Wildfire at Dawn

by M. L. Buchman

  Jeannie lowered them slowly toward the meadow above the Lodge.

  Laura remembered her radio and called out her distance to the ground.

  Jeannie set her down so soft and easy that it felt as if she were merely taking the next step down a staircase when her boots landed in the tall grass. She moved to assist each couple in getting unraveled and unharnessed as quickly as possible. Some of them were pretty unsteady on their feet, giddy on adrenaline.

  The instant she had them all out of their harnesses, she called to Jeannie. “We’re clear. Get Johnny and Tim out of there!”

  Jeannie was already climbing away when she answered, “Roger that.” Someone in the back started pulling up all of the lines.

  Laura herded everyone down to the bar. Ordered a free round for everyone and promised them refunds.

  “Don’t worry about our money,” Gus, the newlywed who’d given her the most trouble before, replied. “It was worth it for that ride alone. That was scary amazing!” The others chimed in their agreement.

  Didn’t they get it? She cried inside. There were two men out there that she’d placed in a trap with no exits! She trapped them with a promise and three little words. Had I love you! ever been more misused?

  “Nonetheless,” she kept her tour guide face on for the guests, “we’ll give you full refunds or vouchers for other outings. Or lift tickets, whichever you’d prefer. I’m sure that Johnny would be glad to identify a worthy cause to support firefighter families if you wish to turn it into a gift.”

  “Akbar the Great, you weren’t kidding.” Gus shook his head. “The guy must be six-foot-six at least.”

  She didn’t bother to correct him. No, Johnny Akbar the Great’s size was measured by his heart not his stature.

  Laura left the group discussing their grand adventure and headed to the desk to fill in Bess.

  “Heard your boyfriend rode to the rescue, sweetie.” She tapped the radio behind the desk.

  As she counted out the t-shirts all she could do was nod.

  He had. Now who was riding to his rescue?

  Chapter 10

  Akbar stared up the slope of Zigzag Canyon, analyzing. The Zigzag River, not much more a rushing stream at this point, tumbled over the boulders lining its bed. The sides of the canyon steepened sharply. He and Tim could get out that way. Maybe. Not with seven horses. They could get lifted out short haul. But not with seven horses.

  “Okay, boss. Short of slinging a lot of horses into harnesses, I don’t have any brilliant ideas.” Tim had moved over to reassure Mister Ed.

  Akbar did his best to ignore that the horse that had been rejecting him these last two months was cozying up to Tim like he was his best friend.

  The choppers could lift the horses, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was rigging a sling quickly and figuring out how to keep the animals from totally freaking out. Frankly, he couldn’t believe he’d managed to get the tourists out of there without any panic. It was all Laura’s doing. He’d expected to descend into a frantic crowd. Instead, they’d all been quietly standing by their horses’ heads to reassure them, despite the forest burning down just out of sight on three sides of them.

  Mister Ed pricked his ears downslope.

  The fire’s roar was building. Hard to estimate time, but one thing was sure, the distance to the blaze was shrinking rapidly.

  He got on the radio to Henderson up in his plane. The west was wholly impassable. They were going to let it burn for the moment. The goal was to keep the fire from continuing east around Mount Hood’s flank and taking out Timberline Lodge and the two ski areas with all of their equipment, buildings, and condos.

  “We lose another half mile and we’re going to evacuate that whole side of the mountain. That’s all the grassland I have that can burn before we’re back into the trees,” Henderson was not having a good day. “Where are you?”

  “Tim and I are down in the throat of Zigzag Canyon.”

  “In the— What the hell, Akbar? I’m sending Emily in to get you out of there.”

  “No, wait.” He’d never heard Henderson swear before. Just how ugly was it out there, outside the fire? It certainly wasn’t pretty here inside the fire.

  “I have a really stupid idea. Need you to give me the go/no-go decision. But I will say that if it’s no-go, I’ll let you explain to Laura about three tons of cooked horseflesh.”

  Then he began laying out his idea. He could feel Henderson cursing, even six thousand feet above them with his microphone turned off.

  # # #

  Laura couldn’t stand it one moment longer. Everyone had their twenty dollar t-shirts and the mood was high. Already their adventure was being shared with other guests, in the past tense.

  She headed out through the same “Employee’s Door” she’d used to avoid Grayson Clyde Masterson, their calls to come join them still ringing in her ears. This time, once she was out the back door, she didn’t circle around to the parking lot to make good her escape.

  Without thinking about it, she started out striding up the meadow behind the Lodge, past where the helicopter had dropped them. She was at a fast trot by they time she passed the base of the Magic Mile lift that could whisk her up to the ice and snow which still covered the upper slopes deeply. After five hundred feet of elevation gain at a run, she picked up the PCT. When her feet hit the trail, she was moving flat out. It was a roughshod run in her riding boots, but she covered the ground fast.

  In just two miles she came up behind the line of smokies and slowed her pace. Her trail group had been so close to making it back before they were cut off.

  What had been a smoke-clogged canyon thirty minutes earlier, was now a towering cloud reaching far past the mountain’s peak. The wind currents that whipped the peak year round were ripping the top off the smoke plume and dragging it over the peak. It was hard to tell if the glacier was blackened by the shadow of the looming cloud or if a coating of ash now covered the usually blinding white snow.

  The trail itself led through the smokies’ position and into a wall of tangled smoke and flame, both so thick it was impossible to discern one from the other in the swirling mass.

  From here, it looked like the smokies were standing right up against the flame. But as she drew closer, she could see that the distances were deceptive and a roll of the landscape made the flames appear closer than they actually were.

  Still, her feet stumbled to a halt well back of the smokie’s line. Smoke loomed above her. That wasn’t surprising except in its massive thickness. But she also saw black clouds billowing overhead when she looked up. Way up. It towered dozens of stories above them, and Johnny’s crew was moving along at the same relaxed pace they’d used while cleaning up her trees. Not relaxed, sustainable for hour after hour.

  It was an impossible world, but they worked in it. One of them spotted her and left the line to come over and talk to her.

  “Hi Laura.” It was Krista, the powerful Nordic woman. “You weren’t planning on coming any closer, were you?” She pulled out a water bottle and offered it to Laura first before taking a drink herself.

  “Nearer the flame?” she shook her head. “No. Not even another step.”

  “Good. Makes you a smart woman. It’s going pretty well so far.”

  Laura looked at the conflagration before her. “This is well?”

  “So far. Still a little early to tell. But I think we’ll be able to hold this side of the fire. Ox and Chas have already had to retreat twice. The northwest side is quite ugly at the moment for such a little fire. Glad you called it in as early as you did.”

  Laura didn’t feel so bad any more about flying out of the fire zone. If this wasn’t ugly, she couldn’t imagine something like the Tillamook Burn that Johnny had fought before they met.

  “Are they…?” She couldn’t form the question.

  “Out? No. Not yet.”

  Laura sagged. She’d actually been trying to ask if she’d killed them. Not yet was the answer there as well
.

  “But stay right here. You’ll see some serious shit here real soon.” Krista, apparently done with her break, stuffed away her water bottle and picked up the axe she’d rested on the ground while they talked. “Of course if it doesn’t work, they’ll be going into the shelters, and that would be very bad.”

  The shelters. Small foil tents that firefighters hid beneath if they were caught in the middle of an inescapable fire. That was a tool of absolute last resort. This had been her doing. She’d put their lives at risk by insisting he save her horses. No. Johnny wouldn’t take risks unnecessarily. Krista was being pessimistic, or maybe preparing her in case things went badly.

  “But we think we’ve got it,” Krista reassured her. “The ICA approved Akbar’s plan.”

  Johnny had a plan. His plans were always good, weren’t they? She wavered on the edge of being sick as the world spun. Please let his plan work. Let him come back to her and not hate her for what she’d done to him.

  “Arson is such a bitch.” Krista headed away.

  It took Laura a moment to process that and she had to sprint up to Krista. Laura grabbed her arm and spun her back before she reached her crew. “Arson?”

  Krista nodded, “Fire Marshall still needs to investigate, but after a while you know it when you see it. Somebody wanted to burn up this canyon for some reason. Gotta go.”

  For the life of her, Laura couldn’t imagine why someone would do that.

  # # #

  “Slit the t-shirts like this,” Akbar demonstrated. He pulled out his big knife and untucked the shirt from Mickey’s bridle. He slit it vertically from mid-chest down to a few inches above the hem, right through both the front and the back. Then he returned to the horse and Mickey shied away.

  He tucked his knife away, cooed at the horse, and tried again with little better luck. If Mister Ed had turned the whole troop against him, this was going to get difficult.

  “Try facing him upslope,” Tim suggested as he sliced Mister Ed’s t-shirt to match the one Akbar had cut.

  Once facing upslope, away from the fire, Mickey became more manageable. Akbar tucked the sides and top of t-shirt back into place, dragging the vertical slit wide open in front of the horse’s face. Mickey could see forward through the gap in the material, but it acted like a blinder to either side.

  He and Tim worked down the line until all seven horses were unmasked, but wore their t-shirt blinders.

  “Okay,” Akbar went up to Mister Ed. “This is about to get ugly, horse. But you and I are going to have to put aside for the moment that there’s a woman out there who loves both of us, and we gotta cooperate if we’re going to make this work.”

  “She loves you?” Tim practically shouted at him.

  “That’s what she said anyway.”

  “And you aren’t runnin’ for the high hills?”

  “Hello,” Akbar waved a hand. “Fire on every side. Nowhere to run.”

  “She actually said it out loud?”

  “Yeah, more of a whisper actually. This ear,” he tapped it and then felt really stupid. “About ten seconds before we launched her into the sky.”

  “Shit! And I thought we were just being nice and saving some horses. Love! Awesome!” Tim’s slap on his back made a thunderclap sound against his Nomex gear, startling the horses.

  “Well done, Two-Tall.”

  “She loves you. You sure she’s right in the head?” Tim was shaking his head and speaking mostly to himself. “Don’t that beat all. She got any crazy sisters?”

  “Only child.”

  “Shit!”

  “You about ready to ride? They should be ready for us in about five minutes.” Akbar needed a subject change badly, but they weren’t going anywhere just yet. Imagining Tim in love was a little too strange. Almost as bad as, well…yeah…almost as bad as imagining himself in love.

  “Small problem with your plan, Great One.”

  “What’s that?”

  Tim actually looked a little helpless. “I’ve never ridden a horse.”

  Akbar rolled his eyes and led him back to Mickey. If there was ever a horse that would make sure his rider stayed aboard it was Mickey. They lengthened the stirrups down to the last notch, it was a close thing, but it would be good enough for Tim to ride without looking too much like an oversized jockey perched atop the horse.

  Of course, he’d planned to bring up the rear on Mickey. This meant that…crap! He was going to be riding Mister Ed.

  He moved back to the head of the line to negotiate a truce with a horse that hated him.

  # # #

  Laura had a front row seat and wished she’d stayed at the Lodge and had a drink with the guests. Several. Gotten good and stinking drunk.

  Instead, she was stone cold sober, sitting and waiting. Krista had finally banished her to this boulder because she kept trying to approach the blaze in hopes of the impossible, spotting Johnny and Tim.

  Not a hundred yards ahead of her, the Pacific Crest Trail disappeared into flame. Between her and the flames, the trees and grasses were dark red with heavy layers of retardant chemicals dropped by the helicopters. It should keep any flames from escaping in her direction.

  She knew from experience that fifty yards into the flame, the level terrain took a sharp dip down into the narrow heart of the canyon.

  Right now, the smokies were beginning an attack on the fire. They were on the far side of the fire, just downslope of the Pacific Crest Trail and this time they were getting close to the flames. Hadn’t Johnny told her it meant things were going wrong when that happened? She shoved that thought aside hard.

  The smokies were felling trees away from the trail to either side as if driving a wedge sideways into the fire right down the trail. A hose team was coming up close behind.

  One of the choppers came in low overhead and dropped a load of water, some of it splashing on the smokies they were so close to the fire. Instead of dousing the leading edge of the fire, which was further upslope, they were making a beeline into the flank of the conflagration. Another chopper followed, then another and another until all five had passed overhead and unloaded in rapid succession right in line with the trail.

  Water. They weren’t dumping retardant to stop the spread of fire, they were dumping water to fight it directly.

  The smokies followed the water-soaked trail right into the fire. They felled trees that still had burning branches here and there, and kept driving forward.

  Less than five minutes later the line of choppers was back. Once again, the four smaller ones made successive water drops straight into the fire. Then the Firehawk roared in and dumped a massive load of the red retardant.

  Some of it splattered on the ground crew, but most of it protected the drenched stretch of trail.

  She could see what they were doing. It was crazy. Johnny had told her that you flanked and headed off a fire. That you never went straight at the flames. Yet here they were cutting a path directly into the inferno. It was Akbar the Great kind of crazy. It had to be him who thought this up.

  Laura looked at their progress. If she were leading the crew, she wouldn’t dare take them much farther into the woods. This had to be it.

  She wanted to hold her breath, but her heart was pounding so hard she could barely get enough air at this altitude. They were right at six thousand feet. Although she spent her days at this altitude, she slept thousands of feet lower.

  This time when the helicopters made their run, the smokies didn’t drive further in. Instead they retreated back to their starting position not a hundred yards from her.

  One by one the helicopters roared by, a bare hundred feet over her head, shot over the edge of the canyon and actually disappeared downward out of sight as they did their drops.

  Now she did hold her breath until each chopper popped back into view at the far end of its run, deep inside the smoke, but turning aside before entering the massive main plume.

  Just as she was doing, the smokies were craning their necks to
watch down the newly visible portion of the Pacific Crest Trail.

  Softly at first. Growing rapidly. A sound she knew as well as her own heartbeat. The earth pounding boom of seven horses moving up the hard trail at a full gallop.

  Riding smoothly atop Mister Ed rode Akbar the Great.

  And, hanging on for dear life in Mickey’s saddle, Two-Tall Tim brought up the rear.

  Chapter 11

  There wasn’t time for Laura to even speak to Johnny at the fire. He managed to stop the whole train of horses not a dozen paces from her perch. He leapt to the ground as she slithered down from her boulder.

  He kissed her, grinned, and slapped her butt, before turning and sprinting back toward the fire. He was on the radio before he was even fully turned away. Many men had slapped her butt. And almost every one had carried the bright red mark on their cheek of the hardest slap she could deliver.

  Johnny’s slap told her that life was so damn good that she could barely keep the feeling inside. She wanted to dance as she hugged Mister Ed’s nose. He was blowing hard with the intensity of the brief run through the close flames, but his ears were pricked forward and his tail whipped about with his pleasure at being out of the fire and with her again.

  Two-Tall clambered down, offered her a sickly smile, then chased his friend’s heels back to fight the fire.

  The horses were positively giddy as she led them back down the trail to the Lodge. In their corral she carefully tended each one, giving them all extra oats. Word soon filtered up to the Lodge that the horses were back. Her entire ride group came down to the corral, much the worse for their time in the bar. Others joined in to see the horses who had galloped through the flames. Bess must be spreading the word far and wide.

  Laura only told the story once. The tour group was much more somber when she finished her tale of what two men had done to save seven horses. She then left it to the voluble Gus and his fiancée to retell and embellish the tale.