He could not turn her head.

She lay face-down on his porch step exactly as she had fallen, unchanged by the six hours that had passed since she collapsed, and she was frozen.

Not cold.

Not even extremely cold.

Frozen.

Wally Nelson did not know what to do with a frozen person.

Nothing in his experience had prepared him for this.

He carried her to his truck, laid her across the seat, and drove as fast as he could to the nearest hospital — Fosston, Minnesota, a small community roughly thirty minutes away.

At the emergency room, the people who received her did not have good experiences with situations like this.

Because there were no situations like this.

What Wally Nelson carried through the hospital doors was, by every observable physical criterion, a body.

She was rigid.

She did not breathe visibly.

Her skin was ashen and hard to the touch.