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They climbed out of the truck, walked into the trees, and picked up rocks, which they arranged in a circle. Then they filled the circle with tinder-dry wood. The fake campfire sat right in the brittle yellow grass. Poe felt confident he’d be able to get the whole job done with one match.

“Good?” asked Mike, breaking a stick over his knee and leaning the pieces together like a teepee.

Poe thought, shook his head. “This looks like two guys drove up here to make a campfire. We need a stack of firewood next to it, logs to sit on, all that shit.”

Mike rubbed his neck and then walked deeper into the trees. Poe heard him crunching around and wondered what went on in his head. Was he wishing he could get back to that video game? Missing his cage and his bunk?

Then Mike came back dragging a log so big Poe couldn’t have managed it if there were two of him. He let it down with a grunt. “Bench.”

They gathered more firewood and stacked it close to the fire ring. Poe pictured the campers as a couple of stoned college kids who don’t know the first thing about fire safety.

“Needs trash,” said Mike, and Poe was actually impressed.

“I got some beer cans. I’ll wipe ’em down, but the fire’ll burn off the prints anyways.” Mike went back to the truck, knowing there would be empties rattling around in the bed. Yet when he came out of the trees, he stopped. The sun had cleared the bald hills to the east. The Bitterroot Valley was hidden by the flank of the mountain, but the Missoula Valley opened up below him to the north.

Brown smoke smothered the town like a winter air inversion, but above it, a steady wind had scoured the sky an aching, brilliant blue. It was like being in a plane above the clouds.

Then he heard a four-wheeler in the distance. It sounded like a VW Bus in reverse. He froze — no backup plan except to apologize, get the hell out of there, and try again in a few weeks. That’s when he saw the rider. “What in Christ?”

“Oh boy.” Mike was beside him.

It was the brown-skinned jogger from half an hour ago: same dark shirt and shorts. Only now he was wearing a helmet and had a shotgun strapped across his back.

Poe’s first instinct was to open the cab and pull his Savage .270 out of the gun rack. But since it was fishing season, all he had to protect himself was the cheap Zebco rod he sometimes used to kill time. He never caught anything because he slept too late.

“You bring a gun?” asked Mike.

“Hell no, I didn’t bring a gun. Nobody hired us to shoot anybody.”

“I guess it’s a good thing I did.” Mike unzipped his fanny pack and took out a .38. It was small in his massive hand, and so old the bluing was wearing off. It looked like a $150 pawn-shop special.

Poe’s stomach dropped. The big man really did want to go back to Deer Lodge.

Sidd’s heart started hammering as soon as he came out of the trees and saw the men — real, live trespassers. It looked like one of them was holding a beer can, so hopefully they were just some “good old boys” enjoying a drink. But why had they driven so far up the mountain?

The whole thing was puzzling. Sidd braked the four-wheeler about fifty yards away. Buck had given him strict orders to show the shotgun and to fire a warning shot in the air if necessary, but he doubted it would come to that. “This is private property!” he shouted.

Then he saw the GMC on the side of the truck and realized that this was the one that had passed him while he was running, and the shorter man was the angry driver who’d yelled at him. Judging by the way he threw his beer can into the bed of the truck and spat on the ground, he was still angry.

Sidd suddenly had a powerful urge to fire the warning shot. As he pulled the shotgun over his head, the strap snagging on the back of his helmet, he saw the two men struggling over something. And then, as he raised the barrel of the shotgun in the air, the big man cuffed the smaller one, who staggered back. The big man leveled a small dark gun over the side of the truck.

Sidd didn’t think. He dropped the barrel and squeezed the trigger. The big man ducked. The shotgun boomed and the recoil punched Sidd’s shoulder, almost turning him sideways. The big man peered over the truck and shot twice. His breath loud in the helmet, feeling like a spaceman, Sidd peered down at his own body, checking for holes. Then he ejected the spent shotgun shell and fired again. The pellets ripped holes in the side of the truck, right above the gas-cap door.

The big man shot back again, and Sidd heard one of the bullets — he heard the bullet — whine past him.

Moving clumsily, as if a child were at the controls of his body, Sidd slung the gun around his neck and turned the four-wheeler down the slope, looking for cover. Swiveling his head, he saw the smaller man scramble into the cab. The truck started moving and the big man grabbed onto the tailgate, ran a few steps to keep pace, and pulled himself into the back, nearly getting thrown off as the truck lurched and bounced.

Sidd brought the four-wheeler around and braked. They were going up, toward what Mr. Severson had told him would be a black-diamond run.

He hesitated. Then he accelerated and went after them.

It was hard going up the slope in the four-wheeler — he had no idea how the truck was doing it. The white GMC on the tailgate blurred as the truck’s tires chewed their way up the pockmarked slope. The man in the back rose up, aimed the gun, and lost his balance before he could shoot.

Sidd zigzagged back and forth, knowing it made no sense to follow but hating the intruders, wanting to chase them off Severson’s land. His land.

The truck struggled as the pitch grew steeper. When the driver turned to take another diagonal line up the slope, Sidd half-expected the vehicle to roll over.

The underside of the four-wheeler struck a rock, so hard it almost jarred his palms loose from the handgrips. He smelled gas. He looked back and saw flames, little signal fires dotting the slope. Sparks? A hot tailpipe?

Then he looked forward and saw trails of fire behind the truck, moving unnaturally fast. At that moment he saw liquid sheeting out of the gap at the bottom of the tailgate. There was panic on the big man’s face as he shouted to the driver and threw a large gas can, amber fuel draining from a dozen holes, beading and shining in the sunlight. Flame from the already-burning grass leaped up to meet it, ignited, and obscured the truck behind a sudden wall of flame.

Sidd stopped as another big red gas can arced through the air. He looked down the slope. The fire was spreading fast, the little islands joining together, the flames rising, smoke whipping. Once it spread from the grass to the trees it would explode. Men would climb the mountain to cut fire lines, and planes would drop orange plumes of retardant.

He turned the four-wheeler downhill, feeling a roller-coaster drop in his stomach, and aimed for a gap in the flames.

The heat from the rising sun was nothing compared to the heat from the fire. The sound, like ripping fabric, was louder than his engine. How could it spread so fast? He piloted the four-wheeler blind through a pocket of smoke, hitting a depression so hard his head almost banged the handlebars; he felt lost, felt fire singe his arms, panicked — and then he was through. Glancing up, he could just make out the truck fighting its way up the slope. He couldn’t see the big man in the back.

Dawn was red. As smoke poured over the hills from the west, new smoke rose up from below. The hope of home was a dream for children. Sidd imagined the fire burning all the way to Idaho, through Washington, to the rising sea. Someday, someone would start a fire that would burn until all the fuel was gone.