Winona smiled. “Chaska? He’s an engineering geek, but he’s also part of the Rocky Mountain Search and Rescue Team and an EMT. We were just out walking when Shota took off running. We followed him and found him sitting next to you.”
“Shota?” The dog licked Naomi’s face.
“It means ‘smoke’ in Lakota,” Winona told her. “We came to Colorado from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.”
Lakota. Pine Ridge.
Naomi was about to say she came from South Dakota, too, but the thought was lost when Shota licked her face again. “Thank you, Shota. He’s a beautiful dog.”
“He’s not a dog. He’s a wolf.”
A wolf. Right.
And Naomi wondered if she was still unconscious and dreaming.
Chaska looked up at Winona. “Be careful.”
He didn’t like sending his sister off by herself, but the wolf couldn’t stay. Shota, though more socialized to accept humans than most captive wolves, wouldn’t take well to the sudden arrival of law enforcement and Team members, and there was no reason to risk a confrontation. If Shota believed that any one of them were a threat to his pack, especially Winona, he might attack.
She clipped the leash Chaska had made of climbing rope onto the wolf’s collar. “Shota will watch over me. You worry about Naomi.”
Chaska gave his sister a nod, watching as she scrambled up the steep slope to the top of the ravine and then disappeared, Shota beside her.
Naomi had slipped into unconsciousness again, and Chaska was pretty sure she had a concussion. She’d let him take a look at her arm, and he’d been relieved to find only a deep graze. It had bled a fair amount and probably hurt like hell, but the bone wasn’t broken, and there was no bullet for surgeons to remove.
Her ankle was another story. It was badly swollen, and there were streaks of blood beneath her skin. He’d bet she had a fracture.
Radio traffic told him that he had at least fifteen minutes before anyone reached them. He got to his feet and looked up and down the ravine for a good evacuation point. He saw a spot about twenty yards to the south. There weren’t any big obstacles—no fallen trees, no boulders, no large shrubs—and there were two sturdy ponderosa pines at the top to use as anchors.
He walked back to Naomi and knelt down beside her, not wanting her to come to and think she was alone. He ran through the evac in his mind. This was the part of rescues that he loved—besides saving lives, of course. A rescue was a high-risk engineering challenge in motion.
He worked on the anchor problem, doing the math in his head. Six rescuers with gear and the litter with Naomi meant the anchor would have to hold at least fifteen hundred pounds. He rounded up for safety’s sake. They would run ropes from the two ponderosa pines. Once they had her out of the ravine, it would be a simple trail evac back to the parking lot.
He checked Naomi’s breathing and her pulse, his gaze shifting to her face, concern for her stirring in his chest. Even bruised and smeared with dirt and blood, she was beautiful—big eyes, high cheekbones, a little nose, full lips. She couldn’t be much taller than five-four or weigh more than one-twenty. The two bastards who’d walked into her camp had probably watched her for a while and thought she would make easy prey. It was just their bad luck that their intended victim was courageous—and smart. How many women in her situation would have thought to use live embers as a weapon?
Chaska wanted the bastards to pay.
As if Naomi could feel him watching her, her eyes fluttered open, pain making her brow furrow. “When will they get here?”
He glanced at his watch. “It won’t be long now.”
If he’d been a paramedic and had a full medical kit, he could have given her morphine, but that wasn’t an option.
She turned her head to the left. “Where is Shota?”
“Winona took him home.”
Fear filled Naomi’s eyes. “How will we know if they’re here?”
He didn’t have to ask who “they” were. “I doubt they’re still in the area. If they were smart, they would have gotten the hell out of here the moment you escaped.”
“They didn’t strike me as smart.”
“In that case…” He rose to his knees and lifted his T-shirt so that she could see the Sig Sauer P250 compact pistol concealed in a holster inside the waistband of his jeans. He always carried when he went hiking. It wasn’t the four-leggeds that worried him, but those that walked on two legs. “I won’t let them hurt you, Naomi.”
She seemed to relax—a little. “What’s your name? I’m sorry … I forgot.”
“Chaska.” He spelled it for her. “It’s Lakota. It means first-born son. Not very original, since Iamthe first-born son.”