Patty was not her mother or her grandmother or even her great-gran. They had all married their men at sixteen or seventeen and given birth well before the acceptable nine months had passed.
The one thing Patty knew for certain, being with a man for more than a time or two was too great a risk. Too dangerous. But again that bear to the honey trap; she could no more resist Fireboy than he could her.
He’d taken to doing the town food-run for both of them so that she didn’t have to leave the wilderness. On his way down the mountain, he would radio, gather what little trash she couldn’t burn, and bring back an extra twenty pounds of supplies. He never stayed away overnight, though she never let him return directly to the tower unrewarded.
If the wolves were running that night, she’d sneak him into one of the blinds she’d created along the primary trail. He’d been nervous as hell the first couple times, even after she assured him that wolves didn’t attack humans. But as they watched The Messenger through the view screen on her night-vision camera—and the female had given them little more than a sideways glance—he’d settled down. When the wolf was gone, they made love among the soft ferns with the rich smell of the forest duff wrapped around them.
“Wolfgirl!” the radio snapped at her early on a hot August afternoon.
A startled rabbit leapt and bolted from close beside Patty’s position.
The Messenger shot after it, but Patty knew the wolf would be too late.
“What?” she yelled back into the radio.
“Where are you?”
“Go away!” She began gathering her camera gear and was about to shut off the radio in frustration—the rabbit would have made a great catch and she knew how hard it was getting for the old wolf to hunt. This wouldn’t be her last season, but the end had just come a little closer.
“Where are you? It’s important,” he shouted at her.
“Head of Long Tail Creek, about two hundred yards above the western den.”
“You need to get out of there. Get up onto the ridge trail. Either get to me or get off the mountain.”
“Why?” But she heard why. She found a break in the forest canopy and caught a glimpse of a black airplane painted with orange-and-red flames like a sports car. Even as she watched, small figures dressed in yellow tumbled out of the rear and then popped open parachutes.
Two smokejumpers. Four.
The plane circled back, four more.
And a third time.
Two smokejumpers is what they sent to stop a typical small fire, under an acre. Four could beat down a half dozen acres. A dozen smokies was very bad news indeed.
A helicopter came in. Instead of delivering more smokejumpers up high, it came in so low that she had to cover her ears as it by passed overhead and continued down into the steep valley. Then there was a high whine, momentarily louder than the roaring engines and the pounding rotors, and a shower of red retardant sheeted from the sky down onto the forest in the valley far below her—but not that far.
The wind, almost undetectable down here in the trees, was brushing downslope, which would explain why she hadn’t smelled any wood smoke. Even though the wind might be washing down the hill, fire loved to climb.
Patty was a dozen scrambling steps upslope before she caught herself.
The Messenger hadn’t smelled the wood smoke either. And if she hadn’t, then the wolves in the den down below hadn’t.
It was absurd, she was human, they were wolves. But she knew them, had named and cataloged each one, knew them by their markings, their behaviors, even the half-grown pups. Of them all, only The Messenger remained nameless to her.
Another helo roared by low overhead, another sheet of red cascading from the sky.
“Wolfgirl, tell me you’re on the move.”
She wasn’t. She was frozen between escape and saving—
Patty plunged down the slope, smashing a shoulder against a tree to slow herself down when her speed went out of control, jumping over a boulder that threatened to kneecap her and landing a dozen feet below in a roll that was only broken when she tumbled into a blackberry patch. Cursing and bleeding from a dozen scratches, she circled wide below the den.
The roar of chainsaws and heart-stopping thunder of crashing trees below told that the trouble was far closer than she’d like.
Approach the den from below.
The pack was out front, agitated by the noise, but not frightened by the fire they couldn’t smell. Blackthorne the big male pacing back and forth. Mariko, the small pack’s second female—Blackthorne’s true love in Shogun—was guarding the pups, keeping them confined in the cave.
Paty climbed back toward them.
“Shoo! Move!” The massive black pack leader turned to face her but, other than a worried snarl, made no effort to move off. She didn’t dare move any closer, he might attack her in simple panic. Then she had an idea.
Patty pulled out her can of bear pepper spray. She shot the smallest squirt she could upslope and a bit to the side.
She heard a sharp Yip! from Blackthorne just as she realized her mistake. The rising heat of the fire below them was now actively pulling air downslope to feed itself. The pepper spray she’d shot near the wolf was also dragged right back down on her.
It wafted into her face.
She cried out in pain as it hit her eyes and nostrils despite her raised arm. Diving down, she rubbed her face in the soft ferns and cool earth. She screamed out the pain that even that small amount of spray had caused.
When she could finally see again, Blackthorne was gone. The female was following and several bushy-tailed youngsters disappeared with them into the brush—upslope, thank god.
She couldn’t count how many pups through her streaming eyes, so she forced her way up to the den. A lone twenty-pound pup had been left behind, Vasco by his markings—one white ear, one black—the Portuguese pilot and Blackthorne’s lone friend. So terrified that he didn’t even nip at her as she reached in to drag him out.
Patty struggled up the steep slope.
What had been a crashing three-minute descent became a brutal half-hour climb. She tried releasing Vasco, dropping him to the ground and shooing him upwards but he merely cowered at her feet, front paw raised. She saw it had a nasty cut and probably hurt too much to walk on. It would heal in the den, could be ignored in a three-footed run across level ground, but the pup couldn’t climb a steep slope with it.
She eventually became aware of two things.
The rising heat wasn’t only from her hard climb, the fire was starting to run up the narrow cleft.
The other thing was Fireboy’s near frantic calls.
“I’m headed upslope,” she answered in between raged gasps. “I have an injured pup. But the fire’s close. It’s hot.”
“God damn it, Wolfgirl. Drop it and run!”
She knew that was the smart thing, the wise thing but, “I can’t,” her voice came out as a sob and she kept struggling up the slope.
As she climbed past where the initial radio call had spooked the rabbit and The Messenger, she started scanning for the female. There was no question, she would know to run. Wouldn’t she? Patty hadn’t.
There was still no smell of smoke, just the insufferable heat.
Patty continued battling her way through the brush. The slope rose so steeply that her sore knee—she must have cracked it against something during her pell-mell descent—often banged against tree roots and rocks.
Would the wolf pup tolerate being inside a fire shelter with her? She doubted it, but they might have no choice.
That’s when she noticed her pack was gone. She’d shed it somewhere. Her camera, data, and radio were attached to her fanny pack, but all of her clothes and gear were lost somewhere in the trees and boulders. And in it was the foil fire shelter kept for true, last-resort emergencies.
A glance back over her shoulder was a bad mistake. The fire had reached the den, only three hundred yards below her, but with flames reaching hundred
s of feet above the hundred-foot tall trees. Even glancing over her shoulder, the heat was a slap on the face. And the roar, the roar was deafening.
There might have been a radio call, but she couldn’t hear it over the fire’s howl.
She turned and kept climbing though her knee throbbed at every step. The stitch in her side was so bad that she was almost weeping into the wolf pup’s fur. Every step had become agony.
Bear down, soldier! There is no such thing as quitting!
She bore down, but she didn’t have much to bear down with.
The roar and the wind peaked, slamming against her so hard that all she could do was drop to her knees and wait for it.
“Hi.”
Patty screamed as a hand touched her on the shoulder.
A man clad in yellow Nomex and a pilot’s helmet dangled at the end of a wire not a foot from her.
Patty’s gaze followed the wire upward until she spotted the helicopter hovering high above the trees, its engines even louder than the fire, the downblast shaking trees and brush.
“Steve Mercer, Mount Hood Aviation. How about we get out of here?”
She held the wolf pup closer, “I’m not leaving Vasco.”
The man swept the pup under one arm—Vasco whined nervously but accepted the transfer—and twisted a lifting ring toward her. It was also attached to the wire; he held it so that the opening faced Patty.
It was like a circular orange life preserver.
“Head, arms, and shoulders through the hole,” he instructed as calmly as if they were on a quiet street corner. “Keep your arms down so that it catches you in the armpits. Keeping them down locks you in place.”
She did as he said and moments later they were lifting up out of the trees, spinning slowly, too much like a rotisserie in the approaching fire’s heat.
Once they were clear of the trees, the helo pulled them away from the fire and she could start to breathe again. A hundred feet above the trees, the flames still reached far higher, but they were rapidly falling astern as they continued to climb up the slope.
“Emily says that we’ll drop you at the base of the mountain,” the man shouted to her.
“Can you drop us near the top?”
10
Patty curled up on the fire tower’s bunk and tended the wolf pup. Calming the young wolf let her not think about how her eyes still stung, how much her knee hurt, or quite how close she’d come to dying.
She listened as Fireboy worked the radio through the long afternoon.
The smokejumpers fought the fire in pitched battle until it was trapped and couldn’t spread either way along the valley wall. The helicopters had contained it before it crossed the ridge. The second den would be safe.
If The Messenger lived, perhaps she’d guide Blackthorne’s pack over to join the larger one to the east.
She buried her face in Vasco’s fur and wept for only the second time since that day as a young girl when she had understood the trap that her family was in. It was the day she’d determined to find a way out.
Patty had wept that first time in Fireboy’s arms as some impossible sense of loss had overwhelmed her, even if she hadn’t known what the loss had been. And now she wept because she understood that from the first time with him, what she had left behind was the Warrior Girl fighting for freedom against all odds. In his powerful arms, she was more truly herself than anywhere she’d ever been.
A long time later, Fireboy sat down close beside her, but didn’t touch her.
The sun had gone, but she hadn’t noticed.
“Is it out?” her voice was rough and still stung from the pepper spray she’d inhaled.
“Yes,” he nodded in the soft light of the small oil lamp that he’d lit. “A ground team has arrived and is making sure it stays dead. The smokies are already being lifted out by the helos. We have another fire north of Cougar Peak that they’re needed on. How’s the pup?”
She held up the long and sharp stone sliver that she’d extracted from Vasco’s pad, “He’ll heal fine now.”
“Is he like a permanent addition to the family?”
“No, I can probably reintroduce him to his pack tomorrow. I think I know where they’ve moved to.” And Patty knew she’d find The Messenger there, she just had to.
Then his words registered.
“The family?”
He shrugged easily, “Does seem to be what I said.”
As she watched his face shifted. One moment he was casual, keeping up a cool façade. The next was a wash of emotion she couldn’t even recognize, but both his hands were crushing down on one of hers.
“I thought I’d lost you. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. I couldn’t imagine this world without you in it. To never be able to talk to you again, laugh with you again, it simply wasn’t possible, but it felt so real. I could barely help on the fire until they found you.”
“Family?” she couldn’t seem to get past the word. Was family about something more than mere survival? Hers had never been.
But she could see in his eyes that she did mean the world to him. She didn’t need his crushing grip nor his eyes glistening in the soft lamplight to know that he’d been afraid to the very core. For her. Of losing her.
“I’ve never been important to anyone,” Patty told him. “Not that important.”
“I swear I almost went charging down into the fire myself to find you. If that Mount Hood Aviation helo hadn’t called that they had you, I would have. I never knew what was important—that anything could be that important to me—until I met you.”
And she could see the truth of that. He really would have run right into the fire for her.
The strange thing was, she’d have done the same for him. Without knowing how it happened, she’d discovered what family was supposed to be. It wasn’t about surviving together, it was about helping each other. Not just from a fire, but from the heart.
She raised her free hand—the one not still locked in his crushing grip—from the pup’s fur and brushed it over his cheek. How could she describe how she felt about him? How could she explain anything to someone who made her feel so important, so precious?
She leaned forward to kiss him lightly on the lips and then leaned back to look him in the eyes.
“Patty Dale,” she whispered because what could be more important than a name.
“Tom Cunningham.”
She listened to her heart and knew. Knew that this was simply right. As nothing in her life had ever been, even more than wildlife biology.
“Patty Cunningham?” She asked it softly, as much of herself as of him.
His smile was all the answer she needed.
About the Author
M. L. Buchman has over 40 novels in print. His military romantic suspense books have been named Barnes & Noble and NPR “Top 5 of the year” and Booklist “Top 10 of the Year.” In addition to romance, he also writes thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction.
In among his career as a corporate project manager he has: rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world. He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife. He is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing by subscribing to his newsletter at
www.mlbuchman.com.
Wildfire at Larch Creek (a Firehawks romance excerpt)
Two-Tall Tim Harada leaned over Akbar the Great’s shoulder to look out the rear door of the DC-3 airplane.
“Ugly,” he shouted over the roar of the engine and wind.
Akbar nodded rather than trying to speak.
Since ugly was their day job, it didn’t bother Tim much, but this was worse than usual. It would be their fourth smokejump in nine days on the same fire. The Cottonwood Peak Fire was being a total pain in the butt, even worse than usual for a wildfire. Every time they blocked it in one direction, the swirling
winds would turnabout and drive the fire toward a new point on the compass. Typical for the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California, but still a pain.
Akbar tossed out a pair of crepe paper streamers and they watched together. The foot-wide streamers caught wind and curled, loop-the-looped through vortices, and reversed direction at least three times. Pretty much the worst conditions possible for a parachute jump.
“It’s what we live for!”
Akbar nodded and Tim didn’t have to see his best friend’s face to know about the fierce wildness of his white grin on his Indian-dark face. Or the matching one against his own part-Vietnamese coloring. Many women told him that his mixed Viet, French-Canadian, and Oklahoman blood made him intriguingly exotic—a fact that had never hurt his prospects in the bar.
The two of them were the first-stick smokejumpers for Mount Hood Aviation, the best freelance firefighters of them all. This was—however moronic—precisely what they lived for. He’d followed Akbar the Great’s lead for five years and the two of them had climbed right to the top.
“Race you,” Akbar shouted then got on the radio and called directions about the best line of attack to “DC”—who earned his nickname from his initials matching the DC-3 jump plane he piloted.
Tim moved to give the deployment plan to the other five sticks still waiting on their seats; no need to double check it with Akbar, the best approach was obvious. Heck, this was the top crew. The other smokies barely needed the briefing; they’d all been watching through their windows as the streamers cavorted in the chaotic winds.
Then, while DC turned to pass back over the jump zone, he and Akbar checked each others’ gear. Hard hat with heavy mesh face shield, Nomex fire suit tight at the throat, cinched at the waist, and tucked in the boots. Parachute and reserve properly buckled, with the static line clipped to the wire above the DC-3’s jump door. Pulaski fire axe, fire shelter, personal gear bag, chain saw on a long rope tether, gas can…the list went on, and through long practice took them under ten seconds to verify.
Five years they’d been jumping together, the last two as lead stick. Tim’s body ached, his head swam with fatigue, and he was already hungry though they’d just eaten a full meal at base camp and a couple energy bars on the short flight back to the fire. All the symptoms were typical for a long fire.
Fire at Gray Wolf Lookout (Firehawks Book 8) Page 3
