Downhill to Water

By seven in the morning the cold air was still sliding downhill, and Kaisa Rautio meant to use it before the sun took it away.

She stood at the bottom of the drainage with one hand on her dog’s harness. Above her the creek came down through cedar and larch from the ridge where, two days ago, a seventy-one-year-old man had parked his truck and walked off to pick huckleberries. Below her, through the trunks, Tally Lake lay flat and grey.

“Everybody else is up top,” said the radio on her chest. It was Naomi Whitcomb at the command post. “You’re sure you want the creek?”

“I’m sure.”

“He’s got a bad knee, Kaisa. The family says he wouldn’t go down anything steep.”

“That’s why I want it.” Kaisa watched a thread of mist drift past her boots, moving downstream. “He’s been out two nights. He’s thirsty and his knee hurts. Going up hurts more than going down, and he can hear water. I’d go down.”

There was a pause while Naomi thought about it. She always did think about it, which was why Kaisa liked working for her.

“Creek’s yours. Check in every thirty.”

“K9 One, copy.”

She knelt. Tansy was five years old, yellow, mostly Lab and partly something leggier, and she was vibrating so hard that the bell on her collar gave a small steady ring. Kaisa unclipped the lead.

“You know what we’re doing,” she said. “Go find.”

The dog went up the creek bank like something poured uphill.

Kaisa followed at a walk. There was no point in hurrying. Yesterday she and Tansy had worked the berry patches on the ridge for nine hours and found a great deal of old scent going in circles, which was exactly how a berry picker walked. He kept his head down and went from bush to bush, and after two hours he had no idea where his truck was. Late in the afternoon a ground team had found his bucket sitting on a stump, half full.

The other searchers had taken the bucket as good news. He had been here, so he must be close.

Kaisa had looked at it for a long time. A man who loved huckleberries enough to pick them in the middle of September did not put down half a bucket and forget it. He had put it down because it had become heavy, and because berries had stopped mattering. He had already been in trouble when he set it on that stump, and a man in trouble did not stay on a dry ridge. He went downhill to water.

So this morning she had started at the bottom. At this hour every cold breath of air on the mountain was draining down the creek toward the lake, and anything lying in that drainage would be carried straight down to a dog’s nose. In an hour the sun would hit the slope, the air would turn around and start to rise, and the creek would tell them nothing.

Her own nose, in this shape, was only a little better than the next person’s. It gave her wet cedar, cold stone, and the sweet rot of leaves in the pools. In daylight, with forty volunteers and a sheriff’s deputy in the woods, the dog’s nose was the one that counted. Kaisa’s job was to put that nose in the right air.

She climbed. The creek bed was a staircase of mossy rock and blown-down trees, and she read it as she went, the way her father had taught her to read a shoreline. One stretch was too steep for a bad knee. Beside the next an elk trail ran along the bank, and a tired man would take the easy thing in front of him. Farther up, the trail crossed the water on flat stones.

A quarter mile up, on the mud beside those stones, there was one print of a boot heel with water standing in it.

She crouched over it. The edges had gone soft. It was more than a day old and it was pointed downstream.

“There you are,” she said quietly.

Up ahead the bell stopped.

Kaisa stayed where she was and listened. A stopped bell could mean a squirrel, or a drink of water, or a dog standing with her head high, sorting the air. Then the bell came back fast, getting louder, and Tansy burst out of the brush, ran straight at her, and jumped up to punch both front feet into Kaisa’s thigh. It was the signal they had trained a thousand times, and it meant that Tansy had him and wanted her to come.

“Show me.”

Tansy spun and ran, stopped to look back, and ran again. Kaisa went after her through devil’s club and over a log as high as her waist. Sixty yards on, a cedar had gone over years ago and its root wad stood up beside the creek like a wall. In the hollow under it a man in a red flannel shirt was curled on his side with his knees drawn up.

Tansy was already lying down beside him, as she had been taught. Her tail swept the dirt.

Kaisa’s heart was going hard and her hands were steady. She had learned to keep those two things apart.

“Sir? I’m with Search and Rescue. My name’s Kaisa.”

His eyes were open. They found her slowly. His lips were grey and there was dried blood on one cheek where a branch had caught him.

“Is that a dog,” he said, in a voice like paper, “or am I dead?”

“That’s a dog. Her name’s Tansy and she’s very pleased with herself.” Kaisa was already kneeling, already pulling the foil blanket and the spare jacket out of her pack. “Can you tell me what hurts?”

“Ankle. Knee was bad to start with.” He swallowed. “Lost my glasses the first night. I could hear the creek, so I came down to it. Figured a creek has to go to the lake and the lake’s got a road.”

“You figured right. You just ran out of leg.”

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. She got the jacket around his shoulders and the blanket over that. His hands were cold and his fingers still gripped hers when she squeezed them, which was good. He knew his own name and he knew it was September. He had been drinking from the creek. She gave him small sips of warm sweet tea from her thermos and would not let him have the cup.

“My daughter’s going to kill me,” he said.

“She’s been at the trailhead since Tuesday night. I think she’ll hug you first.”

Then she keyed the radio. “Command, K9 One. I have him. He’s alive and talking. Stand by for coordinates.”

For two seconds there was nothing on the channel at all, and then a great many people tried to talk at once, and somewhere behind Naomi’s voice a woman started to cry.

Kaisa read off the numbers. She said he was cold, with an injured ankle, alert, and able to swallow, and that the litter team should come up the creek from the lake road because the ridge route was too steep to carry down. Then she sat on the wet ground beside him with her shoulder against the roots and Tansy across both their feet, and she kept him talking about huckleberry pie until she heard boots.

It was her thirty-eighth find. She did not think about the number until later. What she thought, with a stranger’s cold hand in hers, was what she thought every time. He had wanted to be found, and he had done the sensible thing, and it had brought him to a place where she could reach him.
***
They carried him out at half past ten. By noon the trailhead was a mess of trucks, coffee, and people who had not slept, and the old man’s daughter had hugged Kaisa, hugged the dog, and then hugged Kaisa again with her face wet.

Kaisa stood it as well as she could. She was better with the lost than with the relieved.

She was sitting on her tailgate, picking burrs out of Tansy’s ears, when Naomi Whitcomb walked over with two paper cups. Naomi was forty-four, short and square, with reading glasses pushed up into grey-brown hair and a clipboard she carried the way other people carried a phone. She had coordinated Flathead County’s searches for eleven years.

“Thirty-eight,” Naomi said, and handed her a coffee.

“You counted?”

“I looked it up while they were carrying him down. Sixty-three callouts, thirty-eight finds. Nobody else on my list is close.” She leaned against the grey side of the Tacoma. “I told you the creek was wrong.”

“You told me his knee was bad.”

“Same thing. I was wrong.” She said it without fuss. “Listen. I’ve been saving this until you had a good day, and I don’t think you’re going to have a better one. The commissioners funded the position.”

Kaisa pulled a burr loose and flicked it into the gravel. “What position?”

“Don’t play dumb, you’re no good at it. K9 coordinator. Full time, county employee. You’d certify the teams, run the training calendar, and decide which dog goes where on a search so I don’t have to guess. Sixty-eight thousand a year and health insurance.”

It was a good deal more than a contract tracker made, even in a busy year. Kaisa looked at her coffee.

“There’s a desk in it,” she said.

“There’s a desk in it,” Naomi agreed. “There’s also a budget. You could finally make my handlers start at the bottom of a drainage at seven in the morning, and they’d have to listen to you, because it would be your name on their certificates.”

That part pulled at her, and Naomi knew it. Kaisa liked teaching. She liked the moment when a handler stopped watching the dog’s tail and started watching the wind. Twice this summer she had run a weekend class in a hay field for six volunteers and had gone home happier than any paycheck had ever made her.

“You’d still go out,” Naomi said. “I’m not stupid enough to bench you.”

“When do you need to know?”

“The board meets the first week of November. I want a name in front of them, and I want it to be yours. Tell me by Monday the second.” She pushed off the truck. “That’s six and a half weeks. Even you can make up your mind in six and a half weeks.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I know you will. You’ll think about it right up to the Sunday night.” Naomi rubbed Tansy’s head and walked back toward the command trailer. Over her shoulder she said, “It would mean staying put, Kaisa. That’s allowed, you know.”

Kaisa sat on the tailgate a while longer. To the east, far off and blue, the Swan Range stood up against the sky. She looked at it for a moment, as she always did, and then she looked away.
***
She lived over a garage on the east side of Whitefish, in two rooms with a wood stove and a view of somebody else’s horses. By seven that evening she had showered, fed the dog, and eaten a fried egg sandwich standing at the counter. Her braid was wet down her back. Tansy lay flat in front of the stove as if she had been dropped there.

The phone buzzed on the counter. The area code was 218.

Kaisa knew that number the way she knew the smell of the lake. It was northern Minnesota. Her father had it, and he had never once called.

She let it ring three times before she answered. “Rautio.”

“So you sound like him now.” The voice was old and dry and very clear. “This is Hilja Maki.”

Kaisa put her free hand flat on the counter.

Hilja Maki had been on the Vaara Lake council since before Kaisa was born. She was a tiny woman with a white braid who had taught half the pack to read and had once pulled a fishhook out of Kaisa’s thumb without looking up from her conversation. She had also sat on the council bench seven years ago and watched everything that happened.

“How did you get this number?”

“I walked to the south end and asked your father. He gave it to me through the screen door and then he shut the other door.” Hilja did not sound offended. “He is well, since you’ll want to know and won’t ask. He is thin.”

“He’s always thin.”

“He is thinner.”

Kaisa said nothing. Out the window one of the horses lifted its head.

“I will not waste your evening,” Hilja said. “We have two children gone. Pia Hautala, Elsa’s girl. She is twelve. She was not in her bed on the morning of the sixth, so she went in the night of the fifth. And Oskar Niskanen, who is thirteen, went this Tuesday. The fifteenth.”

Pia Hautala had been five years old when Kaisa left, a round-faced kid who followed the big girls down to the dock and cried when she was sent home. Oskar had been a loud little boy with a loud grandfather.

“Twelve days,” Kaisa said. “Pia’s been out twelve days.”

“Yes.”

“And nobody called me until the second one went.”

“No.” There was a short silence. “There are people here who did not want you called at all. I am telling you so that you hear it from me.”

Kaisa’s eyes went to the notepad by the phone. She found she had already pulled it toward her and written the two names and the two dates.

“What did the trails do?”

“Our best noses took each of them from the house to the lake. Both trails end at water. After that there is nothing, on any shore we have walked.”

“Different places?”

“Different places. I won’t say more on a telephone.”

That was pack habit, and Kaisa felt it settle on her like an old coat she had not known she still owned. Some things could not be said into a wire that humans owned.

“Has anyone gone to the sheriff?”

“You know why we have not.”

She did know. Nobody could send deputies and a helicopter after children who might be on four legs.

“You need someone who can read a far shore,” Kaisa said.

“We have not had one for seven years.”

“You had one. You took his paddle.”

She had not planned to say it, and it came out harder than her voice usually went. On the hearth Tansy lifted her head.

Hilja let it stand. When she spoke again she was no softer, but she was slower. “I did not vote for that, girl. It was not put to a vote. I can’t mend it on the telephone tonight, and I’m not calling to ask you to forget it. I’m calling because the council sat last night and voted four to one to hire you. We don’t ask you to come home. We want to hire you, as we would hire any tracker from outside, for money.”

“Who was the one?”

“You will meet him soon enough.”

“And the alpha?”

She kept her voice level when she said it. She was proud of that.

“He knows,” Hilja said. “He will not stand in your way.”

Seven years ago next month, the alpha’s son had stood up at the Hunter’s Moon gathering with the whole pack watching, and Kaisa had stood across the fire from him in her mother’s blue dress with her heart in her hands. He had looked at her and then at the ground. He had said, “I do not choose her.”

She had been gone by sunrise. She had not been back for her mother’s grave or for Christmas, and she had stayed away when the one letter came, in her father’s square handwriting, to say that Tauno Korpela was dead and his son was alpha now.

She had built a life here on purpose. There was a dog and a truck and a county that wanted her, and since noon today there was a desk with her name on it if she liked.

And twelve hundred miles east there was a twelve-year-old girl who had been outdoors for twelve nights.

“I have terms,” she said.

“I expected them.”

“Six hundred dollars a day, starting the day I arrive. That’s my rate. I don’t have a friends’ rate and I wouldn’t use it if I did.”

“Go on.”

“A written contract. I’ll bring it. The head of the council signs it before I put my dog on the ground. If the pack sends me away in the middle of it, I’m paid for every day I worked.”

“Yes.”

“And I take orders from nobody. That means the council and the second and the alpha. I’m not sworn to Vaara Lake and I’m not going to be. I run the search, I say where the searchers go, and if somebody doesn’t like how I work, they can take it up with you and you can take it up with me.”

She waited for the bargaining to start. She was ready to come down to five hundred, and she had no intention of giving up the rest.

“Done,” Hilja said.

“You don’t have to take it back to the others?”

“I am seventy-four years old and I have two children missing. It is done. When?”

Kaisa looked at the clock on the stove. She did the sum that she had not let herself do in seven years, and she found she still knew it exactly. It was eleven hundred and fifty miles and two days of driving.

“I’ll leave at first light tomorrow. I’ll be there Saturday afternoon.”

“The council will sit at dusk on Saturday. Come to the council lodge.” Hilja paused. “You’ll have a dog with you, your father says.”

“I work with a dog.”

“That will be something to see,” said Hilja Maki, and hung up.

Kaisa put the phone down. Her hand was not quite steady now. She let it shake, because nobody was there to see it.

Then she did the next things in order, as she did on a search. She texted Naomi: Family emergency in Minnesota. Take me off the callout list, a month at least. I haven’t forgotten Nov 2. She printed two copies of her standard contract and wrote the rate in by hand. She packed the tracking harness and the long line, the bells, the scent bags, the GPS, the map tubes, and the forty-pound bag of dog food. She packed wool, because it would be colder there than here. In the back of the closet she found the canoe pack she had carried out of Minnesota and never once used in Montana, and she stood looking at it for a full minute before she put it by the door.

Naomi’s answer came while she was filling water jugs. Go. Is it bad?

Two kids, Kaisa typed.

Then go find them. Desk will keep.

It was full dark when she finished. She sat down on the floor by the stove, and Tansy crawled into her lap as if she were still a puppy and sighed.

“You’re going to hate the drive,” Kaisa told her. “You’re going to love the lake.”

She had made up her mind to be calm about it. It was a job, with a client and a contract and a search area. She had worked for people she liked less.

Then, sitting on her own floor with her own dog, she felt it.

It was low in her chest, under the breastbone, in the place that had been quiet for so long that she had stopped checking it. She felt a slow, heavy movement there, like a big fish rolling over once in deep water. There was no hurt in it. It simply faced her east.

She had told herself for years that the bond was dead. A thing that had been refused out loud before a hundred and sixty people had no business being alive.

Kaisa pressed the heel of her hand against the spot and held it there. Under her palm it turned over again.
***