Page 99 of Into the Fire

I explained what I saw. “Four starts. Separate. Strung across the slope along the benches with green fuel between them, all holding elevation and spreading on their own. Embers would start spots downwind of the main. These are upwind, and each one is further up the fork.” I pointed at the fourth smoke column. “That one’s minutes old.”

Hollis came along the crest with binoculars. He found the fourth smoke. “They’re in a line,” he said. “Son of a bitch. They’re in a line up the fork.”

Behind us the crew was quiet, even Shep.

“He’s still up there,” Boone said. “Whoever’s lighting them. That last one wasn’t burning ten minutes ago.” He turned from the fork and looked at the crew strung along the crest. “Nobody works alone. Nobody drops below the crest without eyes on them. We hold the high ground and we keep it.”

I was already looking up the fork, past the fourth smoke, at the country the line of fires was climbing into. Benches stepping up toward the head of the draw. I knew that corridor. It was the pencil line on Dutch’s map.

The crest didn’t run flat. It rose and broke and made us work. Smoke pulsed up the fork now, and the visibility opened and shut like a door flapping in the wind. The lower starts were merging into one. The upper two were still riding their benches, neatly separate.

A fifth column of smoke started to rise. “Another one,” I said.

Boone sent Hollis and the others along the rib to keep us in sight. Then we dropped off the crest above the newest fire, following the rock down into the upper fork. It gave us a way into the timber without crossing the line of fires.

The land changed around us. It was ground the first fire had skipped—spruce and subalpine fir, shade species, duff deep underfoot. It was cool green timber that held snow into June. The smoke sat lower, and I started tasting it: resin with something sweeter underneath, green wood that didn’t want to burn.

I stopped where the rib flattened onto a ledge. The fork fell away below me, benches stepping down through timber and smoke. It was the view from the first Carson Ridge fire: Dutch below me and to the left, stopped with his face turned up the draw. Looking at something. Not the fire.

“Line check,” Hollis called from the rib above us, counting heads through the smoke.

I made myself keep moving, and ten steps along the bench I quit again, because something was off about a spruce. Chest height, on the uphill side, tight against the bark. It was gray-brown and stiff. I’d have walked past it, assuming lichen or a curl of dead limb, except lichen doesn’t have a straight edge.

I walked over to it and crouched at the trunk.

“Dante,” Boone said.

It was a strip of ribbon, tied off with a knot the weather had welded, faded to nearly nothing, gone brittle. Whatever color it had been was five winters gone. The tail of it had wrapped and stuck to the bark.

I touched it, and I heard Dutch shouting my name.

“Dante!” My head rang.

Boone was at my side, close, but not touching.

“He shouted it here,” I said. “Or near here—downslope from here.” I looked down the fork through the trees. “It was this ground, Boone. He was below me on this line, and there was more after my name, and it’s—” I reached for it, but I didn’t get more.

Boone took a photograph of the ribbon with his phone and didn’t touch it. Down the fork, through the smoke, the fire made a new, more intense crackling sound. It had found fuel.

Hollis called our names low and flat.

I rose off my heels and looked upslope. Forty yards on, at the edge of what the smoke would let me see, another spruce carried another straight-edged piece of gray.

The line kept going up. So did the fires.

We climbed the line of ribbons. Sweat had soaked through under my pack straps, and the hip had settled into steady, nagging pain. Boone stayed on my shoulder. Hollis kept the others above us on the rib—Shep in the lead because Shep was fastest.

“There,” Boone said. He’d found a metal tag, small as a dog tag, nailed to a spruce, the bark grown fat around the nail like a lip closing over it. The stamping was corroded beyond reading. He photographed it, and we kept moving.

The fires climbed with us. Every time the smoke gave us an opening, I looked, and there was a new start higher up. Below us the older starts had linked, spreading across the benches and downhill with the wind.

“He’s burning the route,” Boone said, “the pencil line. He’s walking it and burning it.”

Dutch’s voice tried again. Dante! but nothing else.

Above us the draw narrowed toward its head, timber standing dark and unburned at the top, the last of the old shade the first fire never got.

Dutch had been trying to tell me something about this place five years ago. I still didn’t know what it was.