Page 2 of Echoes of Twilight (Dawn of Alaska #4)

2

Five Days Later

N o rabbit. Bryony stared at the noose she’d made with rope she twined together from cedar bark.

When she first decided to try snaring a rabbit, she realized she’d need to peel the bark off a cedar tree and soak it for a couple of days until it became pliable enough to be stripped into pieces and braided.

But even after she’d made her own rope, she still hadn’t been able to catch an animal. Not today. Not yesterday. Not any day since she first got the idea weeks ago.

She’d moved the snare to several different places in the valley, but no matter what she did or how many times she tried, she couldn’t catch a rabbit.

The snares that their guide, Jack Ledman, set all summer had brought in a constant stream of food. It had seemed like a simple thing to recreate to ensure they didn’t run out of food. Sometimes Mr. Ledman had set four or five snares a night, and they would all have rabbits come morning.

But she couldn’t catch a single one.

Oh, what she’d give to go back in time to the day before Mr. Ledman died and ask him how to snare a rabbit. Neither Heath nor Richard had known. She’d asked them both before they left camp to get help, and they’d looked at her as though she was daft.

They didn’t know how to catch fish either, at least not without a proper fishing pole and bait, and they’d had neither of those things.

This morning the snare had been set off, which made the lack of rabbit almost worse. For the first time in a week, they’d been close to having meat. So very, very close.

She tried to ignore the heat pricking the backs of her eyes and the lump in her throat. Tried to ignore the shiver that might be due to the damp, bitter cold, or the fact that she was so hungry, it felt as if her stomach was trying to eat itself.

She didn’t know and didn’t want to think about it. Just like she didn’t want to think about the fact that Heath and Richard had yet to return with help. Or that she’d woken this morning to a light dusting of snow on her bedroll.

Instead, she pushed herself off the ground and forced herself deeper into the woods where she could dig up more roots.

Hopefully the meager stew would tide them over for another day.

And hopefully God would answer her prayers about her brother and Richard returning with help before nightfall.

* * *

He was following the wrong tracks.

Mikhail Amos hunkered into his seal hide parka as he strode up the mountain, stepping around fallen logs and boulders, trying to follow the tracks in the soft brown earth that were growing fainter and fainter in the drizzling rain. A gust of wind swept down the mountain, and he pressed his lips together. The wind was cold enough to bring snow, and all he could do was pray that somehow, by some miracle, the snow would hold off for a day or two, until he found the party of lost botanists he was searching for.

After over a month of heading up the Stikine River, following the river across the border with Canada and exploring the mountains north and west of the river, he’d moved his search south, to the Iskut River that joined with the Stikine before flowing to the ocean.

He wished he could say that searching a new location had led him to the scientists, but he was still at as much of a loss as to where they might be as he’d been when he left Petersburg in early October.

This wasn’t his first expedition into the uncharted Coast Mountains that ran from Seattle all the way up into the mainland of Alaska, nor was it his second or third. He’d been a guide for official government expeditions for the past ten years, leaving every April or May and returning to Sitka every September.

He’d even accompanied teams of men on rescue expeditions two times before. But this was the first time he’d been charged with a solo rescue mission on the cusp of winter.

It was also the first time he’d gotten nowhere after over a month of searching. It was almost as though the team of botanists had disappeared from the earth.

When he finally found a beached canoe and tracks on the sand, he’d been hopeful that following the tracks would lead to something helpful. The tracks were from a party of two, not six. But if the men were prospectors—most men roaming the wilds of Alaska were—and if they’d been searching the Iskut River valley for gold the past month or two, they might have run into the botany expedition or at least come across some other tracks.

Following the men at least presented a chance for him to get helpful information about the lost botanists.

But he was starting to think these tracks belonged to the worst prospectors in all of history.

Any prospector who knew what he was doing would have gotten out of the mountains yesterday when the weather started to turn, realizing that snow was sure to follow.

But these men were moving deeper and deeper into the mountains. It was almost enough to make him turn around, but the tracks looked to be only a half day old at this point, meaning he’d likely overtake the men by nightfall.

Hopefully they’d seen the party of botanists, because if they hadn’t...

Mikhail shook his head, not wanting to think about it. The men in the botany expedition were fathers and sons and brothers. If they didn’t come home, someone would miss them. And seeing how he’d spent the past eleven years of his life missing his own father, he couldn’t turn his back on the botanists without knowing he’d done every last thing in his power to save them.

He paused for a moment beside a creek, noticing how the boot prints on the sandy bank and mossy earth sank deeper into the ground, indicating the men had stopped. There were even two indents where packs had been set in the sand for a bit. The men he was following were definitely prospectors. They’d left similar tracks indicating they’d stopped and searched for gold at the other creek he’d crossed yesterday.

He squatted next to a patch of flattened moss, rubbing it between his fingers, then scanned the dense trees surrounding him. Rain drizzled through the canopy, wetting his face and dripping off the brim of his hat, the persistent patter of water mingling with the rustle of wind through the trees.

The prospectors’ tracks led him higher up the mountain toward where the falling rain would surely turn to snow, at which point he just might lose the fading tracks.

Perhaps he was on a fool’s errand, because even if the prospectors had crossed paths with the botanists, what were the chances there would be anything left of the botanists’ tracks?

He clenched his jaw. It didn’t matter. He knew his way through the mountains in snow, and he’d been sent on a mission to find the botanists and return them safely to Sitka.

He wasn’t ready to give up just yet.