THE HUNT FOR LORRAINE:

Brendan Buhler, Las Vegas Sun

Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2006 | 7:37 a.m.

Call it the Hunt hunt, as in: Where is Nevada Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt?

It's the final week before the election, a time when candidates, especially underdog candidates, are eager for media coverage, desperate for coverage, willing to perform fantabulous and humiliating stunts for coverage. But Hunt?

Trying to track down her schedule, the Sun called her Southern Nevada office Monday morning. No one answered, so we left a message on the machine. Ditto when we called her Northern Nevada office. Next came e-mails to her campaign consultant and her campaign Web site. Then, because we generously call ourselves the working press, we repeated the calls in the afternoon.

No answer.

Tuesday morning, we made the calls again. No answer. In the early afternoon, we called the lieutenant governor's office in Carson City.

A human answered.

"We don't know where she is," the woman said.

She transferred us to a spokesman in Las Vegas, who was not in.

Reluctantly, we called the campaign offices again. The answering machine had begun to sound prophetic: "Hunt for governor."

Just after 2 p.m., our phone rang. It was Hunt's campaign manager, Frank Roberson, nearly 27 hours after we first tried to find the candidate.

Roberson cited the pressures of the campaign trail, which can be enormous. He described her public appearances for the next three days, but said she didn't have anything scheduled between Friday's debate in Reno and election night Tuesday.

"I'm sure we'll come up with something for her to do," he said.

"We're trying to make up 13-and-a-half points," he explained, referring to the estimated distance between Hunt and Republican front-runner Jim Gibbons. "We've never published our schedule and getting that out there, to be honest, is not really a priority."

"She's uncomfortable having everybody know where she is all the time."