Page 39 of Into the Fire

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“He was letting us figure it out.”

“He wanted to watch us figure it out. Like the door. He’d been listening to us squeak for two years.”

Boone smiled at the floor. I needed to put my glass somewhere before I sat on the arm of the chair again, and the side table was buried, so I picked up the stack of maps on it to move them.

The top one had been refolded wrongly, with a middle panel facing out instead of the cover.

It showed a long ridge running east to west; the drainage coming off the north side, cutting itself into forks on the way down.

I stood there, holding the entire stack. “Boone.”

He came over. I set the rest of the stack down and unfolded the one on top.

It was a working map. Dutch had drawn on it in pencil and two colors of pen: spot elevations circled, a shaded patch on the south face with a date from before my time, somebody’s initials next to a creek crossing, and the word BAD underlined twice on a stretch of the road we’d driven that morning.

Boone put his finger near the south face. “That’s the old Yates fire. He had us cutting line off that shaded edge in my second season.” He ran his finger across the map and stopped.

A pencil line ran down the North Fork.

It started high, near the head of the draw below the saddle, and dropped through the drainage. One line. No label. Dutch drew like that when he was recording something, not planning it.

“Escape route,” Boone said. “Or he was scouting access from the creek side.” He tilted his head. “It’s a reasonable line. High ground to the bottom. That’s how you’d take a crew down out of there.”

I looked at it and couldn’t simply nod.

Dutch briefed us on that country. Every route on that side of the mountain had been talked to death in the ready room.

If the line ran down the fork to the creek, sure. But that wasn’t the line. What Dutch drew held its elevation too long and crossed where the walking was worst. If it was a route, it was a bad one. Dutch didn’t take bad routes.

“I don’t remember this line,” I said.

“You wouldn’t necessarily. He scouted alone half the time.”

“I don’t remember it, and I was his lookout. He put me where I could see all of it.” I moved my finger down the fork without touching the paper. “If you’re taking men down out of there, you use the bottom. Everybody knows that. He knew it better than anybody.”

Boone looked at the line again. He didn’t say I was right. He walked over to Dutch’s pile of notebooks.

There was a shelf of them by the chair, spiral and board-bound. Boone brought a handful to the table, and we started with the ones that looked newest.

It was slow going. Dutch had written down everything and explained nothing.

Finally, Boone stopped turning pages. I read what he was looking at upside down before he rotated the notebook.

flagging—N fork—no job number

There was a date—early June, before Carson Ridge in July.

Boone didn’t say anything. It was a note about flagging in a drainage. There’s always flagging in a drainage. Ribbons get tied and forgotten from one decade to the next. We worked around other people’s ribbons all the time.

No job number was the sentence.

Flagging usually came with a number, and Dutch had gone looking for the number. He didn’t find it, and that was something worth noting.

“June,” I said. “We jumped in July.”

“I know what month we jumped.” Boone’s words came out short and sharp. “He had a month. He was working on this for a month, and he never said a word to me.”