Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hunter
The guys wake me up when it’s still dark. Something this intense, we take four-hour shifts sleeping. It can be tempting to stay awake for forty-eight hours straight, but that’s a good way to burn down the wrong part of the forest or fell a tree onto someone by accident.
As soon as I get out of my sleeping bag and stuff it away, I can tell that something’s up.
The wind is slightly different, and strangely, it’s cooler.
I can feel the breeze coming off the river for the first time, even though we’re fifty feet away from it, like something’s drawing it toward our encampment.
Hard to tell what exactly it is. It’s too early in the day for a thunderstorm, but there could be one building somewhere close by. The air feels charged, even though it’s cool, and the guys are a little quieter than usual.
We’re all a little uneasy, a little on edge. I grab my gear, shove an MRE into my mouth, and get back to work.
Silas and I switch off again for a couple of hours, and strange as the weather feels, nothing changes. Not yet, anyway.
After a couple hours, Dashiell, Porter’s second-in-command, comes up to us. I cut the chainsaw and Silas walks over. His hair is covered in ash, and his face is smeared with black except for where his sweat has cut tracks through it.
I probably look the same.
“Take a break,” he says. “It’s your turn for lookout.”
A helicopter whirls overhead, and all three of us look up at it until it flies behind the dense forest, out of sight.
“How’s it going?” I ask. We haven’t gotten an update in a little while, but we’ve been lost in the rhythm of our work, the noise of the chainsaw.
“Not too bad,” he says, shouting over the noise of the other chainsaws. “Fire’s slowed down pretty good.”
Silas and I grab our lunch MREs, then make our way up a steep, rocky slope until we get to a patch of boulders at the top with a panoramic view of almost the whole valley. We radio down that we made it, report on the fire, the wind direction, the air temperature.
Right away, I see it: fluffy white cumulus clouds to the west starting to gather together and darken. That’s it, the thunderstorm building. I report it to Porter, down the hill, and he goes quiet for a moment.
“Well, maybe we’ll get some rain,” he says after a moment. “Hopefully it stays to the west and doesn’t fuck us up too much.”
By the time our lookout is over, the clouds have gathered more, just this side of the Spires. They’re bright white on top but a deep, flat gray along the bottom, the color of molten lead.
Thunderstorms are bad news for fires. The rain is welcome, but not at the expensive of the huge updraft the pressure changes create, not to mention the hard, unpredictable winds. That’s why it feels like the air is trying to lift me up.
This could get ugly, and I have a bad feeling that it might. My stomach tightens, and even though I can’t see Eaglevale, I look over my shoulder in its direction.
We went there sometimes when I was growing up. That’s where my Boy Scout camp was, where I learned to shoot a bow and arrow, to start a fire, and to patch my own tent. If I was good, sometimes I’d get an ice cream cone from Popsy’s, the old-fashioned shop on Main Street.
I hate the thought that maybe we can’t save it. I hate the thought of the Boy Scout cabins going up in flames, of Main Street burning, of houses with kids’ toys in the yard turning into ash.
Every time we can’t stop a fire in time, it feels like a kick in the balls, like we’ve failed at the one task we had to do. Logically, I know that sometimes fires get too big, too hot, too out of control, and no one can do anything. That’s just how it works.
It just feels wrong.
When the hour’s over, we head back down and get to work, but as hard as I try, I can’t stop thinking about Eaglevale burning.