They heard a whimper.

“I thought she was dead,” Sather said later, “but then we picked up an extremely faint whimper.

We knew there was a person existing then.”

The young woman on the hospital table was Jean Hilliard.

She was 19 years old.

She had a pulse of approximately 12 beats per minute.

She had been lying frozen on a porch step at 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit for six hours.

And she was alive.