Trapped beneath a fallen tree in a rocky Arizona ravine, she screamed. And what happened next would change both their lives. The scream came again, thinner this time, swallowed fast by redstone walls that gave nothing back but silence. A riderless horse burst past on the rim of the ravine above. Wild-eyed stirrups, slapping empty against its flanks, and any sensible man crossing the Whetstone Mountains alone that spring would have taken the frightened animal as warning enough to turn the other way.
Levi Callaway was not that kind of sensible. 31 years old, driving a small string of horses south toward Cottonwood Bend to sell before the season turned. He had spent his whole life being the sort who rode toward a sound rather than away from it. He reined in hard, listened for the cry to come a third time, and when it did, left the string ground tied on the rim, and went down into the rocks on foot, boots skidding on loose scree, one hand out for balance against the canyon wall. What waited at the bottom was a young Apache woman pinned from the waist down beneath a fallen cottonwood, her horse having lost its footing on the same loose stone and thrown her hard into the very deadfall it had been trying to clear.
Dust caked the side of her face where she had fought and failed to drag herself free. Her dark eyes came up sharp and furious rather than pleading the look of someone who expected the worst from a stranger and meant to meet it. fighting, not weeping. Levi didn't ask her name. He didn't ask what had happened or who she was or what business a lone rider had this deep into Chiricahua Apache country. He dropped to his knees in the loose rock beside her and started working, testing the angle of the trunk, judging what could be levered and what had to be cut clean through.
The ravine itself seemed to work against him from the first minute. Loose scree shifted underfoot every time he shifted his weight to get better purchase on the trunk, and twice a fresh slide of pebbles came down from above and forced him to stop and steady himself before he could go on. The cottonwood had fallen at an angle that pinned her legs but left her torso free, which he understood once he'd caught his breath enough to think clearly was the only reason she was still conscious and arguing with him in a language he couldn't understand rather than lying still beneath the whole crushing weight of it. He worked fast, and he worked careful in equal measure, because a man in too much of a hurry could bring the rest of the deadfall down on top of her just as easily as free her from it, and slow was the only speed that wouldn't risk making things worse. It took the better part of 2 hours.