Ranger

His eyes opened, and they were not the eyes of a 53-year-old regional sales manager.

They were the eyes of something that had been hunting in these mountains for 25 years and was realizing in that one second that it had been made.

He came up off the bunk anyway.

I had thought the broken collarbone would stop him.

It did not stop him.

it slowed him his right arm hung wrong and he could not use it effectively but he came up with his left and he came fast and he had something in his left hand that he had been palming while his hands were folded on his stomach which i had not seen and which i should have seen

and which I have thought about every night for four years.

It was a folding knife, a four-inch blade.

He had it open.

He swung it at my throat.

I got my left forearm up in time.

The blade went through my jacket and through my sleeve and into the meat of my forearm, and he drove it in until it hit bone, and I dropped the flashlight, and I grabbed his left wrist with my right hand, and I twisted, and I drove my head forward into his face, and I felt his nose break."

I yelled.

I yelled Trent's name.

I yelled for him to wake up.

Dale was smaller than I expected him to be, and older, but the strength in his left arm was the strength of a man who had been living rough for a quarter century and doing physical work every day of it, and he was not going to lose this if I gave him time.

I could not give him time.

I was bleeding hard from my forearm.

I could feel it running down inside my sleeve.

I pulled him off the bunk and onto the floor and I went down on top of him and I put my right knee on his broken collarbone and leaned into it and he screamed and I still had his left wrist and I was bashing his hand against the floor planks trying to make him drop the knife.