Part 5
A voice called from the road, too far away for Cal to catch the words. Owen answered with his name and department, then shouted that there were armed men above them. Another voice repeated the warning farther downhill.
The searchers had heard Flint. Cal lowered the branch only when a light swept through the trees and flashed back from the strip, then raised it again as high as he could. Lucy held onto his wrist until someone in an orange coat reached the bottom of the slope.
The officers came first, spreading out behind cover. One stayed with Owen while others moved uphill; the rescuers and medics waited until they were called forward. Cal heard commands beyond the ridge, then the unmistakable thump of helicopter blades in the break between the clouds.
Captain Dana Holt knelt beside them. Owen had said she would come, and there she was, snow melting along the scar on her chin, telling him to put down the rifle and let the medic see his shoulder.
“Get Rusk,” Owen said. “Don’t let him walk away from this.”
“The upper crew’s at the camp. You stay here and let them stop that bleeding.” She turned to Cal. “Owen’s missed check-in started the search. We found the truck, then heard the dog from the lower road.”
Cal could only nod. Owen passed Dana the bag containing the drone, and Lucy dug the scorched scarf out of her coat. An officer recorded where each had been found and took them into evidence before returning Cal’s medical bag. “Volunteer issue,” Owen told Dana. “It doesn’t tell us who wore it.” Dana nodded and left that question with the officer making notes.
The helicopter set down in the open road clearing after the ground crew marked it. By then officers were bringing the attackers down from the nearby logging camp, hands secured behind them. Rusk came last, gray beard exposed above his collar, still trying to make the man holding his elbow match his pace.
He stopped when he saw Cal. “All this trouble. You could’ve kept quiet.”
Cal put his hand over Lucy’s hood. He watched the officer move Rusk on without answering him. Another officer carried sealed evidence bags from the camp: folders, photographs, pages of names and freight payments. Owen’s account and those records would take longer to untangle than this morning, but Rusk was going downhill in cuffs.
The medic wrapped Lucy in a blanket. She kept one hand outside it, pressed against Cal’s coat, and he didn’t ask her to tuck it in. When they brought the litter, she watched until he was strapped onto it before she let anyone help her stand.
Flint resisted being lifted. Cal called him close, and the dog leaned into his hand while a rescuer checked the paw and covered him against the cold. Dana took a small bronze paw token from the cord inside her jacket and fastened it to his collar.
“Our search crew gives these,” she told Lucy. “He earned mine.”
Lucy touched the cold little shape. Flint’s tail moved once beneath the blanket, and Cal felt the grip on his sleeve loosen just enough to let the medic work.
At the aircraft Cal insisted on helping with the dog. The rescuer took most of Flint’s weight while Cal lifted his chest onto the padded space beside him. Lucy climbed in with assistance and laid her crutches where she could see them; Owen was already secured for the flight, arguing weakly about giving his statement before the medicine made him sleepy.
Dana leaned close enough for him to hear. “You’ll give it. First we get you there.”
Cal kept his hand on Flint until the trees dropped away below them. Lucy rested against his shoulder, awake this time, watching the place where their cabin disappeared into the white.
Months later, in Helena, Cal sat in the public gallery of a courtroom with the same canvas bag between his feet. One corner was still black, and the handle bore Flint’s tooth marks. At the witness stand, Owen was giving the testimony he had insisted he would live to give.
His account joined the records taken from the camp, laying out the operation behind the freight runs and the people Rusk had treated as entries in a ledger. Cal had heard some of it before. Hearing Owen say it under oath, with his injured shoulder still sitting a little lower than the other, made him keep both hands flat on his knees.
The trial would continue. That afternoon, in a separate proceeding after months of visits, checks, and paperwork, the adoption was approved. The promise Cal had made behind the fallen tree finally had a judge’s signature.
Back in their borrowed room, Lucy sat beside him while he put the signed papers into a folder. She had asked whether she could call him Dad weeks before. Now she wanted to know whether she still had to ask.
“No,” he said, turning toward her. “You don’t have to ask again.”
She climbed carefully into his lap, avoiding the thigh that still ached when the weather changed. He tucked her against him and held her there while Flint settled under the chair, his healed paw resting across Cal’s boot.
“Like you said in the woods?” she asked.
“You stay. I stay.” He kissed the untidy part in her hair. “We’ll figure out the rest at home.”
The next morning Dana met them on the courthouse steps with Owen and a handful of officers, neighbors, and rescue volunteers. Flint wore his bronze paw on a proper ribbon now. Dana called him an honorary member of the search crew, and Lucy straightened the ribbon whenever the breeze turned it sideways.
Someone asked Cal to say a few words. He had thought of something on the walk over, but with Lucy beside him and Owen standing stiffly at the foot of the steps, he couldn’t remember how it started.
“Owen carried me,” he said. “Flint got my hands loose. And this little girl kept calling until I heard her.” He looked down at Lucy. “I’m glad I get to look up and see you in that window again.”
She leaned into his leg. The people on the steps began to clap, gently at first, and Flint lifted his ears toward them. He gave one clear bark, making Lucy laugh as the bronze paw knocked against his collar.