Page 23 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

Russ walks the length of it, considering angles. Tessa and Dani are already pulling gear off their packs. Ivy drops her pack against a rock and starts assessing the debris field like she's done this before. She probably has.

“Is this the part where I'm supposed to admit you work harder than we do?” I ask her.

She doesn't stop moving. “You can wait until lunch.”

Once the saw work starts, the rest of us go to work on everything the saw leaves behind. Limbs. Brush. Chunks of trunk too big to move alone but too small to need the saw again. It's not glamorous work. It's just constant. Drag, lift, clear, repeat. And do it uphill half the time. I've done plenty of physical labor in my life. This finds muscles I don't normally use.

Nolan is dragging a limb toward the pile when he stops next to a patch of low vegetation crowding the trail edge. “Should I clear this too?”

Ivy glances over without breaking stride on the branch she's hauling. “That stays. It's not blocking anything, and it holds the bank together on that side.”

“How do you know it holds the bank together?”

“Because I've watched what happens to this section when it isn't there.”

Nolan looks at the plant like it just earned his respect. He moves on to the next pile.

I hear the exchange and don't think much of it until it happens again twenty minutes later, this time about a stretch of trail that needs regrading versus one that doesn't. And again after that, about whether a section of exposed root is a hazard or just ugly.

Ivy doesn't stop working to explain things. She just explains while she works, like the two activities were never separate to begin with.

I've watched Ivy in a lot of settings over the last two days. The crew house. Mercer’s in Timber Creek. Alder Lake. The Grangers' kitchen. This is the first time I've watched her work, and it's different. Not because she's a different person. But because this is clearly where her expertise is evident.

Somewhere past the tree, we hit huckleberries. Nolan spots them first. “Can I eat those?”

Ivy glances over. “You're asking before you ate any, right?”

“Yes.”

She confirms what they are, tells him what to look for if he's ever doing this without someone who knows, and goes back to work.

Nolan eats one. A few minutes later he's eating another one. Then a few more after that. By the time we've moved another fifty yards down the trail, he's developed what can only be described as a foraging habit.

“Nolan,” Ivy says, without looking up.

He looks up, mouth full. “I'm learning.”

“You're eating.”

“Hands-on learning.”

Tessa laughs somewhere behind us. Ivy shakes her head and keeps working, which I take as her deciding this battle isn't worth fighting.

A little farther on, Nolan stops in front of a different plant, clusters of dark berries hanging low on reddish stems, looking pleased with himself. “These too?”

“No.” Ivy's answer comes fast and sharp enough Nolan takes a step back. She walks him through it. Different leaf shape, different stem, different everything if you look closely. Baneberry, she tells him, and not the kind of mistake you get to make twice.

Nolan studies the plant like it personally offended him. “I'm starting to feel like this forest has trust issues,” he says.

Trevor laughs loudly enough that Russ looks over to check nothing's wrong. Ivy just points him back toward the pile of brush he abandoned in order to go inspect poison.

I like watching her do this. Not because she's showing off. She isn't. She barely seems to register that anyone's paying attention to how she answers these questions. She's not trying to showcase her knowledge. She just has it, and it comes out whenever someone needs it.

A while later, Nolan struggles with a knot holding a coil of rope to his pack, twisting it into something worse every time he tries to fix it.

“Here.” I take it from him, work it loose in about ten seconds, hand it back. “Figure-eight. Won't jam on you like that.”

“Thanks.”