A Soldier's Pledge. Nadia Nichols
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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