The man responded, and Lou sensed another few millimeters of movement. With the tourniquet still tight, there was essentially no bleeding. Maintaining maximum tension, he wrapped the cord several times around the tree. The femur fragments held.

“That’s it, baby! Keep the tension on. I’m going to set the splint now. You’re going to make it. You’re going to make it off the battlefield and we’re going to win the war. Then you’re going to go home and get elected the first black governor of Virginia.”

There was no response. Wide-eyed, Cap was staring straight up, awake and unconscious at the same time, but still maintaining the force necessary to keep his leg extended.

It took Lou several minutes to wrap the ACE bandages and nylon straps from what remained of his backpack around the sturdy branches he had placed alongside Cap’s leg. He then created another wrap around Cap’s foot with the remaining strips of backpack fabric.

“Looking good … looking good,” he said.

But there was more to be done. Undoing his shoelaces and knotting them together, he secured one end to the fork in the branch at the bottom of the splint, and pushed the other end up and underneath the nylon strips around Cap’s foot. This would hold the traction on the leg.

Cap’s eyes had closed, and for the briefest moment, Lou thought he might not be breathing. In fact, that was an issue. He had at last surrendered to the pain. His breathing was shallow, and his pulse, still without much force, had slowed to ninety. But he was no longer conscious.

“Nice going,” Lou whispered. “Damn, but you are tough.”

The rain had stopped completely now, and the sky had begun to brighten. Lou lay what few bandages he had across the wound, rocked back on his haunches, and examined the splint. Given the circumstances, it was about as good as it could get.

For several minutes, he caught his breath and debated between trying to claw his way back up the steep hillside to the trail, or building some sort of A-frame litter and heading down toward the river. It would be hard going—a few feet at a time over nasty terrain, but in the end, the thought of leaving Cap was unacceptable, and he opted for the litter, provided he had enough rope.

Naked from the waist up, and now starting to shiver, Lou stood, stretched, picked up the knife, and began casting around for some branches he could lash together—hopefully ones still on the ground.

It was at that moment he heard loud rustling coming from the dense woods downhill from them.

There was no chance it was the wind.

Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

As for man, the biological laws make no exceptions for intelligence and his fate is the same as all lesser creatures. Death.

—LANCASTER R. HILL, 100 Neighbors, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1939, P. 212

Bear?… Wild boar?… Coyote?… Mountain lion?…