by Todd Borg
“Glennie, I need a favor.”
“Hi, Owen. Anything you want.”
“I need you to look in the archives for any articles on the Freel Peak Fire. It was fifteen years ago this week. A woman died in a mining cabin up near Star Lake. A little boy was rescued. What I need is any indication of the location of the trail up to the cabin. I need to drive up there and I don’t know how to go. Can you help me? This is an emergency.” I gave her the number of my cell phone.
“Absolutely,” She said. “I’ll get right on it and call you back in a few minutes.”
I was going around Emerald Bay when Diamond called back.
“Owen, we’ve got a report of a fire. It was started in the tall grass near where Freel Creek runs under Westwood Trail. The wind has already whipped it into the nearby meadow where it flashed into a large wall of flame. It’s now out of control and raging toward the Freel Creek Elementary School.”
“Which means the chopper has to work on the fire and not look for Street,” I said, feeling desperate even as I understood their priorities.
“Right. Sorry, Owen.”
He had to get off.
The phone rang again immediately.
“Owen, it’s Glennie. I’m very sorry, but I couldn’t find anything about any trail. There were a couple of articles on the fire. They mentioned the woman who died. But there was no mention of any mining cabin or a little boy, so maybe I missed an article. But our microfiche records are pretty good, so I don’t know what to think. I’ll keep looking. If I find anything, I’ll call back.”
We said goodbye and hung up.
I listened to the radio and pieced together what was happening as I drove into South Lake Tahoe and raced out toward Echo Summit.
As orchestrated and practiced twice during the previous week, three hundred and twenty-seven children, ages six through eleven, filed in orderly lines out of their classrooms and into buses that were streaming up Westwood Trail past the wall of fire and whipping into the parking lot. The children boarded the buses en masse and were all taken down Westwood Trail toward the state line where they were brought to the Crescent V shopping center parking lot, an area deemed safe from nearly any forest fire.
Meanwhile, South Lake Tahoe Police and El Dorado County Sheriff’s Deputies descended on the nearby Freel Creek Subdivision and were evacuating the entire area.
As I went past the airport where Arthur Middleton’s friend had accidentally started his fire, the trees opened up and I had a view across the big open valley that comprises South Lake Tahoe. A couple miles to my left rose an ugly plume of smoke. It was moving into the sky so fast that I saw dramatic movement in the tiny moment of my glance.
Four miles out of town I came to Meyers. I turned off Highway 50 just before it starts to climb up Echo Summit. I made a hard left onto Highway 89 and shot out Christmas Valley. The dogs had been riding with their heads out the rear windows, but I was soon going fast enough that both dogs pulled their heads in, shaking as if to get the wind out of their ears. I pushed the buttons to roll the windows up.
A thousand feet above me to my right, a line of cars crawled down the cliff road from the Echo Summit pass. Tourists unaware that their picture perfect vacation land was on fire.
I looked at the maps as I drove. According to the old Topo map, the trail I was looking for turned off the highway a few miles after the road began its long climb up to Luther Pass. Both the new and old maps had several elevation lines stacked one on top of the other showing a tall, steep slope coming down to the highway. The trail apparently snaked around the base of that rise.
When I came to an abrupt rise, almost a cliff, I figured it must be the spot even though there was no sign of trail from the highway.
I slowed to a crawl, pulled across the highway and onto the opposite shoulder. Roadside grass and brush obscured any path.
Where was the trail that Winton used?
I could spend thirty days looking and still not find it. And if the fire progressed as I thought, I probably had less than thirty minutes to get to Street.
Which meant that an old, overgrown trail was infinitely better than nothing.
I looked at the brush and focused on the lay of the land underneath, looking for what could have been a trail before everything grew up. Directly next to the steep slope was a reasonably flat spot, the only place that looked like a possibility. The drawback was that there was a patch of manzanita in the way and a good-sized boulder sat just behind it, no doubt fallen from the slope above or put there by the Forest Service to close the trail. I got out of the Jeep, climbed over the manzanita and stood on top of the rock to see farther into the woods.
Everything was overgrown, but the old outlines of the trail were clear. The large trees on either side of the trail were denser farther from the road. Less light from above meant thinner brush. It looked passable if only I could get through the manzanita and past the boulder.
Heavy manzanita is a maze of tangled, wooden branches so tough and dense that it is impenetrable to nearly everything except chain saws and bulldozers. Fortunately, this was a small patch and I thought I might be able to blast over it. But first the boulder had to go.
I got down on the ground with my back to the rock and pushed. It rocked, but that was all. I tried a different angle with the same result.
Archimedes said he could move the earth if he had a long enough lever. Searching the nearby woods produced a length of thin log which I dragged over and wedged between the boulder and a nearby tree. I grabbed onto the far end of the log and leaned into it. The lever action rocked the boulder, but I couldn’t quite roll it out of the way. If I had more power I was certain I could do it.
I saw the dogs watching me.
That was it.
Inside the back of the Jeep I had some nylon line I used for tying odd items to the roof rack. I let the dogs out and they ran around while I worked some knots and loops into place. When I was done I looped the makeshift harness over the boulder and stretched out the line.
“Spot! C’mere, boy.” Spot came running with Natasha at his side.
Spot and I sometimes play tug-of-war. When he gets tugging, I growl at him and he goes into overdrive, showing me time and again that my 210 pounds is no match for his 170 pounds equipped as he is with four feet and claws like studded snow tires.
I got him into position and gave him the line. We tugged and I growled and Natasha ran and grabbed onto the line in front of Spot. I growled some more and Spot growled back, startling Natasha who jumped in fear. But when she saw he was growling at me and that it was only a game, she sunk her teeth back into the rope and tugged. I couldn’t begin to hold against their pull and the rope jerked tight to the boulder. Growling louder, I ran around and leaned against the log lever.
The boulder rolled away like a giant bowling ball. I called the dogs off as the boulder dropped into a depression to the side of the trail. With the line wrapped around it, it looked like a mysterious medieval weapon flung down from above.
“Into the Jeep!” I said and the dogs, excited at these sudden games bounded through the open door, Natasha running so fast she couldn’t stop on the back seat and slid under Spot’s chest.
I backed up to gain some distance and gunned the Jeep toward the hidden trail.
We hit the manzanita fast. The bouncing and scraping was severe and there was a screech of ripping metal as the plants tore something from the Jeep’s underside. But I wasn’t slowing down to check. We got past the manzanita and dove into the dark forest.
I picked up the old Topo map again and glanced at it as we raced up the old overgrown trail. All I could see was that the mine entrance was on a steep slope and there was a square on the map indicating a cabin or building built over the mine shaft. The elevation of the mine was approximately 9500 feet, so I had over 2000 feet to climb.
Branches slapped at the Jeep and scraped its underside. I set down the map and concentrated on driving.
We bounced and jerked
through forest that was getting denser with firs and Lodgepole and Jeffrey pine all crowding each other. In places, the trail was populated with young trees. At those times I floored the accelerator and we crashed over them, bending the flexible trees to the ground and snapping off the stiffer ones. Soon, we shot up a steep rise and burst out onto a meadow. The dried grass and wildflowers of late fall were four feet tall and I had to guess at the location of the trail.
The meadow was like a sea. The grass and wildflowers flowed around the hood of the Jeep like the bow wave before a boat. I risked driving even faster and aimed for a spot across the meadow that looked like a logical place for the trail.
As the waves of grass parted before me, looking ever more like water, I concentrated on where the trail would be under the flowing grass, trying to force myself to see through the illusion.
In some ways it was like art. The illusion was stronger than the truth. Perception is reality. When I looked at the Bierstadt painting I saw only a mountain landscape when, in fact, I was looking at a photo reproduction of a canvas covered in paint.
I realized I was heading up an old, abandoned mountain trail all because I’d forced myself to see through other illusions. Winton’s cabin looked empty. Yet it contained a map book under urine-soaked sheets. Winton’s last fax had used Street’s words about the snow fleas to verify her imprisonment. Yet, I now believed that underneath them was a message saying she was held near a snowfield. Much of the case had been illusory, like a painting of a mythical place. As I drove through the large sea of grass, I had another thought, unbidden and unwelcome, and it suggested a larger, darker, venomous illusion.
I swerved as the realization hit me, an impact as sudden and shocking as if an unseen boulder had stopped us dead.
It was always there and I'd missed it.
It changed everything. I’d made some wrong assumptions and therefore my conclusions were wrong. I thought I was seeing clearly an entire landscape of human behavior. But now that I was finally looking through the image, the killer’s brush marks became visible and the illusion was revealed.
And another person was dead because of it.
I tried to concentrate on my driving, slowing as we came to the end of the meadow and bounced back into the forest, accurate in my guess for the old trail location.
The trail went up another rise which abruptly crested. We plunged down a winding path that descended into a deep broad valley. Freel Peak loomed on the other side. The dogs were thrown about as we lurched around curves. Eventually, we were going back up again, higher than before.
We climbed up a rocky slope with magnificent trees so big that they had probably escaped the clear-cutting of the Tahoe Basin back during the Civil War. I guessed that we were approaching 9000 feet. Soon, we would crest the ridge above us and be able to see down toward South Lake Tahoe. I heard clinking on the roof of the Jeep and then saw black hail falling around us. It took me a moment to realize that they were cinders, lofting in the updraft from the fire down the other side of the mountain and dropping from the sky in advance of the flames.
How large had the fire grown in the few minutes since I’d seen the smoke plume?
Mixed in with the tiny black chunks were larger pieces. Most of these pieces were smoking, leaving little smoke trails as they plunged to earth where they would, in classic forest fire behavior, start new small fires to be the advance guard for the big one coming behind.
The old trail led straight to a slope so steep there was no way to climb directly up it. I stepped hard on the brakes and the dogs hit the back of the front seats. Looking right and left I saw the switchback I had passed several yards back. The wheels dug in as I jammed it into reverse. The Jeep’s engine roared under my right foot and we shot back. Shifting again, the wheels spun and we moved forward with a short lag between inputs at the controls and movement of the vehicle.
Switchbacks force you to come to a near stop to turn 180 degrees as you crawl up a mountain. Any attempt to speed between the turns comes with substantial risk because slopes steep enough to require switchbacks are also steep enough to roll your vehicle all the way to the bottom if you should slip a wheel off the trail. I took it as fast as I dared.
The rain of black cinders grew heavier as we approached the top of the slope. The land was mostly open now with large distances between the trees. And the trees were Whitebark pines, somewhat stunted, which told me I was over 9000 feet with not much farther to go. Several small fires dotted the slope above me. I was on the lee side of the mountain, so there was no wind. The baby fires grew upslope toward the big unseen mother fire on the other side of the mountain. Behind each crest of flame was a blackened path. One of the fires was in the middle of the trail.
I gunned it between switchbacks and blasted through the flames, thankful that the rear windows were still up.
Three more switchbacks brought me to the saddle. I jerked to a stop at a view that would have made Dante pause.
Before me stretched the Lake Tahoe Basin. But instead of the crystalline blue of the lake, there was an angry black thundercloud that rose from the valley below into the sky miles above me. It was the worst sign. The fire was already so big that it was creating its own weather. The fire’s updraft had blasted into the cooler air of the upper atmosphere, creating a thunderhead that was now self-sustaining. Down the mountain orange licks of fire flashed. They looked small enough until I gauged their size by the trees they were devouring. At the present elevation of the fire, the fuel was Jeffrey Pine, mature trees 150 to 180 feet tall.
The smoke cloud shifted and revealed that the licks of flame were all part of a united front higher than the trees.
The wall of fire was 200 feet high and moving toward me fast.
I forced myself to look away. The trail stretched across the saddle to the mountain above me. It climbed up the slope and crawled along the base of a tall cliff that loomed above. In the distance was Star Lake. Below the cliff, in the near constant shade, was a large permanent snowfield.
Street’s snow fleas.
A half mile away the trail dead-ended at a small mining cabin.
Street.
I was so relieved to see her probable location.
But she was directly in the path of the fire raging up the slope from below.
I gunned the engine and raced up to where the trail ran along the base of the cliff. I’d just gotten near the cliff when a loud pop came from below the Jeep. The Jeep lurched and pulled to the side.
I knew it was a blowout. But I thought I might be able to continue on the rim in four-wheel-drive. Then another tire blew. I wondered if I’d driven over something extremely sharp. The question was immediately answered.
The windshield exploded.
FORTY-TWO
We were pinned down below the cliff, easy targets from anywhere up on the rocks.
I leaned next to the side window and looked up. The nose of Jake Pooler’s pickup peeked over the top of the cliff. It was parked on the very edge. As I scanned the palisades above us it was obvious that the rocks held a thousand places to hide. Even if I’d had a rifle I would have been unable to defend us.
The left rear passenger window exploded.
Natasha cried out. I spun around to check her. She appeared okay, just afraid. How could he shoot out the windows on the left side of the Jeep when he was up above us to the right? Then I understood.
He was shooting through the roof.
He had a serious weapon, definitely not a .22, to be able to do that kind of damage.
I had to get the dogs out of the Jeep, away from the line of fire. But if I opened the door, they would hang around the Jeep, a carnival shoot for the killer. There was only one way to get them to run away fast without coming back and that was to give them a mission. I opened the glove box and got out Winton’s baseball cap that I had taken from his cabin.
Another shot exploded the window next to me and the bullet pinged through the dashboard. I held up the cap for the dogs to s
niff. “Smell it, Natasha! Take a good whiff. You, too, Spot!” I made sure they each stuck their nose into the cap. “OKAY, FIND THE SUSPECT!” I grabbed their noses for emphasis. “TAKE HIM DOWN!” I didn’t know if a search and rescue dog like Natasha would know that command. But Spot did.
At that I opened the door as another shot plowed through the roof and took out the far rear window on the other side of the Jeep.
The dogs took off, Natasha a blur and Spot not far behind. The scent must have been strong because they didn’t even have their nose to the ground. Perhaps Winton, sweaty and nervous, had gone the same way. The dogs ran up the trail along the base of the cliff, moving so fast that I knew they were safe for the moment. It would be nearly impossible for a sharpshooter to hit such fast-moving targets.
But when they followed Winton’s scent around the side of the cliff and up onto the top where he had probably walked, they would be easier targets. It would be easy to draw a bead on them as they approached straight on and hit them from a comfortable distance. I hoped that the killer was on the other side of Jake’s truck and that it would shield the dogs from his view.
I could help by distracting him.
I jumped out of the Jeep and ran toward the base of the cliff.
A human is a much easier target than a fast moving dog. So even though the cliff was close, I ran in a jerky fashion, tracing S-shapes as I crossed open ground.
I thought the base of the cliff held cover for me, but before I got next to it I’d be an easy shot. I ran unpredictably, jerking right, then left, then more left to throw him off, my legs pumping fast. Although I heard several bullets hit the dirt nearby, I made it unscathed.
I took a moment in cover against the vertical rocks, sucking air and wondering exactly where above me he might be, when a large falling cinder landed at my feet, smoking like a fresh-puffed cigar. I looked down the mountain.
Under the angry, roiling, blackened cloud, the huge wall of fire was coming up the mountain at maybe 40 miles an hour. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled in the fire-created storm, punctuated by heavy cracks like artillery shells or Fourth-Of-July fireworks. I realized the loud cracks were the moist trunks of trees superheated by the blowup and exploding like popcorn. My eyes followed the upward movement of the flames and traced the fire’s direction.
