* * *
Getting Storm is a good idea—she’s a tracking dog. However, she’s still in training, and so far we’ve always given her an article of clothing to sniff. We don’t have that for our mystery man.
We take her to the spot where we saw him, and I have her sniff the ground, but I can tell she’s confused. I know the direction he went, so I head that way as she sniffs. Dalton has grabbed treats, which helps her think this is a new phase of training.
Storm seems to understand what we want, but after about a hundred feet, she loses the trail as it crosses a path. There are other scents there, familiar ones, and she keeps trailing those and then stopping, as if realizing that’s not correct. She backtracks, as she’s been taught, and tries again.
After a few rounds, she gets bored and requests her treats in that halfhearted way that says she knows she doesn’t deserve them. At some point the work outweighs the reward, particularly for a well-fed and well-loved dog. She tracks for the fun of it, and when that wears off, so does her interest.
She can’t pick up the man’s trail on the other side of the path, which may mean he followed the path itself. So we walk her along that. It’s a major trail, though, and well traveled, and I’m not sure she’d be able to find his scent on it. Someday, yes, but at eight months, she’s a little young for tracking at all.
We stop and peer into the darkness. Storm nudges my hand. She knows she’s failed, and while she may not care about the treats, she hates to disappoint us. I pat her as Dalton motions that we’ll return to where we last detected our intruder, and he’ll use his tracking skills from there.
We’ve walked about ten paces when Storm lets out a happy yip and lunges into the undergrowth. Her nose is up, not sniffing the ground, which means she’s catching a scent in the wind.
“Could be him,” Dalton says.
“Or could be a bunny rabbit.”
He shrugs. “Let her have her fun.”
Even if this scent is our mystery man, we won’t catch him. We have an eighty-pound puppy hot on a trail through dense forest. A charging bull moose would be quieter.
I motion that Dalton could give me the dog and circle around, in hopes of seeing our target, but he shakes his head. He won’t leave me. A stranger in the forest is always trouble.
We keep going, Storm straining at the lead, snuffling and slobbering. Finally, she gives a giant-puppy pounce and lands in the middle of a clearing. Then she looks up at me, her dark eyes glittering.
“Uh, great,” I say. “You’ve found…” I look around. Then I grin, lower myself, and hug her. “Good girl. Very good girl.”
“Shit, yeah,” Dalton says.
Storm hasn’t found her target, but she’s discovered something that could prove equally valuable: his camp. It’s only a couple of hundred feet from Rockton, and it doesn’t look as if he’s actually slept there. He’s just left his pack. Abandoned it in the middle of the clearing, like he’s on a beach, dropping his stuff to go exploring. Not a guy accustomed to the forest. Otherwise he’d know that, presuming there’s food in that pack, it won’t last long.
Dalton reaches to open the backpack.
“Whoa, hold on,” I say, grabbing him back. “It could be a trap.”
He frowns. “In the bag?”
To Dalton, a trap is a literal one, like a bear trap.
“An IED,” I say.
When his frown deepens, I start to say, “A bomb,” but he nods and says, “Improvised explosive device.” While he might never have encountered such a thing, he’s read more than anyone I know.
“It’s unlikely,” I say. “But I want to be sure. This screams setup. Can you hold Storm back, please?”
He hesitates.
“I’m not going to attempt to disarm a bomb,” I say. “I’m just looking, and I don’t want to have to worry about either of you.”
He backs off with Storm. I examine the ground for signs of a trigger. Out here, it’d need to be a literal trigger—trip wire or such. I get close to the bag and crouch. It’s an oversize backpack, the sort campers use. This one is so new that it smells of polyurethane. I can even see a plastic fastener around the handle, where he’s ripped off the tags. That sets my alarms flashing—he could have bought this to house an IED. Then I notice open pockets, and when I aim my flashlight beam inside, I see energy bars and a bottle of water.
I examine the main zipper. It isn’t quite closed, and I poke at the hole with a twig and shine my light through on rolled-up clothing.
Next I pick up a tree, which sounds more impressive than saying I haul over a downed sapling. I use it to prod the backpack. Nothing happens.
None of this proves the pack isn’t rigged to explode, but without any way to test it, at some point I need to make a judgment call. My call is that it’s exactly what it looks like. The guy doesn’t know his way around the Yukon forest, and he’s bought a bag, stuffed it with supplies, and dumped it to go check out the town unencumbered.