Page 37 of Wilderness Search
“A trap? Like, a bear trap?” Danny frowned.
“She says it’s a hole in the ground, with branches over it to hide it. He fell in and she thinks he broke his leg. I have GPS coordinates for you.”
“All right. Go ahead.” Danny nodded to Tony, who was standing next to him, and Tony took out his phone, prepared to enter the coordinates.
The dispatcher rattled off the numbers and Tony typed them in. “That’s pretty close to here,” Tony said. “Less than a mile away, down a different county road.” He frowned at his phone screen. “It’s not near any established trail.”
“What were they doing out there?” Danny asked the dispatcher.
“The woman says they were looking for that missing little girl.”
“Tell them we’re on our way.” He ended the call and turned his attention to the assembled volunteers. “Those of you whowant or need to go home, do so,” he said. “You’ve been out here all day. We only need about six people to handle this.”
“I’ll come,” Willa said. Going home meant hours of sitting and worrying. Better to be active and help someone in need.
“I’ll go, too,” Ryan said. “I want to see this trap.”
Tony, Vince Shepherd and Ryan’s fiancée, Deni Traynor, made up the rest of the crew that set out toward the area where the couple was stranded.
“We’ll have to hike in from here,” Tony said, enlarging the area map on his phone.
Danny distributed first aid supplies, including a wheeled litter, splints, back, neck and leg braces, supplemental oxygen and fluids, as well as ropes and other gear for retrieving their patient from the pit he had fallen into. “Some of this is probably overkill,” he said as he helped Willa stuff her pack with more bandages. “But we don’t know the extent of his injuries and we have to be prepared for the worst.”
They set out with Tony in the lead, breaking trail where there was none. The terrain looked like the country they had searched all day—pine and aspen forest pocked with boulders and gullies, choked with deadfall and impenetrable thickets of scrub oak. Tony had a machete to cut a path where absolutely necessary, but mostly they tried to detour around smaller obstacles, alert for hazards and for any sign of Olivia.
It took an hour to reach the couple. They heard them before they saw them, the woman calling out, “Over here!” and a man’s very loud “Thank you!”
The group stopped at the edge of a small clearing and stared at the scene before them. The woman stood beside a boulder and looked from the group to a hole in the ground. The hole was approximately six feet across, with green pine branches piled around it on two sides. Moving carefully, Danny led the way to the edge of the pit.
The man was approximately five feet down, on his back in the bowl-like depression on a bed of more green branches. The scent of pine perfumed the air. “We were walking along, taking our time, searching for any sign of the little girl,” the woman, a forty-something blonde dressed in jeans, a pink T-shirt and a black day pack, said. “Luke was ahead of me. I heard a scream and looked toward him and he wasn’t there.”
“The ground gave way and I fell,” Luke called up. He wore camo pants and a black T-shirt, a green ball cap over his short, sandy hair.
“Someone spread all these branches over this hole in the ground,” the woman explained. “I pulled them away and piled them to the side. Who would do something like that? Were they trying to catch a deer or a bear or something?”
“What’s your name, ma’am?” Danny asked.
“Melissa Wagner.”
“I’m Danny Irwin. We’re going to take care of your husband. It will take a few minutes for us to get down there to him. Meanwhile, you can answer some questions.”
While the others helped Tony attach a rope to a sturdy tree nearby and assemble the needed equipment, Danny and Willa questioned Melissa about her husband’s medical history and general health. “He said he heard the bone pop when he landed,” she said.
“He’s pretty sure it’s broken, but there’s no bone sticking out.” She bit her lip, her eyes shiny. “I can’t believe someone would do this.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this, either,” Danny said. “But right now, let’s focus on Luke.”
He used the rope to steady himself as he walked down into the pit. Tony and Ryan followed, leaving Deni, Willa and Vince to stay with Melissa and lower supplies via another rope as needed.
“It’s like something aboriginal hunters might use,” Vince said. “I think I saw that in a book—they dug a pit, lined it with sharp sticks and drove game over it.”
“Thank goodness this one didn’t have any sharp sticks,” Willa said.
“This pit wasn’t really dug out,” Deni said. “It looks like a tree died a long time ago and the stump rotted away and left this depression. All anyone had to do was scoop out the debris.”
She walked a short distance away and stopped beside another downed tree. “The branches they used to cover the hole came from this tree. I can see where someone broke them off.”
“They look like they’re still green,” Vince said.
