She was a cold, damaged, deeply hypothermic person — but a person.

Her skin began to change.

The gray, waxy appearance of profoundly chilled and frozen tissue gave way, as blood began to flow back into the peripheral tissues, to the redness of a very cold person whose circulation is returning.

She began to breathe visibly.

Slowly, at first, and then more reliably.

And then, sometime that morning, she spoke.

“I was talking by noon,” she said later.

By noon on December 21, 1980 — twelve hours after she had collapsed on Wally Nelson’s porch step — Jean Hilliard was conscious, talking, and on her way to what would prove to be a nearly complete recovery.