Breathe in … breathe out. For God’s sake, Welcome, get it together. Whatever has happened over there, he needs you. The best friend you’ve ever had needs you!

The steep drop had begun to lessen. Lou stopped himself and peered through the trees. Nothing. The sounds were close, though. Very close. He pushed to his feet and thrashed to the right. A dozen more feet and he spotted Cap, spread-eagle on his back on a fairly level piece of rocky ground. He was continuing to moan, but was otherwise motionless. There was blood smeared across his face and shaved scalp from a cut across his forehead.

Then, as Lou hurried across the last ten feet, it registered that Cap’s right leg was bent at an odd angle. It took a moment to make sense of what he was seeing. When he did, his stomach instantly knotted. Protruding from a gash at the midpoint of Cap’s thigh, was a jagged, bloodied spear of white bone—the fractured mid-shaft of Cap’s femur.

Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

It is the obligation of the family, not the government, to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.

—LANCASTER R. HILL, 100 Neighbors, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1939, P. 167

For Lou, filthy and soaked, the scene was surreal.

Cap was moaning piteously. The jagged mid-shaft of his right femur, surrounded by spaghetti-like strands of muscle, protruded garishly from a four-inch gash—easily the worst compound fracture Lou had ever seen. A tree? A boulder? Whatever caused the break really didn’t matter. The femur was perhaps the strongest bone in the body, and the force that shattered it had to have been enormous. The leg, itself, was shortened and rotated.

Lou knelt beside the man more responsible for his recovery than anyone else beside himself. The two-inch laceration above his right brow was bleeding briskly, blood pooling in his eye socket and running down the center and side of his face. There were no other obvious injuries. Lou felt sick—nauseous and shaky. But he knew what he had to do.

Process.

At the center of treating multiple people with trauma, or one person with any number of injuries, was process—the step-by-step approach to evaluation, triage, and treatment. That this was his best friend and a virtual saint to all who knew him needed somehow to be put aside. Whatever had to be done to save his life, however dangerous or painful, had to be done.