Page 28 of Into the Fire

I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed on the trail at Whitmore Creek, but Carson Ridge had joined me.

“—the shelf, or is it—” Shep was saying. “Dante.”

I didn’t answer him.

“Dante.”

Boone crossed the line to me. “What are you seeing?”

I forced my mouth to work.

“Crown run past the band of rock, moving down the draw, into the wind.” I said it all in order. “It’s not one torch taking a neighbor. It’s running in a specific direction, and that is against everything on this slope. The wind and slope would take the fire uphill. The run’s going down.”

Boone turned and looked.

The run was still moving, ragged now and slower, but it hadn’t changed direction. The flames walked across treetops downhill, upwind, with the smoke streaming back over the ground it had already burned.

Hollis stood on the trail with his head tipped back. “I see it,” he said.

“I see it too,” Shep added in an uncertain voice. “But what am I seeing?”

Just then the run shifted as if someone had thrown a switch. Crowns burned out, and the fire dropped back to the ground on the shelf. Boone was in motion.

“Off the line. Everybody on the trail. We’re re-anchoring off the creek.”

Nobody had to be told why. The line we’d cut all afternoon was built on the assumption that the fire would move uphill. A crew standing below and beside it would occupy a safe zone. Ten seconds of treetops put that in doubt.

Whitmore, having ruined our afternoon, behaved beautifully after that. The shelf pocket burned itself flat and sat in its own smoke. The ground fire went back to doing what it was supposed to do, and the wind gusted when the forecast said it would gust.

A helicopter flew up the valley and worked the head of the fire with a bucket. By early evening, a ground crew was hiking in off the county road to pick up what we’d built. Whitmore Creek would be listed as a routine initial attack with a good line around it and one hour inside it that nobody could explain.

We waited while Boone briefed the ground crew boss.

Hollis looked up at the dead run, a stripe of scorched crowns along the shelf, plain as a brushstroke. He started working through what we saw out loud.

“Terrain-fed wind,” he said. “A draw above the band of rock that we can’t see from here, channeling something downslope.”

I sighted along the shelf with him. “Draws that size don’t stripe crowns for eighty yards. They swirl. That run had a direction.”

“Spotting along the shelf, then. Enough spots close together that it would read as a run.”

“Spots scatter downwind.” I nodded at the smoke, still leaning obediently with the wind. “That’s downwind. The run went the other way.”

Shep looked from face to face, waiting for the adults to produce the answer, and it wasn’t there. I watched him understand that the strangest part of his afternoon was going to stay strange.

Looking at the timber in the evening’s last light, I made the obvious connection.

“Carson did that.”

“I know,” Boone said.

He’d seen it too. Whatever it was, it had two witnesses now who’d also been on Carson Ridge.

We handed off the fire to the ground crew, gathered our gear in the meadow, and started down toward the creek and the road. Boone dropped back beside me where the trail narrowed, and for a full switchback neither of us said anything.

“How’s the body?” he asked.

“Asking for professional reasons?”