A little boy in Montana is alive and himself today because of a Snoqualmie woman’s time spent learning and re-learning a skill she never expected to use.

Kaden Sluggett, now almost 19 months old, nearly drowned in mid-July, after falling into a stream near Lewistown, Montana, upstream of Darci Gillen Dawson’s family cabin.

He didn’t because of a miraculous series of circumstances, the first of which happened years ago, when Gillen Dawson got certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) several times so she could be a college lifeguard.

She wasn’t currently certified in CPR July 9 when she rescued Sluggett, but, more importantly, she was there to see him, minutes after he fell in.

“It was the day we arrived,” said Gillen Dawson, recounting the rescue last week in the Valley Record office. She and her husband, Trent have lived in Snoqualmie for the past 10 years; they have three children, Jace, 11, Madeira, 9 and Rafe, 6, and they go to Montana each year for a family vacation with her parents, Tim and Cheryl Gillen, at the family cabin.

“We were actually not even supposed to be there for another few days but we had a last minute change of plans, so we decided to go.”

The kids had already been swimming in the Warm Spring Creek — “It’s a creek, by Montana standards I guess… right in front our cabin, the water is over my head. There’s a bridge that goes across and it gets shallow on the other side and it’s got a pretty quick-moving current,” said Gillen Dawson — and she was just coming out of the water, too, when she saw something behind her.

“I was getting out of the water and at sort of the last second, I glanced over my shoulder, which was downstream, and he’d already gone past our bridge … If I had waited probably another five seconds, he would have been far enough away that I maybe wouldn’t have realized what it was. Because he wasn’t actually floating on top of the water.”

Kaden was “drifting in the current, under water about six inches. He wasn’t responsive or struggling or anything. He was just kind of gray and,” she paused, “not living at that point.”

At that horrifying moment, Gillen Dawson said she may have remembered some of her CPR training. First, though, her Mom instincts drove her.

“I started yelling at my parents to get my kids into the cabin, so they wouldn’t see what I was seeing, and to call 911,” she said, then she ran downstream, chasing Kaden.

When she caught up to him, she had to carry him back upstream to the cabin before she found a place to climb out and start CPR.

By then, her oldest son had rounded up all of the children and hustled them into the cabin where their grandmother tried to distract them from what was happening outside.

For the next 20 minutes, Gillen Dawson said, things were happening around her, but she couldn’t stop compressing Kaden’s chest and breathing for him.

Kaden’s mother and sister ran into the yard, looking for Kaden. Gillen Dawson guessed that Kaden had already been in the water for six minutes when she saw him.

Her father loaded everyone into his Honda Pilot, Gillen Dawson still working on the child, and drove the rough gravel road to the highway to meet the ambulance. In the back of the vehicle, with two other people crammed alongside herself and her patient, she continued working, stopping only to check his heart rate and color, and to clear away Kaden’s vomit — a very common occurrence in CPR, but one that no one tells you about, she said.

“My dad was trying to drive quickly, but not crazy. It was rough,” she said, but she thought Kaden’s color was returning, and then she felt his pulse. Eventually, they reached the ambulance and EMTs transferred the child and his family to an ambulance and raced toward the Lewistown hospital, leaving father and daughter, emotionally and physically exhausted, to recover on the roadside, still in their wet swimsuits.

She was hopeful, but not optimistic, she admitted, because of those six minutes and what they might have done to the developing child’s body and brain.

Even the next day, when she saw Kaden in a Billings hospital, struggling with his intravenous tubes and being justifiably irritable, she worried.

“I wanted that baby to cry so much!” she said.

Crying was normal. She was hoping for normal.

A few days later, still not sleeping because of the wild effects of adrenaline in her system, Gillen Dawson saw normal.

Kaden’s family brought the child, released from the hospital after four days, to visit his rescuers, she said “and I finally got to hold him.”

He played with the family and wowed them with his animal sounds, especially the elk noise, which none of them could reproduce.

His parents told her then, “He’s our same old Kaden.”

The families have been in touch since then through Facebook, and Gillen Dawson said Kaden seems to be making a full recovery. She’s grateful, even as she relives some of the memories from that day.

Before leaving Montana, Gillen Dawson was presented with a Fergus County Lifesaving Award, the first time it’s been awarded to a civilian in the 17-year tenure of Sheriff Troy Eades.

It was, truthfully, traumatic, she said, “but I’m actually thankful, very thankful, that he’s going to be a whole kid, and live a nice long life… I just did what I hope anyone would do.”

She is also signed up for the next CPR class offered at the Snoqualmie Fire Station.