The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  The fire was hidden from her now by a low shoulder of the mountain. Oddly, the sound of it seemed louder and for the first time in a long while she could smell smoke. And as she looked over the forest below her, away to her right, she saw a white swirl of it coming around the shoulder and then the wind catching it and drifting it fast and flat over the trees and toward the valley. It didn’t occur to Skye that this was something she should worry about, for by now she was surely far enough down the mountain to be out of danger. Directly below her there was a steep slope of loose rocks and she considered going down it and cutting through the trees to meet the valley lower down. But though it would no doubt be quicker, the slope looked too dangerous. Instead, she would stay high and cross over to join the valley at the top where the gullies linked up. The decision seemed to fuel her resolve and she set off again at a jog.

  It was Ed who saw her first. He had just checked in with Hank on the radio and been told that there was still no word on the helicopter and that back at base they were starting to think something bad had happened. Hank said the wind where he was didn’t seem to know what it was doing. If those goddamn thunderheads started spitting lightning, he said, all hell could break loose. Just as they were signing off, down the mountainside and away to his left, Ed caught a glimpse of red.

  At first he thought it was a deer or maybe even a grizzly, but it was too red for either. He reached into his personal gear bag for the small pair of binoculars he always carried, but when he looked through them all he could see was trees and smoke drifting across them toward that huge valley that funneled down to the river. Then he saw another flash of red and this time he saw it was a figure. He reached for his radio.

  ‘Julia, this is Ed.’

  For a few moments there was no reply.

  ‘This is Julia.’

  ‘Is Skye wearing red?’

  ‘No. Gray T-shirt, blue pants.’

  ‘Ed. This is Chuck.’

  ‘Go ahead, Chuck.’

  ‘The girl took Katie’s red T-shirt. She might be wearing it.’

  Ed didn’t have a map and it was tricky describing exactly where it was that he had seen her. He got Julia to study the map for him and from what she told him, it became clear that the lay of the land meant that none of the others yet had a view of where he had spotted Skye. She was still a long way off, maybe a mile or more. But of all of them Ed was the farthest down the mountain and easily the nearest.

  While they were talking, Skye dropped out of sight again. But Ed was sure she must be heading across to the top of the valley. He asked Julia to hold on a minute while he scanned the land with the binoculars. Presumably because it was an easier route and perhaps because it made her feel safer, Skye was staying above the trees. Maybe if he were to take a shortcut diagonally down through the forest, he would be able to drop into the valley below her and cut her off. Julia checked the idea out on the map and said that there was a creek he would have to cross just before he reached the valley, but it certainly looked possible. She said that while he did it she and the others would head down toward the top of the valley.

  When he reached the edge of the forest Ed could see why Skye had chosen the higher route. The land fell away steeply down to the trees in a six- or seven-hundred-foot run of broken shale tufted with sage and stunted limber pine. Had he glanced at the clouds or at the thickening drift of smoke above the forest, Ed might have had second thoughts. But he had run scree slopes as a boy and could remember the thrill and the part of him that was still a boy took over and without further hesitation he launched himself off the edge.

  With his first stride, it all came back to him. The trick was to go for it. The rocks slid with your boots and you had to be fearless and trust the slide and go with it. He tilted himself forward and soon he was striding like a giant, each step taking him another twenty or thirty feet. He felt like whooping but contained himself. Then, about halfway down, his foot caught in a clump of sage and he went head over heels and slithered the rest of the way on his back with rocks cascading and clattering all around him and over him.

  He came to rest at the edge of the forest and stood up gingerly, half expecting to find he had broken some bones, but he seemed to be in one piece. The world around him was blurred. Then he realized he had lost his glasses in the fall and he delved into his personal gear bag for his spare pair.

  Once he had them on, he squinted back up the slope. It looked terrifying. Even if he wanted to, there was now no going back. He was feeling a little shaken and weak and knew he had to eat something. He took out a power bar from his pocket and ate it, looking around him to get his bearings. He was sheltered from the wind down here but he could hear it rushing in the treetops. He looked up at them and was just registering how low and black the clouds above them seemed, when the air around him cracked asunder in a searing flash of white light. Ed shielded his head with his arms and dived to the ground. And there he stayed, curled like a fetus, until the shock subsided and his heart started beating again. He sat up.

  ‘Holy shit,’ he said.

  It was the nearest he had ever come to being struck by lightning and he threw back his head and laughed out loud in some crazy mix of defiance and relief that he was still alive. Where exactly it had struck, he couldn’t see. Maybe it was somewhere higher up the slope.

  He had just gotten to his feet when he heard Julia calling his name on the radio. He tried to reply but she obviously couldn’t hear him because she just kept saying Ed, do you copy? over and over again. Maybe he’d damaged his radio when he fell or possibly the lightning had damaged it. He shook it and banged it but still he couldn’t make himself heard. Whatever had happened, it was no time to be hanging around. He holstered the radio, checked his compass and walked into the forest.

  The going was tougher than he’d hoped. There was a tangle of blowdown and a thick undercanopy of huckleberry and sometimes he had to take detours from the direction he knew he should stick to. And all the while the wind whooshed above him in the treetops. There was a smell of smoke but he thought it was still only the smoke from the fire across the mountain. Then, all of a sudden, he heard a sound that told him it wasn’t.

  It started in a low roar and grew steadily louder, like a train thundering toward him through a tunnel. And Ed knew at once what it was and he felt a first jab of pure fear. He peered to his right through the pillared ranks of trees and saw nothing, not even smoke. Then he heard the first tree explode and then another, and he felt the fire’s heat and knew that it was close and coming closer at great speed. He started to run.

  Julia didn’t see the lightning strike but she heard its hellish crack and its echo rolling like fearful gossip across the mountain. Then, as she climbed out of the gully that she was following and got her first full view of the forest, she saw a small patch of fire among the treetops that even while she watched began to spread like a cancer of flame. And as if by some converse law of reciprocity she felt a cold dread multiply within her.

  She was already having to fight hard to keep panic at bay.

  Her rational side was still in control but only just. And when she saw the fire and realized that Ed was somewhere near it or, heaven forbid, beneath it, the animal in her almost won, but she kept its silent howl within her. She could scarcely believe it was happening. Until just a few hours ago, everything had been golden. How could the world so suddenly have betrayed them?

  She tried calling Ed again on the radio and could hear Connor and Chuck trying too. But still there was no reply. She called Connor.

  ‘Connor, do you see the fire down there?’

  ‘Yeah, I see it.’

  ‘That’s where Ed is.’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t worry. He knows what to do.’

  His voice was calm and clear. He asked her how far she was from the head of the valley and she told him that she could see it and that it would take her about five minutes to get there. Connor said he should be there in ten.

  Neither of them could see into the
valley yet, so nor could they see Skye. Julia signed off and started to run.

  As soon as Connor saw the valley open up below him and saw the fire away to the right moving steadily toward it through the forest, he knew exactly why this place had made him feel so uneasy. And he was sure there were other smoke jumpers on the mountain who had seen the valley from the plane and had the same thought but not wished to utter it. Every smoke jumper in Missoula, every smoke jumper in America, knew what had happened all those years ago at Mann Gulch.

  On August 5,1949, just a hundred miles from where they now were, thirteen smoke jumpers had died when a fire chased them up a drainage very like the one Connor was now looking at. A long-overdue monument to their memory had only recently been erected at the base. The details of what happened at Mann Gulch were etched in every jumper’s mind. Just like here, there had been a river at the bottom of the drainage and the geography had conspired to create its own wind so that the valley acted like an immense chimney sucking the fire up it in a rolling explosion of flame faster than any man or beast could ever run.

  Connor had already called Hank and told him what was happening and Hank had sent out an emergency call for helicopters to evacuate them. He told Connor meanwhile to get everyone away from the drainage and back up into the black where the earlier fire had passed through, or, if that wasn’t possible, into rocky terrain where the fire would have less fuel. It was common sense and Connor didn’t need telling.

  There was Julia below him now, heading down into the valley and there, way below her, was Skye, her red T-shirt vivid against the flaxen grass. The fire was directly to the girl’s right and moving in fast. Connor guessed it would take fifteen minutes to reach the valley, maybe less. And somewhere, in that burning forest, was his best friend.

  Connor scrambled down the slope as fast as he could, stumbling on loose rocks and snagging himself in the scrub. He pulled out his radio and kept going as he spoke.

  ‘Julia, this is Connor. You mustn’t go down there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn around and get out of the valley.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I can see her. She’s right below me.’

  ‘Julia, this is Chuck.’

  ‘I hear you, Chuck.’

  ‘Connor’s right. Don’t go down there. Once the fire gets in there, it’ll come racing up toward you. I’m getting Katie out of here right now.’

  Julia was staring back up the mountain at Connor. He wasn’t near enough to see but he could imagine the anguish on her face. Then she looked down the valley again and above the rush of the wind he could just hear her calling Skye’s name, again and again. But if the girl heard, she gave no sign. She just kept hiking down the valley. Once more Julia looked back up toward him and Connor knew she was deciding and knew also which way it would go. And sure enough she turned and started to run down the valley, calling to Skye as she went.

  Connor yelled for her to stop and said the same, as calmly as he could, over the radio. But she paid no attention. And now he was running, leaping over scrub and rock, with stone and debris avalanching with him, his eyes darting from where he trod to Julia and Skye and from them to the advancing fire.

  And, to his dismay, he now saw that the fire was starting to crown. The top of a flaming tree separated and lifted itself like a torch clean out of the fire and flew ahead with the wind to start another fire in the unburnt trees. Suddenly the sun found space among the clouds and the valley was riven with a band of shadow from the smoke that drifted over it. Julia was in the shadowed part but Skye in her red T-shirt was beyond it and for a moment she was bathed as if in some biblical painting by a shaft of golden light.

  And hurling himself down toward this place of doom and devastation, Connor prayed out loud that Ed, wherever he might be, had found some haven and that all of them would live.

  Ed’s first thought was to head downhill and get below the fire. But the forest floor seemed to flatten and the fire seemed to be spreading as fast in that direction as it was elsewhere. Then he thought of heading back up to the scree run but concluded the fire might head him off, so instead he turned south again and ran as fast as he could toward the creek that Julia had told him about.

  He could hear the fire rampaging behind him and the roar as tree after tree torched and the boom of sap exploding. Sometimes the fire seemed to accelerate and gain on him and although he didn’t look back he knew that this was when it found a stretch of scrub or a patch of dried-out huckleberry. By the time he reached the creek he could see the flames only fifty yards behind him and could feel its heat, raw and intense, surging like a bow wave before it.

  It was both more than a creek and less than one. What water there normally was had long dried into its bed of boulders. But its northern bank was a sheer cliff of about forty feet upon whose rim Ed was now standing, acutely aware that each second he hesitated might be the one that cost him his life.

  His first thought was to clamber down it but the cliff face looked loose and treacherous and the rocks below unforgiving. There were dead trees down there too that had toppled down the cliff. Their branches bristled like spears. Ed had a rope and though it wasn’t long enough to get him all the way to the bottom, he figured that he’d be able to jump or scramble the rest. He pulled the rope from his bag and looked for the best place to tie it.

  All but one of the trees stood back too far from the edge. If he roped it to any of them he would be wasting fifteen feet that he couldn’t spare. The only alternative was the tree that leaned perilously from the very edge of the cliff, as if contemplating the leap that its old neighbors had already taken. Half its roots were exposed to the air but when Ed leaned against the trunk, it seemed stable enough and with the fire booming and crackling only thirty yards away now, he had no choice. He threw the rope around it, made it fast and maneuvered himself out over the edge.

  He had barely begun to rappel down when he heard the crash. It was directly above him and as he looked up he was showered in sparks and flying embers. He ducked but managed to keep his grip on the rope and when he looked again he saw the base of the tree was wreathed in flames. The crown of another tree had flown ahead of the main fire and landed there. The rope was already burning. He loosened his grip and let it run through his bare hands and felt it searing his flesh as he spiraled down, with flaming fragments falling with him.

  But the tree to which he was tied was tinder dry and the fire hot and hungry, and it ate the rope faster than gravity could take him down and when he was not yet halfway, the rope melted and snapped. Ed lunged and clawed with both hands at the cliff face but the rocks crumbled under his fingernails and all he succeeded in doing was to flip himself over so that now he was flying facedown like a chuteless sky diver.

  The fall lasted no more than two or three seconds, but each seemed stretched to a small eternity. He watched the ground swirl slowly into focus below him. He heard his radio crackle and Connor calling his name again. He noticed the beards of lichen on the rocks and the smoke curling from the fallen embers among them. And the last thing that he saw and would ever see was a red butterfly lifting from the spear branches of the dead tree and fluttering away.

  Julia was running as fast as she could down through the long white grass. She kept shouting Skye’s name and her voice was beginning to crack and she knew anyway that it was pointless because even as each cry left her lips it was swept away on the wind and lost. Above the unburnt trees that topped the right-hand ridge of the valley a column of smoke reared like a writhing black dragon, its belly undulating and mottled with the orange glow of the fire. Skye, not more than four hundred yards below her now and running too, kept glancing up at it and once in doing so she tripped on one of the smaller boulders and fell headlong but scrambled to her feet and kept running.

  ‘Skye! Skye!’

  So far the girl hadn’t once looked back and she didn’t now. Perhaps she didn’t even know that Julia was there behind her. But now suddenly she stopped in her track
s. All as one, with a boom that seemed to shake the whole mountainside, the trees along the right-hand ridge exploded into flames. Julia also stopped and for a few moments the two of them stood transfixed. Connor was calling her on the radio.

  ‘Julia, stop! Turn around. You haven’t got time.’

  She looked back up the slope and saw him hurtling down toward her in long strides. He was a hundred yards away and gaining fast. She turned back and saw that Skye had at last seen her. Julia waved to her, signaling to her to come back up the slope and Skye stared at her for a moment then turned to look back down the valley and at the burning trees then again at Julia.

  ‘Come on, Skye! For godsake, come on!’

  The grass below the trees had caught fire now and fanned by the wind the flames were spreading in diagonal lines into the valley as fast as if they were following trails of gasoline. And above them now the tops of two flaming trees and then a third lifted off and flew like comets across the black backdrop of smoke down into the middle of the valley. They came to earth only twenty yards below Skye and cartwheeled as they landed, sending showers of sparks into the grass.

  Skye took one look and immediately turned and started back up the slope. At last, Julia thought. At last, thank God.

  Even as he ran, Connor knew there was no way they could get out of the valley in time. He could see the wind whipping the fire that had been started by the flying crowns, driving it up the valley toward them. The place was exactly like Mann Gulch, he thought, just one enormous chimney. He could feel the searing blast of heat on his face. The girl was going to die. But there was a chance, just a chance, that he could save Julia.

  She was only twenty yards ahead of him but, damn it, now she was off again, running down toward Skye. The slope was steep and the poor girl, three hundred yards below, maybe more, was stumbling as she tried to retrace her steps. Behind her now the three fires had become one and, sucked by the wind, the flames were raging through the grass and closing on her fast. Connor knew there was no hope for her and none for any of them if they tried to help her.