“Sun’s getting low in the sky, Teddy. What do you say we head back? Think this thing through.”
Teddy led his horse back down the ravine. The animal seemed hesitant, but it moved deftly under its rider’s direction. Teddy opened a saddlebag as his horse came alongside Cal’s mare. He reached inside and tossed his canteen to the sheriff. It was an old metal canteen, military issue. Cal opened the top and drank greedily. He’d already drank all of his own.
“We can’t let up, Sheriff. We can’t give up on the trail before nightfall.”
Cal choked and wiped his mouth. “Trail? What trail?” he yelled, and felt his voice getting higher in pitch. “Can you show me the trail, ’cause I’d sure like to see it!”
Ted looked away for a moment, at the sky and the river.
“You ever stalk an animal, Sheriff?”
“Not much of a hunter, Ted.” He felt silly for losing his temper. It made him feel even more like the boy in this pair. He capped the canteen.
“The trick to stalking, Sheriff, is staying stubborn.”
Cal didn’t feel up for another of Teddy’s lessons. But if a story would keep him from having to ride that awful horse for another few minutes, so be it. He handed the canteen back to Teddy.
“How so?” he asked.
“I tracked a buck once for half a day through this woods. You can tell a buck track from a doe track ’cause of the way the hooves spread out in the mud.” Ted held up two fingers and spread them apart. Cal nodded as if he was truly interested.
“Bucks’ necks get thick when they rut,” Teddy went on. “Makes ’em lean back when they walk, spreads their toes apart. I spotted a big set of tracks in the frost and spent the next five hours moving about two hundred yards until I lost them in a thicket. I backed out on my belly, made this wide circle downwind.” Ted traced half a circle in the air with his finger. “And you know what happened, Sheriff?”
“Nope.”
“I started thinking about the football game. About sitting in a warm kitchen. Started getting impatient, walked a little faster and noisier. Eventually the sun came up high enough to melt the frost and the hoofprints with it. I gave up and stood at the downwind edge of that thicket, and what bust up from the poplar slashing but a buck with antlers like this.” Ted spread his arms wide, canteen in one hand. “Antlers thick as wrists, tearing off into the thicket again.” Ted opened the canteen. “If I’d have spent five more minutes, just stayed stubborn, I’d have found him, bedded down with his nose facing the wind.” He took a drink.
“There ain’t no frost out here, Ted. There are no tracks. We’re stomping around blind.”
“The boys are out here. We just gotta keep at it.”
The sun was well down in the trees now. The shadows were long on the forest floor. The sheriff cursed the shadows, and the trees. If he were back in Houston, they’d have a command set up by now. They’d have teams of men. They’d have coffee and maps and helicopters. They’d have a plan. Cal decided to put his foot down.
“We’re going back, Teddy. We’ll get some other departments involved. This ain’t the right way to do this.”
Teddy just looked at him.
Cal went on. “We had to come out here and try, but now it’s time to get serious. Get some support. Teddy, my radio won’t even reach town from out here. It’s just you and me riding through the woods.”
Teddy’s face soured. “No offense, Sheriff,” he said, “but I don’t want more cops involved.”
Cal cringed. Teddy sounded like Blind Burt Akinson, but Cal kept his cool. He needed Teddy to listen to him. “Why not?”
“Because more cops will turn this into a manhunt, and this ain’t a manhunt.”
“They’re boys, Teddy. I know that. Everyone will know that. But we need dogs. We need eyes.”
“I don’t see it.” Teddy waved his hands in the air, as if to wash his hands of the whole idea.
“Don’t see what?” Cal was losing ground and patience. Teddy knew these woods, but he didn’t know search work, and Cal didn’t like being so much at the mercy of another man when the search was ultimately his responsibility.
“And speaking of dogs, where is that dog of yours, Sheriff?”
“He’s in town.”
“You come out to search for two boys and leave your dog? Could have used him out here. Could have used him back where we crossed that river. Could have given us a place to point. And now you think you’re the one to go back and make the plan, the sheriff who fails to bring his dog to a search?”
Cal held up his hands to stop the comments. He spoke very slowly now. “I thought, Teddy, we’d be moving a little faster on horseback. I didn’t think my dog would keep up.”
“What do you mean, faster?”
Cal felt his face blush. “You know, like galloping or something. I thought horses galloped.”
“Where do you think we are, Sheriff, the great plains of Texas?”
The sheriff bit his lip. How could he have known they’d be moving about as fast as a man on foot? How could he have known what it was like to ride through a brush pile of a forest?
“You think we’re out here chasing buffaloes? Drinking whiskey for breakfast? The real Wild West, huh?” Teddy’s voice quavered a bit as he spoke. His face had reddened. He waved his hands in the air again, as if to keep Cal’s worthlessness from sticking to him.
Cal’s face burned with shame. Teddy had smelled the whiskey on his breath in the kitchen. Cal was losing all leverage, and fast. He swallowed the accusation. “You’ve had
