He lopped off the smaller branches at a point just beyond the fence, then tumbled the remaining log onto the ground and sectioned it into cordwood lengths. He made a pyramid of the logs in the back of the truck and set to work mending the wire. Now and then a car or truck rolled by on the county road, and he would raise a hand to the ones he knew and only stare at the ones he didn’t, at the strange faces that turned to stare at him, this solitary working man in a pasture, this human face among the trees and the grasses and the mountains and the sky. There was such randomness in the world, the passing faces told him, such strange and meaningless intersections—this man could be him, or this man. He looked for some ordinary man in a certain kind of car, any kind of car or truck that said mountain, that said unmarked roads and mud, deeply rutted paths, and he would follow. It was madness, but it was all madness; if a man should randomly pick his daughter, then why shouldn’t that same man randomly cross his path? Wasn’t this the way of the world? Wasn’t this the way of the god of that world? He’d trail the man out of town, up into the mountains, his heart racing, his heart growing hot, until the truck he followed, the jeep, would turn at last into a driveway, an ordinary mountain house, smoke spilling from the chimney . . . a child’s dropped bicycle under the pines, a big dog bounding out and leaping at the man who looked back, who caught Grant’s eye and nodded and waved and turned to his house as the door opened, and there was a woman in jeans, in a loose white sweater, leaning for a kiss.

The time he followed one man to the end of a high road that turned out to be no road at all but the man’s driveway and no easy way to turn around, and the man was a ranger and knew him. Angela and Sean were back in Wisconsin by then and Grant was alone in the motel, alone in the resort town at nine thousand feet. A year by the calendar since she’d vanished, one hour by the heart. You need a break from these mountains, said the sheriff.

Now Grant shook his head like a man coming out of a dream and turned back to his hands, the clip they were fastening to a steel T-post, the pliers twisting and tightening.

Other times he would pause altogether to stare into the hills beyond the ranch, up into the climbing green mountains. The sunlit creases in the pines where some living thing might travel, bear or moose or hiker or daughter. One speck of difference in the far green sameness and he would stare so hard his vision would slur and his heart would surge and he would have to force himself to look away—Daddy, she’d said—and he would take his skull in his hands and clench his teeth until he felt the roots giving way and the world would pitch and he would groan like some aggrieved beast and believe he would retch up his guts, organs and entrails and heart and all, all of it wet and gray and steaming at his feet and go ahead, he would say into this blackness, go ahead god damn you.

A moment later, when a cigarette had been placed in his lips, a flame made to light its tip, the smoke drawn into his lungs and held there, and held there, and released at last into the sky, Grant would be calm again, and he would get back to work.

2

They carried the walkie-talkies and they carried their phones and they remembered a show they’d once watched about a girl locked in an underground bunker texting her mother (remembered their own daughter sitting between them, a thin and budding girl of twelve in summer pajamas, bare knees drawn to her chest, smelling of her bath, riveted), and they played and replayed the one message from Caitlin, the last one, her voice breaking on the single word. The sound of an engine in the background and the sound of wind and then a sound like the phone dropping and then the silence.

Daddy, she’d said—but they had not heard her. Had not heard the call. They’d been in bed. They’d been fucking.

In those first days, those early disbelieving days in the mountains, they did not hold each other and they did not weep in bed at night. They spoke of what had been done that day and what must be done the next and who was going to do it—who would sit with Sean at the hospital and who would take sandwiches to the volunteers and who would get more posters printed and who would contact the school back home and who would meet with the sheriff or the FBI men or the reporters again and who would go to the Laundromat, a grotesque feverdream of the domestic, and when they had talked themselves to exhaustion, when sleep was coming at last, Angela would pull them back to pray. She would pray aloud and she wanted Grant to pray aloud too, and he would, in those early days, though it made him nearly sick, the sound of his own voice, the sound of those words in the cheap little room.

Days into weeks. Grant wheeled Sean out of the hospital and the three of them took two rooms on the ground floor of the motel and those rooms were now home and headquarters—papers and supplies and lists and maps on every surface. In town, when a poster came down, Angela somehow knew, and the poster was restored. Weeks into months. In early November Sean turned sixteen; they remembered two days later and went out for pizza. Angela’s calls began to be returned less promptly and sometimes not at all, and when she called the sheriff she was no longer put right through but had to speak to a deputy first, and often the sheriff was not in, nor was he up in the mountains searching some unsearched quadrant of forest. Such helicopters that sounded overhead—the sound of urgency itself in those throbbing blades, of all-out human and mechanical response, massively adept—beat across the sky toward some other purpose.

It may not be just a case of a needle in a haystack, the sheriff told Grant. It may not even be the right haystack.

How do you mean?

I mean a smart man don’t steal a pony from his neighbor. Pardon the analogy.

You mean he might not be local. This man.

I mean a man might drive quite a ways looking for just the right pony.

They’d come to the Rockies thinking it was a place like any other they might have chosen: chronicled, mapped, finite. A fully known American somewhere. Now Grant understood that, like the desert, like the ocean, the mountains were a vast and pitiless nowhere. Who would bring his family—his children—to such a place?

He returned to the motel and checked with Sean in front of the TV, and then stepped into the other room and shut the door and went to her where she sat at the desk staring at the laptop.

Angie. He needs to go home.

What do you mean?

He needs better care for his leg. He needs to be back in school. Back with his friends.

She turned to look up at him. What are you saying?

I’m saying it’s no good for him, keeping him here.

Are you sure you’re talking about him?

Grant didn’t answer.

We can’t go back now, Grant. You see what’s happening here. You see what’s going on.

One of us can go back with him. For a little while.

You mean I can go back. You mean me.

I can keep things going here. I can keep Sheriff Joe going.

And who will keep you going?

He stared at her, and she turned away, and she began to shake.

Angie. He put his hands on her shoulders. He raised her to her feet and pressed her to his chest. He held her as her legs gave out, then moved her to the bed and eased her down and held her. After a while she stopped shaking and he swept the hair from her eyes and kissed the tears up from her cheeks and he kissed her lips and she kissed him back and then she kissed him truly and something broke in his chest and, kissing her, he put his hand between her legs, and at first she let him, but then suddenly her thighs tightened and—No, stop it!—she shoved at him and fled into the bathroom and slammed the door and he could hear her in there moaning into a towel.