第13章 The Old Logging Road

They waited on the bench above the rockslide for the sun, and the waiting was worse than the climbing. The fire was doing everything Bryn expected and nothing she could use. It had taken the south side of the valley, and it was working west along the lower slope, and it had begun to climb the west wall where they stood, slowly, in the draws, feeling its way up through the timber with the patience of something that knew it had all night. Twice she heard it crown somewhere below them, a single tree going up with that flag-snapping crack, and twice she saw the light of it come through the trunks and lay itself across the ground at her feet. The smoke had thinned and lifted and the stars were out overhead, hard and cold, and that was the worst sign of all, because stars meant the air had gone dry and still and the wind was holding its breath before the turn. Bryn took a weather observation on the bench just to have something to do with her hands. Temperature seventy-eight, which was wrong for the hour. Relative humidity eleven, which was wrong for anything. Wind calm and variable, which was the calm before. She wrote the numbers in her log by the light of a shielded flashlight and then sat with the book open on her knees and looked at the page, at the neat columns of a week of fire weather, and understood that every number in it was a small grave marker for a decision somebody could have made earlier. "You keep a diary of it," Delmar said, from the edge of the bench. "I keep a record. It's not the same." "It's a diary. I kept one of the weather for the ranch, twenty years, and a man could go back through it and know when the foaling was and when the creek ran high and why the hay came in short. You'll go back through yours and know why this valley burned." He said it without any particular feeling, the way he said everything. "That's worth something. To somebody." Below them, in the valley, a roof collapsed with a sound like a dropped crate, and a column of sparks went up and leaned west, and the fire kept working down along the lower slope toward the last houses on the creek. Emmet sat with his back against a boulder and slept with his eyes open, or did not sleep at all, which on him looked the same. Delmar Fain stood at the edge of the bench and watched his valley burn, and Bryn stood beside him for a while and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that the fire was not already saying. Just before five the sky went from black to gray, and the bench took shape around them, and the rockslide became a thing with edges. "Now," Delmar said. He walked to the south edge of the fan, where the slope folded into a narrow shoulder before the drop, and he stood there for a long moment with his head down, and then he said, "Here," and stepped off the road onto a shelf of dirt so faint that Bryn would have walked past it in daylight. It was the stock trail. It ran along the top of the slide, narrow and steep, cut into the hillside by decades of sheep, and it went around the whole fan of rock and came out, forty yards later, on the road at the crest. They crossed it in the gray, single file, hands on the uphill wall and feet flat and slow, and Bryn went last and looked down once at the drop and then did not look down again. On the far side the road ran up a hundred more yards to the crest, and they climbed it and stood on the top, and below them the west side of the Pellmar opened up, green and unburned, falling away in long timbered slopes to a river she could not yet see but could feel in the cold air rising off it. "There," Emmet said. "Pellmar River road. Two miles down, maybe three. That's the highway." Bryn stood at the crest and looked down the west slope, and the cold went through her coat and she did not feel it, because she was doing the arithmetic and the arithmetic was not finished yet. The trail down was a real trail. The forest on the west side was green and wet. If they got forty-four people over this crest before the fire came around, the whole valley behind them could burn and they would still walk out. Then she looked north along the crest line, and her arithmetic finished itself and turned cold. The fire had come around. Somewhere in the last hour the wind had gone around the ridge and the fire had come with it, and there was a new smoke column rising off the west slope three quarters of a mile north of the pass, a small brown finger that meant a spot fire had landed in the timber on this side and taken hold. And as she watched, the finger thickened and leaned, and a second finger rose beside it, and then a third, and the whole north end of the west slope began to smoke like a stove being lit. "Spot fires," Emmet said. "It's throwing over the crest." "It's not throwing," Bryn said. "It's walking. The fire's coming up the west side of the ridge behind the spot fires. We've got maybe an hour before the slope below this pass is burning, and the road down is on that slope." Delmar Fain looked at the smoke and then at her. "So it's now or never." "It's now." Bryn keyed the radio and held it up to the growing light. "Junia, Junia, this is Bryn at the pass. We have a route. It's narrow and it's steep and we're going to cross it in the next hour, and then the weather takes it away. Start walking. Start now. Bring the dogs, bring the old people, bring the boy, and tell them the first hundred yards is the steepest and after that it gets easier. We'll meet you on the logging road." There was static, and then Junia's voice, and under the calm of it Bryn could hear the gym behind her, children's voices and a hose running. "We're coming up," Junia said. "Bryn, the field's on fire on three sides. We're leaving a hose running on the gym roof. It's time." Bryn stood at the crest with the map and the wind and the growing smokes, and she did the thing she had been avoiding since the ridge and allowed herself one full second of the other arithmetic, the one she did not write down: forty-four people, a mile of steep ground, a rock slide, a boy with a burned arm, and a wall of fire that was now climbing the slope they had to descend. One second was enough. Then she folded the map and started down the logging road to meet them. ---