“Two people? Do they think Jackson and his kidnapper were caught in the avalanche?” Lily asked, the words coming out as fast as the hammering of her heart.
“Doug didn’t say.” Scott studied his phone for a moment longer, then tossed it on the dash. “There’s a Forest Service road that cuts across to the base of the ridge,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to turn.”
“Shelby and I are only certified for inbound searches,” she said, and felt foolish as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Scott knew this—and it wasn’t as if she didn’t want to help.
“Just do what I tell you,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
She turned the car around and headed back the way they had come. She drove as fast as she dared on the narrow, snow-packed road, teeth clenched, gripping the steering wheel so hard her fingers ached. She lost traction on every curve, and fought to bring the fishtailing car back under control. Scott gripped the dash with one hand and said nothing.
Phrases from her training played in her head.A person caught in an avalanche has a 92 percent chance of surviving if they are rescued within fifteen minutes. Survival rates drop by 3 percent for every additional minute someone is buried.Those were just one set of statistics. A Canadian study put the survival rate at 86 percent after ten minutes and only 10 percent after thirty-five minutes. The whole point of training dogs wasto get to victims as quickly as possible, increasing their chances of surviving.
She had been so focused on training Shelby to locate someone quickly that she hadn’t thought about how long it could take to reach the site of a slide to even begin the search.
She pressed down harder on the accelerator and thought of Jackson.Hang on, she silently told him.Please hang on.
They reached the cutoff road and followed the ruts left by other vehicles to where the track abruptly ended at a six-foot berm of packed snow. Half a dozen vehicles were parked haphazardly in front of the berm. Lily fit the Subaru in between a Jeep and a lifted 4X4 pickup and cut the engine. Scott retrieved his phone and checked the screen. “Twenty minutes,” he said.
She followed him to the back of the Subaru and retrieved her pack. “Put your beacon in receive mode,” he said.
She did so. “What about Shelby?” she asked. The dog had her head over the back of the seat and was whining softly.
“She can search with Hunter,” Scott said.
The dogs raced ahead of them, to the group standing at the edge of the snowfield. The jagged tops of trees jutted through boulder-sized clumps of snow that marked the path of the snow slide, pine needles scattered across the surface like confetti. Dirt, broken branches and boulders littered an area as wide as a football field.
Some people were already searching, moving in a line across the snow, pausing every step to plunge long, flexible poles into the snow. They were feeling for anything soft enough to be human.
Adam Derocher from C-RAD jogged over to them. “A helicopter searching for the boy who went missing from SkyCrest saw the slide run and called it in at 11:56,” he said.
Lily did the math—twenty-seven minutes had passed since that call. “The spotter saw two people skinning up the ridge just before the snow turned loose,” Adam continued. “He didn’t have anywhere to land.”
“Where were these two people?” Scott asked.
“On the east side.” Adam pointed. “I want the dogs to search over there.”
Like Scott, Adam knew Shelby was only certified to search inbounds, but he apparently wasn’t going to pass up the chance to use her now that she was on the scene. Both dogs were eager to go. Hunter had done this before, and was communicating his excitement to Shelby, who raced between him and Lily. Shelby had been part of dozens of training exercises by now, and she knew searching meant a reward of playing with her favorite toy. But she had only found volunteers hiding in man-made snow caves, never anyone buried by an actual avalanche.
Tugging on Shelby’s lead, Lily followed Scott and Hunter across the snowfield, stumbling over blocks of compacted snow, dodging chunks of rock and broken trees, then sinking to her knees in an unexpected drift. By the time Scott halted at the far edge of the field, she was breathless, one knee throbbing where she had twisted it.
“I’m going to release Hunter first,” Scott said. “After he takes off, let Shelby go and give her search command.”
Hunter sat, trembling with anticipation, his attention fixated on Scott. Scott unclipped the dog’s lead. “Hunter, find!” he commanded, and Hunter took off, nose to the ground.
“Shelby!” Lily had to repeat the dog’s name twice before Shelby focused on her. She removed the leash. “Go find!” she said.
Shelby took off in Hunter’s wake, head down and moving back and forth, casting for scent.
Less than three minutes later, Hunter gave one sharp bark and sat, gaze fixed on a patch of snow. “He’s found something!” Scott shouted, and raced toward his dog.
Lily followed. She dug at the compacted snow with her hands while Scott used the folding shovel from his pack. Hunter dug, too, sending plumes of snow flying between his legs. Other searchers joined in.
“I’ve got a leg,” someone shouted, and the searchers shifted their efforts to several feet above this location, hoping to uncover the person’s head.
Five frantic minutes later someone uncovered hair, and then the whole face and upper torso. The man’s skin was blue, his lips frozen in a grimace, his head at an unnatural angle. Adam knelt beside the body and felt for a pulse, then shook his head. “He’s gone,” he said. “Looks like his neck was broken.”
Lily looked away. The body in the snow didn’t even look real, but was still shocking. Scott led Hunter away. He praised the dog and offered the rope toy that was his reward for a successful find, but the dog knew something wasn’t right and kept looking back toward the unknown man’s icy grave.
While the others worked to free the rest of the body, Lucy looked around for her dog. “Shelby!” she shouted, hands cupped to her face. “Shelby, come!”
