Page 46 of A Little More Forgiveness

“Shit,” he swore. What was up with him? He kept looking at me funny, concern creasing deep furrows in his brow. I squinted at him. Why did his voice sound so muffled?

“Leo?” Why did Gabe sound so worried? And why was his voice even more muted?

Both their mouths were moving, so they were definitely speaking to me, but I no longer heard anything they said, only the loud hissing in my ears as I valiantly struggled to keep my eyes open. I was so tired, so bone-weary tired. Their expressions became even more frantic, but by now, the heaviness pressing against my eyelids proved too much to ignore.

I’d just close them for a minute.

Chapter Eighteen

Mitch

“Leo!” I kept shouting his name over and over, but he didn’t respond. I’d watched, horrified, as his eyes had rolled back in his head and closed completely. If I hadn’t been beside him, he’d have collapsed right there in the snow.

“What’s wrong with him?” Gabe asked, as I cradled Leo in my arms and lowered him gently on the path.

I glanced at the soaking wet denim clinging to his legs. “I think he’s contracted hypothermia. We need to get him to the cabin before his body temperature drops even more dangerously.”

“How the hell are we going to get him there? You can’t possibly think of carrying him again, especially over so great a distance.”

Gabe was right. Now he’d passed out, Leo would be a dead weight and there’d be no way for me to carry him, either on my own, or if Gabe and I carried him between us. I needed a plan so scanned the area around us on the narrow path and tried to remember the landscape along the route we’d taken. I’d noticed some fallen branches not that far from us along the trail which might work.

“Wait here,” I ordered Gabe, who immediately took my place when I went to move. “I need to check out something.”

Hurrying back around a bend in the path, I spied the thick branches sticking out of the snow farther up the track. Pulling them free, I sorted through them until I found a couple around four inches in diameter and around six feet long. Taking one in each hand, I dragged them behind me the hundred or so feet to Gabe. After dropping them on the ground, I reopened the backpack, and pulled out one of the ropes.

“What are you gonna do with those?”

“We can build a makeshift stretcher with the branches and rope and carry Leo home.”

“Clever,” Gabe replied, looking at me like I’d suggested something remarkable.

I shrugged. “Just something I learned as part of my training.”

“Still, I’d never have thought of being so inventive.”

I shrugged again, not sure what else to do.

Laying the branches parallel, a couple feet apart, I lashed the rope to one end of a branch, then looped the thick cord around the other, going back and forth until I had a crude lattice mesh bed we could place Leo on.

“You get his legs, and I’ll take his upper body,” I told Gabe. We worked together to lift and carefully place Leo on the webbing between the branches. After grabbing my stuff and Leo’s duffel, we each got in place at either end of the stretcher, crouching down and taking a good grip. “Ready?” I asked Gabe over my shoulder.

“Yep.”

“After three…” We worked in unison and got to our feet.

“Fuck, he’s heavy,” Gabe remarked, more to himself than me.

“Let’s go.”

Measured at first, until we found our rhythm, we made our return trip along the trail on the hour or more journey, the dogs leading the way. Time slowed as we trudged through the forest, but eventually, we stumbled into the yard and reached the house. Lowering Leo on the porch, we picked him up and carried him inside ourselves, rather than trying to get the stretcher through the front door.

“Take him straight to my bedroom,” I urged Gabe, neither of us stopping until we had Leo laying on top of the covers. “Let’s get him out of those wet clothes. He needs to keep warm more than anything else.”

We carefully sat him up and unzipped his padded jacket.

“Why is he not wearing anything under this?” Gabe asked, confused.

“Search me.” I thought back to when I’d found him on the ledge. “I didn’t see any other clothing laying around. We know he left here in a hurry, so maybe he just grabbed his jacket and took off? We can ask him about it when he wakes up, but right now I just wanna get him dry and under a blanket.”

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