Page 14 of Midnight Hunter
“I’m going to poke around a bit. Why don’t you take a seat for a minute?”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. “Sounds good.” Taking a few steps to the side, I unlatched the waist strap on my bag and let the pack slip off my shoulders to fall to the ground. I sank onto a flat rock with a sigh of relief.
“I’ll be right back. Stay here.”
Nodding, I watched him walk away.
Head down, he picked his way over the ground as he moved toward the riverbank. Several times, I saw him squat, poke at the ground, then rise and continue down the shoreline.
After ten minutes, he turned around and came back, taking a slightly different route.
“See anything interesting?” I hopped off my rock, my legs feeling much better now that they’d had a rest, and slid my pack over my shoulders.
“Maybe.”
My fingers froze on the buckles as I reattached the waist strap. “Maybe? What does that mean? Did you find signs Dustin’s been here?” That would be great. Amazing, actually. We could just follow his tracks, which would, hopefully, lead us right to him.
“There are some tracks down there, yes.”
“That’s great.” Any vestiges of pain remaining in my legs and feet vanished. “Let’s go. It would be awesome if we could get back to the plane before the weather hits.”
Toren’s hand on my arm as I moved around him stopped me.
I glanced up with a frown. “What?”
“There’s more than one set.”
My frown deepened. “More than one set of prints?”
“Yeah. The ones look similar to the ones at Dustin’s campsite, but the others are definitely different. There are at least three distinct patterns, including his.”
“So, maybe someone else had the same idea to hunt up this way?”
He pursed his lips. “Yeah. Maybe.” His gaze roved over the landscape past my head. “Let’s go. Keep your eyes and ears open, though. I’d say we’re definitely not alone up here. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.”
The frown on my face didn’t dissipate at his words. That was just great. Now I had to worry about possible crazy people in addition to the wildlife.
Huffing out a breath, I got in line behind him, following in his tracks as he picked his way back to the river.
“See these?” He pointed to a line of boot prints. They crisscrossed each other and were clearly different. “These don’t belong to the same boot as the prints at the camp. Those are over there.” He pointed closer to the water.
I studied the ground, taking note of the tread shape and the length of the shoe. A tracker I was not, but I wanted to make sure I could recognize the print if we came across it again elsewhere.
Toren kept walking, leading me closer to the riverbank. There, he pointed out the other set of prints. To me, they didn’t look that much different from the others, but I could see some subtle changes. I was glad to have him along, and that he was better at noticing these sorts of things.
Turning left, we followed the tracks up the river. Several times, they broke, interrupted by the water where it flowed over shallow sandbars and spots of pebbled beach. Each time, though, we found it again on the other side.
But there was still no other sign of Dustin.
“Are we sure we’re following the right footprints? What if that wasn’t Dustin’s camp? What if he’s one of the other sets we left behind?”
“Then we’ll double back and try again. I don’t think I’m wrong, though. Dustin came alone. Those others were laid at the same time, which means they came together.”
Abruptly, he stopped.
I stumbled, having just taken a step over a basketball-size rock when he paused. “Would you stop doing that?”
“Do you smell that?” he said, ignoring my comment.
