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Chapter Two – Trapped
What the hell? Holly’s first reaction was annoyance at being thwarted in her attempt to collect the sample of what she desperately hoped was actual sabertooth genetic material.
She instinctively tried to pull her foot free by crawling forward on her hands and knees, but whatever had her wasn’t letting go.
Even worse, the movement sent a white-hot spear of pain through her calf, dispelling the numbness.
This was bad. Really bad.
She twisted around to look at it.
Horror squeezed her chest as she caught sight of the huge curved metal jaws fastened around her boot.
Someone had set an illegal bear trap under these bushes, where the abundant summer leaves would have hidden it from any bears foraging for the sweet cherries. A thick, rusty chain fastened the trap to a metal stake pounded deep into the earth beneath the bush.
She swore out loud. Then she forced herself to stop, take three deep breaths, and assess the situation.
All the campgrounds in the immediate area were closed for the season. That meant she was at least ten miles from the nearest source of help, the historic lodge just outside the park’s entrance.
Even worse, thanks to her really poor decision earlier, her backpack, with its emergency distress call device, was out of reach.
She was completely on her own.
Okay, time to make a plan, she thought. Step one: free myself from this trap.
Step two: walk or crawl over to my backpack and activate the distress signal.
Step three: wait for help and hope that none of the local apex predators decide to stop by for a snack, she finished with black humor.
Trapped as she was, even a hungry raccoon could take her out, though not without a fight.
Grimly ignoring the deep, throbbing pain in her lower leg, Holly backed up on her hands and knees, trying to create as much slack as possible in the trap’s anchor chain.
Then she tried standing.
Spears of incandescent agony lanced through her immobilized leg and sent showers of fiery gold sparks across her field of vision. Her stomach twisted with nausea. She collapsed back onto the cold, wet ground.
Panting, she lay sprawled for a long moment and tried to get herself together. Then, moaning with pain, she raised herself back up on her hands and knees, and began trying to rotate the heavy trap so that she could sit with her knees bent up and lean forward to reach the trap.
By the time she succeeded in repositioning herself, she was dizzy, panting and shivering. Minus her warm gloves, her jeans soaked to the skin and plastered in freezing mud, she knew couldn’t stay out here much longer.
Holly studied the bear trap’s mechanism. From experience, she knew she couldn’t simply grab both halves of the trap and pull it apart to free her trapped leg. That was the strategy a trapped bear would employ, and the trap was designed to thwart this.
Instead, she would have to compress the pair of thick metal springs on either side of the trap plate to free herself. These two springs pushed the trap’s jaw together and locked them into place. The trick was to press both springs down at the same time.
The jaws would then open, releasing her leg. In theory, that was.
Okay, I can do this, she told herself. She took a deep breath, then bent and twisted her body to reach the springs. Her fingers ached with the cold, and moved stiffly.
She pushed down on the coiled metal with all her strength.
Nothing happened. She tried again, grunting with the effort.
Still nothing.
Even worse, she couldn’t feel the springs anymore because her fingers had gone numb.
“No!” she protested out loud. “No! No! No! This can’t be happening! This is stupid!”
