by Dianne Drake
“I’ll call for help,” he interrupted.
“No, listen to me. I’ve already called. What I need from you are blankets and a couple of pillows. Immediately.” The boy was already shocky, but warming him up and elevating his legs could lessen the trauma, help keep him stable until Eric got there. “And I need someone to go and find his family. His last name is Dawson. This is Troy, and he asked for his brother and father.”
When she clicked off, she didn’t have to wait for more than a minute before one of the lodge workers came running with an armload of blankets, followed by another one carrying pillows. Redmond followed up with a first-aid kit and several bottles of water, and he was flanked by two more workers who had come only in case more help was needed.
“We’ve got someone going up to his cabin now. According to the registration, they’re staying in one of the family cabins. And they’re a family of five—husband, wife, three children.”
Dinah had a sinking feeling that maybe Troy’s brother and father had been with him, that they might have been injured, too. But she didn’t want to voice that opinion and cause a panic. Best to leave the search to Eric, should a search become necessary.
“Dr. Ramsey called us. His ETA is two minutes,” Redmond informed her.
“How?” she said, then looked up as Redmond pointed to the helicopter coming into view.
By the time it had landed on the east lawn, which had been cleared of guests by another one of the lodge workers, Dinah had Troy’s feet propped up, and had him well tucked into his blankets. His pulse was still too fast, too thready, and he wasn’t responding at all to her attempts to rouse him by calling his name or by pinching him. It was a serious head injury, possible fracture, with bleeding and swelling. She was convinced of it.
“Any change?” Eric shouted. He was running hard in her direction, carrying a medical bag.
“No response.”
He dropped to his knees, and handed his medical bag over to her. Immediately she went for the blood-pressure cuff. Thirty seconds later, she looked over at him. “It’s ninety over sixty.” Too low.
“Pupils are responsive, but very slow,” Eric said.
Bad sign. But not the worst-case scenario by a long shot.
“So was he coherent when you found him?”
“He was walking…more like staggering up the trail.” She pointed to the south end of the lawn. “I watched him for a while because he seemed to be moving so slowly. But I didn’t know he was injured. Then as he made the clearing, even though I couldn’t tell, I had the feeling that something wasn’t right. So I ran down there, and he…he collapsed. Wanted me to tell his brother and dad. At least that’s what I thought he wanted. But, Eric, I might be wrong. I have this hunch that his dad and brother are out there somewhere, and he was the one who was coming for help.”
“Damn,” Eric muttered. He looked up at Redmond. “Does anyone here know for sure? Has anyone seen his family?”
“We’re tracking them down now. Nobody’s at the cabin, but one of our guests saw the mother and daughter go off together earlier. Didn’t see the father and sons, though. So I’ve got my people knocking on doors right now.”
“Then they could be out there?” Dinah asked, looking out to the vast expanse of woods around her, and the neverending mountains beyond that.
“I’m going to send him down to the hospital right now, go down there with him, then I’m coming back, getting Neil up here with me, and we’re going to start a search and rescue, unless I hear something different in the meantime.” He motioned over two of the hotel workers, instructed them to retrieve the stretcher from the helicopter then he made a phone call to the hospital. Two minutes later Troy Dawson, who’d yet to regain consciousness, was on his way to the helicopter, while Eric lagged behind for a moment. “I think I may have to take a rain check on that dinner later on,” he said, grabbing his medical bag and spinning away.
“I want to do this,” Dinah said, practically running to keep up with him. She was tall, but her strides didn’t come close to matching Eric’s, especially when he was in a hurry.
“What?” he shouted, the noise of the helicopter getting louder the closer they got.
“Help with the rescue,” she shouted back. “I want to be part of it.” Because she felt obligated. Because Troy had been trying to tell her something and she hadn’t been able to keep him conscious long enough to find out what. Hadn’t been able to hold on to Molly long enough…
“Can you find the trail he came up on?” he yelled, then motioned her away as he climbed into the helicopter. “That could get us off to a faster start if we know where to start looking.”
She was still nodding when the helicopter lifted off, watching it disappear over the older Sister in a matter of seconds. She had to find the trail…First thing she did was run to the kitchen to tell Oswaldo he would be in charge of the cooking. Next, she phoned Angela to let her know what was going on, and make sure she wasn’t in labor. Then she changed into hiking boots, put on a comfortable pair of jeans and layered on a couple of shirts with a green sweater, tied her hair up in a bandana and scrounged for anything that might be of help in a mountain rescue, even though she’d never been on one before. She had her medical bag…bandages, scissors, stethoscope. More bulk than she wanted to carry, but…
Out the door in a blink, she ran to the gift shop and grabbed up a souvenir backpack.
“You can’t take that!” the teenage clerk exclaimed while Dinah was dumping her med supplies inside, totally ignoring the girl’s protests. After her own supplies, she added a lightweight blanket she found on one of the giftshop shelves, as well as a flashlight, a small travel pillow, and several plastic bottles of water. On impulse, she scooped up a handful of candy bars and several pairs of fluorescent pink shoelaces popular with children. She had no idea what she’d need them for, but she felt better with a full pack.
“I said, you can’t take that!” The clerk was now yelling. “I’m calling Security.” Which she did. But the kindly old security officer, a man called Wallace Gilpin, who’d been perched on a chair almost outside the door, reading a magazine, scooped some packages of premade crackers with peanut butter from the gift shop shelf and handed them to Dinah.
“Protein,” he said. “Not much, but it could help.” Next, he dug a gold cigarette lighter from his pocket and handed it to her. “You might be needing this, too. But, please, take care of it. It belonged to my father.” With the lighter, he handed her his magazine. “And this, just in case you need a fire starter.”
“The brother and father were with him,” Redmond called from across the lobby. “And no one has seen them come back. We’ve sent someone down to the village to find Troy’s mother and sister. I’ve got a cell phone number for them, but I thought having someone tell them in person was better than a phone call.”
“Well, I’m going on ahead to find the trail.” In the whole scheme of a search-and-rescue operation, it would probably be a small contribution, but saving time had to be good. Especially with only a few hours of light left.
“Use this,” Redmond said, handing her a walkie-talkie. “Dr. Ramsey has his own communication, but it doesn’t hurt to have a back-up. And you won’t get cell reception once you’re too far away from the lodge. But these carry for quite a way.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Angela asked. She’d wandered down to the lobby, where Wallace was already scooting a chair in her direction.
“No, I’m not sure. But the one thing I do know is that I can’t sit around and do nothing. Eric needs me to find the trail, and if there’s a chance that Troy has a brother or father out there, and they need help…” She ran to her sister, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Let Redmond know if you need me…one twinge, Angela, and I’ll be back. Promise?”
Angela lifted her hand to wave, but Dinah was gone before she saw it. Running across the lawn, she discovered at least a dozen different trails, all starting at approximately the sam
e place, all leading to vastly different areas. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure where she’d seen Troy. At least four of the trail heads seemed likely, which meant she was going to have to go further. See if she could find traces of anything…blood, something he might have dropped.
Half way across the lawn, her cell phone jingled. “We’ve got Troy in the emergency room, and I’ll be back in a few minutes. Any luck finding the right trail?”
“When I find the trail, will you let me go out with you?” she asked.
“We’ll talk about it.”
“I want to go, Eric. I feel…responsible. If I could have kept Troy talking, I might have discovered where his brother and father are. Or, if I’d noticed him sooner, gotten to him quicker…” So many things bothered her, but the thing that bothered her most of all was thinking about someone else being lost out there. “I want to go, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
“On my rescues, you follow my orders, Dinah.”
“I’m a nurse, Eric. I always follow orders.”
“But you’re not experienced in mountain rescue.”
“Then send me back if I get in the way or impede the rescue. But give me a chance. I need to…need to do this. The idea that a young boy is out there somewhere…” She shut her eyes, trying to not picture all the possibilities of trouble that boy, and his father, could be in. But in the dark of her eyelids, she saw bad things. “I have to do this, Eric.” But she wouldn’t, if he didn’t want her. Because she was a good nurse. Because she knew how to take orders.
“Find the trail, Dinah. Just find the right trail…”
The first two trail heads turned up nothing. She went some way on each, looking for clues that Troy might have come that way, and found nothing. It was on the third trail she discovered fresh drops of blood…probably from the gash on Troy’s head. “Hello,” she shouted, on the off chance that the Dawson family was within hearing distance. Of course, no one answered, not that she’d really expected them to. But on impulse, before she headed down that trail, she tied a pink shoelace to a tree branch so Eric would know where she was starting. Then she plunged into the woods, looking for more signs that Troy had come this way.
There were signs everywhere. Scuff marks in the dirt indicated he’d been dragging himself exactly where she was tracking. And she found more blood droplets, and other larger marks in the dirt…handprints? Perhaps where he’d stumbled and fallen?
But there were only signs of one person coming through here. She’d hoped for more, hoped that a few feet into the woods she’d find Troy’s brother, or dad. Maybe with a broken leg. Something incapacitating, but not too serious. Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case, but she refused to allow early discouragement to get her down. Rather, she followed the obvious trail, one that was easy to read. Bargaining with God for an early success.
Everything reminded her of a giant jigsaw puzzle, and she was the only one there to solve it. “Solve it,” she whispered, bending down to have a closer look at the broken frond of a fern. Nothing. It wasn’t broken. Just not fully developed. And nothing else around her gave her a clue, which meant, to the untrained eye, the trail had run out not far after it had started. Maybe she’d gone the wrong way? Or taken a wrong turn?
Maybe she was letting the Dawson family down the way she’d let Molly down.
Suddenly a cold chill swept over her. What was she doing, thinking she could be of use out here, as a nurse, as…anything? In the distance, through the trees, she could still see the lodge, and the search activity mounting in the parking lot. It was time to go back. Raw, bitter discouragement was beginning to overtake her because she wanted to make a difference and she wasn’t.
“It’s not easy,” Eric said, suddenly stepping up behind her. “It’s never about strolling through the woods until you come across your victim.”
“But I thought that if I found the trail.”
“You did find the trail,” he said, holding up the pink shoelace marker. “This is it.”
In her mind’s eye, the scenario played out happily. She and Eric would turn the next bend in the trail and find Troy’s dad and brother sitting there, waiting for someone to find them. They’d be alive, slightly damaged, but good. Except the story she saw etched on Eric’s face told her something altogether different. “Worst-case scenario?” she asked.
“We run out of daylight without finding them. Or we find them and they’re…”
This was going to be a long, hard search and the hard lump in her stomach was telling her the outcome might not be the one she wanted. “I’m right behind you,” she whispered, as Eric took the lead. Instinctively, she looked up to see the sky, but the canopy of leaves overhead totally blotted out all but a few splotchy patches of light. “And I can run, Eric. I won’t slow you down.”
She followed him for the next twenty minutes, alternately running and stopping to assess the trail. Words between them were spared in order to conserve breath, but she did what Eric did. She observed everything, looking off to the sides of the trail, looking up, looking down. Once, when they stopped to take a drink of water, she asked the question she feared asking. “What happens if we have to go back?”
“We could lose the trail. It could be wiped out by a light rain, or a good wind. Since it’s spring, that’s highly likely.”
“And you don’t stay out after dark?”
“It depends on the situation. Normally we don’t keep the volunteers out. Too many people out in the dark becomes a risk factor itself. But I have some specialists who go out at night, and Neil’s getting them ready to go right now. He’ll send them on an alternate trail, one that parallels us.”
“All I can think about is that if we have to turn back, what if Troy’s brother and father are only over the next hill? How do you make the decision to quit, and start again tomorrow, when you could be so close?”
“Judgment…experience. I don’t ever like to quit, but if I’m leading the field team, I have to think about their safety first. Neil and I have a good group of volunteers who’ll put their own lives at risk to save someone else, and it’s up to me to make sure they don’t put their lives at risk.” He took one more swig of water from the plastic bottle, held it out to her, and when she refused another drink he capped it and clipped it to his belt. “It’s only going to get rougher up ahead, Dinah. We need to cover more area, faster, because daylight is getting to be a huge factor now.”
“Am I slowing you down so far?” she asked.
“No, but I don’t want to make this miserable for you, since you’ve never done this type of thing before.”
“What makes me miserable is knowing that…” She swallowed hard, trying to fight back the emotion. Eric didn’t need her to be emotional out here, didn’t need her thinking with her heart when a search and rescue such as this followed logical, ordered procedures. “I can do this, Eric.” She trusted that completely.
Actually, she trusted Eric with all her heart. Too bad her heart hadn’t found him when she could have given it to him. Because now, there was nothing left to give away except tatters. But, then, Eric had a few tatters of his own. So maybe knowing she couldn’t have him was part of the attraction she felt for him. If nothing else, it was safe.
Safe. Yes, she wanted to be safe. But how safe? “And I’m ready to run.”
He reached out and squeezed her hand. “When this is over, remind me to tell you how amazing you are.”
“I’ve got part of the team going up to the ridge, looking for a vantage point,” Neil relayed to Eric. “We might get lucky and find them by looking down, if we have enough daylight left. Oh, and Redmond’s just heard from the boy’s mother. She said her husband and the boys were going out to camp, but she didn’t know where, except they’d mentioned renting a rubber raft. Troy is eighteen, by the way, and his brother, Shawn, is twelve. William, the father, is forty, and in good health.”
“Where is she right now?” Eric asked.
“She’s gone to the hospital to
be with Troy. He hasn’t come round yet, and it’s not looking good. Scan shows a skull fracture, and they’re getting ready to fly him down to Salt Lake City for surgery. He’s got a subdural hematoma, too. Mrs Dawson will be going with him.”
“Damn,” Eric muttered. It would have been so easy to let the concierge know where they were going. But people came out here and did…foolish things. Foolish, like taking two sons and going off God only knew where for an adventure. Skilled outdoorsmen left word, drew their course on maps and left them behind as a reference. They checked in with the national park authorities. Told their wives. But amateurs went and assumed things would work out. Sometimes they prepared properly as far as the gear they took, sometimes they didn’t. More often than not, they didn’t do the proper research, didn’t tell anybody anything. More often than not, they were the ones he was sent to rescue. When there were fatalities, they were the ones who usually died.
No, he didn’t have a good feeling about this at all. Then he thought about Dinah again, and had to smile. For an amateur in outdoor rescue, she’d done it all right, sort of. Her inexperience taken into account, she’d left her markers for him, kept in touch, gathered up odd, but good supplies, according to the security guard. Good instincts. Untrained, but with a natural knack. Someone to train properly in rescue later on. If she stayed…
“Is Dinah keeping up with you? Because I could get someone from the hospital to run the base camp and come in to pair up with you. Or…” Neil chuckled. “Maybe you’d rather be pairing up with her?”
Eric studied her for a moment, standing off by herself, looking in every direction, studying, taking it all in. “What I’d rather be doing is having a nice quiet dinner—”
“With Dinah?” Neil interrupted.
“With Dinah,” Eric admitted. “But right now we’re taking a water break, eating protein bars, and getting ready to run another mile or two.”
“Toward the river,” Neil said. “If they were carrying a rubber raft…”
“Then they wouldn’t have gone too far.”