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

who had fallen past her, farther down the slope, and she couldn’t hear him. She hoped he was okay.

“Em--y,” a soft, broken voice whispered not far from her. Turning her head towards the edge of the shelf, she saw his navy SAR cap become visible. Then his beautiful brown eyes, dull with pain, looked at her.

“Matthew, are you ok?”

“Bleed-ing bad, busted femur,” he said, speech slurred, “sorry.” His eyes closed, his head slumped, and he slid out of sight.

“Matthew,” she called again and again. He didn’t answer. Oh God, Matthew was gone too. She’d never get to marry him. She knew he had been going to ask her this weekend, she just knew it. “I love you Matthew,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for you to fall. I couldn’t let Lady go without trying to catch her. Too slippery. Should have known you’d try to grab me. Didn’t think. Just wanted to help Lady.”

Could she use her arms? Could she still drag herself and Lady over to Matthew so she could touch them both? Concentrating hard, she used her shoulders and arms to push herself over onto her belly. Then she reached back and grabbed Lady and pulled her up beside her.

Little by little over the next hour, she moved across the ledge, pulling Lady with her. Finally she reached the edge and could see the top of Matthew’s head. Pulling herself all the way to where she lay right on the knife-edge of the drop-off, she pulled Lady onto her chest again and then reached a hand down to rest on top of Matt’s cap.

She was cold now and very tired. Pulling herself across the ledge by her elbows had used up all of her reserves. Even her arms were heavy. She didn’t think she would be able to move them again. Twitching the fingers on the hand holding onto Lady’s fur she found she could still pet the little dog. She closed her eyes and slept.

Something startled her awake. She opened her eyes and tried to see what had caused the noise. Could only see the darkening sky above. Straining to look down her torso she could just make out the tip of Lady’s head and her golden hair. Though she could no longer turn her head to see him, she knew Matthew was to her right over the edge of the shelf. She couldn’t feel the hand touching his hat, or her arm for that matter, but she hadn’t moved them. She still held on to him. Silence. Nothing else here.

She drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of consciousness. When she was awake she tried to remember all the good times she, Lady and Matthew had shared. She remembered one time in the break room after a particularly gruesome retrieval of victims’ bodies. They’d tried to think of all the good ways someone could die. We did it she realized and smiled. She thought she smiled. Not sure the muscles in her face worked anymore.

Best way to die, she checked off the list in her mind - a broken neck, instant. Lady won. Second - bleed out quickly, jugular, aorta or femoral artery. Matthew got second place. And she took third; freeze to death. In second and third place you just went to sleep, her way just being slower than Matthew’s
.
We did it Matthew. If we had to go out, at least we did it well. They can use us for examples now.

The last time Emily opened her eyes they were just slits in her frozen face. It was twilight. No one had found them yet. Soon, they’d have to call off the teams. It was too dangerous to be out in the slippery, treacherous terrain with just a headlamp’s beam lighting the way. Too bad Lady was lying dead, here with her. Lady could have tracked them, could have found them. No other dogs. The team needed more dogs.

Not coming in time, were her last thoughts; bye Matthew, bye Lady, see you both again soon.

Search teams found them the next morning. They had hoped their missing team had holed up in a cave somewhere, unable to call out but safe from harm. A windstorm had moved in over night preventing them from finding their missing friends. At first light they had made their way out to the last GPS coordinates Matt had called in, seen their slide marks over the cliff and had known their friends were not coming back.

Finding the blood trail from where Matthew had dragged himself up the slope to Emily and the drag marks where Em had pulled herself and Lady over to Matt, they understood the love this team had shared for each other. Because of this they broke the county’s rules that stated no more than one body could be put in a grave. The rules neglected to state how many could be put into a casket.

One of the team members was a carpenter. He built a wider than normal box out of nice, finished oak and they laid Matt and Em in it, side by side facing each other. Between them they curled the little dog. On the tombstone they all chipped in to buy they had carved, Team Lady - Matthew Stone, Emily Jones and a fantastic little search dog named Lady.

FIRE<</font>

CHAPTER ONE:

Jana pulled into the access road of the Cattail Point Peninsula in Custer State Park. A thumb-shaped protrusion into Stockade Lake, the forty-acre hump of broken, uplifted granite was sparsely covered in Ponderosa Pine, wild flowers and fine, tall summer grasses growing along the water’s edge. The peninsula’s three miles of shoreline boasted the best crappie and brown trout fishing in the area.

She could see Mike, Charlie and Cristi’s vehicles off to one side of the small gravel parking area. Her three friends were standing near Charlie’s park truck. They weren’t here to fish today. She had JJ, a young husky-malamute mix search and rescue dog in the van with her. She knew Cristi had her SAR dog, Blaze in her Subaru.

“Hey guys,” she said, “what’ve we got today?” Jana, the most experienced dog handler on the Custer County Search and Rescue team, normally took the lead in any canine-assisted search. Cristi had served as her flanker and fellow trainer until she purchased and began training her own young dog, a Belgian Tervuren. At that point Mike had taken over as Jana’s flanker. Charlie, a new addition to the search team had volunteered to flank Cristi and Blaze and had been working with her for thirty days. Cristi stepped forward to answer Jana’s question.

“You gonna take point?” Jana asked with a smile. She was glad Cristi felt ready to take a lead role. This would be the first time she and Blaze led a search.

“I am,” Cristi answered. “Mike was first on scene so he gathered our victim data.” Charlie’s park radio interrupted with static; then a female dispatcher’s voice came over the airwaves: “10-18, buffalo vs. car, wildlife loop north of bison pens, buffalo won. Need officers to respond.” Everyone but Charlie smiled. The buffalo almost always walked away, supposedly unharmed, from a car-buffalo or motorcycle-buffalo accident whereas the vehicle driver often didn’t. It lightened the tone of a call just a little when the dispatcher called the fight in the bison’s favor.

“Sorry, someone else will get that,” Charlie said and reached to turn the radio to ‘vibrate only’ until he was back on duty. “Didn’t mean to interrupt Cristi.”

“No problem,” she responded, “we’ve got two adult male victims, missing. That’s their truck parked right over there,” she pointed at a navy, diesel, 4x4 parked in the trees near the lakeshore. “They were supposed to be fishing off the rocks near the water’s edge in this area. They didn’t call their wives or come home for lunch. A boater questioned by park security staff said he heard a commotion at the lake’s edge when he was fishing off shore this morning. He looked over at the rocks and didn’t see anyone. That doesn’t mean the commotion he heard was our missing guys but there’s a chance it was.”

“The two men might have taken the same route when they left the truck or they might have split up. We won’t know what they did until the dogs find a trail for each man. Since JJ is the good at starts (finding the trail from the victim’s scent), I thought you should have her get a scent from the passenger’s side of the truck first.

Once she has her track, I’ll lay a gauze square on the driver’s seat and then scent Blaze off that. If she follows you guys we know the men took the same route. If she heads in a different direction, we have two trails. That sound ok?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jana said. “I’ll get JJ ready while you get our gear Mike. Cristi, I think you can lay your gauze on the seat while JJ scents the passenger side. It won’t bother her if you do that and it’ll get you and Blaze going faster.” Jana left Cristi and Charlie to handle the gear for their team. As a member of law enforcement for Custer State Park, Charlie was involved in many of the lost person cases in the park and was well acquainted with the gear he’d need while on a search. As a flanker in a dog team he also carried the dog handler’s gear.

Trailing dogs like JJ and Blaze worked fast, often at a trot. SAR dog handlers had their hands full managing a twenty foot long line attached to the dog’s harness, watching the dog’s body posture for ‘tells’ or indications that the canine has or does not have a trail, directing the dog when it loses scent or gets into a situation it’s not sure how to handle, and generally trying to watch the ground so they didn’t trip over debris as they move quickly through all kinds of terrain. Jana and Cristi were both emergency medical technicians in addition to being canine handlers so each carried a small bag of medical gear strapped snugly to their lower backs. Any more than that would just be in the way as they scrambled through brush or into and out of rock crevices following their dog.

“Sounds good,” Charlie and Cristi said at the same time. Cristi retrieved a sterile, 4x4 gauze square from her medical kit and placed it on top of the driver’s seat. Skin cells and oils sloughed from the driver’s body would be lying on the truck seat and would adhere to the gauze. It was shed skin cells a dog followed when it had a trail. It took about three minutes for the gauze to soak up enough scent for Blaze to detect.

Jana opened the passenger side door and told JJ to “Check it.” The lithe, black and white female jumped up into the truck, sniffed the passenger seat deeply, jumped back out and started sniffing the ground to discover where the man had walked when he left the truck. In just a moment Jana had clipped her line to the back of JJ’s harness and was following her towards the lake shore, Mike flanking them and carrying the pack and the communications equipment.

“I love to watch her do that,” Cristi told Charlie, a big grin on her face. “It’s like giving a kid a cookie. Finding the trail is JJ’s cookie.”

Blaze had