She cradled her right arm in her left hand, and worked her legs until they were under her and she was in a kneeling position. She couldn’t see anything but the basket at the moment, but from the direction that the ropes went, Tad should be right behind her.
She was almost afraid to look. If he were dead—
She turned, slowly and carefully, and let out a sob of relief as she saw him—and saw his sides heaving. He wasn’t dead! He wasn’t in good shape, but he was still breathing!
He lay sprawled atop a tangle of crushed bushes, still unconscious. His left wing was doubled up underneath him at an angle that was not natural, with his primary feathers pointing forward instead of back, most of them shredded and snapped. So he had one broken wing for certain, and that meant that he would not be flying off anywhere for help.
As she shifted again, trying to get to her feet, his eyes opened, and his beak parted. A thin moan came from him, and he blinked dazedly.
“Don’t move,” she called sharply. “Let me get over there and help you first.”
“I know, I can see it. Just hold still and let me get to you.” Gritting her teeth, she worked her right arm inside her tunic and belted the garment tightly, using only her left hand. That would do for immobilizing the shoulder for now.
She stood up with the aid of the debris around her, and worked her way over to Tad. Once there, she stared at him for a moment, deciding where to begin. The rain forest was unnervingly quiet.
“Can you wiggle the toes on your left hind foot?” she asked.
He did so, then repeated the gesture with his right, then his foreclaws. “The right rear hurts when I move, but not as if something is broken,” he offered, and she heaved a sigh of relief.
“All right, your back isn’t broken, and neither are your legs; that’s better than we had any right to expect.” The knife she had been trying to use to get him free was gone, but now she could reach all the snap-hooks holding the ropes to his harness. Hissing with pain every time her shoulder was jarred in the least, she knelt down in the debris of crushed branches and scratchy twigs and began un-snapping him.
“I think I’m one big bruise,” he said, as she worked her hand under him to free as many of the ropes as she could without having him move.
“That makes two of us,” she told him, straining to reach one last set of snap-hooks. He knew better than to stir until she told him to; any movement at all might tear fragile blood vessels in the wings where the skin was thinnest, and he would bleed to death before she could do anything to help him.
Finally, she had to give up on that last set. She moved back to his head, and studied his pupils. Was one a little smaller than the other? Without a light to make them react, she couldn’t tell. “You might have a concussion,” she said doubtfully.
“You might, too,” he offered, which she really could have done without hearing.
“Just lie there,” she advised him. “I’m going after the medical gear.”
It
She worked her way over to the basket again, to find to her great relief that the medical supplies were still “on top”—or rather, since the basket was on its side, they were still the things easiest to reach.
Although “easiest to reach” was only in a relative sense. . . .
She studied the situation before she did anything. The basket was lying in a heap of broken branches; the supplies had tumbled out sideways and now were strewn in an arc through that same tangle of branches. The medical supplies were apparently caught in a forked sapling at about shoulder height, but there was a lot of debris around that sapling. It would be very easy to take a wrong step and wind up twisting or even breaking an ankle—
