Wes buried Duke under a cairn of stones with his collar on, and then he picked up the tracks.
Nobody said lion anymore. Kurt carried the rifle slung, not raised. "In case," he said, when Dana looked at it, and he didn't say in case of what.
The prints went down the draw in the frost and out onto the sage flats, where the ground was soft enough to hold them. Small, split, deep. Wes walked bent over beside them with his bow on his back. Every so often he crouched and laid two fingers in one, the way he'd have checked a blood trail.
"Elk," he said once. "Cow elk, by the size. Walking." He measured the depth against his knuckle. "Like she's got a man on her back."
"Then it's going where it took Theo," Dana said.
Nobody argued with her. That was why they were following it. Hassan walked with Adam in front of him, close enough to touch, and Caleb limped in the middle of the line without complaint. Twice the tracks crossed hardpan and vanished, and twice Wes cast in a wide half circle and found them again on the far side, heading the same way.
By midafternoon Hassan could see where they were heading. A smudge at the edge of the white playa, low roofs and a steeple.
The tracks went straight to it.
They came into Sweetwater in the last hour of daylight.
It was small and old and kept up. A dirt main street ran along the playa's edge with a dozen buildings to a side, wood and stone, the siding held with square nails. A stone building had a plaque: "Sweetwater Station, Pony Express, 1860-1861". There was a general store with a tin roof, frame houses with late tomatoes on the vines, and a white church. Hassan looked at the steeple a while before he saw what was wrong with it. There was no cross, only a square of darker wood where one had been. Past the church was a cemetery behind a picket fence, then a long smokehouse, then a gray barn with its doors chained. At the far end of the street, facing the playa, a diner: "PRUITT'S", and under it, "Good Food Since 1952".
The tracks ran out in the packed dirt at the head of the street.
A ladder leaned against the store with a paint can on the top rung and a brush across it, the paint still tacky. A bicycle lay on its side in a yard. There were no tire tracks in the street, only old ones softened by wind, and their own boots coming in.
Three people were out.
An old man sat in a rocker on the porch of the store, deep in the shade of the roof, a cup of coffee on the rail beside him with a skin on top. A tall young man with black hair leaned in the diner doorway. And a woman came out past him onto the steps, drying her hands on a dish towel.
"Well, Lord," she said. "Look at you all. You look like you walked here from Utah."
She was about fifty, brown hair pinned up, a white apron over a blue dress, a round, kind, tired face. Her name tag said "MAE". There was a small white scar through her left eyebrow.
"Where is everybody?" Kurt said.
"Up at the high field, hon. Getting the last of the hay in before the snow."
"Gone after elk," said the old man from his rocker, at the same time. "Season's on. Town empties out."
The young man in the doorway smiled. "Funeral in Ely," he said. "Most of them drove over this morning." He had a little silver pendant at his throat, a cross with curled arms like a pinwheel. "I'm Jake."
Kurt looked from one of them to the next. "Which is it?"
Mae laughed. "All of it. Small town, hon. Everybody's somewhere." She turned to the old man. "Earl, don't tease them."
Earl rocked and didn't say anything.
Caleb had already gone up the porch steps. He sat on the top one at Earl's feet, the way a grandson might, and the old man reached down without looking and patted his shoulder twice. Caleb leaned into it. Hassan watched him. Two days in a ravine, a head wound, a stranger's porch, and the boy looked as if he had come home.
The diner was red booths and a long counter with chrome stools and pies under glass domes, a place Hassan had seen only in films as a boy, on a cousin's satellite dish in Homs. The coffee in the pot on the warmer was cold. Caleb went behind the counter and came back with a glass of water. He didn't have to look for the glasses.
By the register was a black telephone on the wall.
Kurt picked it up and his face changed. "Dial tone."
He called 911 and got a dispatcher in Ely, and he told it flat and certain. A missing producer. Two missing fishermen from Boise. A dog killed in camp. He didn't say what had done it. When she asked where he was calling from he said, "Sweetwater. The diner. Pruitt's," and there was a pause on the line long enough that he said, "Hello?"
He hung up. "First light. She says the county road's bad after dark. They'll send a deputy at first light."
"Good," said Mae. "You call everybody, hon. That phone's for anybody who needs it." She looked round at all of them. "You've got people worried sick. Call them. Tell them where you are. Tell them to come get you."
Caleb called his mother. Hassan heard him say, "Mom, it's me, I'm okay, I'm in a town called Sweetwater." The call lasted less than a minute. Mae patted his arm as he passed her.
Dana called Lisa, who handled the show's money in Portland, and told her Theo was missing. Her voice went thin and then steady. "Sweetwater. Off Highway 50, the county road north. No, don't come. Lisa. Don't come. Call his mother."
Mae wrote on a napkin at the end of the counter. "Directions," she said, "for whoever comes. It's a hard road to find." Then she looked at Hassan. "And you, hon? Who's waiting on you?"
He thought of his manager at the pharmacy. The imam on Kietzke Lane, who would notice if he missed Friday. The neighbor who took in his mail. He didn't know why he said what he said.
"Nobody," he said. "It's only me and my son."
Mae smiled and put the pencil down.
Dana found the board by the register while Mae was making coffee. Hassan went to stand beside her. Lost dog. Hay for sale. And down one side, missing-persons posters. The top one was new and glossy: "MISSING: ERIK AND MARIT LINDQVIST", a blond couple sunburned on a summit, "Last seen October 3, Harrow Creek Trailhead". Below it they got older. A man in a cowboy hat, 2019. Two college boys, 2016. A young man in a denim jacket, 1988. At the bottom, the color of tea, a woman with her hair pinned up, in an apron: "MISSING SINCE APRIL 1971. Last seen Ely, Nev." The name had been rubbed away by fifty years of thumbs.
"They keep them all," Dana said, and photographed the board.
Mae gave them four rooms above the diner, iron beds and quilts. "No charge. Supper's at seven, when everybody's back. Elk stew and cornbread. You'll eat with us."
"Thank you," Hassan said. "My son and I will eat our own food. It's a religious thing. The meat."
For less than a moment her face had nothing in it, as if a lamp behind it had been switched off. Then the lamp came back on.
"Of course, hon. But the boy'll have some cornbread. There's nothing in cornbread."
Adam's face was all hope. Four days of lentils.
The sun touched the western ridge. Kurt stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking at the road.
"Deputy at first light," he said again, to himself.
Out on the porch Earl stopped rocking.
"County sent one out after those Swedes," he said through the screen door, pleasant as weather. "Liked it here fine. Never did leave."