Looking for the Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  “Yeah, sorry. This is Tess. You’re Jack…” she left it open as a question.

  “That’s Gray Wolf Summit to you. Over and out.”

  Well, if that didn’t beat all. A guy with a decent sense of humor.

  5

  Jack left the radio on, though he had no intention of replying.

  Not a sputter or a squawk came in.

  Clarie had talked about how sweet Tess was; all alone in her tower summer after summer. Mitch’s expression had been less forgiving about why she was alone. Princess in a tower or bitch on a rock? He was gonna side with Mitch on this one.

  Jack had only one bar on his cell phone off some distant tower. Claire had told him there was reception, but this was sad. It flickered briefly up to two bars which he found ridiculously encouraging. It made him feel at least somewhat connected. He called Burt to say he’d arrived and wasn’t—as his buddy was kind enough to predict at length over their final couple beers last night—ready for immediate evac.

  Jack had stayed several beers later than he’d intended; he’d sure enjoyed watching the bartender. Long blondes were generally more trouble than they were worth, but this one had been something special. Not just her figure—which had been decidedly athletic in those tight jeans and cowboy shirt untucked with the tails tied across her flat belly—or her shower of blond hair.

  What had really caught him was the combination of an absolutely no-nonsense attitude, yet how easily she laughed and joked with the patrons. It didn’t look like a sham, even if it had coaxed an extra ten-spot out of his pocket when Burt left the tip. Lady like that, who looked like that, wasn’t gonna be interested in his down-and-out sorry self anyway. Especially not the night before he left for five months to serve a sentence in solitary.

  His lookout tower was an all-in-one cabin in the sky. His toilet was a wooden outhouse fifty feet downslope from his tower. At the top of the tower’s thirty-seven steps was a fourteen-foot square box surrounded by glass and topped by a radio antenna and a big-ass lightning rod.

  Lightning, hadn’t thought about that one.

  Or the heavy guy wires that stretched out to every side, bolted into bedrock, to keep what must be titanic winds from wiping his temporary home over the cliff and into the valley that was freakily far below.

  He’d had the mandatory couple days of classroom training, but the place was still a goddamn mystery. Mitch had planned to hike in with him to show him the ropes, then he’d sprained his ankle in a game of pick-up ball, so Jack was on his own.

  The big two-foot disk of the Osborne Fire Finder stood on a pedestal in the middle of his tower cabin. It had a circular map of the area and a pair of sights mounted on a ring that spun around it.

  He studied the map, which covered an enormous area and began picking out landmarks.

  East and West Goat Mountains.

  Sugarloaf Peak.

  Como.

  The Lonesome Bachelor.

  Yeah, there was a good joke. Corporal Jack Parker (U.S. Army retired) who’d found a job staring at trees. Sure wasn’t going to find anyone to cuddle with up here.

  Clarie and Mitch were at the dead end of a long, tough trail that only connected to the lookout tower. Last year they’d had three visitors, total. One had been the mule train supplier who’d delivered their stock of goods.

  Medicine Point Lookout.

  Cougar Peak.

  Tess Weaver. He spun the Osborne until it lined up perfectly on the map and then looked through the sights. Once he was sure he knew which peak it was, he grabbed for his binoculars.

  His closest neighbor, fifteen miles away. Even the big glasses that Mitch had loaned him barely resolved the lookout tower as separate from the rocks.

  Which was just fine.

  Didn’t need her anyway.

  6

  Jack was surprised at how quickly the days become routine. He rolled out with first light. Hauled up a gallon or two of water to get him through the day and made a quick breakfast of oatmeal and maple syrup with hot chocolate as the sunrise lit the horizon with a thousand shades of pinks and yellows.

  After the sun broke the horizon, he’d go for a quick trail run. Didn’t need to go more than five K to work up a good burn. No sweat, it evaporated in the high, thin air, but his muscles and the salt stains on his t-shirt told him he was working it hard on the steep and rugged grades.

  Each morning held some surprise. A family of gray squirrels, a doe picking her way ever so delicately through the undergrowth, a bear who had surprised the shit out of him.

  He’d rounded a sharp bend in the trail, circled around the next boulder, and almost run head on into the bear. His squawk, her furry roar of surprise, and they both instantly headed back the way they’d each come. He’d practically levitated back to the tower, not breaking from a dead sprint for almost a thousand feet of vertical gain. He’d sat and laughed at himself, wondering which of them had been more surprised, but only after he was in his tower and had the trapdoor closed and bolted from the inside.

  Then there was the daily radio routine.

  Nine a.m.

  “Bare Cone Lookout in service. No smoke.”

  “Spot Mountain in service. No smoke.”

  “Cougar Peak in service. No smoke.”

  Then it was his turn.

  He hadn’t spoken directly to Cougar Peak since that first time, but he liked the sound of her voice. Efficient, clear, and well practiced.

  Fifteen minutes later he’d stumble through his peak weather report: percent cloud cover, high and low temperatures, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation, and so on. He was always forgetting one item or another, even though it was listed right there on his log.

  Tess Weaver was a machine, rattling it all off in half the time, almost in a single breath, in that totally female voice of hers that was teasing him across the airways. Probably one of those thin desiccated fifty-year olds.

  Nine a.m. to six p.m. and they were done. Fires peaked between noon and four when the sun dried out the foliage and the midday heat led to stronger circulating winds. By six, the worst of the day was over.

  Except so far there hadn’t been anything at all.

  Routine broke on the ninth day of his first tenner.

  Nine days and there hadn’t even been a cloud. He’d run out of guys to text; they were either out of the Army long enough to have busy lives, or they were still soldiers and had even less to say to someone gone civvy.

  He’d already read all five books he’d brought, twice. Definitely got to get more during his days off. Maybe some movies, but then he’d need another solar charger, a player, and a bunch of disks because wi-fi on top of the mountain peak, not so much.

  “Dispatch, this is Cougar Peak. I have a smoke at three-sixteen point four degrees, approximately fourteen miles. Gray Wolf Summit, can you give me a cross? It might be behind a ridge for you.”

  Jack felt as if he’d just been electrocuted.

  He looked down at the map. Three hundred and sixteen degrees from Cougar Peak. He rested his thumb on the mileage scale. About a thumb width and half for fourteen miles. That put it almost due west of him.

  Grabbing his binoculars he hurried to the window. There was an awful lot of country out that way. The next road or town in that direction was Moscow, Idaho a hundred miles away—the great trackless waste of central Idaho.

  “I don’t see it,” he sent after the first couple minutes of searching.

  “Try looking closer to you,” Cougar’s voice came over the radio. She didn’t follow that with, “Common beginner’s mistake is looking too far away,” which he appreciated.

  It was…Holy Crap! The smoke was just one valley over. A thin pillar of white smoke wandering lazily into the air.

  “I got it!”

  “Okay,” Tess teased him. “Take a breath, B
ig Bad Wolf, and shoot a cross sight so we can triangulate a fix.”

  He lined up the Osborne, “Two seven three degrees. Dead on.”

  “Roger that. I make it fourteen point three miles for the cross. Down in the guts of Loco Creek. Your fire.”

  Jack held his radio with both hands because he needed to hold something to keep his hands steady.

  “What do you mean? You spotted it.”

  “It’s in your territory.”

  His first fire and he got to name it. “How about Harold?”

  The laugh that came back over the radio was musical and bright. It shocked the hell out of him. Who knew Cougar Peak could laugh like that. “The name is supposed to relate to the topography. And sorry, my end of Loco burned last year so I already used the obvious name.”

  “I knew a pretty crazy dude named Harold once.” He had a tendency to not bother with body armor and Jack had seen him more than once walk through a hail of bullets unscathed as if he were untouchable. “How about Crazy Creek Fire? You sure that’s not just someone’s campfire?”

  “There’s been no lightning, so it actually was someone’s campfire. There’s only the one smoke, so it’s probably not a pyromaniac. Except it’s not a campfire anymore. When you can see that much smoke, it’s already dug in and burning. Dispatch, we’ve got the Crazy Creek Fire, credit to Gray Wolf, I’d call it at an acre and growing fast. Just at the end of Forest Road 328-Alpha so watch for a camper or car racing to get off the mountain though they’re probably long gone.”

  “Roger that. We’ll get an engine out there to give it a look. Well done. Out.”

  Jack still felt giddy with adrenaline. He really needed to share it with someone. In the Army there’d always been the other guys in the MRAP that day or the CHU that night. He thought about calling Burt, but he wouldn’t really understand.

  Something had him picking up the radio.

  “Hey, Cougar Peak?”

  “Go ahead.”

  How did you boil such a feeling down into something that could be transmitted through a radio? A feeling as if he’d made a difference. Not just trucked teams back and forth across some section of hell as a living target in a massively armored vehicle, but might actually be saving some forest, even lives.

  “Uh, thank you.”

  Her voice was soft when it came back over the radio, “You’re welcome, Mr. Big Bad Gray Wolf. And welcome to the Freaking Forest Circus.”

  Ha! That was perfect. He was being paid to sit and be bored out of his skull. But in one instant, he’d jumped from useless to really helping. A circus act indeed.

  “Roger that, She-lion.”

  She clicked her transmit button in acknowledgement but didn’t speak again.

  7

  Tess wasn’t sure how it had begun.

  They’d talked at different times as the number of fires increased with the deepening season. When he spotted his first one on his own, she thought he was going to have kittens. It juiced him up something wild, reminding her of the joy in her first season—a feeling that hadn’t diminished with time. It was grand to hear someone else who felt that way.

  He settled well into working radio relay for the hand crews too deep in the canyons for their bosses to hear. Even on the Colgate Fire—which he’d named for being along Crest Creek—when there were six lines of madness going at once, he handled the radio fine. The airshow on that one had been impressive, huge air tankers lumbering by their towers just a few hundred yards straight out the windows. Helicopters painted black and fire-red whirling through the valleys and ridges. The airborne incident commander circling high above in his plane too busy to keep up with the ground relays. A fine piece of radio work, more than she’d have been able to handle on her first season.

  So, the man had both a sense of humor and skills. Probably had a wife and kids down below that he only saw every other weekend. A couple times she came close to asking, but stopped herself. The Forest Service frequency was about business and—

  “Hey, Cougar Peak. You there?”

  “This is Cougar, go ahead Gray Wolf.”

  “Wanna dial up four tenths?”

  “Sure.” After six p.m., they were off the clock unless there was an active blaze close by.

  They re-tuned their radios to a frequency off the Forest Service frequency by zero-point-four megahertz. And as the evening waned, they talked about nothing for half an hour before going to sleep with the sun.

  On another night he asked, “You play chess?”

  “Sure, but I don’t have a board up here.”

  “Bring one after your next break.”

  And she did. They played radio chess through much of June and the fires of July.

  Their three days off every two weeks never matched, so they were connected only eight work days out of every fourteen.

  A couple times she almost hiked into Gray Wolf Summit on her days off, but she didn’t want to ruin the illusion.

  The time in July when her substitute couldn’t make it because of car trouble, she gladly skipped the luxury of a city shower and a couple nights at her mom’s place in order to stay in the sky and talk to Jack the Big Bad Gray Wolf.

  “Tell me about you out in the world.”

  That stopped her.

  “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Big secrets?” he teased.

  “It’s not that.” If not, what was it? “I don’t want to think about those months. These months are the ones when I’m myself. This is where I belong.” Which was true…and a total lame-ass evasion. I don’t want to spoil the illusion.

  She’d had plenty of relationships, with the usual good-bad ratio. Nothing that stuck. Nothing that felt as real as when she sat in the sky and looked down on the world made of forest.

  “What do you look like, up there in your Cougar Tower? Give me something to go on.”

  “Sixty-five, round as a washtub, with bottle-red hair, and those stretchy pants in bright paisley green. You?”

  “I’s jes a bow-legged old cowhand, Ms. She-lion. Thas all I be.”

  “Your cowboy accent sucks.” But still it made her laughter echo about the tower.

  “What? Did I sound human there for a moment?”

  “No, it wasn’t that bad.”

  During the day, they were all business on the Forest Service frequency. But at night she sometimes fell asleep listening to him talk about his day, not that it was all that different from hers, but she liked to hear about it anyway. He didn’t push again about the outside world as July rolled into August.

  It was the crash that woke her with a shout of surprise. She’d slept down in the lower cabin that night, though she wasn’t sure why.

  A moment later, a blinding light filled the cabin brighter than daylight. An instant later, another flash. In the same instant, a deafening boom of superheated air as it was torn apart shook the walls hard.

  There was no point counting seconds, the flash and boom of lightning and thunder were wrapped around each other like crazed lovers gone wild in the dark of the night. Instead she counted strikes, losing track around forty-seven. The tower and the peak were struck as if by a hailstorm of billion-volt hammers of Thor.

  When it tapered off, she edged up to a window. The cool night air slipping over the windowsill reeked of ozone.

  She’d ridden out some bad storms, though nothing like this. She remembered the terror of the first time a strike had hit her tower while she was in it. And that had been a single strike; this was a seriously wild.

  It was rolling north, straight for Gray Wolf Summit. He didn’t have a ground-level lower cabin like hers, his tower was his cabin. Jack was going to be right in the thick of it in a minute.

  “Jack!” she shouted over her radio. “Jack! Wake the hell up!”

  “Huh, what?”

  “There’s
a lightning storm heading your way. Bad one! Do not try to leave your tower. The lightning rod and guy wires are your best protection. Lie on the wooden floor. Get off your bunk and don’t touch anything metal. You got that?”

  “Got it. I’m under the Osborne table and—” There was an unholy crash over the radio at the same moment she saw the strike from across the fifteen miles.

  His scream was one of the most horrific sounds she’d ever heard.

  Not surprise. Not fear. Stark terror.

  She cried out his name, but there was no answer.

  It would be impossible for him to hear under the storm of multiple strikes piling up on him.

  No sound but that one scream and the crash of thunder. Fifteen seconds later, the muted roll that was only now starting to reach her through the fifteen miles of ozone-laden air that separated them.

  Somewhere in the middle of it he transmitted a garbled message degraded into unintelligibility by the thunder on his end. It sounded like barely controlled panic. He might have shouted for her to keep talking. Actually, it hadn’t sounded so controlled.

  So she did. Shouting messages of comfort for fifteen seconds, listening for five. Shouting again.

  Her voice grew hoarse, but she didn’t stop.

  Not even to wipe at the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  8

  Jack heard a voice somewhere. Far away. Calling him back.

  Starting and stopping.

  Calling to him until he came to.

  He’d gone fetal on the floor of his lookout cabin. Cradled to his chest was a radio—it kept calling to him.

  A woman.

  Cougar Peak.

  He managed to double-click the transmit key during her next break.

  “Oh thank god! I thought you’d been incinerated or something.” Her voice was thick, hoarse…as if she’d been shouting for a long time.

  “How long?” his voice sounded even worse. The mere whisper hurt like hell.