Alice's Arc

Chapter 3 of 20

Alice meant to spend the next morning scouting new ground for her practice work with Biscuit. She took the ridge trail east, away from the snare country, and let the dog set the pace. He kept his tail high and his nose working. She was watching him think, pleased, when a voice came up from the draw below the ridge. It was thin and cracked. It called for help, then stopped, then called again. Biscuit's ears swung toward the sound. He did not sit. Alice took that as a green light and stepped off the trail onto the slope. She planted her walking stick with the light on top and used it to brake her descent. The draw was steep and choked with fern. The voice grew clearer as she dropped: an older woman, from the sound of it, calling the same three words in the same order. Alice stopped twice to let Biscuit read the air. The second time, a small bird with a red head and blue wings landed on a low branch and held still. It looked down the draw the way Biscuit did. Alice took the bird's calm as a second opinion and kept moving. She found the hiker at the bottom, sitting against a mossy log with one boot off. The woman's ankle was swollen and purple. Her water bottle was empty. She said she had been calling since first light. She had come up from the lodge trail and lost the switchbacks in the dark. Alice knelt, gave her the full canteen, and checked the ankle with two fingers. Not broken. Badly turned. Alice thought through the climb. The draw was too steep to carry a grown woman up. Downstream was gentler and would meet the lodge road in about a mile. She cut a second walking stick from a straight alder and braced the woman between the stick and her own shoulder. Biscuit went ahead at a slow heel, checking back every few steps. Alice matched his pace. When his ears went flat once at a wet slab of rock, she stopped and waited until he stood on his own, then guided the woman around it. They reached the lodge road by early afternoon. A warm cedar building sat at the bend, lanterns already lit against the shade of the pines. The woman's family was on the porch. Her daughter ran down the steps. Alice handed the hiker off, refused the offered meal, and said only where she had found her and which way the draw ran. The father wrote it down. He asked her name. She gave it, and her father's, and the ridge she worked. Walking back up the road with Biscuit, Alice counted what had changed. Biscuit had held a live search from first call to handoff without one wrong step. She had a name at the lodge now, and adults who owed her a hearing. Friday was three days out, and a ranger would listen to the family she had just helped.