Free Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney Page A

John? Where’s Maya? How long have I been lying here?
    I tried shouting but what came out was a pathetic wheeze. I tried to sit up, thinking I should crawl out to the trail. My arms, like bags of sand, wouldn’t respond. My legs felt shackled, as if roots had reached up from the soil and lashed them to the ground. I tried again to rise . . . and failed. I could hear blood dripping off my face and hitting the grass. Drip . . . drip . . . drip. I could feel blood pooling inside my waders. God, it hurts. It hurts so bad . My mind began racing with crazy, crazy thoughts.
    Oh man, I have to work in the morning, and now I’m probably going to be late. Oh, and isn’t this just great; I’m supposed to drive the kids to that compass course tomorrow, and the keys to the van are in my pocket. What a mess you’ve made of things, Bigley. Mom and Dad are going to be so pissed. And what about Amber? What’s she going to think of you now that you’ve gotten yourself mauled by a bear?
    Lying on my back, wet and sticky and too weak to move, my thoughts continued to spiral until I just wanted to sleep.
    How long have I been lying here? A half hour? More? Does anyone even know I’m here?
    I started to shiver, just a little at first, and then violently.
    John, where are you? Please hurry. I’m cold. So cold.

CHAPTER 5
    Hanging on in the Dark
    It would be years before I would piece together what happened in the minutes, hours, days, and weeks that followed my decision to fight for my life. I remember vividly, unfortunately, some of the most disturbing moments between me and the bear. But I recall only scraps of what happened after the blue place dissolved into darkness and I lay alone on the forest floor. The friends I fished with that day, as well as medics, law enforcement, forest service, and other officials called to the scene, plus others who were down at the river or up in the campground have filled in details of my rescue. I continue to run into people now and then who tell me more, most recently, eight years later, as I was emerging from a restroom.
    “Hey, are you Dan Bigley?”
    “I am. Who’s that?”
    “I’m Wes Masters. I was with you in the ambulance that night.”
    Medical records, doctors, surgeons, nurses, hospital staff, my family, my friends, and many others who passed through my life without me even knowing it have helped me reconstruct the times for which I have no memory. They’ve helped me make a bit of sense of the morphine-induced hallucinations—or dreams, I’m not sure what to call them—that occasionally intercepted reality while I was clinging to life in intensive care. Physical descriptions of people, places, and events I could not see, of the expressions, gestures, and body language of those around me, were provided by many along the way.
    I know that memories, my own and those of others, can be fickle. They can fade, evolve, and distort in both the heat of the moment and with the passage of time. But as far as I can determine, what happened went something like this.
    About the time John and I were packing up to leave The Sanctuary, Jaha and Emily were topping the stairs to the parking lot. Finding the doors locked, they leaned their poles against the side of John’s car, slid out of their packs, and set them down next to their rods. Fifteen minutes came and went. Then thirty. Although the sun hadn’t officially set, it had ducked behind the mountains a good while ago, so it had to be around eleven. It was a beautiful evening for killing time, but they both had to work in the morning and were getting antsy. More time went by. What the hell was taking us so long, they wondered.
    They noticed people taking pictures on the bluff above the river, so they wandered over to see what was up. What was up was bears. Emily hadn’t been in Alaska long, and she had yet to see one. Jaha, who’d worked at the Russian River Campground the previous summer and had since landed a job as a river guide on the