“Shoulda coulda woulda,” she muttered.
She wandered along, trying to be in the moment and focus on the simple joys of listening to birdsong and other sounds of nature. If she wasn’t lost, this would merely be another hike in the mountains, and she’d done this hundreds of times. So, she started trying to find where the birds were, looking high up into the branches each time she heard a call and response. She wasn’t too well-versed in birdese, so this would be a good way to learn more about them. The fog seemed to thicken and soon, while navigating a rock scrabble, she stepped on a rock that gave way beneath her feet, and suddenly she went toppling downhill, ass over teakettle till her tumbling body came to a sudden stop smack into the trunk of a large tree, and everything went dark.
Well. This was going to make things much more difficult.
Chapter Four
ELLIOTT stuck the pig and a bowl of fruit into the dog crate in a corner of the search-and-rescue office, located above the fire station in town. There were about fifteen volunteers already waiting for marching orders when he arrived. After a briefing, he learned the basic details about the missing hiker: twenty-five-year-old woman, grew up in the area, so very familiar with the mountains. Was supposed to have met a friend for drinks after hiking and never showed up. Didn’t answer phone calls. The friend had called the woman’s folks, John and Kathryn Lovingston, who had immediately sent their most recent picture of their daughter, but it was a good year old. The mother said she hadn’t changed much. They were looking for a woman who was about five feet seven with shoulder-length brown hair. How hard could it be to find her in a million-acre national park?
Their crew had specialists in mountaineering, orienteering, river recovery, off-road driving, first aid, operating a search drone, and even scuba diving (you never know when they need to search for a body in a river), and volunteers were being assigned duties in an effort to find her.
“The subject’s car was found parked at the Swiftcurrent Motor Inn,” Charlie Kincaid, the man in charge of the search, said of the parking area for the nearby trailhead. “Her cell phone was found on the floor of her car, there was an empty water bottle there as well, and a jacket was on the passenger seat, so it’s safe to assume she didn’t have anything warm with her since the temperature was in the high eighties and she hadn’t planned to be there long, according to her friend who was slated to meet her for drinks around nine. We think she started at the Iceberg Lake trailhead at around five o’clock.”
Elliott knew that area—he’d hiked there many times. How hard could it be to find her there? It was a pretty well-traveled trail.
“She was supposedly gathering huckleberries, and the area that people are known to go off-piste to find them was closed after a young adult grizzly charged a visitor who deployed bear spray.”
Elliott raised his hand. “So you’re not sending anyone out there till the bears have moved on?”
“We’re going to monitor things over the next few hours and make that determination. In the meantime, we’ll patrol areas free of bears, use infrared from above, and drones to search the difficult areas that are impossible for ground crews to reach. It looks like we’ve got weather coming in over the next day or two, so things could change quickly. But I’m hoping we’ve got her back by tonight.”
Elliott rolled his eyes. Who was stupid enough to go out there without a phone, water, and a jacket? This woman had grown up around Glacier and should have known better. Sometimes it chapped his ass how careless people could be with these mountains—Mother Nature was nothing to mess around with. Filled with spectacular beauty, these mountains could also be dangerous if things went wrong.
~*~
Sometime midafternoon, Charlie took a call that yielded information.
He clapped his hands and everyone gathered around. “I got a call from a gentleman who said he saw her early in her hike, about a mile past the trailhead. He said he was choking badly after having eaten some berries, and she offered him her water.”
“Did she fit the description?”
Charlie shrugged. “He said he was too busy choking to notice much about her, but he said she was about twenty-five for sure. He said he sent her off the trails where he’d found a lot of huckleberries.”
“So have the canine units been out that way?” some woman dressed like a firefighter asked.
“Yep.” He grimaced. “Took all sorts of crazy contortions, going a whole lot of wrong directions for a good distance, all the way up into the snowpack. But then the trail went dead.”
“Near?” Elliott asked.
“A big drop and a crapton of trees and boulders. SAR people couldn’t go any farther at that point. Having trouble getting a drone in there, and the other route that we could use has had too many grizzlies spotted for our people to safely get by there.”
Oink started making noises and Elliott got up to take her out to relieve herself. He figured if you can train a dog, you can train a pig. Oink’s next owner would thank him. Which reminded him—he wanted to call that woman up. Surely she’d answer her phone by now. He pulled out his cell phone and pushed send, but the phone again went right to voice mail. He was growing more and more frustrated with her. He didn’t want to show back up at the rescue clinic and get her in trouble with her boss for pawning off an inappropriate house pet. But he also needed to be done with this damned pig.
After the oinker did her business, he scooped her up and took her back inside. It was gonna be a long day, and he’d have to figure her out later.
Chapter Five
WHEN Coco came to, she was relieved she’d kept hold of the bag of snow the whole way down but wasn’t so thrilled when she took a look at her ankle. It was swelling up and sported a fat goose egg that was rapidly changing color. On top of that, her berries were all sorts of smashed in her pockets. She patted her forehead, only to feel a warm, wet spot. She took a look at her fingers, which were smeared with blood.
Well, shoot. This was going from bad to worse. At least it explained why her head was throbbing. She slowly started inspecting herself from the top down, moving her limbs, making certain other remaining body parts were still functioning. To her great relief, everything else seemed to be intact, so she was going to have to work around whatever little issue was going on with her ankle.
After catching her breath, she hoisted herself up and tried to bear weight on the injured ankle, only to yowl from the pain. Dammit. This was not good. How the hell would she get out of here if she couldn’t walk? She heaved a sigh of despair. It was late enough that she had to accept that she’d need to give that ankle a little rest before trying to do anything too strenuous on it. She looked around and saw the forest floor was covered in pine needles: she was looking at her very own plush Motel 6, Glacier Park-style.
She grabbed some smashed berries from her pockets and stuffed them into her mouth, then slurped from her bag of melting ice. Crawling on her on her hands and knees, she gathered up the necessary accoutrements to keep warm for the night: leaves, smaller limbs she could snap off of some nearby fir trees, and soon she bedded down for the night, mourning the lack of Advil for her throbbing head and ankle and lamenting the loss of civilization in general.
Hours after she fell asleep, she woke with a start upon hearing coyotes in the distance. Did coyotes eat wounded women lost in the forest? Were they like sharks and could they smell her bleeding head? If there were coyotes, could there be wolves far off? Surely, they’d be licking their chops at a bleeding woman who was out of commission. She sniffed long and hard to be sure she wasn’t smelling cat pee and wondered which was worse—death by a pack of wolves, or by a lone mountain lion who might drag her up into a tree where she’d die a long, slow death before being eaten? At least the wolves would cut to the chase and chow down: quick and less painful perhaps?
Coco tried to think happy thoughts. She thought about Oink and wondered how she was doing in her new digs, wondering if that cute man had even given her a second look. Wondered
if his mother hated her for having foisted a soon-to-be three-hundred-pound oinker onto her lap. Oy. Or would it be Oynk? If she got out of here alive, she would reach out to the man with the Lake Grinnell-blue eyes and a) take back the pig and b) ask him out for a drink. What with them being two wayward returnees to home base, maybe they’d enjoy each other’s company.
She wanted to get back to sleep because at least that made the time pass a bit. Plus you could only worry so much in a state of dormancy. And it might tamp down on her teeth chattering, which probably was a siren call to predators. She clamped down on her molars. No way was she going to serve herself up on a silver platter. She pulled up a branch of pine needles and pretended it was an electric blanket. She remembered one time reading that if you can’t sleep, you should take a deep breath and hold it for a count of four, then exhale. A handful of times doing that and poof! you’re asleep.
She tried to follow those instructions, albeit while breathing quietly. At long last, between the coyote sounds dissipating and the heavy breathing, she fell back into a troubled sleep.
~*~
Day three gave her hope. The fog had lifted. Hints of dappled sunshine speared through breaks in the overhead tree canopy. She’d find an opening that wasn’t snow-filled so she could stay there and wait for rescue.
She rolled over and tried to get up from being on her hands and knees, and once she put weight on that ankle, she accepted that today was going to suck big-time. Because she was going to have to hobble in pain until something went her way. She stood there with all of her weight on one leg like a flamingo, grabbed some smashed berries and gulped them down, put her lips to her watertight bag of now-melted snow, and gingerly sipped to save the precious fluid. Zipping the bag shut, she hobbled to the closest tree to take care of pressing business. The one upside to drinking very little and eating almost nothing was you didn’t have to take care of much in that manner. The downside was she was famished and had started fantasizing about a breakfast of maybe a pound of bacon, but then she thought of Oink and realized she might have to rethink her love of processed pork products.
Before she’d have to worry about that, she had to figure out how to walk with any sort of ease. Glancing around, she tried to figure out how to fabricate a bandage or splint or something for her ankle. Eventually she gathered up a bunch of vines and leaves, some sticky sap seeping from a tree, and a couple of sturdy twigs to rig up a splint. She glued leaves to the vines with sap and secured twigs on either side, wrapping her clever little natural bandage from the arch of her foot to above the goose egg injury.
Coco stood up, scouted which way made the most sense to proceed, chanted a quick round of “Eenie Meenie Miney Moe,” and aimed herself in the direction her finger had pointed. She found two sticks to help ease the way as she walked on her wounded ankle and started the slow slog to God-knows-where.
~*~
Coco made a mental note to binge-watch about fifty series on Netflix instead of hiking for the foreseeable future. That is if she ever got back to civilization and had a foreseeable future to foresee. Instead, right now, her ankle throbbed and her head pounded and her stomach growled and her parched throat wanted more than the meager sips she was allotting herself to conserve what little water she had left. And she wanted to cry. But she soldiered on and finally, she saw the curtain of trees parting in the distance, and in its stead, what looked like a high Alpine meadow with late-summer wildflowers and views. If someone were still searching for her and if they were using a drone or a helicopter, maybe she could be found.
She hobbled on her sticks and scanned the area for rocks, limping to anywhere she could find some and tossing them all till she had assembled a healthy pile. Using the rocks, she set about spelling out her message in three large letters: SOS.
Through a combination of tossing and lugging, she had the letters spelled out about twenty feet tall in an hour. Thank God she didn’t have to write a huge diatribe or she’d have died trying. She noticed in the distance the smoke from wildfires curling into the late afternoon sky, creating a haze. At least there was no sign of wildfires near her—so common in Glacier in the summer and they spread like, well, wildfire. She was having enough trouble without worrying about that. She hoped all the helicopter resources weren’t being used toward putting out fires and at least one might be scouring the horizon for her.
Exhausted, she sprawled out on her back and drifted off to sleep as the sun gave way to a twilight sky. She hadn’t even prepared herself for a cold night and was rudely awoken by splashes of cold water on her face. Rain. Crap. The good news was she could open her bag and collect drinking water. The bad news was she’d probably turn into a chunk of ice by morning if she didn’t protect herself. But she didn’t want to go far from her rescue message. She decided to scavenge for a handful more rocks and created a stone arrow pointing toward the forest line, hoping they’d take the hint and save her there.
For the time being, she opened her bag wide and tried to collect as much water as possible, keeping her head tilted back and her mouth open wide to refresh her palate while she waited, then retreated to the nearby woods to try to keep from being saturated. Later as darkness descended, Coco had a good cry, ate what remained of the damned berries that had lured her into this endless hell to begin with, and crafted a woodland bed for yet another night away from her life. She eventually drifted off to sleep with tears trickling down the side of her face, feeling more convinced than ever she’d never get back home again.
She woke to sunlight and the wub-wub-wub of helicopter blades cutting through the mountain air. She could hardly contain her elation and hobbled as fast as she could to the clearing, where she jumped on one leg and screamed over the noise as the chopper almost blew her down. And then it disappeared. Which was when despondency kicked in. She was starving to death. She had a finite amount of water left and even if it rained more, precipitation had the double-edged sword of being her salvation and doom, so she couldn’t even wish the hours away hoping for more rain as that would mean she was also hoping she’d freeze to death, drenched to the bone overnight.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a grasshopper. It was then she knew she’d reached the nadir of this hellish experience. Because she knew she needed the protein that this horrifying critter could provide her. She slammed her hand down over it, cried for about ten minutes over what she was about to do, plugged her nose with her thumb and pointer finger, squinted her eyes, nearly hyperventilated, then dropped the thing into her mouth, screaming as she did it. The texture was a bit like sticks and hay in her mouth as she tried to not chew but chew, all while screaming because, well, she was chewing a fucking cricket!
Sadly, her cricket munching efforts were for naught, because she no sooner tried her best to gulp it, even stroking her finger along her throat to encourage the muscles to cooperate, but her psyche was having none of it and she began to dry heave. She rolled onto her hands and knees as her body rejected the idea of her nutritionally sound breakfast and soon up came cricket bits along with whatever digestive juices had joined in the protest. And she was certain an antenna was stuck in her teeth. If she’d thought the low point was eating the cricket, puking it up was a further step down in the pecking order. She rolled over onto her back, tears streaming down her face, which was flushed and sweaty from the effort. Could life get any worse?
It was then she was certain she heard the sound of humans… right before she passed out.
Chapter Six
BY the time Elliott arrived for his volunteer shift on the morning of the fourth day of the search, he was rather discouraged—he knew the statistics were not in their favor at this point. The vast majority of lost hikers were found in the first twenty-four hours. Most of the remaining ones by day two. After that, the chance of being found decreased considerably. It bummed him out. Even if she had been a complete idiot for going out there unprepared, he hated to think of her suffering alone in the woods, afraid, hungry, cold, thirsty—thoroughl
y deprived of everything one needs in life.
He’d dragged Oink along with him again as she was becoming an unofficial mascot for the rescue volunteers. He figured if she gave them something to smile about, he’d go along with it. Even though he was ready to throttle the woman who foisted the piglet on him—how dare she ghost him like that? He’d been so busy working rescue in the dispatch center that he didn’t even have time to return to the animal rescue clinic to unload the thing. Although he had to admit, he’d been pleasantly surprised that Oink had been sleeping through the night. This morning he even had to wake her to go to the bathroom. That wasn’t so bad. In the house, she followed him around everywhere, which was sort of cute. He was starting to like the little porker.
The radio crackled and he focused his attention on it.
“Our subject was spotted from the sky. We have a team on their way now to extract her.”
Those in the room breathed an audible sigh of relief before breaking out into applause. Finally, everyone could return to normalcy, and—assuming they got her out without a problem and she was healthy—the missing hiker could finally return home. It would be the better part of the day before they got her off the mountain, so until then, the volunteers would wait till they knew she was in good hands before accepting the good news. For the rest of the day, Elliott remained at headquarters communicating between teams.
Late in the afternoon, they had word that the rescuers were within an hour of having her back to civilization, so he grabbed Oink and headed to the site so they could watch the SAR team bring the woman to the waiting ambulance—he’d heard she had an injury and needed to be seen by medical professionals. This being his first rescue since coming on board, he wanted to see the person they all worked so hard to save. He got to the trailhead and soon the group showed up, their patient strapped to a backboard, her leg in a splint.
Lady Killer (Confessions of a Chick Magnet Book 5) Page 3