Page 43 of Into the Fire

We began at the beginning of the fire. Fourteen hundred, the crew’s on the south face and the fire topped out. Dutch split us at the saddle. Fellhauer and I held the south flank. Dutch took Nash and Mendoza over the top to catch the spill, and he put Dante on the crest, where a lookout could see the whole fork.

I put my finger on the south flank, a quarter mile east of the saddle, where I’d spent the afternoon.

Dante leaned across and put his on the crest.

“From here, I could see into the fork.”

“Parts of it.”

“A lot more than you could.”

I looked at where I’d been standing. There was a spur ridge between my position and the fork. It had a thick growth of timber, and by fourteen-thirty, smoke reduced the visibility.

“I had a ridgeline and smoke,” I said. I kept my finger where it was. “I’ve read my statement. There’s not one line in it about the fork, because I never saw the fork.”

“And the official report indicates that we watched the same fire.”

“I talked like it,” I said. “I was there, so I thought that counted.”

The door opened. Nash walked in. “Has either of you seen Shep?”

Before we could answer, he saw the table. “What are you doing? That’s Carson Ridge.”

“Sorting out where everybody was,” I said.

“We already did that a long time ago.”

“Apparently not very well,” Dante said.

Nash looked from him to me. He had somewhere else to be, and he stood there anyway, reading the map upside down.

“You were the fourth man,” I said. “I had the south flank. Dante had the crest. You were in the fork with Dutch. I want to ask where you were standing.”

“That’s—a lot.”

Nash took a deep breath and then pointed at the map. “Here,” he said. “Below everybody. Dutch walked the escape route ahead of us, so I was between him and Mendoza.” He moved his finger up the fork an inch. “Dutch had me closing the gap when the wind shifted.”

“When did you lose sight of the crest?” I asked.

“Fourteen forty, maybe. Smoke came across the upper fork, and that was the last I saw of it.” He glanced at Dante. “It was the last I saw of you.”

Dante had picked up a pencil, and it drifted across the draw while Nash talked. It stopped on the far slope, where the contours opened up around a flat spot partway down.

“There,” he said. “That’s where he was.”

For the past five years, the man had never had a fixed location.

“Could you see it?” Dante asked Nash. “That bit of bench across the draw.”

“In and out.”

Dante moved the pencil to the crest and laid the point down. He didn’t write anything.

We had three hands on the map, and they were far enough apart that they represented men who couldn’t see each other. Six men went up the mountain that day, and five came off. The investigation sanded their accounts down into one story.

“All right,” Nash said. He pulled a chair out and sat. “Walk it again. From the split.”

The split was where Dutch took half the crew over the saddle and left me on the south flank. We walked it again from there.