Cold Fire

by Dustin Stevens

  Ahead of me I could see the precipice of Mount Sheridan was less than a half mile away. After walking in silence all morning I wanted to get her talking, to put her in a better state of mind about what we might find on the other side. Doing that meant ignoring whatever inconsistencies her story contained.

  The odds were, my earlier assessment was right. Her brother had just walked off and wanted to be alone for a while.

  On the off chance that wasn’t the case, I wanted to make sure she was okay before we got there. If not, the sight of whatever we might find could push her into a state of catatonia.

  Trying to wrestle her back down the mountain in such a condition was not something I would particularly look forward to.

  “No, no,” Lita said. “New Mexico. The state.”

  “Ahh,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder at her, trying my best to appear engaged. If my memory served, less than 5 percent of the state was non-Mexican immigrants. It still wasn’t impossible that she was telling me the truth, but it was growing quite unlikely. “Nice country down that way.”

  “You’ve been there?” Lita asked, her tone a bit lighter. I couldn’t tell if she cared at all or was just going through the motions, but at the very least she was starting to interact.

  “Spent some time there,” I said, the answer not the entire truth, but close enough. “Down near the border.”

  “Hmm,” Lita replied. “We are from a little farther north.”

  Overhead, the first puffs of dark clouds started to appear. Reflexively my stomach clenched at the sight of them, the telltale sign that a winter storm wouldn’t be far behind. Set against a background sky the color of milk, they rolled in one after another, dark blobs the shade of lead.

  At the sight of them I picked up my pace a half step. The top of Mount Sheridan was just a few hundred yards away.

  “What do you guys do down there?” I asked.

  “We all work in the family business,” Lita said, matching my pace stride for stride. “I run the warehouse. My brother is the bookkeeper.”

  “Ah,” I said again, nodding my head. “Agriculture?”

  “Yes,” Lita replied. “Green chilies.”

  I grunted in response as the trail widened out. The angle of ascent diminished before us as we slowed our pace, coming to a stop on the apex of the mountain. From where we stood we had a 360-degree view of the world around us, our bodies being at the highest point for ten miles in any direction.

  Spinning on the ball of my foot, I turned back the way we had come. I swept a hand back over my head, pulling away a stocking cap, shaggy hair falling down in front of my eyes.

  There was a time I wouldn’t have dreamed of letting it get that long. Now, I had no intention of cutting it until spring, when the return of business required me to look semipresentable at all times.

  “Wow,” Lita said, the first word all morning that sounded sincere. “I now see why you didn’t stay in New Mexico.”

  A wan smile crossed my lips as I stared down at the sprawl of green stretching out from us. Mountainsides carpeted with lush pines, punctuated by the occasional riverbed knifing through it, their waters laced with white fingers from scouring over rocks and tree roots.

  “Something like that,” I said, sliding the cap back onto my head and turning to face forward.

  Up ahead, the back side of Mount Sheridan sloped away toward Heart Lake, a body of water named for the shape it took, nestled down between us and Flat Mountain across the way. I’d been there before when the water flashed bright blue beneath the summer sun, reflecting up into the sky, making it impossible to determine where one started and the other ended.

  Today, there was no such trouble. The lake sat silent and cold, the water dark gray as it remained mirror calm, casting an air of foreboding over the entire scene.

  Squeezing on the plastic clasp across my chest, I slid my arms from the pack and let it drop to the ground beside me. I unlatched my canteen from the side of it and took a long swig, passing it over to Lita as I extracted my binoculars from the side bin and held them to my eyes.

  “The coordinates you gave me were for the lake itself, which is pretty damn big,” I said, my face scrunched up behind the lenses of the binoculars. Starting on the north end of the shoreline, I swept the glasses down along the bank, scouring for signs of life.

  “So what do we do?” Lita asked, taking one more drink of water before twisting the lid back on. I could hear the sound of metal scraping against metal as she did so. A cold wind at the top of the mountain blew across our bodies.

  “Well,” I said, keeping my attention aimed on the rocky outcroppings lining the lake. “Most of the area is too rugged for good camping. My guess is he’ll set up just off the shore somewhere, where he can have access to water and fishing without being exposed to the wind.”

  A sharp inhalation rolled out of Lita, the auditory equivalent of a wince. “This lake looks to be fifteen miles across. How are we ever going to find him there?”

  Once more I noted her tone, the seeming lack of empathy in her voice. The first several comments I had written off as merely the actions of a worried sibling, but for some reason her candor was beginning to rub me the wrong way, as if the mission was more important than the goal.

  I couldn’t place how or why, but something seemed a bit off.

  “What did you say your brother’s name was again?” I asked.

  I kept the binoculars pressed to my face, my view trained on the lake below, but I could sense her staring. A quiver of tension passed through the air between us, dropping the temperature a degree or two around me.

  “Matthew,” she replied quickly. “Are you going to be able to find him or not?”

  It was a simple question, one that should not have raised her ire. As a test, she had passed, but just barely. The only thing that made me believe her even a little bit was the fact that she had not hesitated in the slightest at responding with his name.

  Halfway down the far bank, a slight smudge caught my attention. Stopping my swing south, I focused in on it, nothing more than a few quick wisps, white against a dark green backdrop.

  Smoke.

  “Can you find him or not?” Lita repeated, her voice a tad sharper than before. Again I heard the twang of her native accent, definitely ranging from somewhere on the European-Asian border.

  I kept my focus on the smoke a moment longer, lowering my aim to the shoreline where a simple blue pup tent was tucked in low between a clump of lodgepole pines. A moment of queasiness passed through me as I stared at it, lowering the binoculars away from my eyes.

  There was absolutely no concrete reason for me to feel like this entire thing had been a setup. Nothing more than a conglomeration of bad feelings and inconsistencies.

  There were fifty thousand reasons why I should just take her down and get away as fast as I could.

  “Relax,” I said. “I think I already have.”

  Chapter Five

  Overhead the clouds continued to roll in, the first gray clumps serving as a precursor to angry black thunderheads. Inch by inch they appeared from behind the peak of Flat Mountain, a tangle of multicolored tendrils, all fighting for the upper hand. With them came an uptick in the wind, the temperature plummeting. As we hiked down toward the lake, our breath became visible, little puffs of white vapor extending from our faces.

  “I don’t like the look of those clouds at all,” I said, motioning with the top of my head.

  Behind me I could hear Lita grunt a response. “I didn’t think a guide would be afraid of a little rain.”

  I felt my hands clench into fists for a moment, a natural reaction to the unprovoked barb in my direction. I waited a full moment to let the feeling subside, the animosity within me recede, before replying. “This temperature? At this altitude? That’s not going to be rain. Not by a long shot.”

  O
ur boots crunched as we walked downward, the trail that had been covered in leaves and crusted earth all morning now giving way to gravel as we descended toward the lake. My quads began to burn a bit from walking at such a steep decline, and my toes curled against the front of my boots, gravity forcing them forward.

  “He’s right over there,” Lita said. “We have time to grab him and get out before it hits.”

  Two things caught my attention. First was the way she said grab him. I wasn’t sure why, but it caught in the back of my mind, an odd word choice, even for someone who wasn’t a native speaker.

  Second was her insinuation that we could be on our way before the snows arrived. We would be lucky to get to Matthew’s camp before the powder starting swirling. Getting out would be a different game altogether.

  A handful of retorts came to mind, each a little more pointed than the one before it. One by one I shoved them back, settling on, “This isn’t New Mexico.”

  If she got my point, she didn’t let on, remaining silent as we tramped along.

  Underfoot the ground leveled out, depositing us on the bank of Heart Lake. The walking became easier; my feet slid back into their normal positions in my boots, and the pack on my back no longer tried to propel me down the mountain. Gone was any trace of the forest floor. The shoreline was made entirely of gray stone deposited by glaciers centuries before. It scraped beneath us as we went, the sound rippling out across the water.

  My watch said it was nearing two o’clock in the afternoon, though it appeared much later than that. The ominous clouds had blotted out almost all sun from the sky, casting a gray pallor over the lake. The world around us was still, void of any wildlife, any sounds of nature.

  The only sign of any life at all was the lazy curl of smoke that continued to rise into the air. I could pick up just the slightest hint of it on the breeze as I walked, the clean scent of pine wood burning slowly.

  The expanse of the rocky beach allowed Lita to draw even with me, her stride increasing in length, beckoning me to match her pace. Within a hundred yards we were almost jogging over the uneven ground, the tread on my boots clinging to any traction it could find as we went.

  “Is there a reason we’re running?” I asked as I fought to inflate my lungs with the thin air. Under the weight of my pack and winter hiking gear I could feel my back starting to get warm. My scalp began to itch under my cap, a sure sign of rising body heat.

  “He’s right there,” Lita said. “I have to get to him.”

  Again her word choice struck me as odd, though I didn’t press it. My attention was aimed at the impending storm above, on reaching the campsite and getting my tent up before the snow started to fly.

  We came up on the camp from the northwest, rounding the top loop of the heart-shaped lake and coming down toward the center. For almost a quarter mile the shoreline wrapped us out of sight from the camp, the smell of smoke our only reminder that it was still just up ahead.

  The moment the tent disappeared from sight Lita picked up her pace again, pushing us as fast as the terrain would allow. Her mouth drew back into a tight line, and the skin around her eyes pinched by the temples, obvious signs of strain.

  Sensing me studying her through sideways glances, she looked over at me and made a show of slowing a half step. She forced a lopsided smile onto her face and said, “Sorry. Just excited.”

  “Ahh,” I said, nodding as if I believed her, already counting down in my head the minutes until I could be free of her and on my way again.

  Together we rounded one last bend in the trail, coming out on a narrow sliver of beach just forty yards from our destination. On our left, dense forest pushed down off the mountainside, forcing us close to the water. On the right, the water lapped up at our feet, spurred on by the wind howling across the water, staining the rocks dark gray.

  “There it is,” I muttered, picking my way through the stone field. Beside me I could hear an audible sniff from Lita, a sharp inhalation of air through her nose, but nothing more.

  The camp was made on a rocky outcropping rising three or four feet above the trail. Formed from a single piece of limestone laid flat on its side, the stone created a makeshift shelf that protruded out over the water below.

  As campsites went, it was an excellent choice. It was elevated from, but still easily accessible to, the water. Dense forestation nudged right up beside it, providing cover and firewood.

  The trail ended abruptly at the side of the shelf and disappeared beneath it, no doubt continuing on the opposite side. I walked to the edge and placed my palms flat atop it, hoisting myself up onto my knees and scrambling to a standing position. By the time I made it up Lita was already there and waiting for me, a look on her face that bordered on contempt as she watched me regain my balance.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “Not sure,” I said, taking a look around. On the back end of the shelf was a small campsite, a two-person dome tent staked down into the earth at its center. Constructed of blue nylon, it looked like it was just a week out of the box, bright white lines anchoring it to the ground.

  To the left of it was a foldout chair made of the same blue nylon and a fishing rod with a spin reel leaned against it. A coffee pot and two pans were on the ground nearby, each made from polished steel.

  All of the items looked to be brand new and barely used, the results of a five-hundred-dollar trip to REI on the way into the park.

  In front of the arrangement was the campfire we’d first spotted at the top of Mount Sheridan, the logs on it no more than half burned.

  “Somebody’s been here recently,” I said, looking away from the fire and checking the storm as it gathered steam above us. “And there’s a good chance it was your brother.”

  My last words drew Lita’s stare, her gaze snapping over at me in a quick movement. “Why do you say that?”

  I matched the look, waiting a long moment before nodding to the fire. “The wood on there is still burning strong. It’s been added recently.”

  “And what makes you think that this is Matthew’s camp?”

  “Same reason,” I said. “The wood is arranged in a log cabin formation. Anybody who’s ever spent time in the woods knows a teepee fire burns hotter and longer.”

  “Hardly convincing evidence,” Lita said, dismissing the statement as fast as I had said it.

  “Every bit of this equipment is brand-new,” I added.

  Lita pursed her lips, considering the information. “Still means nothing. Maybe we should take a look inside the tent to make sure.”

  It was my turn to snap a surprised look at Lita, my eyes bulging a bit. “Um, no. If this isn’t his spread, there’s no way we’re going poking through some random camper’s site. That’s a good way to get yourself shot out here.”

  Though void of humor, the comment brought a smirk to Lita’s face.

  “Here, let’s try this the old-fashioned way,” I said, raising a hand to my mouth.

  “Matthew!” I called, extending the word out a full ten seconds in length. “Hey, you here?”

  The smirk slid from Lita’s face as my voice carried into the cold air, reverberating off the mountainside and echoing across the water. Her eyes grew larger and her lips curled back into a snarl, incredulity on her face.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “I . . . I thought you said that was a good way to get us shot?”

  “No,” I said, ignoring her glare, keeping my focus on the trees surrounding us. “I said pilfering through someone’s camp was a good way to get shot. Announcing our presence is a good way to bring someone into camp so we can talk to them, Matthew or not.”

  In the distance I heard the faintest sound of a stick snapping, the kind of noise caused by someone stepping down hard on it, breaking it clean in two. I trained my ear toward it, hearing as a second sound emerged, the muffled din of feet scraping th
rough dried leaves.

  “I still think we should have waited,” Lita said, staring across at me.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” I said with a shrug. “They’re on their way down as we speak.”

  Chapter Six

  Our respective attention was aimed in different directions as the owner of the campsite advanced toward us.

  I could tell by the rudimentary state of the setup, by the brand-new gear strewn about, that the camp most likely belonged to Matthew. If not him, someone much like him, a neophyte in from a major city, trying their hand at roughing it in the woods for a few days.

  There were no signs of a weapon of any kind around. No fresh meat, no boxes of shells, nothing. That didn’t mean one wasn’t nearby or on their person, but the odds were there wasn’t one at all to fear.

  Instead, my focus was on the gathering winter storm above us. The clouds seemed to be gathering in the low-pressure dip between the two peaks, swirling into an angry tangle. The wind had continued to pick up to where it was now just short of gale force. Small whitecaps were surfacing on the lake.

  The first few flakes of snow started to dart through my field of vision, flung by on the force of the breeze.

  Across from me Lita stood with her back to the camp, staring into the water. It was an odd pose for someone expecting her brother, more agitated than hopeful. Once more I reminded myself it was not my place to judge, remembering that every person dealt with family in their own way.

  The sound of the person approaching grew louder, thrashing through the forest like a Sasquatch in search of food. I lowered my gaze from the sky overhead toward the trees, already planning my next move. If this wasn’t Matthew, we were going to have to find our own place to set up camp, and fast.

  Judging by the sky overhead and the white powder gathering in the air, I gave us a half hour, an hour at most, before things started to get nasty.