“I saw lights in one of the buildings last night,” Bender whispered. He pointed from the brushy hillside. After leaving Jim Golly’s forest road, they had crossed a rivulet of springwater in one long stride, then bushwhacked painstakingly through underbrush, mindful of a dog, until they could look down upon the same vague geometric shapes that Sheriff Kick had seen from the airplane: arcs and partial rectangles, limned by just-visible gaps in the natural meadow plants. She strained to see clearly through ground fog that drifted up and became lustrous as it intersected with sunlight. As she focused, she began to understand what Bender meant by “buildings.” She began to see depth, a perpendicular plane. She was looking at walls.

“Otherwise I would have bumped right into one of them,” Bender said. “Those are sod buildings, like pioneers, natural bricks, dirt and root and grass, blend right in. But there were lights and moaning coming from the bigger one on the far right.”

The coulee looked about a hundred yards across and three hundred yards long. Birds called cheerily as they flitted through its layered fog and light. The tiny creek, rocky and fast, barreled down the center, bobbing jewelweed and oxeyes. She counted four structures, two rounded, two squared.

“Some are sheds,” Bender whispered, “storage probably. There are two more of those round ones that we can’t see because they’re right under us. That other square-cornered one is a garage where I saw the vehicles. Both the square ones are dug back into the bluff behind them. We’re just looking at the front. The one on the far right, I guess that’s the house.”

“You saw lights? You mean lanterns?”

“No, incandescent lights. No power lines. No generator running. So, solar. Batteries from his brother. He had to have support to live this way.”

Bender pointed toward the opposite ridge, where the sun ignited a stagger of tall red pines.

“Off that way is where I heard the dog barking again, kind of trailing away, and more gunshots—”

He stopped.

“Sheriff, speak of the devil.”

A great black dog galloped out of the pines and down a tarn of tumbled limestone toward the coulee bottom. From the last rock the creature leapt and disappeared, its progress toward them marked by stirring goldenrod and asters. Then it reappeared, trotted out between the two rounded sod buildings, and leapt over the creek. Now they could see the dog wore a harness with a handle. Once across the creek it advanced more slowly, head raised, sniffing in their direction.

“Or maybe that’s the devil’s guide dog,” Bender muttered as he raised his rifle.

She stopped him, pointing down the near bluff. Below them, three lean and ragged coyotes pawed through a mound of earth, haunching up and squirming backward, yanking on something buried. The dog had picked up the coyotes’ scent.