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when this raid is over.”
    Burwell raised his hand.
    “Yes.” Smokey smiled. Burwell was young and energetic, had seen more violent activity in his first year on the re servation than most cops do in ten years, regardless of their department. He was cocky, and was getting the hang of it. He and Kincaid, the Blues Brothers.
    “Sir, we heard the missing lady was camping on the rez, looking for Bigfoot.”
    “That’s what we know so far.”
    “So Bigfoot exists on the rez then, far as you know?”
    Smokey laughed. Time to stop this and get to work. “Only in your dreams, Officer Burwell.”  He looked at Detective Williams and motioned for him to continue.
    Sarah held her thumb and forefinger up in front of Burwell, holding them about an inch apart.
    “You heard the Lieutenant, Burwell, in your dreams.”
    It’s gonna be a long afternoon, Smokey thought.
    It’s gonna be a long afternoon.
    And then he had another thought. When he was a kid, camping up in the Mt. Jefferson wilderness with his uncle, he had heard things, seen things that he didn’t talk about with anyone. Certainly not when he was in the white man’s school up there in Madras.
    I hope this woman, whoever she is, doesn’t hear and see any of the same things I saw. I had my uncle with me, and he told me to ignore them, but my uncle was scared then, and he wouldn’t let me talk about it. Not then, not ever. If she sees things and comes out of the mountains alive, she will not be the same.
    I wasn’t. I should talk to her. If she comes out.
    Smokey heard the detectives call the officers to their cars. He heard the voices far away, as if he were in another land.
    If she’s still alive, this Jennifer Kruger, she certainly is in another land. A land closed for almost two hundred years, back in a time before computers, cars, airplanes, penicillin, a time of magic and superstition. A land closed before the conquest by the European invaders.
    A time when beasts now forgotten roamed at will.
    But we don’t talk about them.

C hapter 6
     
    Aboard 939 th Air Rescue Squadron Blackhawk
    Near Mt. Jefferson
     
    While Smokey prepared the search warrant team, Sergeant Nathan Green was straining to see the countryside out of the side door of the Blackhawk. The nose of the helicopter tilted and they hovered a thousand feet above Jefferson Creek. Across the creek, off the reservation, the creek was the jumping -off spot for the Bigfoot Expedition members. Nathan leaned forward toward the pilot and observer. He pulled his microphone closer. “There, at nine o’clock, Hole-in the-Wall Park.” He pointed.
    “They would have crossed the creek there, and then on the trail to the northeast, under Waldo Glacier, to somewhere in the area of Parker Creek.”
    “Rugged country,” the pilot said.
    “It gets worse if she gets into the Whitewater Glacier drainage. Steep canyons, rock slides, dead trees crisscrossing every animal trail.”
    “Any trails at all in there?” the observer asked.
    “Except for the Parker Creek Trail, the one that starts at the Hole-in-the-Wall Park, none.”
    “I have someone on the trail, looks like four people,” the observer said. He pointed to the north.
    “That’s our group, tribal police officers, with the boyfriend. He supposedly is going to show us where their camp was.”
    “Why all the police?”
    Nathan looked down at the hikers. “This boyfriend, Carl, he just might be lying. Their camping area, if there is one, may be a crime scene. We’ll just have to see.  Should know in a couple of hours.”
    They turned back toward the north, rising with the terrain to stay a thousand feet above ground level.
    Rugged. It didn’t get much worse than this, unless they continued on past Parker Creek.
    “Search area?” the pilot asked, looking at a map on his knee.
    “Let’s stay within ten miles of where their camp should have been, at the head of Parker Creek. Even though she could be fifteen miles away now, hundreds of square