Leave No Trace - Softcover

Nyala, Hannah

3.87

159 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743451716 ISBN 13: 9780743451710

Publisher: Pocket, 2002

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A trip to the Australian outback with her boyfriend, Paul, and his young daughter becomes a nightmare for Native American search-and-rescue tracker Tally Nowata when Paul and the child mysteriously vanish in the harsh desert landscape and Tally becomes the target of merciless killers out to destroy them all. By the author of Point Last Seen. A first novel. Original.

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About the Author:

Hannah Nyala's experience as a Search and Rescue tracker in the United States brings a gritty realism and emotional depth to the action-packed fictional adventures of Tally Nowata. Her previous Tally Nowata novel, Leave No Trace, is available from Pocket Books, as is her highly acclaimed memoir, Point Last Seen, which was made into a CBS-TV movie starring Linda Hamilton. She is currently at work on her next Tally Nowata novel. Visit her website at www.pointlastseen.com.

Chapter One: Day 1

I worked my first search for the National Park Service the day I turned nineteen, and found my first dead body three days later.

Her name was Loren Blair, young and athletic and as good on a mountain as anybody ever gets -- a first-rate climber in a class of her own -- but she wasn't climbing the day she disappeared. She was simply out for her morning run, tall and blond and beautiful as always, looking more like a model than a nature rat, when she stepped off the trail, slipped, and fell to her death. Five days passed before anyone even reported her missing. I didn't get to her till two weeks later, far too late to do anything but call in the 11-44 and bag the body for transport and try desperately not to throw up in the process. Loren no longer looked like a model or a climber. She belonged to the dead, not the living. Nothing and no one could bring her back. This is the bitter edge of the work I do. The smell of death never lets up.

The next day the Chief Ranger made me a permanent part of the Windy Point Search and Rescue Team, and since then I've been stationed in the Grand Tetons, mountains that draw plenty of people who are a lot less prepared and fit than Loren Blair was. I've been trained to rescue these people, dead or alive, clothed or not, in all kinds of situations and all kinds of weather. I can rappel off a rock face carrying a grown man and do a solo rope rescue without backup, if needed. I can ski an injured climber off a pass in a blizzard and control the descent. I have been well trained to do these things.

But I have not yet been trained to deal with myself at the smell of a three-week-old corpse. They can't train you for something like that.

And I certainly wasn't trained for this.

Nobody can train you to die.

My name is Tally Nowata and this morning, for the first time since I was ten, I remember my dreams.

I dreamed of rain and then of dying and then of rain again and woke in a cold blind sweat, reaching for my half-finished net like a drowning person lunges for a line except my net was on hot sand instead of water. Red desert sand that hasn't seen rain in at least a year to boot -- which puts the lie to the wet part of my dream and punches the death part home. Hard.

It's the bird, the songbird, that brought me to this, not the situation, not the sand, not the fear, not even the raging hunger. It's just the bird. My very own personal last straw.

Two months ago I wouldn't have eaten a songbird to save my life. Today I did exactly that. Stranded in a strange desert 10,000 miles from home, starving, alone, and beginning to come unraveled at my seams, and still, the worst of it is having to eat bird.

"When you get down to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on," Grandmother Nowata used to say. She never said what to do with the nausea that comes with hanging onto your own rope that tight. Or what you're supposed to do if you discover your neck in the noose. Pray for double joints from the waist up and squirm free if you can, I suppose. That is Oklahoma's answer for anything a gun won't solve.

Never was much for a gun. Ropes are more to my liking, but a rope here would be overkill. The best tool I have for this job is a hank of flimsy hemp twine, and its rough edges did a number on my fingers this morning. Every knot I tied in my homemade net left its mark on me, but I squared them off anyway, four by four out from the middle until it was the size of a small tablecloth. My hands are still raw and shaking and look like they belong on somebody else -- one of the dead tourists we pulled off the Skillet Glacier last year maybe. Minus the bloated pallor, mine look just like theirs did when we zipped them into the body bags: blue-gray, chapped, and battered from the struggle to survive.

On the carryout, Jed quipped that if only they'd prepared their minds for the backcountry as well as they had their fancy, color-coordinated, Goretex-studded gear, we might not be having to tote them and it out.

"Any man who can say tote and hold up his end of a litter at the same time might be worth keeping around," I muttered, easing my way down a section of scree while trying to keep my side of the litter stable, and Jed shot me the bird with his eyes and almost tripped in the process.

"People pick some of the most inconvenient places to die, don't they?" Jed grumbled, regaining his feet and making do with a gloved finger my direction. I grinned and winked at him. Jed's been my best friend, colleague, and climbing buddy for nine years. We've shot each other the bird so many times we can do it without moving a muscle, so one of us going to the trouble of raising a finger is like shouting through a bullhorn. (And winking back is the rough equivalent of poking the bullhorn inside his eardrum and hollering at the top of my lungs.) I could feel Pony Sutton grinning at the back of our heads. The Windy Point Search and Rescue crew has been together so long now we know each other's every last quirk. That is handy for the kind of work a SAR team does: total equality, total comprehension means we don't have to waste words unless we just want to. Jed shook his head. He could feel Pony's grin on us too.

Laney Greer piped up from the head of the second litter. "Bet the jackets these blokes're wearing cost $500 apiece. Pay my rent and part of the super's with that kind of dough. And just look at all the good it didn't do them."

We got quiet then, the way you do on a carryout sometimes -- not tense, just focusing on the job, no longer able to leave issues of mortality to someone else.

Pony broke it up. "New gear's a dead giveaway, Lanes," she deadpanned, and we all groaned at her bad pun, then laughed not just because it was true but because every last one of us needed a break from knowing what we were toting right then.

It's a fact. People who pitch up in the wilderness sporting the latest outdoor fashions are a SAR team's surest customers and biggest nightmares. We used to bet on how fast it would take them to need rescuing after they left the visitor center at Moose and how big the callout would be for each one. Ten dollars a head for every SAR crew member called in to work the gig; two for every body put on standby. Since a big search can sometimes have more than a hundred people on the ground and that many more packed and ready to show up, our bets got lucrative fast. I paid for a two-week vacation in Yosemite that way one time, and the rest of the crew groused about it for three years in a row, but that didn't stop us betting on the tourists.

Paul once said it was arrogant the way we did that. "Save people's lives and bust your sides laughin' at 'em all the way home." When Paul is annoyed, the Louisiana bayou baptizes every word.

I tried to explain it -- how if you don't laugh when you're scraping somebody's body off the rocks and hauling it down the mountain you'll go right round the bend in your own head -- but couldn't, so finally agreed, "Hell yep, it's arrogant. Got a right. Let me tell you one thing for sure, O'Malley, one thing for damn certain. You ever see me needing the services of a SAR team, you can count on it -- bet the farm you don't own and your next girlfriend's pretty blue eyes too -- it'll be a cold day in hell proper. Very cold, like switching that brimstone for this blizzard, poof!"

"As if one little Indian girl could change the whole ecosystem of hell," he drawled, and I retorted that if you spend enough time anyplace you eventually get around to working on the decor.

"And please don't call me Indian because I am only half." This has always been a sticking point with us. Paul puts more stock in ethnicity than I do. He can afford to. He's Cajun and Irish. I am something a good deal more complicated.

So here it is. Midsummer in the Tanami Desert of c

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