1. First Light

I set off when no one would see me scramble up that pine needle-strewn path into the forest. So cushiony it was a challenge to get a grip with each step forward. I felt sick trying to imagine how Pedee could stay safe out here. How long could she survive? Search and Rescue had been at it for two days with Boy Scouts, a Sheriff, and church volunteers who set up a Command Center.

They told me to stay put, let the experienced searchers handle it. I didn't want to add to the search if I got lost, too. I stayed and made them coffee. But now I questioned whether they were ever going to find her.

“Doro, how could you lose her?” Pedee’s mother Maribel was frantic. I felt it was my fault even though so many others had been watching. The field that had become a film site stretched along the edge of the forest with Do Not Enter signs posted at the start of two trails where bears had been sighted.

Two days before, at 6PM, Pedee was being filmed as the 10-year-old prodigy elk whisperer who would later be found by her birth mother, played by Maribel. Everyone loves it when earth-shattering losses resolve so easily. In this version, the young daughter already knows how to talk to an elk. So unlikely, but Pedee had that wild, unruly Beasts of the Southern Wild look that would make people believe she’d be capable of such a feat.

My job was to cheer Pedee on. Her mother had just headed into the farmhouse for a meeting. The crew sat me in a director’s chair off to the side. Yes, I’d been sipping wine from my travel mug, watching the clouds resemble breaching whales. I admit my attention might have slipped away. Now I resolved to stay sober until Pedee was found.

When we arrived in Jackson Hole, Pedee wore the wolf tail she’d made from a mix of found fibers. It might have been inspired by her late-night Anime film watching. It was her idea to wear this clamshell grey and brown whooshy thing to mark her time in the West. As she described it, “Doro, I'm weird!” Now that she’d disappeared, I’d given the tail to the canine unit handlers for the dogs to sniff before they sent them out to find her.

Oh God, how could this be happening? At the end of Day Two, my bar mate Raven arrived out of the blue and said, “Doro. Don’t sit here when you can help.” His son had died after being struck by lightning out here. Now he sent young people off on vision quests, so he began logically enough, “You know Pedee better than they do. If you don’t try to find her, you will never forgive yourself.”

He startled me when he said, “You have to do all you can so whatever happens, you’ll be able to accept the outcome.” He had never told me how he felt about what he did or didn’t do to save his son.

I tried to sleep, not knowing what I'd do, then sat up thinking “Go.” I hustled across the field before anyone got up. Why did she disappear? Was it that Fitz, the director, made her take off her wolf tail, and wouldn’t let her perform Elk Talk by singing? He wanted her to do it the way white men do. Was it the wolf tail that made me tear up now?

Yesterday one woman in the visiting prayer circle asked “What's Pedee like?

“She’s fiery,” I said. “She can be strident, too. Usually when she’s mad at white people.” Now I felt short of breath. High altitude I could work with, but my fear of getting lost, let alone meeting a bear might make me turn back.

Raven gave me silver trail markers to tie on each branch when I turned off the trail. Something to convince me I knew what I was doing reminded me of reporting in my tenth-grade science project notebooks. I forgot to ask Raven, “Are bears early risers in the Tetons?”

The searchers said “Bring the spray and you won’t see a bear. Don’t bring it, and you will.” They added, “make noise, show the bear you’re human.” But how? If I see a bear, I’ll spray her if she charges me. But how long should I wait to spray? After listening to the searcher’s story about the man who got mauled by a grizzly, I kept batting away thoughts about how I’d use the spray.

Stop thinking about that. I dredged up another picture, flying over snow-capped peaks through wispy clouds, dropping through a thick cloud bank to the ground. Maybe because I felt off-kilter, I remembered Pedee’s pet fly in our Lander Airbnb. I caught the fly in a paper cup and threw it out the front door. “How could you?” she asked, then started in on the barbed wire decoration on the coffee mugs and how racist that is. Another set of thoughts I had to stop thinking about.

I switched to remembering the woodworker’s wife I met on our first trip here, walking down Main Street. She told me her family drove 6000 miles and prayed “Don’t give us any peace until we find the place where He wants us to live. That place was Lander, Wyoming.” She added, “He asks that you and your little friend find a way to be of use.” Well, I was doing my part on this trek. Who knows what made Pedee bolt when she did. I’d heard the story about two grizzlies, a mother and cub, eating an elk calf on one ridge while the elk calf’s mother watched from another ridge. So heartbreaking, this place.

Were those branches breaking ahead? Is that an elk past those willows, slashing saplings with his antlers? What if he charges me? Should I use bear spray on him? Or turn and run? Turns out if he was an elk, he had left when I got there. The thought of meeting any living thing made me stop, rip off the blue work shirt I threw on as an extra layer. I tied it around my forehead like Lawrence of Arabia. To shield me from the sun? No, to feel less like me.

Almost tripping over a mossy tree root, I begged for energy now. I swatted a branch that scratched my forearm. Blood ran down my arm. Who cares? Keep going, I told myself tromping up the path remembering the saleswoman who sold me my shoes. Glad I didn’t opt for the sandals. These steel shank soles would help me keep my balance on dirt, pebbles, bare rock.

Twigs broke or I might have missed the deer so close I saw her ears wiggle before she leapt into the woods. Not many songbirds were singing. They say 24 hours is pushing it and we were about to begin Day Three. Coming around a bend, I caught sight of the Teton they call the Grand. I felt like a stranger arriving at nature’s courthouse to defend myself in front of a jury of jagged peaks.