6 Miles With Courage (6 page)

Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring
— “Sykes surveying and mapping Judy speaking.”

“Hi Judy, it
’s Sheriff Bob Mallory, I wanted to let you know that the ‘bird’ is going to be down for a few days.”

“What bird?”

“The helicopter, it’s going in for maintenance,” Bob says, “it’s routine, but I thought you should know.”

“Why
are you telling me this now?” Judy asked.

“Because if we need to go on
a search for Rob, I’m going to need a couple hours of advance notice. So for this one time only, I’m telling you to call me by twelve o’clock noon tomorrow if you don’t hear from Rob by then.” Bob said.

“Thanks
Bob that makes me feel
so
much better. I know Rob has been a real pain with his ‘scouting’ trips but this time he has my baby with him.”

“Did you say, Baby
?”

“Bob aren’t you the youngest in your family?”

“Yes I am.”

“Well then you will always be the baby, am I right?”

“You’re right Judy. That one always slips by me.” He said chuckling.

“Well alright then, I just wanted to let you know about the bird. I’m sure
if they have to spend the night somewhere they will have an enjoyable evening bonding around a campfire so try not to worry.” Bob said.

“I won’t
worry, at least not until after seven o’clock.”

“Oh, why is that?” Bob asked.

“Because I got a call from a restaurant, Rob made reservations for nine o’clock, for Ryan’s birthday, but he never got back to them with the number of people in his party. I didn’t know anything about it.” Judy said.

“Well then let’s just say for the sake of
argument that if you don’t hear from Rob by seven o’clock, we can consider this to be an all-nighter.” Bob said with a comforting tone.

“That’s what I was thinking
and I wasn’t going to call you until three o’clock tomorrow, but you did say that twelve o’clock is OK now, right?”

“Yes, did Rob say where he was going?” Bob asked.

“Not exactly, somewhere north of his last job is all I know.”

“OK Judy, then
I will make some calls to see if he filed a flight plan. You get that peach cobbler going, and if I don’t hear from you by seven o’clock I will head over to your place. We are going to have to get into Rob’s office and try to see if we can find something about where this new job is. Perhaps an aerial photo or a description, sound good?”

“Yes Bob
, that sounds wonderful.”

“That way we will have a starting point just in case we have to search but keep your fingers crossed, he may walk in
at any moment.”

“OK
, and if he does I will call you and maybe you can come over for some cobbler after we get back from the restaurant.” Judy said.

“Sounds good then, talk to you later—bye now.” Bob
said.

Judy went back to doing some chores and preparing the peach cobbler. She did so with a song in her heart. Rob could walk in at any minute and if not, Bob would be
there to comfort her and go over a game plan for noon tomorrow. It was a good thing that Rob had a track record of “all-nighters”. It’s this fact that allows her to keep a song in her heart. For if she knew that her husband was hanging on to life by a thread, and that her son was on a journey through a treacherous swamp to save himself and his father, that song would be replaced with terror.

God is good.

Rob is in a deep black hole
with no way out. He cannot move his body, nor see, nor hear. The swelling on his brain has completely shut him down. He lies in a coma.

He feels
insects biting his neck but there is nothing he can do about it. He remembers the crash in the blackness of his mind, and he remembers communicating with Ryan, but he is not sure about anything.

He is drifting through the
past. He sees faces of people that he has seen before but he cannot remember when or where. He sees them in towering storms of electricity at the outer edges of the blackness in his mind. He is somewhere, and yet he is nowhere but in a broken body. That’s how it is with Rob’s coma.

His time was limited as he knew. He guessed his survival time correctly. Ryan must bring medical help between the hours of
three and six o’clock tomorrow afternoon. The exact time is dicey and known only to God.

And so he hangs
on, oblivious to the outside world and in this state he will stay until he is rescued and revived, or the darkness closes in and takes him home. The outcome lies solely with Ryan.

Ryan continues at a steady pace, clearing vines, tying ribbons, all the while staying his course. In these late afternoon hours the yellow flies and mosquitoes are ravenous. He stops to reapply the bug spray, and for the first time cracks open a water bottle.

The snapping of the plastic cap is a foreign sound in the swamp
. It causes a turkey vulture to abandon his roost directly above Ryan’s head. The beating of its wings startles Ryan into a silent crouch. He has not been silent for quite some time.

He drinks half of the first bottle and r
emaining still he hears the drone of the yellow flies and mosquitoes just outside the barrier of the bug spray. He hears the rustling of the wind high above in the treetops. He hears a faint splashing in the swamp, and he looks to see a strange sight. 

A ball of fur the size of a dog is bouncing
in and out of the swamp. It jumps forward, and then for no apparent reason it falls backward. It does this with a steady but fast motion. Ryan cannot process what he is seeing until he approaches it. He has to get within a few feet and then he realizes what he is looking at. It’s a fawn caught in a small circle of hog-wire fence. No telling how long it had been caught in this trap. Being startled by Ryan it felt it had to run for its life—but it was going nowhere.

The circle is no bigger than two feet across and the hog
-wire fence is made of squares. The fawn is jumping and putting his head into one of the squares, and the fence is pushing him back. He does this with continuous motion and doesn’t stop even when Ryan approaches to within one foot. The fawn’s heart is beating out of its chest. Ryan tries to calm it down.

“Easy boy, easy now,” he says, “calm down, we got to get you out of there.” The fawn does not calm down
and continues the ceaseless jumping, making Ryan nervous as to what he should do.

And then
it came.

A deep
growl
from a distance echoed through the swamp.
Ryan looks back at the path with a growing uneasiness.

The panther was on the move
.

Still believing that Ryan was out to hurt him—the fawn continued jumping. Ryan has an idea. If he le
aves the fawn the panther’s hunger will be satisfied and Ryan can spend the night with one less worry. It is a tough decision to make.

“
It’s nature’s way and after all who am I to get involved with Mother Nature?” he says as he walks around in circles, waving his arms about, fretting the decision.

“That’s it I’m going,” and he takes a bearing and marches off leaving the struggling fawn behind to become a tasty meal for a hungry panther. Fifty
-feet later he stops and looks back. The fawn continued jumping with his heart beating wildly, all he wants is a chance. Only Ryan, can give him that chance. Ryan begins to see himself in the struggling fawn. He has another idea.

“I
have a chance,” he says, “Somebody needs to give you one, and besides, your scent could lead him off my trail.”

Ryan walks back and
immediately rips down the hog wire fence and sets the fawn free. “Run little one, and don’t stop running until you’re far away from here.” It bounds through the swamp, stops to look back as if to say thank you, then shakes its coat and vanishes into the swamp.

Ryan continues on course and on time to make the Oklawaha
River by dark, but he is growing a little leery now as he has yet to find “no-name” creek. The mind can play tricks on you. You begin to ask yourself. “Are my instruments telling me the truth?” It happens to pilots flying in the clouds. It happens to scuba divers at great depths. You
must
trust your instruments. The doubt nags at Ryan when up ahead he notices a thinning in the trees. He hears the rushing of water. He ties a ribbon on a tree and heads in a hurry towards the sound.

At
last he has found “no-name” creek!

What a wonderful si
ght it is. Not only because of its beauty, but because it proves that he has navigation skills.

“
Oh, yes!” Ryan says joyfully lifting the little GPS unit high into the air. He felt as though he were a great explorer landing on the beach of a new found country. His confidence is fully restored in his instruments. He will never doubt them again. Now to cross the creek and then one half mile more and he can make camp on the banks of the Oklawaha River.

He pauses before crossing to secure his backpack
and to take-in the change of scenery. He does not know the depth of the creek for the water is dark. The creek is twenty-feet in width, the size of your average city street. The flow is steady. On the other side more sweet gum swamp. Ryan moves out into the creek.

The first few steps reveal a hard sandy bottom. Red-belly pan
fish and minnows scurry for the safety of the creeks center. Ryan makes for the middle. He cannot see very far downstream as the creek makes a sharp bend. He pauses in the warm “goo” of the creeks center. Looking upstream he can see for a great distance. It looks like a painting.

The ducks go to
-and-fro, yellow and purple flowers sway gently in the breeze. An otter frolics near the shore. With hands that appear to be human it works at opening a freshwater oyster. Yes everything above the water looks picturesque, but under the water it is a much
different
story.

People often wonder how is it that such a hideous creature as a leach can attach itself to your skin
and start sucking blood without you feeling it. The answer lies in the antiseptic they produce before they bite. They apply it to your skin, kind of like a dentist when he uses a cotton swab before he sticks you with a needle. You don’t feel the needle; you don’t feel the leach, or leaches.

Down under the water, in the muck surrounding Ryan’s leg
s the leaches are searching. They are searching for the source of the heat and the motion. Four of them find a host from which they will feed.  There are now two leaches on each of Ryan’s legs. They are below his knees and inside his pants. It will be some time before he discovers them.

After taking a moment to enjoy the view Ryan continues across the creek. Once again he feels the hard sandy bottom and once again the red-bellied pan fish and minnows scurry for safety as Ryan exits the far
side of the creek. He looks back to admire his beautiful line of ribbons fading off into the distance from which he came.

He knows he can
lead the way back to his father now—without a fancy gadget. He figures he will be right here at this point at around three o’clock tomorrow leading the rescue party in. He looks ahead with anticipation. Just ten more ribbons, or a half-a-mile, and he should be at the Oklawaha River. He starts moving through the knee deep water of the sweet gums. The shadows are growing longer as the light continues to fade.

With five ribbons tied and only five more to go until he reaches the river he moves with a sense of confidence now.
He finishes tying the fifth ribbon and picking up his machete he hears a hammering noise not far away.

TAP, TAP, TAP—TAP, TAP, TAP.
He envisions a man with a hammer. The swamp noises can play tricks on you. It sounds so close, and with the possibility of finding help he decides to make a quick detour.

He makes a hard left and walks in the direction of the hammering. His mind is running wild with the thought
of finding someone who could help him. Maybe it’s the man who helped him out of the hole. He has only gone a short distance when he comes across a small pond full of waist high “pitcher-plants.” He had only read about these plants in his biology class, seeing them now gives him the
creeps!

The pitcher
-plant is just one of many carnivorous or meat-eating plants that thrive in the wetlands and swamps. They have adapted to eating meat because the soil is too poor to provide enough nutrients to sustain life. Some pitcher-plants are big enough to eat rats! He must wade through them to get to the source of the hammering. About halfway across the pond he peels back the hood on one of the plants and looks inside to see what it has caught to eat. He sees a lizard, some flies, and a half digested tree frog. Releasing the plant he shudders at the thought of what it must be like to be eaten by a plant!

The hammering stops
as he looks around. Then it starts up again and he spots the source.

Up ahead in a dead tree
is a giant woodpecker. It is the
pileated
woodpecker, the largest in all of North America. Ryan should be upset that it’s not a man, but instead he is mesmerized by its beauty, its striking red cap and black and white stripes—along with its odd looking feet. Most birds have three toes forward and one back, but the woodpecker has two forward and two back, making him much more at home on the side of a tree. Ryan watches as he leans back on his stiff tail feathers using them like a chair. TAP, TAP, TAP—TAP, TAP, TAP. He drills a hole, and then with his long beak and sticky tongue, pulls out an insect.

“You fooled me this time Woody,” Ryan says, “It won’t happen again.”

Ryan turns around in the pond and makes the short walk back to the path. Looking back he says, “It wasn’t a total waste of time, I got to see some cool stuff,” and as he continued brushing and walking he thinks about how interesting the swamp is, and maybe not so scary and dangerous after all. But Oh! How a person’s opinion can change in just a moments time.

With
the next two ribbons Ryan progresses through the knee deep sweet gum swamp with ease. He ties the seventh of ten ribbons on a cypress tree as the sweet gums are giving way to cypress. The swamp is only ankle deep now as the ground is rising to meet the banks of the river. He looks ahead to try and see a tell-tale sign, but at seven hundred and fifty feet it is too far away. He reaches in the backpack and pulls out the water bottle and after dropping it bends over to pick it up. His hand brushes a lump just above his ankle and rolling his pant leg up he exposes one of the blood gorged leaches. He screams.

“Get it off me! Get it of me!
” he shakes his leg violently but it does no good. He grabs it and squeezing it, rips the leach off of his leg—the blood pours down. He stares at the wound in disbelief. It burns with pain as he splashes water on the wound. He wants the bleeding to stop but it takes time—leaches secrete an enzyme to keep the blood from clotting. Ryan has never seen a leach, nor does he know how to properly remove one.

Never squeeze it. Squeezing causes the leach to vomit bacteria into the wound which may cause an infection.
You should slip your finger or a knife blade under the mouth and lift it off
without
squeezing it. Once off the bleeding slows as the blood clots. Removing a leach is harder on the mind than the wound. Later, Ryan will have three more chances to improve his removal technique.

He wraps one of the socks from the backpack around the wound
. He thought about using the first aid kit but decided it should wait until he makes camp. He did not want to drop any of its contents into the swamp. With gritted teeth he presses on.

It’s not the wound that’s the concern now, but rather the very
traceable trail of blood that he will leave behind—leading to his campsite. Not to mention three more bleeding wounds, soon to be exposed to the danger of the drifting night air.