He was happy just to be walking, then, happy that he had not quit, and he was so pleased with this that he almost missed the rifle.
It was above him, on the rocks, maybe thirty feet up, and the climb seemed mighty and the reward unworthy, because who was there left to shoot?
All the same, it was there.
A man who was happy to die walking, he reasoned, ought to be happier still to die climbing. Getting upright had meant something, and those first steps another thing, but to climb? The story he wanted to leave out here was that of a climbing man. A fallen one, to be sure, that part was undeniable by now, but one who’d climbed as far as he could.
He paused long enough to fill his lungs and check the bandages. They were both a shade darker, but not dripping. Then he fixed his sights on the rifle and began, one unsteady step at a time, to climb toward it.
40
The wind swung around after sunrise, started blowing out of the northwest and regaining the momentum it had sacrificed for the lightning storm.
The fire shifted with it, and Hannah knew then that it was going to be far closer than she’d wanted to imagine. In her mind, she’d always kept them half a mile from it, at least, a wide swing over the top of the fire ground and down to the creek, the two of them staying well away from the dangerous heat of it and from the ghosts that waited for her within the flames.
They weren’t going to have half a mile. Maybe a quarter of a mile. Maybe less, if that wind kept blowing.
Don’t show it, she told herself. Don’t show him that you’re scared.
They had taken too long getting down the mountain. They were about half a mile from the creek and she couldn’t see the crew that should be there, and that was more trouble, because it meant they’d camped farther north than she’d realized, and this was even worse news, thanks to the wind. It would push the fire up the gulch, which the team on the ground would regard as a fine thing, because that was exactly the direction they wanted the blaze to move, away from forest and fresh fuel and on toward the rock. Rock always did a better job of fighting fire than humans did. The mountains took care of themselves in the end; all you did was help.
This was turning into a beautiful morning for the fire crew, then, because the wind was helping them, and they’d stay north and appreciate their good fortune since there wasn’t anything up the gulch worth fighting for. Maybe three acres of fir and a ridge of grass and then the rock.
And Hannah and Connor.
“It’s high,” Connor said.
She understood that he meant the fire itself. They were close enough to see the flames clearly now, see how they climbed the pines and still weren’t satisfied, kept flapping higher, tasting the air to see if there was anything edible up above. She remembered being struck by the same thing in her first fire season, remembered swinging a Pulaski and trying to keep calm and pretend that flames so high above did not unnerve her.
The sound of it was powerful now too. As the wind provided reinforcement, the fire took on a sound like soft thunder, but steadier, the echo of distant trains.
“It’s going to be a problem,” she said.
“What is?”
“That fucking wind,” she said, and then looked at him and said, “Sorry.”
“Call it what you want,” he said.
She nodded and wiped sweat from her face and saw that her palm came away smeared with ash. Her eyes were stinging from the smoke and tearing constantly.
Hotter the fire, cooler the head; hotter the fire, cooler the head, she told herself, one of the mantras that Nick chanted at them as they worked, and it meant two things: Keep yourself hydrated and as cool as possible against the fire heat, and, more important, keep your thoughts clear. Keep your mind working, and keep calm.
“Here’s what the fire wants to do,” she told Connor. “Jump that creek and find the forest. Why? Because it’s on a quest, just like us. We want to find help; it wants to stay fed. But here’s what the wind is instructing it to do: push up the gulch. The problem for the fire is that it doesn’t know what we know, and it won’t realize that going up the gulch is a mistake. It will know that only when it finds the rock shelves.”
He was staring at her. “Why are you talking like that? Like it has thoughts.”
“Because it does.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, trying to draw up some saliva, wishing for water. They were both out now. “It has needs, at least, and it knows how to meet them and what to do if something gets in its way. And right now…we are very close to doing just that, Connor.”
“It’s still pretty far off.”
It seemed to be, anyway. Looked as if it were taking its time chewing through the timber, and they had elevation on it and some distance, and the creek loomed, shimmering in the sunrise.
“You said we just need to get across the creek. Right?”
“Right.”
“The creek isn’t that far. We can make it. We can run.”
God bless him, he still thought he could run. How long had he been on his feet; how long had he been awake?
“Hannah?” he said. “We can make it if we run.”
“There’s one problem,” she said. “It can run too, buddy. You haven’t seen that yet, but trust me, it can run.”
The temperature of the main fire was maybe twelve hundred degrees, maybe fifteen hundred, and it was finding plenty of fuel, and the wind was pushing oxygen in, so that temperature was rising. When it got hotter, it would get excited, and it would be ready to run.
Hotter the fire, cooler the head.
She had cost them both dearly by keeping them high, and it was fine to acknowledge that but imperative to know that continuing to climb would no longer be a mistake. The creek was tempting but she wasn’t sure that they could make it, not even running, and if climbing again might save them, then they had to do it. The very idea of climbing made her feel defeated.
“We’re going to backtrack a bit,” she said. “I’m sorry. But it’s the right thing. We need to go back up the drainage and get up on that ridgeline, you see it?”
He followed her pointing finger and nodded.
“We can walk along that. It’s not too steep. And it gives us plenty of space if the fire makes a jailbreak and decides to run. It won’t like the rock, and there will be plenty of rock between us and the last of the trees. Slower going, but safer. We’ll just make our way along that ridgeline and then deal with the creek.”
He didn’t say anything, but his face told her that he didn’t agree, and she knew the look well, had worn it herself on the day she convinced Nick that there was enough time to get down and save the family and make it back up.
“It may not get that high,” she said, “but we’ve come too far to risk it. So it’s just a little more time, and then…”
The rest of the explanation faded into silence and inconsequence when a horse with two riders appeared out of the smoke ahead of them.
The sun had risen above the fire in a war of red heat, but the light had shown them nothing and Allison was unwilling to push Tango any longer. It was too vertical here and they were too close to the fire, and if Jamie’s son had made it down the back side of Republic Peak, they should have seen him by now. She had been prepared to announce all of this for the past fifteen minutes but hadn’t managed to get the words out, because how did you tell a mother that it was time to give up the search for her son? So she rode just a bit longer, slowing Tango to a walk. He was uneasy with the fire, trying to pull them farther away from it, but farther away was steeper and more treacherous ground and so she made him hold the ridgeline. When he stopped entirely, her first instinct was to look at his leg again. Jamie’s first instinct was to look forward, and so Allison had her head down when Jamie said, “Who is that?”