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Cara Jumper loves the giant saltwater pond on her grandparents Swansea, South Carolina, property(房产). One January afternoon, her grandfather Coy Jumper piled ten-year-old Cara and her sister, Claire, six, and Emma, five, into his Pontiac Sunfire and took them down to the pond. He and the girls walked happily through the pines, checking traps. No luck---they were empty.
As the sun disappeared gradually toward the horizon, the group turned back to head home. But as Coy walked along the bank, he was suddenly unable to put one foot in front of the other. Then Cara saw Coy walk unsteadily and fall backward into the pond's deep water.
When her grandfather didn't surface immediately, Cara jumped in. With one hand, Cara grabbed the bank. With the other, she reached for her grandfather, making contact in the dark water.
Coy had suffered a stroke(中风) the year before. Now Cara wondered if he'd had one again. Just 80 pounds to her grandfather's 230, she held his head and pulled his face out of the water. That woke him, but he was still dead weight. She managed to move Coy towards the three-foot bank and pulled him up onto solid ground.
The winter sun had almost disappeared, and they were all trembling. Cara knew she'd have to get Coy to the car, a quarter mile away. She helped him to his feet. Coy slowly moved forward.
Sixty feet from the car, Coy fell. From there, he crawled, dragging himself under a gate, to the car. His granddaughters helped him into the passenger's side, and Cara got into the driver's seat.
“I used to sit on my dad's lap and drive,” she says now. Coy, too, she says, had let the fifth grader drive through the fields around the house. Still, she felt nervous, but she pushed on the gas and steered(驾驶) them the three miles home. “I was trying to get there fast, but I didn't want to get us hurt,” Cara says. When she pulled the Sunfire into the garage, her grandmother, Esca was there to meet them.
Coy spent six days in the hospital recovering from a stroke. Says Esca, “If Cara hadn't helped, she might not have a grandpa anymore.”
