Chapter 12 Recon at Wickers Pass

They left at eight with three flashlights, two handheld radios, a compass, and the map, and they told nobody they were leaving except Junia, who stood in the gym door and watched them go with her arms crossed and did not say goodbye, because in her valley you did not say goodbye before a thing like that. You said, "Be careful," and you went back to work. The old logging road left the north end of the ballfield and climbed into the timber on the west side of the valley, and it was exactly as Emmet had said: a road in name, a trail in fact, two ruts with young fir growing up through the middle and alder crowding from the sides. The fire had not been here yet. The ground was duff and needles and the trees were dark around them, and the only light beyond the flashlights was the glow behind them and the glow to the north, two separate reds that crawled along the underside of the smoke like stains on a ceiling. Bryn walked second, behind Emmet, and read the slope as she went: the aspect, the fuel, the draws. The timber here was older and denser than the stuff that had burned, and there were springs in the draws, and she could hear water running somewhere under the duff, and those were good signs. A slope with water in it burns slow. If they could get forty-four people over the pass before the fire reached this side of the valley, they would be walking through country that wanted to fight them less than the country behind them did. It took them an hour to gain three hundred feet. Judd had wanted to come and Bryn had said no in a way that left no room, and she had left Delmar to say it again if the boy argued, and the boy had not argued. He had lain back down on the gym floor with his arm propped on a folded coat and shut his eyes, and Bryn had seen the effort it took him to look calm, and she had decided that when this was over she was going to write down what that boy had done, so that somebody besides her would know. At the top the road broke out of the timber onto a bench of open ground, and there was the pass. It was blocked. A rockslide had come down off the north shoulder at some point in the past and dumped itself across the road in a fan of boulders and broken rock a hundred feet wide, and behind the slide the road ran on up to the crest and over. Emmet stood at the edge of it with his flashlight on the rocks and said nothing for a while, which was his way of swearing. "Can we walk over it?" Bryn asked. "Maybe. In daylight. With a rope." He swept the light across the fan. "At night, with forty-four people and a kid with a burned arm, and it's all loose. You put a foot wrong on that and you start it moving again, and it's got a hundred feet of fall on the downhill side." "What's on the other side of the crest?" "Once you're over, it's the Pellmar River side. There's a road down there. Highway. If we can get to it, we're out." Bryn turned and looked back the way they had come, down at the valley, at the glow that had spread while they climbed. From up here she could see the whole shape of it, and the shape had changed. The fire had crossed the south side of the valley. It had taken the fairgrounds and the row of houses along the lower creek, and it was working west toward the road out, and the road out was the only road out and it was still full of cars because a whole valley does not empty in an afternoon. And there, small and green and ringed by black, was the ballfield with the gym on it and forty-four people asleep inside. Delmar Fain stood beside her with his hands in his pockets and looked down at his valley burning, at his own ranch gone, at the pasture where the horses had run, and he said the thing that decided it. "The slide's got a way around it," he said. "Not the road. There's a stock trail on the south side, where the sheep used to go. You can't see it because it's under the rock at the top, but it comes out on the bench above the slide and joins the road at the crest. I walked it as a boy. It'll take a horse. It'll take a person." "Could you find it in the dark?" "No." He looked at her. "But I can find it at first light, and first light is the thing we don't have, so we'd better go now and stand on it and wait for the sun." Bryn looked at the rocks and the dark and the fire, and then she keyed the radio, and after a while Junia answered, tinny and small. "Junia. We found a way. It's a stock trail around a rockslide, and it's narrow, and we're going to be crossing in the dark. I need you to get everybody up and fed and lined up at the north end of the field by three. And Junia, tell them it's a walk. Tell them to wear everything they own and carry nothing they can't hold for two hours. The fire's going to be at the ballfield edge by dawn." There was a long pause on the radio. Then Junia's voice came back with the flat calm of a person who had been waiting all day for somebody to tell her what to do and was relieved to finally be told. "Three o'clock," she said. "North end of the field. We'll be ready." ---