Part 2
“Don’t move,” Sarah shouted into the draw.
A man’s voice came back, frayed by distance. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
The joke told Sarah he was conscious. The way the last word broke told her not to take comfort from much more.
She dropped to one knee at the rim while the rescue leader, Noah Pike, clipped a safety line to a cedar trunk and moved forward on his stomach. Wren lay several feet to his right, keeping the receiver low. Below them, the draw narrowed into a cut crowded with rock, deadfall, and storm-twisted oak. Robert was visible beneath a limestone shelf, one shoulder against the wall. A slab pinned his lower left leg. His hat lay upside down in the dust beside him.
Nova had disappeared.
“How long have you been there?” Noah called.
“Since a little after seven.”
Five hours in shade that had moved away from him. Sarah saw an empty water bladder beyond his reach and one hand wrapped in a faded bandanna.
“Any heavy bleeding? Trouble breathing? Neck or back pain?”
Robert answered each question, pausing between them. No heavy bleeding. Breathing all right. Hip hurt. He could feel his toes but could not move the pinned leg without the rock shifting.
Noah backed from the rim. “We need the tripod and lifting bags. Access is better from the south end, but it’ll take twenty minutes to carry gear around.”
“Can we lower water?” Wren asked.
Noah nodded. “Small bottle, tethered. Nothing he can drop on himself.”
Sarah was already pulling paracord from the emergency pouch on her belt. Wren took it from her and tied a compact knot around the bottle neck.
“That won’t hold,” Sarah said automatically.
Wren pulled the line tight and handed it back. “Then test it.”
Sarah did. It held.
Together they eased the bottle over the edge. Robert guided it toward himself with a broken branch, lost it once, and caught it against his ribs on the second try. He drank in controlled swallows after Noah warned him not to empty it at once.
“Where’s Nova?” Robert asked.
Wren looked at the receiver. The pulse had shifted north but remained close. “In cover. Leave her there.”
“She kept coming back.”
“Don’t whistle again.”
Robert closed his eyes. Even from above, Sarah could see that he understood more in those four words than she did.
The rescue crew split. Noah and one firefighter carried the rigging south toward the lower access; the third stayed at the rim. Sarah radioed coordinates and requested an ambulance meet the crew at a ranch track Wren identified on Robert’s map.
Wren began moving south with the rescuers.
“You stay up here,” Sarah said.
“I know the access.”
“You gave them the map.”
“The lower wash forks. The left branch dead-ends at a drop, and GPS puts both on top of each other.”
Sarah looked at Noah. He waited for her decision without rescuing her from it.
“Helmet,” Sarah told Wren. “Stay outside the collapse zone. Noah tells you to stop, you stop.”
Wren took the spare helmet he offered. “Understood.”
It should not have felt like surrender. It did.
Sarah remained at the rim, keeping voice contact with Robert and tracking the other teams by radio. His answers became shorter. He had opened Nova’s acclimation pen just before sunrise, he said. She ranged east, returned once, then vanished over the ridge. He had followed only far enough to confirm her direction. The edge under him had crumbled.
“You were alone,” Sarah said.
“Yes.”
“Your phone was in the truck.”
“No signal down here. I left it charging.”
“Your check-in device?”
There was a pause.
“On my desk at the center.”
Sarah wrote that in her notebook. She heard shame in his voice, but shame did not get to edit a search report.
“Wren was supposed to be with you?”
“Until I changed the plan.”
“Why?”
“Freezer compressor burned out at four this morning. We had six hundred pounds of donated feed thawing. She was needed there.”
That was the sort of answer Sarah distrusted: practical enough to be true, insufficient to make the choice safe.
Below, equipment clanked against stone. Wren’s voice came over the radio, giving Noah the turn at the fork. Calm, precise, no extra words. Sarah pictured her moving through the wash in the heat, and every muscle in her body wanted to order her back. Instead she asked for their status.
“At the patient in three,” Noah answered.
The collar signal wandered farther north. Sarah watched the brush for movement. Once she saw a barred tail pass between two rocks. Nova had not fled the valley, but she no longer approached Robert. The distinction mattered, though Sarah could not yet have said why.
The extraction took fifty-three minutes. The crew stabilized the slab, raised it less than an inch, and slid Robert’s leg free onto a vacuum splint. Wren stayed beyond the working circle, relaying only when asked. When the litter reached the lower track, Robert’s face had gone the gray-white of the limestone around him.
Paramedics started fluids and cut away the boot. They used words such as deformity, poor perfusion, and possible crush injury, not the confident diagnoses people later supplied to reporters. Robert gripped the stretcher rail while Wren stood near his head.
“Did she go to the road?” he asked.
“Three times that we know of,” Wren said.
His eyes opened fully. “Three?”
“She reached the truck side, crossed west, then came back east before we went in.”
Robert looked toward the ridge. “I thought I heard engines. I kept calling her.”
Wren’s face changed, but the paramedic asked Robert a question and the moment closed around it.
At the turnout, the road had filled with people who did not belong to the rescue. Dale Briscoe was back, filming from behind Deputy Nolan’s cruiser. A local television SUV had arrived from Kerrville, its mast folded but ready. Sarah had no idea who had notified them until Dale lifted his phone and gave her a guilty, pleased smile.
The ambulance doors were open. Before the crew loaded Robert, he caught Wren’s wrist.
“Bring her in,” he said. “Until Mae decides.”
Wren nodded. “I’ll set the remote trap tonight.”
“Don’t let them call her dangerous.”
“Then don’t give anyone a reason to.”
Robert released her. Sarah could not tell whether the exchange was an argument or a promise.
The reporter intercepted Sarah after the ambulance left. Sarah refused an interview, but Dale’s camera remained on her as she gave the road-opening instructions. Someone asked how they had found Robert in country no one could see from the highway.
Sarah had been awake since four-thirty. The collar’s pulse still sounded in her head. Wren was standing twenty feet away with the receiver, staring toward the darkening slope where Nova had vanished.
“The bobcat kept crossing back to him,” Sarah said. “We followed her route.”
“So she led you to the missing man?” the reporter asked.
Sarah should have repeated the facts. Instead relief shaped them into something cleaner.
“If she hadn’t come to that road,” she said, “we wouldn’t have found him in time.”
By evening, Dale’s edited clip carried a caption Sarah had never spoken: WILD BOBCAT LEADS OFFICER TO SAVE HER HUMAN. Wren watched it once in the center’s feed room, then set Sarah’s unopened text facedown beside the thawed boxes of meat…
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