“Gotcha.”
“And Leon?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Take care, will ya?”
Leon paused for a moment, and Eli could almost see his expression of puzzlement. “Always, boss,” he finally replied.
“You folks can make yourselves comfortable,” Leon Wilmot said to the tourists in the small cabin that served as Alaska Bush’s office. “Eli will be back in about half an hour. He’ll refuel and then head out with you for your sightseein’. You, Doc, I’ll escort to Shubert.”
“How far is it?” Bryn asked, suddenly remembering Eli calling Leon something like a “crazy old pilot.”
The short, wizened man was already moving out. “C’mon, Doc. You got your first patient waitin’ on ya,” he said from the open doorway.
Bryn followed him down the bank to the docks, to a Cessna on pontoons. He opened the door to enter, caught himself, and stepped back to assist her in. Jamie came down the slope to give the prop a good pull and help them cast off. The Cessna, like the de Havilland, was tight inside, and Bryn struggled to get situated with her bulky Housecalls bag and an overnight duffel. “Sure you don’t mind dropping me at Summit after this trip?”
“No problem,” Leon said, smiling at her with teeth that were in sore need of a dentist’s care. “We won’t be but seven miles from Summit.”
“That’s what I figured from the map. I’d be happy to pay—”
“Please. It’s my pleasure, Doc.”
It had been a week of twiddling her thumbs and plowing through the latest Oprah pick. The thrill of finally seeing a patient, to do what she had come to Alaska to do, charged through her veins. She had been about to scream, what with her constant thoughts about Eli, here, in his home turf, and memories of them together at Summit driving her to distraction. She had just called Carmine, asking if it would be okay to spend a long weekend up at the lake, when the emergency call had come into headquarters.
“Go ahead and go,” Carmine had encouraged. “We can radio you there and pick you up at the lake if necessary.”
Leon nodded at Jamie, who cast off their mooring line, and he headed out toward the end of Fish Lake. A gray swan and seven cygnets scattered in the wake of the prop wash, hustling into the safety of tall, yellow-green reeds. And then Bryn and Leon were motoring down the lake at increasing speed, the highway and Alaska Bush coming into quick view. Bryn’s hand tightened around the other, but she willed herself not to scream. The plane lifted at the last possible moment, clearing the cabin by twenty feet—twenty feet that felt like two.
“You got grit, Doc,” Leon said with nod and a cracked-tooth smile. “Gotta love a woman with grit.”
Bryn struggled to find her voice. “I’m in Alaska now, aren’t I? And I’ve done my years as a cheechako. It’s time to do as the natives do and fit in.”
They landed on a pristine robin’s-egg blue lake, just a mountain saddle over from Summit. It occurred to Bryn that it might have been there that the poachers had once landed their own plane. A white-faced, winter-worn woman greeted them at the shoreline and, trailed by two small children, led them up to the tiny two-room cabin where they made their home. In the back bedroom, a man was trying to sit still, trying not to writhe in the obvious agony he was enduring, and a broad bandage was soaked through with bright red blood.
“First things, first,” Bryn said, taking control of the situation. “Mr. Jurrel, I’m Doctor Bailey. We’ll get you feeling better right away or ferried out of here to Willow.”
“Want to stay here,” he said through clenched teeth.
“That’s up to me to decide,” Bryn answered. She bent to unzip her Housecalls bag, searching the compartments for lidocaine to ease the man’s pain, 3-0 Vicryl to sew up the first, deeper layer, 3-0 Silk to close, Betadine, and an antibiotic ointment. “Had a tetanus shot in the last seven years, Mr. Jurrel?”
“Four years ago,” he gritted out.
“Good. You’re up to date. How’d this happen?” she asked, still looking for the 3-0 Silk while trying to keep the man’s mind off the pain.
“Chopping firewood. Stupid. Stupid of me. My boy came up … wanted to help. All of a sudden he was in my line of swing and … tried to avoid him. Hit me instead.” He managed a rueful smile, and Bryn realized with a start that he couldn’t have been any older than she was. This country had a means of aging people that was startling. Tough, mean, long winters. Only the narrow shoulder seasons of spring and fall and the delightful summer kept them at it, kept them all holed up in Alaska. If it was only winter, they’d all run from here screaming. But those other seasons made it all worthwhile.
She quickly cut away the bandages Mrs. Jurrel had applied and efficiently injected lidocaine along the wound. “You did good work here, Mrs. Jurrel,” Bryn said with a smile of encouragement. The woman had enough to deal with in her two rambunctious children.
“The wound’s clean. The ax missed anything important, lucky for you,” she said, noting the proximity of the femoral artery, half an inch from the cut. “Looks to me like you’re going to need about twenty stitches, some cleaning up, and bed rest.”
“Told ya we didn’t need to radio in,” Mr. Jurrel said to his wife.
“You did the right thing,” Bryn interrupted. “You talk tough now, but you wouldn’t want to suffer these stitches without anesthesia.” Thoughts of Eli, memories of stitching him up in her cabin, tumbled through her mind—broad, strong hands; tender hazel eyes. But he was not hers to dream about anymore. He was Sara Cussler’s. And Bryn had every intention to stay out of their way. No one would ever claim Bryn Bailey as the cause for unhappiness again. Not if she could help it.
“I have some whiskey somewhere,” Mr. Jurrel said with a pained smile.
“You just sit back and let modern medicine do its duty,” Bryn said, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder.
They were taking off from Shubert Lake when a second visit request was made from Housecalls. There had been a cave-in at the old Lone Gulch gold mine, where, Leon informed her, operations had recently been started again.
“When it rains it pours,” Bryn said with an assenting nod to Leon’s unspoken question. “This is what I came to do.”
Leon banked the plane, wing to sky, and headed off toward his new coordinates. “The only problem,” he said so softly she almost didn’t hear, “is a good landing site.”
Bryn licked her lips and stared out the window. Please, Lord, I am here to serve you and the people. Please get us there in one piece. She didn’t care to be in an accordion-like crash, her body one with the earth. But eventually she relaxed. The Cessna’s loud hum had almost lulled her into napping when Leon took a sudden dive toward land.
Bryn sat up straighter, frightened, but the old man let out a shout of glee. “Just wanted to wake you up, Doc,” he teased.
“I’m awake.”
Leon flew low over the mine site, tipping his wings at the frantic man on the ground who waved a red flag. The mine was little more than a dark hole against a naked mountainside with three outbuildings. They surveyed the impossibly short, boggy arm of the river nearby as their landing strip. Leon banked and made another low run.
“Leon—”
He held his hand in the air, shushing her, staring outside at what Bryn hoped wouldn’t be their own site of catastrophe. He banked the Cessna again, this time going over the waterway and reeds and mud like a pro golfer judging how far it was to the tee. When he pulled up and banked, then banked again, Bryn couldn’t hold her tongue.
“Leon, we can’t make that.”
“Sure we can, Doc. Just close your eyes if it scares you.”
He came in low again, just a few feet above the rolling tundra, making Bryn fear that it would be the land and not the water that would kill them, that it would take hold and grab and flip them into a cartwheel, or worse, a dead stop. But onward they rolled, the engine slowing, the nose up, so that as soon as they hit the nearest bank, Leon had the plane in the water, madly
working to slow it down, the far bank almost upon them.
At the last possible moment, he made a high-torque turn, and Bryn let out a little scream, finally shutting her eyes. It was then she realized they had come to a full stop, the back ends of the floats neatly tucked on the muddy bank.
“You okay, Doc?”
She fought for breath. “Fine,” she managed. “Fine,” she said again, as much to reassure herself as to convince Leon, who was already out the door.
The man with the flag met them at the riverbank, his booted feet sinking a few inches into the sludge. It had rained here recently, maybe accounting for the cave-in. The man, who introduced himself as George Schwender, shouldered Bryn’s Housecalls bag and hustled her to the largest of the outbuildings, which served as a temporary triage unit.
When he opened the door, five men spilled out, and Bryn quickly entered to examine the injured miners. The first had a compound fracture of the forearm that would require surgery; the next was suffering from a wound to the eye and would also need surgical care; the third and final victim was still unconscious, possibly with a broken neck. Bryn’s eyes widened as she gazed from one patient to the next. “These men all need a hospital, not an emergency medic. I can stabilize them, but they need to be taken to Willow.”
“Didn’t know it was so bad when we called,” George said, hands in his pockets. “We were still gettin’ them out. Would’ve asked for a helicopter to airlift them, but you were so close—”
“Fine,” she said, waving her hand to shush him. She looked at Leon then. “How long would it take to get a chopper here?”
“Probably come from Anchorage. Hour, hour and a half. Depends on what’s avail—”
“These men don’t have that long,” she snapped. “They need to be in a hospital in under two hours or we might lose him,” she said, nodding at the unconscious one. “I’ll need you to make two stretchers to get them to the plane and out of here. The guy with the bad eye can probably walk, right?” She waited until he nodded slightly, and then she went to work, doing her best to stabilize them for the miserably long and bumpy ride back to town. She had seen the gray bank of clouds moving in as clearly as Leon had.
She edged toward the unconscious man first. “Has he been conscious at all since the cave-in?” she asked.
“Yeah. Complained of pain in his neck. He was thrown backward when it happened. Couldn’t get up and walk out of the mine,” said the nearest man. “Said he couldn’t move his legs.”
Bryn wrapped his neck in a plastic collar from her bag, trying her best to immobilize his spine. Who knew what damage his fellow miners had done in moving him to the mess hall. “Okay, now when we move him to the stretcher, our goal is to keep his back as straight as possible.”
She moved on to the man with the broken forearm, which was at an odd angle at his side.
“Hi.” She looked in his eyes. “I’m Doctor Bailey.” For a moment his gaze connected with hers in a nod before the pain of his injury reclaimed his attention. “This is going to smart,” she warned. Then with a quick movement she reduced the fracture, snapping it into place. The man screamed in agony, and all eyes moved to Bryn. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking in her bag for a portable metal-and-foam splint. She quickly wrapped his limb and surrounded the support with an Ace elastic bandage.
“His leg? Why do you think it’s broken?” She directed her question to the crew boss, still a little ashen and wide-eyed over her quick movement. “George!” Bryn shouted.
“Uh, he couldn’t put weight on it. Said it hurt like all get-out.”
They were probably right in their assessment, but without an x-ray, a broken tibia was tough to tell. She rummaged for her other splint and wrapped his leg too. The man moaned. She drew up a hundred milligrams of Demerol and gave the man a shot in the rear to ease his agony.
Turning to her last patient, she said, “Looks like your eye’s in a bad way.” The man remained silent while Bryn fashioned a disk out of a plastic foam cup and taped it over his seeping eye. She was in no position to extract anything inside and then close the wound in the middle of the Lone Gulch mining camp. It was better to send him to the hospital. As she wrapped gauze around his head, she gently probed his zygomatic arch. He winced, even with the Demerol in his system.
“That bone could be broken. Tell the doc when you get there. They’ll x-ray it. You’ll be fine.”
“Am I gonna be blind in that eye forever?” he finally said.
“I hope not. They do amazing things these days. We’ll say a prayer for you. For all of you.” She rubbed his arm in encouragement, and then they moved the patients out to the plane.
They were at the Cessna before Bryn realized there would be no room for her to go, not if Leon wanted to get off that slender band of water. He had already taken the two backseats all the way out of the fuselage to make room for the other two on stretchers and to reduce his total cargo weight.
“Guess I’ll have to come back for ya, Doc,” Leon said, helping the man with the wounded eye in first, to sit beside him up front, in the cockpit. “Won’t scare him so much since he can’t see that approaching bank,” he whispered to Bryn.
She half laughed and shook her head, turning to get out of the way as the men brought the other victims aboard. Leon led her off to a small stand of spruce and pushed a gun of cold metal into her hands. “It’s loaded. You know how to use it?”
In shock, Bryn turned over the Colt and studied it. Her dad had taught her to use firearms as a girl, hoping she might one day be a hunter as he was. “Yeah. I can use it.” She supposed it might come in handy here, in a mining camp.
“Good,” was all Leon said, returning to the plane. Bryn tucked the gun into her waistband, underneath the back hem of her coat.
If Leon could just manage to get off safely and over the mountains to Willow in time, they all might make it. Again Bryn cast her eyes to the gray sky.
“Hey, at least you packed,” Leon said, eyes twinkling as he dumped at her feet the bag she had intended for Summit. “I’ll be back when I get these guys situated and the weather clears.”
Bryn licked her lips again, staring at the grizzled old pilot, suddenly fully aware that she was in a mining camp full of perhaps twenty female-starved men, miles from civilization.
“You’ll be all right, Doc. Have you got any money to gamble with?”
Bryn thought about it, remembered the twenty she always carried in her shoe. “Twenty bucks.”
“That’ll get you into the game!” a miner yelled behind her as Leon shut the fuselage door and grinned even more widely. Leon gave her the thumbs-up sign and tentatively made his way over the injured to sit beside his one-eyed copilot. In minutes he was revving up the engine for a short-field takeoff and then was rushing the far bank like a high-school hockey player dead-set on getting the puck. He cleared the trees by a matter of eighteen inches, and a miner at her side let out a long, low whistle. “Don’t make flyboys like that anymore.”
“Come on, Doc,” George said, coming to her side. “We’re a hospitable lot when we put a mind to it. Come in and we’ll have ourselves some supper and then a game of cards. You play poker?”
“You left her there?”
“Doc’s own mind to do it too. She could plainly see that she couldn’t come. You know that bog. Can barely get two people in and out, let alone five,” Leon defended. “She’s a grown woman. Can take care of herself. Besides, I left her my .357 in case she comes up to any trouble.”
“You gave her your gun,” he said flatly.
“Told me she knows how to use it.” Admiration shone in the older man’s silver-blue eyes.
Eli sat back, thinking that one over. Bryn Bailey with a gun. Since when? Maybe the streets of Boston had proven harder or scarier than she had anticipated. Maybe she’d had a brush with a mugger or … “I can’t believe you left her there,” Eli said again, as angry at this feeling of insecurity and helplessness as he was at Leon. He knew he would’ve done t
he same thing, had the situation been reversed.
“Now look, Eli, I—”
“Who’s the mine boss out there now?”
“Fella named George Schwender.”
Eli stalked over to the radio. “Think I’ll call up there now, ask to talk to her.”
Leon went to the window. “There’s no gettin’ her out. Not till this storm blows over. She’s fine, Eli. George’ll look after her.” He paused. “You worried ’cause she’s a woman or ’cause she’s Bryn Bailey?”
Eli ignored him and bent to turn the dials on the radio when footsteps on the front porch caught his attention. It was Sara, with a jar full of wildflowers and a bright smile on her face. “Thought you could use a little color on what promises to be a gray—” She sobered at Eli’s look. “Eli, what’s wrong?” she asked, abruptly setting the bouquet down and coming to him.
“Well, Leon just …” Eli stared at her for a long moment, then at the mike in his hand, then back to her. Quietly he set it down. “Nothing’s wrong. Storm’s blowing in. Want to go grab some dinner before it lets loose?”
“Sounds good,” Sara said, her tentative smile returning. She looped an arm around Eli’s waist, and he slipped his around her shoulders. Together they went to his desk where he grabbed his keys and cell phone.
Before exiting, Eli turned and looked at Leon with what he hoped was a meaningful glance. “Leon, check on that client for me, will ya? Just to make sure, I have this with me,” he added, holding up his cell phone. “In case there’s anything to report.”
“Won’t be nothin’ to report, boss,” Leon returned, “until that storm passes by and we can see for ourselves.”
“Check on it anyway,” Eli said, then turned away, knowing he had revealed how hung up he still was on Bryn. And the knowledge that he was being somehow unfaithful to Sara burned deep inside him.
The miners proved to be harmless, as appealing and problematic as a den of wolf puppies. They obviously longed for a feminine gesture, a word spoken in a soft voice, a flip of her long hair—lapping it up like milk. And after several shots of Jack Daniel’s, the men were laughing and having a great time, their bellies full of caribou and whiskey, a fire burning brightly in the wood stove, and twenty almost-clean bodies shoved into the mess hall for a game of cards.
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