Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [137]
“Can you climb just a little way?” She tried to sound upbeat.
“I think so.” Devon sounded dazed and with that bump on her head . . . Clare helped her up and wondered if she would be able to support her up the hill, for her own legs felt unsteady.
Steve and Karrabotsos arrived together, both limping, but looking game.
Deering faced the older pilot. “I’m sorry, man.” He gestured toward the ruined helicopter. “I know you didn’t want to hire me . . .”
Karrabotsos gave him a level look. “I never do anything I don’t want to do.” He surveyed the topography. “Wind currents can be murder in a spot like this.”
Clare helped Devon to the ridge top. Steve clapped an arm around her shoulders. “You found your gal.”
She gave him a smile through the sting of tears she’d held back while being a medic. With one arm around him and the other around the taller Devon, she managed, “She’ll always be my little girl.”
“I’ll just scatter this fire on the rocks,” Deering suggested.
Clare turned to help, but Karrabotsos pointed back the way they’d come. “Won’t matter.”
Driven by the wind, the Clover-Mist had worked its way up the slope close to the ridge crest. It leaped ahead in the trees, heading for the summit on a diagonal that had the potential to intersect their path. Beside Clare, Steve cursed.
If her great-grandmother had not survived a fire on this very mountain, she and Devon would not be standing here today. Grabbing her daughter by her uninjured arm, she urged her onto the trail.
Deering took the lead. He moved well, but looked more pale and depressed than when Clare had seen him at Old Faithful. Between Deering and Clare, Devon climbed like a robot, one sturdy bare leg in front of the other. As the slope grew steeper, sweat darkened her hairline. Behind Clare, Steve limped grimly while Karrabotsos brought up the rear, favoring his lame foot.
The wind shifted and brought the fire’s path more directly toward them. The stench of burning grew stronger. Clare eyed the patch of brush and scrubby trees they had to cross to reach the summit.
The flat-out race made her think of other times when people had been caught in the open and tried to outrun a fire. In the worst disaster the Smokejumpers had ever experienced, thirteen had perished in 1949 at Mann Gulch, Montana. Once fire had chased them out of the trees and onto the grassy slope, they had never had a chance.
As the ridge widened onto a more open hillside Deering slung an arm through Devon’s. They moved up and slightly ahead of the fire.
After a single glance over her shoulder, Clare refused to look again. The survivors of Mann Gulch had been lucky to slip through a rocky crevice and emerge above the fire.
There was no place of safety like it in sight.
Their hope lay on the treeless summit. It was only another fifty yards, then twenty-five, but the men at Mann Gulch had been overcome mere seconds from safety.
As fire attained the brush, its sound sharpened from a dull roar to a snapping. Clare helped Deering with Devon and the first aid kit fell from her hand. It landed with a clatter and bounced down about fifteen feet, then wedged into the rocks.
Clare abandoned it.
The straggling group struggled on. How slim the margin between life and death, how fine the edge they trod. Everyone said she’d been lucky when the roof came down on Frank, a few feet and a hair’s breadth from horrifying cremation. Had he had time to know this screaming rush that drove her? Had he watched the rafters begin their slow deformation and felt the choking certainty?
Don’t look back, she thought, but knew Steve had fallen behind. A scream built inside, but she could do nothing for him with her daughter staggering and about to fall short of the finish line.
Above, Deering made it to bare gravel. Clare shoved up out of the weeds, gasping and supporting Devon with an arm around her. Her impulse was to keep running from the