“You’ll have to drag me,” she said.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, sweetie. You’re in pain. Just try to relax; I’ll figure something out.”
“John, listen to me. Stop.” Her hand found mine and paused my work. “John, stop.”
I looked into her eyes for the first time since the bear attack, and found that they had lost none of their strength or vitality. She might be fading physically, but mentally she was right there with me. And she knew a lot more about the outdoors than I did.
I pinched my lips together and nodded jerkily, agreeing to let her call the shots. For a moment.
“I know you feel like you need to take care of me,” she said. “But you can’t do this alone. We’re both injured, we have limited resources. We need to work together to get back to our daughter. I need you to trust me.”
I nodded again, feeling my raw eyes pool with unshed tears. I finished wrapping her leg, securing the gauze with strips of medical tape, and then loosened the tourniquet a little to restore some blood flow to the leg, hoping the pressure from the bandage would slow the bleeding enough. But that blood was important if she was going to heal. If those wounds were going to try to close up.
Regardless, it was the best I could do for now. It didn’t, however, answer the question of how we were going to get out of here. I knew she couldn’t walk and knew I wouldn’t be able to carry her that far. She might have been small, but even I had my limits as to what I could carry and for how long.
“Okay, sweetie,” I said. “There was a small cabin about five miles back. I noticed it on our way over from Ellis Woods this morning. If we can make it back there, we might find a radio or a vehicle. We might find help.”
I hadn’t thought much of the cabin when I’d first seen it. I certainly hadn’t looked at it as a possible destination. Then again, I hadn’t been expecting all the animals in the woods to go crazy. Or a freaking bear to attack us.
But we were going to have to do what we were going to have to do. And right then, that meant getting her out of the elements—and away from any animals that might smell the blood and come around thinking they were going to have a free meal. An easy target.
“First things first,” I continued, without waiting for an answer. “I’m going to have to build you a stretcher.”
I lashed the final corner of my improvised stretcher together, threading the tent cord through the canvas and wrapping it around the end of the sapling before tying it off and sitting back to inspect my work. Angie had given me pointers here and there—between bouts of faintness—and though neither of us had done anything like it before, and we were now trying to figure it out in the most stressful situation ever, I thought we’d done an okay job. I’d gone into the woods to find two saplings of equal size to use for the frame of the stretcher and cut them down using nothing but my hunting knife. The four-inch blade had not been designed for chopping down trees, but I hadn’t had a choice.
My wife was dying. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a small knife blade stop me from saving her.
The first thing I’d done was leave the two sides of the frame a little long. It meant the thin branches at the top of the saplings would be dragging behind us, making this more of a sled. With luck, it would keep the thing from digging into the snow.
With luck, it would mean quicker travel for us. Because the day was getting darker and darker, and I was having more and more trouble getting Angie to wake up when she faded off. We had to find shelter, and we had to find it quickly. I ripped through the tent with my knife, cutting cloth for the sled, and grabbed the ropes that would have held the tent to the ground for binding the canvas to the saplings. The result was a narrow length of tent canvas stretched between two long saplings, a ski setup at the back, and handles for me to hold in the front.
Our tent had been absolutely destroyed, and though it was worth it, it also meant that we’d have no protection against the night. We had to find that cabin. If we didn’t, or if we got lost, we’d be stuck out in the woods without any protection whatsoever.
If that happened, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore. But that wasn’t an option.
I gathered together the rest of the supplies, trying to think through what we might need, and stuffed as much as I could carry into my pack. Then I very carefully moved Angie from the truck to the stretcher and bundled her up in every blanket and scrap of cloth I could find. I would be moving and would heat up quickly. But she was just going to be laying there. It was going to make her horribly vulnerable to the seeping coldness of the air.
“You move your arms and good leg every five minutes or so,” I told her firmly as I tucked the last blanket up around her ears. “Keep the blood circulating. I don’t care how much it hurts. I won’t have you dying of hypothermia, do you hear me?”
She nodded, but I didn’t know how much she was actually even hearing at that point. I was losing her. Quickly.
Too quickly. We had to get the hell out of there.
Before I picked up the branches and started running, though, I went through some of my training. What was I forgetting? Was there anything else that I needed to do before we left?
Then I remembered. “Arrow,” I whispered to myself.
A marker for anyone who might come after us. Something to tell them where we’d gone. I dug through the snow near the truck, scraping and stomping out the shape of a large arrow pointing in the direction I intended to take us. Then I filled it with stones—and hoped that it didn’t keep snowing, and that the rocks would stay visible. If anyone saw it, they would at least know where we were headed.
Not that anyone was likely to come.
In a final moment of inspiration, I walked over to the dead bear and yanked the deer antler from its neck, cleaning the blood away in the snow and returning it to my pocket.
“Okay, Ange. Just hang on. We’re gonna find you some help.”
I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me or not, and added stopping every few minutes to manipulate her extremities to my list of things to do.
Five miles. I’d said it had only been about five miles to the cabin I’d seen. God, I hoped I was right. I secured my backpack on my back, hoisted the end of the stretcher up by the handles, and started the long walk toward the cabin, dragging my wife behind me.
Hoping we would reach shelter before nightfall, and before my strength gave out.
The snow clawed at my boots, forcing me to fight for every step. Weariness dragged me toward the frozen earth, but I pushed through it, channeling old habits from long days spent marching across rocky Afghan terrain. My arms and back ached with a slow burn from dragging Angie’s stretcher behind me, and I stopped every time I thought about it to check on my wife and move her arms around. Massage the circulation back into her good leg.
I didn’t mess with her broken leg. I didn’t want to start the bleeding again. Figured that at this point, the cold might be good for it. Might be keeping the wound from going bad.
Then, finally, after what felt like one thousand years, I saw something in the distance. I didn’t know what it was at first, but after several minutes of squinting and holding my breath, it finally began to take shape.
A cabin. Right there next to the road, just like I’d thought. A cabin. Shelter. Safety. And perhaps a way to contact the outside world.
I watched it materialize from the trees like a ghost fading into view, thanking every deity I could think of for delivering us. Behind me, Angie was quiet, and though I wondered if I should wake her and tell her that we’d found shelter, I decided not to. Instead, I started pushing myself harder, making my steps longer and quicker. Angie was fading quickly, and the sooner I could get her under that roof, the better.