The first sign was the dogs.
Hale had two of them, big mixed breeds that lived in the outbuilding with the snowmobiles and had been quiet all day in the way that dogs are quiet when nothing is asking for their attention. At ten past nine they started, not barking but a low sustained sound that was worse than barking, a sound that meant they had detected something specific and were reporting it in the most serious register available to them.
Hale heard it first. He was at the back window and he turned his head and listened and then said one word. "East."
Reyes was already moving to the eastern window. He pressed himself to the wall beside the frame and looked out at an angle, not straight out, never straight out, and scanned the tree line in the way Colton had shown him months ago, not l
