Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

rocks that jutted into the cove. The sight of the new boat focused both women immediately.

“He said someone is already here,” Van Dyke said under her breath.

“Keep an eye uphill,” Lola said. She started for the trees above the skiff, getting a better picture now of what Cutter had meant on the phone.

You didn’t need to be a trained tracker to locate a bunch of footprints in mud, but Lola had a moment of pride when she was able to suss out where Cutter had squatted to take measurements and make sketches. She’d seen him do exactly the same thing dozens of times. Another set of impressions stood well behind Cutter’s. Those would be Maycomb’s, observing Cutter work, just as Rockie Van Dyke was observing Lola now.

Lola looked up the mountain, trying to peer through the dense shadows of moss and brush and fallen trees.

Now came the hard part.

Behind her, Van Dyke held up the sat phone and shook her head. “I’m getting no answer from Cutter.”

“Understandable,” Lola said. “He’d have to be holding the antenna just right to get a signal in these trees.”

She searched the willows until she found a straight branch and then bent it so it was taut at the base. Her pocketknife cut through it like butter. She trimmed the leafy twigs along the length of her tracking stick and measured the stride between two tracks she believed to be Cutter’s. He would try and leave her a trail, so in theory, his tracks would be easier to follow. In truth, it didn’t matter. Lola wanted to save Donita Willets and arrest the bad guys, but it was Cutter she’d follow, wherever his tracks led. He was her partner. He needed her.

Urgency drew Teariki and Van Dyke up the mountain. The tracks became more difficult to find as soon as they passed into the woods. Lola slowed, doubting herself, using the willow stick the way Cutter had taught her, willing the tip to point to a track. Her eyes settled on something she thought might be the print of an Xtratuf in the dirt. Crouching, she took a shuffling half step and then held the stick over that spot, twisting her wrist so the point of the stick arced back and forth.

She gave an audible gasp when it crossed a divot she absolutely knew belonged to Cutter’s heel.

She reached in her pocket and took out a roll of bright orange flagging tape, ripping off a foot of it and dropping it on the ground beside the good track.

“This is going to take all day,” Van Dyke said. “Going from track to track.”

“Agreed,” Lola said. “That’s why we’re not going to do that.”

“What then?” Van Dyke asked, brow raised.

“We’re going to bound,” Lola said.

“Okay…” Van Dyke said.

Lola moved forward as she explained. “Cutter knows heaps about tracking,” she said. “And he’s a terrific teacher. I’m learning, but it helps if I hang what I learn on things I’m already familiar with.” She studied the hillside ahead, looked down at her feet, then the area ahead again. “My dad’s a sailor, a voyager. Loves the ancient ways of navigation our forefathers used to cross the Pacific in double-hull canoes.”

She stopped to study a devil’s club leaf that had been torn off the plant and now lay on the ground, bruised and darker green from being crushed under a boot. She marked it with tape as well and moved on.

“Anyway,” she continued. “When I was a little girl, my dad used to sail with this friend from the island of Mongaia who taught him something called Kaveinga… and he taught it to me. In a nutshell, it’s the same sort of thing I’m learning from Cutter.”

Ten yards up Lola spotted a divot where someone, likely Cutter, had dug a heel into the mossy ground. She marked it with another piece of flagging tape and stood.

“Where was I?”

“Your dad and his friend from Mongaia.”

“Right,” Lola said. “Kaveinga. You locate a star on the horizon in the direction you want to sail, then steer toward that star. When it rises too high and out of line, you pick the next star that comes over the horizon at that same spot and steer to that one, until it’s too high and out of line… and so on and so on. A path of stars. We’re just following the azimuth between two known tracks as fast as possible until the next one presents itself, then adjusting course as needed. Kaveinga, but with tracks instead of stars.”

“Sounds cool enough,” Van Dyke said. “But you have to know which stars to look for. And what if there are clouds and you don’t even have stars?”

“Yeah,” Lola said. “Those would be problems. But I prefer to focus on what we do have, and right now, we have stars – tracks.”

Lola moved as quickly as she dared, going from heel divot in the soft loam here, a toe scuff in the moss there. She paused to study a stalk of cow parsnip. Waist high, it was the diameter of a large piece of celery. The leaves were green and healthy, not yet beginning to wilt. Fresh sap pooled around the broken stem. She’d learned the hard way that she was allergic to the stuff, using the stalks to swordfight with another deputy at a party. Her skin had become hypersensitive to the sun wherever the sap had touched her, causing her to burn and scar.

Less than an hour into Lola’s gut-wrenching first solo tracking effort, the woods began to clear. Dirt gave way to bedrock, making it difficult to find any clear sign at all. Lola kept moving in the general direction of what she’d already found, losing faith in her own abilities with each passing step. She brightened when the roar of a waterfall carried through on the wind. A crossing would give her a funnel, a track trap where she was sure to find some sign of Cutter. She broke out of the trees