she had done the ingrained thing. She wouldn’t be questioning herself at all if she’d found someone who needed help.
Get on with it, she ordered herself. Just get on with it. If she survived this, there’d be plenty of opportunity to figure out whether she’d acted on training or for some other reason.
Pain exhausted her by the time she reached the scattered tree limbs. She lowered herself to her back, stared up at the boughs that darkened above her and sought some energy.
This was no time to flag.
Her groan was smothered by the rushing water as she forced herself to sit up and select some branches that might work. When she had found four of them, she pulled off her sweater, blouse and undershirt. Chilling air gave warning of the night to come. She quickly pulled everything back on except the undershirt, which she started tearing into strips. It wasn’t easy to get the rips started, but once she got them going, they tore freely.
Then, nearly blacking out, she leaned forward to move her leg until it was on top of one of the sticks with strips of cloth lying beneath it. Tying them in place was going to be just as bad. She bit her lip until it bled and set to work.
* * *
Night was moving in no faster than usual, but to Craig it seemed to be advancing like a speeding car. Various other rangers had appeared and set out to cover patterns on the search grid laid out on a map on a folding table. The helicopter overflight would probably have to end shortly. In these mountains the darkness and the dangerous drafts as day changed to night would make them useless.
Pretty soon he’d set out himself, once he made sure that everyone who arrived was assigned a grid section. He hated waiting here, he wanted to march off into those woods, but he grasped the fact that doing so would probably not be the best thing for Sky.
But with each passing hour he worried more. Her last contact with Lucy had been around midday, six hours ago. Even the long twilight wasn’t going to be much help in a few more hours. Search teams would have to come back in when night settled. Time was running out.
For the first time in a very long time, he felt terror. He kept it tamped down by focusing on the demands of getting the search going, but he hadn’t been this afraid since his early military days. It dawned on him that of all the things that mattered to him, one of the most important was that Sky be alive.
He didn’t care that she’d be leaving in a few weeks. He just needed to know that wherever she went she was still breathing and healthy.
Every wish and want he might ever have had narrowed to that one simple thing: please let Sky be okay. He’d give anything, his own life, if it would help make that so.
It chafed the hell out of him that so far he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing except organize the search. Yeah, that was essential, but it left him feeling like a caged tiger.
Just when he least needed it, Buddy and his friend Cap showed up with another guy. Craig watched their approach stonily. He didn’t need this crap now.
But Buddy surprised him. “Hey, Craig.”
“Hey.”
“I hear that painter lady is lost in the woods hereabouts. Me and these guys, we came to help look.”
For a mere instant Craig felt gratitude. Then suspicion surged. Buddy maybe, but Cap, the guy on the terrorist watch list?
“Kind of you, Buddy.”
“It’s what folks do, right? I feel bad about yelling at her. Besides, I wouldn’t feel good about myself if we didn’t do nothing.”
Craig thought Buddy looked fairly sincere, but he wasn’t so sure about the other two. Especially since they were carrying those damn rifles.
“What’s with the firepower?” he asked point-blank.
Cap shrugged. “One of my guys got raked by a bear.”
That immediately set off Craig’s alarm bells, considering the bear and cub he’d found yesterday, so oddly separated as if mama bear had been chasing off an intruder.
But could he in good conscience turn down an offer of help? And there was honestly no reason to think these guys would do anything else. No reason except for instinct, anyway.
He started to look at the map, deciding which way to send them when Cap punched his finger on a sector that didn’t have a