopped and glassed a slope and found nothing, and twice he said nothing about it. The tracks never wavered. They went straight through sage that should have turned an animal, straight over a dry wash, straight down. At noon Duke pulled Wes through the brush to a cut in the ground where a spring creek had dug itself a ravine.
At the lip of the ravine the dog stopped. The bay went up into a snarl. His hackles rose all down his back in a stiff red ridge, and Wes hauled back on the leash with both hands.
The prints went to the lip and over.
"There's somebody down there," Adam said.
There was. At the bottom, against the cut bank, a young man sat with his legs out in front of him. He wore a blue rain shell and hiking pants and heavy brown leather boots, laced to the top. A T-shirt torn into strips was wrapped round and round his head, and the side of it above his left ear was dark and stiff with old blood.
He looked up at them. His face was pale and his lips were cracked.
"Oh, thank God," he said. "Are you real?"
His name was Caleb. He was twenty-seven and from Boise. He and two friends from work, Josh and Ty, had come in from the east side four days ago to fish the high lakes. Two nights ago something had come into their camp. He'd heard Ty shout, and the tent tearing, and Josh screaming, and he'd run and fallen into this ravine in the dark and hit his head.
"It dragged them," he said. "I heard it the whole way. They were alive."
Dana had Theo's recorder on her jacket. "Our friend was taken last night," she said. "Theo. We're looking for him."
"I'm so sorry," Caleb said.
Then he smiled. It came a beat after the words, as if he'd had to remember it, and it stayed a beat too long. He wasn't smiling at Dana. He was smiling past her, at Adam.
Hassan saw it. The man had a head wound and two nights in a ditch. People smiled wrong in shock; he had watched them do it across a pharmacy counter. He let it go.
"Dragged them," Kurt said slowly. He was looking at the ground at the lip of the ravine, where the only tracks were the ones they had followed down. He opened his mouth. "Was it a. . ." He didn't finish. He didn't say lion.
They got Caleb up the side of the ravine between Kurt and Wes. He was lighter than he looked, Kurt said afterward. Like lifting a kid. At the top Duke went for him.
The leash came out of Wes's hand and the hound went at Caleb low and fast with his lips back. Caleb stepped back without any hurry and looked down at the dog. Kurt got a boot between them and Wes caught the trailing leash. Duke backed off, still snarling, all the way to Wes's legs.
"He's never gone for a person," Wes said. "Not once. I'm sorry, man."
"It's okay," Caleb said. "Animals don't like me since. I probably smell like that thing."
Kurt laughed, too loud, glad of something to laugh at. Wes didn't. He knelt and ran his hands down Duke's legs as if looking for an injury, and found none, and stayed kneeling with his face in the hound's neck.
Hassan looked at his head.
He hadn't meant to. He had stopped being a medical person at a border crossing in 2016, when they asked for his profession and he said "pharmacist" and the man with the clipboard wrote "laborer." But you didn't leave a two-day-old head wound in a dirty T-shirt.
"I have a first aid kit," he said. "Let me clean that."
"It's fine."
"It might be infected."
"It's fine," Caleb said again, pleasantly. He didn't move away, so Hassan crouched and unwound the strips.
The cut was there, above the ear, two inches long and black at the edges. It wasn't bleeding. A scalp wound bleeds and bleeds, any first-year student knows it, and this one had stopped as if it had been painted on. The skin around it was cold under Hassan's fingers. Not cool. Cold, the way a countertop is cold.
Caleb didn't flinch at the alcohol wipe.
"You were limping. Let me see the ankle. I'll take your boot off and. . ."
"No." It was the first thing he'd said fast. Then the pleasant voice came back. "Sorry. It's swollen. If the boot comes off I'll never get it on again. The boot's the splint."
That was true. Hassan had said the same thing himself to people coming in with sprains. He sat back on his heels.
"There's a town south of here," Caleb said, to all of them. "Sweetwater. Josh's uncle used to hunt up here. He said there's a landline at the diner. They can call search and rescue. They might have found Josh and Ty already."
Hassan opened the food bag. "In the name of Allah," he said in Arabic, under his breath, out of thirty years' habit. He held out a protein bar, and Caleb shook his head before it was clear of the bag. The last of the flatbread, a pouch of lentil soup. No, and no, polite and quick. "I can't. The head thing. I couldn't keep it down."
"You haven't eaten in two days."
"I'm not hungry," Caleb said. He pushed the soup gently back toward Hassan's hands. "Keep it for Adam. He's growing."
Hassan put the soup away.
He went back over the hour since the ravine while he zipped the bag. Dana had said "your son." Kurt had said "kid." Wes had said nothing at all. Hassan himself had not spoken the name once.
He looked up. Caleb was smiling at Adam again, and Adam, not knowing why, was smiling back.