Chapter Seventeen
Creed
Creed scanned the horizon on the top of the hill before he sprinted Rougarou across the four-lane highway, slowing to check the distance to the red point on his topo map.
Rou was ridiculous in her little red shoes with matching socks.
The Cerberus trainer, Reaper Hamilton, had just introduced them to Rou’s training, so on the upcoming hot summer days, standing on the macadam and sniffing out the crowds, little Rourou didn’t scald her paw pads.
Rou hadn’t quite figured out how to navigate the new sensation. To say she was clownish as she moved down the road was an understatement.
With a bit of time and a job to perform, Rou would shift her focus away from the odd addition to her paws, but so far, she wasn’t yet distracted enough to forget she was wearing them.
As Rou ran along, each step went too high or too sideways as she hopped and popped and waggled, trying to figure out how to move forward in a straight line.
She was lifting her hind legs with a kick, kick, hop, then the other side, kick, kick, kick, hop, followed by some fancy prancing with her front paws that included a little wave, as if she were a movie star working the red carpet at a gala, greeting her fans.
Ridiculous and endearing, the teams would stop to watch and get a good chuckle during training.
Under these circumstances, while she was keeping up with Creed, she was burning energy. But with the glass and metal pieces peppered across the area, he wasn’t risking an injury.
“That must be the woman up there, Rou.”
She was sitting on the edge of the road, with her legs dangling down into the gutter below.
The weeds, left unmown for months, spiked up around the thickness of her soft body.
The kind of body that reminded Creed of summers on the porch, sitting with the neighborhood elders as he snapped beans and listened to them sing.
It was the kind of soft body that gave hugs that he could remember wrapped around him like a blanket when he was lying in the desert listening to the bombs explode and wondering how he had found himself so far from home.
Creed made sure to call the woman’s attention to his approach so he didn’t startle her.
In his search and rescue classes, he’d learned that Cerberus often got called out to assist on local searches, and there were three main subjects in this area—those with dementia, children with autism, and (to be frank) men doing dumb shit in the woods.
The elder had wrapped her arms around herself and was rocking side to side, making a humming sound as she self-soothed.
“Ma’am?” Creed said, warming his voice and adding a dash of confidence and capability.
She jerked, then shifted his way. Putting her hands on either side of herself, she rocked harder, this time to gain momentum to stand.
“No need to get up, ma’am. I’m coming to you.” He put his hand to his chest. “I’m Creed Duchamp. This is my search and rescue dog, Rougarou.”
“That little thing with her too-big paws? She’s trained to look for people?”
“She’s a star,” Creed said with a grin, seeing that she was trying to tease, though her eyes were red-rimmed with crying.
“My grandson, Parker, was in the car with me, and we were in kind of a protected place there.” She hitched a thumb over her shoulder to the sedan pressed at the trunk between the car in front and the one in the back.
“Looks like you almost maneuvered yourself out of that mess.” He pulled out the emergency blanket, along with the disposable plastic poncho that he’d prepositioned in his pocket.
“I was doing a three-point turn, just not quite enough room or time. But I tried. Anyway, Parker, my grandson, hit his head pretty hard. I told him we needed to sit quietly in the car until the rescue workers came. Well, that only lasted for so long. He went out through the moonroof. He never could stand to be caught in places. Claustrophobia, you know. But when he got out, he wasn’t himself.
He walked in the wrong direction, out toward those woods.
Silly me, I took off after him. Slipped on the gravel, now I’m down for the count.
A man from further up in the accident was heading up the road.
I asked him to get help, and he made a video.
He said he’d seen earlier in the day that there was a search and rescue team at the event.
” She looked Creed up and down. “Beggars can’t be choosers, but when I heard ‘team’ I thought something other than a man and his puppy. ”
“Star puppy,” Creed smiled as he wrapped the Mylar blanket around the woman. “I want to get on Parker’s trail as fast as I can. So let’s go through a few things, please.”
She held the sides together in a fist. “Ask away, and thank you. This here is a blessing.”
“Your grandson’s name is Parker. How old?” He pulled the poncho from its plastic packet.
“Oh, let’s see, I think that one was thirty-six on his last birthday. Maybe thirty-seven. I’m an old woman, and I have almost a dozen grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. It’s hard to keep track.”
“I’m going to pull this over your head to cut the wind and keep you dry.” He opened the poncho. “Can you tell me what kind of shoes he was wearing?”
“Flat-bottomed, go-to-church shoes. We were there for the late service, then stopped for a bite to eat at the diner back in town.”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, that’s okay. What was he wearing? Is it appropriate for a day like today?”
“He had on his church suit. He left his overcoat in the car.”
“I’ll take that with me.” And as Creed found the man’s dress coat draped over the driver’s seat, he watched Rou give her coat a good shake. In this drizzle, Parker would be wet too. “Does Parker have a change of clothes and rain gear in your car?”
After Creed had gathered the information he needed, he offered Rou the coat to scent before putting it in his pack, then they went off into the woods.
Rou, nose to the ground, seemed to be tracking easily.
It was good luck that they were following before the weather had a significant impact on the scent cone.
The rain, as heavy as it had come down, though brief, dripped from the overhead evergreen needles and the bare deciduous limbs, still winter-naked.
The forest floor was undisturbed for the most part.
Parker wouldn’t slip on the carpet of needles that tend to roll and slide underfoot when wet, threatening a twist or sprain.
The head trauma was Creed’s biggest concern.
That, and if Creed found Parker non-ambulatory, there was no help to be had.
No sense in using brain cells to anticipate next steps; he had no idea what condition he’d find Parker.
While searching for Jeb in the woods earlier, Creed had found fault with the technology that allowed him to trace the zigzagging trail Rou had followed as she lost and then regained her scent.
Now that he was jogging into more difficult terrain, he could see the benefit.
During the search and rescue training sessions the team conducted in the Virginia mountains, Creed found that the leaf debris was thick and often hid naturally occurring pockets and holes in the ground.
How many times had he been on searches when his foot unexpectedly went down into a hole?
It could easily take a searcher off the playing field, and worse, pull resources to him instead of focusing them on the lost person.
A searcher’s weight, plus the weight of the resource pack he carried, typically filled with bivouacking supplies along with Rou’s needs and first aid equipment, meant that the body created a forward momentum that resisted stopping.
A body in motion—The sudden shift from go to stop meant wrenched knees, twisted ankles, and snapped tendons. A responder could train—and they did, they trained hard at Cerberus with athletic trainers who taught their bodies how to be both stable and dynamic—but a hole was a hole was a hole.
Nothing to be done about the hole other than hopefully shake it off and keep going.
This was more like war. Everyone was out on parallel missions, doing their best to handle the situation at hand.
Here, Creed was alone in his efforts to find and protect Parker.
Should he have a stick to prod? Yes.
Was he going to take the time to be prim about this shit?
Speed.
All else be damned.
Just like earlier in the day when Rou found Jeb, the howling “Come here!” bark went up.
Stepping around a massive rhododendron, Creed found a man, blood running down his head and soaking his white collar, sitting stupefied on the ground.
“Good girl, Rou,” Creed said, approaching softly.
The problem was immediately apparent. The man had stepped into a trap. “Rou, wait.” Creed took off his pack and laid it at his feet. Then he picked up a sturdy stick to probe the area and make sure that there weren’t more traps that might cause harm.
It looked horrific as the teeth bit through the man’s dress pants, now wet with blood.
“I’m Creed with Iniquus, here to help. You’ve already met my pup, Rou. I’m trained in first aid. Do I have permission to help?” He pulled out his first aid kit and pulled on gloves.
No response.
Creed began his mental orientation questions. “What’s your name?” he asked as he pulled out his wound dressing supplies.
The man stared off as if he couldn’t hear. His grandmother said she didn’t know of any disabilities or health concerns.
“Do you know where you are?” Creed draped the sterile cloth over the wound.
“Can you tell me what day it is?”
Not a blink. Not a flutter.
“What happened to you?” as Creed wrapped Parker’s head with gauze bandaging, he hoped to provide enough pressure on the wound that he could free up his hands for other tasks.
Not ideal.
Creed was recalling the time his family went inland to hunt deer to stock up the freezer with sausage meat.
One of the boys from the farm stepped into a rusty trap just like this one.
It was the first and only one Creed had ever seen.
He’d known since he was a boy how to set out a snare made out of wire and sticks to catch rabbits, and other small critters to add to the stew pot, but that damned thing had been terrifying with its rusted jaws and sharp teeth.
When it snapped, his cousin’s howl was otherworldly.
He looked the trap over and couldn’t see the mechanism for release.
It clapped shut, he reasoned, so it couldn’t be rusted to the point where he couldn’t get it back open.
His first instinct was to grab hold and wrench it open.
The last thing he wanted to do was more damage.
Rou had squirmed into the man’s lap, and then Parker, much to Creed’s surprise, pulled Rou tight to his chest.
Rou seemed fine with that.
Creed pulled his phone from his thigh pocket and called Mandy. “Creed here. I’ve located the missing subject, Parker. Parker is conscious and oriented zero out of four.”
“Is he ambulatory?” Mandy asked.
“Right now,” Creed said, taking a knee to inspect the device, “his foot is caught in what looks like an old-timey bear trap.”
“Creed, repeat last,” Mandy said after a pause, “did you say the vehicle crash victim has stepped in a bear trap?”
“Yes, ma’am. This one has to be from back around the nineteen hundreds or so because it has teeth.
Big ones. I’ve seen a modern trap opened.
I need instructions on how to proceed. I don’t want to make any mistakes on this one and have it clamp down on him, causing further damage.
I’m opening my video so you can see for yourself. ”
Creed held his phone out, moving it slowly back and forth.
“Creed, standby, let me see if anyone has expertise. I’m not equipped to support this particular situation.”
“That’s you and me both,” Creed said under his breath.