Evan

There were alcoves.

There were old soot marks on stone where someone had cooked a hundred years ago, or five hundred.

There were faint figures pecked into rock, bighorn sheep, stick people, spirals.

There was a quietness in there that wasn't just the absence of sound.

It felt like the air was thick.

Wes stopped near a small overhang and pointed at the ground.

There were bones arranged in a line, not a natural scatter.

Small animal bones, rabbits maybe, and a bird skull.

I crouched and saw dried plant fibers tied in a knot around one of them.

I didn't touch anything.

I photographed it and marked the location on my GPS.

It could have been kids messing around.

It could have been some kind of personal ritual.

It could have been nothing.

But the arrangement was deliberate, and in an investigation, deliberate things matter even if you don't know why.

On the way back down, we found a print in a patch of damp sand where a seep crossed the trail.

It was a human boot print, clear, then another, then another.

The prints came from above, from deeper in the canyon, and they headed toward the bench.

The tread was old, not modern.

The spacing was strange, too wide, too long, like someone taking steps that were just a little too big, a little too confident.