Chapter 3
MAC
Iwas a man of routines. Every morning, I rose before dawn, did a series of stretching exercises to keep my body in as decent shape as it could be after the years of abuse I’d put it through, then had my first cup of coffee while the darkness decreased and the creek bubbled and battled against the rocks.
After chopping some wood, I’d have breakfast, and then it would be time to get to work. Seven days a week, no days off.
The list of shit that needed fixing was endless.
A place that hadn’t been maintained for a decade didn’t come back easy.
Today, I’d decided to replace the trail markers along the path from the parking area to the main trailheads.
Half of them had rotted through, and the other half were leaning at angles that would only confuse the hell out of hikers.
I’d cut new posts over the winter—one of the things I could do when it was a winter wonderland outside, the ground too frozen to do much else.
Now I was digging out the old ones, then setting the replacements one by one.
Fill the base with gravel, put the post in, put the soil back in, then stamp it down until the post wasn’t going anywhere in the next decade.
It was the kind of repetitive, physical work I loved because it kept my hands busy and my mind occupied.
The mountain helped. The temperature was a pleasant fifty degrees, and I loved how the early-morning light filtered through the Douglas firs, how the smell of wet earth and pine always clung to me, how the air was fresh in my lungs.
This was the deal I’d struck with the world: I’d stay up here, the world would stay down there, and nobody would get hurt.
I was tamping the base of the fourth marker when I heard tires on gravel.
The parking area sat about two hundred yards from the campground’s main house, separated by a tree line and the service road.
Cars showed up on weekends—hikers using one of the many public trails that started from the lot and wound into the National Forest. They usually stayed away from the campgrounds, so it didn’t bother me.
Despite that, I glanced through the trees in an automatic gesture. I’d been trained to never ignore sounds. A dark-blue BMW I didn’t recognize parked in one of the spots. The driver’s door opened and a man got out, his blond hair catching the morning light.
My hand stopped on the post.
Arek Jacobson.
His two boys climbed out after him, both dressed in track pants and wearing shiny new boots. One of them was already heading for the trailhead, backpack bouncing. The other stood by the car while Jacobson adjusted his pack straps, tugging the waist belt tighter.
I watched for longer than I should have.
Jacobson crouched slightly to inspect the second boy’s boots, then retied them.
The other one called something from the trailhead, and Jacobson straightened and waved him back.
He pointed toward the Ridge Creek trail, the one that followed the creek bed up along the eastern slope before switchbacking to the overlook.
I’d hiked it several times, and it was a good trail. Scenic. Rocky in places, especially the upper section, where the path narrowed and the roots broke through the surface like knuckles. The footing got tricky up there, even more so in the mud the snow melt had left.
Not my problem. Not my kids.
I turned back to the trail marker and drove the post in harder than necessary.
An hour passed. Then ninety minutes. I finished the markers and moved on to clearing brush from the service road—dead branches that had come down in the last windstorm, plus a section of blackberry that was staging an invasion.
The BMW was still in the lot. Not that I was deliberately doing work here so I could keep an eye on it.
Hikes took time. People often lingered at the overlook.
Families with kids went more slowly, especially if they came from the city and lacked experience in nature.
There was no reason for the low hum in my chest, the barely there vibration I recognized from another life as alertness—my body tracking something my mind refused to name.
I was dragging a branch to the burn pile when I heard voices on the trail, one of them high and tight in a way that made me drop the branch and straighten before I’d consciously decided to move.
They came around the bend in the trail where it connected to the parking area.
Jacobson first, his arm tight around one of the boys—the quieter one, the one who’d stood back and watched at Collins.
Jules, I thought his brother had called him.
The boy was upright but barely. He was limping badly, his left leg held stiff, and his face was a shade of gray-white that meant pain and blood loss and the effort of not crying. Then I saw the leg and cursed. Jesus, it looked bad.
His track pants were rolled up, and a shirt had been tied around the boy’s shin, which was soaked in blood.
It dripped from underneath the shirt, running down into his sock and shoe in a steady, urgent stream.
Trail debris covered both his legs and his hands.
Dirt. Bark. That meant infection if it wasn’t cleaned out fast.
The other boy—Kace, the loud one—was carrying both backpacks and his brother’s hiking pole, and he had the wide-eyed, lock-jaw look of someone who wanted to help and couldn’t, who was watching someone he loved bleed and had no skill to stop it.
I’d seen that face on soldiers, but seeing it on a fourteen-year-old hit me like a fucking punch to the gut.
My body was already moving across the service road, through the tree line, closing the distance with the efficient stride that was drilled into me so deeply that it bypassed every conscious objection my brain tried to mount. Not your kid. Not your problem. Stay away. You don’t get to—
But the boy was bleeding, and the shirt pressed to his shin was soaked through.
Jacobson was keeping him upright and moving, but his eyes were scanning for options, for resources, for anything.
When they landed on me, there was no warm smile, no niceties.
Just a father with blood on his hands and a wounded son who needed help.
“He slipped and caught his shin on a rocky outcrop on the switchback.” Jacobson’s voice was steady, a man who’d treated a thousand wounds and wasn’t going to let this one be different just because it was his son’s.
I admired him for it. “Went straight through his pants. It’s deep.
I need to clean it out and close it. Do you have a first-aid kit? ”
“Inside. Follow me.”
I grabbed the two backpacks from Kace’s shoulders, and the kid sighed with relief.
I led them through the door of the main house that no one but Fraser had walked through in eighteen months—the space I’d rebuilt with my own hands with new beams alongside original timber, a refitted kitchen, the floor I’d sanded and sealed on my knees over three weekends in February.
This was my safe space, my solitude, and suddenly it was full of people.
Full of a bleeding boy and a focused father and a scared brother, plus the sharp copper scent of blood mixed with dirt.
“Kitchen,” Jacobson said, and he was already guiding the boy there, gently lowering him onto the sturdy oak chair I’d found at the town dump.
The kid’s jaw was clenched so tightly I could see the muscles jumping, and his eyes were bright with the tears he was refusing to let fall. Jesus, he was so brave.
“You’re okay, Jules.” Jacobson hurried over to the sink to wash his hands, then knelt next to his son, peeling the soaked shirt away from the wound. “I know it hurts. I know. Let me see.”
He carefully removed the blood-soaked T-shirt, revealing the wound. The kid’s shin was laid open. A gash, maybe four inches long, ran diagonally from right below the knee, deep enough that the edges gaped and the wet dark-red tissue underneath was visible.
“It’s fine,” the boy said, and his voice cracked on the second word in a way that made my chest do something I didn’t authorize.
“It’s not fine. It’s gross,” Kace said from the doorway, and his voice was too loud and too fast, the verbal equivalent of a pressure valve blowing. “There was so much blood, Dad. Like, horror movie amounts.”
“Kace.” Jacobson didn’t look up from the wound. “Not helpful.”
“I’m providing a distraction for Jules, Dad.”
“You’re providing a headache. Macallister, the kit?”
I was already moving to grab the green canvas bag with the white cross that I’d carried through three deployments and meticulously replenished every time I used something.
I laid it out on the kitchen table the way I’d done a thousand times—gloves, saline irrigation, tweezers, antibiotic ointment, butterfly strips, gauze, the good trauma shears.
Jacobson glanced at the kit, then at me. Relief filled his eyes, but there was also recognition, an assessment of the military-grade organization, the contents that went well beyond what you’d find in a drugstore first-aid kit.
He snapped on the gloves and reached for the saline irrigation. “This is going to sting,” he told Jules. “Squeeze whatever you want.”
Jules grabbed the armrests of the chair, his grip white-knuckled.
“You want something to bite?” Kace asked. “I could get a stick.”
“I don’t want a stick, Kace.”
“A belt? A leather strap? You could bite down on Dad’s belt.”
“I want you to stop talking.”
Jacobson irrigated the wound. Jules made a sound like a dog who’d been kicked and his whole body went rigid. “I’m sorry, bud,” Jacobson said, his voice so soft and warm. “I need to clean it so it doesn’t become infected.”
“I know, Dad.” Jules’s voice was so small, yet so brave.