Sam awoke in a white place, in a white bed. It was a room. He felt chilled. He smelled chemicals—disinfectant. He felt much of his head and upper torso wrapped in tight bandages. He put it together slowly. He was in a hospital. The last thing he could remember was having spotted Cindy from his lookout. Then he slept and dreamed, and then he awoke again. He remembered the mountain lion. He saw his mother and father, or, yes—Mr. and Mrs. Dorah. They spoke to him, and he thought he heard them, but he couldn’t distinguish what they might have really said from what he dreamed. He wasn’t even sure they’d really been there. He had dreams of laying helpless in a ring of flames under the sun. He wrestled with the cat over and over again. He struggled to strangle it with Buck’s leash. There was a shaft in the cat’s shoulder—an arrow shaft.
Sam began to feel more stable. He didn’t slip between waking and dreaming so easily. His parents visited him again. This time he believed they had really visited. They told him that he was going to be fine, that he just needed to rest and heal. He asked about Cindy, but they couldn’t understand him. He gestured for a pen and paper. They understood. He wrote “Cindy” without looking at what he was writing.
“Cindy will be fine,” Mr. Dorah answered. He paused, and then continued. “She’s in some trouble with the law, but she’ll be fine. That’s what’s important.”
“Trouble?” Sam scrawled.
His parents inspected the writing for a moment.
“They say that you were probably attacked by an animal.”
Sam gestured for the pen and paper. He wrote “cougar”.
Mrs. Dorah nodded to Mr. Dorah, and then Mr. Dorah continued. “They found you unconscious in a forest fire. They say that Cindy started it.”
Sam voiced a muffled “Ah” through the bandages.
He realized what had happened. He had unwittingly helped the authorities find Cindy. She must have started the fire to draw attention to him. He should have left her alone. She would have been better off without him.
He took the paper and pencil once more and wrote, “Sleep.” He couldn’t stand to visit any more.
“Okay, Sam. We’ll let you rest. We’ll see you later.”
Before they walked out, Mr. Dorah put Buck’s leash in Sam’s hand.
Cindy was arraigned in juvenile court and put in a medium-security girls’ home on the edge of the Range, near Tule River. Sam’s testimony helped to eliminate any suspicion that she might have somehow been the cause of Sam’s injuries, but she was still held under suspicion of arson, though the only fire she was positively linked to was the fire that saved Sam’s life.
Sam returned to the dairy once his wounds healed. He underwent several rounds of cosmetic surgery, but the scars could not be removed completely. They would be immediately evident to anyone that encountered Sam for the rest of his life, but that didn’t worry Sam. Cindy worried Sam. He resented himself for betraying her, and he could not see a chance to forgive himself for being the menace that he had always been.
Cindy didn’t seem deeply troubled by her incarceration. She wouldn’t have chosen it, to be sure, but she seemed content enough to spend the off-season there. She kept busy with school assignments and several books she’d acquired through her parents.