Chapter 1

Valerie Boren-Odell, Talihina, Oklahoma, 1990

When our ancestors first came to southeastern Oklahoma one of the first things they set their eyes on were the beautiful, forested Winding Stair Mountains. They are our Plymouth Rock, our Mississippi River, our Rocky Mountains, our Pacific Ocean.

—Ron Glenn, Winding Stair Mountain Wilderness bill, S. 2571, congressional hearing, 1988.

Dear Val,

Why mince words? Dreams are wonderful things, but a single mother needs to be practical. Please tell me it isn't too late for you to return to your job at the Arch in St. Louis?

Have you lost your mind? Talihina, Oklahoma? I can't even find it on the map without putting on my glasses. No wonder you didn't tell us ahead of time. Kenneth has been around asking about you, by the way. You know he thought you two were becoming more than just friends. I understand grief, my dear, but you can't cling to it forever, and let's face it, if you remarried, you wouldn't have all these financial struggles. If you don't call Kenneth to iron things out, I'm telling him where I sent this postcard to.

Put Charlie in the car and drive home. I know you have always been a free spirit, but it's time to grow up.

—Gram

I read the postcard for the third time since grabbing it from the mail on my way to work, then survey the breathtaking valley below Emerald Vista turnout and try to decide how much trouble I'm in. My grandmother taught high school English for more than a half century. She does not end sentences with prepositions.

…where I sent this postcard to.

She is in a mood. This note is meant to tear me up a bit, and it does. To unsettle me slightly, and it does that, too.

I am in the backwoods of southeastern Oklahoma, where after a rain, the morning shadows linger long and deep, and the mountains exhale mist so thick it seems to have weight. The countryside exudes the eerie, forgotten feel of a place where a woman and a seven-year-old boy could simply vanish and no one would ever know.

A puff of wind slides by, unsettling the folder I pulled from my day pack to extract the postcard. A mockup brochure and a half dozen high-end paper samples tumble to the pavement and slide away like fallen leaves. I should chase them down, but instead, I stand frozen. My mind drifts all the way to Talihina, where a cheery yellow house offers the only acceptable daycare willing to watch over a boy whose mom's new job will sometimes entail rotating days off and working odd hours.

Just go get him,I tell myself. Pick him up and pack everything back into the car and go. This is crazy. All of this is crazy.

Instead, I pull a slow breath. The morning air is thicker, greener, and warmer than I'm accustomed to in May. It smells of summer. Summer, and earth, and damp stone, and shortleaf pines. Different from St. Louis in a way that whispers something so compelling my heart quickens.

The yearning for wild spaces is as much a part of me as my father's gray-green eyes and thick auburn hair. He fostered that passion in me even before a stint in Vietnam quietly severed my parents' ten-year marriage and made the backcountry the only place he was at peace. Knowing him at all after that meant spending time in the woods, so as often as she could, my grandmother drove me from the Kansas City burbs to the Shawnee National Forest, where her only surviving son guided hikes and raft trips. Gram made those journeys seem like a gift rather than a burden, so I saw them that way, too.

I thought she, if anybody, would understand this job transfer from Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the newly minted Horsethief Trail National Park in Oklahoma's Winding Stair Mountains. But now I wonder if she sees history repeating itself—another thirty-year-old parent running from pain instead of dealing with it. Another helpless kid caught in the tailwind.

Is this relocation a reckless escape attempt or a smart career move? The position here is a GS-9 level job. At the Arch, developing programs and exhibits, shuffling tourists around patches of grass and concrete, I was doing what amounted to grade-level 5 tasks, which was all I could handle when Charlie was three and suddenly without a father. I didn't have the mental space to care about career advancement. But it's time now. This is my chance to step back into park law enforcement. I never thought I'd get the position at the new Winding Stair unit, and I still don't know why I did. But here I am.

It isn't selfish,I assure myself. It's necessary. If Joel were here, he'd tell you to go for it.

Just the thought fills me with a bittersweet mix of warmth and longing. I wish he could share this stunning morning view. Joel liked nothing better than a mountain he hadn't yet climbed. Nothing.

"Hey…your stuff!" The voice seems remote at first. "Hey, Ranger, you dropped your papers."

I come back to earth and Emerald Vista overlook, where suddenly I'm not alone. From the path to a nearby campground, a spindly adolescent girl sprints across the pavement, snatching up my runaway brochure sample on the fly. She's eleven, maybe twelve. A few years older than Charlie. Wiry with long, dark hair.

Clutching the folder to my chest, I gather the pieces still at my feet. When I straighten, the girl is on her way over with the rest of the escaped papers in hand. She's dressed in raggedy cutoffs and a washed-out T-shirt that reads Antlers Bearcats Baseball. I search my memory for where Antlers is located. Someplace farther south along the Kiamichi River. I've seen it on the map.

"Here ya go, Ranger," she says with a childlike admiration that reminds me I'm wearing my Class A Field uniform for the first time since the move. My start at the new unit has been frustratingly slow, my daily assignments for the past two weeks alternating between familiarizing myself with park trails and facilities, performing menial office tasks, and stocking brochure pockets on shiny new notice boards. I donned the uniform, gear-laden duty belt, and Smokey Bear hat today to make a point. I'm ready to do the job I came here for. But once again I find myself tasked with the same busywork.

The girl draws back upon getting a full frontal look at me. "Hey, you're a girl ranger!" She blinks as if a UFO has landed. One of the advantages of being tall—I can almost pass for one of the guys, but the guys at the station have been quick to remind me that I'm not. A female law enforcement ranger wasn't something they'd imagined here at Horsethief Trail.

But this little girl likes it, and so I immediately like her. "That's cool," she says.

"Thanks." I recover the paper samples, spreading them like a deck of cards. "Got a favorite? I'm working on print materials for the park's official opening ceremonies." More busywork from my new supervisor, Chief Ranger Arrington. You know, give you some time to get up to speed. He came just short of patting me on the head when he said it.

"Looks like the park's already open," the girl observes. "The church field trip bus just pulled right on into the campground down yonder after some kid upchucked all over the place. Nobody's camped down there, but the gate's not locked or stuff."

"Opening ceremonies aren't for a week and a half yet, but, yes, the facilities are already available to the public." The park is an eclectic combination of WPA-era recreational areas built over fifty years ago and fifteen million dollars in additions and upgrades funded by the congressional designation of Horsethief Trail National Park.

"My grandma told me they were making all kinds of new trails and stuff up here," the girl chatters. "She said she'd take me to see everything."

"Great idea. It's a beautiful time of year."

"Except she can't right now." A hopeful look slides toward my patrol vehicle. "But somebody might take me around, since I'm stuck for the summer. In stupid Talihina. Where I don't got any friends."

She's laying it on thick, but I nod sympathetically anyway. "I bet we'll be hosting summer opportunities for kids, once we're fully staffed here." Visitor programs aren't in my purview, but the cultural and historical features of the region include ancient earthen mounds left behind by prehistoric Caddo-Mississippian cultures, Viking rune stones that are either genuine or forged depending on whom you ask, French and Spanish treasure legends, rumors of hidden outlaw loot, Civil War sites, the 1830s-era military road, and the Horsethief Trail, by which stolen animals were moved between Kansas and Texas back in the day. "These mountains have a lot of history."

"Yeah, my grandma knows all that stuff. She's been around here since, like, forever."

"Interesting." Grandma might be a good person to meet, as I'm trying to acquaint myself with my new neighborhood.

I'm about to inquire further when a car veers in, the sky-blue-and-yellow seal of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma emblazoned on the driver's side door. The fresh paint testifies to the fact that tribal police are increasing their resources in the region. In the past few decades, with changes in federal policy regarding tribal nations, the tribe has begun reconstituting infrastructure gone since the turn of the century. Their law enforcement arm, once the Choctaw Lighthorse, is now the Choctaw Nation Tribal Police.

Horsethief Trail National Park lies amid the ten and a half counties that fall within the jurisdictional area of the Choctaw Nation. Even in my short stint here, I've picked up on the tenuous relationship between the tribal authorities, state politicians, area residents, local law enforcement, and the federal government. The designation of any new park stirs some controversy, but this one is a political cherry bomb. Reclassification of thousands of acres has cramped the business bonanza of timber companies that've had easy pickings on federal forest land. Shady deals and backroom handshakes allowed the decimation of huge swaths of trees. From almost any ridgetop, the view is scarred by patches that look like the surface of the moon.

The tribal police officer leans out his window, elbow hooked over the frame. I'd guess him to be around my age, thirtyish, with dark hair cropped short. "Sydney, you better scamper back down that trail." He thumbs abruptly toward the campground.

"There's puke all over the bus." Her retort has enough vinegar in it to marinate a salad. "They'll be cleanin' that up for, like, a hour."

"Might help if they weren't wasting time looking for you."

"Whatever," she huffs. "I told some kid where I was goin'."

His cheek twitches a little. "You don't watch it, you'll be in hot water when you get back to Granny Wambles's place." He pumps the thumb again, this time with fingers clenched so that the muscles in his forearm flex. He has the red-eyed look of an officer coming off a long shift. "Go."

She shrugs my way. "But I was helping her."

"Sydney." His chin jerks to one side, straight white teeth gritted. He'd probably have a nice smile, except he's not smiling. "You need me to walk you down there, or what?"

"Geez." She punctuates the word with an exaggerated sigh. If that were Charlie, I'd be putting his skinny behind in the car right now and offering him an earful all the way home.

"See you later," I say to urge her on. "Thanks for catching those loose papers for me."

"No prob." Brazenly edging closer to the drop-off rather than the campground, she cranes toward the mountains as if she's considering bolting into them. "You see my brother out there?" A beseeching look turns my way. I sense it as the first emotion that isn't a performance. "He's got red hair, real tall and skinny and stuff? Might be he's lost."

"In the park?" Lost-visitor reports are usually false alarms.

"I dunno…maybe."

"Did he come here with you this morning?"

"No. But he didn't visit me at Granny Wambles's place when he said."

"Oh, I see." My mental dialogue shifts from potential park incident to family issues, and then, this poor kid. "I'll keep an eye out for him."

"Tell him to come get me at Granny Wambles's."

"If I see him."

"He's got red hair."

"Yes, you told me."

The tribal officer intervenes, instructing her to quit messing around and march herself back to the campground.

Sidling closer to me, she lingers unabashedly, then finally says, "That one," and points to one of the paper samples atop my folder. "It'd look best."

I glance at the pale green parchment-style square. It's suitable for materials meant to impress state political muckety-mucks, their local counterparts and constituents, and whoever the Department of the Interior sends our way.

"Thanks. Great choice." I muster some brochure fervor for Sydney's benefit.

"See ya," she mutters, dragging her sneakers and kicking stones as she crosses the pavement. I sympathize with her mood. My hopes for this job transfer are like a kite struggling to catch air. Up, down, sideways.

The tribal police officer's fingers drum the metal just above the Choctaw emblem, pulling my attention. "You the new addition at Horsethief Trail?" No doubt he already knows the answer. Everybody here seems to have heard of me in advance, just not in a good way. I've been trying to let it roll off, but my Gore-Tex is wearing thin.

"I am. Got here a couple weeks ago. Staying in a cabin over at the Lost Pines Tourist Court until park housing is available. It's not bad. Gives me a chance to learn my way around Talihina."

"Well, that won't take long." The joke comes with a suppressed yawn. Spattered mud on his shirt testifies to the fact that his shift in the tribal jurisdiction hasn't been uneventful. "Watch out for Sydney," he offers out of the blue. "She's…been known to tell some tall tales."

The mom in me bristles. What an unkind thing to say about a kid who's dealing with a bad day, bad week, bad…whatever. "Sounds like she's missing her friends and her brother. Kind of a tough way to spend the summer when you're just…what…eleven or so?"

"Twelve, maybe. A couple of my nieces are on the same church field trip down there, so Sydney must be about their age. Mrs. Wambles drops all her group at the church every time the doors are open and someone's there to watch them for her." His tone holds an undercurrent, but I can't decipher it.

"Well, I hope her summer gets better."

His fingers drum the car door again. "So, you're the new park LEO?" Again, the question is rhetorical.

I nod anyway, affirming that I am the new park law enforcement officer.

The tiniest smirk plays on one side of his mouth. "Looks like they fixed you up good." A quick chin jerk indicates my patrol vehicle, which required a jump-start before being issued to me. I have less than affectionately nicknamed it The Heap. It came complete with wobbly mismatched tires and an AC that only works when it's in the mood. I feel like I'm being hazed.

"Looks that way," I reply.

"Not surprised."

I shrug. "I can handle it. I know my way around cars. Although I'll admit that one is a dinosaur."

He puts his shiny new cruiser in gear. I swivel away, resigning myself to returning to the ranger station. Working on brochures and picking out party plates and plastic silverware for the opening ceremonies can't wait forever. We have no public information officer here yet, so Mindy, the clerk typist at the station, and I are it.

To my shoulder, the tribal officer says, "They tell you about the bones yet?"

"Bones?"

"Figures," he grumbles, and then he's gone.