Tainted Trail by Wen Spencer

nightmares. He shook his head and ducked out of the tent.
    Rose continued with her account of the day. “I tried calling Alicia every half hour. When she didn’t come back by evening, I called the park rangers and then you. I should have called while it was still daylight.”
    â€œThat’s okay. You did fine,” Kraynak soothed. “Do you remember what she was wearing?”
    Rose said that she didn’t remember, but in the last day she had pieced together which of Alicia’s clothes were missing. Hiking boots. Blue jeans with a Celtic-knot design painted down the outside seam. A mottled mauve T-shirt. An oversized flannel button-down shirt, mostly in red. Backpack. Phone. Field journal and compass.
    The conversation turned to the search that had started at dawn yesterday.
    â€œThey asked the same questions that you’re asking,” Rose said. “They seemed pretty organized.”
    All thirty searchers seemed to have moved through the campground, trampling out Alicia’s presence. Ukiah pressed fingers into the various tracks, picking up the dirt and sifting it though his fingertips, sniffing it, and then tasting it, trying to determine when the prints were made and by whom.
    â€œIt’s so weird having you here,” Rose said. “She talked about you guys all the—what’s he doing?”
    â€œHe’s tracking,” Max answered without pause.
    â€œIt looks like he’s eating dirt.”
    â€œIt only looks that way,” Max assured her.
    Ukiah started a spiral search from the heart of the camp. The women had been in Oregon almost three weeks before Alicia had vanished; she had walked around the camp in every pair of her shoes. Ukiah found hundreds of her footprints. It was going to be difficult to tell which was the last set of tracks she had set down. He ranged out to the fringe, to find departing tracks, which were fewer in number.
    Nose almost to the ground, he examined Alicia’s various trails. The sun was rising as he leaned back, stretching.
    Max caught the motion. “How’s it going, Ukiah?”
    â€œShe left the camp the day before yesterday with this trail here,” Ukiah answered, standing. “I’m going to be switching into high gear. You ready?”
    Max consulted his map and compass. “Hmmm, that trail runs kind of parallel to one of the forest roads, keeping about two to five miles from it. You going fast?”
    Ukiah nodded. “It’s a clear trail.”
    â€œOkay, go ahead, we’ll follow in the four-by-four.”
    He turned to go, then remembered that he unthinkingly promised Indigo a phone call. “Oh, Max, can you call Indigo for me and see how Kittanning’s appointment went?”
    â€œSure thing.”
    So he went, at an easy lope he learned from the wolves.
    Â 
    Over the voice-activated radio, Ukiah caught Max’s side of the phone call to Indigo as he headed out of the campground into the park proper. She kept the conversation short, limiting it to a report that everything went smoothly with Kittanning’s checkup, hopes that they find Alicia quickly, and then a pledge of love to be passed along.
    After that was silence as he tracked Alicia over steep hills, through rugged valleys, and across dirt forest roads. Occasionally he caught the sound of the Blazer as Max drove the forest roads, trying to keep them close together via Ukiah’s GPS tracer.
    Max broke the radio silence after a half an hour with a muttered, “What the hell does he want?”
    â€œWhat is it, Max?” Ukiah paused on a rocky spar at the top of a ridge. Trees screened the Blazer from sight. A red light flickered oddly through the green, too bright and quick for brake lights.
    â€œThere’s a police car that just came up behind us and it’s flashing its lights at us,” Max explained.
    â€œOh, joy,” Ukiah muttered, and plunged down the next hillside.
    â€œHow are you