I climb the ridge back and come up out of the trees to the sight of lightning flashing across the opposite ridge. The sun is completely hidden, trees thrashing. And there they are again, the filaments, wriggling up to the tops of a pine thirty feet away. There’s a spark and a flash, and I close my eyes. I’m breathing hard from the climb. I sit on a log, but it gives way under me, and I slide on my rear back to the trail, the log hitting my back. I keep my eyes closed. I breathe slowly and dump the last of my water over my face. I’m a mile from the lookout. If I jog I can make it in fifteen minutes. When I open my eyes again, the filaments are gone. The clouds are lumbering in and it’s darker, so I get up and run, walk, run, until I’m back at the lookout. From the deck I watch the storm rolling through, feeling sick to my stomach. When the lightning flashes, the filaments follow. Red, gold, white. It goes on like this. The thunder shatters the air, and I count. One… two… three… four. Lightning streaks, my retinas fill with tiny flames. It’s getting closer and closer, the thunder breaking right on top of my mountain, and I go inside. There’s a hammering in my head. I lay down for just a minute, on the cot.
I smell the pillow, but even her scent is gone.
I’ve been asleep for three hours. It’s unnaturally dark outside, clouds still hanging over the foothills, but the worst of the storm seems to have passed. Carey’s voice comes through on the radio.
I jump out of the cot and pick up. “Hey, I’m here.”
“Darlene said to check in with you about a female hiker?”
I hesitate.
“Lucie, are you there? Over.”
“I’m here.” I’m shaking; I don’t know what to tell him.
“I just wanted to check on conditions.”
Pause.
“Lots of lightning but no strikes that we know of, yet. What’s it look like up there?”
“Lit up like the Fourth of July, for a while. Quiet now.”
“Any strikes?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll keep watch.”
“Did you have a hiker?”
“I did,” I lie. I’m about to keep lying. “But I only saw her from a distance. Red bandanna. Tan pack. Headed down the mountain, toward the river. Not a backpacker. Day hiker. She didn’t have any gear.”
“Nobody like that has checked in with us, but day hikers usually don’t. There are campers out at Strawberry Wilderness, maybe they were checking out the trails. Strange not to go up to the lookout, though.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I say. “Let me know if somebody checks in? She could’ve been caught in the storm.”
Twenty-four hours pass. At night I lie awake, forcing myself to imagine different scenarios in which she saves herself.
She makes her way out of the woods, meets another car full of Christians or hippies, hitches a ride to town — any town. She borrows a phone. She calls Jen and Elle. Or her parents. She turns herself in at the nearest sheriff’s office. Someone comes for her. Someone takes her home.
But I can’t help seeing the other possible scenes. Her foot stepping off the trail, her path into the unfamiliar wilderness. She hunts the site of an old fire — years old — scanning the felled trees, the rotting logs. She would find what I have seen there before: the Psilocybe, the wood-eaters. Like fireweed, they come back to the scenes of disasters; they thrive where others were destroyed; they make a place for another generation. She only needs a handful of the mushrooms. These would ease the discomfort. But she would need something else — something acutely toxic. She could have plucked many kinds from the woods of the Cascades, even in a drought year. She could have collected more than enough Amanita smithiana, the ones they fed me; she would know how much to ingest. Once I imagine it, it’s like a bad dream that can’t be undreamt: it infiltrates all the other scenes. There she is, choosing the place, taking off her pack, settling against a pine trunk, looking out at the bend in the river, drinking the last of her water while dog ticks climb up the leg of her shorts, mosquitoes drink until they’re heavy. It would happen to her like it happened to me: the immediate sickness, the hallucinations, abatement, then weakness, deterioration. She would feel how I felt, and she would understand. It would be her way of confessing to me. But of course, even if we found her, no one would be able to carry her out in time.
The fire breaks out five miles to the northwest. An hour away by foot, if I’m running, but I know fires can move faster than that, especially with the wind urging them. They’ve already started digging containment lines, redirecting some of the crews from the Ochoco fire, which is 90 percent contained. The men are exhausted.
“It’s the other side of the river, so you should be fine for now,” Carey says, “but you should come back down to the cabin tomorrow.”
“If I leave now, I can get back to the cabin before dark.” Or I could stay, I think, in case she comes back tonight. But instead, before signing off I say, “Carey: make sure everyone knows about the hiker. Just in case.”
I throw my books and clothes into my pack, leaving the food, the toilet paper and the hand sanitizer and all the other things I’ve brought.
As I close and lock the door, overhead one raven, then another, then another. They’re loud, calling out to each other. There are other birds on the move, too, a strange migration: Steller’s jays, in pairs, songbirds so fast I can’t tell them apart, a solitary magpie. They scatter, alight on high branches, call from tree to tree. Particles of ash drift by on the breeze.
I remember reading about the unusual movements of wild animals before earthquakes — this was long after our quake, in a geology class in college. Days, even weeks, before there are shifts in the earth’s plates, animals flee. Getting as far away from the center of the disaster as possible. The evidence is anecdotal, of course, but often cited to demonstrate the abject ignorance of the earth and its movements that humans live with, the utter divorce from the relationship with the environment that nurtured us through millions of years of evolution. The animals know what’s coming before we do; they heed the instinct to flee. But we humans, even when we know what’s coming, we do nothing. We watch the animals disappear.
I stop at the bottom of the path before I head off into the trees. I turn back to the lookout, for a last glance.
At the cabin I see the evidence of the early fire season, of nights Carey has spent at the field office in Prairie City: cold coffee in the pot, moldy oatmeal on the stove, dirty dishes, a stale smell — windows have been closed — a pile of unopened mail on the table. There’s a blanket and pillow on the couch. He sleeps there when he’s on call; it’s a horrible place to sleep, so it’s easier to wake up.
The light on the answering machine is blinking. There are three messages, and I can guess that at least one of them will be from my mother. Her voice comes out, as if from a can attached to a string, stretched along the five hundred miles between us.
“Lucie, it’s Mom. Please call me when you get this. I love you.” She sounds anxious. The cord of tension travels through my ear and into the back of my head, down my neck and spine. The message is from yesterday; they’re all from her. Each one is shorter, taut with anger, with worry.