The sun was still low on the horizon and dew was still on Magic Carpet’s wings when Jennlynn helped Shirley into the right seat, then got into the pilot’s seat and fired up the four-cylinder Continental engine under the cowling. In a matter of minutes, they were high above the Nevada desert, heading eastward.

The noise level in the cockpit was really just a touch high for casual conversation, so they were pretty quiet as the landscape flowed slowly below them. "I don’t know how many times I’ve driven up that road right there," Shirley said at one point. "And how many times I wondered what was beyond that ridge, like there might be some wonderland there. And there is – a wonderland of empty desert."

Jennlynn’s navigation was mostly bushwhacking, following roads until they neared the ranch. "From here on in you’re going to have to tell me where to go," Jennlynn told the older woman. "Do you know where you are?"

"Oh, Lord, yes," Shirley smiled. "I grew up out here, after all. Turn a little to the left; we ought to be crossing a road in a few minutes, then we can follow that road."

They flew on for a while, and pretty soon some ranch buildings began to be seen through the disk of the propeller ahead of them. "That it?" Jennlynn asked.

"That’s it," Shirley nodded, shaking her head. "I mean, I always knew it was empty out here, but Lord, to look at it from a plane shows me just how empty it really is."

"You said once that it’s not in the middle of nowhere, but you could see nowhere from there," Jennlynn laughed. "Boy, I guess you were right."

"It really was like that when I was a kid and it’s not much better now. We still don’t have electricity or a telephone."

"That’s hard to believe in this day and age," Jennlynn nodded.

"It’d cost the electric company more than it’s worth to run a pole line out there," Shirley explained. "When I was growing up we had a Jacobs wind generator to run a radio and a refrigerator. That was thirty-two volt, and finally the refrigerator gave out and the Jake not a lot later. We got along without until Duane found this wind generator out of Australia, that was after he and Ellen got married and moved out here. They still get along on kerosene, mostly. The only way we were ever able to call out was by ham radio. I always looked forward to getting into town to go to work so I could have hot showers and flush toilets."

It was hard for Jennlynn to believe people still lived that remotely and primitively in the United States, but reflecting on how few and scattered the ranches they’d seen along the way were, she figured that the Hoffman ranch must not be the only one.

It took several minutes for the ranch buildings to crawl into view. "The field on the far side of the house probably will do you," Shirley told her. "But you might want to take a look at the road that leads up to the house."

Just looking from the plane, the field looked better than the road; even from several hundred feet Jennlynn could see obvious potholes. Still, she knew from her training that it always pays to take a close look when you’re landing off-field, and this would be her first landing away from an airstrip. She selected a promising line, a faint two-rut path or cattle track or something through the sagebrush that seemed fairly straight. She let the plane down and slowed down, flying along the track only a few feet above it, looking from her side of the plane. There didn’t seem to be any obstacles, so she picked up some altitude, turned around, crossed her fingers and let down the full forty degrees of the little Cessna’s "barn door" flaps so she could land as slowly as possible. With the engine keeping her floating along in the ground effect, she eased Magic Carpet down as gingerly as she could, then came down fairly hard on the brakes so she could go as slowly as possible over any rough ground. As it turned out, the path through the sagebrush was harder and smoother than it had looked from the air, so she was able to taxi fairly steadily up to the yard in front of the small, low ranch house.

"That’s strange," Shirley said as they taxied up. "There doesn’t seem to be anybody here."

She was almost right. As Jennlynn shut down Magic Carpet’s engine and set the parking brake, she could look up and see a good-looking teenage blonde girl in blue jeans, maybe about early high school age, come out of the house and walk up close to the plane. "That’s Angela, Chuck and Dorothy’s youngest," Shirley said. "I got a feeling I don’t like."

A few seconds later, the prop windmilled to a stop, and Shirley opened the door. "Hi, Grandma," Angela said, concern in her voice.

"Has something happened?" Shirley asked.

"Will went out to round up some strays yesterday afternoon, and he hasn’t come back," Angela replied. "Everybody but me went out to look for him, even Dad. Now that you’re here I’m gonna saddle Paint and go look up the wash."

"You have any idea where he was heading?" Shirley asked.

"Don’t know for sure, but everybody thinks it was out beyond the ridge, out towards the dry lake, but it could be anywhere."

"Lovely," Shirley said. "That’s only about forty square miles to look through. That could take forever."

"You know where that is?" Jennlynn said.

"Hell yes, I grew up out there," Shirley snorted.

"Then we’ll go look, too," Jennlynn said. "We can cover ground more quickly than you can on horseback. Angela, stand back." She looked up, checked that the girl was standing well back, and turned the key to "Start."

Magic Carpet started up again in an instant; Jennlynn had already noticed that the air was still, so she just swung it around and pointed it toward the track where they’d landed, dropping twenty degrees of flaps in the process, and cobbing the throttle open. In seconds, they were airborne again. "We can look for about an hour and a half before we have to head for Ely for fuel," Jennlynn warned while they were still rolling. "Now, which way do we go?"

"I guess we might as well go look at the dry lake first," Shirley sighed. "Go left and over that ridge about ten o’clock. Damn, if Chuck is out there, they really think there’s trouble."

"Why’s that?" Jennlynn asked as she rolled the little Cessna toward the ridge as it climbed out.

"Chuck’s a city boy. You’ve been on a horse more than he has. Their kids have spent a lot of time up here in the summers, they’re pretty good on horses and out on the range, but he don’t know jack shit about ’em."

It was still cool, and Magic Carpet quickly climbed to the level of the low ridge. "You just tell me where to go," Jennlynn said. "We probably don’t want to be up real high, though."

"Bear left once you get over the ridge," Shirley said. "There’s a dry wash over there that I’ve chased a lot of strays out of over the years."

There were neither strays nor any sign of a horse and rider in the dry wash, and apparently the searchers hadn’t gotten that far, either. "Probably the best thing to do is just go back and forth and keep our eyes open," Shirley told Jennlynn.

That’s what they did for an hour or more – fly back and forth across the barren sagebrush of the flat dry lake bed, several hundred feet up. There really wasn’t much to see; it really was empty out there, and Jennlynn, even with a couple years in the west and a summer in the Nevada desert to learn better thought it next to lifeless. There were patches of sagebrush and large expanses of dirt where nothing grew at all. How cattle could live and thrive out there, let alone people, was beyond her.

The twin gas gauges on Magic Carpet’s instrument panel were sagging to the point where Jennlynn was close to saying something about having to head for Ely when she heard Shirley say fairly loudly, "There’s a horse with no rider."

"Where?" Jennlynn looked to the right, where Shirley was pointing.

"About two o’clock," Shirley said.

"A stray?" Jennlynn commented, unable to pick anything out of the expanse of sagebrush and dry ground.

"Not with a saddle on, it’s not," Shirley said.

Still wondering how Shirley had seen what she’d claimed, Jennlynn turned to the right and throttled down to descend, hopefully in the right direction. "A little more right," Shirley said in a few seconds; Jennlynn could still see nothing, although it was now probably on the wrong side of the plane. At least she hoped Shirley could still see it.

They had to go what seemed like a long ways; Jennlynn was beginning to wonder if Shirley had seen anything at all when the older woman said, "The horse is tied. He’s got to be around here somewhere."

Jennlynn swung the plane to the left to get a better look out the right side of the plane. Yes, there was a saddled horse still well off in the distance. How Shirley had picked it out, with that level of detail was beyond her. Now with some idea of where the horse was, Jennlynn slowed down and began to circle the horse at a fairly close distance. "There he is!" Shirley cried out. "There, lying down in the dirt, just this side of the horse!"

Jennlynn could barely make out the horse, but using it as a guide she looked around and saw a dark object that looked sort of like a body. What sharp eyes Shirley had! In an instant she had an insight. The older woman with the deeply sun-lined face may have spent half her life in Nevada cathouses, but the other half of her life had been spent in this barren desert, accounting for the lines in her face in the first place. She was used to being out here, knew what to look for, and when she looked, she saw. "The open spots down there look pretty smooth," she commented. "You have any idea how firm the surface is?"

"This time of the year, real hard, almost like concrete," Shirley said.

"All right, we’ll check it out," Jennlynn agreed, swinging the plane to the left to pick out a likely spot to land. Though she eased her way down much like she had in the field back at the ranch an hour before, Shirley was proved right. She also could point right to where the man lay after Jennlynn landed the little Cessna.

The surface was hard enough to be able to taxi right up near where Will lay. She barely had the engine shut down when both of them were getting out of Magic Carpet and heading for him.

About all that Jennlynn could pick out was that he was unconscious. She knelt down, and her first aid class from high school told her that the young man had respiration and a pulse, but couldn’t be roused and seemed rather cold. "What happened?" she said.

"Looks like a rattlesnake to me," Shirley said, pointing at a dark, swollen leg. "He’s got his pants leg pulled up, tried to do something about it, but passed out." She pointed just above the top of a low boot. "See, there’s the fang marks. Damn fool has got hiking boots on."

"Huh?" Jennlynn said.

"You want to know why cowboys wear high boots? That’s why," Shirley snorted. "Must have happened last night. Crap, we’re going to have to get him into Ely. There ain’t much we can do for him here."

"I can fly him," Jennlynn offered.

"That’s the best answer," Shirley agreed. "Can’t even use a truck from the ranch. You can’t get over the ridge on wheels, and it’s a hundred miles by road."

"But Shirley," Jennlynn protested. "I don’t want to leave you out here alone. I don’t know how we found him and I don’t know how I’d find you again."

"No big deal, so long as the horse is all right and I’ll find out right quick. You can pick me up back at the ranch, it’s only about ten miles. You think you can find that all right?"

"Yeah, sure, I took some bearings before we landed," Jennlynn nodded. "Look, probably the easiest thing to do is just pop the right seat out of the tracks and throw it in back. That way we can lay him on the floor. I just have to have his feet toward the back, or else it’s going to throw the balance off."

"We can do that," Shirley nodded. "He’s a pretty big dude; we’re just going to have to lift him."

It took about ten minutes to get the young man loaded into the plane; there wasn’t much Jennlynn could do to secure him except use the seat belt. While she was doing that, Shirley hustled over to the horse, untied it, got on, and waved. With that, Jennlynn waved back, fired up Magic Carpet, and in moments was airborne again. Still low, she turned north toward Ely.

Several minutes out, she came across several people on horseback, spread out wide over the landscape, a couple hundred yards between them – obviously, the Hoffmans, out searching. They happened to be in an area where there was no good place to land close by – how to get a message to them?

Inspiration struck in an instant. She reached around behind the seat, grabbed her purse, and dumped it out on the floor next to the prostrate cowboy. There was a notepad and a pen there; she set Magic Carpet into a wide circle and scribbled furiously on the pad. W snakebit, taking to Ely. Shirley about 5 south with his horse. She stuffed the notepad into the purse, then turned back toward the horsemen and dropped her altitude, slowing the Cessna as much as she could. She could see a cluster of them, stopped and watching her, wondering what was going on. Just short of them, she popped open the door and threw out the purse, then turned to the left to watch what happened. Below, she could see a horseman spur his horse toward where the purse had fallen; she could see him get off, pick the purse up, open it, and then give a big two-handed wave. Message received, Jennlynn turned back to the north, waggled the wings, and started to climb for some altitude.

As soon as she was above the top of the ridge, she turned on the #1 radio – she hadn’t bothered to turn it on yet this morning – and turned it to the emergency frequency. "Any station on 121.5, this is Cessna two three two one seven," she called.

The response was instantaneous. "Cessna two one seven, this is Nellis. Go ahead."

They were a long way away from Nellis Air Force Base, down by Las Vegas, but she figured there must be a repeater around somewhere. "Nellis, Cessna two one seven is heading for Ely with an injured cowboy on board. Can you call the hospital or whatever up there and have an ambulance meet us at the airport?"

"Can do, Cessna two one seven," Nellis replied. "Can we inform them of the nature of his injuries?"

"Snakebite, probably last night," she said. "He has pulse and respiration, but he’s unconscious and hypothermic. This is a Cessna 150; I can’t do anything for him in the air."

"Roger, we have them on the line now," Nellis replied. "Can you squawk two three zero zero and ident?"

"Give me a second," she replied. She hadn’t turned the radar transponder on this morning either, but now she did and spun the dial to 2300, then pushed the ident button. "Cessna two one seven identing," she replied.

"Negative contact," Nellis replied. "Give us a minute." Jennlynn leveled Magic Carpet off, since she was high enough, but she kept the throttle open pretty wide as she headed north toward Ely as fast as she dared to crowd the engine. In a moment, she heard a different voice call. "Cessna two one seven, squawk ident."

"Roger," she replied as she pushed the button.

"Radar contact," the strange voice replied. "AWACS has radar contact on Cessna two three two one seven three eight nautical miles south of the Ely VOR, on course for the airport, speed one zero seven knots true. Estimate ETA Ely airport one niner minutes."

"Thank you, AWACS," Jennlynn replied, just a little bit stunned. They were out of the radar coverage from Nellis, but they’d called one of the Air Force’s huge radar planes! It must have been already up covering some kind of exercise, even on Thanksgiving morning!

"Two one seven, this is Nellis," the first voice replied. "Ely Rescue reports they’ll be waiting at the airport. Do you need further assistance?"

"That’s a negative," she replied. "But thank you for your services, and you have a happy Thanksgiving."

"You have one too, Cessna two one seven. Nellis out."

She glanced over at Will, still unconscious on Magic Carpet’s floor, and an interesting irony crept over her. When they’d found him laying there on the dry lake less than half an hour before, it was a scene that could well have been Thanksgiving in 1890, not 1990. Then a little two-seat plane from the 1960s flew through the time warp, aided just a little by a billion-dollar up-to-the-minute airborne radar system! Time has a little different meaning out over the Nevada desert, she thought.

* * *

When the ambulance picked up the still-unconscious Will, Jennlynn told the crew that she’d gas up, then head back out to the ranch to bring in one of his parents. She circled the ranch house when she got there, but no one came outside, so she figured they must not be back yet, and Angela must be out wherever that dry wash was. Questioning a little what to do, Jennlynn headed back out in the direction where she’d seen the searchers earlier and found them near the bottom of a rough trail down the steep ridge. She found a flat spot at the bottom of the ridge and landed, waiting only a few minutes for several riders to come up. A fortyish woman on horseback, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, yelled as soon as she got in earshot, "Is he all right?"

"I got him there OK," Jennlynn yelled back. "He should be in the hospital by now. I can take someone back there with me."

"Sure, I’ll go with you," the woman said. "I’m Ellen, his mother. Duane and Dorothy rode out to bring Shirley in, so they’re a ways behind."

"Good, I was worried about her. Not real worried, she seems to know what she’s doing out here, but still."

"I’m real damn pleased to meet you," Ellen smiled. "You’re one of the girls that works for her, right?"

"Jennlynn Swift, also known as ‘Rebecca’ once in a while."

"I know how that works," Ellen smiled as she swung off her horse. "I was ‘Maggie’ for a few shifts, back half a lifetime ago, up at the Triangle in the bad old days. Miss Swift, I’m just real glad that you offered to bring Shirley over here today." She smiled, and continued. "Sure seems strange to think of a Nevada house girl with her own airplane."

"As far as I know, I’m the only one," Jennlynn smiled. "But I’m mostly a student at Caltech. Before we get going, Angela said she was going to take one of the horses and go look for Will up some wash. I don’t know any more than that."

"I do," Ellen nodded. "Didn’t think there was much chance Will would be there, but didn’t think she could get into much trouble there, either." She twisted her head and yelled at another woman on horseback. "Sara! Angela’s up the dry wash, go bring her in. The rest of you might as well head back to the ranch. Wait and come in town with Duane and Shirley. Guess we’re going to have Thanksgiving dinner in town. Just as well, I never got started on anything."

Magic Carpet got Jennlynn and Ellen back to Ely quickly, and when they got to the hospital the doctors were able to report that Will was responding to anti venom and showing signs of coming around. "Just as glad it didn’t go much longer, though," one of the doctors said. "He would have slid downhill real bad in the next few hours, might not have made it until night."

There really wasn’t a lot to do but sit around in the hospital waiting room and talk small talk with Ellen, who proved to be about as rough-cut a jewel as her mother-in-law. What tough, competent women this family produced, even the kids! It was almost three hours before the rest of the family showed up, and Thanksgiving dinner was in the hospital cafeteria – although, as Duane Hoffman said, there was a great deal to give thanks for, especially for the Lord’s leading Jennlynn to offer to bring Shirley over today.

"I’m just glad it worked out," Jennlynn protested. "It was just a chain of circumstance. But I’m glad I could give you something to be thankful for."

"Miz Swift," Duane said. "While we were coming into town, Momma said that your family had thrown you out over something that in this family we treat as an honorable thing that people have to do sometimes. There probably ain’t a lot of families that think like we do. I know it’s got to hurt you to be away from your family on a day like today, but if you want you can consider us a sort of a replacement family. Sort of kissin’ cousins, and that means something a little different to us than it does to most people. We owe you a big one, Miz Swift, probably more than we can repay, but you’re always welcome at our door."

"Mr. Hoffman," Jennlynn said – he had that kind of old-fashioned formality about him, it seemed like a natural thing to say – "What you said just now was all the repayment I ever need. Yes, it’s been hard. But at least I know someone understands."

"Tell you what," Ellen smiled. "We still got all the stuff for Thanksgiving out at the ranch. The doctor said that Will ought to be able to go back home by Sunday, so why don’t you figure on bringing Momma Hoffman back over then, and we can have a real Thanksgiving dinner?"

"It’ll have to be early, since I have to get back to Caltech," Jennlynn nodded. "But I can’t think of anything nicer."

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