Chapter 14 The Second Run

They came up the logging road in a line that stretched the whole length of the dark timber, and Bryn met them at the halfway bench and counted them as they passed, because counting was the only part of this she could control. Junia led, with a flashlight and a walking stick and a face like a stone. Behind her came the elderly, roped together in threes with lengths of clothesline, Mr. Lantry and his dog and Mrs. Caird with her oxygen on a hand cart pushed by her grandson. Then the families from the creek road, the mother carrying the youngest and the father carrying two duffels and a child on each arm, and the young man in the T-shirt carrying a terrier in a crate against his chest as if the dog were the only thing left in the world. Then the road crew, four men with tools, walking the edges like fences. Then Wilma Stane, who had come back for the school group after driving her van to the highway and leaving it there. Then the children, Junia's students, in twos and threes, holding hands, silent, going up the hill in the dark the way children go when an adult asks them to be brave and they decide to be brave. And near the back, Delmar Fain walking beside his grandson with a hand hovering at the boy's elbow, close enough to catch him and far enough to let him walk on his own. Bryn had been up this road in the dark an hour before and it had been quiet; now it was a river of people and the fire had a voice in it. Above and behind them the eastern sky was not yet light but it was no longer dark, and the glow over the ridge came through the timber and turned every trunk orange on one side and black on the other, and the smoke smelled of pitch and the cold ash of things already burned. A piece of ash the size of a playing card drifted down and landed on the shoulder of the woman in front of Bryn, and she brushed it off without breaking stride, and Bryn noted the way people did things without being told once they had decided to move. That was the whole trick of an evacuation. You did not manage a crowd. You gave a crowd one direction and one reason and then you stayed out of the way. "Junia," Bryn said, falling in beside her. "How did you get them up the first hill?" "I told them the truth and I told them fast," Junia said. "I told them there's a pass and a trail and a river road at the bottom and I said we are going to walk it together and nobody walks it alone. Then I put the strongest at the back and the ones who talk at the front and the children in the middle where they could hear somebody being calm." "They're quiet." "They're listening." Junia looked down the long line of them, at the flashlights bobbing between the trees. "Every one of them is listening to the mountain and to you. That's the job now. Don't waste it." Bryn walked the last stretch with them and took the count twice: forty-four, three dogs, which matched. At the pass she put Emmet and two of the road crew at the stock trail with flashlights, and she stood at the corner of the slide where the trail began and told them all the same thing one at a time as they came to her. "Keep your right hand on the rock. Don't look down. Put your foot where the person in front of you put theirs. Don't hurry, don't stop. On the other side there's more road and it's flat." The first across was Mrs. Caird on her hand cart, and Emmet walked backward in front of her the whole way, holding the cart handles against his chest, and it took four minutes and it felt like an hour, and then she was across and sitting on the road at the crest and everyone behind her saw a woman who had crossed and was safe, and after that the line moved. They were two thirds across when the fire crested the ridge. It happened faster than Bryn had modeled, which by now she had stopped being surprised by. The main body of the fire came up the west slope behind the spot fires and broke over the crest line a half mile north of the pass with a sound like water going over a dam, and then the whole ridge went orange from the pass to as far north as she could see. The heat reached them almost at once, a hot wind that pushed up the canyon of the old road and carried ash and burning needles on it, and people cried out and covered their faces, and Bryn stepped into the middle of the trail and shouted the only thing that would work. "Keep going! Do not run! Left hand up, right hand on the rock, keep going!" The last across were the children. Bryn went back into the trail with a flashlight and found the last group of them frozen at the worst place, the narrowest stretch, where the drop was longest and the rock was slick, and she went down on her knees behind the smallest girl and put her own body between the child and the open air and said, "You're on a step. It's flat. I'm right here. Move your left foot six inches. Now the right. Now again," and they crossed one step at a time, and the fire came up the ridge behind them and the ash fell and someone was crying and someone else was praying in Spanish, and the girl kept moving, six inches at a time, until Emmet's hand came out of the smoke and took her. The last person across was Bryn, and by then the smoke was so thick she could not see the far side of the trail and she crossed it by memory, hand on the rock, feet where she had put them four times already, and when she came off the trail onto the road at the crest she found forty-four people and three dogs sitting and lying and standing along a hundred yards of black road, alive, and she counted them a third time, because she was beyond trusting anything now, and the count was forty-four. But the fire was on the road. Not on their road. The road down. A quarter mile below the crest the west slope was burning now, a long orange edge advancing upslope across the very route they had to take, and between them and the river there was now a band of fire that had not been there an hour before. Bryn stood at the crest with the whole group watching her, and did the arithmetic for the hundredth time that day, and for the first time the arithmetic did not have an answer she liked at all. ---