“The way you done that splint tells me yer either one yerself, or you was an eagle scout.”

“Both,” Lou said, a kaleidoscope of images of the highs and lows of his life flashing through his mind.

Cap’s next few swallows were deeper than before, but ended the same way. It was like they were shooting a rampaging elephant with a BB gun.

“We need to get him to a hospital, and fast,” Lou said. “How far away do you live? Do you have a phone or … or a car? Better still, a truck. Is there a road out to your place? How far to the nearest town?”

Floyd brushed his palms across the front of his pants.

“Easy now, Doc. Easy. You kin pepper me with as many questions as you like, but I’m only equipped to answer one of ’em at a time. I stopped gettin’ educated a little short of medical school, but I’d like to say somethin’ before I wade into that bog of questions a yers.”

“Okay, but quickly.”

“If we don’t get this fella outta here, none of those other questions are going to matter.”

First things first.

Countless AA meetings over the years, many of them with a blue-and-gold-fringed banner on the wall saying precisely that, and here Lou was getting a one-sentence seminar on the subject from a woodsman, who had probably figured out the simple philosophy on his own.

“Sorry,” Lou said, calming himself with a deep breath, checking Cap’s pulses once more, and continuing to hold his cool hand when he was done. “How far from here do you live?”

“Half mile, thereabouts.”

“Half a mile?” Lou looked surprised. “There’s no town anywhere near here,” he said, recalling what he had seen on his trail map.

“Me ’n the missus live right here in these woods. Her family land, not state owned, so we ain’t poachin’. We grow our own food and I catch whatever else we eat. We got no phone ’n no reason to have one.”

“I can’t get a signal up here.”

“Maybe out in our field you will.”

“You have a truck?”

“We got a road … if you kin call it that. No car, though, ’n no truck. We got a canoe with a five-horse outboard that we use to bring stuff we grow ’n make to Hadley, ’bout five miles downriver. Not sure we can get yer friend here in it, though. It’s only sixteen feet.”

First things first.

“Okay, okay. We’ll worry about that when we get there. Let’s build some sort of drag litter that we can also lift, and see if we can get him down to your place.”