Chapter 21

Lying on the cave floor, Mac knew he was trapped. Green was between him and the mouth of the cave. And as soon as he moved, Green would hear him and shoot, probably hitting him.

Think, MacGyver, think.

He was fresh out of ideas. Any diversion or light to throw into his adversary's eyes to distract him wouldn't work on Green. He realized he'd never fought a blind person before, and he was surprised how terrifying it seemed.

All at once, Mac heard a ferocious snarl. There was the noise of a body hitting the ground; simultaneously the gun went off, and gravel rained from the ceiling. The growling continued, and clothing rustled and tore. Boots kicked against the ground and the man screamed. Mac rolled to his hands and knees, feeling his way toward the tussle.

"Get him off me!" Green yelled, and Mac heard Puck yelp as one of the kicks found it's mark.

The first thing Mac found when he reached the flailing tangle of snarling dog and writhing man was Green's left hand, holding a pistol. He didn't take time to examine the details but wrenched it from his grasp and threw it as hard as he could toward the cave entrance. He didn't hear it land, so he hoped it was out on the grassy hillside somewhere in the dark.

Calmly, he grasped Green's left wrist and wrenched it behind his back. He found the man's right hand protecting his face from the dog's teeth.

"Puck," he said quietly. "Leave it."

Puck subsided his attack and sat back on his haunches, panting hard.

Mac pulled two hefty zip ties from his pocket and used them to tie Green's wrists. He left Fist on his stomach, warily circled the slumbering campfire, and found Frank's prostrate form, slumped against the cave wall. He used the rope and another zip tie on his wrists and ankles.

"Puck, c'mere, Buddy," he called once the men were secured. The dog padded over to him and buried his head against Mac's chest as he sat propped against the wall of the cave.

"Thanks you," Mac whispered. He was hugely surprised the dog had fought like that. Guide dogs were bred to be docile and non-aggressive. Puck was not bred or trained to be an attack dog or a police dog. As the trainer had told Mac, he was a lover, not a fighter.

But some primal instinct had told him that his person was frightened and being threatened, and he had decided to fix it. Mac wondered how extensive Green's injuries were. He hadn't said anything after Mac had called off the dog.

At the moment, Mac didn't have time to find out.

"Puck, I've got to find our stuff. Can you help me find my pack?" He asked, ruffling the fur around the dog's neck.

As the dog leaped off the ledge of the cave floor, Mac scrambled after him, shaking his cane straight as he went. He heard the dog crashing uphill through the brush when he turned to his left, and he followed, trying to remember the landmarks he'd memorized earlier. The small steep rise. Yes. The clump of thorny bushes. Yes. The edge of the rock field. Yes. It wasn't long before he had joined Puck in the brush where the dog sat next to Mac's backpack. He dug in it briefly for the radio, then hefted the pack onto his shoulders. He harnessed Puck and folded his cane, slipping it into a side pocket of the pack. He took a moment to pause and take a long drink from his canteen; then he stooped and poured some water into his cupped hand for the dog to lap.

"Forward, Puck," he said, giving the handle a little shake. "Back to the cave."

He followed the tug on the handle, and stepped gingerly down the steep hill, thinking how much faster it was to follow the dog rather than feel his way with the cane.

As he went, he held the radio to his mouth, sending his call sign out to whomever was monitoring the other end this late at night.

It turned out to be one of the Forest Rangers at Moose Creek.

Mac briefly explained his situation and asked them to get Pete on the horn. He would send in a chopper to pick up Mac and his "buddies."

"Do you need assistance right now?" the Ranger asked.

"You know, it sure wouldn't hurt. Come on over," Mac said, thinking how far he had come in the last year regarding feeling the need to prove himself and being unwilling to ask for help. Now, he was happy to have another pair of eyes watching these two.

"It'll be a couple of hours," warned the Ranger. "I'll ride, but it's still a good ten miles."

"I'll be okay till then," Mac assured him, and signed off.

He hoisted himself onto the cave floor again, and set his pack against the right-hand wall where he could find it again. Puck leaped up behind him. Green made a small sound, probably surprise or fear.

Mac, still on hands and knees or feet, felt his way to the fire. It took a few minutes to find the pile of unburned wood the men had collected, and Green didn't seem to be in a helpful mood. Frank had stated to stir and to fuss with his bindings but Mac ignored him and went about building up the fire until he had a fairly tall blaze. He certainly didn't feel like messing with a cougar or a black bear on top of everything else.

"So, you were saying?" he asked conversationally to Green as he squatted near the fire, holding his hands near the warmth of the blaze.

"Go to hell," snarled Green.

Mac didn't respond to that. After a while, he asked, "Are you bleeding?"

"Your f—king dog attacked me. Do you suppose I'm bleeding?" Green responded.

Mac grinned at the man's snark.

"I meant…" Mac drew the word out with exaggerated patience. "Do you need first aid?"

"I'll live," Green said and Mac shrugged.

The trio sat listening to the fire pop and crackle for quite a while. Then, Green, as though the words had built up inside of him and suddenly exploded out, said, "How do you do it, MacGyver?"

Mac, startled, asked, "do what?"'

"Just… everything," the man said.

"We're talking about blindness here?" Mac clarified. "You yourself said you hunt by sound. And you successfully ran a pretty big criminal operation. Seems like you're managing pretty well." Mac grinned as he delivered this bit of irony.

"But… I hate it. I hate it!" Green burst out again. "It's been closing in on me for so long… first the night blindness, then the peripheral going… until now there's almost nothing left. My whole life it was like this thing… hanging over my head… f—cking with me… always teasing me, a little less every week, every month."

Mac sat quietly, listening. His own sight had gone so quickly, he hadn't had to deal with the long, drawn-out pain and grief of gradually losing his sight.

"And the people around me," Green continued. "Always trying to help, always trying to tell me everything would be ok… well it's never ok!"

The bitter words hung in the air like the smoke from the campfire.

"I guess that's the difference between us," Mac said quietly. "I let it be ok."

"As simple as that. You just let it be ok," Green repeated, sneering.

Mac sighed and closed his eyes. "I'm not saying it's easy or fun," he amended. "But it is what it is. And it doesn't change who I am."

"It does change who you are," argued Green. "It changes who you are in other people's eyes. You're helpless, nothing. Worthless. Surely you've experienced that."

Mac thought of the overhelpful people, the awkward people. The people who stood around and stared, waiting for him to make a blunder so they could swoop in and save him.

"Yeah," he said, still very quietly. "I've experienced that. But they're the ones who don't know. They don't know what to do. That's not their fault."

"I'm sick of it!" Green exploded. "I'm not a child. I'm not a woman."

"No need to diminish women and children," Mac reproved mildly.

"F—ck you," returned Green. "I'm a man. I want to be treated like a man."

"So you gathered a group of subordinates and intimidate them through fear," Mac observed. "Does that help?"

"It's better than being babied like a damn cripple," Green threw back.

Mac thought about Pete pushing him to get back into the field, even cutting short his training and not giving his burns time to heal. At the time, he'd thought it a bit extreme, but now he realized how smart Pete had been. He'd known Mac would wither with inaction as this man had done. But instead he'd given Mac a job, knowing he'd figure out how to do it.

"You asked how I do it," Mac said slowly. "I'll tell you, although whether it helps or not is up to you."

Green grunted, and Mac took it as encouragement to continue.

"I was lucky enough when I was first blinded to have good friends who believed in me," Mac said. "And I realized that being ok was something that had to happen inside myself. I couldn't let people diminish me by how they treated me. I know who I am and what I can do. I've even learned that it's alright to ask for help once in a while."

"I just want to be a whole man," Green said.

"Can't you be a whole man and still be blind?" Mac queried.

"No!" Green shouted. Then he paused, thinking. "But you seem to be."

"Well, there you go," Mac smiled. "I think, therefore I am."

"It's not that simple," Green said sourly.

"No," agreed Mac with a sigh. "It's not. The medical information says we are broken. Missing our most vital sense. And it's damn inconvenient."

"Inconvenient," snorted Green.

"But I believe we don't all have to be alike to have equal value in the world," continued Mac, feeling preachy, but plunging ahead anyway. We don't have to be the same color or gender or have the same abilities in order to bring something of worth to the table."

Green was silent for a minute. Finally, all he could come up with was, "Very Kum-Bah-Yah."

Mac didn't take his bait. He just sat poking the fire with a stick.

Horse's hooves, muffled by the dirt trail, approached the cave, and then Mac heard the squeak of the saddle as the Ranger dismounted.

"Hello?" he called.

"Hello!" Mac called back, and the man swung up onto the lip of the cave.

"MacGyver?" asked the man, who sounded much younger than he had on the radio.

"That'd be me," Mac said, rolling to his feet and extending his right hand.

The Ranger shook it but gasped. "You're blind!"

Mac would have loved to catch Green's eye at that moment and share a sympathetic eye roll, but instead he grinned at the young man, gave him a firm handshake, and replied cheerfully, "you're right! I am. Thanks for coming, Mr…?"

"Oh right! Richard is my name. Richard Andrews."

Mac chuckled. "Literally Ranger Rick."

"I prefer Richard," he said stiffly.

"I bet," Mac agreed easily.

"Ahem," Richard cleared his throat in a "let's get back to business" attitude. "I called Pete. He seemed surprised to hear that you had captured two men. I guess now I see why."

This time Mac really did roll his eyes. "It's not that, kid. He just didn't think they'd be out here. In fact, why are you out here, Green?"

"Go to hell," spat Green.

"Green?" Richard asked alertly. "There are some Greens that live on one of the ranches out here," he explained. "Parents?"

Green didn't answer.

"Sure," Mac added. "If you grew up as a boy out here, you'd know what a good place it is to hide, lay low for a while till the heat's off. Isn't that right?"

Green still didn't answer.

"Anyway, Pete's sending a chopper, but it won't get here till dawn at the earliest," Richard told Mac.

"That'll do," Mac said.