Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself Read Online Free

mud. I could almost count the vertebrae in his spine. He had only a cavity where the belly should be. I tried to recall the survival training I received as a Marine. I didn’t know about dogs, which I finally decided the creature was, but I knew a man can go as long as a month without nutrition and less than a week without water. The mud-caked fur meant there must have been standing water in the hole at some point. My best guess was that the poor creature was in that final stage of starvation. I knew as well that a kind of madness accompanies malnutrition and, in particular, dehydration when it reaches the point that the body can no longer flush itself of toxins, which then affect brain function by causing chemical imbalances. I recalled that my mother used to say she had a “chemical imbalance,” though not from dehydration. I had no way of telling how far gone mentally this poor dog was.
    The tail hung limp and seemed incapable of wagging. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from its shoulder blades and pelvic bones, which were now the most dominant features on its body. As I watched, the animal collapsed, dropping first to its elbows before falling into the dirt, where it lowered its head to the ground and lay motionless. I wondered if it had died, right before my eyes.
    I looked up. The canyon walls were too high to see the topmost edge. I was minimally two hundred feet deep—but perhaps twice that. The sky was a broken narrow blue line. I tried but could not for the life of me figure out how this animal arrived here. It surely could not have fallen and survived.
    I looked up-canyon to recall how I’d already used seven twenty-five-foot lengths of rope to reach this spot. I’d needed hand lines to navigate several difficult scrambles and had completed two free-hanging rappels—the dog could not have casually ambled away from its owners and made its way here on its own.
    I wondered if he’d arrived here by some natural event. Occasionally, exploring places like this, you come across the carcass or skeleton of a dead animal that got washed into the canyon during a flood. I found the body of a coyote once. Slot canyons are generally not full of life, beyond the birds that make their nests on the canyon walls. Slot canyons are typically too dry and bereft of sunlight to support vegetation. Because there is too little to eat, prey species don’t come down into slot canyons, which means predators don’t frequent them, either. When there is water, it pours through with such force that it would kill any animal—small or large—caught in the current. About a mile up-canyon, I’d passed beneath a large logjam of tree branches wedged between the canyon walls by the force of flood waters. The logjam had been sixty feet above my head.
    In other words, the dog could not have tried to ford a shallow wash or arroyo upstream and gotten carried here. It would have been dashed against the walls.
    I took a moment to assess the situation. The first task was to identify and evaluate the problem, but I couldn’t do that unless I went down into the pothole. I couldn’t go down into the pothole without a hand line at the very least, but I couldn’t see any way to rig a hand line—nothing to tie off to, no raw materials to arrange as a dead-man’s anchor, no logs or rocks. I would need to set a bolt, but my tools to do that were in my backpack, which I’d left behind.
    I almost said, “Wait here,” though the dog hardly had a choice. It didn’t move, but something told me it was still alive. Maybe that was just the hopeful part of me engaging in wishful thinking. If it was still alive, it was alive the way a candle smolders after you blow out the flame, and for a moment, the tip of the wick glows orange.
    I set off to retrieve my pack, and as I moved, I arrived at the only conclusion that remained. I recalled the old Sherlock Holmes stories I read as a boy where the great fictional detective says, “When you have eliminated the