High Country Hero

by Ford, Holly

  Mitch was standing there watching them, a look on his face that stopped Lennie’s heart. Beside him, Nate was buying a jug and Tess was tearing into a packet of chips, her eyes on the TV screen. Lennie felt her mouth open. As she continued to stare, Mitch gave her a single nod of acknowledgement before turning away. With a brief word to Nate, he headed for the stairs.

  ‘Pick us a horse,’ Benji was saying, his arm still draped around Lennie’s shoulders, ‘and I’ll get us a drink. What’ll you have?’

  ‘Excuse me for a second.’ Lennie ducked away. ‘I just have to get something from the car.’

  She caught up with Mitch at the exit of the tunnel. ‘Mitch?’ He kept walking. Throwing dignity to the wind, Lennie scampered after him. ‘Mitch!’

  In the cold light beyond the stand, he came to a halt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she began.

  ‘No.’ Mitch’s back was still to her. ‘It’s okay. It makes a lot of sense.’ His voice was brusque but calm. ‘You and Benji are good together.’

  Struggling for words, Lennie reached out to touch him. Mitch turned under her hands. For one weightless moment their eyes met, her body flushing with the memory of last night, then, somehow, Lennie’s back was against a portacabin wall and she was clinging to Mitch’s shoulderblades as he kissed her hard, a kiss that wiped her mind of everything but the need for the length of his body pressed to hers. When it stopped, she had to fight for breath.

  ‘I…’ She tried to rally a thought. Jesus.

  Mitch’s arms were still braced against the wall on either side of her head, but he’d turned his face away. ‘You have to get back to Benji,’ he finished for her.

  Well, right now she kind of did, yeah. But…‘That’s not what I want.’

  ‘It should be.’ He paused. ‘It’s a better choice.’

  Ugh. Lennie kicked her heel against the wall behind her in frustration as Mitch walked away. Did he think he was protecting her?

  Pulling herself together, she set out after him.

  ‘Lennie?’ As she emerged from the alleyway between the portacabins, a figure planted itself square in her way. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ Kath Prentice smiled. ‘I didn’t recognise you for a moment without your white coat.’

  ‘Kath.’ Lennie peered around her. ‘Hi.’

  ‘You know, I’ve been meaning to call you all week. Suky’s been doing the strangest things since you gave her those pills and I just don’t know—’

  ‘Look, Kath, I’m sorry.’ Lennie could see Mitch about to enter the public stand. ‘I really can’t stop right now.’ Putting a hand of apology to Kath’s shoulder, she moved forward. ‘Call me later, okay?’

  ‘Lennie!’

  Shit. She looked back at the sound of Benji’s voice.

  He was coming out of the tunnel with her bag in his hand. ‘You’ll need the keys to the car.’ He held them up.

  ‘Such a handsome young man, that one,’ Kath whispered to her. ‘You two make a lovely couple.’

  Lennie took a last, desperate look at the crowd up ahead, but Mitch was gone.

  Fifteen

  Bone-tired and wind-burnt, Lennie drove home through the slanting afternoon light. Her rear-view mirror—for once not entirely taken up by a wall of white fur—blazed with the lowering sun as the hairpin bends that gave Snake Gully its name twisted east. In the last eight hours, she’d treated three horses and a house cow, artificially inseminated a herd of pedigree dairy goats and debrided the lame hoof of a very sweet Jersey bull, and she was ready for a long shower and a large glass of wine. Not necessarily in that order.

  As the road straightened, heading west for Kimpton, she smiled at the sight of yet another skein of crafty mallards heading for the pond in the park. It was going to be standing room only in there by the end of duck-shooting season. Passing through town without stopping, Lennie turned into Chalfont Road and followed it over the hill, lowering her visor against the flicker of the sun through the pines as she reached the final straight.

  At the end of it, she pulled into her grandfather’s drive, debating yet again whether, after said long shower and large wine, she was going to try calling Mitch one more time. Maybe she should just give him some space. Maybe, argued a voice of self-preservation that was getting increasingly difficult to ignore, she should give him a lot of space. Maybe Jim was right, and it was too hard. Maybe three days of trying to apologise, and explain, to a guy who refused to speak to her was enough. Especially when he had no right to an explanation, and by any sane measure she hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Just because the whole Kimpton Valley had jumped to the conclusion that she and Benji were some kind of item didn’t give Mitch the right to do it too.

  Okay, it had looked bad. Really quite bad. She got that. But still…

  As usual at this point in her internal argument, Lennie tried not to dwell on how hurt she would have been if the situation had been reversed. If it had been Mitch laughing in some other girl’s arms the morning after he’d left her place. It had looked like what had happened between them had meant absolutely nothing to her, that’s how it had looked.

  Having parked in the garage, Lennie climbed out of the truck. The side gate was already open—that was strange. Walking towards it, she shifted her kit bag onto her back, freeing her arms in preparation for Pesh’s welcome party. Nothing happened. Lennie looked around. Was Pesh sulking because she’d been left behind today?

  ‘Pesh! Where are you?’

  The garden was eerily quiet. With a growing sense of unease, Lennie walked past the conservatory to the back lawn. Oh shit. The gate to Alice’s paddock was open too. What the hell? Hurrying through it, Lennie searched the shadows under the trees. They were empty. Alice had gone.

  Lennie cupped her hands to her mouth. ‘Pesh!’

  Okay. Okay. Surely Alice couldn’t have gone very far. But having completed a circuit of the house, the only traces Lennie could find of either Alice or Pesh were a hoof print in the rain-softened ground outside the shed where the deer nuts were kept and a few bite marks in the hydrangeas.

  ‘Pesh!’

  Lennie listened, waiting for a bark, a crash, the sound of the dog returning. There was nothing. Except, from somewhere, a distant gunshot. Her stomach knotted. Duck shooters, she reminded herself. Just duck shooters, that was all.

  But maybe, if someone had been shooting closer by, the noise might have scared Alice down the drive. Something must have taken her down there—short of jumping a fence for the first time in her long life, it was the only way she could have gone. Down the drive and into…Lennie swallowed. Into the road. With Pesh.

  Some of the neighbours might not stop to ask questions if they see a stray dog…

  And some of the neighbours drove the blind bends around here pretty fast. Trying not to panic, Lennie set off down the drive. Halfway to the road, in the mud of a drying puddle, she spotted another hoof mark. And then, the unmistakeable print of Pesh’s giant paw. Oh, this was bad. At the end of the drive, in the middle of the road, a scatter of deer droppings lay over the centre line. Lennie stared up the short stretch of tar seal to the first bend. Oh, Alice. Stupid, stupid old thing. What the hell had she done?

  Lennie was just about to run back for the truck when her eyes fell on the close, dark ranks of the pine trees across the road. That, surely, would be a better way for a deer to go? Hurrying over, Lennie scanned the ground. Yes! There was a clear, fresh print heading into the trees. She looked up the steep slope.

  A couple of hours’ drive away, on the other side of these hills, forestry roads headed into the old Crown plantation. There were walking tracks, a firefighting reservoir, picnic tables and information boards. On this side, there was nothing but trees. She could barely even make out the light that marked the top of the ridge.

  Heading in, Lennie cupped her hands again. ‘Pesh!’ Her voice fell dead among the pines.

  Readjusting the strap of the bag across her shoulders, she struggled up the slope as best she could, tryin
g to hold a straight course towards the strip of daylight she could glimpse high above. There was no hope of finding more tracks in the slippery carpet of pine needles under her feet.

  ‘Pesh!’

  All around her, the forest was silent. Pesh would come if she could hear her, Lennie knew that. Even if it meant leaving Alice. She’d come to Lennie if she could. But what if she couldn’t? What if there was something stopping her? There were fissures in the steep clay that could break the leg of a galloping dog, spikes of branches that could impale, trap a collar, asphyxiate…

  ‘She won’t be running,’ Lennie told herself, aloud. ‘She’ll be with Alice. They’ll be going slow.’

  But in which direction? They could have gone anywhere. Lennie paused beside each tangled pocket of scrub, searching the grasping blackberry thickets for a white shape. Her muscles were burning with the climb, but she kept moving up. Even if they weren’t up there, her voice would carry further from the top of the ridge. And deer liked the high ground. Pesh did too. Not that it mattered—she’d go wherever Alice went. She was bred to follow and guard, not to herd.

  ‘Pesh!’

  Reaching the top of the slope at last, Lennie looked over what lay ahead as she gathered her breath, her sense of desperation growing. The other side of the ridge fell away just as steeply to a small basin below. It had been logged a while ago, the resulting wasteland ringed by forestry tracks. In the distance, she could make out other felled blocks, the cuts of other roads. Around them, the plantation stretched away, ridge after ridge, as far as she could see.

  ‘Pesh!’ Lennie circled, calling in every direction. From here, the sound ought to travel for kilometres. She stopped, listening for a bark, a howl. Something. The forest remained spookily quiet. She couldn’t even hear a bird. Behind her, the sun was already dipping below the western range. It wouldn’t be long before it was dark.

  Lennie pulled out her phone with a unvoiced prayer. Yes. She had one bar of signal. She made the call without rational thought, as if it was the only number she had in her contacts list. Turning out of the breeze, Lennie listened to the phone ring, praying again for an answer before her signal gave out. But it was just the machine that picked up.

  ‘Mitch,’ she said, when the greeting had run, ‘I’ve lost Pesh. She’s up in the forestry block somewhere. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ Mitch’s voice said into her ear.

  Lennie closed her eyes. ‘I’m at the top of the ridge across from the house. I don’t have much signal.’

  ‘Can you see a clear space?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a clearing about a hundred metres downhill.’

  ‘Get down to it,’ he said. ‘Stay in the open. Don’t go anywhere else. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  ‘She should be able to hear me,’ Lennie found herself saying, her voice choking up. ‘Something’s happened to her, I know it has.’

  ‘Just sit tight. I’m on my way.’

  It wasn’t until she’d slithered down to the clearing and sat on a rock beside the logging track for a while that Lennie’s overloaded brain grasped how Mitch was planning to get there. By that time, the sound of a helicopter engine was already beginning to bounce off the hills. As it was joined by the beat of the rotors, Lennie realised she was sitting on the rock because the ground around her was wet. Getting up, she scoured the dirt road at the base of the slope she’d just descended. There! Not twenty metres away from the spot where she’d exited the trees herself were the prints of a deer and a dog, the latter almost obscuring the first. Alice and Pesh had made it this far, at least.

  The helicopter was still just a dot above the hills. Hurriedly, Lennie followed the tracks. They skirted the rectangle of logging waste along with the road before disappearing back into the pines, heading north. Ugh. Where in god’s name did Alice think she was going? It looked like the crazy old deer had even broken into a jog.

  As the racket in the sky gathered force, Lennie ran back to open ground, waving as the helicopter crested the ridge. It lowered in front of her, settling onto the track. Beneath the still-beating rotor, Mitch rounded the nose and opened the passenger door, standing guard between her and the tail as he waved her in.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she yelled.

  Mitch shook his head. ‘Get in.’

  In the passenger seat, Lennie jammed the headset on.

  ‘What was Pesh doing up here?’ Mitch’s voice asked, in the sudden calm.

  ‘Alice got out. Pesh is following her.’ Lennie buckled her seatbelt.

  ‘So we’re looking for a dog,’ Mitch said slowly, ‘and a deer.’

  ‘They were here,’ Lennie said. ‘There are tracks.’ She pointed. ‘They headed back into the trees over there.’

  ‘Well, at least one of them’s white.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed. Oh god. She was going to cry. Which was not remotely helpful. ‘I’m sorry you…You’ve had to come all this way…’ She watched the skids leave the ground.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Mitch said. ‘We’ll find them.’

  They would. They had to. The alternative was unthinkable.

  Lennie focused on the contours of the country below as they flew up the corridor of pines the tracks had led to. At the top of the ridge, Mitch banked east, following its line as it climbed, the ranks of the trees opening neatly to either side.

  ‘You often see deer along here,’ he said. ‘There’s a tarn a bit higher up. Maybe Alice wants to find some mates.’

  It was as good a plan as any, Lennie supposed. Both Pesh and Alice had to be getting pretty thirsty by now. How much further could they possibly have gone? There was a section of younger trees ahead, grasses and gorse still flourishing between its unthinned plantings. Plenty of cover in there for any number of deer. As they flew over it, Mitch lowered, the rotor wash raking the grass.

  ‘If there’s anything in there, it ought to break about now,’ he told her.

  Lennie could just make out a couple of rabbits scudding across a patch of scarred earth and a frantic scamper of something that might have been quail. Nothing else moved. Having circled the block, Mitch took them up again, continuing over more harvest-age pines. Beyond them, she could see the jewel-blue rings of the tarn and the open ground around it.

  ‘There!’ Oh god, it was them. ‘There they are!’ As she pointed, Mitch nosed the helicopter around, hanging over the spot. Lennie felt almost sick with relief, the head-rush leaving her woozy. A couple of rows of trees back from the tarn, in the shelter of what looked like a ditch, Pesh and Alice were lying together just as they did in the paddock at home. Lennie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘I’d better not get too close,’ Mitch said, backing off. ‘We don’t want to get Alice moving again.’

  Right on cue, Alice lifted her head, her hindquarters struggling to rise. In a second more, she’d dropped back to the dirt. Lennie’s fingers dug into her knees. Pesh hadn’t moved. She hadn’t moved at all.

  ‘Mitch…’

  ‘I see it,’ he said quietly. ‘Hold tight. I’ll get us down.’

  Lennie was out of the helicopter as soon as it hit the ground, running for the trees without waiting to see if Mitch was with her. It took her a moment to find the depression she’d spotted from the air. At its edge, the smear of fresh blood on the pine needles was clear to see. As Lennie raced down, Alice raised her old head again, but Lennie only had eyes for Pesh.

  The dog was lying on her side, a precise red hole punched in her white chest, its edges tinged with black.

  Lennie stared for a moment in disbelief. She’d been shot? She dropped to her knees beside Pesh’s head. She was breathing. She was alive. Snatching the stethoscope out of her bag, Lennie found the faint beat of Pesh’s heart. But even as she listened, the rate was starting to drop. Jesus. Jesus. Pesh needed a chest tube. She needed fluids, blood…Her breathing was getting fainter. Lennie could clearly hear the air being drawn in through the hole in Pesh’s chest wall.
Pressing the heel of one hand to the wound, Lennie grabbed her clippers with the other. There was no chance of getting an airtight seal on the wound with all that fur in the way.

  ‘Who does this?’ Lennie had no idea who she was asking. ‘Who shoots someone’s dog and just walks away?’

  ‘Someone who wasn’t supposed to be up here.’ Mitch, she realised, was kneeling on Pesh’s other side. ‘This block’s closed to hunting.’

  ‘Pull on a glove and press here,’ Lennie told him. Working as fast as she could, she shaved a square around the wound. The only dressings she had in her bag were porous. Whacking one over the bullet hole, she taped the wrapper over the top. As she secured the final side, the dressing sucked in and held. Lennie took a breath of her own.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she snapped, as Mitch began to move Pesh.

  ‘It’s a rifle shot,’ he said. ‘There’ll be an exit wound.’

  Oh god, there it was. Lennie stared down at the second hole in Pesh’s chest, the spatter of blood that marked the end of the trail of destruction the bullet had blazed through the vital organs, nerves, blood vessels, bones. Every structure in between would be crushed, the soft tissue collapsed by the heat. Fragments of casing, of gun oil, of fur and bone driven into lungs, muscle, kidneys, heart…

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she said. It was hopeless. Pesh might as well be dead now. It was too much, too much to fix.

  ‘Yes you can.’ Mitch’s voice entered the chaos in Lennie’s brain. ‘You just need to get her stable, and then we’ll get her out. Take it slow. You’ve got all the time in the world. Work it through.’

  Lennie heard herself sob.

  ‘We’ve got a sucking chest wound,’ Mitch said, ‘so we need to treat for a potential tension pneumothorax, right?’

  With a needle thoracostomy. Right. As it dawned on Lennie why Mitch would know that, for a second she felt even sicker. People had to do this in war zones. Worse things than this, in worse places. They did it every day, they did it with bombs falling, with people still shooting at them. But patients survived. Picking up her clippers again, she prepped to seal the second wound.