10. Trav
TRAV
The landline at the ridge station has exactly one purpose as far as I’m concerned right now and that’s getting me to the Black Timber Peak fire operations coordinator before the afternoon wind assessment locks in the tanker schedule for the rest of the day.
I find the number in the emergency contacts binder on the shelf above the radio.
Every ridge station has one, laminated, updated annually, held together with a binder clip that’s been there since probably before I was born.
I dial while Coral’s in the bunkroom changing out of her smoke-saturated field clothes.
It rings four times.
“BTP Fire Operations, Hendricks.”
“Hendricks it’s Trav Morton, Firehawk tower three. I need the current tanker schedule for the eastern ridge.”
“Morton.” A pause and I hear keys clicking. “You’re supposed to be evacuated.”
“I am evacuated. I’m at the ridge station. What’s the tanker schedule?”
More clicking. “Two birds working the southern residential evacuation corridor. One on standby at the Kalispell base.”
“I need that standby bird on the eastern ridge. Northern flank, grid Delta-seven. There’s a retardant line from this morning’s drop that needs reinforcement before the wind shift pushes the fire back into the drainage.”
“Morton the residential evacuation is the priority?—”
“I understand that.” I keep my voice even.
“The residential evacuation should absolutely be the priority and I’m not arguing that.
I’m talking about the standby bird. The one that’s sitting on the tarmac in Kalispell right now doing nothing.
” I pull the spread map I photographed on my phone before we left the tower and look at it.
“The eastern drainage connects to the southern watershed. If the fire gets into that drainage tonight it’s got a fuel corridor that runs straight down to the residential area you’re currently evacuating.
You reinforce the retardant line now you protect both. ”
Silence on the line.
I wait. There’s nothing more that I want to say right now.
I’ve been in enough operational conversations to know that silence after an argument means someone’s doing math. You don’t fill that silence. You let them get to the answer.
“What’s in the drainage?” Hendricks asks.
“Confirmed gray wolf pack migration route. Protected corridor survey in progress. Black Timber Peak wildlife corridor, forty-six miles of connected habitat with active wolf pack usage confirmed this morning.” I pull up Coral’s corridor map on my phone.
“The survey contractor has pack confirmation data that’s going into a MDFWT protection filing within thirty days.
You let this drainage burn and you’re not just losing timber you’re losing the habitat connectivity that filing is built on. ”
“You’re asking me to deploy a standby asset for wolves?”
“I’m asking you to deploy a standby asset to protect a drainage that connects to your active evacuation zone.” I pause. “The wolves are a bonus.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
I look up and Coral’s standing in the kitchen doorway in clean field clothes with her hair down and her arms crossed and her dark eyes reading the conversation with complete attention. She heard enough to know what I’m doing.
I look back at the window.
“Grid Delta-seven,” Hendricks says finally. “Northern flank. I can get the standby bird there in forty minutes.”
“That works.”
“Morton.”
“Yeah.”
“The watershed and drainage better be worth it.”
“It is,” I say. “I’ve been watching it for eleven months.”
I hang up and set the phone back in its cradle and turn around. Coral’s still in the doorway and she’s got the expression she had when I called base about the tanker on the first morning. It’s that recalibrating look, like she’s updating a file she thought was complete.
“Delta-seven,” she says. “That’s the rock shelf.”
“Retardant line needs reinforcing before the wind shift pushes the fire back into the northern drainage.” I pick up my coffee. “Forty minutes.”
“You told him about the corridor?”
“I told him about the drainage connecting to the residential evacuation zone.” I take a sip. “The corridor was supporting information.”
“Trav.” She says my name the way she says it when she’s not going to let me be casual about something. “You just went to bat for my wolves.”
“I went to bat for the drainage.”
“On a landline from a ridge station kitchen using a laminated binder from approximately 1987.” She unfolds her arms. “Using my corridor data.”
“Your corridor data made the operational case.” I set the mug down. “It wasn’t a hard argument. The math was and is there.”
She looks at me for a long moment. I look back and I’m trying to keep it simple and factual because the alternative is admitting that I was on that phone before I’d consciously decided to make the call, that it was just the next obvious thing, that somewhere in the last three days her wolves became as much mine as Marshmallow the bear and tree and the 6:47 sunset and the north window view and everything else I’ve built a life around up here.
“You said they were in your corridor,” she says quietly.
“They are.”
“You’ve never seen them before four days ago.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I look at her. “They’re using my watch grid. That makes them mine to protect.”
She crosses the kitchen in four steps and her hands go to my face and she kisses me with the same decisive no-hedging energy she brings to everything.
I get my arms around her and pull her in and she’s warm and solid and smells like clean clothes and woodsmoke and something underneath both of those that’s just her, just Coral.
I’ve been cataloguing it for three days the way she catalogues wolf tracks and I’m done pretending I don’t know what that means.
She pulls back and looks at me. “Thank you,” she says.
“Don’t—”
“Trav.” The period voice. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I say.
She stays where she is with her hands still on my face.
I remain with my arms still around her and outside the afternoon’s going gold and the smoke column to the south has shifted slightly, pulling back from the ridge, and in about thirty-eight minutes an air tanker out of Kalispell is going to make a run on the northern flank of the eastern ridge and reinforce a retardant line that’s protecting a drainage that four gray wolves crossed this morning like they owned it.
Which they do.
“Tell me something,” she says.
“What?”
“The bear.” She’s got that almost-smile. “Why Marshmallow?”
I take a deep breath. It’s not something I’ve ever had to explain and it feels…
heavy. “My grandpa treated us to hot chocolate with marshmallows daily. It was his treat for a good day. But like Marshmallow the bear, my granddad was stubborn, showed up uninvited, never quite figured out the entry situation, and left with more dignity than the circumstances warranted. It’s an homage of the best and worst of my grandpa.
Plus, a bag of marshmallows accidentally fell from my food delivery and guess who made a quick meal of it. ”
She laughs. The full one, not the almost-smile. It fills the ridge station kitchen and does the same thing to the temperature that it did in the tower cab two nights ago.
“Marshmallow the larch?” she asks.
“Same reasons minus the sticky situation.” I look out the window at the smoke. “That tree’s been here four hundred years. Stubborn as they come.”
“He’ll make it,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think he will.”
She leans her head against my chest and I rest my chin on top of her hair.
We stand there in the ridge station kitchen while the mountain works out its own problems outside and the tanker flies in from Kalispell and somewhere in the southern timber four wolves move toward their winter range on instinct and patience and the knowledge that a route worth taking is worth taking even when it gets hard.
I’ve been up in that tower for months on end.
I came down for coffee and wolf tracks and a straight shooter with dark auburn hair and good binoculars who climbed my ladder like she’d already decided something.
Turns out she had.
Turns out I had too.
I just needed her to show up at the base of my ladder to figure that out.