On Monday, Ray Landis drank a cup of bad coffee with the game warden.
On Wednesday they found the warden's truck at a trailhead. Locked. Keys gone.
By Friday the search was smaller than it had been on Thursday.
Ray is sixty-three, a retired welder, three years a widower. The last week of October in the Pennsylvania big woods is the only stretch of the year that still feels like anything, and he goes up alone, the way he has for forty years.
He is not a detective and never was. He is a man who has read ground since he was eighteen, and the ground is telling him something.
The state police are polite and they are not friendly. Nobody stops him and nobody asks him anything either.
Then a woman walks out of the dark into his firelight on ruined feet, in boots four sizes too big. She gives him a name. She eats his food. She tells him one true thing about her father, and she asks him one careful question about the only thing he is any good at, and he answers her honestly.
In the morning she is gone. Her tracks go the wrong way. They go back up the mountain.
