Freeing the leg took forty minutes of careful, muddy work before the light in the ravine began to fail.
First Ashaun walked fifty paces down into the pine timber and cut a six-foot lever pole from a deadfall fir, stripping the side stubs with her camp knife in her right hand while bracing the trunk beneath her heavy boot. While she was gone, Osha and Chaska dug out the loose shale beneath Deyun’s calf with flat stones, and Osha wedged two thick slabs of limestone under the curve of the ironwood root as safety chocks so that if the lever slipped, the timber could not drop back onto his shin.
“Don’t pull him until I say the wood is clear,” Ashaun told Ysabet as she jammed the bevelled tip of the fir pole under the root and laid a fulcrum rock beneath it. “My left arm’s only good for dead weight on the butt end. Chaska, get your shoulder under the middle.”
Ysabet crouched behind Deyun, passed her good left arm under his right armpit, and hooked her bandaged right forearm—keeping her burned palm turned inward away from the rough sheepskin—under his left shoulder. Pip stayed pressed close beside the boy’s hip, its warm chest fold open against his ribs to steady his shivering.
