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By Root 854 0

an older woman who looks to be his mother. He asks if we need any assistance, and I reply with a question: “Do you have a cell phone or a satellite phone?” He does not have a phone of any kind, but he offers that he is medically trained. Relieved to have come across someone with more medical knowledge than my meager education by osmosis from search-and-rescue missions, I ask him to join us as we hike. He leaves the woman who continues hiking and introduces himself as Wayne, and I engage him in a back-and-forth to double-check that I’m doing everything I can at the moment to help myself. We walk together through endless stretches of tamarisks that whip at my arm and face, as I ask questions like “Is it OK that I eat?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, sure”) and “Should I worry about drinking too much water?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, you’ll be OK.”)

I assume that Monique and Andy Meijer are running farther ahead to climb out and ask for a helicopter, but I haven’t seen them for about ten minutes. As we come up on yet another long sandbar covered in brush and a few scattered trees, I have to stop to empty the sand in my shoe again. The grating friction on my bare left foot is so intense that it pushes the agony of my arm into the background. I find it ironic that my foot is distracting me from the fact that I’ve cut off my arm. I think it’s doubly ironic that now, when I tell Eric I’m going to stop, he is the one who protests, “No, you must keep going.”

“No, listen, I am going to sit down and empty the sand out of my shoe, and then you are going to help me retie my shoe when I’m done.” I can be a bossy SOB when I’m tired and in pain, but Eric takes it in stride, and after I find a seat on a downed tree trunk and dump half a sandbox out of my sneaker, he ties my shoe for me.

I tried to imagine what Aron must have gone through over the past few days. I was really impressed by his physical, as well as mental, power. He exactly knew what he was doing, what he wanted and where his limits were even after going through all this.

Despite all the loss of blood, his walking pace was remarkably strong, until sand in his shoe started to irritate him and he just stopped in a shady part to get that out of the way before he wanted to continue. He asked me to fasten the lace of his shoe.

It is mile seven, and a few minutes after three P.M. The sun is beating down hard on the shadeless sand at the bottom of the eight-hundred-foot-deep Horseshoe Canyon. Eric and Wayne and I have just come around a wide bend in the open canyon, and I see what must be the beginning of the exit trail that leads to the parking area, zigzagging up the steep hillside ahead on the left. Somewhere on the rim, some seven hundred feet above me, the rescuers are waiting. Oh, how I wish I were a raven and could simply open my wingspan and, with a husky-voiced ca-caw, catch a rising thermal current in the air; I’d be at that trailhead in two minutes.

It will kill me if I try to hike out of this canyon. I’ve lost too much blood; I’m on the verge of deadly shock. I contemplate sending Eric up to get help as well, but before I can spit out the idea, the rapid stutter of a booming echo interrupts my thoughts.

Thwock-thwock-thwock-thwocka-thwocka-thwocka.

Two hundred yards in front of us, the metallic body of a wingless black bird rises over the canyon wall.

The sight shocks me into an abrupt halt and then inundates me with emotion. In disbelief, I try to sort out how Monique and Andy got to the trailhead and the rescuers brought in a helicopter so quickly, but I then understand that this bird was already here. My astonishment yields to immense relief, and it’s all I can do for the moment to remain standing in the sand. Also stunned to a standstill, Wayne and Eric begin waving their arms over their heads, trying to signal to the helicopter. We are in the middle of the canyon, the tallest, darkest shapes in a hundred-foot-diameter area on a flat sandbar that is sparsely covered with short grasses and stunted rabbit brush, but even still, I’m not sure the helicopter