Chapter 66

On searches, Cst. Keith was the man in charge. He had the gun, while the rest of the squad was mere civilians.
His title was IC, Incident Commander.
Usually, that entitled him to kick back in Big Orange, drinking Timmy’s coffee all day as the search leaders drafted their routes on large paper topographic maps from the Department of Natural Resources, and listening to the action as it progressed squawk by squawk over the UHF/VHF radios and satellite phones.
But today, he was ‘boots on the ground,’ walking beside Rawle in a line of 20 men and woman.
When the search leaders plotted Jack and Tee’s doughnut zone, on the map, it was full of countless places where a person could conceivably die: Dense forest, rocky hillside, ice-covered Sunken Lake, streams, cottages, Lumsdens power dam, power lines.
The lake and the dam were being searched by a military diving crew from CFB Gagetown and firefighters, dressed in red Mustang cold-water immersion suits.
There were a few holes in the ice on Sunken Lake that had to be checked, and the pool at the bottom of the power dam.
As reluctant as he was to accept what was happening, Rawle had to admit his friends would not likely miss a hospital visit to Tamara’s little sister.
Something was definitely wrong.
The more he thought about the situation, the more scared he got.
As a ground search volunteer, Rawle knew better than most how easy it was for intelligent people to die in the woods, especially in the middle of winter. Just like that.
Rawle had personally seen half a dozen dead bodies, three or four per year since he started with Valley Search and Rescue: Old people with Alzheimer’s, suicidal people, little kids separated from the Scout pack, hunters, fishers, Geo-cachers, hikers young and old, swimmers, lovers, cigarette smokers, and just about everything else under God.
Dead hunters without even a compass or the rudimentary tools to build fire, propped in a snow bank, frozen stiff. Most often drunk, but sometimes not.
The simple fact of the forest was, people got lost in it. They marched through the bush, hour after hour, refusing to stop and build a shelter. They tripped from exhaustion and cracked their skulls, or impaled themselves on a tree branch, or broke their ankles and froze to death, or slowly got scavenged by hungry coyotes, crows, dogs and the odd Eastern Cougar.
Last winter around this time, a deer-hunter went missing in Annapolis County.
All the search crew found, a week later, was the man’s foot and ankle stuck in a snow bank.
Like some kind of Hitchcock movie.
The animals’ revenge.