She lifted the glasses again as if the second viewing might prove her wrong; she felt like someone on a ship in ancient times who, sighting land after many months at sea, was afraid that it was an illusion.
It was not. The smoke was there, and it was spreading, and Hannah Faber had her first chance to help.
She was nervous going to the radio; the simple protocol suddenly felt infinitely complex.
Get it together, Hannah. Get it together. This is your damn job, they’ll do the rest, all you have to do is tell them where the hell it is.
That was when she realized she didn’t know where it was, that she was rushing to the radio without first identifying the location. She went to the Osborne, rotated the bezel, put her eye to the gun sight, and centered it up with the smoke. Looked at the map and got her bearing. This one wasn’t far off at all. Five miles from her tower.
Too close, too close, get the hell out of here.
She shook her head again, chastising herself. It was the first flare-up, and they’d get it under control fast. Nothing was coming this way.
Easy to say, hard to believe. She was supposed to be removed from it up here. She was supposed to be far from the flames, supposed to-
“Supposed to do your damn job,” she said aloud, and then she went to the radio and keyed the mike.
“This is Lynx Lookout. Do you copy?”
“We copy, Lynx.”
“I’ve got smoke.”
She felt as if it were a stunning proclamation, a real showstopper, but the response was flat and uninterested.
“Copy that. Location?”
She recited the location and bearing, told them the volume was small, the character was thin but building, the color gray.
“Copy that. Thanks, Lynx. We’re on it.”
“Good luck. I’ll keep watching.”
Keep watching. What an impotent thing to say, and do. Once she’d have been putting on the Nomex gear and the White’s fire boots; once she’d have been strong and tanned and ready to take it on-the whole world afire couldn’t scare her. Now…
I’ll keep watching.
“Hurry up, guys,” she whispered, watching the gray plumes grow, seeing the first tongues of orange in the mix now, and she wondered how it had started. There on a ridge so close to the road; how had it started?
Nick would say a campfire. There’d been no lightning, she’d watched for it every night and had not seen any, and so the source was likely humans. It was an odd place for a campfire, and a dangerous one. She looked at the map and traced the contour lines and saw what it might do. It could burn up off that ridge and find open grasses and scorch through them and then hit the high forest, pushed by the wind. If it did, it would run into the rock, and in its quest for fuel, it would climb sidehill and find the gulch that waited, lined with dry timber. And then they’d be fighting it low. Down in a basin rimmed by steep slopes.
Some of the best friends she’d ever had died trying to outrun a burning wind in a basin like that.
She didn’t like the way those contour lines looked. There was plenty of fuel in the gulch below the place where the fire had begun to burn, and, dry as it was with this early drought, the flames would be moving fast.
The first crew got there within thirty minutes, and they encountered more than they’d bargained for. The wind was pushing the fire upslope, toward a stretch of dry jack pine, and the reports over the radio were grim and surprised.
“We can get a pump truck to the bottom, but no higher. It’s climbing pretty well.”
“So trench it and bladder-bag it,” Hannah said. She wasn’t on the air, they couldn’t hear her, but she hoped they’d somehow sense her advice and take it. If they got up high enough, they should be able to contain it. With the truck soaking the bottom of the hill and a proper trench cutting it off from climbing toward any more fuel, they’d be fine. It would be hot, hard work, though, and the sun would be setting soon, and then it would be just the crew and the firelight and the wind. The wind was the great enemy, the most menacing and most mysterious. This she knew as well as she knew her own name.
They didn’t hear her advice but they followed it anyway, and she listened as they sent a trenching team a half a mile farther up the mountain, where they could cut the blaze off from the next stretch of forest and hopefully leave it to burn out in the rocks.
“It will go sidehill, guys. It will have no choice, and the wind will help it, and then you’ll have to fight it at the bottom.”
That was what they probably wanted. The fire would be bordered by creeks and road and rock there, and they would believe they had it sequestered. Unless the wind had different plans.
Her first fire with Nick hadn’t been all that different from this one. A wooded windblown hillside. She was on her second summer then and had a sophomore’s cockiness-been there, done that, seen it all, though of course she hadn’t. Rookie bravado, sophomore cockiness, and veteran’s wisdom. The three stages she’d come to know. She suspected that some sort of law required wisdom and loss to be partners. At least, they always seemed to ride together.
She’d loved Nick from the start. In the way it wasn’t supposed to happen, the way you weren’t supposed to trust. Love at first sight was a fairy tale. Tough girls rolled their eyes at it. And she’d meant to, she had absolutely meant to, but the really special thing about love was that it scorned your attempts to control it. That was a great thing. Sometimes.
Rule number one for a woman on the fire line: you had to outwork everyone.
Rule number two: when you did, you’d be considered less of a woman because of it.
That had been infuriating in the first summer. Fighting fires was a male-dominated world-weren’t they all, though?-but she hadn’t been the lone woman. There were three on the crew, but she was the only rookie. The jokes came early and often, but she was cool with that, because, frankly, that seemed to be the way it went. Boys being boys. Giving each other shit over any perceived weakness, circling wolves settling pack order, and her weakness, as they saw it, was readily apparent: the extra X chromosome. So you took the jokes and you gave them back and then you went to work, and here’s where it mattered-would you live up to the identity that the jokes created, or would you forge a new one? You couldn’t be the joke, there was no respect to be found there, no room for softness among crew members for whom fatigue was often the starting point and not the finish line. When you erased the jokes, though, when you matched the guys’ work or exceeded it, a fascinating thing happened-apparently, you lost your femininity. Now the jokes came out of respect, and the tone was altogether different. Once your nickname was Princess; now it was Rambo.
All of this wasn’t to say she had had bad relationships with the boys of summer. On the contrary, they were some of the best friends she’d ever had, or would ever have-if there were no atheists in foxholes, then there were no enemies on the fire lines. But dating someone on the crew was different. It was like giving something back that you’d worked hard to earn. She’d made a rule before the second summer, a sophomore’s rule, the unyielding kind that broke the minute you applied it: The fire line was work. End of story.
And so of course there had been Nick. And of course he hadn’t been just on the crew; he’d been the boss.
That was the summer she wore makeup to a trench line, the summer of the cosmetology-school jokes, the summer of the happiest days and nights of her life. She’d become certain of the invalidity of her own rule-it didn’t have to be all work. You could work with someone you loved, even on the most dangerous of tasks.
She no longer believed that. On the witness stand, pointing at the topographic map and the photos and explaining how it had all happened, she knew that her rule had not been invalid. You fought fires as a crew. Lived and died as a crew. And if you were in love with one person on that crew, just one? All your best intentions didn’t mean a damn thing. Love always scorned your attempts to control it.