Caleb knew the way to the Brandts' camp.
He didn't say so. When they came down off the ridge with the afternoon going long and gold, Kurt pointed north toward the pines, and Caleb, limping between Wes and Dana, said, "That draw's choked with deadfall. Go round by the spring." Kurt grunted and went round by the spring. There was a spring, a small clear one under a ledge of black rock, and from it a game trail ran straight up to the Brandts' tents.
"Good eye," Kurt said.
"I saw it from the ridge," Caleb said.
Hassan had been on the ridge too. From up there the ledge hid the water. He looked at Adam, but Adam was watching Caleb, and his face held nothing but sympathy.
Duke went to the far side of camp and lay down behind Wes's tent, where he could see Caleb's boots.
They built the fire too big. Wes kept feeding it after Kurt told him to stop, dragging dead limbs out of the pines until it roared and threw sparks up into the first stars.
Hassan prayed the sunset prayer at the edge of the light, aloud, facing north and a little east. When he came back to the logs Kurt was cleaning the rifle. He had cleaned it at noon. He ran the rod through again with the same care and didn't look at anyone.
"I keep saying lion," he said. "You notice that? I keep saying it because a lion I can shoot." He sighted down the bore at the fire. "But there's no drag. No blood. I've seen what a cat leaves, and it isn't this." He snapped the bolt home. "So I don't know what I'm saying anymore."
Hassan had not expected that from him. Kurt was a man who liked to have the answer, and he had set it down in front of strangers.
"I know what it is," Dana said. She had the recorder in her lap like something she was keeping warm. "Everybody thought Lyle Dawes worked the Uintas with one tape recorder. Two episodes, and I still think about it. It took them a year to catch him because nobody believed one man could be in that many places. He wasn't. He had six recorders." She tapped the recorder. "Somebody's doing that here, with better gear. He records us. He plays us back."
"My first night," Hassan said, "something called me from the pines in my grandmother's voice."
"Okay."
"She died in 2009. In Syria. Where would your man find her voice?"
Dana opened her mouth and closed it. "I don't know yet," she said. "I'll find out."
"Well, it's not a ghost story either," Kurt said. He looked across the fire at Hassan. "No offense. You've been looking at the dark like it owes you money since we met."
Adam looked down at his hands.
Hassan had spent nine years in America learning which sentences turned people's faces. He was tired, and the voice in the pines had known how Teta stretched his name, and he said it anyway.
"My grandmother's people believed in jinn," he said. "Not like the films. They live in wild places. Deserts, ruins, places where nobody lives. They're not animals. More like spirits." He searched for the word. "You'd call them ghosts. In her stories they called people by name."
Caleb laughed.
It came out of him all at once, bright and loud, and it went on. It went on after a joke would have been over, if there had been a joke. Kurt glanced at him. Dana smiled uncertainly, waiting to be let in on it. Caleb laughed until his eyes were wet, then stopped the way a tap stops, and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. Long day."
Nobody knew what had been funny.
Dana leaned toward Hassan while Kurt put more wood on. "Don't take it personally," she said, low. "Maybe he's on the spectrum. My brother smiles when he doesn't know what face to make. He laughed all through our grandpa's funeral."
It was a kind way to see it. Hassan nodded and let it go. Across the fire Wes was looking at Caleb the way he'd looked at the creek bed that morning, before he trusted it to hold his weight.
"Huh," Wes said, and nothing else.
The barking came from the north, over the ridge behind the camp, faint. Several dogs, deep-voiced, answering each other, the barking of animals doing a job.
"Working dogs," Wes said. "Sheep dogs, maybe. Big ones."
"There's nothing up there. I looked at the map. BLM ground and the ridge."
"A sheep camp," Hassan said. "There were Basque herders all through this country. My manager at the pharmacy, his grandfather herded near Elko."
"There's no road north," Kurt said. "North, we're climbing a ridge in the dark toward dogs that might not be there. South, there's a town with a landline and a sheriff on the other end of it."
"Six people have gone missing within fifteen miles of that town."
Caleb spoke for the first time in an hour. "Josh's uncle said they were good people in Sweetwater," he said. "He said Mae at the diner makes the best elk stew in the state." He smiled at all of them, tired. "I just want to call my mom."
Hassan watched it settle in Kurt's shoulders and in the way Wes looked at the ground. Nobody wanted to be the one who said no to the hurt boy who wanted his mother.
"I want it on the record," Hassan said, "that I think we should go north."
"Noted," said Kurt. "South at first light."
North over the ridge the dogs barked a long time, then stopped all together, as if someone had called them in.
The voice started an hour after dark.
"Dana?" It came from the pines below the spring, thin and hoarse. "Dana, I'm so cold. Where'd everybody go?"
Dana's whole body went toward it. Hassan caught her wrist and held on. "Don't answer," he said. "Don't."
It moved around the camp, slowly, just past the firelight. It was Theo's voice, the slight rasp, the way he said her name like it had two syllables too many. Hassan thought of the pines on the first night and of Teta's long vowel, and of the stories she told on the roof about the things that lived out past the last houses. They were spirits in those stories. They didn't know anyone. He couldn't understand how this one knew Theo, or how the other had known his grandmother.
At half past seven he stood for the night prayer. He didn't want to turn his back on the dark, and he did it anyway, and because the voice was out there he recited louder than he meant to, so that his own words filled his ears.
When he finished he sat on his heels and listened. The pines were quiet.
They stayed quiet for a long minute. Then, from farther off, "Dana? Dana, please."
Wes was on watch by the woodpile with his bow across his knees. He was looking at his wristwatch. When Hassan passed him he looked at it again, and wrote something on the back of his hand with a pen, and didn't explain.
Hassan lay awake in the tent with Adam's back against his arm. Through the nylon he heard Kurt run the cleaning rod through the rifle again, the second time that night. Kurt didn't come to bed. He sat by the fire with Caleb, who sat upright with his back to the dark and his laced boots toward the coals, head bowed, never lying down.
Near midnight Hassan heard Wes's voice by the Brandts' tent, very quiet. "Kurt. That first night. Who did you think you were answering?"
A long pause. "Go to sleep, Wes."
Wes went to bed in his boots.
Wes's shout woke the camp at dawn.
Duke lay at the end of his rope by the stake, curled on his side with his nose in his tail, the way he slept. The collar was still buckled. Under his ribs there was a hole no bigger than a man's hand, and through it there was nothing at all. When Wes lifted him the body came up like an empty coat.
Kurt stood over them with the rifle. His face was dark red.
"I was awake," he said. "I sat up all night. I was looking right at him."
Caleb stood by the dead fire, shocked and sorry. "I must have dozed off," he said. "I'm so sorry, Wes. I didn't hear a thing."
Wes put the dog down. He walked a slow circle in the frost with his eyes on the ground, and he stopped.
The tracks were small and split, sunk deep, the same ones Wes had followed from the creek where Theo walked away. They came from the dog. They went round the camp, tent by tent, and stood a while at each door.
Then they went off down the draw. South.
"South," Wes said. He looked up at his brother. "That's the way we said. Last night. By the fire."