I open my eyes to a gray wool hat and a face so near I see individual wiry hairs in his brushy, walrus mustache. I close my eyes and groan. My teeth rattle against each other. “Moose . . . help.”
“Hold on. I never found a half-dead person before. Gotta get you into the truck.”
Curled in the fetal position on the seat of an old pickup truck, I am wrapped in a dirty blue blanket smelling of stale beer. The pain, like knives, stabs at me, over and over and over. My head rests against the man’s thigh that smells of oil and sawdust. My feet bump against the door handle. During the few moments I am conscious, the truck rattles and shakes and hammers the bumpy, icy road. I doze and, moaning, wake up to the engine roaring in my ears. Soon, white snowy silence. Then I hear a growling rumble as the man shifts down, and the jarring clatter of loose tools and beer cans on the floor. Am I worse off now than when I lay in the woods?
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