Across a Thousand Miles (24 page)

“Can you move your fingers at all?” he asked.

“No.”

“I have a splint and a sling in my first-aid kit,” he said clearly into her ear. “I'm going to put it on your arm, right over your parka. Can you tell me where it hurts the most?”

“My forearm. Glad you came. Wind blew us off the trail.”

“I know. Wilton and Beech told me. They're still up there.”

“You can still win this race, Mac. Get going. You could still win!”

Mac rummaged in the first-aid kit. “I don't give a damn about the race. I don't care if I ever race again! This is going to hurt, Rebecca, but I have to move your arm. Lean forward just a little. Good girl.” He wrapped the splint around her forearm. She bit her lip hard to keep from crying out. In spite of the cold, her forehead was slick with sweat, which iced almost instantly. She closed her eyes against the pain when Mac adjusted the sling around her neck and moved her arm into it. There was a loud ringing in her ears, and Mac's voice seemed to come from very far away. “Dammit, don't you pass out on me! I need you to stay awake. You hear me?”

“You owe me a lot of money. If you don't leave right now, you'll never be able to pay me back.”

He ignored her words, holding her until her head cleared and she was able to sit up on her own. “I'm going to get you back up to the trail,” he said. “We can't be that far from Mile 101. I'll load you in my sled and take you there. Your dogs'll be fine right where they are until I can get back and get them out. Can you stand up?”

He helped her to her feet. Her head spun and she was afraid she was going to be sick. “I don't think I can walk that far. Maybe in a minute or two…”

“I don't intend for you to walk,” he said, scooping her gently into his arms. “Merlin, you come,” he said unnecessarily to the dog who hadn't left his side.

“Put me down,” she protested weakly. “You can't carry me. The slope's too steep and I'm too heavy.”

“Heavy? When I first met you, Rebecca Reed, I thought to myself, ‘I bet a strong gust of wind could blow that little lady clean away.' And I'll be damned if it didn't,” Mac said as he began the painstakingly slow process of climbing back up the steep incline with Rebecca in his arms. He dug one booted toe into the slope to make a step, then the other. “If that little bit of wind was strong enough to blow you down this hill, I guess I'm strong enough to carry you back up it. Hell, you don't weigh much more than one of your scrawny sled dogs.”

The pain of being moved one jolting step at a time was so intense that Rebecca could not always stifle her gasping moans. The climb lasted forever. She kept her left arm curled tightly around Mac's neck, her head tucked beneath his chin, and tried to make herself as light as possible for him. The slope was very nearly steep enough to require ropes and belays, and with the wind screaming across the face of it, she couldn't imagine where he found the strength or the balance to stay on his feet.

For the most part he did. He stumbled twice, but Rebecca only remembered the first time. The second time he went to his knees, the impact sent such an explosion of pain through her arm and shoulder that she could no longer keep herself from falling into the black abyss. She no longer wanted to try.

 

“R
EBECCA
?” A
STRANGE VOICE
summoned her from a faraway place. “Can you hear me? I'm Dr. Stamm, your admitting physician. Can you squeeze my thumb, Rebecca? Squeeze my thumb if you can hear me.”

Rebecca opened her eyes, blinked them into focus and saw a young doctor gazing down at her, a nurse standing to one side with a look of pleased surprise on her kindly face.

“Well, now, that's a pretty sight,” Dr. Stamm said. “Her eyes are blue and they're lookin' right at me. Pupils equal and very reactive. And best of all, she's just about breaking my thumb. Let go, Rebecca. I know you're a strong lady. You don't have to prove it to me.”

“Mac,” Rebecca said. “Where's Mac? Where am I?”

“You're in the emergency room at Fairbanks Memorial. You had an accident on Eagle Summit. You have a fractured radius, a mild concussion and numerous bruises that shouldn't have any lasting ill effects. You arrived here approximately two hours ago, pretty incoherent, in and out of consciousness. We've done all the X rays and put a cast on your arm, so the hard part's over with. All you have to do now is behave yourself. I'm keeping you overnight as a precautionary measure. We're going to give you another unit of fluids, because you were pretty dehydrated when we admitted you.”

“How did I get here? Where's Mac?”

“How much do you remember?” Dr. Stamm asked.

Rebecca's forehead furrowed as she thought. “I remember the sled blowing over and starting to fall, and Mac finding me. He carried me back up that slope. I don't know how he did it. It was so steep.” She moved her head on the pillow. “I don't remember much of anything else.”

“Well, from what I understand, you were brought into Mile 101 riding inside someone's sled bag at approximately 4 a.m. Someone with a ham radio called for emergency ambulance service. By then the storm had pretty much blown itself out, so they sent a chopper after
you. You've been here since five-thirty. It's almost nine o'clock now.”

“Where's Mac?”

“I take it Mac is the guy who rescued you?” Dr. Stamm shook his head. “I don't know, but there's another guy out in the waiting room. Japanese. I believe his name is Kimono.”

“Kanemoto,” Rebecca corrected. “Can I see him?”

Relief flooded through her when Kanemoto walked into the room. His face was drawn and somber, but he tried to smile when he saw her. Rebecca propped herself up on her good arm. “I'm sorry, Kanemoto. I can't finish the race. My arm is broken and the doctor says I have to stay here overnight. Where are my dogs? Are they okay?”

Kanemoto stood beside the gurney and touched her cast very gently with his fingertips. “The dogs are fine. You are fine. Don't think I am disappointed. I think next year you will win and I am very proud! Mac brought you to Mile 101. He left his team there and went back to get your dogs. I'm going to drive back out with the truck and meet him at Mile 101. It will take him a long time to get your dogs. The trail is still very bad. A race volunteer went to help him. He sent me here to check on you and told me to come back as soon as I knew, so I will go back now and wait for Mac at Mile 101.”

“Take good care of my dogs,” Rebecca said. “And, Kanemoto, stay with Mac. Stay with Mac the same way you would have stayed with me. Okay?”

Kanemoto nodded. “Okay.”

 

I
T WAS STRANGE
, really, how things worked out. Mac had spent the last eighty miles thinking about all the choices he'd made, all the roads he'd traveled, all the
things he'd regretted doing and the things he wished he'd done but hadn't. He tried to think of what he'd do differently if he had it all to do over again, but when it came right down it, there weren't many things he'd change. There weren't many he
could
change. Sometimes a man's path is laid down by forces greater than himself, and Mac was bound by his sense of honor and duty to walk his no matter how difficult it was.

He felt that way, sometimes, when he thought about his naval career and his father. He'd had no choice but to do what he had done, and he had no regrets. Well, almost none. He wished he hadn't had to kill the two Iranian pilots. But he wouldn't have traded those years of flying for anything. As for his father, the old man might come to realize that he'd been wrong about his son. It was possible. All things were possible. It was even possible that Rebecca might fall madly in love with him, though by the time she did, he would probably be a very old man.

“We're in the home stretch, Merlin. Not far now.” Mac pulled up the sleeve of his parka to glance at his watch. It was exactly 1400 hours, and the afternoon was clear and sunny, a balmy zero degrees. He had seen his first houses a few miles back along the Chena River, and he had returned waves to a few spectators lining the Chena Hot Springs Road. He had no idea what day it was. He did know that he was at least two days behind the winners and about twenty miles from the finish line, and the way he was feeling, if he could just hang on to the sled and keep his eyes open for the next two hours of river trail, he'd be doing fine.

He hoped these last miles would be easy miles. He hoped that soon he'd be seeing Rebecca with his own eyes, be able to touch her, feel the warmth and the life
of her and know that she was really and truly all right. Kanemoto had assured him she was fine, and in fact, Mac had spoken to her by phone on his Angel Creek layover. She had left her number with race officials there, and he had dialed it with his heart in his throat. A motel operator answered and connected him to her room. “Mac!” she had said when she heard his voice. “Mac! Are you okay?”

She'd been worried about him? What was wrong with that girl? Didn't she realize that she was the one who'd been hurt? She had told him she was fine, but knowing Rebecca, he knew she'd say the same thing if she'd been told she only had one day to live. He needed to see her. He needed to be sure she was really all right. That awful night he'd carried her up the hill, that terrible, mind-numbing moment when he'd stumbled to his knees, and she'd gone limp in his arms…

He'd never driven his team harder than he'd driven them to reach Mile 101. It had taken more than two hours for them to travel a mere six miles, each step an immense struggle. His dogs had collapsed in their harnesses, completely played out, when they'd finally reached the checkpoint. If it hadn't been for Kanemoto, Mac never would have survived the horror of that night. Stress took on a whole new dimension when a loved one's life hung in the balance.

It was daybreak before he persuaded a snowmobiler to take him back to where Rebecca's team had been blown off the trail, and the steepness of the slope astounded him. He was glad it had been dark when he'd carried Rebecca up it. Had it been daylight he might have deemed the task impossible. It was a good 150 feet to where her sled had come to rest against an outcropping of rock. He and the race volunteer spent an hour
getting the dogs up, and then the sled had to be unloaded and its contents carried up to the trail before they could haul it, step by agonizing step, back up that hellish stretch of mountain. They'd reloaded the sled, hooked in the dogs, and then Mac had driven Rebecca's team six miles to where Kanemoto waited with the dog truck and news of Rebecca. By the time Mac was finally on the trail to the Angel Creek checkpoint with his own team of dogs, it was nearly 6 p.m. and he was once again way behind the front-runners.

“All right, Merlin. Steady as she goes. Good dogs.” For having just completed a one-thousand-mile run, his team looked good. They were still moving along well, and in spite of the stress of the past few days, they still seemed happy to be trotting down the trail.

Rebecca had told him about Guy Johnson, the sick pilot, when Mac called her from the Angel Creek checkpoint. She'd given him a blow-by-blow description of the diagnosis, the emergency open-heart surgery and the prognosis. “He's doing nicely, but it was touch-and-go for a while. You saved his life! The doctor said if you hadn't gotten him there when you did, he'd have been a goner. Johnson and his family know it, too. They want to thank you in person.

“And, Mac, did you know that Guy Johnson was the pilot who took over Sam's mail route when Sam retired? Don't you think that's quite a coincidence? Oh, and by the way, Sam and Ellin won't be at the finish—Ellin caught Sam's cold—but I promised I'd let them know just as soon as you arrived. How's your team doing? How's Merlin?”

Mac had never heard Rebecca talk so much all at once, her words tumbling out in a bright, breathless rush.
“The dogs are fine but they're tired. I'm going to stay right here until they tell me it's time to go. I know it's only eighty miles to the finish, but I pushed them too hard coming over Eagle Summit. I really burned them out. Don't expect me for at least another day or so.”

At the end of their conversation he replaced the phone in the receiver and sat for a few moments, his head spinning. “I don't care about Guy Johnson and his mail route!” he'd wanted tell her. “I only care about you!”

Not that he had anything against Guy Johnson. Well, he did resent the fact that if Guy hadn't had that damn heart attack, Mac and Rebecca would probably be counting their race winnings right now. None of that was Johnson's fault, of course.

Mac raised his arm in response to a riverside wave. More and more people were turning out along the riverbank as he drove his team nearer to town. A stray dog ran out onto the ice, yapping at the team, but his dogs ignored it, trotting steadily on. He wondered if they would travel like that forever, this incredible team of dogs who had been his loyal companions for the past fourteen days.

He had stayed a long time at the Angel Creek checkpoint, fussing over his team, feeding them special treats, apologizing to them for the way he'd driven them over Eagle Summit. He didn't pull out of there until all of them were ready to roll, and he'd babied them on this last stretch of trail, stopping every hour to snack, to rub tired muscles, to tell them what grand and glorious dogs they truly were.

Mac heard a noise coming from up around the next bend in the river. He thought at first it was the sound of water rushing over a dam or a strong gusting wind that never diminished. His dogs heard it, too, and checked
their pace so much that he had to step on the section of snowmobile track dragging between the runners to keep the brush bow of the sled from bumping into his wheel dogs. “All right,” he said reassuringly. “All right.” They pulled forward again, but their ears were pricked and their tails were raised. The noise grew louder as they approached the curve. More people were lining the riverbank waving to him, and he wondered what all the commotion was about. He turned to look behind him, but the river trail was empty. He knew there were no mushers between his team and the finish line. He'd left Angel Creek nearly a day behind the last group of middle-of-the-pack mushers, and the back-of-the-pack mushers were another day or so behind him. He'd had the trail to himself for the past seventy-five miles.