Page 98 of Into the Fire

Kincaid came down with the cargo and immediately began gathering his chutes. By the time we’d broken down the boxes—saws, water, tools, radios—the smoke past the saddle had thickened. It rolled over the crest in pulses.

Hollis shouldered his saw and looked at the crest. “Let’s go see it,” Boone said. He left Kincaid at the Park with the cargo, a radio, and the jump gear, and told him the meadow was his until we came back.

The rest of us started up out of the Park toward the saddle. The climb out of the Park ran through the young lodgepole pine first. It was coming up thick and nearly waist-high. Grasshoppers jumped off it ahead of us.

The original burn was still visible on the ground. The slope turned to snags and rock and fireweed gone to seed.

We climbed through it single file, saws and tools slung, nobody talking much because the grade didn’t leave air for it. My hip was sore but bearable.

Hollis stopped where a rock outcrop split the slope and looked up, breathing hard. “Saddle from the left, or straight up?”

“Left,” I said. “Straight up cliffs out under the notch. You can’t see it from here.”

Boone came up the line past Teller and fell in behind me, close enough to talk. He let me set the pace.

Radio traffic came and went on Boone’s chest—air attack monitoring the smoke column and, behind it, the sound of the fire itself.

Halfway up, I stepped over a downed snag, and my boot came down in a patch of bare shale. It touched my memories. Smoke, and men above me, and Dutch’s voice behind everything.

“Watch the shale,” I said to Teller, and pointed. He went around it.

We were close to where I was at the first Carson Ridge fire. The crew had come back over the top and down through this, into the black, and somewhere in this stretch a snag had knocked me to the ground. I didn’t know the exact spot.

Below the notch, Boone’s pace changed. He walked a half-step slower through one stretch of burned ground.

In the last hundred feet to the saddle, the wind funneled smoke down at us. I put my head down and continued to climb.

“Once we’re up,” Hollis said behind me, “I want to see which way the fire’s moving before anybody starts digging a line. If it’s coming down the fork, we start above it. If it’s—”

“You’ll want it from the crest,” I said. “The saddle shows you the top of the fork.”

We reached the saddle, and the North Fork opened beneath us. The drainage fell away in benches, subtle ledges, and the timber stood tall and dark down the length of it. The old burn’s fingers laced through the green where the first fire had skipped from tree to tree. Three columns of smoke continued to rise. Below the lowest, orange showed through the trees.

We spread along the saddle, catching our breath and looking. The back of my neck prickled. Something about the fires was wrong.

The wind poured over the crest, down into the fork, funneled between the slopes below us.

The main fire sat low in the fork, down where the draw widened, orange and eating through the timber away from us. That part was right. The wind was pushing it downhill toward the creek.

The low fire didn’t bother me. Midslope, on a bench below the second smoke, flame was showing through the trees in a line. I watched it while Hollis got his radio check done. In the time that took, the line lengthened sideways.

It ran across the slope, along the bench, holding its elevation like water refusing to run downhill.

“Torching midslope,” Hollis said. “Wind’s eddying in there. Fork’s a chimney—it’ll swirl on those benches and throw fire around corners.”

“Watch it,” I said.

“Main fire could be throwing embers,” Hollis said. “If they land in receptive fuel, those spots could link.”

That was what I would have said at Whitmore if I hadn’t been standing in it. I walked twenty yards along the crest, west, to where a rock knob changed my angle and I could see more of the fork. Boone came with me, and Hollis stayed where he was.

From the knob, the fork sorted itself into layers. I saw the low fire, the midslope bench with its sideways run, and higher, in a stand of green timber the previous Carson Ridge fire never touched, the third column of smoke, still thin and young.

“Dante.” Boone stepped up beside me, watching my face instead of the fork. “What are you seeing?”

I didn’t answer him right away because I was counting. The midslope run reached the end of its bench and stopped at a band of rock. The third smoke thickened. Beyond it, at the same elevation, in green fuel with no fire within three hundred yards of it, a fourth smoke rose out of the timber while I watched.

“Somebody’s setting fires,” I said.