Page 44 of Into the Fire

I gave them the south flank first. Fellhauer and I held a line with the wind coming up the face. At fourteen-twenty, Dante’s call came through about a man in the fork.

“You answered me,” Dante said. “Somebody answered me.”

“I did. I told you everybody was accounted for and nobody else was on the mountain. Then the traffic buried it.”

Dante took the crest with the fork below him. He talked about the crew mid-slope and Dutch low on the escape route. He mentioned the far bench, and the man on it, moving down-drainage in the wrong direction. He wore nothing that identified him as one of us.

Then the wind shifted. The fire topped the crest and spilled into the fork. That was the last normal thing. Then the run came down through the timber, against the wind and the slope.

Nash sat with his forearms on the table and listened to all of it. When Dante stopped, he looked at the fork on the map.

“You want what I had,” he said.

“Only if you want to add something,” I said.

“Nobody’s ever asked for it. The investigators only wanted to verify the times.” He put his finger back on the map. “I’ll tell you what I had. I had Dutch.”

He moved his finger as he talked, small movements, an inch of mountain at a time.

“When the wind shifted, he was below me, walking the route. He came back up it fast and got Mendoza and me turned around. The whole time he was moving us, he kept looking upslope. That was over his shoulder. I thought he was watching the fire come.” Nash paused. “He stopped once. In the middle of getting us out, he stopped walking and stood there looking up the fork. It was three seconds, maybe four. I yelled at him. I yelled at him to move.”

“He wasn’t watching the fire come,” Dante said quietly.

“No. A man watching fire come at him doesn’t stand still. He was trying to see something, to understand something.” Nash rubbed his thumb along the edge of the map. “And he got on the radio. Before the shouting. He asked you something.”

Dante looked at him.

“Dutch?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he ask me?”

“What are you seeing?”

Nobody said anything.

Dante stared at Nash.

“I answered him.” Dante’s voice remained level. “I had the mic in my hand. I was telling him—I could see the direction. The fire was coming down. There was something below me I was trying to—” He pushed so hard on the pencil that the tip broke. Then his shoulders dropped half an inch. “It’s not there. He asked, and I answered, and then he was shouting, and the words aren’t there.”

“Take a breath,” I said.

He glanced at me, and I looked back at the map.

At fourteen twenty, Dante, our lookout, reported a man where no man should be. Fourteen-forty-something, our crew boss with thirty years of experience stopped walking to look at something up a draw. He got on the radio and asked his lookout what it looked like from above. They were trying to understand the same thing from two different directions.

I was a quarter mile east, behind a spur ridge and a wall of smoke, seeing none of it.

Nothing Dante remembered required me to have seen it. I couldn’t have seen it. That’s the piece I didn’t understand five years ago.

I’d made my report the standard, and the official document agreed with me. Somebody wrote it that way.

I was still looking at the map when I heard myself say, “Who typed the statements?”

Nash’s chair scraped, but he didn’t answer because Shep stuck his head in the door.

“There you are.” He looked at Dante. “Teller’s got his letdown rope in some kind of knot that I personally think should be photographed, and he won’t ask Nash because he’s scared of Nash. Hollis told him to figure it out, so.”