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fillets they dined on that night. It was his favorite meal. Soon they began to hear the daily cracking of the ice floes in the river. Only the first eight-foot portion of each side of the 60-foot-wide waterway froze solid enough to support the boys' weight. Tomek and Drake could always count on open water and cold fishing if need be.
    Spring came just as it did every year with the breaking up of the river ice. It was quite a powerful and magical thing to see. Every ice chunk that came from upstream would eventually pile up into huge ice jams along the front of their bend in the river. The jams would stick around every year for about a week and then slowly make their way downstream. Leaving behind plenty of fresh gouges in the riverbank and shorelines, much like a glacier carving out an entire continent. The ice floes were so heavy this year that the path of the river had changed and now the whale rock was completely underwater. The ice floes would also leave items behind that the boys found useful. Logs for building or burning, random eating utensils, hand tools, fishing rods and even camp stoves often would wash down stream and not make it past their bend.
    The river often had a way of bringing them what they needed in terms of food and supplies. It also disposed of what they didn’t need, such as the bones of a hunter or two. It was what they did not need that would soon matter to them the most. Many months after the fact and thirteen miles downriver in Pine Run, a small lumber mill town, what they thought they did not need showed up on top on an ice floe.
    A child playing on the ice floes that had come ashore had grabbed it having no idea exactly what it was and took it right to her father. The girl’s father, being the local sheriff, knew exactly what it was and had a good idea on who it might have belonged to. The sheriff’s notions were confirmed the minute he read the label on the back: Property of the United States Department of Justice.
    Tomek had no clue that the waterproof satellite phone would have made it this far. He had no clue the batteries would have survived through the winter in the river. There was no way for either Tomek or Drake to know that the hunters were the sons of a high-ranking government official. There was no way for them to know that the hunters were promising college star athletes. Most of all, Tomek could not have known that the phone tracked its coordinates via GPS.
    The hunters' disappearance was a national news story. Both from a political standpoint with a powerful father, as well as on the athletic front. Multiple rescue parties were dispatched. Only they were 15 miles to the west of the where the hunters took their last breaths. The snow and ice conditions of the following winter had stopped the search parties from getting any closer. With the discovery of the phone and its data now downloaded, the parties could resume their search efforts utilizing the GPS tracking software. This in effect would put them in the twins' orchard. The track would continue down the hill and then into the river. It was out of pure luck that Tomek never took the phone directly to the cabin.
    Not only did the phone give insight to the last known locations of the lost hunters, there also were four photos saved to its internal memory card. The sheriff, an outdoorsman himself, knew the hunters could not have survived that hard of a winter, but he still was shocked as he flipped through the stored images. The first picture featured the hunters together in their camp and then a picture of the dead buck lying below on the river bed.
    The sheriff then looked in horror at the third image, which clearly showed hunter number one’s naked body in a pile of brush with an arrow through his head and chest. The sheriff now knew that the government official’s sons were not just “lost.”
    The last photograph on the memory card confirmed his suspicions. The same sheriff who had investigated the disappearance of two