Page 3 of Tracked By the Mountain Man
But I can read the story they tell: someone moving too fast, not paying attention to direction. Someone running from internal demons rather than navigating toward a destination.
I've seen it before. Grief makes people reckless, pushes them into the mountains seeking something they can't name. Usually it's men after a divorce or job loss. But sometimes it's someone carrying a different kind of weight.
The trail climbs steadily, switchbacking up a steep slope thick with pine and fir. My breathing stays steady despite the pace—twenty years of mountain living will do that. But worry gnaws at my chest with each step. This path leads toward some of the most remote terrain in the Darkmore wilderness. If Leah Walsh is out here alone, injured or disoriented.
A flash of blue catches my eye through the trees ahead. Bright blue, the color of a hiking jacket. I quicken my pace, pushing through a stand of young aspens.
The overlook opens before me like a wound in the forest. A jutting promontory of granite offering stunning views of the Darkmore range and a sheer drop of nearly two hundred feet to Silver Creek valley below.
She's sitting on the edge.
Leah Walsh, twenty feet from a fall that would kill her instantly. Her dark hair escapes from a ponytail, her shoulders shake with sobs that carry on the wind. She hasn't heard me approach over her own grief.
My heart pounds. One wrong move, one startled reaction, and I could be carrying another Walsh twin down this mountain.
"Leah?" I keep my voice low, calm. The same tone I use for spooked horses and cornered wildlife. "Leah Walsh?"
She spins toward me, eyes wide with shock and recognition. For a moment we stare at each other across the years and the space between us. She's older now, sharper somehow, carved thin by grief and time. But those eyes are exactly as I remember.
"Tyler Brooks," she whispers. "You were part of the search team."
I nod, staying motionless. "That's right. I'm with Darkmore Search and Rescue." I gesture carefully toward the cliff edge. "Mind stepping back from there? Makes me nervous when folks get too close to the drop."
Awareness creeps back through the haze of grief. She looks down at the edge, at how close she came to following her sister, and scrambles backward.
"I didn't... I wasn't going to..." She can't finish.
"I know." And I do. This isn't suicidal ideation—it's grief so raw it's made her blind to everything else. "But this isn't Eagle's Rest, Leah. This is Devil's Thumb overlook. You've wandered pretty far off the main trail."
She looks around as if seeing the landscape for the first time. "I got lost. I was trying to follow the creek path, but I couldn't remember which way we went that day, and then I was thinking about Katie and I just..." Her voice breaks.
"Happens more than you'd think." I ease closer, close enough now that I could grab her if she startles toward the edge again. "These trails can be confusing, especially when you're dealing with a lot mentally."
"You remember me." Not a question.
How could I forget?The image of her collapsing when we brought Katie's body down is seared into my memory. The way she keened like a wounded animal when the medical examiner confirmed what we already knew. The sight of identical faces, one still, one shattered, haunts my dreams more often than I care to admit.
"I remember," I say simply.
We sit in silence, the wind moving through the pines around us. In the distance, Darkmore Peak catches the last golden lightof afternoon. Beautiful and treacherous, like everything in these mountains.
"I came back to finish what we started," she says finally. "Katie and me. We were supposed to summit Eagle's Rest together."
"That's a good goal." I keep my voice neutral, professional. "But maybe not alone. And maybe not today. The sun's getting low, and you've been out here a long time."
She turns to look at me fully, and I see that desperate determination I recognize from other lost hikers. The need to push forward even when every instinct says to stop.
"I have to do this," she whispers. "I have to finish it."
"Why?"
The question hangs between us. She stares out at the mountains, at the vast wilderness that swallowed her sister whole.
"Because I'm the one who lived," she says finally. "And I don't know how to do that without her."
The honesty in her voice, the raw pain of survivor's guilt, hits me like falling rock. I've seen this before, families torn apart by mountain accidents, survivors who carry the weight of the dead like anchors.
But Leah Walsh, sitting on this cliff edge with tears streaming down her face, breaks through the professional distance I usually maintain. Maybe it's the years I've carried her sister's memory. Maybe it's the way grief has carved her face into something both beautiful and heartbreaking.
