Six consecutive1 days of spring rain had created a raging2 river running by Nancy Brown's farm. As she tried to herd3 her cows to higher ground, she slipped and hit her head on a fallen tree trunk. The fall knocked her out for a moment or two. When she came to, Lizzie, one of her oldest and favorite cows, was licking4 her face. The water was rising. Nancy got up and began walking slowly with Lizzie. The water was now waist high. Nancy's pace got slower and slower. Finally, all she could do was to throw her arm around Lizzie's neck and try to hang on. About 20 minutes later, Lizzie managed to successfully pull herself and Nancy out of the raging water and onto a bit of high land, a small island now in the middle of acres of white water.
Even though it was about noon, the sky was so dark and the rain and lightning so bad that it took rescuers another two hours to discover Nancy. A helicopter lowered a paramedic(伞降医务人员), who attached Nancy to a life-support hoist5(吊起,提起) They raised her into the helicopter and took her to the school gym, where the Red Cross had set up an emergency shelter.