Page 34 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

She gives me the actual explanation, about postfire vegetation recovery patterns and how they affect wildlife habitat use in the years after a burn, more detail than I need but not more than I want. I ask a follow-up question, about whether that's connected to what she just told me about the fireweed. She stops walking and looks at me.

“Are you actually interested in this?”

“I'm interested in what you're saying.”

Then she keeps walking and talking, and I keep listening, all the way until Reid calls back to us about a downed tree blocking the trail ahead.

We spend the next thirty minutes clearing it, dragging pieces off to the side, the conversation naturally on pause while everyone works. By the time the trail's clear and everyone's moving again, Ivy and I end up walking together again.

Another patch of fireweed shows up a while later, smaller than the first, tucked against a fallen log.

“Fireweed,” I say, before she can.

She looks at it, then at me. “Look at you.”

I like that she sounds pleased about it.

The trail eventually opens into a longer, easier stretch, and the conversation drifts toward what comes after this. Ivy doesn't know what she'll do once she finishes her master’s program. Somewhere in Montana, maybe. Timber Creek, if the right opportunity exists. Somewhere else if it doesn't. She says it without much worry attached, like it's simply a question she hasn't answered yet, not a problem she's dreading.

“What about you?” she asks. “After fire season?”

“Ski patrol. Same as always.”

“Where?”

“Don't know yet. I'll see what's open. Could be Montana. Or Colorado. Maybe Alaska. Wherever makes sense.”

She takes it in stride, no more worried about my future than I was about hers a minute ago.

Farther up the trail, Nolan trips over a root and manages to make it look like an intentional dance move, which earns him applause from Cassidy and a look of deep skepticism from Reid. Ivy laughs, pulls ahead a little to check something on the trail surface. I end up behind her again, same view as this morning.

Her legs are still spectacular. That hasn't changed. But somewhere over the last few miles, between fireweed and Ramstein and a thesis about vegetation I never expected to find interesting, I’ve discovered there’s a whole lot more about her I’m attracted to than just her legs.

eleven

Ivy

Silver Bell looks like it did last time, which is to say like something out of an old photograph that decided to stay standing. Weathered buildings lean at angles that shouldn't work but somehow do. Grass has reclaimed most of what used to be the main street. The mountains rise up behind it all, indifferent to the fact that people once thought this patch of dirt was worth building a town around.

“So this was a real town,” Nolan says, turning in a slow circle. “Like, people lived here.”

“Couple thousand, at the peak,” Trevor says. “Silver Bell mine opened in the 1880s. Whole place sprang up around it. Store, saloon, hotel, the works.”

“School too,” Dani says.

Cassidy's more interested in whether the place is haunted than in its actual mining history, which she brings up twice before Trevor tells her everywhere in Montana is haunted if you ask the right person.

Tessa gets her phone out. “Group photo. Before the ghosts get camera-shy.”

We cluster in front of the old general store, or what's left of it, everyone shuffling into some rough approximation of a photogenic arrangement. I end up next to Beck, close enough our shoulders touch. Tessa snaps a few. I don't think much of it. It's just one more photo in a summer full of them.

After that, the group scatters. Nolan wants to see everything, dragging Cassidy and Trevor toward the old hotel. Tessa, Dani, and Reid head for the saloon, arguing about which building was the most important one.

I look toward the trail that climbs past the last of the buildings, up toward where the mine itself used to be. “I want to see the mine trail.”

Beck falls into step beside me without discussion.

“This building's ancient,” I say, nodding at a leaning storefront as we pass it.