25. We Can Reach It
We Can Reach It
For the first hour, it was still possible to call what they were doing a plan.
They followed the lower stock trail through open pasture and into timber, climbing steadily toward the high country while smoke erased the western horizon behind them.
Harris kept Rain at a controlled pace even when the wind strengthened and Jay’s whole body began insisting they ought to be going faster.
The logic was excellent, which made Jay resent it.
An exhausted horse halfway up the mountain would become four legs of additional trouble, and neither of them knew how far Rain and Red might have to carry them before this was over.
Harris understood that because Harris appeared capable of maintaining a working relationship with reason under circumstances in which Jay’s own brain had begun suggesting increasingly unhelpful things like faster is probably better and perhaps fire cannot climb mountains as efficiently as advertised.
They passed the spring they had filmed weeks earlier, then the old trough and the granite slope where Jay’s legs had nearly stopped functioning after four hours in the saddle.
Every landmark occupied its proper place, yet the mountain felt reconstructed incorrectly from memory.
Smoke had altered the distance between things and flattened the colors until familiar country looked like a set after the crew had gone home and somebody else had changed the light.
“This is still the route to the lookout?” Jay asked.
“Part of it.”
“And after that?”
“Past it.”
Useful.
Jay looked over his shoulder. There was no longer enough distance to see what followed them, only layers of brown and gray where mountains and sky should have been.
He had spent enough of his career looking through lenses to know when scale became impossible to judge, and that was happening now.
Smoke turned a ridge half a mile away and one five miles away into the same flat shape.
“Harris.”
“Yeah. I know.”
That had become Harris’s answer to most things since they left the ranch. Jay had learned not to mistake it for reassurance. It meant Harris had already seen whatever problem Jay was about to point out and had nothing useful enough to offer in its place.
By seven thirty, the light had begun failing well before sunset.
Ash drifted through the trees in intermittent flecks, catching in Red’s mane and collecting against Jay’s jacket.
The gelding tossed his head more often now, and Rain had gone tight through the neck, her ears working constantly toward sounds Jay could not separate from the wind.
That frightened him more than the smoke.
Rain had carried inexperienced guests through creek crossings, wind, rattling gates, and demonstrations of human incompetence so severe Jay had occasionally wondered whether horses maintained private standards for contempt.
If she had decided the mountain was unsafe, he saw little reason to challenge her professional opinion.
Harris slowed where the trees opened onto a narrow slope, wet one finger, and held it into the wind.
In almost any other situation, Jay would have found the gesture distractingly attractive. His mind, apparently committed to dying stupid, supplied the thought anyway.
Then Harris turned in the saddle, and it vanished.
Nothing dramatic happened to his face. Harris did not suddenly look afraid. The change was subtler and therefore worse: every trace of distraction disappeared, leaving him so focused Jay could almost see him rebuilding the terrain around the new direction of the wind.
“What’s wrong?”
“Wind shifted.”
“Toward us?”
“Across us.”
The upper branches bent northeast, flashing their pale undersides in the gusts.
“And that’s worse?”
“Ain’t good.”
Harris pulled up the last fire map loaded on his phone. With no service, it had stopped being a map of where the fire was and become evidence of where it used to be. Jay watched Harris compare it to the slope ahead, then to the ridge above them.
“We need high ground before dark.”
“Were we not already doing that?”
“Faster now.”
No more explanation came. Harris touched his heels to Rain, and Jay followed.
They were less than a mile from the lookout when Harris stopped again. This time Jay saw the problem before he had to ask. Smoke lay thick ahead, and when a gust opened the view between the trees, a darker column rose from below the eastern slope.
“That wasn’t there before.”
“No.”
Harris sat still on Rain, studying the terrain.
Jay had watched him solve failed equipment, injured livestock, weather arriving earlier than forecast, and one gate hinge that had apparently offended him on a personal level.
Harris rarely wasted time reacting. He gathered information, decided, and moved.
He was doing that now.
The difference was that his eyes kept coming back to Jay.
“What are our options?”
“Eastern descent is gone. South puts us closer to the main fire. North gets too steep past the rock face.” Harris looked west, toward the lookout and the land beyond it. “There’s an old burn on the other side. Less fuel. More open ground.”
“Can we reach it?”
“Yup.”
The answer came too quickly.
Jay held his gaze. “Can we reach it safely?”
For a moment Harris said nothing.
Then, “We can reach it.”
Apparently this was where the standard changed.
Harris turned Rain west. “Stay close. Red spooks, give him enough rein to keep his feet, but don’t let him choose the trail. Keep him behind Rain.”
Jay nodded.
“Say it back.”
Under ordinary circumstances, Jay would have objected to being treated like a child receiving instructions before crossing a street. Harris’s expression stopped him before the complaint made it out.
“Give Red enough rein to keep his feet. Keep him behind Rain. Stay close to you.”
“No matter what happens.”
Cold moved beneath Jay’s ribs.
“No matter what.”
Only then did Harris turn away.
The trail deteriorated quickly. Wind struck in violent gusts, carrying smoke strongly enough that Jay could taste it.
His eyes watered until the ground blurred, forcing him to trust Red’s footing more than his own vision.
Harris kept them moving fast enough that the gelding had to concentrate on each step instead of inventing new ways to panic.
Every few minutes, Harris looked back.
At first the checks reassured Jay. By the fifth or sixth, they began making the danger measurable.
“I’m still here,” he called.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to keep—”
A tree cracked below them.
The report exploded through the timber, followed by branches tearing through branches and the violent impact of something massive hitting the ground. Red lunged sideways. Jay’s left boot slipped partly from the stirrup as the world tilted beneath him.
“Give him his head!” Harris shouted. “Don’t lock your hands!”
Jay loosened the reins on instinct more than understanding. Red found his footing, surged forward, and nearly collided with Rain before settling behind her again. Jay recovered the stirrup and forced his knees to unclench.
“I’m good!”
Harris looked back anyway.
“I said I’m good.”
“I heard you.”
There was no disbelief in it. Harris simply seemed incapable of accepting the statement without seeing the evidence himself.
They rounded the shoulder of the ridge and saw fire.
Jay had expected a wall. There was no wall.
That was worse.
Fire appeared everywhere separately: grass flashing orange and vanishing beneath smoke, brush igniting in sudden bright bursts, individual trees catching one after another until the mountainside seemed to be burning in pieces.
The lack of order made it impossible for Jay to understand where the danger began or ended.
A wall might at least have suggested a boundary.
This moved according to rules he could not see.
“Harris.” His voice came out thinner than he intended. “How fucked are we?”
“Keep moving.”
“Harris.”
Rain danced beneath him, but Harris’s hands remained steady. He looked at Jay once and held his gaze long enough that the answer became unnecessary.
Quite fucked, then.
Fantastic.
Jay tried to slow his breathing and discovered that smoke made the exercise mostly theoretical.
The roar behind them grew until it stopped sounding like separate trees, wind, and falling timber and became one continuous violence beneath everything else.
Red’s fear traveled directly through the saddle.
Every muscle beneath Jay remained rigid, foam gathering around the bit, and Jay had the unnerving sense that he was borrowing the gelding’s panic while contributing plenty of his own.
Ahead, Rain balked.
Harris brought her around and asked her forward again. The trail narrowed beneath a granite outcrop, constricting between exposed rock and a steep drop into timber. Rain planted all four feet and refused.
Jay looked downhill. Flames climbed higher through the trees, and the spaces between them were disappearing.
“Harris.”
“I know.”
His gaze moved from the choke point to the granite above them. Whatever decision came next arrived fast enough that Jay understood Harris had already been considering it.
“Get off.”
Jay dismounted before the command had fully registered. “What happened?”
“We’re done with the horses.”
It took a second for the words to become meaningful.
“They’re faster than we are.”
“Not through there. They balk with us on them, we go down or get trapped. We can fit under the rock. They can’t.”
“And they can outrun it?”
“In open ground, maybe. Not carrying us.”
Maybe.
Another revised standard.
“Strip Red.”
Jay looked toward the fire.
“Jay.”
Harris had used that tone with horses and frightened guests, never with him. It was not angry. It was absolute, and underneath it Jay heard something worse than impatience: the knowledge that they no longer had enough time for him to be afraid slowly.
He moved.