My alarm went off at four a.m. My goal was to be at base camp at first light. Rusty groaned when the alarm went off.
“It’s okay, go back to sleep,” I told him.
I showered and dressed in my regular tracking clothes: camouflage pants, and an olive drab t-shirt. I debated whether to wear moccasins or hiking boots. The hiking boots won because of the rocky terrain. I put them on grudgingly. I liked to feel the ground beneath my feet.
After my shower Rusty paced the bedroom nervously. He was always a jumble of emotions when I went on a search. I thought it was funny to see my big, tough detective; eyes full of concern, arms reaching out for reassurance. Every time I was out of his sight for more than a day his loneliness and worry grew. It didn’t seem to matter that I was safely hiking the mountains with an EMT, I was armed, and had help at the touch of a button. I think the problem was he trusted me; he trusted me to get into trouble. And he knew his idea of danger was different than mine, so he worried.
Victor picked me up on his way into the mountains. He pulled up about five in a search and rescue car.
“Remember, if I’m not home by Friday afternoon, call the ranch and tell them what’s going on.”
“You’ll be home in time. Take care of my girl out there.”
“I will. I always do.”
Lou Strickland had everything he could come up with that he knew I needed. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to go on. Like usual, Marcel had not brought extra shoes on his camping trip. A small patch of ground had been taped off where Strict had found a few good tracks. Other than that I was pointed in a general direction. No talking to Marcel’s family, no picture, no shoes to gain some knowledge from. Okay, if a few good tracks are what I had to work with, it’s what I would study so I sat by the tracks and sketched them and labeled the tracks with the little bit of information I could squeeze out of them: worn heels, a tread. I measured the stride. It wasn’t much to go by. I felt my enthusiasm slipping a notch and it was already pretty low to begin with.
“Can you give me a starting place?” I asked Strict.
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re not acting like yourself. Normally you’d be a half-mile down the trail by now. You’re dragging. Why are you dragging?”
“Am I? Lou, I’m sorry, nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. A friend of mine died. When I’m through here I’m off to a funeral.”
“Who was it?” Lou asked, concerned.
“To be honest in the twenty-six years I’ve known him I don’t think I’ve ever heard his last name. I always just called him Old Frank. Last time I visited the ranch I found out he was sixty-two when I was born. No wonder I always thought he was old. Lou, he was like a grandfather to me and more. He taught me how to think, how to ride horses, how to get along in the woods, how to shoot, how to get along with my dad. He was my grandpa and mentor and teacher and friend. I don’t think I’d be here right now if it weren’t for him. He had a stroke. And his funeral is Saturday.”
Lou finally gave me the hug he usually greeted me with. I wanted to pull back. I didn’t want sympathy. Maybe I’d been a little standoffish when I’d arrived.
“Why didn’t you tell me when I called?”
“It didn’t matter. I’d still have gone out. Now let me get going. It’ll be better when I get on the trail.”
But it wasn’t. The part of the trail that I could follow with my eyes I tracked easily but my mind was such a jumble that I wasn’t profiling and when I got to tough spots I had to reorganize my thoughts to make room for the puzzle before me. Lou had called Victor aside, I assume to fill him in on what I’d told him.
I stood over a rocky patch of invisible footprints trying in vain to concentrate. What would Old Frank tell me to try? I thought. He’d say, “People take the easy way. They’re lazy bums. So if’n you cain’t see the tracks look for the easy way.” Or he’d say, “Them rocks sure are slanty. If a man had to walk on those rocks he’d have a hard time walkin’ straight.” So I looked at the slanty rocks and pictured a man walking across them and I pictured how he’d have trouble walkin’ straight and where the easy way would lead him to, and sure enough, the tracks were there. When I saw the tracks there on the ground a big lump formed in my throat. I marked the trail and walked away from it. I sat on the ground, backpack and all, and tried to get my emotions under control.
“Cassidy? Are you okay?” Victor asked.
“I’ve got a ghost telling me how to track,” I said, my voice breaking. “Did Strict tell you?”
“Yeah, he told me.”
“My thoughts even sound like him, bad grammar and all. We gotta get going.”
He gave me a hand up and I found the tracks again.
“Would it help to talk about him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can.”
“How long have you known him?”
“He worked for my dad when I was born. So… my whole life. I know him better than my dad.”
“How can that be?”
“You have to know my dad. Rusty wouldn’t be surprised.”
“What’s your earliest memory of him?”
I thought for a minute and smiled, “He used to meet me at the bus stop. I rode a bus to school all my life because we lived so far from town. Old Frank was supposed to meet me at the bus stop and walk me home. This was when I was six. There was a kid at school who had leg braces and one day I was curious what his tracks would look like, so I got off at the same bus stop that he did. I hid in the bushes and then tracked him home. I was standing outside this kid’s house with a whole basket full of new information and no idea how I was going to get home. So I walked back to the bus stop and I started following the road the direction I remembered the bus going to get to my bus stop. I was doing all right, for a little kid. I wasn’t lost. The bus only took five minutes to get from one bus stop to the next so I thought it couldn’t be far. Old Frank pulled up in the old ranch truck and he was hoppin’ mad. ‘Dag nabbit, Trouble!’ he said. ‘What’d you get off early for? You sceared your mom spitless!’ I hadn’t even thought about consequences. I was just curious and when I got curious the question in my mind became top priority. ‘I just wanted to see what a kid’s tracks were like if he wore leg braces. I just followed him home. He didn’t even know I was there,’ I said. ‘An’ how was you goin’ to get home?’ he asked me. ‘I’m walking,’ I told him. ‘An you think walkin’ is goin’ to get you there?’ I told him I thought it would. He told me to get in the truck so I did. Then he says, ‘If a kid can walk three miles an hour how long will it take ‘em to walk nine miles. Nine is three plus three plus three.’ I had to think. ‘So, that means they’d be walking one plus one plus one?’ He helped me see that if I walked home I wouldn’t get there until after dinner time if I could walk three miles an hour. He was that kind of a guy. He didn’t just yell at a kid. Everything was a reason to think. And he was on my side. When he got the lecture over with he asked me, ‘So, what did you learn about tracking a kid in leg braces?’ I told him that the tracks were a lot like a normal person’s but there were brackets where the braces fit with the shoes and maybe the walk was stiffer. He admonished me, saying, ‘you ain’t ever to make fun of a kid in braces, or glasses or in a wheel chair. Not ever. It’s only by luck you ain’t the same way.’ I never had made fun of other kids and he wasn’t scolding me, just passing on a word of advice.”
“You could track people as a kid?”
“Yeah, the ranch hands were the easiest. The whole ranch was dirt and I was Dad’s messenger boy so I was always tracking down the hands.”
“Don’t you mean messenger girl?”
“No, my dad wanted a boy so he raised me as a boy.”
“What did Old Frank think of that?”
“Nothing. I took to it and I thrived on it so he didn’t worry about it. If I’d have been unhappy or rebelled against it he might have stepped in and stood up to my dad. But that wasn’t the case. I thought it was great being raised as a boy. I got to go tracking and hunting and I grew up training horses. It wasn’t odd that I wanted to join the military. In my eyes guys got to do what they wanted and girls had to wear dresses and wash dishes and dust and learn to sew. I thought I had it better than my sister because I got to do whatever I wanted. It just happened that I wanted all the chores a boy would do. I split firewood, fed the horses and brushed them when the hands were through for the day. I mucked out stalls, painted fences and learned how to fix the truck. Of course, the subtleties of tracking didn’t come until much later.”
“How did you learn the subtleties?”
“Years of careful observation and tracking. Every movement people made got catalogued. Every movement they made I imagined a track to match it and it got catalogued in my brain. As a kid it was a crude system. It was more just a matter of satisfying curiosity. As an adult I watch people and I track them even when they don’t leave tracks. Every movement is a potential track and every track has a corresponding movement.”
“The stories that float around the station say you can spot a person who is going to commit a crime before they do it. Is that true?”
“I’ll tell you I have spotted people who I thought were up to no good and I was right. I won’t say I can do it all the time and I won’t guarantee I am right all the time.”
“How do you do that?”
I stopped to figure out the tracks. Victor was used to frequent pauses in my story telling. He waited patiently while I studied the ground. As long as Victor kept me talking I seemed to do better. I could track with one part of my brain and talk with another part so the part that was sad got shoved aside. The track turned and then turned again. Marcel was wondering if he was sure he knew where he was. This was one of many thinking stops he had made. I found the direction he headed and started walking again.
“You can understand that every movement leaves a corresponding track, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Would you accept that every intention has a corresponding movement?”
“Every intention? No.”
“What about frequently? Do intentions frequently have a corresponding movement?”
“I don’t know, I never thought about it.”
“Okay, well, say you are walking down the mall and the guy in front of you glances at every bag and purse he comes near? What would you think?”
“I doubt I’d notice what people are looking at. But if I did happen to notice that, then I might be suspicious.”
“Most people don’t notice. But I do. Since I watch movements I notice things like that. Did you know that even something like a guy watching for a purse to snatch leaves evidence of it in his tracks? Even eye movements if you follow the movement down to the feet, might be reflected in the tracks if one were skilled enough to see it.”
“Are you?”
“No, not even close. But I have seen eye movements reflected in the movement of a person’s feet because I am watching for it.”
“Cassidy, did anyone ever tell you you’re weird?”
“Yeah, I tell myself that all the time. But most people think I’m a nice type of weird. I don’t tell people that I think like that. Most people don’t know I watch every move they make. In academy we watched surveillance tapes of robberies. I could spot the robber way before anybody else in class. Their intentions were exhibited through their actions. Robbers would check their weapons and the class didn’t notice. They would fiddle with their keys and shift back and forth nervously, watch video cameras and take stock of their getaway while standing in line and yet nobody seemed to notice they were fixing to rob the place. I didn’t understand how they could not know. In class we watched the tapes so we could see the process, what we might be walking into if we were called into a situation like that. But I saw all the things that led up to it and wondered why someone didn’t do anything to stop it.”
I talked and tracked, stopping when I got stuck. I studied the ground while Victor waited patiently.
“Do you really want to know all this or are you just keeping me talking so I won’t think about Old Frank?”
“It’s interesting to me. It doesn’t matter why we’re doing it.”
“I guess I do remember him from before I was six. He’d always been around. My mom says he used to haul me out of the paddocks when I was just a toddler. He thought the horses might hurt me. I don’t remember a horse ever hurting me until I started riding. I started riding when I was three and I was left to ride on my own when I was five, just a very gentle, easy to manage horse that was my friend and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Old Frank worked me up through the horses until I was riding like hellfire on the work horses. When the work horses weren’t enough of a challenge I started trying to ride the horses in training. So I do remember Old Frank from before I was six.”
The tracks were fading more and more as we got closer to the rocky hillsides. Please, don’t even try to go up those hills, I thought. Tracking could be fun but it could also be mind numbingly challenging, too. Looking for that one piece of a track that would point the way. A slight indentation with an edge that looked like a person had made it. A tread. A scuff. Anything? The tracks were disappearing and we progressed slower and slower until, finally I was forced to get down to ground level. Crawling on the ground with a thirty pound pack on my back got old real fast. I stood and took it off, propping it against a rock.
“Don’t let me forget it,” I told Victor.
“How can you forget your pack? It’s almost a part of you. It’s got all your food and water in it.”
“Just don’t let me forget it.”
“Okay.”
I knelt down again looking for clues. There was no plants, no sand, just rock and fine gravel. I looked for scratch marks on the rocks and found a few. Was it enough? I examined the scratch marks and looked the direction they pointed. I wasn’t sure enough to just leave the spot behind, even if I was only moving a few feet away, so I marked the last clue. This was feeling hopeless. I looked at all the rock ahead of me. “Don’ choo let what mightn’t be stop you from what could be,” Old Frank said in my head. And later when I was truly exasperated, “Oh, no you don’t. You ain’t run out of options yet. You get back in there and run your options out first.” I finished examining the rock. One little scratch mark. It could have been made by anything. I stood and brushed my hands off.
“How far have we come?” I asked Victor.
He took a few moments to plot our location on a map.
“As the crow flies? Two miles.”
“Damn. We’ve spent all morning going two lousy miles?”
“If they were the right two miles they weren’t lousy ones.”
“We’ve got to do something to put these rocks behind us. This is ridiculous. And I’m still hearing Old Frank in my head.”
“Yeah, what’s he saying?”
“That we haven’t exhausted all our options yet.”
“Smart man.”
“Okay, next option.”
I looked at the area ahead. Rough rock, sparse vegetation. Was Marcel hiking at this point or did he consider himself lost? He had stopped a few times and his tracks looked like he’d been thinking. But maybe he had just been watching something, or deciding which way to go. If he was just hiking his decisions would be very different than if he thought he was lost. I marked my spot so I would know where to return if my ideas didn’t work out. I followed the known trail and kept going, watching the ground. Okay, so my choice of hiking paths didn’t pan out. I walked an arc zigzagging across the area I thought Marcel had crossed. An hour of zigzagging and I was ready to throw in the towel. My spirits were at an all-time low. I went back to my marker and looked for the next direction to try.
“Cassidy, eat something,” Victor said. “You’ll feel better.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel better. I had settled comfortably into my blue funk and it felt like too much bother to try and climb out of it. I got out the bag of cookies and let Victor take a couple, then I took one for myself. How could you not feel better after a chocolate chip cookie break? After the cookie I thought I ought to have some real food so I dug out my trail mix and picked out the M&Ms. Victor just watched, arms folded over his chest.
“No wonder you never grew up,” he said.
“I bet if your wife thought chocolate would keep her young she’d convert,” I joked back. “Besides, I didn’t see you turning down any chocolate chip cookies. Just think of the green M&Ms as vegetables, the red ones as berries, the brown ones as meat, and the orange ones as cheese and you have a balanced meal right here in a bag.”
The search didn’t look quite so bleak after that. I still didn’t know how I was going to find Marcel’s trail but at least I could look at it with a tracker’s eye again. I tried another direction, walking until the soil got better, then walking a large half circle around the last sure track. I was looking for a dirt-colored indentation in the dirt. Or a rock colored scrape on a rock. Tracks always wear camouflage. They blend in and they are good at it. I had to change the way I looked at things to see them when they were faint. Any change in the normal pattern of the ground was something to investigate. Most people would say there is no pattern to the dirt on the ground, unless they were looking at dunes that had been scoured by the wind into a washboard effect. Think of randomness as a pattern. If you take a bunch of randomness and add just one pressure point, or one line, that one thing suddenly stands out. The static on a television screen is a good example. All these random dots coming and going, but if there is an interruption or small change in the power a line will appear in the randomness. So it is with tracking except it’s not all black and white. It’s all dirt colored or rock colored. And the change is very subtle. Walking through the scrubby, rocky, barely forest I was looking for something very faint that said a person had been here. When my half circle didn’t reveal anything I continued the circle on around. When that didn’t help I widened the circle. Scanning, scanning, with an analytical eye, searching the randomness. When I finally found the tracks again I could see why the circling had finally paid off. Marcel had turned around. Why do people always choose to do unpredictable things on rock? Two hours I had spent on one spot in the trail. I ran back for my pack, exasperated.
“We’re back in business,” I told Victor. I fished out the cookies again and offered some to Victor. He took two, as did I, then I stuffed the bag gently back in my pack, zipped it up and shrugged into the straps. I pulled the hip belt snug and shifted it around as I walked. Victor got up calmly and followed. There was no use hurrying. Tracking was slow and his even pace would keep up. All he had to do was keep me in sight.
I returned to the track I found, just a corner of a heel print, but the heel is always behind the toe so I had a direction and I was back to moving from track to track. My frustration started to fade as I settled into my comfort zone again.
“Told ya you weren’t outa options yet,” Old Frank said.
I was back in business but everywhere we turned we ran into rock of some kind. When night fell we were a mile and a half from base camp but we had tracked much farther than that. At dusk we set up camp and went about our activities in relative silence. Normally I kept up a friendly banter with Landon or Victor on a search. If I had to go with Rosco it was a quiet search. If I had to go out with Thez he kept up a constant flow of friendly chatter. That evening, with Victor, I was sad, tired, and frustrated. My emotions were wearing on me. My pack weighed a ton. Little setbacks felt like giant obstacles. Little things faded in importance. Eating was a little thing. I didn’t want to bother. I just wanted to go to bed so morning would arrive faster. However, I knew it didn’t work that way. Going to bed without dinner only caused me to wake up hungry during the night.
“I’ve never seen you that stuck before,” Victor said.
“That’s because I’ve never been that stuck before,” I answered as I shook out my tent. If I’d been alone I wouldn’t have even bothered with the tent.
“I need to call Strict and give him our coordinates.”
“Tell him to just look west and he can see us,” I said sarcastically.
I set up the tent, carefully hammering in each tent peg with a rock. Victor was precise. If I didn’t peg my tent he would tell me that it might blow away. If I didn’t use a rain fly it might rain. If I went without a tent he would offer me his. He was a father and a gentleman and I bore the brunt of that grudgingly and happily. I liked Victor. I enjoyed his company on searches but I sure wish he would ease up in some respects. Landon was nearly as bad but he’d come to accept some of my quirks and eccentricities. When I thought about my camping quirks as eccentricities Chase came to mind and I wondered if I was gradually becoming more like him. I could camp any way I liked with Chase. He often slept in a hammock on searches so when I simply rolled out my sleeping bag and climbed in he didn’t question me, didn’t offer me a tent. He knew I chose my own conditions and he left me to choose for myself. I wondered if Chase would go to the funeral. Chase didn’t know Old Frank well. He had only met the man once, or was it twice? But Chase knew Old Frank was the man who had taught me to track. He respected the old cowboy, and he had a vested interest in the goings on at the ranch, because Patrick was there. Chase watched out for Patrick and me, making sure the art of tracking didn’t die. Even though he lived in San Diego he kept tabs on us. He’d been doing long distance mentoring with Patrick, and he appreciated Old Frank’s presence and involvement in Patrick’s life. And now Old Frank was gone.
I was setting up my stove as these thoughts rattled around and then dragged me along with them into deep sadness. I set the stove aside and walked. I kicked rocks. I brooded. I struggled, trying to control my emotions. Victor went about his camp preparations keeping one eye on me. He wouldn’t get emotionally involved but he’d be assessing the situation, ready for an answer when Strict asked.
Old Frank was gone. That meant Patrick’s backup was gone. And what exactly did a seven year old need backup for? Well, if he was like me as a seven year old, which so far seemed very likely, he needed Old Frank’s brain. The old man encouraged Patrick to think. He had been developing the same inquisitive mind in Patrick that he had in me, more so since he had more time to devote to Patrick.
Chase had hinted that he knew a man who could train horses and teach Patrick to track but I couldn’t imagine a person like that. A person with those particular qualities was rare. There was just no replacing Old Frank.
The light was fading fast. I needed to get back.
When I got back to camp Victor was going through our evening check in with Strict.
“Yeah, it was a disappointing day but it was a rough trail. Everything about this search has been hard… Yeah, she’s doing okay. Don’t worry…It’s bound to affect it some but she’s not letting it stop her. It’s the rock that held us up today, not Cassidy…No, don’t call us back…I know we’re close enough but Cassidy is the only one who could track this search. We’ll check in tomorrow. G’night.”
I finished assembling my stove, pumped it up and lit the burner. Pretty soon I had a pot of water heating. I looked around in my backpacker food for something that wasn’t very filling, but it all looked alike. I looked for one meal that I liked better than the others and they all tasted alike, too, so I just grabbed one. Spaghetti. Okay, so they might taste different. I put the spaghetti back and pulled out chicken and rice.
“You’re not yourself tonight,” Victor observed. “You usually have camp set up and dinner half cooked by the time I get my pack off.”
“Sorry, I’m being pokey because I don’t care. I don’t want to bother with the tent. I don’t want to eat.”
“What will you miss most about Old Frank?”
“From the past, just his ornery old cowboy attitude. For the future, he was the one who helped my nephew follow his tracking genes. The boy is only seven and already shows talents for tracking. I’ve tracked with him a little, stalked deer with him. He’s got the right mindset for it but my sister won’t encourage that part of his education. Old Frank would. Old Frank would challenge Patrick’s mind. That influence is what will be missed the most.”
I poured water into the pouch of backpacker food and folded the top down. I propped up the pouch against my pack and waited for it to cook.
“What do you think of this search?”
“If there wasn’t a person counting on us, I’d quit. But I won’t. As long as we know Marcel is still out there I’ll stick to the trail.”
“Do you think we’ll find him?”
“Yeah, we’ll find him. I just hope we find him in time. Today was mind-numbingly difficult. If I ever get to relive a day in my life, I’d never choose today. I’ve got a whole list of days I would go back and relive but today’s not one of them.”
“Really? What would you choose?”
“I’d like to see Old Frank’s expression when I was eight years old and I jumped off the barn roof. I’d like to relive the time I went home to the ranch to recuperate from a bout of trouble and Rusty drove up and surprised me with a visit for my birthday. I didn’t even know it was my birthday. That’s how sick I’d been. He just showed up and I was so happy! I hardly knew him. I only knew I loved him and he showed up anyway. I’d relive that day a hundred times. I’d go back and jump out of the airplane again. My parachute barely opened and I thought I was going to die. Now that I know I lived through it, I’d do it again.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Normal bouts of trouble make life exciting. It’s man made trouble I can do without.”
“Cassidy, allow me to define normal for you. Normal is what happens to everybody else. Your trouble is not normal. Normal does not include jumping out of an airplane with a faulty parachute. Normal people don’t jump off roofs.”
“If I’m not normal it’s half genes and half Old Frank’s fault. He never encouraged me to be normal.”
We stayed up late. Usually we turned in shortly after dark in order to get a good night’s rest and be ready to get up with the sun. I tracked during daylight hours so it was important to me to be ready as soon as the sun was up. When we finally went to our tents, I knew it was going to be a very short night. It was a very troubled night, too. I tracked in my dreams. I tracked Marcel through impossible rocks and I tracked Old Frank around the ranch. I had always known Old Frank’s tracks. Even when they changed and finally became a weary shuffle I knew it was him. His tracks degraded in my dream and each tiny change brought a stab of pain as I watched him fade from my life, through his tracks. I woke in the night longing to snuggle closer to Rusty, but he wasn’t there. Loneliness smothered me. My heart ached. Frustration made me worry about the tracking the next day. The sun came up and I wanted to turn it off again and go back to sleep. I was exhausted. I pretended I was back in the Marines and forced myself up anyway. I prepared and ate a packet of oatmeal just out of habit. I broke camp and packed everything up. It was a new day. I found the trail again while Victor finished up packing.
When Strict checked in with us he asked to talk to me.
“Cassidy?”
“Go ahead, Lou.”
“Victor says you’ve had a hard time of it.”
“No kidding, this is the toughest trail I’ve had yet.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“Rock. There’s nothing I can do to hurry it. There’s no way to get rid of the rock. It’s just plain old, tough tracking.”
“Do you need help?”
“No, Chase is the only one who could possibly help and he’s too far away.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Rusty called. He’s worried about you.”
“I know. You know what to tell him.”
Strict had been fielding Rusty’s calls ever since I’d started tracking for him. He’d known Rusty long before I came along so I left the guys to their own battles regarding me.
Marcel’s trail started out faint and it got worse. It was slow, track to track tracking. There was no walking along, just watching for the next track. I knelt by the tracks, tracing the hints I could see, following the hint a few feet farther, looking for the next track. At the rate we were going we’d find Marcel dead. I despaired when the trail led straight into the rocks again.
“Victor, this is impossible!”
“I agree. I don’t know how you’ve come this far.”
“Maybe it’s time to split up. One of us can circle the rocky area and find where Marcel left it.”
“I don’t know if I’d see it, but I sure won’t see anything here.”
“Well, give it a try.”
I stayed on the rocks trying to spot any signs at all of Marcell’s trail and Victor took off to find the end of the rocks and search for signs of tracks. He wouldn’t venture far.
Okay, Cass, the rocks, focus on the rocks. I was so tired of focusing on the rocks. I took off my pack and got down on hands and knees. I picked up tiny rocks, looking for pressure points, scrapes, anything in the spot where the next step should have been. I measured from the last track and moved over hoping Marcel had turned. I worked my way, slowly in a circle around the last track. I was sitting there cross legged moving small rocks, hoping for hints beneath them when a quick, dark blur shot out from under the rock and ran up my pants leg. Pain shot up my leg from the back of my calf!
“Oh shit!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet. Oh, man, it hurt! Imagining squished bug all over my clothes and leg, I slapped at my pants leg trying to kill whatever it was that ran up there. Big mistake! It stung my hand, too! Right through my pants leg! I frantically began pulling at shoe laces, trying to get my boots off as squirming feelings brushed against my leg between the skin and the fabric of my pants. What was it? I pulled off my hiking boots and pants, hoping Victor was still circling the rocky area. “Damn it, where are you, you stupid critter? What are you?” I shook out my pants and a large brown scorpion ran away and hid under another rock. Oh it hurt! The sting sites burned and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if this was the worst of it or what else I could expect. I pulled on my pants again with difficulty. My hand barely worked. My fingers were getting stiff. Pain shot up my arm and my leg. I paced around cradling my right hand and trying not to put much weight on my left leg. Where was Victor? How far away was he? I was sure he would know what to do.
“Victor!” I called out as loud as I could. I cupped my hands and called again, “Viiiictor!” I sat and examined my hand. The site of the sting was red and my hand felt like the inside was on fire. The pain radiated farther as the poison spread.
Victor came jogging up. “What is it? Did you find something?”
“Yeah, I found a scorpion! The stupid thing ran up my pants leg and stung me on the leg and when I tried to kill it and it stung my hand.”
How he managed to laugh with a worried look I don’t know. The guys were mastering that look. I noticed it a lot when trouble hit. When he’d finished with the mental picture of what had happened he got back to work.
“Did you see what kind it was?”
“No. It was just a scorpion.”
“It wasn’t yellow and ugly?”
“No, it was brown and scorpionish.”
“That’s good. Yellow is bad news.”
“Hell, this is bad news.”
“I can tell you it’s not going to kill you. This could be the worst of it. Let’s hope you don’t have an adverse reaction to it. Can you walk?”
“If I can dance around and get out of my pants, shake them out, and get back into them again, I think I can walk. Did you find anything?”
“No, not yet.”
“Damn.”
I could walk but my left leg hurt like hell and within an hour we could tell this was going to throw the search way off. First the pain radiated farther from the sting sites. Then, I didn’t tell Victor for a while, but my hands and feet began going numb. I started salivating like crazy. I felt antsy. I had to keep going. I had to. I became fixated on finding the tracks. It didn’t matter if it was the logical method. I felt pushed to go on. When my feet were well and truly numb I began having trouble walking. Finally, Victor put a stop to the search.
“Cassidy stop. You’re reacting to the poison. Your extremities are numb, aren’t they?”
“We can’t stop! We’re only three miles from base camp. We’ve been on the trail for two days. We can’t stop!”
“Hush, listen, you’re displaying all the symptoms. There’s nothing we can do except wait it out. How far has the numbness spread?”
I sat down, defeated, “Even my face is numb,” I admitted. “But I have to do something. I can’t just sit here!”
“Then I’m telling you. You are going to just sit here. Until you can feel again and your vital signs return to normal, you’re going to sit here. I’ll set up camp. It could be hours; at worst we’ll be here overnight.”
“Overnight? No! We can’t waste a whole day!”
He seemed amused by my attitude, a calm that I’d frequently seen in EMTs when they are faced with emergencies. He just remembered this was the effect of the poison and gently prodded me in the direction I should go. “I’m setting up your tent and you’re going to get out of the sun and wait this out. I’m telling you, that’s what you’re going to do.”
I tried to help Victor with the tent but I couldn’t tell how hard I was grasping things and my right hand hurt like crazy making any coordinated effort impossible. The numbness was scary. It felt like it would take over everything and leave me drifting. I was scared to lie down in the tent. I was afraid I’d pass out from sheer numbness.
“All the odd things you are thinking are part of the reaction. Just don’t listen to them. An agitated feeling is normal for a bad reaction. Just ignore it.”
When he had the tent set up he spread my sleeping bag out.
“I want you to lay down in there and wait until I come back. I’m going to circle the rocks like we were planning on doing and I’m going to call Strict. He might want to try another method.”
I lay in the tent as low as low can be, numb, sad, lonely, and extremely agitated. Fighting the urge to track was difficult. I was trapped in a mental war with myself. How could the stings hurt so badly if I was numb all over?
Victor took my pulse and blood pressure. The pulse was fast. The blood pressure low, normal for a scorpion sting, he said. He looked at my eyes.
“If you notice your vision changing in any way, call me,” he instructed.
He left the tent and I heard him call Strict.
“Strict, it’s Victor.”
“Go ahead,” Strict answered.
“We’ve got another setback...” He walked out of my hearing, I presume to circle the rocky area. I curled up on the sleeping bag, miserable. I couldn’t lie still because I felt antsy but I was so numb I couldn’t do anything. I faded in and out, dozing nervously, losing track of time. I thought I heard a helicopter in the distance. The search had expanded. I hoped they were not coming for me. I’d feel like a total failure if I didn’t finish this search. I would blame myself for the outcome if I didn’t do everything I could. I was already kicking myself for letting a dumb bug get the best of me. Just a stupid scorpion. And why did I have to swat it with my hand? That was one of the stupidest things I’d ever done. My thoughts wandered from my stupidity to what Victor was doing, to Rusty, to Old Frank. I’d never catch up to Marcel before Friday afternoon. I wondered if we could make it to the ranch in time on Saturday if we left early. My feelings spiraled down further and further until I couldn’t do anything. Every corner of my mind was either antsy from the poison, sad from grief, or frustrated with my situation. Physically I was okay, just incapacitated. I lay there for hours until, finally, Victor came back.
He crawled into the tent. “You okay?” He quietly asked my still form.
“Yeah, still numb, though.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’m trapped. I can’t move without feeling pins and needles. I can’t think without getting sad. Did you have any luck?”
“Maybe, you’ll have to take a look. I’ve got the place marked and I’ll go back and try to get farther but I wanted to check on you first. Your pulse is still fast. Look at me. Okay. Isn’t this fun? Just normal type trouble. It makes life exciting, right?”
“Very funny. I heard the helicopter.”
“Yeah, we’re kind of in a time crunch. We’re going on four days. Marcel needs to be found.”
“It would help if his buddies had called earlier too.”
“Well, there’s not much we can do about our position so we might as well make the most of it. If you’ll be okay, I’m going to check out that possibility I spotted. If it’s Marcel we’ll be back on track in the morning.”
“In the morning? I can’t stand this idleness. I’m not waiting here until morning!”
“You’ll stay there until I say,” he told me.
After he left I crawled out of the tent, cursing a mile a minute because the stings hurt like crazy whenever I put any weight on the that limb. When I got out of the tent I was dismayed because I couldn’t track Victor. He was as untrackable as Marcel. I cursed the hard ground, the pain, and the situation. Since I was out of the tent I went to my pack, unzipped it left handed, and pulled out the cookies. I took a bite but I was so numb I couldn’t chew well or swallow right. After a terrible coughing fit I gave up on eating anything.
Victor came back and saw the bag of cookies.
“Cassidy, I swear, you’re as stubborn as they come.”
“Didn’t do me any good. I can’t eat them. What did you find?”
I handed over the cookies, left-handed.
“I can’t tell. I think it was a person, but I can’t tell if it was Marcel. We’ll go back in the morning.”
As evening wore on Victor set up his tent and began dinner preparations. I crawled out of the tent thinking perhaps it wasn’t quite as painful this time. Perhaps the numbness was wearing off a little too.
“Don’t bother heating water for me,” I told Victor. “I can’t swallow. My throat’s numb.”
“You should try,” he said.
“Not if I have the same reaction I did to the cookie. I’d rather skip that.”
I went to my pack and got out a bottle of water. I sipped that for my dinner. I went to bed hungry, numb, sore and very discouraged. Victor called Strict for our nightly check in. I went through my nightly ritual of wondering where Rusty was and what he was doing but I pictured him worrying about me and it made me sadder.
I woke up in the night and the numbness was mostly gone. In the morning the only things to remind me of the scorpion sting were two very sensitive sting sites. I cooked dinner for breakfast and Victor felt better about our situation.
“Show me where you found the tracks,” I said.
I limped after him. When he showed me the tracks he found, I was impressed. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of spotting tracks that faint.
“We’ll have to follow them to know for sure,” I said. “Should we take that chance?”
“I say, there’s very little chance of it being anybody else. If you think it was a person it’s a good chance it was Marcel.”
“Let’s follow it then.”
The day was brighter. We had tracks again, a day of rest, and breakfast. The only thing that hung over us was time. We had to find Marcel as quickly as possible and even with a good trail the pace was slow. The helicopter showed up later in the morning. They buzzed overhead and we waved. They reported our position to Strict. We now had a day and a half to find a man missing four days. The fact that the helicopter hadn’t found Marcel was worrisome. I thought if he had heard a helicopter overhead he would have done something to attract their attention.
I hit the trail ready to put in a full day. I tracked as quickly as I could, moving from track to track, pausing only long enough to verify I was on the right trail.
Victor had saved us hours of frustrating work. He just seemed to think it was part of being a team. If one person runs into trouble you just do what you can to achieve the goal. He had done well.
I couldn’t move very quickly. Each step still brought a jab of pain from my leg. My right hand was useless. I couldn’t put any pressure near the sting, which, unfortunately, had gotten me square in the palm of my hand. When I swat something I swat it good and hard. I needed to remember to not swat scorpions.
The tracks led us on. Time was weighing on both of us. We didn’t know how much water Marcel had started out with but it was bound to be gone. We searched the map for springs and creeks but we couldn’t find any that seemed likely places for Marcel to go, so time was precious. I grumbled to myself about spending a whole day laid up, especially due to stupidity. Okay, Cassidy, I told myself, so you flubbed up, you’re still the one who can track this trail the fastest so get after it. Your sergeant is standing behind you giving you an order and you better track this trail or you’ll be doing KP for a week. Nope guard duty. It was guard duty that I had hated. Anything with activity I hadn’t minded. Guard duty was boring.
When I asked Victor for our position I was encouraged. We were making good time. The tracks were staying visible. Marcel was doing logical, predictable things. The rocks had given way to more open ground. We had spent two and a half days on the trail and, unless some accident befell Marcel, he had at least a two day head start on us. It looked bleak, even with this breakthrough. We could only hope that something had stopped Marcel from continuing and even that thought held little promise. What would have stopped him? An accident? Injury? Lack of water? Usually a lack of water drove people to look for it and that could prove fatal. There was very little water in these mountains and to go looking for it used up precious physical resources.
Marcel’s tracks looked old. They were eroded from the wind but, fortunately, not from the rain. One thing I could count on in these mountains was dry tracking. It was very rare for a rainstorm to interfere. The tops of the tracks were rounded from the wind but the tread was still visible. I was glad to see the footprints led farther into the mountains. There was more shelter from the wind in amongst the trees and more protection from the sun. Sources of water were more prevalent, although still rare. Another thing that gave me some hope was that Marcel watched for trees he could climb to get an idea of his whereabouts. Tree climbing would use up time, time we could use to our advantage catching up.
Morning faded to afternoon and we ate lunch on the trail. Afternoon faded to evening and I kept on until I couldn’t see the tracks anymore. Another night. We would be starting day four. Friday. The day we were supposed to drive to the ranch. The day we were running on empty. We had a little food in our packs. I had an extra backpacker dinner because I couldn’t eat it the night of the scorpion sting. Victor and I could split it. I had a couple of oatmeal packets, a stick of jerky, some trail mix and four chocolate chip cookies. Victor dug through his pack. He cooked his last backpacker dinner. What was left was a packet of powdered eggs, a granola bar and a cinnamon roll wrapped in plastic.
“I’m good for another day,” I said.
“Me too,” he said hesitantly. It wasn’t much to go on but we could do it.
“If you can stand oatmeal for breakfast you can save your eggs for later. We can pool our resources.”
He nodded. “I need to get back to work one of these days, too. I told them this was likely to be a long one but I’ve never been gone this long. They’re going to think I got lost and send out a search party.”
“I hope they call Strict for the search party.”
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Okay, the stings are going away. I was able to concentrate on tracking today. I just wish I could make it to the funeral but that’s not looking likely anymore. My dad won’t be happy with me. He says women shouldn’t be traipsing around in the mountains looking for people. Of course, when he said that I was looking for a violent criminal. Maybe he’d feel different about this search.”
“What would Old Frank say about it?”
“Old Frank was proud of me. He said if he ever had kids he hoped they lived life like I do, jumping in with both feet.”
“Did he have kids?”
“Not that he knows of,” I laughed. “He was never married as long as I knew him either. Maybe he was married before I was born. He never said and I never asked. He was just Old Frank. He never seemed lonely for any one person. The ranch was his family. He could have had a whole other life before my dad hired him on. I don’t know. It’s weird to think that we only know about his life from the ranch on. I wonder what he did before.”
Sixty-two unknown years. That really seemed odd. More than twice my lifetime, lost to time, forgotten, only known to Frank himself. Anything could have happened. My cranky, old, adopted grandpa could have been a soldier in the war, a cattle rustler in the old west. Something told me he had always worked with horses. Even when he could hardly walk he could ride with ease. His mannerisms revealed a lifetime of horse sense. Even when he walked around the end of a fence he placed his hand on the post as he walked around it, just like he’d place a hand on a horse’s rump to let them know he was there. Imagining all the old mannerisms made me feel lonely again. It was things that most people didn’t even notice about him that brought back the memories. I doubted anybody else noticed his habit of placing a hand on things as he went around them. Nobody else knew that to go over a paddock fence he placed his foot just like he would into a stirrup and swung his other leg over, just like he was mounting a horse. When he handed me a quarter for the gum machine at the grocery store it was always palm out, fingers back, like he was giving a sugar cube to a horse.
“Cassidy?” Victor said waving a hand to get my attention.
“Sorry, my thoughts kind of wandered away.”
“It’s okay.”
Our discussion turned to the search.
“Any chance of finding Marcel tomorrow?”
“I doubt it. The tracks are still old. We’re not catching up to him. Tomorrow it’ll be five days, so it’s not looking good.”
We got out the map, found ourselves on it, and speculated about the terrain ahead. It looked more pleasant than what we’d done so far. At least that was encouraging. The direction we were heading was into deep forest. It didn’t make sense to me. If I was lost I would follow a creek or wash downhill. Around here, downhill led to a campground or highway. If one could walk far enough, downhill led to Joshua Hills to the north or the L.A. area to the south. But people seldom thought that way. They left trails for wilderness; they left roadways and cut cross-country. It didn’t make sense to me.
“What would you do if you were lost up here?” I asked Victor.
“I doubt I could get lost up here. I’ve walked so much of it with a map and GPS. Maybe Marcel was a boy scout. They say to find a high vantage point and try to get your bearings. He has tried that a couple of times.”
“I wish he had read the part of the book that says to find a safe spot and wait to be found.”
He nodded.
As I snuggled into my warm sleeping bag I thought about Marcel out in open. I’d slept out in the open in weather like this. It was cold, although not dangerously so. The water problem was what bothered me the most. A cold night was minor trouble, but being lost without water was major trouble. I searched my heart for Rusty and wondered what he was doing. It was unusual for me to be gone three nights. I was sure he had found out about the scorpion by now. He called Strict for a nightly report. He always called after dark and he knew how to read Strict’s answers. I wanted to reach out and ease his worries. The pain from the stings was easing and only ached when I put pressure on them. In the morning I expected to be nearly back to normal.
The next morning the challenge was not rocks. It was the opposite: pine needles. The forest was covered with them. It goes against the nature of a tracker to disturb the trail, but four days worth of pine needles had fallen over Marcel’s tracks. At times I could see where the pine needles had slid under Marcel’s feet. Those areas I could cross quickly. Where walking was level though Marcel’s footprints were only a slight indentation in the blanket. It had sprung back up and more needles had fallen, hiding his tracks. I tried looking at it from ground level and sometimes I could make out very subtle indentations. I lifted the needles like pickup sticks, one sprig at a time to reveal the larger indentations below. It didn’t often work. I came to celebrate steep uphill climbs because it forced Marcel to leave a good trail.
Victor could see the trail was wearing on me again. My brain was fried, just thinking of all the impossibilities and trying to pull out the visible from the invisible.
“Taint invisible, Trouble, it’s just subtle. You gotta get down to subtleties. Think like a blanket of pine needles. What are you hiding? Where is it? It’s there somewhere’s. You just gotta think subtle like.”
My brain feels like Jell-O from thinkin’ subtle like, I thought.
There was a fallen tree. Marcel had stood next to it. The indentations in the pine needles were obvious here. He’d broken off pieces of bark and thrown them into the woods. The fresh wood beneath the chunks stood out like a beacon. I looked over the tree; very few pines needles rested on top. Pieces of bark were scuffed on top. Fairly recently. I climbed up on top of the tree and walked the trunk until I came to a freshly broken off branch and when I looked to see where the branch had fallen I saw Marcel.
“Victor! I found him!”
I jumped off the tree and knelt down beside him, afraid to reach out. Victor jogged around the end of the tree. I felt for a pulse. I couldn’t find one, but I didn’t trust myself to be able to find one right away. His skin was cold but not like dead cold. As Victor took over I got back to tracker mode. Marcel had been here for some time, but he’d been able to move around a little. He’d been here at least one night, maybe two. He’d pulled pine needles around him. He’d had water for a while after he fell. The empty bottle was tossed aside.
Victor slipped into automatic and the staccato transmissions fired back and forth over the mountains.
“Ten sixty-five found.” Missing person found.
“Ten forty-five?” What is the condition of the patient?
“Ten twenty-three.” Stand by.
“Ten four.” Okay.
“Cassidy, we’re going to need a pick up. Look around for an open area.”
“Okay.”
“No wait, help me get him where I can see better.”
Something didn’t feel right about that. It was a tracker thing, not an EMT thing. He knew not to move a person unless it was absolutely necessary. He was thinking a fall from a tree, no big deal. He was thinking maybe Marcel had sheltered there. I saw something different.
“Victor, I don’t think we should.”
“I can’t see a thing in here.”
“I know, but…” gee I hated disagreeing with the authority. “Victor, call an ambulance.”
“I can’t even tell what shape he’s in.”
“Call an ambulance and the guys will help you. Something’s wrong that we don’t know about. Marcel pulled pine needles over him for warmth, but he did it while he was lying down. He only moved his legs as much as they shifted while he used his arms. I think it would be dangerous to move him without help.”
He stepped back and examined the situation from my point of view. It only took a few seconds. He didn’t see it in as much detail as I did but he acknowledged the observation. He sighed and looked at what he had to work with.
“Okay, find a pick up area.”
I set out to find a clearing where a drop could be made.
“Ten forty-five B,” Victor fired back to Strict as I jogged off to begin my search. Patient serious. I knew it was just a starting point to get things moving. The condition could change at any time but better to play it safe and call it serious.
I chose a direction and took off in search of a flat area where a helicopter could land, or at least drop a cable. The first area didn’t pan out. It was too thickly forested. I began hiking in the gentler direction, and found one farther away than I liked. Still, it was a good pick up spot, highly visible from the air, close enough that our GPS coordinates would lead the pilot to the right area. I jogged back to Victor. He’d removed the pine needles.
“What can I do?”
“Did you find a spot?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope the helicopter can find us before dark.”
He had a point. It was late afternoon. It could take hours for a helicopter to take off from LA and find us, just one tiny speck in the mountains. I always felt tiny when I knew a helicopter was looking for us. The mountains grew and the little clearings and canyons shrunk. When the light began fading I took two flashlights to the pickup spot and waited for the clatter of helicopter blades. I might not be a good EMT but I was willing to do anything else that was needed. Flag down a helicopter? No problem. I stood in the middle of the open area and waved my arms, flashlights shining. When the helicopter had found us three men were lowered on cables. They brought a basket to transport Marcel in. I led them back to Victor and Marcel, then got out of the way. It took them a while to stabilize Marcel for the ride to the hospital. He was young and fit but he had been injured, out in the open and without water too long. The three had taken a toll on him. I stayed out of the way while the men worked. Victor saw me sitting there and sat with me.
“He’ll be okay,” he told me.
I just nodded, hoping it was true, wondering if my stupidity had cost him in some way. I never found out. We landed in L.A. and Marcel was rushed off to ER and I found the hospital lobby. The lobby was usually a relatively quiet place so, rather than fighting the crowds in ER or the waiting rooms, we usually met in the hospital lobby. I found a quiet corner and called Rusty.
“Cassidy?” he said on the first ring.
“Hi.”
I had so many things battling it out in my head. I just hoped he didn’t hit the wrong buttons.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m in L.A.”
There was a long pause. He knew a flight to L.A. meant a close call, and a close call usually involved a major guilt trip on my part. On the bright side he knew I’d found my man.
“Strict said it was a tough search.”
“The toughest one yet.”
A long pause.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
An hour and a half I waited while thoughts of the search battled it out with the memories of Old Frank. The last four days had taken a toll. I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Victor found me when he had finished his EMT duties and Rusty arrived to give him a ride to the compound where he picked up his own car.
Shadow went nuts when I walked in the door. I had to sit while he jumped all over me, getting caught up on four days worth of petting. When he finally settled down it was Rusty’s turn. I needed the hug on the big brown couch as much as he did. I slid into his arms and found that certain spot where we fit together just right. As I finally let my guard down the tears came. I felt his concern change a little until it felt like comfort. Tears he could deal with. Tears were normal. There were lots of other things he worried about, but he could comfort me, so he felt better.
“Oh, babe, it’s okay. If you’re worried about the funeral, we’ll make it,” he said softly into my hair.
It wasn’t just the funeral. It was the mental strain. It was four physically demanding days. It was feeling trapped in a numb body with nothing but negative thoughts. It was being far away from home when I needed familiarity. I needed a meal and a good night’s sleep, time to sort out my feelings and give my brain a rest from invisible details. I wasn’t ready to deal with life yet, much less death.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I think so, sort of.”
“Do you want to try and get there tonight?”
“If we leave now we’ll get there at two a.m., but we can sleep in. If we leave in the morning, we have to be on the road at six and not stop. Both of them sound like too much.”
“This doesn’t sound like you. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, it’s been a hell of a week. What did Strict tell you?”
“He just said it was really tough, almost impossible tracking conditions. He said you were having a rough time of it. We talked about Old Frank.”
So he didn’t know. He thought I was blaming myself for the slowness of the search.
“I had a rough time up there for other reasons besides emotions and a tough trail. I did something really stupid and it laid me up for a whole day.”
He waited while I stewed.
“I got stung by a scorpion,” I almost laughed. “You should have seen me, and I’m glad Victor didn’t. It ran up my pants leg and stung my leg and when I tried to squash it I got stung again. I was dancing around in the woods trying to get rid of the stupid scorpion, cussing a mile a minute. It hurt like crazy. Then I reacted badly to it. I spent a whole day stuck in the tent while my whole body went numb. I wanted you so bad. I just wanted to be held. I wanted you to take away all the sadness and frustration even if it was for just a few minutes. I was so miserable.”
“Where was Victor when all this was going on?”
“The trail went cold. I was searching the rocks for tracks so I sent him to find an exit point. It was a logical course for us to take. He came running when I called, and he made me stop when he knew I was having a reaction to the sting. I’d have kept going but he made me stop. It was a bad reaction, too. It was awful. If Victor hadn’t been there to tell me it was normal I would have been terrified.”
“My girl, when will you learn? You don’t have to go through all this. You’re allowed to turn Strict down.”
“No, I can’t. I couldn’t live with myself if I just left people out there when they can be found. While I was laid up Strict sent out a helicopter but they didn’t spot Marcel. He’d fallen off a dead tree and hurt his back. He was half buried in leaves and half hidden under the trunk of the tree. They couldn’t have spotted him from the air if they’d looked for years and searchers would never have thought to go where we finally found him. He was almost impossible to track. I almost gave up but Old Frank wouldn’t let me.”
“You might as well admit it. You can’t kill Old Frank. He’s just a part of you.”
I snuggled closer trying to fight off the tears again.
“Why didn’t Strict tell me about the scorpion?” Rusty asked.
“Because it was just part of the search. Things happen. We deal with them. We dealt with that. It didn’t leave any lasting effects. It was a long delay but just part of the search. I just hope it didn’t cost Marcel.”
“What about the ranch. Do you want to leave now?”
“I don’t want to think about the ranch. I just need time, just a little time.”
“Babe, it’s after ten. If we’re going to the ranch tonight we need to call.”
“If we leave in the morning we’ll be pushing it,” I sighed. “We better go tonight.”
“I had to go shopping and repack a little. Your mom called and said not to wear black. She said to bring something cheerful to wear. So I found a bright western shirt in your closet and I went shopping for something western for me.”
“You’re kidding! You didn’t need to do that. What did you buy for you?” I’d never seen Rusty dressed western before.
“You’ll see.”