Amy Raye awoke to complete darkness and pain shooting up through her leg, and an odd feeling of displacement. But soon enough it all came back to her—the fall, the break, the shelter she had found. Though she did not know what time it was, she felt certain it was close to sunrise. She would have been gone a full day by now. People would be looking for her. And then she thought of Farrell. She imagined him getting the call from Aaron or Kenny, or even one of the authorities, and her heart ached because she knew how much her husband loved her. With all of these thoughts came a surge of adrenaline. She had hope that she would be found. She’d keep the fire going so that someone would see the smoke. And she’d have to take care of her leg. She’d have to keep it packed with snow. She’d have to immobilize it. She sat up and edged herself along the wall of the cave until she found her pack. She retrieved her matches and put them inside her coat pocket. Then she spread out her hands, moved them over the floor until her right hand felt the charred cedar that was still warm. Beside the burned-out fire was the pile of bark shavings she had gathered. She lit a piece of juniper bark and was then able to see well enough to get another fire going. She ate the remaining beef jerky and drank some of the water from the bladder in her pack. She looked over the wood she had gathered the night before. One of the limbs was almost three feet long and would work well as a splint. She’d need to find another limb about the same length to make the splint work. And she’d have to gather more wood, which, given the snowfall, wouldn’t be as easy as it had been the night before.
She carried her knife in a sheath on her belt, and her bone saw under her arm, and scooted out of the cave and onto the ledge. She would have to work fast. Over a foot of snow had accumulated, and it was still coming down. The flakes were small and sharp and smited her face. The cold and the snow worked their way into her pants and gloves, up the sleeves of her jacket. But the deadfall was everywhere, and she’d been right. She’d made it through the night. The sun was beginning to rise, a welcome glow that allowed her to assess her surroundings. The ledge was large. It wrapped around the rock face like an enormous step that had been carved into the bluff, and climbed upward into an expanse of rocky terrain fleshed with pinyon and juniper. Amy Raye gathered armfuls of wood and tossed them into the cave. With her bone saw, she also cut live boughs, knowing they would smoke better than the wood and could be used as signal torches. And she found a perfect-sized limb for a splint. And so she returned to the cave. She organized the wood and the boughs. Then she sat beside the fire and, using her knife, began paring down a side on each of the limbs. The splints would need to be smooth and flat against her leg or she would not be able to withstand the pressure.