Backwater (16 page)

“
We could get a helicopter to fly in, lower a rope, and lift you out,
” Mountain Mama shouted.

“
How long would that take?
”

“
A few hours
.”

Jo’s face suddenly turned gray. It was as though she had moved to a dangerous, deadly peril.

My fingers and toes were numb, the cold wracking my body was overwhelming. If I didn’t move, I was going to freeze.

Jo’s eyelids began to close like death. “No, Jo! Stay awake.
She’s going to die!
” I screamed. Jo barely moved when I said it.

I turned to Malachi, who was standing solidly on the ice. “How much do you weigh, huh? Eighty pounds? More?”

I weighed one hundred and fifteen.

“You think there’s room for all of us on this ice?”

Malachi cocked his head, listening.

I took off the snow shoes. “You show me the way.”

Malachi looked at me, tilted his head.

“Go ahead,” I said, and took the rope in my hands.

Malachi made a broad sweep around the sled. The ice didn’t crack once where he was going.

Mountain Mama was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear, and it didn’t matter anymore. I felt the ice underneath the snow, every inch of it around me. I wrapped the rope around my shoulder, got on my hands and knees, and inched slowly across the path Malachi had set.

My heart beat in my ears; my face was pained from the wind and cold.

No tears now.

Malachi waited for me.

“Get me across.”

The wolf gently moved in an arc toward the shore. I crawled after him like an injured infant, pulling the sled slowly.

“Good boy,” I said, clinging to the rope. “Good boy.”

I slipped on my knee, felt a piece of ice give way.

“
No!
” My hand just missed the crack. I was bent there, frozen perfectly still, the only motion was the beating of my heart, which I was sure would cause the ice to give way.

“Oh, God. Help me.”

Jo had grown deathly still. I crawled faster as Malachi led the way to the left, then to the middle. We were losing ground again, but I didn’t have much choice except to follow. We headed to Jack in a huge circle as Jo’s unmoving figure slumped in the sled.

“
Jo! Hold on!
”

“
Almost there!
” Jack shouted.

Malachi looked at me.

“You’re a world-class wolf,” I told him. “Get me there.”

Malachi moved gingerly across the middle-ice section. My knee stuck on a crag. My breath came heavy.

I didn’t have the strength to go further.

“
You’re almost there!
” Mountain Mama said it like she did when I took the ledge. “
You’re almost there!
”

And it wasn’t strength of character that got me up, it was fear.

“
Okay now
,” Mama said. “
Here comes the last of it!
”

I followed the wolf, who was moving closer to Jack and Mountain Mama. The ice underneath felt stronger, but I was losing strength. Malachi howled at me and it was so clear a call to courage that I stood up and pulled on the rope and pulled the sled forward. Jack was stepping across the ice now and telling me to throw the rope to him, he’d yank Jo in.

I took the rope and with everything left in me, pulled harder and harder following the wolf. I fell down and started crying.

I froze in terror.

Jack walked quickly, stepping lightly on the ice.

He made it to me.

“It’s solid here,” he said, helped me up, and he pulled with all his Search-and-Rescue strength, which had been there all along, and got Jo to shore.

I half ran across the ice to Jack and Mountain Mama, who were rubbing Jo’s hands and her cheeks, looking inside her closed eyelids, and asking her if she could hear them. Drool was frozen on her face. She didn’t move.

Jack took off his pack and threw it to Mountain Mama.

“Can you run?” he asked me, and grabbed the sled rope and pulled it behind him down the path.

I couldn’t do anything, but I did.

The wilderness teaches you to do things you never thought you could do.

We ran through the snowy forest, up and down trails as Jack pulled Jo for what seemed like forever, all the way to the ranger station.

I dropped to my knees in the snow as rangers circled us, hands lifted Jo out of the sled, and took her inside by the fire.

“
Is she all right?
” I screamed, looking at Jo’s unmoving body and the somber faces of the rangers. “
Is she going to be all right?

Sound of a motor.

Something moving me.

Blankets everywhere.

Someone rubs my hands.

I heard, “Can you hear me?”

I can. I can’t.

I’m crying. Hands lift me out, put me on a rolling bed, push me through doors. “Exhaustion,” a woman’s voice says. “Over-exposure,” says another. The lights are so bright. I close my eyes.

Someone takes my hand.

“Ivy, I’m Dr. Hillerman. You’re in the hospital. Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to put your hands in this lukewarm water to help them thaw out. You passed out back at the ranger station. You’re going to be all right.”

Warm blankets are piled on me.

So good to be warm, not moving.

*    *    *

I woke up the next morning when I heard my father’s voice.

Dad was standing next to my hospital bed, his face gray as a tomb. Jack and Mountain Mama stood next to him.

A nurse said, “Well, it’s about time you woke up.”

I tried sitting up. “Careful now.” The nurse pointed to the IV taped to my left hand.

“Is Jo all right?” I croaked out.

“We’re waiting to hear on that,” Dad said.

“She’s still alive?”

Dad’s voice cracked. “So far.”

A nurse took my blood pressure and said it was a miracle we had made it.

I drank four mugs of mediocre hot chocolate.

A doctor came in the room. She looked in my eyes with a light. I followed her finger with my eyes—up, down, left, right.

She took my hand. “Squeeze as tight as you can.”

I did.

She smiled. “Don’t break my fingers please.”

“Sorry. Do you know about my aunt?”

The doctor sat on the bed.

“Your aunt is hemorrhaging internally around her broken thigh bone, Ivy. She’d reached a dangerous stage of hypothermia so that her body temperature was chilled to the core. Either one can be fatal. Right now we just have to do the best we can for her and wait.”

The doctor said I was doing well, but I had to stay another night for observation. I should be able to leave in the morning.

Mountain Mama said the color was coming back to my face.

Jack said my eyes looked brighter.

Dad said he should never have let me go.

“But I found her, Dad.”

He nodded grimly.

“We talked about so many important things.”

Mama looked at Dad. “Your daughter did you proud, Mr. Breedlove. She’s got wilderness in her through and through.”

Dad grumbled something and stared straight ahead.

We waited for news about Jo.

“Still touch and go,” said a nurse.

“Still unconscious,” said another.

I prayed as hard as I’ve ever prayed in my life.

And then from the north and the south and the west and the east, a great company of Breedloves poured into the hospital.

Tib came, and Egan and Fiona and Uncle Archie.

Cousins filled the hallways and elbowed into my room like a pushy mob.

They were arguing with the doctors who were caring for Jo.

They were arguing with the nurses who they thought should be taking better care of me.

Fiona accosted the head nurse on my floor when I didn’t get my medicine at four
P.M.
and stalked her every four hours until she brought it in
on time
.

“Who are all these people?” the doctor asked me, pushing through the morass to get inside my room.

I looked at the smiling worried faces surrounding my bed and said, “My family. We’re pretty close.”

“I guess so,” said the doctor, checking my chart.

And that same evening when Josephine Breedlove woke up, it was said that she did it by the sheer force of the legal profession. The first thing she saw was Dad standing there, hat in hand by her bed, like a giant tree. When the nurse came in and told Dad that Jo couldn’t have any visitors, Dad said something in lawyer to her and didn’t budge.

“You always were the difficult one,” Dad said to Jo, grinning while he did it.

“You haven’t changed, Dan,” Jo said back, but she took his hand when she said it.

When the announcement was made in the visitors lounge, thunderous applause followed and the swarm of Breedloves pushed into the corridor like shoppers at a close-out sale. It was so loud that the night nurse came in and asked everyone to please keep it down, there were other patients who needed their rest.

Archie came over and hugged me hard. “If you hadn’t gone up there, Ivy, she wouldn’t have made it. You know that.”

I thanked him for saying it.

Fiona took my hand and said that even though her video was completed, the rest of the family history was just beginning.

“It’s up to you, Ivy, to write it all down.”

I smiled weakly.

“Just remember the limited human attention span.”

Egan put his hand over my mouth. I didn’t scream until she’d left the room.

*    *    *

“Well, Breedlove, the trail has ended.”

I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed, but the night nurse said I could walk Mountain Mama to the hospital elevator. I was wearing my LL Bean arctic parka that hit right above my bare knees. Hospital gowns aren’t fit for public appearances.

I looked at my
NO YIELD
button and I said I didn’t know if I’d ever learned more in a week than I had with her.

Mountain Mama said it was doubtful anyone had.

She said she was headed back home to begin her first draft.

“I want to thank you for rescuing us,” I said, reaching out my hand. “Jo and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

She shook my hand and tossed back her hair that was grayer from the experience. “You rescued yourself, Breedlove. I just called out a few last minute plays.”

“If you hadn’t been there, Mama …”

“I told you, I haven’t lost one yet.”

“I’ve never been part of a how-to book before.”

“Life is like a how-to book, Breedlove—you take it one chapter at a time.”

“I’ve never thought of it that way.”

“Neither have I. I think I’ll put that in the introduction.”

She took out her small notepad and jotted it down.

I said she’d made it possible for all this to happen, but this was a woman who only took credit in print.

“You did the work, Breedlove. I just knew the terrain. Time
to update yourself and embrace chapter fourteen—
Now That the Wilderness Is in You, You’ll Never Be the Same.
”

“I will, Mama, I promise.”

She slapped me on the back, marched into the elevator, and said I could be one of the great ones.

My fall was broken by a male nurse pushing an empty wheelchair.

He took pity on me and wheeled me back to my room.

Jo had to have surgery to set her broken thigh bone and stayed in the hospital for three full weeks. She developed a staph infection and was running a fever that didn’t want to break. Her thigh had steel pins in it, her cast was very large, she was weak and drawn, but all she could think about were her birds and Malachi and getting back home to rebuild her cabin. Jack organized the students at his college to make regular feeding rounds at Backwater. The sick birds from the hospital were taken to a nearby veterinarian, Malachi stayed with a local ranger and his wife, but Jo wasn’t convinced they were getting the care they needed.

The family took turns visiting her on a round-the-clock vigil organized by Fiona, who got everyone’s schedule down and coordinated a “Josephine Visiting Timetable” lickety-split. I kept reminding everyone that Josephine’s true self needed solitude, but to Breedloves the need for solitude is something to get over, like strep throat. I tried mentioning that we needed to approach Josephine slowly and sensitively because people become hermits for a
reason.

But the crowds pushed into her room and I could see her deteriorating inside, playing Scrabble, playing hearts. Her eyes looked more hunted than when we had been on the frozen lake. Any sensitive person could see that this woman wanted to play solitaire.

Jack said it was like watching a wild bird who’d been caged and would never be content until it was set free.

I sighed deeply. He was a poet.

I went up every weekend to visit Jo and see Jack, working on the family history up and back on the train. I had lost my interview tapes when the cabin was destroyed, but bit by bit I got Jo’s reminiscences on tape again. My schedule was hard on Genghis (we always spent weekends together), but Jo’s memories put the last piece in the puzzle, and he had to make the sacrifice for this and future generations.

I wrote like a historian on fire, connecting the dots.

When you’ve personally lunged shrieking from the jaws of death, you understand the things that truly matter, the things that have lasting significance.

Jack Lowden was one of them.

On this vast subject, I was becoming an enthusiastic expert. He was, in short, the greatest male I had ever met. He said that meeting me had taught him that he really was a ranger deep inside. He got extra credit for rescuing me and Jo, and because there were two of us, his grade point average soared to a B-minus. I thought he should get extra credit for wolf discernment, but he said that understanding wild animals of the far north was a benefit of acing the course.

It was hard being crazy about a person who lived five hours away. Octavia said Jack was “pitifully G.U.” (geographically undesirable), but she changed her tune fast when I showed her his picture, standing in front of a mountain with a frame pack on his back looking like something out of
Outside
magazine.