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The sound of his mobile ringing shattered the silence. “Dr MacDonald?” a young male voice asked. “We have an emergency. I know you’re not officially seeing patients till Monday but my brother came off his bike. Mum and Dad are with him now. We’re not game to move him in case...”

Sitting so close Alex could hear the hitch pitch of panic in the young man’s voice and quickly found a pen and a piece of paper and pushed it towards Mack. He gave her a grateful glance and began to scrawl down the details of where the patient was located and any obvious injuries he had sustained. “Stay calm and we’ll be there as soon as we can,” he said to the young man as he ended the call.

“Is it serious do you think?” Alex asked as they rushed out to Mack’s four wheel drive with their doctor’s bags.

“I’m not sure,” he answered, pulling down his seatbelt and snapping it into place. “Hopefully it’s just concussion. There’s no external bleeding but that doesn’t mean he’s not bleeding internally.”

Alex tried to keep calm and controlled as she ran back through the Primary Survey routine she had learned at her Early Management of Severe Trauma course. She had only ever been at the scene of one accident before but no one had been seriously injured. Bike accidents were notorious for blunt injuries and out in the bush where the use of helmets wasn’t too strict, severe head injuries were always a possibility.

Mack tossed a local map in her lap. “Find Wattle Flat Road,” he said. “I think it’s near the turn off to Kingfisher Creek.”

Alex fumbled with the map, her eyes blurring as she tried to read it while the car rocked over corrugations in the gravel road. A wave of car sickness assailed her but she fought it back down.

“Have you found it yet?” he clipped out.

“I’m still looking,” she said trying not to panic. What if she couldn’t find it? What if because of her pathetic attempt at navigation the young man died? He was probably bleeding out from his spleen right now, his blood pressure plummeting while she lamely struggled to identify one of the few streets out here. What if—

“Come on, Alexandria,” he said with a brittle edge of impatience. “A ten year old child could read that map. There are hardly any streets out here.” Alex felt her hackles rising. “If you would stop jerking the car all over the road maybe I would be able to find it,” she snapped back. “Anyway, what if I wasn’t here? You’d have to find it yourself.”

He snatched the map out of her hands and propped it against the steering wheel. Keeping one eye on the road he glanced down and located the turn off and the road he was looking for, gripping the spot between thumb and finger. “There it is,” he said handing the map back. “Keep me on track. We have to take a left turn soon into a property called Karoo. Keep a look out for it. There’s a sign above the cattle grid or so Nick Ellis said.”

Alex glanced back at the map and looked up just in time to see the Karoo sign flash past on her left. “There it is!”