by Denise Gwen
Then again, it was night-time.
Dang, this was getting worser and worser.
He hobbled deep into the woods and it took him longer to return than it’d taken him to get back, but when he reached the clearing, he was surprised to see the cabin door still closed and the fire dying in the fire pit.
And then he saw the bear.
Oh, dear.
The bear was drawing near to the cabin.
Oh, no.
He fumbled around in his haversack but couldn’t find the bullhorn. Dammit to hell, he’d left it behind in the cabin. He wanted to shout out to Sarah, tell her to use it, why didn’t she use it?
The bear walked through the fire, crushing it with her mighty, padded paws. The last, white glowing coals died as she walked through them. The bear walked right up to the door, stood up to her full height of eight feet and Jake trembled at the sight of her. She leaned her huge paws up against the door and sniffed.
She knows Sarah’s in there, dammit.
What to do, what to do?
He heard Sarah whimpering, her soft, weepy cries, and his heart ached. He’d left her alone.
With a sudden burst of inspiration, he reached up above his head, grabbed a tree branch and ripped it right off the tree. “Hey,” he yelled at the bear. “Hey, hey, hey.” He stood his ground, waving the branch wildly around his head and yelling. “Hey, run along, now.”
The bear turned around and looked at him.
“I mean it,” he shouted. “Go, get on out of here. Git.”
The bear dropped down to all fours and turned around and charged toward him.
“Whoa,” he called out. “Hey, there, hey, there, run along now.”
The bear ran toward him.
She was charging.
Chapter 11
January 21st
Jake reared his right arm back and flung the branch toward the bear and it took on a strange trajectory, flying boomerang-like and it struck the bear smack-dab on her snout, and the bear stopped, startled, then growled.
Uh, oh.
The bear pulled its lips back in a growl and ran straight for him.
He couldn’t run, he couldn’t run, he couldn’t climb; he couldn’t do anything other than just stand there. The bear would catch him, no matter what. He may as well accept his fate.
The bear roared at him and ran.
And then, just like that, it stopped.
Jake looked around the back of the bear and that’s when he saw Sarah. She stood in the doorway of the hut, clutching the bullhorn. She looked alternately terrified, exultant, and pleased. She pressed the button again and the bullhorn rang out into the clear air. “Go on,” she cried. “Get lost. Get lost!”
The bear looked confused. It lifted its head, sniffed the air.
Sarah pressed the bullhorn again and Jake’s ears rang with the shrill reverberations. It resounded in his head and bounced back and forth against his temples, and he wished Sarah would stop. And, when she finally did, it had the intended effect. The bear, cowed, slunk its shoulders and sidled off, her cubs following in close pursuit.
Jake waited for one tense moment, then another, then inhaled and let his breath out slowly. The bear had left the clearing, but she might come back, and he waited one more long moment, then let his breath out in a gasp and leaned against the tree for strength as his left leg buckled underneath him and he became light-headed and woozy.
Sarah lowered the bullhorn and gazed at him, her eyes wide.
He wrapped his left arm around the tree trunk for support and held out his right hand toward her. “Sarah.”
She dropped the bullhorn and ran to him and threw herself into his arms.
“Oh, that was close, so close,” she said, nuzzling her face into his chest.
“It wasn’t that close,” he said, but inwardly, he agreed.
“Oh, Jake, oh, my God, oh, my God, you saved my life.”
“I could say the same for you,” he said as he stroked her silky black hair, she lifted her face to him, and he kissed her, fully and she kissed him right back.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“Let’s go back to the cabin and wait for daylight.”
“Will they come?” she asked.
“Yes, they’re on the way.”
He let go of his hold around the tree and, wincing, wrapped his left arm across her shoulders and she grabbed him with her right hand circling his waist and together they slowly and painstakingly hobbled back to the cabin and once they got inside, he leaned against the wall and felt another wave of nausea and pain sweeping through him.
“Oh, you poor thing,” she said. “Here, let me get a bed set up.”
“What are you going to do?”
“This is what I’m gonna do. I’ve got a second sleeping bag,” and she pulled it out of her backpack and laid it out on the ground, then unzipped the first sleeping bag and laid it out, then joined the two sleeping bags together. They were not yet completely closed up, and after she’d spread out the sleeping bags and stretched them out, she helped him to lie down, which was very difficult, as he was in great pain, but she finally got him stretched out on the ground and with his back on a sleeping bag, and then she rucked it up around his legs, his hips, and then, finally, eased it up and around his shoulders and he cried out with the warm relief of it, and then she snuggled in beside him. In the palm of her hand she held an OxyContin tablet, an entire tablet this time, and he didn’t argue with her, but accepted it. He stuck out his tongue, she placed the tablet onto his tongue, and he swallowed it down.
She snuggled in next to him and lay down beside him, facing him.
“I wish I could make love to you,” he said, and this time, he didn’t amend it with, but I can’t because you’re engaged. No, the only thing stopping him now was his broken leg.
“I know,” she said, her eyes full and warm with love.
“Sleep,” he said. “You need your rest.”
“I want to tell you about my sister, Elizabeth.”
“Go on,” he said. “I want to hear of your sister.”
“She was my older sister, by two years, and two years younger than Rachel.”
“Yes, you were the youngest.”
“I was.”
“One day, when I was six, in the middle of summer, she complained of being tired all the time, and not wanting to run around and play with me, the way she used to.”
Her eyes shone with tears.
“I noticed the change in her immediately, because she loved running around with me and my friends, and she was fast. I had to run to keep up with her.” Her eyes grew unfocused, dim.
“I see.”
He gazed at her, mesmerized. She’d never before looked more beautiful, more vulnerable.
“But she didn’t want to do anything, all of a sudden, and all she did was lie around the house on the sofa. Her getting tired all the time was strange, so strange. My parents took her to doctors, but they all said was she needed rest, sunshine, and healthy food.” She shook her head with a weary anger.
The hurt has never left her.
With a sudden, keening insight, Jake asked, “Were any of these so-called professionals, either physician’s assistants or nurse practitioners?”
She flushed, and he realized he’d just discovered why she’d been so resistant to him practicing medicine. He had a pretty good idea where this was going, though, and he understood, in a way he’d not known before, why Sarah had held onto her bias against people with his training.
“Elizabeth kept getting worse and worse, the physician’s assistant said she had mono.”
Jake watched her, silent.
“Finally, my Mom took Elizabeth to a doctor friend, who felt a lump in one of Elizabeth’s lymph nodes. She sent her to Mayo Clinic for a thorough work-up, and that’s when they discovered she had leukemia.”
“Wow,” Jake said. “I’ll bet that was hard.”
“It was,” she admitted. “My parents got her
treatment, but there came a point when it became clear Elizabeth wasn’t responding well to the particular drug the doctor had prescribed her.”
“How old were you about this time? Seven, eight?”
“Ten.”
Jake whistled under his breath. “That’s a long time for a little girl to be fighting leukemia.”
“I know. She went into remission, and they thought they’d licked it, and everybody started breathing easier. But then it came back.” Her eyes welled up, but she fought them back. “By this time, by doing my own research, I’d found this new drug that’d just come on the market.”
“RBU ten-ninety-nine,” Jake said.
“Yes. It gets used a lot now, but back then, well, it was new and untested.”
“So, what happened?”
“I told my parents about this drug, and how I thought it might help Elizabeth, but my parents stuck to the same treatment regimen they’d used earlier, because that’s what the doctor back home recommended. Only this time, Elizabeth’s body didn’t respond as well to the treatment, and . . . she got worse, and then she died.”
She remained silent for a long time.
“I was angry with my folks for a long time after that, for not trying harder, for not trying the drug I recommended.”
“You were only ten years old.”
“Closer to eleven, by this time.”
“Yes.”
“I knew in my heart it’d help, and my parents didn’t listen to me.”
“It’s hard to second guess when it’s a child you love.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Is that why you’ve made it your mission to be . . . so assertive?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes bright. “It is.”
He sensed her disquietude as she rolled over onto her other side, with her back facing him.
It felt like a negation.
“Hey,” he said, stroking her hip. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said distantly. “I’m just tired.”
“That’s okay.”
He wanted to say something more, he longed to say something to her, but then he realized, perhaps it’d be better if he left her alone.
“What an exciting day it’s been.”
“Too much excitement,” she said, and right then, he knew.
I’ve lost her.
She lifted her head and he wondered if perhaps she’d heard the bear again, poking around the campground. He glanced up at the door, half expecting to see the beast charging in through the door at them. “What is it?”
“That sound . . . I think it’s a helicopter.”
In less time than she believed possible, they’d been rescued. She’d spent what felt like several lifetimes with him, and yet it’d only been twenty-four hours, if that, and now they were being rescued.
Sarah scrambled out of the shared sleeping bag, cried out with alarm at how cold it was outside the bag, and away from the soothing, protecting warmth of Jake’s body, and burst out the cabin door and into the campsite to greet the rescuers. A team of paramedics hoisted a gurney between them.
As the men entered the cabin, and as Jake lifted his head, she inhaled with horror at the sight of his face. He looked unwell. The pain medication had started to wear off, and the poor guy winced with pain as they set the gurney down beside him on the ground and adjusted the board.
“How much OxyContin did you take, Jake?” one of the paramedics asked.
Jake gazed up blearily at her. “How many did I take, Sarah?”
Uh, oh.
She noticed the curious way the paramedics’ eyes widened as they turned to look at her.
Did they think we had sex? As if! The poor guy has a broken leg.
“I gave him an initial dose of fifty milligrams, then another fifty, then a hundred, over a three-hour period.”
“I wouldn’t let her give me any more than that,” Jake said.
“Yes,” she said hastily, lest the paramedics think she’d been neglecting her duty in caring for Jake. “But I also gave him an initial fifty mcgs of fentanyl, when I was splinting his leg.”
“I need to unzip the bag, Jake, to get you out of it,” a paramedic said.
“I expected that,” Jake said.
The paramedic unzipped the bag and there, exposed and looking very pale and wan, was Jake. The splint she’d fashioned for him had withstood the bear attack, the long walk across the campsite to the cabin.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a better splint job in an ER,” the paramedic said.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, smiling shyly.
“Considering what you were up against, you did great.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
“Now’s the hard part,” the paramedic said. “You ready, Jake?”
“No, not really, but I’m going to have to be, aren’t I?” Jake shuddered with pain as they slid the cardboard shape underneath his body, then hoisted him onto the gurney.
“Easy, easy,” the paramedic said.
“We’re almost there,” the second paramedic said.
“Okay, one, two, three,” and the paramedics hoisted the gurney up and onto their shoulders and Jake cried out in pain and she regretted her selfish thoughts. Jake had been injured and needed treatment. And she needed to quit obsessing over herself and worrying what other people thought of her.
And yet, even in the remote Alaskan wilderness, it still bothered her. Somehow, in her deepest heart she knew she’d failed him.
“As soon as we get him onto the chopper, let’s get him started on some IV, and put some morphine into the drip,” the paramedic said.
She bit her cheek as she followed them out of the cabin and across the campsite, past the fire, and past the tree where he’d stood and heroically scared off the bear when it started charging, and then the enormity of what’d happened hit her with full force.
Jake saved my life.
Nobody would know that the branch Jake had thrown to save her life had distracted the bear long enough for her to get the bullhorn out of the backpack and let it rip. Nobody knew that the fire they’d tended had kept them warm and safe. And nobody knew that on that sleeping bag, now rolled up into a ball and stuffed into a haversack, which was now, at this moment, in a backpack on her shoulders, had been a place of great intimacy between them, where she’d shared the most painful story of her life, the terrible journey of her sister’s short life toward death.
She wondered what she could’ve done to make it easier on Jake and berated herself for all her mistakes. She looked at his pallid features, at the sweat running in streams down his cheeks, and realized the poor man was in a full state of shock.
He might yet die.
“You’re keeping up great,” one paramedic said over his shoulder to Sarah as they hustled the gurney out into the clearing.
This helicopter was much bigger, a military copter, but it was still a copter, and the last time she got into one, the durn thing crashed, but she had no more time for reflection, for a paramedic gave her his hand and helped her in and up into her seat.
They laid Jake down on the floor between the seats and the cockpit, she strapped herself in behind the pilot, unable to see Jake’s face. When they were all inside the copter and it was lifting up into the air, she looked out the window at the scenery, and a swell of wonder and love filled her heart. What beautiful, majestic countryside, and yet how dangerous, too. That was the rugged beauty of Alaska, a state so unlike anywhere else on earth.
“We’re taking him to Anchorage,” a paramedic told her.
“Good,” she said.
“A treatment team’s ready and waiting to take care of him. He’ll be in good hands,” the paramedic assured her.
“I’m glad.”
Jake lay on the gurney, his eyes closed, and she watched his shallow breaths. A paramedic got an IV going, and then gave Jake an intravenous shot of fentanyl. She checked the dosage as he administered to Jake, and she nodded with approval.
/> After a little time passed, Jake stopped shaking.
But all the same . . . Jake was so ill now he didn’t appear to notice as the helicopter crept up, higher and higher until it cleared the mountain.
Sarah gazed raptly at the mountainous peaks and ridges. It would’ve taken her all day long, and then some, to hike that mountain, but the copter cleared it in the time it’d taken her to clear her throat.
She was surrounded on all sides by people, and yet she felt so alone. She tried not to look at Jake. The poor guy looked so broken, so defeated. She wondered if she’d succeeded in killing him?
A soft touch at her thigh. She looked down, startled, and her heart lifted when she saw Jake looking at her, and reaching for her with his right hand.
He wants to hold my hand.
Tears streaming down her cheeks, she did just that.
Chapter 12
Anchorage Hospital
January 21st
The moment the helicopter set down on the roof helipad of Anchorage Hospital, a group of orderlies wheeling a gurney hurried toward them. They eased Jake out of the helicopter on the makeshift gurney she’d fashioned for him before the rescue helicopter arrived and whisked him away through the rooftop door.
A third orderly stood by, and when the helicopter pilot indicated she could disembark, she did, and grabbed all their things. The orderly helped her inside and led her to the bank of elevators and then brought her back out into the emergency room on the ground floor.
She saw an orderly pushing Jake’s stretcher into an exam room, and walked toward it, when a hand weighed down her shoulder and she looked around.
“Ma’am,” a nurse said. “That patient’s being taken care of and needs to be in a quiet environment.”
“But I’m his—” and she stopped short, the words dying on her lips. What was she, exactly, to her beloved Jake Roundtree? His colleague? Yes, she was his colleague. But he’d become so much more to her than a mere colleague in the last forty-eight hours. She felt a special relationship with him that she knew she couldn’t explain to this lady in thirty seconds or less.
The nurse gazed inquisitively at her. “Are you family?”