Page 27 of Double Exposure

“Sweet Milk runs another three miles and then there's a waterfall,” I say to her. “He was originally looking for wolves, right?”

She has to straighten up to talk to me. She raises her voice. “Yes. Wolves.” She glances to Ross and Ryan.

I nod. “Wolves are here. They've been reintroduced.”

Ryan, the frustrated biologist, adds, “They've done really well here. Totally reshaped everything from the size of herds and grazing lands to the shape of rivers.”

But she shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s what he was after.”

Ryan lands the answer first. “Bear?”

She nods.

Ryan is going to have a hard time hiding his disgust. Tourists go after bears because they think they’re cute. They feed them and get them used to humans. It’s a bad combination of not respecting nature and wanting to be close to it. Ross shakes his head. But she feels it.

I decide to provide some context. “Her father is Ken Choi.”

“Am I supposed to know who that is?” calls Ross from the front, his head tilted back slightly.

“No. But trust me. He’s a big deal. Outdoorsman.”

Ryan, however, knows exactly who he is. “Your dad is Ken Choi? Ken Choi, that photographer? The guy from National Geographic. All those nature shows?”

She nods and grips the top of his seat, leaning forward again. “He wanted to catch a family waking from torpor.”

Ross leans back again. “Torpor?”

“Hibernation,” explains Ryan. “Did he just wander here thinking he was gong to find some bears?”

“My father never ‘wanders.’ I’m sure this was strategic. I think he thought he’d be up here and back before sunset.”

I stop pressing the binoculars to my face for a moment. “Then he knew exactly where he was going.”

“Yes,” she says. “My dad can be such an asshole.”

This throws me off and I do a double take.

“He is.” She thinks for a moment then softens her comment. “He can be. He was supposed to take me and then he ghosted me that morning with a note saying he ‘didn’t want to wake me,’ and he ‘can’t wait to get into the field’ with me.”

I clear my throat. “And you don’t think he was just looking out for you?”

“Yes! That’s exactly what he was doing. That’s what he does all the time. Look out for me. I hate it.” She crosses her arms over her chest.

“We’re almost to the falls,” says Ryan.

A mile ahead, the edge of the falls glitters pink with the sunrise.

“Two o'clock,” says Ross and starts swinging the chopper around for a closer sweep.

I train my binoculars down. A thin string of smoke floats from the base of a rocky ledge and a thick wedge of pines.

Jade leans over and puts a hand on my thigh so she can see out my side of the window.

I hand off the binoculars. “Here.”

She takes them and quickly presses them to her face. “That’s him. Right? I mean that has to be him?”

Ross saves me from answering—no, there could be a dozen different reasons why that’s not him—but Ross is talking now. “We're going to set down over there, that's less than a quarter of a mile away.”