Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney Page B

down here. Let her know it wasn’t one of those jackasses. Let her know it was Dan.”
    By then it was fairly dark down there. They say I was talking one minute—“Where’s Maya? Where’s my dog? Has anyone seen my dog?”—and silent the next. Talking, not talking, fading in and out. Jaha kept checking my pulse. It was erratic, then weak, then he couldn’t feel it anymore. Oh, Jesus. On his knees leaning over me, he crossed his hands over my heart to begin CPR. Before he could make his first compression, I gasped for breath like someone yanked from the bottom of a pool.
    As word got around, a posse began to assemble. Some stood guard with .44s and shotguns since there was no telling where that sow might be. Even if she was long gone there were still a lot of edgy bears out there. Others illuminated the scene with flashlights and headlamps, and offered jackets and space blankets to help keep me warm. Not all were helpful.
    “Oh my god!” one man gasped, covering his mouth with his hands. “Is he dead?” Colonel Valentine got him out of there.
    “You know what would be a big help? Why don’t you go up to the road and wait for the ambulance to make sure they know how to find us.”
    Among the first responders called out of bed was Todd Wilson, chief of Cooper Landing’s volunteer fire department, who lived just a few miles away. He tromped down the stairs with his medical kit and found a crowded, chaotic scene. I was lying on my right side, my head resting on my arm to keep blood from running down my throat.
    “Why the shirt?” he asked.
    “You don’t want to know,” Jaha said in a low voice so I wouldn’t hear.
    “Well, I’m going to have to move it so I can see what’s going on.”
    “You don’t want to see this.”
    “Well, I really have to.”
    Jaha shook his head. Together they carefully peeled back a corner of the shirt. That was enough. They laid it back down. In twenty years as a first responder, it was the worst injury Wilson had ever seen, and he wasn’t about to touch it. He caught his breath, then checked my vitals. He dug scissors out of his medical kit and cut open my waders from my chest to my waist to look for other wounds. I was fully conscious at that point, fueled by surges of adrenalin. I asked over and over about Maya. Nobody could believe I could speak, let alone fret about my dog. But what really got them was when I kept asking, “I can hear you guys, why can’t I see you?”
    Carrie Williams, who lived just up the road from Wilson’s place, was the next medicon the scene, and the most credentialed as a volunteer Level III Emergency Medical Technician. She’d been sound asleep when the emergency tone went off on the handheld radio on her nightstand. She awoke with a start, groaned, and turned to her husband, a retired US Marine who knew the routine so well she didn’t have to ask: “Honey, would you warm up the truck for me—please?” She rolled out of bed, got dressed, headed downstairs, climbed into the jumpsuit hanging by the back door, and grabbed her gloves and hat on her way out to the idling truck. At the ambulance barn across from the post office, she met up with teammate Phil Weber. They jumped into the ambulance and, siren blaring, lights whirling, headed down the Sterling Highway, pulling into the Grayling parking around one in the morning. Bystanders led Williams down to the scene, while Phil stayed up top with a radio waiting for orders. She did a quick 360 to make sure that between the bears and firearms there wasn’t some other accident waiting to happen. She then set down her medical kit and knelt down next to me in the grass.
    “This is what we’re dealing with,” Colonel Valentine saidas he lifted the T-shirt.
    Breathe. Focus. “Okay. Got it.”
    She’d save her reaction for later. Off duty, guard down, that’s when she’d let the things she saw hit her. Like the time she worked a car accident that injured a mother and several children and left