The next day we had to get back in the swing of things. Rusty drove into town to check in at the station. I restocked the house and picked up Shadow, my lively Shetland sheepdog, from the kennel. Lou Strickland called to make sure I had returned and would be at the search and rescue meeting at his house that evening. Fortunately he didn’t ask me to tell him about the trip. I spent the day puttering around the house, pulling weeds around the corral and mowing the lawn. In the afternoon, I started dinner and when Rusty came home we ate quickly before heading for Lou’s house. Rusty wasn’t required to attend the search and rescue meetings, but liked to stay on top of things, and he knew everyone so he usually attended too. The meetings were not just for my little team. There were several teams that worked both together and separately in the area. My team was called when tracking was required but there were other teams trained in varied areas of expertise and Lou constantly worked at expanding the skills of the different teams so that they increasingly overlapped.
“Hey, hey, our little tracker has returned from the wilds of Minnesota!” Thez called out when we walked in. Their little tracker. I thought it was funny how they called me that, but it was exactly how I felt when I was with them.
“How was the honeymoon you two?” Victor asked.
“It was exciting. We had a blast!” I replied.
Victor, Landon and Thez exchanged glances. If I described something as exciting they knew something had happened. They knew my definition of exciting went way beyond the norm.
Victor broke first. “Okay, spill,” he said grimly.
“Guys! We’re happy to be back and we had a great time. Isn’t a honeymoon supposed to be exciting?”
“We know your definition of exciting. Exciting to you is being hunted by lunatic serial killers and cornered by angry rattlesnakes. Let’s see, they went to the woods in Minnesota. You got attacked by bears?” Thez guessed.
“Nope sorry, we did see one though.” I answered, “That was great! I saw a moose too!”
“Good evening!” Lou announced as the meeting got underway. “If everybody can take a seat somewhere we will get started.”
“Strict, you can’t do this to us,” Victor said. “Cassidy has another tall tale to tell us and she’s not talking. We’ve got to pry it out of her or she’ll escape and leave us all hanging until the next search.”
“You guys need to wait. What are we going to talk about on the trail if I tell you the whole story at a meeting?” I asked.
“Out with it,” said Lou. So we sat and I told them all about it but left out the part about my parachute not opening.
“So we dropped into the woods of Minnesota with no food and no water. Fortunately, Minnesota has a lot of water. We gathered dew and we found streams. We snared a rabbit and caught fish. One day we ate nothing but cattails. All we knew was our cabin was on a lake and the lake was north of us. We couldn’t count on search and rescue because we were nowhere near where the plane went down. We didn’t even know if the pilot was alive to tell people where to look.”
“So what happened?” Thez asked.
“It took us five very hungry days, but eventually we found the lake and our cabin, and we had a wonderful time.”
“Michaels? What is she leaving out?” Landon wanted to know.
“The part you won’t believe. You’d think she was nuts, so she left that part out.”
“This is Cassidy we are talking about. We don’t believe that’s all there is to it.”
Rusty shrugged.
“These guys are getting harder and harder to keep entertained,” I said. “What do I have to do, jump out of the plane without a parachute and live to tell about it?”
“That would be more up to your speed.”
“Oh, come on guys, would you really believe me if I told you I jumped out of the airplane without a parachute? Would you?”
The room grew silent. They weren’t sure. This was me we were talking about. Anything was possible.
Sigh, “Okay, I did have a parachute but it didn’t open. There, is that better?”
More silence.
“I give up. Strict, the show is all yours.”
“Wait!”
“Yes, Thez?” asked Lou.
“You didn’t really jump out of the airplane without a working parachute, did you?”
“Yeah, I did, but I managed to untangle it on the way down.”
“Michaels, what did you do?” Thez asked Rusty.
“I watched helplessly from my working parachute and couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t tell what she was doing tumbling through the air. Then the chute sort of opened but she was landing so fast. All I could do was watch. She splashed down in a lake and I landed in the woods. I ran down to the lake, but I couldn’t see anything out there. I couldn’t do anything and didn’t know anything for what seemed like an eternity.” Rusty paused. A very long pause, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then got up and stalked out the front door. I found him standing outside trying to compose himself. He glanced at me forlornly.
“I’m sorry, babe, I lost it.”
“It’s okay, they all know how you feel. Well, my team does anyway. The others, they can guess. It’s okay. You’re allowed to have feelings too, you know. They may joke and push for stories but they do it so they can deal with it all. They hear it and joke about it so they can process it. You run into the same stuff at work. So don’t worry about it.”
He could accept that.
“Wait until you hear Lou talking and I’ll get us back in without them noticing, and then we can sit in the back. Walk softly.”
The meeting continued, something about a quicker response time on the Mathis search. I silently opened the door and we slipped in, walked softly to the back of the group and found a place to stand.
I wasn’t familiar with what was being discussed in the meeting because it involved the calls that happened while I was gone. When I was in town word got around. We all heard about the searches second or third hand, but this time I had no background on a lot of what they were discussing. They had been busy. Fortunately, it had been more broad field searches and urban searches than tediously slow tracking searches.
“Cassidy, you’ll be relieved to know Thomas Parker is once again safe at home. He’s starting at college, majoring in business and accounting so maybe you won’t see him for a while.”
“Where did he get lost this time?” I asked.
“Guffy.”
“You can’t get lost from Guffy. It’s on the top of a mountain. You go downhill to leave it. You go up hill to find it.”
“Yeah, but this is Thomas Parker we are talking about.”
“That’s true.”
I’d found Thomas Parker twice. I was curious how many other teams had found him. He managed to get lost every time he ventured into the mountains.
The meeting went on with questions, discussion and training days. I never got called to training days. Strict and Rusty didn’t want me to get involved in aquatic rescues, rock climbing or apprehensions. So my list of training options was a bit limited. I always took the CPR class when it came up. I went to the rock climbing wall at the fire training station just because I was allowed and it was fun. I also practiced at the firing range and worked out at the gym.
“Cassidy, if some of us were interested in learning outdoor survival, would you be willing to teach us what you know?” asked Mark Hamil, a member of a different team.
That took me by surprise.
“Guys, you know as much as I do. You could snare a rabbit and catch a fish. You can read a book about edible plants. You just have to use your head.”
“How did you know what to do on your trip?”
“I’d studied it as a kid and tried it on camping trips and then later I went on real survival trips. This was only the second time I’d been forced to use it.”
“What would have happened out there if you didn’t know what to do?”
“We still would have gotten by. We saved Rusty’s gun for defense but we could have used it to hunt. You all carry. You could hunt for food.”
“What if we’d like to try a trip out there where we had to get by on our wits alone?”
“Then you better make sure you’ve got a good supply of wits.”
“Aw, come on Cassidy, you seem to know a thing or two. What could you teach us?”
“The first thing you have to do is learn to see things differently. You have to see the uses in everything. Instead of seeing a hillside you need to see the tracks and game trails. You have to look at a field and see the nutritional value of grasses, the uses for it. You have to see plants for what they really are. Some are edible and can help you, while others are poisonous and can kill you. Some you have to cook, some you can just harvest. Then there are others you can make things out of. You have to be able to see nature and see its uses, not just as pretty flowers, majestic trees, little furry animals. Flowers can be food, trees can too if you know what to do with them. Trees have many uses. Branches can be made into pieces for snares or a spear or a bow for hunting. Animals are food and if you are cold and know how to clean them you can use their fur for insulation to keep warm. Fine bones can be needles. There’s more than one way to see almost anything in nature. You have to learn to see everything differently. Are you willing to change your perceptions of things that are seemingly set in your mind? You need to see manmade things in a different light, too. On our trip I was adamant that we find Rusty’s parachute. Why?”
I looked around the room and received blank stares.
“We used the cords when we made the snare and we used the fabric to collect dew when we weren’t near water. We could have also used the parachute for a fish net if it had been needed. So you see, you mostly need to change the way you think about things.”
Judging from their reaction it appeared as if they had never thought of survival in that way before.
“Thez, what do you need to catch a fish?” I asked.
“Well, I guess for the most basic set up you need a hook, line and bait,” he answered.
“What if you don’t have a hook? What could you use?”
“A hooked stick? The right bone?”
“That’s possible. Whatever it is has to be stronger that the fish’s mouth. What if you don’t have fishing line?”
“That’s tougher.”
“What could you use for bait?”
“Anything to trick a fish. A leaf?”
“Or some fur or something icky and smelly. Rusty, what do you need to catch a fish?”
“Thirty sticks,” he answered, “and a quick hand.”
“What if you don’t have a quick hand?”
“Then we could have used the parachute to net them.”
“Or?”
“Or we could have speared them.”
“So with thirty sticks and another long stick you can have fish for as long as you stay near the trap. Game wardens aren’t nice to people who use fish traps, though. Only use one in a survival situation. My point is, you can always find sticks in the woods. You can’t always find a hook, line and bait. So you need to use the things you can find to your advantage.”
Lou watched the discussion with interest. Maybe all this was showing him that I really did have a head on my shoulders. I was prepared when he sent me on a search. I wasn’t just some kid girl who happened to know how to follow tracks. I knew a thing or two.