A Testament to Teen-Age Courage : Rescue: Zabrina Courtney spent hours alone after a plane crash that killed her father. She walked about two miles on broken ankles before being found.

Fourteen-year-old Zabrina Courtney remembers nothing of the plane crash. But she remembers feeling her father’s body turn cold, the howling of coyotes, and striking out on the desert floor at daybreak with two broken ankles in search of help.

On Wednesday, her nurse, doctor and others at Loma Linda University Medical Center used words such as hero and courage to describe the character of this eighth-grader with braces and wavy, strawberry-blond hair.

Zabrina was found by a California Highway Patrol search-and-rescue helicopter crew Monday after the youngster had spent more than 12 hours alone in the high desert near Victorville. She had walked about two miles on broken ankles.

The girl survived with surprisingly few other injuries after she and her father, 39-year-old Irwin Courtney, crashed in the Cessna 152 he was piloting Sunday evening.

Just two weeks before, Zabrina had begun her own flying lessons--a reward from her father for her straight-A report card. He wanted her to be able to land the plane should he ever be incapacitated during their frequent recreational flights.

Her father was presumed killed on impact. The National Transportation and Safety Board is investigating the cause of the crash, a spokesman said.

Dr. Gibbs Andrews said Zabrina sustained multiple scratches and bruises to her face in addition to the broken ankles. He added that she could be released from the hospital in a few days.

At a news conference Wednesday, Zabrina said she had no recollection of the crash. She and her father, a dispatcher for a trucking company, had just flown over his Adelanto apartment. “I asked, ‘Are we going home?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and that’s the last thing I remember,” she said.

Zabrina said when she regained consciousness, she was in terrible pain and was turned upside down in the small cockpit. She crawled out but was unable to pull out her pinned father.

She said she spent part of the night next to him to help keep him warm. “After a while, I reached down and touched his hand, and he was cold,” she said.

She crouched beneath the wing of the plane the rest of the night, frightened by the howling of nearby coyotes. “I was scared to go anywhere,” she said.

At about daybreak Monday, she decided to try to hike back to the Apple Valley airport, about six miles away.

“What had happened hadn’t really hit me yet,” she said. “I wondered, ‘What am I going to say when I get back to the airport? What if I don’t make it?’ ”

Indeed, she collapsed several times and remembers only that she eventually became “so tired, I just fell asleep. I woke up when the helicopter was over me.”

Rescuers didn’t begin searching for the plane until Monday morning, when her father’s co-workers reported him missing.

By mid-morning, the plane’s wreckage had been found and rescuers saw Zabrina’s footprints. Marks in the sand indicated that she had been dragging a foot and sometimes crawling.

CHP helicopter pilot Merrill Gracey and on-board paramedic Gary Hulen found the girl, head down in the sand and dressed in jeans, T-shirt and tennis shoes.

“She was disoriented, but real happy to see us,” Hulen said.

“She’s a very determined individual,” said her mother, Maria Haley.