3. Coral
CORAL
I wake up at five-fourteen a.m. because Travis Morton is already on the radio and his voice carries.
Not that he’s loud. He’s actually the opposite of loud— low and even with that unhurried California cadence that doesn’t belong up here in the Montana cold but somehow fits him exactly right anyway.
It’s the kind of voice that makes you pay attention without trying.
I noticed it last night when he called base about the air tankers and I noticed it again just now when it pulled me straight out of a dead sleep.
That’s new. I sleep like a stone in the field. Always have.
I lie still for a minute with my eyes open listening to the wind outside and the one-sided conversation happening six feet from my head.
“Yeah.” Pause. “Northeast. Same as last night but faster.” Longer pause.
“How much faster.” It’s not a question the way he says it.
It’s a demand dressed up in a calm voice.
“Okay. Yeah. First light drop is still a go?” Another pause and whatever the answer is I can tell from the half second of silence before he responds that he doesn’t love it. “Copy that. I’ll log it.”
I sit up.
He’s at the console with his back to me, shoulders squared, one hand on the radio and the other wrapped around a mug. He’s already dressed which means he’s been up a while. The sleeping bag on his bench is folded back neat and flat like he made it out of habit without thinking about it.
The eastern ridge outside the window is pre-dawn grey and the smoke is visible again, darker than last night and sitting lower which is not what I was hoping to see.
“How bad?” I ask.
He turns around. If he’s surprised I’m awake he doesn’t show it. “Wind picked up at oh-three-hundred. It’s pushing closer to a half mile per hour now instead of a quarter.”
I do the math fast. “That puts it at the corridor boundary by?—”
“Midday. Maybe earlier depending on the afternoon wind.” He sets the mug down. “First light drop’s still scheduled but they’ve got two other priority zones ahead of us so it’s not guaranteed to hit before nine.”
I’m already out of the sleeping bag reaching for my boots. “I need to get eyes on the wolf pack’s last position.”
“You need coffee first.”
“I need?—”
“Coral.” He says my name like it’s a period at the end of a sentence.
Not harsh. Just final. “The drop’s not until nine at earliest and you hiking out in the dark to a position that’s going to be in the fire’s path by midday helps nobody.
Especially not the wolves.” He turns back to the burner. “Coffee first. Plan second.”
I want to argue with it and I can’t because he’s right and that’s annoying in a way I don’t have a modicum of energy for at five-fourteen a.m.
I sit back down on the cot and pull on my boots.
The coffee appears on the console beside me without ceremony, black, same as last night. I pick it up and the first sip is strong enough to sand paint and I feel it hit my bloodstream like a starting gun.
“Thank you,” I say.
He nods at the window. “Cloud cover moved in overnight. That’s the one good thing. Lower temps slow the burn rate.”
I look outside. He’s right. The sky’s a flat pewter grey and the air coming through the gap in the window frame is colder than yesterday. I pull my fleece tighter and study the ridge.
“Can I see your spread data from overnight?” I ask.
He steps aside from the console and gestures at it like it’s obvious I can which I guess it is because he already said the corridor’s in his watch grid and the wolves are his problem too and I’m still thinking about that this morning, the easy way he said it, like it wasn’t even a decision.
I pull up the overnight log and map the movement against my corridor data.
The fire’s tracking exactly where I was afraid it would.
Going up the eastern drainage and angling northwest toward the narrow pinch point where the corridor runs closest to the ridge.
If it hits that pinch point before the pack clears it the wolves will have to backtrack miles to find another route south and in fire conditions that’s time they might not have.
“This pinch point,” I say and tap the screen. “Is there any natural firebreak here?”
He leans over my shoulder to look and he’s close enough that I’m aware of it in a way I’d rather not be at five-fifteen in the morning. He smells like coffee and woodsmoke and something that is just outdoors, totally mountain, and… man. I make a point of keeping my eyes on the screen.
“Creek runs through there,” he says. “Seasonal. Might be low enough by now that it’s not much of a break.
” He reaches past me and pulls up a different layer on the monitor.
Topographic. “But there’s a rock shelf on the north side of the drainage.
If the fire hits that it’s going to slow. Not stop but slow.”
“How wide is the shelf?”
“Wide enough.” He straightens back up. “I’ve been down in that drainage. Last spring before—” He stops. Doesn’t finish it.
Before the shoulder. Before whoever put a bullet in him on peak eight and changed the whole shape of his life.
I don’t push it. I file it away the way I file everything— careful, quiet, patient. You don’t spook a wild thing by reaching for it too fast.
“So if the tanker hits the northern flank before nine,” I say, “and the shelf slows the eastern spread, the pack might have a window.”
“Maybe.” He picks up his mug. “It’s not a great window but it’s a window.”
I look at my corridor map and then out at the ridge and then back at my map.
The pack was northeast of my last position yesterday afternoon.
If they kept moving through the night, and wolves move fast when something’s pushing them, they could be close to the pinch point already.
Which means they could be through it by now.
Or they could be sitting right in the middle of it. Shit.
“I need to get down there,” I say. “Before nine. To get a read on their position.”
He looks at me over his mug.
“I know the drainage,” I say before he can argue. “I’ve run this survey grid three times. I know where the pack shelters and I know their movement patterns and I can get in and get a position read and be back out before the tanker drops.”
“By yourself?”
“I work solo. That’s?—”
“Not what I said.” He sets the mug down on the shelf and reaches for his jacket hanging on the hook by the door. “I said by yourself like it was a question.”
I look at the jacket. Look at him. “You’re the FireHawk on this tower. You can’t just leave.”
“I’ve got two hours until the drop window.
Nash at tower five has eyes on my eastern quadrant when I’m running a ground check which I do twice a week anyway.
” He pulls the jacket on and I watch him work his left arm into the sleeve with the particular careful economy of someone who’s learned exactly how to move to avoid pain without making it obvious they’re avoiding pain.
“Besides.” He picks up his radio and clips it to his chest strap. “The wolves are in my corridor.”
He says it the same way he said it last night.
Like it’s just a fact.
Like I’m not standing here recalibrating everything I thought I had figured out about the suspicious man who opened his door like I was the last thing he wanted to see.
“You don’t have to?—”
“Coral.” The period-at-the-end-of-a-sentence voice hits me again. “Drink the rest of your coffee and get your pack. We’ve got about ninety minutes before that cloud cover burns off and I want to be back up this ladder before it does.”
I look at him for a second. He’s already checking his radio signal and pulling on his gloves and not looking at me at all like it’s settled which I guess it is.
I drink the rest of my coffee and I get my pack.
We go down the ladder into the grey pre-dawn cold and the forest closes around us and the only sounds are our boots on the frost-stiff ground and the distant low mutter of the fire on the ridge and somewhere out ahead of us, moving through the trees on four legs and their own good instincts, a wolf pack that doesn’t know we’re coming to check on them.
I’ve had stranger mornings.
Not many though.