Page 150 of The Fire Line

25

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.”