Page 73 of Battle Mountain

In fact, he realized ten minutes later, he’d taken the wrong trail. This one veered off and cut across the mountain, rather than descending to lead him back. He knew he’d need to backtrack to the promontory and start over.

And he’d need to remain calm.

That’s when he noticed an old logging road coursing through a meadow to his south. The starlight made the depressions of the two-track stand out as twin ribbons in the grass.

A road? he thought. Kany had said there weren’t any.

Before trudging back to the promontory, Joe walked out into the meadow for a closer look. After twisting the lens of his headlamp to bring it to full illumination, he was surprised to see that the grass in the tracks had been crushed down flat into the soil. There were recent tire tracks going in both directions based on the tread marks.

It was puzzling, he thought. They hadn’t seen a single other vehicle that afternoon, and the elk season in the area had yet to open. Yet the road had been recently traveled by multiple vehicles.

He was also surprised to see that someone had used a chain saw to clear downed trees where the road entered the forest on the other side of the meadow. There were yellow piles of sawdust on the grass where the trees had been cut, as well as fresh cuts on the remaining logs still resting in the timber.

Was this the road Kany had mentioned? he wondered. The road that went to Summit, the old mining town? The road that was impassible due to the fallen trees that blocked it?

He walked up the two-track into the trees for a hundred yards, seeing by the light of his headlamp. Not only had fallen trees been cleared along the surface, but green branches had been cut back on the sides of the road to allow vehicles to pass. Since it wasn’t an official Forest Service road, who had taken the time to open it up?

Joe stopped and stared ahead into the dark past the reach of his beam. Where did the road lead, and who had been using it?

“Hmmmmm,” he said aloud.

Chapter Eighteen

At midnight, Natedrove the Suburban on WYO 230 through the Snowy Range, while Geronimo hunched over his iPhone in the passenger seat. The glow from the screen turned Geronimo’s dark skin multihued as he swiped and enlarged topographical images on several navigation and GPS mapping apps to better familiarize himself with the terrain in and around Battle Mountain.

They’d stopped only twice since leaving Cheyenne. Once to buy ammo and junk food at the West Laramie Fly Store, and again to gather road-killed rabbits from the pavement of the highway to feed their falcons.

The only time Geronimo looked up was when Nate slowed suddenly to let a herd of elk run across the road in the beam of his headlamps. Later, they passed a dark collection of cabins and a log-built structure to their right that was marked with aWyColo Lodgesign constructed of short lengths of wood to spell the words.

“Where are we?” Geronimo asked.

“We’re crossing briefly into Colorado,” Nate said. “It’s a placewhere they’ll welcome the goofy green license plates on this thing.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess.”

“Then we’ll veer north again back into Wyoming to Battle Mountain.”

“Gotcha,” Geronimo said. “I could get a better idea where we are and where we’re headed if I could keep a cell signal for more than five minutes.”

Nate shrugged. “I have a general knowledge of the area, and I learned it without maps on a cell phone. I’ve hunted sage grouse with my birds around Warm Springs, and I was here once in the winter helping out Joe.”

Geronimo looked out the passenger window at the heavy timber that opened up to reveal a deep drop-off that went nearly straight down to a small mountain stream.

“This is some harsh-looking country. I don’t think I’d like to be here in the winter,” Geronimo said. “I suppose that’s why they call it the Snowy Range.”

“That’s right,” Nate said, leaning forward and looking around. “I once brained a guy with a frozen fish not too far from here.”

“You didwhat?”

“I’ll have to tell you about that sometime,” Nate said. Then: “Do you miss your daughter?”

“Of course. Where did that come from?”

Nate shrugged again. “I find myself missing my daughter. Sometimes I think I see her out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head, she’s not there. Sometimes she appears in my dreams.”

They went through a narrow canyon and emerged at a junctionknown as “Three-Way.” The highway to the left went to Walden, Colorado, and WYO 230 continued to the right and climbed back into the mountains and led to Warm Springs, according to the sign.

Nate barely slowed down when he turned to the right.

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