EPILOGUE
Coral
Six weeks later the gray wolf pack is confirmed at their southern winter range.
I know because I’m standing at the window of my Missoula office at seven-forty-three a.m. looking at the telemetry data on my laptop when the notification comes through from the southern range monitoring station.
I make a happy squeal that causes my office neighbor Dana to knock on my wall and ask if I’m okay.
I’m extremely okay.
I pull up the full data set and there they are— all four signals, clustered in the southern range habitat exactly where the migration model predicted they’d land.
The juvenile’s signal is the strongest which means the collar’s seated well and the pack’s healthy and moving and exactly where they’re supposed to be.
I take a photograph of my laptop screen.
I text it to one person.
The response comes back in under a minute which means he was already awake and on the radio and that doesn’t surprise me at all.
Trav: Marshmallow says nice work.
I laugh out loud and Dana knocks on the wall again.
The Black Timber Peak wildlife corridor protection filing went to the MDFWT nineteen days ago.
Forty-six pages of survey data, pack confirmation records, habitat connectivity assessment, fire behavior documentation and one evacuation log that I wrote at a ridge station kitchen table while an air tanker made a dusk run on the northern flank.
The MDFWT reviewer called it the most comprehensive corridor submission they’d received in a decade.
I didn’t tell her I wrote half of it in a fire tower cab at five a.m. with someone else’s coffee going cold on the console beside me.
Some things you keep to yourself.
I’ve been back to Black Timber Peak three times in six weeks.
Once for the post-fire corridor assessment, once because the pack’s northern range telemetry showed unusual movement that turned out to be nothing but I wasn’t going to not check, and once because it was a Friday and the resupply helicopter was coming and Trav said the larch were doing something with the light in the late afternoon that I needed to see.
He was right. I always need to see the things he tells me to come see.
And him.
The tower sustained surface damage on the south face. There was scorching on the lower platform, one equipment panel that needed replacing, the south-facing window cracked from the heat. It was back in service eight days after the fire. Trav was back up the ladder the same morning.
I know because I was at the base watching him go up.
I know because I’ve started to understand that watching Trav Morton climb his ladder is one of those things I’m apparently going to want to do for a very long time.
The drive from Missoula to Black Timber Peak is six hours on a good day and slightly longer when the October weather decides to be dramatic about things which it does approximately forty percent of the time.
I’ve learned which gas station outside of Drummond has the best coffee and which stretch of highway 90 loses signal entirely and which pull-off on the mountain road has the best view of the eastern ridge before you lose sight of it on the switchbacks.
I’ve learned a lot of new routes in six weeks.
I make the drive on a Friday in early November when the larch have gone full gold and the mountain’s wearing its autumn colors like it’s showing off specifically for people who drove six hours to see it.
The air’s got the first real bite of coming winter in it when I get out of the truck at the tower base and tip my head back and look all the way up.
A hundred and twenty feet.
Still a long way up.
I grab the first rung.
By the time I’m at the catwalk the door’s already open, he’s leaning in the frame with his arms crossed.
That cut jaw that still hasn’t decided about razors and the almost-gold eyes that are doing what they always do when I come up the ladder, that thing I spent the first twelve hours pretending I didn’t notice.
“You made good time,” he says.
“Good coffee in Drummond,” I say. “The larch are extraordinary by the way. You were right.”
“I’m right about most things.” He steps back from the door. “Come see the north window.”
I follow him inside and it’s the same cab —logbook on the shelf, radio on the console, two mugs, propane burner, the bench along the north wall with his sleeping bag and the cot folded in the corner that’s become mine on Friday nights— but it’s different too in the way that things are different when they’ve become familiar.
When they’ve become yours in the way you didn’t plan for and can’t quite explain and don’t want to.
The north window view is extraordinary.
The trees have turned the canopy gold, a rolling sea of it in every direction, and the afternoon light’s hitting it at exactly the angle that turns ordinary into something that has no business being real.
I stand at the window and look at it and feel the familiar settling that comes every time I’m back up here.
Like something that was slightly off-key going back into tune.
“Good?” he says from behind me.
“Extraordinary.”
His arms come around me from behind and his chin drops to the top of my head and we look at the gold canopy together and the radio does its thing in the background and the tower sways just slightly in the easy north wind and I think about the first time I stood on this catwalk and let myself have one second before I knocked.
I’d give a lot more than one second now.
“Pack’s confirmed at the southern range,” I say.
“I saw your text.” His arms tighten slightly. “All four?”
“All four. Juvenile signal’s the strongest.”
“Marshmallow would be pleased,” he says.
I smile at the window. “Marshmallow the bear or Marshmallow the larch?”
“Both. They’re invested.”
I turn in his arms and look up at him and he looks back down at me with that full steady attention that used to feel like an assessment and now just feels like home.
“I’ve got news,” he says.
“Good news?”
“Depends on your perspective.” He’s got the particular careful expression he gets when he’s saying something he’s not certain of, which happens less often now but still happens and I love it every single time because it means he’s about to say something true.
“Nash is taking over tower five permanently. Moving his family up from Billings.” He pauses. “Which means tower four is open.”
I look at him. “Tower four.”
“It’s two miles north of here. Same ridge line.” He holds my gaze. “Better south-facing window. Worse coffee setup but that’s fixable.” Another pause. “It’s also directly above the northern boundary of the Black Timber Peak wildlife corridor.”
I’m very still, goosebumps covering my body.
“Which is going to need ongoing monitoring,” he says. “Indefinitely. Or until the pack stops using it.”
“Gray wolves mate for life,” I say quietly. “They return to routes that work.”
“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth moves. “Someone told me that.”
I look at him. At everything I’ve learned about this man in six weeks and four days and a wildfire.
The coffee before the radio. The twice-rolled shoulder.
The sight lines at blind corners. The logbook he grabbed before he came down the ladder.
The way he says the things that matter in the flattest most factual voice like he’s reading from his log because that’s just how certain he is.
“Are you offering me a fire tower?” I say.
“I’m offering you a base of operations for long-term corridor monitoring with direct sight lines to the northern pack range.” He pauses. “And proximity to tower three.”
“How much proximity?”
“Two miles.” His hands move to my face. “Which is about two miles too far but it’s better than six hours.”
I look up at him. “Trav.”
“I love you,” he says. Flat and certain, no buildup, no hedge, same voice he uses for wind data and spread projections and everything else he knows without question.
“I loved you when you grabbed my first rung and I loved you when you asked about my shoulder and I loved you when you went straight at the sight lines thing and didn’t let me be casual about it.
” His thumbs trace slow arcs along my jaw.
“I loved you when you watched the wolves clear the pinch point and didn’t try to contain what you felt about it.
” He pauses. “I’ve been logging it since day one. It’s in the books.”
My chest does something large and complicated.
“I love you, too,” I say back. “I loved you when you made coffee before you checked the radio. I loved you when you named everything Marshmallow. I loved you when you called Hendricks on a 1987 landline and went to bat for my wolves without making a single thing of it.” I hold his gaze.
“I loved you when you grabbed my arm on the service track and didn’t even think about it. You just— moved.”
“Hotshot mountain instinct,” he says.
“Best instinct on the mountain,” I say.
He looks at me for a long moment and I look back and the north window throws its gold larch light across the cab and the radio crackles with Nash’s afternoon check-in and the tower sways easy in the north wind and then he does something I didn’t see coming.
He steps back.
He reaches up to the shelf above the logbooks.
It’s a high shelf, the one I always assumed held equipment manuals and emergency contacts and the kind of practical things a FireHawk keeps close.
He takes something down and when he turns back around he’s got a small box in his right hand and an expression I’ve never seen on him before.
Not uncertain.
Not careful.
Just— open.
Completely and entirely open in a way that this man who spent eleven months keeping the world at a careful distance has been working his way toward since the minute I grabbed his ladder.
“Coral Hanscom,” he says.
“Travis Morton,” I say back. My voice does something embarrassing on the second word and I don’t manage it.
“I’m not great with names,” he says. “But I’d like to give you mine.” He opens the box.
It’s simple and it’s beautiful and it catches the gold larch light from the north window and throws it in every direction.
“I know it’s six weeks. I know how that sounds. But I’ve got months of clear signal and no interference and I know my own mind.” He looks at me over the box. “And my mind says you’re the best thing that ever came up my ladder.”
I look at the ring. Look at him. Look at the ring.
“You got a ring?” I ask, still not quite putting two and two together.
Unlike me.
“I went to Black Timber Peak yesterday during my ground check.” He’s watching my face. “Jeweler on Main Street. Woman named Patty. She was very helpful and only slightly alarmed by how fast I made the decision.”
“How fast?”
“About as fast as you climb a ladder,” he says.
I laugh. The full one, not the almost-smile. It fills the cab the way it always does and he watches it happen with that look that I’ve learned means it does to him what the north window view does to me.
“Yes,” I say.
He goes still. “Yes?”
“Yes, Travis Morton.” I reach out and take the box from his hand. “I’ll take the tower and the corridor and the two miles and the six hours and Marshmallow and the 6:47 sunset and all of it.” I look up at him. “Yes.”
He takes the ring from the box and slides it onto my finger and his hands are completely steady which is very on brand and I look at it catching the north window light and think about routes and corridors and the things that find their way back to the places they were always meant to be.
He pulls me in and his arms come all the way around me and I put my face against his chest and feel him breathe.
“You want coffee?” he says into my hair.
I laugh again. “Actually,” I say. “I want hot chocolate with…” I reach down and pull a bag from my duffle, “Marshmallows?”
“You know we’ll have to ‘accidentally’ give some to the mooch below.”
“I already left him an open bag.”
He makes it the same way he always does. He considers me before anything else, before the radio, before the logbook. “That’s my girl.”
We stand at the north window with our mugs and watch the trees go gold in the last of the afternoon light and the corridor lays itself out below us intact and whole and going on paper before the end of the month.
Somewhere in the southern range four wolves are settled into their winter habitat on a route that almost didn’t survive October.
Almost.
But some things are built to hold.
Some routes are worth taking even when they get hard.
Some people grab a ladder and already know something before they reach the top.
We always knew.
We were just both working our way up.