Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney Page A

as she drove up Turnagain Arm to the Rabbit Creek turnoff that would take them up to Bear Valley. She glanced over at Bekkie a second, then back at the road, then back at Bekkie, then back at the road.
    “I’ve got to tell you, I had a truly amazing time with Dan Sunday night.He came looking for me after the Galactic show and invited me over for a beer. Well, actually, I was pretty much waiting for him to come find me. Anyway, we ended up spending the night together, just cuddling, but connecting in a way I’ve never felt before. It was really kind of magical.”
    This did not sound like the Amber Bekkie knew. The Amber she knew didn’t do touchy-feely, “magical” talk. She was a certifiable book-smart left-brainer. Earthy, but the kind with both feet planted firmly on the same planet she lived on.
    “You sound like you’re in love or something.”
    Amber laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that. I barely know him. I just know I’d like to go for it. He was supposed to call me last night when he got back from fishing, but he must have gotten in really late. I’m pretty sure he had to work this morning. Anyway, we’ll see where things go from here.”
    Later, as they were ordering sandwiches and microbrews on the sunny deck of an Anchorage brew pub, Dr. Kallman was picking the last of the debris from the wreckage of my eye sockets. When the final speck was out, he pushed my eyes more or less back where they belonged and moved on.
    Putting my bones back together, confining swollen brain tissue, could have cut off blood supply and left me a vegetable. Most critical at this stage was closing my skin to minimize the risk of infection and to give every piece a chance to survive. He began with the tears and punctures across my scalp, which required multiple layers of stitches topped off with staples. Then he began sorting out the shreds of my face.
    He worked slowly, methodically, as he separated the tatters, pulling them apart like tangled fishing lines, one segment at a time, carefully studying each piece of the puzzle. Did it go here? Or there? When he was unsure, he put in a thinking-stitch to hold the skin in place until he was ready to commit. This took not only a steady hand and immense skill, but extraordinary patience. Growing up in a family that did jigsaw puzzles had to have helped. Kallman has fond memories of sitting in front of the fireplace at Christmas, putting jigsaws together with his father , the tougher the better, including a two-thousand-piece puzzle that was entirely red called “Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood.”
    His mastery of shape recognition paid off as he searched for the remnants of my eyelids, and when located, reconstructed and reattached them with tiny stitches. He closed them over my eyes and sewed my eyelids shut.
    Word gets around when cases this extraordinary come along. Over the course of the day, a couple of Kallman’s colleagues, scrubbed and masked, poked their heads into the operating room to see how he was doing and offer words of encouragement.
    “Nice job, Jim,” they told him. “Impressive.”
    By the time he came up for air, it was late afternoon. Cleaning my face and stitching it back together had taken nine hours.
    Remarkably, nothing was missing. With all the skin and soft tissue accounted for, my face more or less came together in a meander of staples and stitches. I looked like a guy who’d tangled with a chainsaw, but at least I looked human again.
    After surgery, I went straight to intensive care, where a ventilator made sure I kept breathing, and hoses, tubes, and wires poked tentacle-like from various parts of my body. To keep me from thrashing about, I was put into a drug-induced coma with Propofol, or milk of amnesia as doctors call it. There was nothing more Kallman could do for me until the swelling went down enough to go back in and start repairs. If I survived.
    Kallman had his doubts about that. Any of my cluster bomb of puncture wounds could have