Quechee
Quechee resident Bob Bracy, the hunter in question, knows a good deer when he sees one.
Bracy, 58, has hunted them since his days as a high school student at the Maine Central Institute west of Bangor, long before he became headmaster of the Mid Vermont Christian School.
At the Quechee-based school, Bracy draws on his faith when he’s called upon to discipline a wayward student. Students often argue that in breaking the school’s rules, they were simply reacting to a provocation. Bracy doesn’t accept that. They may not be able to stop bad things from happening, he tells them, but they can control how they respond. Anger and bitterness are counterproductive, he points out.
“I keep directing them back to core values and truths, help them to reflect on that and see, maybe, a better approach,” he said on Wednesday, a day after he returned home following more than eight weeks of hospitalization.
Hunting in nature was an extension of Bracy’s faith-based moral principles. He saw the hand of God behind every stone and woodland creature in the hardwood forest atop the White River Ledges, a landscape dominated by the sheer cliffs that are visible from Pomfret Road.
“It certainly reminds me of his handiwork,” Bracy said. “We can be as close (to God) in our home as out there, but it reminds me of how creative he is. Though on frigid mornings, it’s not that enjoyable.”
And indeed, when the deer dropped around 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 18, it was below freezing. Bracy felt it even through his woolen red-checkered hunting coat, his layers of shirts, his three pairs of socks and his foot warmers.
Excited, he used his new cellphone to text a picture of the whitetail to his wife, Lori, as well as to Ralph and Jacob Richards, a father-son pair who came to the Ledges with Bracy on the first day of each year’s hunting season.
Even after disemboweling the buck with his knife, it still weighed 175 pounds. That was significantly more than the 151-pounder he’d taken the previous year from the same spot. He’d dragged that smaller deer up and over the path he’d walked in on, but after a false start, he realized he wouldn’t be able to do the same this time around.
He knew of another route, an old deer trail. It was treacherous, but he had walked it two or three times in the past, and was familiar with how it cut down along a sheer drop and came out through a V created by two larger ledges.
“It would be risky,” Bracy said, “but that was the only way it was getting out of there.”
About 50 yards from where he’d gutted the deer, Bracy set down his gun and fanny pack at the top of the steep grade, preparing to lower the deer on a long rope before coming back to retrieve his gear.
As he maneuvered himself and the deer into what he thought would be the best position, something happened.
Bracy’s not sure what. When he tries to remember, his mind hits a wall, a blankness that extends from that moment until weeks afterward, when he came to his senses in a Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center hospital bed and began to comprehend the extent of his injuries.
On Wednesday, he sat quietly in an easy chair, his torso and left arm immobilized by braces, while Lori Bracy, a certified wound and ostomy nurse at DHMC, described his injuries, brushing her fingertips along the contours of his broken skull.
“So the orbitals, here and here, were fractured,” she said. “This one was fractured all the way back in the base, all the way in.”
She touched the left side of his brow.
“This was all open. And that is where he was bleeding. He pretty much almost bled out. They did five blood transfusions.”
The massive injuries to the left side of Bracy’s head were only part of the toll. His left sinus was obliterated. The radius in his left arm and the clavicle on his right shoulder were both fractured. Eight of the 33 vertebrae in his spine were cracked, including one, the T5, that burst (his spinal cord was somehow spared). Though much of the damage was near his left eye, it retained vision, while his right eye lost sight.
Being in the brace for hours at a time causes pain in his hips, Bracy said. But, he noted, the device “serves a purpose for healing.”
A Call for Help
For Lori Bracy, the first hint of trouble came at about 10:50 a.m. when, while picking up a gift card for a shower (and a pair of socks for herself) at Kohl’s in West Lebanon, her phone rang. It was her husband.
He seemed to be saying something about an accident, but she wasn’t worried. She knew him as a capable, resourceful woodsman. Once, when they were in a truck doing missionary work in Papua New Guinea, a band of young men stepped onto the road on a mountainous incline and demanded that he pull over. Instead, Bracy swerved and hit the gas, evading the would-be robbers with nothing but a few scratches where the barrels of the guns the men were brandishing had scraped the paint off the truck.
Standing among the department store shoppers, Lori Bracy didn’t find his tone to be particularly alarming.
“He’s a steady-as-we-go person,” she said. “He doesn’t get too excited about anything, and he doesn’t get too upset about anything. He was himself.”
The voice on the cellphone told her that he’d been in an accident, and he asked her to call Ralph Richards to go into the woods to help him out. She suggested he contact emergency responders.
“Can you call 911?” she asked.
No, came the answer. Then he said something that hinted at the severity of the situation.
“I can’t see,” he told her.
She stood in the bedding department, the socks in her hand forgotten.
“I asked him if he could move. And he said ‘I can’t see.’ So he didn’t answer my other questions but kept coming back to, ‘I can’t see.’ So I asked him ‘why can’t you see?’” Lori Bracy said.
His response was not reassuring.
“I don’t know,” she remembers him saying. “It’s the blood, I think. It’s that there’s blood.”
Lori Bracy left the socks in the bedding department and hurried out of the store in her high heels, headed for her husband’s battered body in Pomfret.
She didn’t have a phone number for Ralph Richards, a maintenance worker at the Mid Vermont Christian School who’s been friends with Bob Bracy for 18 years, but she had the phone number for Richards’ wife, Thelma.
Thelma was in the kitchen with her son and husband, who were eating breakfast and mapping out the second half of the day’s hunting excursion behind their Hartford home. Listening to his wife’s half of the conversation, Ralph Richards gathered that Bracy had been hurt and had blood in his eyes, but he had no reason to think that the injuries were life-threatening.
“I’m thinking he’s got a cut on his head, or he sprained his ankle,” Richards said.
But even a minor injury should be treated seriously, especially in the cold. Richards and his son knew the area — it was about an hour’s hike into the woods. As Lori Bracy called 911 from Kohl’s, the family hurried out, also headed for the White River Ledges.
Lost and Found
Ralph Richards waited by the road to help orient the emergency responders, while Jacob Richards walked the trails, looking for Bracy.
Down by the road, Lori Bracy hoped that the injuries would prove to be mild. In 2016, Bob had suffered a relatively minor accident during a 400-mile bike tour in Iowa, and was airlifted by helicopter to Omaha at what would eventually prove to be a $45,000 medical expense. When she learned that a helicopter was being sent from DHMC, she was worried the family would be hit with another, perhaps unnecessary, airlift tab.
The deer, the gun, and the fanny pack were all near the top of the 175-foot cliff, but Jacob Richards didn’t see them. He walked along the top, unaware until Bracy, who seems to have heard him, called out.
When Lori Bracy saw firefighters and EMTs carrying her husband out of the woods, she stopped worrying about the cost of the helicopter.
Between the bandages that covered the worst of the damage around his eyes, and the swelling of his face, she couldn’t recognize him. The man in the stretcher was talking, but bleeding in his throat was affecting his vocal cords, so his voice sounded like a stranger’s.
“It was horrible,” she said, simply.
After Bracy was airlifted to the hospital, he went into shock and needed to be resuscitated by emergency room doctors. It seemed unlikely that he would live, let alone retain full function of his brain.
Bracy left unanswered questions up on the ledge.
He doesn’t know why he fell. He guesses that he slipped on some leaves and found himself without anything substantial to grab onto.
He also doesn’t know how, after either pinwheeling or plummeting down the face of the cliff, he not only survived, but remained conscious long enough to retrieve his cellphone from his right pants pocket and call for help. The phone contained an incomplete and undelivered text to Ralph Richards that read “Need.” The cellphone had a bloody fingerprint near the “home” button, but they think he used a voice command, a feature he’d enabled just days earlier, to place the call that saved his life.
In the aftermath of the accident, during a time that Bracy no longer remembers, Richards said Bracy expressed worry.
“He was very concerned about getting his deer,” Richards said.
Ralph and Jacob Richards recovered the gun and fanny pack. Then, “Jake and I stayed there to get his deer and drag his deer out for him,” Richards said. “That’s important.”
They hung the deer, skinned it, butchered it, wrapped it in freezer paper and brought the Bracys as much meat as their freezer could hold. Lori Bracy said she planned to make a venison stew sometime in the next few days.
In the spirit of finding positives in adversity, Lori Bracy credits two injuries with saving her husband’s life and mind. First, she said, he was suffering from hypothermia, which might have slowed his brain functions, allowing for greater preservation. Second, the breach of his skull (a plastic surgeon used another section of his skull to knit together the shattered area) relieved pressure that could have been catastrophic.
Community Support
Word of the accident began to spread throughout the Bracy’s network of friends at the Mid Vermont Christian School and at his Valley Bible Church in White River Junction.
Perry Seale, the chairman of the MVCS board, said that, while Bracy’s life hung in the balance, he spent his evenings in the intensive care unit waiting area at Dartmouth.
“I saw loads of people coming through. Loads of families. I was just kind of watching the hurt, the pain, the disappointment. The shattered lives,” he said. “We were hurting. The Bracys were hurting. But there was love, hope, genuine care for one another. That’s what was important.”
Inside his recovery room weeks later, Bracy began to get hints of the impact his accident was having on the community. Lori Bracy had plastered the walls of his room with cards from the school’s students, hand-drawn get-well messages and containing little jokes that were a nod to Bracy’s own sense of humor.
There were prayers and visits, gifts of food and running of errands. Lori Bracy’s managers at DHMC supported her taking time off from work so she could juggle and coordinate the activities of six different medical teams working on him. A GoFundMe campaign raised more than $6,000 in donations.
Only after the school’s leadership gathered to chart a path forward did they fully understand how much work their headmaster had been doing during his 18-year tenure.
“We put together a list of everything that was on the plate that Bob had,” Seale said. “It was like four pages long.”
Everyone pitched in. Parents volunteered to spend two, three or four hours answering phones in the front office, allowing staff to handle some of Bracy’s paperwork. Teachers stepped into Bracy’s role as school disciplinarian, and took over teaching his media design course. Seale himself came to touch base and sign checks.
“He asks so little. He’s just one of those humble guys who asks so little,” Seale said. “This has been an opportunity for others to give back to him and serve him.”
Bracy has been surprising the doctors — the emergency room surgeons who weren’t sure that he would live, the physical therapist who wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk, the speech therapist who didn’t think he’d recover his memories and mental capacity.
Bracy said he welcomes the work of recovery. It’s the inactivity that troubles him.
“I’m go, go, go,” he said. “Lying in bed, in many ways, is challenging. And then trying not to think through everything that needs to be done.”
He’s gone from being fed through a tube, to liquids, to soft foods, to venison stew. The path to a full recovery seems clear, with one exception — doctors aren’t sure why he can’t see out of his right eye, which sustained no obvious injury. He plans to see an eye specialist after the end of the month, when his brace is scheduled to come off.
Bracy said that his current focus is on healing, but he sees himself returning to work and reshouldering his duties, a little at a time.
Reflection
Bob Bracy, who has spent the better part of his adult life teaching others to think of adversity as an opportunity for personal growth, is now facing his own monumental test.
He has recovered full mental capacity, but he is in pain, with limited mobility, a pending medical prognosis for his blinded eye and an unknown magnitude of medical bills on the near horizon.
And yet, he and his wife are lacking in criticism. Falling off a cliff, Bracy mused, is something of a mixed bag.
“I could become angry or bitter, but it really doesn’t help me gain anything from the situation,” he said.
His appreciation for his wife has been deepened by the ordeal, and the response from the community and family — they have three adult children — has demonstrated their level of caring for him.
“Even in the midst of tragedy … there is a deep joy and inner peace there. … It’s good to see the sons come home and see them stand by,” he said.
He’s worried about the bills that might be, even now, speeding toward his mailbox, but “we’re thankful for the insurance.”
The memory gap leaves him wondering about the moments before he wound up at the bottom of the cliff. But he sees the positive in that, too.
“I’m kind of glad I don’t,” he said. “One of the purposes of the blackout is trying to protect the person from the tragedy.”
Bracy said the incident won’t stop him from hunting. He might even venture back up the Ledges. But in talking about it with his wife, he said, he might take extra precautions.
“Next year, she says I have to wear a helmet,” he said, before rising, unaided, to his feet to do a little work around the house.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.