“There were a lot of fires last summer,” she said. “I was part of some of them.”
He must have sensed her desire to short-circuit the conversation, because he ducked his head and spoke briskly. “You’d report the distance and heading. That way, when they send a plane out for a look, they can pinpoint it easily. Then you use this breakdown to clarify for them.”
He showed her a clipboard that contained checklists of information for each sighting-the distance, the bearing, nearby landmarks, and then three categories of information about the smoke:
Volume: small, medium, large
Type or character: thin, heavy, building, drifting, blanket
Color: white, gray, black, blue, yellow, coppery
“You report all that,” he said, “and then you sit back and listen to them sort it out.”
“No bad ones yet?”
“None. Late-season snow helped. But it melted fast, and it’s dried out since then. Temperatures started climbing, and the wind started blowing. No rain. If that holds, they think it’ll be a busy season. Lately the winds have been up. Trust me, you’ll feel that. This thing seems solid until the wind starts to blow. Then it’ll sway on you pretty good. So if the weather keeps on like this? Yeah, it’ll be busy. Supposed to be a run of storms early next week. If those develop, it could be trouble.”
He was right. You would think rain would help, but thunderstorms were trouble. They were sitting on top of the world here. Lightning didn’t have to travel all that far to make contact. And when it made contact with dry timber…
“Could be a busy summer,” Hannah said. Her heart was beginning to hammer now. He was standing too close to her, making the small room feel smaller. She wet her lips and took a step back. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve had a long walk out here and-”
“You want me out?”
“No, I’m just saying…I’m good here. I understand it, you know? And I’m tired.”
“Okay,” he said. “Guess I’ll get on the trail, then. You’re sure I didn’t rush you too much? I was supposed to show you all of the-”
“I’ll figure it out. And I love it up here already.”
He gave a wry smile. “Get through a night before you say that, okay?”
She ignored that and returned to the Osborne, peered through the gun sight and, because there was no smoke on the peaks, located the group of hikers once again. She watched them plod along and she pretended that they were fire.
8
Connor Reynolds was a different kid than Jace Wilson, and as the days passed, that began to take on a certain appeal.
The kid he had to pretend to be now was the kind of kid he’d always wanted to be. Tough, for one. Fearless, for another. Jace had spent his life trying to be good and fearing the trouble that would follow if he slipped up. His parents had split when he was so young, he hardly remembered it. Two years later came the accident, a chain on a forklift letting go, a pallet falling, his dad earning a life of eternal pain in a few quick seconds because of somebody else’s mistake. He still had a job at the same warehouse, a foreman now, but the pain followed him and so did the mistake. His obsessiveness with procedure had seeped into Jace, who knew he came across to people as a nervous kid-double-checking locks, insisting on using seat belts in the third row of a friend’s parent’s SUV, reading the instructions on a model-plane kit five times before he even opened the bag of parts. He knew how he seemed to people. The kind word was cautious. The mean one (real one?) was scared.
But Connor Reynolds was not scared. Connor was supposed to be a bad kid. There was a kind of freedom in that. You could say what you wanted, act how you wanted. Jace tried to embrace it without pushing it. He didn’t want to draw attention, and, truth be told, he didn’t want to get his ass kicked. After the initial flare-up with Marco, Jace had kept his distance and given him enough respect to appease him, evidently. He tried to do it without showing any fear, though. Kept his sullen stares and silence. The longer he wore them, the better he felt.
He was glad to be out of the camp and on the trail too. He always felt better on the trail, felt like he was vanishing, every trace of Jace Wilson disappearing, nothing left but Connor Reynolds. Today, Ethan was telling them about bears, and everyone was listening, even the loudmouths like Marco, because all of them were scared of bears. It almost made Jace laugh. If the other boys had had any idea who might be following them, they wouldn’t have given a crap about any bears.
“When we come into a blind curve or a dark area, one of these thick stands of trees, or when we break out of them and into a meadow, we want to advertise our arrival,” Ethan was saying. “Talk a little louder, give a few claps, make your presence known by sound. They’re more eager to avoid us than we are to avoid them, believe it or not. They’ll have no problem with us hiking through their territory, assuming we understand them. That’s our job. In this situation, understanding them is largely limited to one word: surprise. We do not want to surprise the bear, because then he will not have the chance to react with his true personality. He’ll turn aggressive even though he’d prefer to be passive, because he will feel that’s what we’re forcing him to do. So we make a little noise to advertise our presence in the right areas, and we pay attention to our surroundings so we don’t go into areas that we should avoid.”
“All our surroundings look the same to me,” Ty said.
“They won’t in time. And it requires all of your senses. All of them. You watch, of course, you keep scanning the landscape. Drew, back there, he’s key, because he’s guarding the rear for us. He’s got to turn around and double-check for us now and then.”
Drew seemed to puff up at that, and Jace wondered if he realized that being the guy in the back also meant you were the first guy the bear ate.
“We have to listen,” Ethan said, “because the last thing we want to run into is a tangle between bears, and if that’s happening, we should be able to hear it. We have to use our sense of smell-”
“You can probably smell bears at, what, two miles? Three miles?” This was from Ty, another of the jokers, contending with Marco, and he said it seriously but while winking at Connor, who gave him dead eyes in response. Jace Wilson would have laughed, but Connor Reynolds wasn’t a laugher.
“I cannot smell bears,” Ethan said, “but I can smell crap. That helps. Sometimes, you see, a bear takes a crap in the woods. I’ll let you check it out as soon as we find one, Ty. I’ll give you plenty of inspection time.”
Now Jace really wanted to laugh, and the rest of them did laugh, but he stayed silent. He’d decided that was Connor Reynolds-strong and silent. And fearless.
“I’m also interested in the smell of something rotten,” Ethan continued. “A carcass gone bad. If I can smell it, you better believe a bear can-they actually can detect odors from over a mile away-and we need to stay far from that, because what smells nasty to us smells like a free meal to them. No hunting required. Bears are lazy; they appreciate free meals. We’ll be talking a lot about this once we set up camp and store the food.”
“That’s three senses,” Jeff said. He was one of the few who’d dared to express any real interest so far; the rest were maintaining their wilderness-camp-is-bullshit attitudes, for the most part. “And if I have to taste one or touch one to know it’s a bear, I’m a pretty huge dumb-ass.”
The rest of them burst into laughter, and even Ethan Serbin smiled with them.
“I won’t argue that point, language aside,” he said. “But you might taste a few berries along the trail. Might see a thicket of berries and try one and think, Dang, these taste pretty good. Remember-if it tastes good to you, it does to the bear as well. Be more alert, because you are in a feeding ground.”