A Soldier's Pledge

“Hank cheats. So does Slouch.” Cameron entered the office, tossed her ball cap on the desk, pulled the band from her ponytail and finger combed her dark shoulder-length hair. “One of these days they’ll pay, soon as I figure out how they’re doing it. I’m missing way too many easy shots I could make blindfolded when I was twelve.”

“I won’t be able to get your money till the bank opens. Coffee?” Walt asked, lifting the pot from the hot plate.

“No way. The coffee you make should be banned. I’m going to the diner for a real cup of joe and a big breakfast, and then I’m going to take a long hot shower in my rusty old trailer, and then I’m going to come back here and collect my bonus, so you better have it ready. Bank opens at nine. I’ll be back at nine thirty sharp.”

“If I have your bonus ready, will you make the phone call?” Walt asked hopefully.

“Nope. You talk to the Lone Ranger’s sister. I’m just the pilot who flies the plane. You’re the boss. You get the big bucks for handling all the drama. Tell her he was fine when I left him yesterday. I can’t vouch for how he is today. Wet, probably.” Cameron pulled her hat on and started for the door.

“I know how Hank and Slouch are fouling your shots,” Walt said as she reached for the doorknob. She paused and looked over her shoulder. “If you make that phone call for me, I’ll let you in on their dirty little secret.”

She hesitated just long enough to make Walt squirm before nodding. “Deal.”

* * *

TWO HOURS LATER she was back at the floatplane base, clean, well fed and dialing the number Walt had provided her. A woman’s voice answered on the third ring, and Cameron studied the words she’d carefully drafted on a paper napkin while she ate her breakfast at the diner.

“Mrs. Tedlow?” she said, speaking slowly. “This is Cameron Johnson. I’m a pilot for Walt’s Flying Service, and Walt asked me to call you when I got to the office this morning.” She read the words aloud over the phone to the Lone Ranger’s sister in Montana. Writing her opening had been clever. She had a tendency to get tongue-tied on the phone, so she’d made extensive notes in preparation for this call.

“Thank you so much for getting back to me, Cameron,” the woman replied. “I really appreciate it. I’m afraid I wasn’t very coherent when I called yesterday. I apologize for that. I was just so relieved to have finally located my brother. And please, call me Lori.”

“Walt understands completely how upset you were yesterday.” Cameron shot a glance at Walt, who gave her an encouraging nod and two thumbs up. “He’s a very understanding man.” She scanned her notes and continued reading. “I just wanted to let you know that I saw your brother yesterday afternoon, and he was just fine. He’d set up camp and was going to get a good night’s rest and start his hike today. It’s not raining nearly so hard now, so it won’t be bad going at all.”

“It’s raining up there?”

“First real rain we’ve had all summer, and it was coming down cats and dogs yesterday.”

“Oh no!”

“It’s not a bad thing. We needed the rain. We’ve been fighting a big forest fire up here, and thanks to this downpour it’s just about out.” She was getting way off script. She turned over the napkin and continued reading from her notes. “Your brother told me he was carrying an emergency transmitter, and he’s programmed our number into it. If he gets into any trouble at all, we’ll get him out. We have good search and rescue up here, what with the park being so close to us and all.”

There was a frustrated sound on the other end of the line. “My brother wouldn’t signal for help if he was being eaten by a grizzly. He’s an army ranger, and they all think they’re invincible. Look, Cameron, I’m going to be blunt. He checked himself out of Walter Reed—that’s a military hospital near DC. He was in rehab. He was badly wounded in Afghanistan and needs medical supervision and treatment. He can’t be wandering around in the wilderness. He has to be brought back before he gets into trouble. He could die out there in the shape he’s in.”

Cameron shot Walt an exaggerated frown. “I guess I’m not following you. You expect us to find your brother and bring him back? That’s not our job.”

“I know that, but you have to understand, this is all my fault. I’m to blame. This has to do with his dog.”

“This is about a dog?”

“I should have told him about his dog last summer after it happened, but I didn’t want him to freak out or be distracted when he was still deployed and doing dangerous soldiering stuff. I knew he’d be really angry at me, so I just kept putting it off. I kept lying to him and telling him everything was fine, and then when I went to see him in the hospital last week, I told him what happened and he just...” Her voice squeezed off and ended in a high pitched, mouse-like squeak.

Cameron waited a few moments for the woman to collect herself. She covered the phone and mouthed to Walt, “I bet she’s a blonde.”

“I’m sorry,” Lori continued shakily.

“No need to apologize, Lori. I think I understand the situation. You were taking care of your brother’s dog while he was deployed and something bad happened to it, and when you finally told him, he freaked out and took off.”

“It’s worse than that.” She paused, and the sound of her blowing her nose came over the line. “This wasn’t just any dog. This dog saved his life in Afghanistan. Twice. They featured the story on the national news down here in the States. We held fund-raisers to get the dog home because Jack was so attached to her. It took forever and three thousand dollars, but we finally got her flown back here a year ago last June.

“My fiancé and I had been planning for two years to do this paddling trek in Northwest Territories last July. My mother offered to take care of the dog, but she was really sick from her chemo treatments, so we thought we’d just bring the dog along with us rather than put her in a boarding kennel, you know? She’d gotten to know us and was well behaved. We traveled up where you are to take a canoe trip down the Wolf River to the Mackenzie, and then to Norman Wells.” There was a snuffling noise, another squeak or two, and then Lori resumed. “Everything went fine until a huge bear came into our camp on the second night. It walked right in while we were cooking dinner. The dog chased the bear off and she never came back. We waited there awhile, then moved a short distance downriver to get away from our cooking spot and stayed for two days hoping she’d return.”

“The bear probably killed her,” Cameron said. “Bears don’t like dogs very much.”

“That’s what we figured. Still, we didn’t know. Maybe she got lost, couldn’t figure out where we went, or maybe she was hurt and just lying out there. We waited for two days, looked around as best we could, then left her there. That’s the bottom line. When I told my brother about it in the hospital, he told me to leave. Wouldn’t talk to me, he was so upset. It was awful, the worst moment of my life. The next morning when I went back to see him again, he was gone. They told me he got up in the night, got dressed and walked out.”

“So now he’s up here, searching for a dog that’s probably been dead since last summer,” Cameron said. What a cheerful story, she thought to herself.

“There’s more,” Lori continued amid another round of sniffling, nose blowing and mousey squeaks. “Like I said, my brother got all shot up in Afghanistan. That’s why he was at Walter Reed. He was wounded four times and lost the lower part of his left leg. He spent the last two months in the hospital. At first they weren’t even sure he was going to make it. He was only recently fitted with a prosthesis and had just started physical therapy and rehab.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m not sure how I can help.”

“Don’t you see? He’ll die out there if you don’t go get him!”

“Me? How’m I supposed to rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued?”

“He’s depressed. There’s no telling what he’ll do. He probably brought a gun with him, too.” Cameron thought about the rifle in the case. “He could be planning to kill himself. Lots of veterans do. Twenty-two veterans commit suicide every single day, twenty-two, and I don’t want my brother to be one of them. I don’t want him to become a statistic because of something I did. This is all my fault. We shouldn’t have brought Ky on the canoe trip. We should have put her in a boarding kennel.”

“Ky’s the name of the dog?”

“Yes.” Loud sniff. “That’s what he named her because she looks so much like a coyote, but she looks more like a small wolf to me. They have wolves in the mountains of Afghanistan, where he was deployed. He really loved that dog. I mean, she was just a pup when she followed him out of the mountains. She bonded to him, and he got really attached to her.”

Cameron gnawed on what was left of her fingernail. All her fingernails were short and chewed. The past year had been a hard one on her nails. Walt moved into her line of sight, eyebrows raised in question. She shook her head and blew out a sigh. “Look, Lori, I’d like to help, but I don’t know what I can do. He has an emergency GPS with him. He can signal if he gets into trouble. Tell you what. If you come out here, I’ll fly you back to the lake and you could try to catch up with him. He’s probably not traveling very fast.”

“Believe me, I was going to fly up there yesterday but my husband Clive—we got married last August, right after our canoe trip last summer—said he wouldn’t let me go even if I hired a guide because I’m eight months pregnant. I told my brother where the bear came into our camp. It was just above a trapper’s cabin on the north shore of the Wolf. It’s the only cabin on that entire river.”

“Let me guess. You want me to look for your brother there.”

“He can’t make that kind of walk on a prosthetic leg. No way. He’ll die out there. If you could just find him and tell him how sorry I am about his dog and how much he’s needed back home, if you can just bring him back out, I’ll pay you good money.”

“Why don’t we give him the eight days he asked for? If he doesn’t show up, we can go look for him.”

“Because we’re afraid he might be suicidal,” Lori said. “Eight days is way too long to wait, and besides, there’s something else. My mother’s really sick. She didn’t want him to know how sick she was. She didn’t want me to tell him about the cancer. She didn’t want him to worry about her while he was in Afghanistan, and then when he got hurt and was shipped stateside, she made me promise not to tell him, but he really needs to know. He has to come home. You have to find him.”

Cameron gnawed on another fingernail. “What if he won’t come?”

“He will, if you tell him how bad things are with our mother,” Lori said. “Will you do it? I’m begging you.”

“Why didn’t you tell him that his mother was so sick when you saw him at the hospital?”

“I was going to, but he got so mad at me when I told him about his dog. He wouldn’t even look at me. I couldn’t add that awful news to what I’d just told him. I was going to give him time to calm down and tell him when I came to see him the next day, but he’d already gone.”

“I don’t know how much time I can spare,” Cameron hedged. “I have my job to consider.”

“Then consider this,” Lori said, her voice suddenly all steel with no trace of a mousey squeak or sniffle. “My husband Clive and I have some money in our savings account, money we were going to put toward our baby’s college fund, but we’d spend all of it to get Jack back safe and sound. I’ll pay you five thousand for getting him off that river and back to a town where we can pick him up, and a generous bonus if you can find him fast enough so we can get him back to Montana just in case my mother takes a turn for the worse. She’s holding her own right now, but that could change. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

Cameron glanced out the window at her rusting eighteen-year-old SUV with its bald tires, badly cracked windshield and crumpled front bumper, thought about the leaks in her rusting house trailer rental, the carpet and furniture that reeked of old cigarette smoke and the moldy ceiling tiles that dropped onto the floor when it rained, and wondered how far into the future five grand would carry her. She thought about Johnny Allen’s sexy red Jeep that he’d just listed for sale. She didn’t have to think on it for long. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

After she hung up the phone, she met Walt’s questioning expression with a thoughtful frown. “Looks like our Lone Ranger really is a ranger, an army ranger, and I just went from being a bush pilot to a bounty hunter.”