Page 41 of Last Chance Cowboy
“Yep. See, you’ve got your little V footprint here. And behind it, you see the two dots. You can’t always see it, because it depends on how quick the deer is running, whether or not the dewclaw made contact with the ground, but when you see it, you can be sure that what you’re looking at is a buck.”
“How does this help me survive?”
“It doesn’t. But it’s pretty cool, right?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Bear footprints are kind of wonky and uneven, and you see claws at the end of the toes. The same is going to be true with a coyote or a wolf. There is a wolf pack out here, so it’s good to be aware of that.”
“This is scary!”
“Animals aren’t scary. They generally don’t want anything to do with you. As long as you come into their house and respect it, and give them a wide berth when you can, there’s nothing to worry about. When you don’t see claws in the footprints, you’re looking at a cat. Cougar, or bobcat. Because their claws are retractable, they don’t walk with them out.”
“I’m going to get eaten.”
“You’re not going to get eaten,” he said. Their eyes caughtand held, and he felt compelled to say something that was almost flirtatious.
Definitely a double entendre.
Because he was the Big Bad Wolf after all, with those big teeth.
Yet again, he was tempted to say it to her. But he wouldn’t.
Because even in another lifetime, he had never been that guy. He had never had the opportunity to be that guy. He wasn’t sure if he would’ve been even without all the heaviness.
But he surely wasn’t now.
And he definitely couldn’t be that for her.
He cleared his throat and kept on blazing a trail down toward the river. “I got you some iodine drops that will kill protozoa and other hazards, but it has a shelf life, and as great as I think all of these hacks are, it’s good to be able to make safe water decisions no matter what you have on hand.”
He’d seen guys get Giardia from drinking water that hadn’t been purified. No one wanted Giardia.
He gestured toward the rushing river. “If you absolutely have to drink water without boiling it first, fast-running water like this is going to be thesafest. Key word being safest, not safe. Stagnant water isbad,bad, don’t do it. Ever. Dehydration is a killer, but the issue is that if you drink water without sterilizing it, that’s a fast track to dehydration via bacteria or parasites. All water carries a risk if you can’t heat it up first. But you’ve got your canteen. And it’s metal. So if you absolutely have to, you can put water in the canteen, stick it on the fire, and get it to a boil. That way, you can kill the bacteria in the water. If you’re already lost, the last thing you want is to develop a serious gut issue. That’s going to dehydrate you faster than just about anything.”
“So, what I’m getting from this is that I might get lost,” she counted off each thing on her fingers. “I might get ill, and then I mightget eaten.”
“Look around you,” he said. “That is not the takeaway from this.”
“Oh, sorry. Given my recent brush with near death, I wasn’t sure what my takeaway was supposed to be.”
“You didn’t almost die. And anyway, life is dangerous. But safety protocol helped you mitigate the danger. That’s what we’re doing here.”
“All right. I’ll try not to panic about the animals that I didn’t even know were out here until we started this lesson.”
“Would you rather run into one without expecting it?”
“No.”
“All right then.”
He sighed. “You’re not a very eager recruit.”
“I didn’t choose this life, it chose me.”
“Well, that’s just not true. You chose to move out here. You chose to go on that hike. You’ve chosen this in a hundred different ways, even if you didn’t know all the places that it might lead you. You enlisted yourself in this army. So now you need to know how to conduct yourself.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
