We moved closer to the alpine bowl, scanning the steep mountain flanks that soared above it, looking for people climbing out. A quarter of a mile from the open ground, we passed through thick groves of low spruce, like Christmas trees, the kind of place Brayton said a wounded creature might hole up. We all had our AR guns at port arms, ready in case we got in a firefight.
I admit I suffered a few moments of incredible anxiety easing through the last hundred yards of Christmas trees, sure that M’s men were going to spring up and mow us down as they’d done to so many of the cartel gunmen behind us.
Fifty yards from the edge where the trees met rocky alpine terrain, there was a tremendous crash to our right. We all spun toward it, guns shouldered, hearing more crashes, the dog barking wildly.
There was a flash of brown ahead of us. A cow elk and her calf broke from the timber with a clatter and snapped branches as they bolted out of sight.
“I almost had a heart attack there,” Mahoney said.
“I almost soiled myself there,” Sampson said.
My temples were pounding with my racing heart. But I laughed as I lowered the gun. Out in the bowl itself, we found another splash of fresher blood on a game trail that led toward a notch high in the cliffs above us.
“That’s midmorning,” Brayton said, staring up the steep path that led to the notch. “She’s tough, I’ll give you that.”
Lightning flashed again. The bolt hit the ridge to our right. The rain came in a deluge that swept toward us like a dark curtain.
“That’s it,” Sergeant Brayton said, turning Maximus around. “Not even Mr. Nose Wizard could follow a track in these conditions.”
The rain hit us and we were soaked before we reached the Christmas trees.
“The chopper can’t come for us in this kind of weather,” Mahoney said. “We’ll have to hike back.”
“Better we jog back, stay warm,” Sergeant Brayton said. “This is classic hypothermia weather.”
“What’s back up that trail?” I asked. “I mean, over that ridge?”
“Eight miles of wilderness and misery before you hit a web of logging roads.”
Chapter
72
Matthew Butler, Big David Dawkins, and J. P. Vincente ignored the rain, the lightning, and the thunder, totally absorbed in working on their burglar’s right thigh. They had Alison Purdy on her back below a tarp they’d rigged between several saplings to keep her and the wound dry.
Her pant leg was slit open. She had a piece of stick wrapped in a bandanna in her mouth, and she bit into it and screamed every time they probed the wound.
“Think I feel it,” Dawkins said. “But I’m going to have to go deeper, Alison.”
“Gimme more oxy,” she said, panting. “Everything in my bugout kit.”
Months before, as a precaution in case they ever had to escape the ranch on foot, Butler had insisted they stash packs filled with survival gear, medical supplies, ammunition, and new identity documents a mile up the canyon, off the trail in an old bear den.
They’d reached the den within an hour of the cartel’s retreat and began tending to Purdy’s wound, from a shard of grenade shrapnel within inches of her femoral artery. They put her in a tourniquet, doused the wound with antibiotic gels, and used blood-coagulant patches to stanch the flow until they could get her to a doctor.
With the three men rotating as Purdy’s assist, they’d climbed steadily out of Fell’s Creek Canyon and down into the far drainage. Even with the help of three men, Purdy had a hard time; she’d been weakened by the ordeal. Butler realized they were going to have to remove the shrapnel if they were to make it the last five miles to an old Toyota Land Cruiser he’d left covered with logging slash in the early spring.
Big DD groped in Purdy’s kit and found the painkillers.
“How many?” she asked.
“Six,” he said.
“Gimme all of them,” she said.
“Negative,” Dawkins said. “You’ll stop breathing. You get three now and three when we’re done.”
Purdy didn’t like it but nodded and held out her palm for the pills, which she threw in her mouth and washed down with water. “I wish this was vodka.”
“I bet you do,” Butler said.
They waited twenty minutes, until the rain began to subside, before trying again, using surgical tools to retract the wound and probe deeper with forceps. Even with the added painkiller, Purdy was weeping and biting down hard on the stick in her mouth.
Butler felt the tip of the forceps click against something. “Hold her, now,” he said to Vincente, who held Purdy down by her shoulders. “This is going to hurt.”