FINDING THE LOST, Jeanne Tody Beroza [reading tree txt] 📗

Author’s Note:

Custer County in the Black Hills of South Dakota has a wild, rugged and varied landscape. It includes the 65 million year old, eroded solid granite backbone of the Black Hills at its center. Continuing east or west the landscape tapers to foothills, the Ponderosa Pine giving way more and more to the cacophony of color that are the beautiful wild grasses of the hills. And then at the farthest reaches of the county are the beginnings of the plains, high, semi-arid, undulating grasslands. Here can be found cactus growing among the criss-crossing paths made by herds of grazing cattle. This is where the buffalo once roamed freely, where antelope can still be found, and where the prairie rattler, and the prairie dog are common.

Custer County is loved and visited by so many admirers each year it is almost too hard to count them. Persons coming into the county quadruple our population and during the peak parts of tourist season, even double the census count of the entire state. Most of those persons visit the quaint small towns, gift shops, myriad numbers of artists shops and stalls at fairs; they ogle the landscape, hike the trails and marvel at the rock surrounded waters.

They often get lost. Some can be ‘talked out’ by an experienced search and rescue volunteer with the use of a GPS reading taken from their cell phone and a good topographical map showing local ridges, draws and trails in their vicinity. Sometimes they are hurt and we carry them out on stretchers using ATV’s where ever possible to speed our transit time to them and theirs to the always waiting Custer Ambulance crew.

The dogs are called in for the ones that get lost stepping off the paths; this includes the hunters, adventurous hikers, small children, and persons incapable of knowing where they are as in those with Alzheimer’s. It is equally easy to get lost in the middle of a jumble of house-sized rocks, on the mountain’s eroding slopes among fallen timber so torturous and thick even the dogs have trouble getting through it or in the grasslands with their ever present sun and wind.

And, just by design, the places that are easy to get lost in are also very hard to find someone in during a search. If the lost did not leave an established path at some point, the searchers may have no starting point to begin looking for them. Without a starting point, a tracking dog cannot find a trail and an air scent dog cannot locate the right winds to search for scent.

The authorities really do all work together on a search. Custer County takes care of its own and its visitors. Law enforcement, emergency personnel, fire volunteers and search and rescue all wear pagers and come at a call; each to lend their particular talents and skills to a search and, hopefully, rescue of the lost. It is an amazing thing; actually, to be among the ranks of the volunteers in this bit of God-Given heaven we call the hills.

I have worked in search and rescue, with dogs and without while providing emergency medical services with Custer Ambulance, with our local fire department and with Custer County Search and Rescue for several years. I trained and worked my own SAR dogs. My husband was a volunteer EMT, volunteered in SAR and served as a volunteer fireman helping to stop many, many wild land fires during our recent drought years. When I write these stories, I do so using first hand experiences and knowledge.
I plan to write a full-length novel involving canine search and rescue. It will be set in the Black Hills of South Dakota; will include dogs I have known well and characters based upon those I worked with. In offering these short stories for all to read, I was experimenting a bit with style, tone and format.

The first, Seventeen Below, is meant to sound more like a search log with a little excitement thrown in during the actual search with Tahoe. Tahoe died this year. He was a wonderful dog in all ways. He loved to search for people and he was very, very good at it. So, if I am writing about Tahoe, even in terms of including him in an incident log come to life, I have to include a little of his charm, his dedication and in his skill in the story.

The second story, Fallen, is meant to show that search and rescue personnel and their canines do put their lives on the line during every search. And sometimes we lose our lives trying to save others. I cried while writing this story. I hope you cry while reading it.

The third short story, Fire, is meant to be the most like a novel in tone and personality. In this story you get a little more description of the characters, a little romance, a view into the shortcomings and fears of a character, a little fantasy or taste of the Para-normal, and an exciting search scene as our rescuers outrun a fire.

I hope you enjoy reading the stories as much as I did writing them to share with you. Look for Jana, Cristi, Mike, Charlie, Denny, Dave and others in more stories in the future.

Seventeen
Below

CHAPTER ONE:

Seventeen degrees below zero (-17F); frostbite weather even without a wind. It was still three hours until daylight as dog handler Jana Stein, K-9 Tahoe, and their flanker, Mike Richards deployed into the silent Black Hills forest and were quickly lost from sight. Incident Command (IC) finalized staging near the old dilapidated, primer-covered Chevy pickup sitting empty in the softly falling snow. Two neatly folded army surplus blankets and a small Styrofoam cooler containing frozen sandwiches and a battered thermos of lukewarm, hot chocolate were sitting on the truck’s seat. There was no sign of the boy or his father.

Custer County authorities were experienced and adept at locating and rescuing lost persons. Serving a county frequented by tourists and out-of-area hunters they had to be. Staffed by volunteers, search and rescue (SAR) assisted in finding and caring for the lost along with paid staff from the sheriff’s department and the county ambulance service. Emergency Dispatch 211 operators fielded lost person calls 24-7 and were trained to determine whether to page law enforcement, search and rescue or ambulance personnel. In this case the responding operator had paged and then relayed information to all three.

Deputy Jim Davis had briefed volunteers before the canine team left the staging area. He’d delegated Incident Command to Custer County Search and Rescue but stayed on site to assist. He’d also supplied a fact sheet with pertinent information regarding this case, starting with its initiation. Davie Freeman, a ten-year-old boy, was missing and presumed lost. His mother had made the report at 2330 last night. The temperature at that time had been zero and falling.

A section of the fact sheet contained 211-call dialogue. “My little boy’s lost,” the caller sobbed. “His father took him hunting. He got cold so Duane sent him back to the truck to warm up. Davie never made it there. I-I-I’m afraid. It’s so cold out.”

“How long has your boy been missing, Mrs., ah, Post?” the dispatcher asked having performed a quick computer inquiry to identify the caller’s name and address from the phone number on the screen.

“Mrs. Freeman not Mrs. Post, I’m using her phone, Maxine’s phone, ah Maxine Post’s phone. We don’t have one. I’m not sure, since sometime before dark but he’s not missing, he’s lost. Duane looked for him but he can’t find him. He’s still out looking. I’m really scared.”

“I’ll notify the Sheriff’s Department to send a deputy Mrs. Freeman. I’m showing you’re calling from 5280 Tr-47 in Custer Highlands. If that’s not where you live, can you give me good directions to your house? Its hard to navigate in the dark and with snow falling, it might be even more difficult to find you.”

Custer Highlands was a ‘wanna-be real-estate development’ encompassing thousands of acres south of Highway 16 on the South Dakota-Wyoming border. Comprised of former ranch land the area was wild with its thick forests, rocky crags, steep ravines, canyons, bluffs and semi-arid grasslands. Lack of water and services to the area made it uninhabitable for anyone other than the few folks with plots along Highway 16. They’d paid to have electric and phone lines run. They also hauled their own water and graveled a road to their doors. Others had pulled-in trailers or built shacks farther into the wilds of this beautiful area, but they lived off the grid.

Veteran sheriff’s deputy Jim Davis and his rookie partner Deb Moore received a page to respond to a missing person call at 2340. Already in the Jewell Cave National Park area, they’d been assigned to continue to the caller’s address to investigate. They bounced over a snow covered two-track named trail #47 by the county in their effort to give every road upon which someone lived a name and each home an address. They passed by #5280 the site of an older model singlewide mobile home that was up on blocks and without skirting. “That’s where she called from,” Deb said as they passed by, “I’m surprised they have a phone.”

“Unhh,” Jim grunted in agreement while straining to see the rutted lane that was rapidly being covered by the newly falling snow. “Her place is supposed to be another mile down this cow path on the right. Watch for lights. Try to give me enough of a heads up to make the drive so I don’t have to back up. I won’t be able to see a thing behind us.”

“No drive,” Deb said as they neared their destination, “but there’s a shack with a lit window. That must be it.” Pulling off the rutted lane Jim parked the big SUV on pristine snow just to the side of a door in the dark exterior of the small, box-shaped, wooden structure. There was no porch or stoop in front of the door but it appeared to be the building’s entrance. A low-level orange glow flickered inside, dimly lighting the only window. Jim smelled wood smoke so guessed the light was made by a fire.

“I don’t think they have electricity,” he said, “This feels a little weird, cover me, just in case.” He made his way to the door of the shack, hand on the sidearm resting loose and ready in the holster at his hip. “You never know what you’ll find