Part 5 – Haul, Shelter, Hold
The rope went tight enough to sing.
Ruth planted her boots and dropped her hips, hands locked on the belay like prayer. Ben leaned back into his harness until the fir tree at his anchor creaked. Water shouldered higher, brown muscle trying to take the culvert for itself. Harlow’s stomach fell through him; his fingers found the shovel handle like a railing.
“Line’s loaded,” Ben grunted.
“Avery, talk to me,” Ruth called, voice pitched for chaos. “You still with him?”
From the black throat: “Still here.” Avery’s words came thin but steady. “He’s wedged on a shelf. Right tib-fib looks deformed. Hypothermic. Breathing shallow. I’ve got a chest sling on. Starting a hasty harness.”
Ruth blew air out slow. “Copy. We’re your mule team.”
Scout stepped so close to the lip his whiskers picked up spray. He breathed fast, not panic-fast; it was the kind of breath that carried a job.
Inside the pipe, Avery moved by inches. She slid webbing under Jack’s arms, buckled the improvised chest harness across a sternum that felt like cold bark. Jack’s eyes found her headlamp once, flared, drifted. “You… you’re real?” he said, voice shaved down to a whisper.
“Real as rain,” she said. “Jack, listen. This is going to feel like the worst roller coaster of your life. I need you to keep your chin tucked, arms crossed, and let the rope do the work. Can you nod?”
He nodded, a slow ghost. His teeth chattered in a rhythm that didn’t belong to any song. “The dog,” he said, as if the word were heavier than the water. “Don’t… let him… in here.”
“He’s outside,” Avery said. “He found us. He’s the reason I’m here.”
Jack closed his eyes. The corners of his mouth moved toward a smile and didn’t quite get there.
Avery cinched a loop around his thighs without moving the broken leg more than physics allowed. She pulled the strap of a SAM splint through her teeth, bent it, taped what she could. It wasn’t pretty. It was better than nothing. “Ruth,” she called. “We’ve got to pull now. We’ve got a surge coming. Ben, I’ll feed you two tugs for go, one to stop.”
“On you,” Ben said, palms burning.
Outside, the county cutters finally arrived, skidding a dented utility truck into the service turnout. Two men in yellow helmets hustled over, lugging a tool that looked like it argued with cars for a living. They took in the scene—the grate hanging like a torn eyelid, the rope snaking into dark, the dog planted at the edge like a saint—and didn’t waste breath asking for explanations.
“Cut me that last hinge for later,” Ruth said without looking away from the line. “But nobody touches anything until she clears the shelf.”
Metal moaned under the saw. The grate sagged another inch, enough to change the way the water sounded.
Avery took a breath that tasted like battery and cold. She put her shoulder under Jack’s, angled his body out of the pocket that had saved and trapped him, and gave two sharp tugs.
“Haul!” Ruth barked.
Ben and Tino and a cutter named Ray leaned into the line. It bit down into the rock, into their gloves, into the morning that had decided to be mean. The rope creaked through carabiners; the webbing found all the places on Jack’s body that could complain and asked them to be quiet for a minute. Jack gasped, then grunted, a sound that made the hair lift on Harlow’s arms.
“Stop!” Avery shouted. One tug. The surge shouldered past, brown and sudden, filling the culvert like a drunk filling a doorway. Avery pressed herself against concrete and made herself thin. She felt the harness hold. She felt the world decide to let her try again.
Outside, someone’s radio squawked: “Be advised, cell’s moving faster. Gusts twenty-five. Helibase says no rotor until winds drop. Earliest ETA dusk—more likely first light.”
Ruth didn’t let the words land yet. “On you, Avery,” she said.
“Go!”
They hauled. Jack slid. The harness took his weight, then the leg’s bad geometry tried to argue with the universe, and Avery swore softly and used her own body as a wedge. “Almost there,” she lied in the tone that had made rookies believe a three-hour hike out was just around one more bend. “Jack, we’re going to see sky. Can you smell it?”
“Coffee,” he said, not exactly answering.
A laugh broke out of Tino like a cough. “My thermos,” he said, choked, and hauled harder.
The line went tight enough to hum, then slackened a hair, then went tight again in a rhythm that sounded like a heartbeat. Harlow dug his heels into gravel he would find in his boots a week later and pulled until the world resolved into simple math: weight, friction, breath.
Avery’s helmet bumped daylight.
Then Jack’s face.
He came out pale and river-slick, pupils trying to decide what size to be, lips blue enough to bother the part of your brain that counts pulses. He was smaller than the internet had made him. He was a person.
Ruth was there with a slicker spread like a tablecloth over the concrete, with blankets, with the kind of hands that talk a body into staying awhile. “Hi, Jack,” she said, like they had a standing appointment. “We’re the ones who didn’t get the memo that you’re allowed to go alone.”
He coughed, a thin sound. “Scout?”
“Right here,” Ruth said, and then Scout was there, too close by every rule, exactly in the right place by every other. Ruth caught his chest with her forearm and let Jack feel whiskers on the back of his hand without letting sixty pounds of love undo a splint.
Jack’s eyes flooded. “Good boy,” he said, voice like wet paper. “Go home.”
Scout huffed and pressed his brow into Ruth’s sleeve like even saints need somewhere to collapse.
They rolled a hypothermia kit around Jack—foil blanket, wool, a bivy sack that made him look like a baked potato someone was praying over. Ruth cracked two chemical warmers and tucked them deep under armpits and groin. Her hands moved with a fluency Harlow would later try and fail to describe without sounding like he was making something up. “Breaths are shallow,” she said. “Pulse is there, thready. Ben, elevate the leg we splinted. No, not that high, we’re not making a sculpture.”
Avery climbed out of the culvert on elbows and will. Her teeth chattered so hard it made her words staccato. “We need hot, now.”
“Truck,” Tino said, sprinting. He came back with his jug like a lifesaver. Ruth poured a palmful into the cap, cooled it with breath, and touched it to Jack’s lips. “Small sips,” she ordered gently. “Don’t try to prove anything.”
Harlow realized he was crying only because cold air made his tears feel like knives. He looked at the phone in Ruth’s pocket—he could see the outline—and he didn’t ask. Instead he knelt where Ruth told him and pressed his palms into a folded blanket against Jack’s left flank. “You’re a space heater now,” she said. “Don’t faint on me.”
“Copy,” he whispered, to no one in particular.
The county cutters finished the hinge and stowed their toy with the relief of men allowed to be grunt and not savior. “We’ve got a litter,” Ray said. “But that road to the lot is soup. If we move him now, we’ll shake him like dice.”
Avery glanced at the sky like it might blink. “Helicopter says negative until winds drop,” she said. The words were clean of blame. “We shelter in place. Build a windbreak. Get elevation under his core. Set a tarp.”
Ruth nodded. “We make a nest.”
They did. Tino parked Rescue 3 nose-to to the culvert mouth, a block of steel against the gusts. Ben and Ray stretched a tarp off the truck’s frame and pegged it low into the earth with stakes and whatever else they had: a pry bar, a broken branch, a stubborn length of rebar that pretended to be easy. Harlow held the edge while Avery tied knots that would impress a scout master and, for once, didn’t make anyone laugh at the word.
Ruth slid her own field jacket off, ignoring Avery’s automatic protest. “Save it,” she said. “You’re running on adrenaline. I’ve got nurse fat.” She tucked the jacket around Jack’s shoulders under the foil, making an ugly, warm sandwich of man and gear and hope.
Jack’s lips moved. You had to lean close to hear it. “Maya.”
Ruth’s eyes flicked to Harlow, then Tino. “Phone?”
“Waterlogged,” Ruth said. “We bagged it to try a recovery.”
Harlow cleared his throat. “I—I can get a message out,” he said, the words like swallowing gravel. “No video. Just text. To the station. To… to someone.”
Ruth measured him for a second that was longer than it was. “You’re going to send what I say, and only that.”
“Yes,” he said, and for once did not think about engagement.
She bent close to Jack’s ear. “We’re going to tell her you’re stubborn,” she said. “And you’re warm now. And you asked about the dog before you asked about yourself because of course you did.”
Jack tried to laugh; it came out like a cough with a memory attached. “Tell her…” He paused to hunt air. “Tell her the thing about tacos. He still… gets it.”
Ruth smiled with the corner of her mouth that did that. “We’ll tell her.”
Harlow thumbed a message into his phone with fingers that wanted to shake: Ranger at Red Hollow reports father located alive, hypothermic, stabilized on scene with dog present. Weather preventing air evac; ground teams sheltering in place until safe to move. Family of Jack Mercer please contact station. He added nothing and for him, it was a kind of penance.
At Aunt Dee’s, Maya’s phone lit up in a clean white pop-up from an official number. She read it once, twice, then pressed both hands to her mouth so hard she left half-moons in her cheeks. Her mother took the phone, read, and sat down without aiming for a chair, like her legs ended early. Aunt Dee started to cry in that weird, grateful way where you keep saying “okay, okay,” as if the word itself could hold a roof on.
Back at the culvert, Dr. Nolan’s dented Subaru slid into the turnout like a thought that refused to go away. He hopped out with a soft-sided kit and hair the storm had made into an idea. “Don’t say it,” he told Avery. “I know. I’m not supposed to be here. Consider me a delivery service.”
Ruth didn’t waste time. “I’ll take blocks and warmers and that new thing you swear by.”
He handed over ampoules, syringes, gel packs like a magician laying down cards. “If he drifts, I can do a little local to buy comfort,” he said. “I’m not intubating a man in a ditch today, not with coffee for backup and an audience.”
Scout looked up at Nolan and gave two slow thumps of tail like he was signing for a package.
Wind shifted. The tarp popped like a sail wanting to remember its other life. The radio rattled: “Debris dam unstable above Service 2. Possible second release in five to ten.”
Avery made eye contact with everyone in turn. “We can’t move,” she said. “We can’t call a bird. We hold. We keep him warm. We ride whatever comes.”
Jack’s eyes drifted, then swung back like a compass remembering north. “You… you stay?” he asked, and it wasn’t a question about logistics.
“We stay,” Ruth said, and tucked a hand around his as if you can hand someone through a night.
Scout circled once, an old man testing his joints, and lay pressed to Jack’s hip outside the foil, lending heat the way dogs have since caves were news. Harlow slid down the tire of Rescue 3 and felt the earth through his back and thought about the piano loop he’d laid under a stranger’s worst twelve seconds. He pulled the battery out of his camera and set it on the gravel like a tooth he’d decided to give up.
Thunder crowded the ridge again. Somewhere upstream, the creek rehearsed its anger. The sky narrowed.
Ruth checked Jack’s pulse and looked at Avery and Nolan over the top of his head, a corridor of professionals sharing math without words. The beat under her fingers was there, thin as thread.
“Okay,” she said to the wind, to the dog, to the man under the foil, to the storm that would not be bargained with. “If we keep him warm, we keep him.”
The radio crackled, a voice at the edge of frantic: “Release starting. I repeat—release starting.”
Avery tightened her grip on the litter handles, eyes on the black mouth of the culvert, body poised to become a wall.
“Hold,” she said.
The world inhaled.
They held.
Part 6 – A Ladder from the Sky
The world exhaled mean.
Water shouldered out of the culvert like something newly angry, brown and studded with sticks and bark. The tarp snapped. Gravel skittered into the mouth of the pipe and vanished. Ruth widened her stance and clamped both hands on the litter handles over Jack’s ribs. Ben’s rope line thrummed. Tino’s knuckles went white on the stake he’d driven into the earth. Harlow pressed his shoulder into the frame of Rescue 3 and felt the truck’s cold steel accept him without judgment.
“Hold!” Avery barked, eyes on the culvert’s lip. The surge climbed, slapped the torn grate, spilled. It wanted their little shelter. It didn’t quite take it.
Wind shoved, then relented. The water settled back down from monster to brute. Leaves pinned to the grate peeled away and streamed toward whatever waited downhill.
Ruth didn’t exhale until her body made the decision for her. “We’re okay,” she said, as much to the dog as to anyone. Scout had not moved, pressed along Jack’s hip, grey muzzle shining with mist.
Jack’s lips were the color you hope never to see on people you love. He blinked like coming back from a long way off. “That it?” he whispered.
“For now,” Avery said, scanning the canopy, the creek, the road, the sky. “We’re riding the night, Jack.”
Ruth tucked a warm pack deeper into Jack’s armpit. “You and me both.”
Dr. Nolan crouched, palms open, the way you approach an animal or a human you refuse to spook. “Pain?”
Jack tried to shrug; his body vetoed it. “I’m… busy with other things.”
“Good,” Nolan said with a crooked smile that understood bravado. “Let the cold bully pain for a bit. Small sips?” He lifted the cap of tepid coffee to Jack’s mouth. Jack wet his lips and swallowed like a man negotiating.
They built the rest of the day into something that could pass for a plan. The county cutters fetched more stakes and a second tarp. Ben rigged a redundant anchor for the line that now lay coiled useless at their feet—useful earlier, mercifully irrelevant now. Harlow jogged the service road twice to meet volunteers arriving with dry wool, a spare heater the size of a loaf of bread, and a plastic tote full of church-lady cookies that tasted like kindness and cinnamon. He said thank you and didn’t film any of it.
Coyotes spoke once on the ridge, a lonely commentary. The storm remember-then-forgets routine ground on. In the trees, drops let go in little applause bursts. The air smelled like pennies and split sap and coffee that had given everything it had to give.
In the quiet pockets between gusts, words found room.
“Phone,” Jack rasped. “Tried to leave… for Maya.”
Ruth tapped her jacket. “We have it. You did. We’ll save it.”
Jack’s eyes went glass-bright. “Tell her… tacos,” he said. “She’ll know.”
“We will,” Ruth promised.
Harlow sat on his heels across from them, hands useless. The apology had been growing behind his teeth for hours, and now it crowded his mouth and made him feel clumsy. “Jack,” he said before he could think himself out of it, “I—”
Ruth cut him a look. Not now.
Harlow swallowed it. “Do you want… I can send another message to the station. To your daughter.” He kept his voice soft as the foil blanket.
Jack’s head rolled a half-inch toward him. “No video,” he murmured. “Please.”
“None,” Harlow said. “Just words.”
Jack’s eyes found Scout’s. If dogs can nod, Scout did. Jack’s mouth tried for a smile. “Good boy,” he whispered, and Scout did the huff that had become their whole language.
Afternoon thinned into a gray that couldn’t commit to evening. Temperatures slid. Ruth rotated warm packs, moved bodies like Tetris to keep heat where it mattered. Avery paced their perimeter, counting out loud without numbers—roots, stakes, stress points—because checklists keep fear on a leash. Tino told a gently stupid story about a raccoon that kept stealing his lunch from the substation, just to lay sound over the silence. Ben wrapped and re-wrapped the splint until it looked like a thesis on stubbornness.
Dr. Nolan leaned against the truck, phone in hand, staring at text from his tech: any update? he typed back: with him / warm / waiting / tell Mr. Rosales we can squeeze his beagle at 4 and tell him this is why I run late / he can be mad and I’ll be grateful.
“Why’d you come?” Avery asked without stopping her slow circle.
Nolan lifted one shoulder. “Because sometimes the right title is ‘neighbor.’”
Avery nodded. “That one plays in any state.”
On a sagging couch across town, Aunt Dee snored soft under a fleece throw while the TV murmured a midwestern crime show to no one. In the dark spare room, Maya lay flat on her back with her eyes open, listening for the sound of her father’s key in a door he didn’t have. Her phone face-down on the nightstand kept trying to light itself. She let it. She didn’t touch it. She whispered “go home” into the quiet until the words felt thin and holy.
Evening arrived disguised as more gray. The ranger station’s update—text only, matter-of-fact—pushed to a few inboxes. Someone took a screenshot and posted it without captions; a few thousand people shared it without snide commentary, like they were tired of their own exhaust.
Harlow’s phone buzzed in his pocket with the post showing his name still stapled to the clip with the piano loop. He didn’t take it out. Instead he peeled open two chemical warmers for Scout, sandwiched them between towel and vest, and tucked them along the old dog’s belly.
“Careful not to overheat him,” Nolan said automatically, then smiled at himself. “Listen to me, policing kindness.”
Scout sighed like a bellows settling. Jack tracked that sound with his eyes like north returning to a compass.
“Tell me what happened,” Avery said, not interrogating—making a map. “From the trailhead.”
Jack’s voice arrived in pieces. “Leash off… so he’d… go. He knows trucks. The smell. Oil, coffee. He wouldn’t. Stood. So I… threw a rock. Not at him. Near. He hates the culverts. He wouldn’t leave me. He… didn’t leave me.” He swallowed, grimaced. “I told him ‘go home.’ Loud.” He closed his eyes. “Guess the camera… didn’t love my mouth.”
“Cameras don’t love nuance,” Harlow said, and then wished he hadn’t spoken.
Jack didn’t open his eyes. “You the one?” he asked—not angry. Just checking his map.
“I am,” Harlow said, the shame plain.
Jack blinked slow. “Don’t… let the dog in here,” he said again, then: “Don’t… let yourself be here forever either.”
Harlow flinched like kindness stings. “I’ll try.”
Night finally made a decision and settled. With darkness came a new kind of still; the wind clocked out, or at least took a break. You could hear the creek like a body sleeping badly. Branches ticked. An owl’s question dragged across the ridge. Close by, Jack’s breaths came a little deeper, warmed from shallow into careful.
They took turns with the inside heat positions, rotating like planets: Ruth against Jack’s left shoulder, Harlow at his flank, Ben at his feet with a blanket over both shins, Avery dropping in, dropping out, always orbiting back. Nolan sat with Scout’s head on his shoe and thought about every animal who had lay its head on a shoe in a clinic while a person gathered courage.
At some point—a time without a number—Jack’s hand groped and found the edge of the blanket. Ruth laced her fingers through his. His skin felt like paper that had been folded too many times; life had written on it in pencil and ink and thumbtack holes.
“Cold,” he murmured.
“You’re allowed to be,” Ruth said. “We’re borrowing another person’s sun in the morning.”
As if cued, the wind laid itself down for real. Clouds thinned from gristle to gauze. The stars came on stingy but present. The temperature slid again and then, as if deciding there would be a tomorrow, stopped.
Avery’s radio crackled at 4:52 a.m. “Helibase to Red Hollow teams. Winds projected to fall below threshold after dawn. First ship fueled and ready at daybreak. LZ options?”
Avery looked at the narrow service road, the trees shouldering in, the high-tension lines like a cautionary tale. “We can clear a postage stamp at the turn-out. Better—send the hoist. We’ll light the canopy and mark with chem.”
“Copy that. Hoist team briefed. ETA first light plus twelve.”
Ruth smiled into the dark where no one could see it. “There it is,” she said softly. “The grown-ups coming with the big ladder.”
Nolan stood and stretched until his spine popped. “Everyone drink water while hope warms up.”
They did. Someone unearthed a packet of instant oatmeal from a bottom pocket and made it with coffee because flavor is a luxury on mornings that might not happen. Harlow held the warm cup under his nose without drinking, inhaling like prayer.
Dawn negotiated up from the east. It tested the treetops first, then draped thin light down the trunks until their bark got its texture back. Scout lifted his head and watched the forest change color. He thumped his tail once, twice, and tried to lick Jack’s knuckles without moving his body. Jack’s mouth twitched toward a smile again; it made it halfway and stayed.
The thump came then—softer than television had taught them, more like a steady promise than a movie’s shout. A dragonfly’s dream of a machine shouldered into view above the ridge, lights winking polite Morse. Rotor wash combed the trees; a thousand leaves whispered “okay, okay.”
Avery stepped into the clearing, arms up, chem lights already swinging from branches. The crew chief leaning out the door of the ship gave a thumbs-up big enough to read from fifty yards. The hoist cable uncoiled like a silver sentence looking for its period.
“Ben, you ride with him,” Avery said. “I want your hands on that litter. Ruth, you’re with me on the tag line. Nolan, mind the dog. Harlow—stay out of the wash, and if you film anything, it’s our boot tips.”
Harlow nodded, throat tight. He wasn’t filming boot tips. He wasn’t filming at all.
The cable kissed down. The crew chief’s voice came over a handheld loudhailer, efficient and kind. “Hooking litter first. Tag line on. We’ll lift slow. If it spins, damp it. You get dizzy, close your eyes. You’re all doing great.”
Ruth leaned into Jack’s field of view. “You’re going to fly, stubborn man,” she said. “It’s just the elevator with sky.”
Jack’s eyes watered in a way that had nothing to do with wind. “Scout,” he said.
“We’ll bring him next,” Nolan said. “First you.”
They clipped the litter, tied the tag line, checked knots with fingers that had become smarter than their owners. The winch whined. The litter rose—six inches, then a foot, then thigh high. The rotor stirred the world into a snow globe of needles and grit. Scout barked once, deep in his chest, the old call: I’m here.
The basket kept climbing. Ben rode beside it, one hand on the rail, the other on the tag line, jaw clenched, eyes on Ruth’s face because eye contact is a bridge.
A gust, an eddy, some invisible hand tugged. The litter swung and began to yaw, slow at first, then a touch more.
“Tag it!” Avery called, shoulders braced, fists white on the rope. Ruth hauled, set, hauled again, and the swing diminished to a tolerable wobble.
“Nice and easy,” the crew chief said, more to the morning than to them.
Then the wind changed its mind—just a notch—and the litter kicked wide once, hard, knocking a fist of air out of every chest under it as Jack rose into the pale day, the line a bright slash between danger and the part of the story where people get to go home.