Caleb unbuckled his hunting knife from his belt and carefully sliced away the ruined, blood-soaked leather of the warrior's legging.
The wound was ugly. The heavy iron teeth had torn through the thick calf muscle, leaving ragged, gaping meat that oozed dark venous blood. The shinbone itself appeared bruised and scraped, but by some miracle, the iron had not shattered the main bone completely.
"Lucky bastard," Caleb muttered, his voice shaking slightly from the cold and adrenaline. "Another quarter inch and you'd be leaving this leg in the mountains."
Caleb set to work with methodical, practiced efficiency. He pulled his canteen back out, using the remaining water to wash the dirt, pine needles, and rust flakes out of the open wound. The warrior flinched violently in his unconscious stupor as the icy water hit the raw meat, but he did not awaken.
Caleb unstoppered the small bottle of carbolic acid, pouring the harsh, medicinal fluid directly into the torn tissue to burn out any rot. Then, using his hunting knife, he tore his clean cotton rags into wide strips, wrapping them tightly around the calf, pulling the bandage snug to apply pressure to the bleeding vessels.
As he bound the leg, Caleb’s mind drifted backward, slipping helplessly down the dark, familiar slope of memory.
November 1864. Tonto Basin.
He remembered the bitter smell of burning cedar lodges. He remembered the blinding red glare of the morning sun through the smoke, and the frantic, echoing pops of Springfield carbines firing in rapid succession. Major Harlan had stood on his horse atop the ridge, his silver saber drawn, shouting orders about clearing the valley of hostiles.
Caleb had been riding near the rear of the column. He had rounded the corner of a burning wickiup and found an Apache woman crouched in the dirt, her arms wrapped tightly around two small children, her eyes wide with terror as three volunteer scouts dismounted with drawn revolvers.
Caleb had spurred his horse forward, yelling at the men to hold their fire—that these were non-combatants, that the order was only to secure the camp.
One of the scouts—a scarred, whiskey-soaked corporal named Vance—had turned his bloodshot eyes toward Caleb, sneered, and raised his pistol anyway.
Caleb had reached for his own gun to stop Vance, but he had hesitated. For two fatal, unforgivable seconds, Caleb’s mind had frozen—caught between the ingrained discipline of a soldier obeying his superiors and the moral imperative of a human being stopping a murder.
In those two seconds of hesitation, Vance had pulled the trigger.
The memory snapped shut like the jaws of the bear trap, bringing Caleb violently back to the present.
He pulled the final knot tight on the warrior’s bandage, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. He sat back in the snow, staring at his blood-stained hands, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He hadn't stopped the fire at Tonto Basin. He hadn't saved the woman or her children. But sitting here in the frozen silence of 1867, three hundred miles away from that burned valley, Caleb looked at the wounded man lying in the snow.
"I am not letting you die out here," Caleb whispered to the quiet forest. "Not today."
The sun was beginning to drop below the western peaks, casting long, purple shadows across the snowfields. The temperature was plunging rapidly; within an hour, the mountain air would freeze a man’s exposed skin in minutes.
Caleb knew they couldn't stay in the open clearing. The warrior was incapable of walking, and Caleb could not carry a two-hundred-pound man through three feet of snow while leading a horse.
He scouted the surrounding area, finding a natural rock overhang two hundred yards up the slope—a shallow granite cave protected from the north wind by a thick stand of fir trees.