Read Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself for Free Online

five times as likely to experience depression. Upon reading this, I wasn’t surprised—I grew up not trusting anybody, and certainly not relying on anybody. Today, I am initially distrustful of people, and I often expect the worst from them,
    Or maybe I’m just surprised when something short of “the worst” happens. When I become someone’s friend, they could not wish for a friend more loyal or committed, but I am slow to commit, wary and skeptical. It explains in part why I so quickly committed to helping the dog—it was not a commitment that required questioning, so I could make it without hesitation.
    Back at my truck, I parked the ATV, a 4WD Yamaha Grizzly. I realized I was going to have to make an exception to my rule to ride only on designated dirt roads and ATV trails. I transferred the supplies I’d bought to my backpack, then fastened it to the cargo rack on the ATV and headed toward the canyon rim, bouncing over the depressions and steering to avoid the larger rocks and clumps of sagebrush and mesquite. I had to guess where the pothole would be, and I knew I could be off by a half mile in either direction.
    Finally I stopped the ATV and walked to the edge of the canyon, stepping down the decline as far as I dared, looking for the coiled rope I’d left as a marker. I didn’t see it. I walked twenty yards toward the head of the canyon and looked again.
    There it was.
    This was dumb luck, but, I thought, I’ll take it .
    I scouted around for something to anchor to, but the ground was too loose and sandy to set a bolt. I made a decision I hoped I wouldn’t regret and decided to use my ATV as an anchor. A Yamaha Grizzly weighs more than six hundred pounds and would be nearly impossible to drag while in park, but to be safe, I tied both hand brakes in the engaged position and chocked all four wheels with large stones to avoid some sort of accidental Wile E. Coyote scenario where I plunged to the bottom of the canyon and pulled my ATV down on top of me.
    I tied a 200-foot length of rope to a 265-foot length with a figure-eight joining knot, calculating that had to be more than enough length. I fastened one end to the ATV, backed my anchor up in two places with redundant knots (in case the first one failed), and then tossed the coil over the edge and watched my line fall clear. I clipped on to begin my descent, giving the rope as firm a tug as I could to test it before loading it. If I looked calm and collected from the outside, inside I was terrified, making what was probably going to be the longest rappel of my life, knowing that a fall meant certain (and sudden) death, and that if I hurt myself or miscalculated and for some reason couldn’t get out the way I got in, I could face a death less sudden but no less final.
    Fifty feet down, the rope brought me over a ridge to a hundred-foot free drop and then a ledge where I could rest a minute, dividing my descent into two stages. I leaned out, but I still couldn’t see the bottom. I passed the figure-eight knot through my descender and kept going, careful to avoid kicking any loose rocks that could fall on the dog below. Another hundred feet and I was down, hitting the canyon floor about twenty feet upstream from the pothole.
    When I reached the dog, he didn’t turn his head or look up or wag his tail, but he was still breathing. I realized I’d been bracing myself for the possibility that I’d get back and find him dead, in which case I would have pulled him out and given him a proper burial, but he was hanging on to life with whatever strength he had left. My goal and hope, bringing him food and water, was to make him stronger, even if only by the smallest degree. I wondered if, at this stage in the pathology of starvation, he was drifting in and out of consciousness or incompletely aware of what was going on around him. He didn’t seem to know I was there.
    I crouched next to him, cracked the pull tab, and popped open a can of dog food. The smell rising