The Smoke Jumper (20 page)

In a series of radio conversations, Glen and Julia had worked out a plan: Scott and Laura would hike out south with the rest of the students while Julia and Katie began searching for Skye. The Forest Service and the police had already been alerted. The fire had been reported just before Julia first radioed in. It had been spotted by two wildlife biologists flying the continental divide. A planeload of smoke jumpers was on its way from Missoula.

‘Your boyfriend’s on his way to save you,’ Glen said. ‘It’s so romantic.’

She nearly snapped at him but didn’t. She knew he meant well, but it wasn’t a time for jokes. And she had no idea whether it was true. It was over a week since she had been able to speak to Ed. She didn’t know how recently he or Connor had jumped and how high they therefore were on the jump list. For all she knew, they might both have been sent down to fight fires in California. She half hoped they had.

Katie was going on and on about how guilty she felt for not stowing her boots and pants securely, which was one of the basic WAY rules. Julia had told her three times already that she shouldn’t be too hard on herself and that it could happen to any of them. But as they followed Skye’s footprints up the trail and came out into the clearing, she lost patience and stopped.

‘Listen, Katie. You feel bad, I feel bad. I should have seen it coming. We should have put her on watch and taken it in turns to sleep. So let’s just take it as read that we both feel guilty and get on with the job of finding her.’

It sounded sharper than she had intended. Katie looked chastened and just nodded and they didn’t speak again for a long while except when they lost Skye’s tracks and split up and one of them hollered to say she had found them again.

What Julia had said about her own feelings of guilt wasn’t the half of it. Although she still didn’t know what had happened yesterday between Skye and Mitch, she knew it was her fault that they had been allowed to wander out of sight. If she had been more vigilant, none of this would have happened. She also reproached herself for letting things become so tactile with Skye. Lately they had become almost like sisters, often putting an arm around each other. She hadn’t thought about it, as she should have done, it just seemed so natural, but it was this that had no doubt prompted Mitch’s lesbian taunt.

In hindsight, Skye’s transformation had seemed such a breakthrough, after all those weeks of tension and heartache, that Julia had allowed the mood to become too relaxed. She had forgotten how easily things could go wrong.

And things didn’t go much more wrong than this - a student missing on a burning mountain. Julia didn’t consider herself religious. Since falling foul of the nuns at elementary school, she was about as lapsed as a Catholic could be. But looking up toward the ridge and seeing the plume of gray smoke that stained the sky behind it, she found herself muttering Hail Marys to the rhythm of her footfall.

Three-quarters of the way up to the ridge, the trail turned to gravel and rock and the footprints vanished. But the terrain on either side was so harsh that Julia doubted that Skye would have deviated. It depended on what the girl had in mind. Kids on the run in an unknown mountain wilderness usually did one of two things. They either followed a drainage down in the hope that it led to a road or headed for a high place in the hope of getting their bearings and spotting the best route of escape. Skye’s tracks so far suggested the latter. But there was another possibility which Julia hardly dared contemplate; perhaps the girl was looking for another kind of escape, a more permanent one.

Julia thought about their last conversation and how Skye had thanked her and said she felt she had blown it all. Now the words echoed in Julia’s head like a valediction and even though the morning sun was already warm, the memory made the sweat at the back of her neck turn cold.

They were coming now to the ridge and as they walked the last few steps, the other side of the mountain revealed itself and for the first time Julia saw the fire itself and the damage it had already done. For perhaps a thousand feet below where they stood, the land was a smoking wasteland, the trees broiled to charred spikes that still smoldered in the wind.

Below that, beyond one of the many rocky spines that traversed the mountain, the forest was as yet untouched. But farther down, just before the trees gave way to grassland and the scrub-filled gullies converged, there were pockets of white smoke where sparks must have carried and caught.

The main fire had been driven north and east across the mountain by the wind. Julia could see it about half a mile away, a tall front of flame moving steadily away from her through the trees. She had never seen a forest fire before and she found herself oddly mesmerized. It seemed somehow animate, even the sounds it made, the roar and crackle and rumble, like some insatiable beast rampaging through the trees. She dragged her eyes away from it and scoured the slope back and forth for any sign of life but saw none. She got out her map and worked out exactly where they were.

‘So if you were Skye, standing here, what would you do?’ she said.

Katie didn’t answer at once and Julia turned and saw she too was transfixed by the fire. She looked very frightened.

‘Katie, we’re safe here. Ed always says it’s like with money, if you’re in the black, you’re okay. Everything around here is black and burned. We’re safe.’

Katie nodded.

‘So what would you do? Where would you go if you wanted to get out of this place?’

‘We don’t even know she came up here.’

‘Assuming she did. Where would you go?’

Katie considered for a moment. She looked at the map and then pointed to her left down the southern section of the mountain face where the unburnt gullies and spines of white rock funneled down toward the river.

‘Down there, I guess.’

‘Me too. I’d head for the river.’

That is, she added to herself, assuming I wanted to survive.

They stood staring down the mountain while Julia tried to figure out a route. Unlike the east side of the ridge, where they had camped, there was no obvious trail. They had no idea what time Skye had sneaked away. If the fire was already burning by the time she reached the ridge, maybe she would have turned back. But they had found no footprints heading back down. The chances were that she had gotten here before it started.

Then the thought occurred to Julia that perhaps, in some vengeful brainstorm, Skye might have started the fire herself. She doubted it, but it was possible. But then, there were a hundred other possibilities. They knew nothing. The only course, Julia resolved, was to follow her own instinct. And her instinct was the same as Katie’s: Skye would have headed down the left-hand side of the slope, following the diagonal spines toward the river. If the fire had already been burning, this would have seemed the safest route. If the fire hadn’t yet started, it would still have seemed the most logical.

‘Come on, let’s go.’

They hiked along the ridge until they were above the edge of what had been burned. The first of the spines was directly below them and its white rock stood out starkly beside the black of the burn. To reach it they had to clamber down a short but steep fall of loose rocks then lower themselves feet-first past a small overhang. Then they were on the spine and the going was easier. The rock was smooth but not slippery and the gradient was gentle. Sometimes Julia felt as if they were descending a broad white staircase, bordered to the right all the while with the black carpet of the burn.

‘Look, what’s that?’ Katie said, pointing ahead.

On the black earth, some fifty yards below, something white was fluttering and at first Julia thought it might be a wounded bird. They scrambled down toward it and as they drew closer she saw it was a book. It was lying open with the wind strumming its pages and long before she picked it up Julia knew whose it was. It was only a paperback and from Skye’s avid use of it the covers were battered and creased. The pages were singed at the edges from the heat that lingered in the scorched earth. Julia flipped to the title page and saw what John Standing Bird had written on it.

Skye heard the plane just in time, a moment before she saw it. It was coming from the south, flying low above the river and as its nose appeared around a bluff she dived for cover. Had she been walking on top of the rock they would surely have seen her, but luckily she’d just dropped down to cross one of the gullies and so she plunged into the bushes and stayed put until the sound of the engines melted into the dull roar of the fire.

She rolled over on her back and lay there, panting and looking at the sky through the dry leaves of the willow scrub and realized she wasn’t scared anymore. Not like she’d been when she first came over the ridge and saw the fire. She’d stood watching it awhile, wondering if she should go back and warn the others, then deciding not to and persuading herself there was nothing to be scared of. The worst that could happen was that she might die and she didn’t give a shit about that. She really didn’t. What was the big deal about dying? It was just bang and then nothing. Just plain black nothing. It sounded like bliss. Then she’d had a sudden flash of the young cop they killed and the terror in his eyes as he was being dragged along beside the car and she slammed a door in her head and refused to go there. But it must have affected her because after she’d set off down the mountain, the fire kept on scaring her, the sound of it more than the sight.

But now she was okay. She was even starting to think how good it was to be on the run again. For a while, these last two or three weeks, she thought she’d found somewhere she belonged. But it had turned bad, just like everything always did and the best thing was to get the hell out of it.

She sat up and cautiously raised her head above the bushes, like a rabbit peering from a hole. The plane had gone but she knew it was probably looking for her and would be back. She was thirsty and reached for the knotted red T-shirt that she was using for a bag. All she had in it were her water bottle, Katie’s headlamp and her book and now, reaching into it, she found that the book was missing. She gave a little moan and her shoulders slumped. She cursed out loud and then thought what the hell, what did it matter? All that Black Elk stuff was just bullshit anyway, just their way of trying to fool her into thinking she had something to be proud of.

The water bottle was almost empty and she drained it in one swig and threw it away and still felt thirsty. Her own gray T-shirt was sweaty and torn so she untied the knots in Katie’s red one and put it on instead and threw hers and the headlamp into the bushes. Katie’s boots were about a half-size too big for her and she had painful blisters on both heels, but there was nothing she could do about them. She stood up and looked down the mountainside. She felt as if she’d been hiking downhill forever, but the damn river didn’t seem much closer. At the top she’d kept well to the left and started following these weird platforms of rock, but lower down they kept going off at funny angles and took her too close to the fire, so now she was going to try cutting across them and head directly down the slope.

The gullies were of different depths and widths but all were filled with the same tangled scrub that was as high as Skye’s hips and sometimes her shoulders. Now and then she found a trail that must have been made by animals, but mostly she had to wade through it and soon her arms were scratched and bleeding and she had to hold them aloft to protect them.

Soon she heard the plane again, and she ducked down and watched it through a gap in the bushes. This time it dropped a pair of pink and yellow streamers which snaked through the air over to her right where the fire was. The plane disappeared again, but in a short while it was back and dropped two more, blue and pink this time, and then did it a third time, two blue ones, by which time Skye was not only puzzled but also a little freaked. It was like they were playing a game. She figured the streamers must be some kind of signal or marker or something.

Each time the plane disappeared she stood up and headed off down the mountain again. By now her arms were covered in blood and she had nothing to wipe them with. The next time the plane came, it flew in a lot higher and this time, instead of streamers, it dropped two people on parachutes and she wondered if they’d been sent to find her or if it had something to do with the fire. Then it came back and dropped two more and then the same again and again until it seemed like a whole goddamn army was being flown in. She watched them floating down, drifting across the mountain, blue and white and yellow. They looked real pretty but no doubt the sonsofbitches all had their beady eyes spying for her so she stayed crouched in the bushes until she was sure the last of them had landed. She couldn’t see where they came down, but it was definitely a lot farther up the mountain than she was and that was good because it meant they probably hadn’t seen her.

When she stood up again the air felt cooler and the wind was stronger and seemed to be coming from a different direction. It rattled the dried leaves of the scrub and felt good on her face and on her bleeding arms. Away on the horizon there were some weird clouds building up. The sky seemed to be boiling.

She set off again. The river was at last starting to look a little closer. What exactly she was going to do when she reached it, she had no idea, but something would happen. Something always did.

 

They had made radio contact with Julia on their very first pass across the mountain. What with all the engine noise, it was only Hank Thomas who got to hear her voice, but he relayed what she said and Ed felt a great rush of relief that she was safe. Connor grinned and gave him a pat on the back. Julia told Hank where on the mountain she was and on the next pass Ed and everyone else peered out of the windows and saw two tiny figures fifteen hundred feet below, standing on a strip of white rock and waving frantically.