This treatment worked, in the sense that it achieved its immediate purpose. It is not being described here as a survival technique for readers to replicate; it is being described as a specific act of documented ingenuity by a person drawing on specific knowledge from her specific background, in a specific emergency. The medical risks involved in self-treating a wound in this manner are significant. That it worked for her does not generalize.
After treating the wound, she was exhausted to the point of collapse. She lay down in the camp.
## The Camp and the Canoe
The lumberjack camp was located on a river bank. It had a boat moored to the shore. It had a hut with a roof. It had gasoline and tools and the evidence of recent human habitation.
She had reached it after approximately ten days of walking, following the creek downstream as it joined larger tributaries and eventually reached the river. The camp was not occupied when she arrived, but it was clearly in use — the equipment was recent, the gasoline was there for a working engine, not as an abandoned remnant.
She treated her arm. She rested. She waited.
The following day — January 3, 1972, by the accounts of her rescue — three local men arrived at the camp. They were lumberjacks, or forest workers, who used the camp periodically in the course of their work in the area. Their arrival was not the product of a systematic search finding her. It was the coincidence of their return to a camp they used, at a moment when a girl who had fallen from a crashed airplane eleven days earlier happened to be in it.