Chapter 1
Victor Flemming stood behind the podium and looked over the twenty students seated before him. Every one of them wanted to become a search and rescue volunteer.
For now, anyway.
He'd seen that same look hundreds of times over the years. Excitement. Confidence. Maybe a little apprehension hidden beneath both. They had no idea what the next two months would demand of them.
Becoming a SAR volunteer wasn't easy. The classroom at the Forest Ranger Foundation in Keene, New York, was the simplest part of the process. Here, they had comfortable chairs beneath them, a solid roof overhead and four walls protecting them from the elements. The faint smell of coffee still lingered in the room, mixing with the more familiar scents of old wood and damp hiking gear.
None of those comforts would matter once he got them outside.
Vic rested his hands on either side of the podium.
"How many of you think you will make it through the two-month class?" he asked.
Twenty hands shot up.
Some went up faster than others. A few students exchanged confident smiles. One man in the second row raised his hand so enthusiastically that Vic almost laughed.
He didn't.
Vic smirked slightly instead.
"OK, how many think you will still be around in six months?"
The twenty hands remained in the air.
Vic let the silence linger. He looked from face to face before finally speaking.
"Three," he said softly.
The hands slowly lowered.
Confusion replaced some of the confidence. One woman in the front row shifted in her chair. Someone near the back cleared his throat.
"On average, only three people who sign up ever make it through training."
His eyes scanned the room again. They were framed by a mapwork of fine lines that spoke of his twenty-five years spent searching for people on the worst days of their lives.
He didn't say it to frighten them. At least, that wasn't the only reason.
They needed to understand.
A person lost in the Adirondacks didn't care how enthusiastic their rescuer had been on the first day of training. They didn't care how much equipment they owned or how good they looked wearing it. When someone was cold, injured and terrified, they needed the person coming for them to possess the skill and determination to bring them home.
"Even the very best of us can get our asses handed to us by the woods. They are rugged and unforgiving," he said.
A few of the students glanced toward the windows. Beyond the glass, the Adirondacks rose around them, beautiful beneath the morning sky. The mountains looked peaceful from inside a climate-controlled room.
Vic knew better than most how quickly that beauty could turn deadly.
At six feet three inches tall, he barely fit behind the podium. His broad shoulders extended beyond either side of it, making the wooden stand look almost comically small. A classroom had never felt natural to him.
He belonged in the woods.
Vic's father had first taken him into the Adirondacks when he was five years old. He still remembered struggling to match the man's stride, taking two steps for every one of his father's. Back then, the forest had seemed endless. Every trail led somewhere new, every mountain offered another world waiting at the summit.
His father had taught him to read those woods. How to recognize a storm before the clouds arrived. How to find water. How to keep his bearings when the trail disappeared beneath leaves or snow. Most importantly, he'd taught Vic to respect the mountains without fearing them.
By the time Vic was thirteen, they had summited every peak in the state.
Those were some of his happiest memories.
They were also the reason he stood in front of twenty strangers now.
Vic drew in a slow breath.
"I became a ranger because I was once one of the people needing help."
The room grew noticeably quieter.
"My father and I were hiking up Hurricane Mountain one December when I was fifteen. It was icy, and the snow came up to my waist in spots."
The memory arrived with more clarity than he wanted.
The bite of the cold against his cheeks. Snow clinging to his eyelashes. The crunch beneath his boots. His father's breath hanging in the air ahead of him as they climbed.
Even now, if Vic closed his eyes, he could almost smell the cold. That peculiar absence of scent that came with deep winter, broken only by pine and the occasional whiff of sweat trapped beneath layers of clothing.
Twenty-five years of rescues had done nothing to dull those particular details.
Vic paused and looked over his class.
The joking smiles were gone.
Good.
Now they were listening.
"My father slipped on a sheet of ice. He'd neglected to strap on his crampons. Shattered both of his legs and tumbled down into the trees, well off the trail. I didn't know any better, so I climbed down after him."
A few faces changed at that. They understood immediately what fifteen-year-old Vic had not.
He'd left the trail.
"I tried to help him up. Tried more than once, actually. He couldn't stand. Every time I moved him, he screamed."
Vic swallowed. That scream had followed him through more than half his life.
"So, I stayed with him."
He paused again, pulling up the memory he had recounted at the beginning of every class. Repetition had made the words easier to say. It had never made the memory easier to carry.
His blue eyes narrowed with the next part.
"We spent four days on that mountain. Huddled together and freezing. My dad couldn't move. After the first day, we expected someone to come."
No one in the room moved now.
"By the second day, we stopped expecting and started hoping."
Vic felt his fingers tighten against the edge of the podium.
"He died on the third night, and I refused to leave him."
The words settled over the room.
For a moment, Vic was fifteen again. Curled against his father's body, desperately trying to share warmth with a man who could no longer feel it. He remembered talking to him long after the answers stopped coming. He remembered refusing to admit what the silence meant.
Then he pushed the memory back where it belonged.
Vic stepped out from behind the podium.
Every eye in the class followed.
Good. He had their attention.
"Ranger Thomas Griffin saved me on the fourth day."
He scanned the room. One student sat rigid in her chair, another stared at the floor, and a young woman openly wiped tears from her cheeks.
Vic didn't enjoy making them uncomfortable. But discomfort in this room was cheap. A mistake in the woods could cost a life.
"I have another number for you."
He let the silence linger.
"Thirty-three."
A few students shifted.
"That is how many people I lost doing this job. Thirty-three families never got the ending they were praying for."
Thirty-three faces. He remembered every one of them.
Some had been dead before he ever entered the woods. Others had still been alive when he reached them. Those were usually the ones that stayed with him the longest.
"It is a hard pill to swallow, and if you think you will choke on it, then leave now. No shame in it."
Nobody moved at first.
Then a young man in a faded flannel stood so quickly his chair scraped loudly across the floor.
Every head turned toward him.
The young man flushed and quickly gathered his things. He kept his gaze down as he walked past Vic.
Vic gave him a quick nod.
There really was no shame in it. Better to discover the truth about yourself in a classroom than halfway up a mountain with someone's life depending on you.
The young man returned the nod and continued toward the exit.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Nineteen.
Vic allowed the silence to remain for another few seconds before returning to the front of the room.
"Alright," he said. "Let's begin."
Several students visibly relaxed.
"The first thing you need to learn is how to stay alive. You cannot rescue anyone if you get lost, hurt or die yourself. It takes more than knowledge of the woods and physical strength to succeed."
He paused.
"It takes heart. A lot of heart."
A hand shot up toward the back of the class.
Vic looked at its owner and nodded.
A woman somewhere in her thirties stood. She had dark, curly hair and brown eyes that met his without hesitation. There was confidence in the way she carried herself. Not the nervous bravado he'd seen from some of the others. Something more practiced.
"Mr. Flemming—"
"Vic, please," he interjected.
She paused, her mouth working for a second. Clearly, she wasn't accustomed to being interrupted.
Interesting.
She cleared her throat.
"Vic, I feel like you are preaching at us instead of teaching us. I'm a trauma surgeon. Every shift, I make decisions that determine whether someone lives or dies."
Vic stood silent for a moment.
Of course.
He had taught doctors before. God complexes wearing lab coats.
They were usually among the first to discover that the woods didn't give a shit what letters came after their names.
"You are?" he asked.
"Doctor Mariah White."
The name clicked almost immediately.
"Boston General's trauma unit?"
Mariah looked a little shocked as she nodded.
Vic had heard the name before. Anyone who worked around emergency medicine long enough eventually heard about the people who were exceptionally good at keeping the nearly dead from becoming completely dead.
That didn't make her a rescuer.
Not yet.
"Well, Doctor," he said, "I am preaching at you. Teaching comes after. You and everyone here need to know exactly what it is you signed up for."
A flicker of irritation passed across Mariah's face, but she didn't challenge him again.
Her shoulders relaxed slightly as she settled into her seat.
Vic noticed the hardness in her brown eyes. He recognized it because he'd seen something similar in the mirror.
She had clearly seen death before. So had he. They had simply met it in different places.
Losing someone on the table was one thing. Losing someone who needed rescuing was another. In a hospital, Mariah had lights, equipment, medication and an entire team surrounding her. In the Adirondacks, she might have whatever she could carry on her back and miles of unforgiving wilderness between herself and help.
She would learn the difference.
"The woods are alive," Vic continued. "Not just with animals. The forest itself is constantly changing, and it'll react in ways you don't expect."
He stepped away from the podium again and walked slowly across the front of the room.
"There are sinkholes. Fallen trees. Loose rock. Water where there wasn't water yesterday. Trails disappear. Storms come in faster than you think they can. And that carpet of leaves you're walking across?"
He pointed toward the windows.
"It looks harmless. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's covering a six-foot hole left by an uprooted tree."
Vic stopped walking.
"Step in it, and you've just turned one rescue into two."
No one spoke.
Mariah stared back at him from her seat. The hardness remained in her eyes.
Vic almost smiled. Good. She might be interesting.