Page 66 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

"On me." The command leaves my throat flat and steady, the instinct of eleven years in transport turbulence taking the wheel. "Let's bring him home."

We step out together into the roar of the blizzard, the search line fanning into the blinding snow.

EIGHTEEN

The Tune

JASON

The radiator stopped hissing twenty minutes ago.

Freezing slush hangs in gray stalactites from the cracked fiberglass grille of the Chevy, cementing the crumpled bumper to the granite boulder at Mile Marker Six. The impact sheared the front axle off its mounts, driving the right tire up into the wheel well until steel tore through rubber with the sound of a mortar round.

Wind howls off the high ridge at forty knots, driving needles of sleet through the shattered windshield. The dash thermometer registered fifteen below before the battery died. With the windchill ripping down the logging cut, thirty-five below settles into the timber like dry ice.

Inside the crushed bed, the canvas dog crate lies buckled under four hundred pounds of fallen lodgepole pine.

The pine sheared off at the root when the gale crested the ridge, smashing through the tailgate and splitting the aluminum latch. Radar bolted before the branches settled. The Malinois mix trailed ten feet of nylon check cord into the whiteout, driven by the raw terror of a young dog unfamiliar with thirty-knot winds in the high country.

"Radar." The shout tears out of my throat, flattened by the gale.

Sleet cakes the wool collar of my shearling coat. My boots sink past the shins into fresh powder as I drag myself out from the driver's side, my right leg catching on the bent rocker panel. Pain flashes through the scarred tissue of my inner thigh—a sharp tear that radiates from the femoral graft straight up into the hip socket. The surgical scar burns as though dipped in boiling oil, damaged nerves screaming in the sub-zero air.

I catch the bent bed rail with both gloved hands, forcing weight onto the heel of my left boot until the joint locks.

Ten yards into the timber, a thin whimper cuts through the roar of the gale.

The sound comes from the north draw, where the logging cut narrows into a stand of second-growth timber. Down there, deadfall lies stacked in tangled heaps under four feet of drifted snow. If the nylon cord catches a root ball while Radar panics, hypothermia will take him before the storm breaks at dawn.

I let go of the truck.

Waist-deep powder swallows my thighs with the first step off the gravel shoulder. The drift gives way beneath my boots like flour, dropping me to my knees. I claw through the crust with my mittens, driving my toes into the frozen shale underneath, pulling forward one agonizing yard at a time.

"Radar. Here."

The gale swallows the command. Pine boughs groan overhead, heavy with slab snow, snapping under the weight like rifle fire. A cascade of powdered ice dumps across my shoulders, driving down the neck of my canvas parka.

Another whimper rises twenty feet down the slope, muffled and desperate.

I scramble over a buried cedar log, sliding hip-first into a narrow depression between two granite outcrops. Beneath the bowed limbs of a fallen spruce, a flash of red nylon catches the dim gray light.

Radar lies pinned beneath the heavy central bough of the spruce. He wedged his chest into the hollow beneath the trunk, but a secondary limb snapped under the drift, trapping his left hindquarter against the frozen earth. Snow is already drifting over his flank, dusting his sable muzzle white. His dark eyes are dilated wide with shock, his teeth clicking together in violent tremors.

"Easy." I drop flat into the snow beside him, dragging my mittens off with my teeth to work the tangled boughs.

Bark tears into skin, splitting calluses across my knuckles as I haul back on the broken spruce limb. Wood groans under the snow load. Pine needles grind into my frozen palms, slick with sap. I plant my left boot against the main trunk, throw my full weight against the bough, and heave upward until the wood cracks free.

Radar scrambles forward on his belly, scrabbling against my chest with frantic claws. The young dog lets out a sharp cry, shivering so hard his rib cage rattles against my sternum.

"I have you." I catch him by the scruff, pulling his trembling frame tight into my chest. "Quiet now."

I unzip the heavy shearling coat with numb fingers, hauling Radar inside the fleece lining until his ribs press flush against my wool shirt. He tucks his snout beneath my chin, breath coming in fast gasps that bathe my throat in thin moisture.

Getting back up the draw takes twenty minutes of crawling on elbows and knees.

Sensation has vanished from my toes; my fingers are stiff pegs inside my fleece mittens. The wind tears across the open logging cut with freight-train violence, blinding me with blowing drift until the crushed shape of the Chevy materializes three paces ahead.

I drag Radar around the front bumper, wedging our bodies into the narrow triangle of dead air between the crushed passenger door and the vertical face of the granite boulder.