The shed hunters who had discovered the body were legal shed hunters, and they were admittedly new to the sport. Chris Avery and his girlfriend, Mandy Spiers, were enjoying the beautiful spring day with their two golden retrievers, Mutt and Jeff, when the dogs started paying particular attention to some brush near a meadow. Even though the dogs were not trained to locate sheds, Avery was hoping that maybe a big bull elk had not made it through winter and the dogs were attracted to the decaying flesh of a dead animal.
As he got closer, Avery could see he was right, at least about the dogs being attracted to something dead. Unfortunately, what they were attracted to was definitely not an elk.
The man thought he was going to lose his lunch when he saw the bloody human remains in the grass. His girlfriend wasn’t so lucky. In one big eruption she lost every bit of the nice little picnic lunch she had enjoyed while sitting on a blanket not an hour before.
McCain didn’t normally get non-wildlife calls, but based on where the body had been found, and how it might have some similarities to the body Jack had tracked, dispatch called.
“What’s your location?” the dispatcher asked.
“I’m out past Selah talking to some folks about a possible wolf sighting,” he answered.
“Another body has been found in the mountains,” the dispatcher said. “Looks like another woman. YSO would like you to come up if you have the time.”
“Text me the location and I’ll roll right away,” McCain said.
McCain couldn’t believe it. He’d been working out of the Region 3 office for nine years and only two times before had he been involved in a call with a dead body. One of the prior calls had been to help locate a fisherman who had capsized his drift boat after getting caught by a sweeper on the upper Yakima River and had drowned. The other was a homeless guy who had been living on an island in the lower river. Now, in the span of two months here he was headed to another body discovered in the Cascades.
McCain hopped on Wenas Road and headed northwest. He went by a new housing development being built in what were alfalfa fields just a few years before and continued past Wenas Lake to where the pavement ended and three unpaved roads split in three directions. He stayed on the left road, veered left again when it forked, and got on a smaller dirt road that followed Milk Canyon up to the top of Cleman Mountain.
According to dispatch, the kids who had found the body were just northeast of the old Cleman Mountain lookout. Within a few minutes, McCain spotted two Yakima sheriff’s rigs and a silver Toyota Tacoma parked in the sagebrush just off the road. He couldn’t see anyone but knew the deputies couldn’t be too far, so he pulled over and parked next to the other rigs.
He climbed out, let Jack out, and looked around for the group’s tracks. It didn’t take long. Four people can trample up some ground without much effort, and McCain was soon able to distinguish at least one of the tracks. Williams had fairly large feet for a man just six feet in height, and from working with the deputy on several other cases, he knew Williams wore a good-sized boot.
Interestingly, there was a second track, with a different sole than the boots Williams wore—at least a size 12, maybe bigger. McCain had no idea if they were the tracks of the young man who had been up here looking for shed antlers or the other deputy who had come on the call. The fourth set of tracks was much smaller, obviously those of the young woman shed hunter.
“C’mon, Jack,” McCain said to the yellow dog, and off they went following the trail of boot tracks made in the arid soil.
They followed the tracks up a hill for about a half mile, through scattered pine trees and buck brush, and then cut over a small ridge to the north. When they crested the hill, Jack’s ears went up, and McCain knew he had heard the voices from the people at the body.
“Okay,” McCain said to the dog. “Go find them.”
Jack took off on a run, with McCain trying to follow as quickly as he could without twisting an ankle on the rocks, or worse yet, breaking a leg.
He heard Williams’s voice in the distance say, “Hey Jack! Where’s that no-good partner of yours?”
“I’m right here,” McCain said as he came around a small growth of young pine trees. “But I’m not sure why. This is YSO’s call from what I can tell.”
Actually, McCain was glad he had been asked to come take a look. He wanted to see if there were any similarities to the body of the Pinkham woman other than the fact that it had been found on the east side of the Cascades, miles and miles from anywhere.
McCain said his hellos to Williams and the young deputy Stratford and introduced himself to the two antler hunters. Jack did the sniffing-to-get-to-know-you routine all dogs do with Mutt and Jeff. Within twenty seconds the three dogs were romping up the hill, chasing each other with tails wagging a hundred miles an hour.
“What a beautiful dog,” the young lady said to McCain. “Deputy Stratford here says he’s a tracking dog. Did he track us here?”
“No,” McCain said. “I followed your tracks. Williams here leaves a print like Sasquatch, and evidently . . .” McCain paused and looked at the feet of the other two men, “so does Stratford. Both size 12 or 13 if I’m not mistaken.”
McCain looked more closely at the young female shed hunter. She
