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gunshots? No, it couldn’t be—it’s just static.
“Dad!”
    Then the noise cut off and the channel went dead.

FOUR
    I immediately tried every channel on the radio, in case he’d somehow switched. I got nothing. I tried Henrico. Nothing. As a game warden, he often went on weeklong trips to survey the land. Chances were he was out of range.
    I met Sam’s eyes speechlessly, beseeching him to make sense of what we’d heard. He returned my look grimly.
    “What do you think happened?” he asked.
    I didn’t know what to think. I
couldn’t
think. My mind was transfixed, as if the static had invaded my brain and pushed out all other thought.
    It took Sam’s repeated question to pull me out of my stupor.
    “He must have caught up to the poachers,” I said. “Or they caught up to
him.
He said he was trying to lose them. They must have seen him and Theo.” I ran my hand agitatedly over my hair, tangling my fingers in the ends.
“
We need to call someone. The military, the emergency center,
someone
. But the satellite radio is in the Cruiser with Dad. The nearest road is thirty miles away, but since most of the villages around here are abandoned, vehicles are rare as rhinos in these parts. You could stand on that road for days and not see a single one.
Sam
. What if . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut and inhaled sharply. “What if those were gunshots? What if he—What will I do?”
    “Whoa. Don’t jump to the worst conclusions. Not yet.” He was rattled too. I could tell by the way he knit his fingers together, his knuckles white with tension. I gazed at him in a silent plea for answers. “Let’s think this through, okay? What do we
know
?”
    I nodded shakily. My nerves crackled like electric wires, making my entire body buzz with anxiety, and I clung to his question as if it were the only thing keeping me grounded. “He’s fifteen or so miles southwest of here. The poachers know he’s onto them. He’s being chased and . . . and it sounded like he was being shot at.” Those last words stuck in my throat.
Don’t panic
,
I told myself. That was the first rule for dealing with trouble in the wild:
Don’t panic.
I almost laughed aloud. It made as much sense as telling an antelope
don’t run
when faced with a hungry cheetah.
    Sam nodded, encouraging this line of reasoning. “So what are we going to do?”
    I shut my eyes, striking off the first dozen ideas that spasmed through my thoughts, ranging from
Find the bastards and shoot their faces
to
Run screaming into the bush
. “We either stay here and wait,” I said, “or . . .
don’t
.”
    Sam nodded thoughtfully. How
did
he stay so composed? “Can you track him?”
    My heart was beginning to pound at the thought. “Yes. Theo’s been teaching me bushcraft for years.”
    Sam’s green eyes burned into mine. “I trust you, Sarah.”
    Well, that made one of us. I tried not to think about the fact that the Kalahari is larger than the state of Texas, that if I got us lost, we could walk for weeks out here without finding another person. Sure, I knew the
general
direction of civilization, but even our most thorough emergency evacuation plans always included some form of transportation, either by land or air, and I never expected to be out here on my own, with five people depending on me.
    I forced a lid on the hysteria before it could boil over. This wasn’t like me. I was underestimating myself, wasn’t I? I’d spent my entire life in the woods, in the jungle, in the desert. This was my element.
    “I can’t sit here and wait,” I confessed. “I just can’t. He and Theo could be out there injured”—
or worse—“
with no one to help them. It’s too dark to track now, but if I leave first thing in the morning, I could go see what happened and make it back here tomorrow night or the next morning. Would you look after the others while I’m gone?”
    “I’d rather go with you. I’m not the sit-and-wait kind either.”
    “Okay,” I said.