Chapter 68

Cst. Keith and Rawle started jogging in the direction of Team Two, smashing through dense stitching of close-together pine trees and piles of interlocking deadfall.
Cold tree branches above their heads were creaking loudly in the wind, making horrible dry sounds, like breaking pottery.
Scrapers and thorns dragged across Rawle’s face and hands, as he ran.
Abandoning the Team was a no-no in Search and Rescue, but Rawle didn’t care. His vague nervous feeling about Jack and Tee had turned to terror.
The dog was dead. What does it mean?
After a several minutes of flat-out running, Rawle began to see the tangy orange colour of Search and Rescue coveralls.
It was hard to miss Team Two. They were dressed head-to-toe in fluorescent clothing, standing in a line through the forest like a long line of orange pylons.
Awaiting orders.
At the far end of the line, team captain Dave LeBlanc stood in a small cluster of men and women, including GPS navigator Bob Harvey and medical first-responder Susanne Belliveau.
Rawle ran straight up to the group of team leaders.
The frozen body of Jack’s longtime hound dog, Isha, was lying at their feet.
Rawle knew the dog by sight, but she was also identified by her dogbone-shaped metal dog tag hanging from a bright red collar.
He kneeled beside her. Her fur was dull and bristly. Her body looked deflated.
Rawle’s attention immediately went to the dog’s narrow skull. It was deformed and had clearly been smashed in by a blunt object. There was a large ripple in the centre of the skull, where the porridge of her brains had been smushed and then froze overnight into a rounded crest.
This dog did not freeze to death, she did not get attacked by a wild animal. Somebody, some human, clubbed her skull with a baseball bat.
“Christ!” Rawle gasped, aloud.
He fell back on his rear-end. A panic attack was rising quickly in his chest, strangling him, as if all the oxygen in the air had suddenly stopped absorbing properly into his lungs, causing him to suffocate in the cold, fresh air of South Mountain.
“Somebody give the man a cigarette!” Cst. Keith ordered, clasping his hands on Rawle’s shoulders, hard. “He’s having a freak attack!”
A bunch of guys stumbled forward with their cigarettes and purple Colt packs out.
Rawle reached for one, but pulled his hand back immediately, mumbling his homemade quitter’s mantra: “I don’t smoke. I never smoked. There’s no such thing as smoking.”