The next time I remembered looking up, it was starting to get dark outside. I scrambled upright in a panic that I had dozed off. Shit, the sun was setting. That meant it was like, what? Four-thirty? I had been stuck out here for over an hour now.
“Help!” I screamed. “Help!” I continued to yell until my throat felt raw. Being stuck out here in the dark felt a lot more hopeless. I refused to go out like this.
I swear I heard someone yelling back in the distance. Maybe up the hill a bit. It was hard to tell surrounded by these trees.
“Help!” I shrieked again. “I’m over here!”
“Mattie?” I heard someone calling my name now. There was no mistaking it.
“Over here.”
Tears of relief pricked at my eyes as two men I’d never seen before in red ski patrol jackets appeared.
“She’s down here,” one of them called up the hill, and two more men in red jackets appeared.
“Are you hurt?”
“Just my ankle. And my head.” I winced as I touched the large bump that had formed on my forehead.
“Let’s get you out of here.”
They started to pack me into a gurney-looking thing.
“We’re bringing her down now, have the ambulance there waiting.” I heard one of them say into a radio.
Once I was packed into the bag, the men expertly maneuvered me through the trees. It felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, but after just five minutes, we were back on the main hill that I had strayed from.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we made it to the bottom. There were flashing lights everywhere and quite a crowd. The two men that brought me down helped hoist me into the ambulance.
“We would have found you a lot sooner if that skier that ran into you had come forward earlier. Good thing you wore this outfit. As soon as we put the call out that you were missing, he remembered colliding with you.”
I guess my obnoxious outfit came in handy after all.
The ski patrol backed away from the ambulance, and the E.M.T. closed the door.
“Wait, I was with my friends—”
“They’re probably still out looking for you. There was quite the search party.”
I groaned in embarrassment.
“Don’t worry, we’ll alert everyone that you’ve been found, and your friends will be notified you’ve been sent to the hospital. We can’t waste any more time getting you checked out, though. That’s a nasty-looking head injury you’ve got yourself there.”
* * *
The doctor tookmultiple scans of my head before determining it was just a slight concussion. Unfortunately for me, it looked like my snowboarding days were over since I had fractured my ankle pretty badly.
“You’re lucky. It could have been a lot worse,” she said, showing me my X-Ray. “Those trees can be really dangerous.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
“We’ll get this set in a cast and have you on your way in a few hours. We won’t have to keep you overnight as long as you have someone that can monitor you at home to ensure there’s no turn for the worse.”
“I live alone. Can I just call someone if I notice a change?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You can’t monitor yourself. What about your husband?”
I squinted at her in confusion.
