Page 29 of Into the Fire

“Asking if you can jump tomorrow if the phone rings.”

“The body’s fine, Hatcher.” I let a few steps go by. “Kind of you to keep track of it.”

From somewhere behind us, Shep announced he wanted to know about dinner.

At the last switchback, I stopped and looked back. Smoke drifted up out of the black, thin and tame, with the ground crew’s headlamps beginning to show along our line.

The ride home was a green Forest Service crew van. Nobody talked much.

Fatigue was part of that. We’d jumped, cut line for eight hours, and humped ninety-pound packs down to the road in the dark. This was quieter than that. Shep got halfway into a bit about the ground crew boss’s mustache, heard the lack of response, and let it die.

Somewhere past Kessler, Hollis said, “I want to see the weather record.”

“So do I,” Boone said.

The base was mostly dark when we rolled through the gate, but Operations wasn’t. Marty met us in the ready room with a pen behind his ear. He had piles of forms.

“Whitmore paperwork’s begun; sign where the flags are, not tonight if your hands don’t work.” He set a folder on the table in front of Boone. “And that’s the weather. Hourly obs from the Whitmore RAWS, the spot forecast, and Sunday’s strike map. You radioed something about observed behavior, so I figured you’d want it waiting rather than having to ask for it.”

He looked around at the four of us, filthy and flat. “There’s chili on the stove that Ramirez made, so approach it with caution. Debrief tonight or in the morning?”

“Ten minutes tonight,” Boone said. “The rest will be in the morning.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it. If the behavior’s going in the report as an anomaly, tell me before nine, because Helena’s form for that is different.” He was out the door, and his truck was headed down the base road before we’d gotten our line gear off.

Boone conducted the ten-minute debrief. He read the hourly weather report while Hollis read it over his shoulder. I watched them fail to find the explanation they had hoped for.

Shep and Hollis drifted toward the chili, hunger beating caution. I stayed to rack my gear, and when I emerged from the locker row, Boone was at the table with the folder closed and one hand flat on top of it, looking at nothing.

“You said Carson did that,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Exactly that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tomorrow we’ll go through Carson Ridge again,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, as if he’d proposed inventory.

He took the folder under his arm and turned out the lights. We walked out into the chilly night together, smelling of smoke.

From what we saw at the opening of the jump, I’d have ordered this fire out of a catalog. It was small, honest, and completely understandable.

It wasn’t that anymore. It hadn’t been since the crowns ran. Somewhere in that ordinary little fire, five years and a mountain range away from Carson Ridge, something impossible had found me again.

The difference was, this time it found four of us.

Chapter eight

Boone

Iwalked Dante out after the debrief and watched him cross the gravel to the bunkhouse. Then I went back inside.

The ready room was quiet at midnight. Smoke clung to my shirt. The coffee pot was cold on its burner.

I spread the Whitmore paperwork across the table and tried to make the facts work.