4. Trav
TRAV
Here’s something they don’t tell you about being a FireHawk: the forest looks completely different from the ground.
I’ve been up in that tower long enough that I’ve got every ridge, every drainage, every rock shelf and creek bend in my grid memorized from above.
I can look at the canopy from a hundred and twenty feet and read it like a map.
But down here in it, moving through it at ground level with the trees closing in on all sides and the frost still on the undergrowth and the smell of smoke getting incrementally less distant with every quarter mile…
it’s different. It’s louder and closer and more immediate and I’d forgotten how much I missed it.
I don’t tell Coral that.
She’s moving ahead of me through the drainage and I’m letting her lead because she knows the pack’s patterns, but I know the terrain and between the two of us we’ve got the whole picture.
She moves well in the woods. Quiet feet, good sight lines, stops when she needs to stop and doesn’t waste motion.
Six years of solo field work will do that.
I recognize it because it’s how Hotshots move and it’s how I still move even when my shoulder’s reminding me that descending a hundred- and twenty-foot ladder at five-thirty a.m. in the cold was an interesting choice.
Worth it though.
“Track,” she says low and stops.
I come up beside her. She’s crouched at the edge of a frost-soft patch of ground between two creek-side boulders and there in the mud at the boulder’s edge are tracks. Fresh. The frost hasn’t touched them yet which means they were made after the temperature dropped at oh-three-hundred.
She pulls out her notebook and sketches fast of the size, stride length, the slight drag on the left rear that she told me over coffee means the juvenile. Her hands are steady and quick and she doesn’t second-guess a single measurement. I crouch beside her and look at the direction of travel.
Northeast. Still moving the right way.
“They came through here in the last two hours,” she says quietly. She’s not looking at me she’s looking at the track line following it with her eyes up the drainage. “At least four individuals. The juvenile and three adults.”
“Moving fast?”
“Steady. Not panicked.” She stands and wipes the mud off her fingers on her field pants. “They know something’s wrong but they’re not running. They’re navigating.”
I look up the drainage toward the pinch point. Maybe six hundred meters from where we’re standing. The cloud cover’s still holding and the air’s cold and flat and the smoke smell is stronger now, that particular sharp bite that means active burn not just residual drift.
“We need to move,” I say.
She’s already on the way.
We cover the six hundred meters in under ten minutes.
The drainage narrows as we go, the creek bed shrinking to a trickle between mossy rocks, the trees pressing closer on both sides until the sky above us is just a grey strip between the canopies.
This is the pinch point. A narrow section of the corridor where the terrain squeezes everything through a gap that’s maybe forty meters wide between the eastern ridge face and the creek.
It’s also the most beautiful forty meters on the mountain and I’ve been watching it from above for eleven months without ever coming down here to see it like this.
I don’t say that out loud either.
Coral stops at the edge of the gap and raises her binoculars toward the ridge.
I raise mine. The rock shelf I told her about is visible from here.
It’s a long flat band of granite running along the north side of the drainage about thirty meters up the slope.
The fire’s still on the other side of the ridge but I can see the smoke column now, close enough that I can watch it move, and the top of it’s starting to lean northwest with the morning wind.
Fuck. Not good.
I check my watch. Six-forty-seven. We’ve got maybe an hour before that cloud cover burns off and the temperature starts climbing and the fire’s rate of spread picks up.
“Trav.” Coral’s voice is low and completely still.
I look where she’s looking.
At the far end of the pinch point, half screened by a deadfall spruce, four wolves are moving in single file through the gap.
Grey and tawny and completely focused, their paws absolutely silent on the creek-side gravel.
The adults first, moving fluid, unhurried in that way that means they’re covering ground efficiently not casually.
And then the juveniles follow, smaller and slightly leggy, picking its way over a moss-covered rock with the particular careful concentration of something still learning its own body.
Coral doesn’t move. And I don’t move.
We stand there in the cold grey morning and watch four wolves clear the pinch point and disappear into the timber on the far side and it takes maybe ninety seconds total and it’s one of the best ninety seconds I’ve had in eleven months.
She exhales slowly. I hear it. I feel it, actually, like the whole drainage exhales with her.
“They’re through,” she says.
“They’re through.”
She lowers her binoculars and when she turns to look at me her face is doing something complicated.
It’s a brush of relief and exhaustion and something lit up underneath both of those that she’s not trying to hide or manage or contain.
She’s just feeling it out in the open, no apology, and it hits me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
I’ve been careful for eleven months about what I let in.
I look back at the tree line where the wolves disappeared.
“Good timing on our part,” I say.
“Really good timing.” She pulls out her notebook and makes a quick entry.
Date, time, pack count, direction of travel, location.
Her handwriting in the field is small and fast and completely legible.
“This is the confirmation I needed for the corridor report. This is the data that gets it protected status.” She looks up. “This is what makes it real on paper.”
“It was already real,” I say.
She looks at me for a second. “You’re right,” she says quietly. “It was.”
The radio on my chest crackles. “Tower three, tower three, base calling tower three. Do you copy?”
I key it. “Tower three, go ahead base.”
“Trav we’ve got a wind shift advisory just came through for your eastern grid. North-northeast winds expected to increase to fifteen miles per hour by oh-nine-hundred. Air tanker drop has been moved up to oh-seven-thirty. You copy?”
I look at Coral. She’s already looking at me.
Seven-thirty. That’s forty-three minutes from right now.
“Copy that base. I’m on a ground check in the eastern drainage. What’s the drop zone?”
“Northern flank of the eastern ridge. Grid reference Delta-seven.”
Delta-seven is the rock shelf. Which is three hundred meters from where we’re standing.
“Copy,” I say. “Tower three out.” I lower the radio and look at Coral. “We need to go. Now.”
She doesn’t ask questions. She’s already turned back the way we came, pack adjusted, moving fast and clean through the drainage and I’m right behind her and the smoke smell is sharper now, that acrid leading edge that means the fire’s crested something it wasn’t supposed to crest yet, and the wind’s picking up through the trees with a low sound that I know and don’t love.
We’ve got forty-three minutes and six hundred meters and a ladder to climb and I’m moving through my own corridor on the ground for the first time in eleven months with a woman I met eighteen hours ago who just watched wolves clear a pinch point with the same expression I probably had the first time I dropped into a perfect barrel at Malibu and understood for the first time why people gave their whole lives to the ocean.
Some things just get you like that.
You don’t plan for it. You don’t see it coming.
It just breaks over you and you’re either ready or you’re not.
So I keep moving.