A frozen, rigid, unresponsive body that had clearly been there for many hours in temperatures that were incompatible with life.

A reasonable person in that situation might have concluded that the person was dead and called the appropriate authorities — the local sheriff, perhaps, or a county official who would handle the documentation and removal of a body found on a porch.

Wally Nelson instead picked her up and drove her to the hospital.

Whether this reflected an instinct that she might still be alive, or simply an inability to accept the visual evidence that she was dead, or a belief that the proper place to confirm death was a medical facility — the outcome of his decision was that Jean Hilliard arrived at a hospital where the medical staff could discover the faint whimper and the barely-beating heart that made the difference between a frozen body and a recovering person.

Without Wally Nelson’s decision to drive her to Fosston, it is not clear that Jean Hilliard would have survived.