Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [55]
Oh Jesus, if only he believed there was somebody he could ask for help. No one had radioed for many hours and he wondered if Dugan had engineered giving him privacy for the worst of it. Gradually, control came back, until he was able to sleep a few hours. After three days, his hands had ceased their trembling. Yesterday, he had savored beans and bacon through a resurrected sense of taste.
This small, square tower might have been set on top of the world, with a view that encompassed a hundred miles. As the sun struggled to break through, Steve sipped strong black coffee and imagined that the curling tendrils on the horizon rose from the campfires of the Nez Perce, ghost travelers from the past.
It had been a long time since he’d considered breakfast, preferring to get through his hangover first. Today, he felt like having fried eggs. He turned toward the supply box but became aware of a change in the familiar landscape.
All the monitored fires were posted on his map, updated daily through communication with Fire Command. If something new caught his eye, he had his Osborne Firefinder, a combination telescope and transit mounted on a column in the center of the room. He’d check the trajectory and compare it with the coordinates of the known devils. The final location would be determined though triangulation from more than one lookout.
Binoculars in hand, Steve tried to decide. At about ten o’clock, between the definite smoke of the thousand-acre Shallow Fire and the smaller plume from the hundred-acre Fern, was what appeared to be a new signal. He’d seen last night’s dry lightning on the ridges, felt the cooler wind of the front and suspected conditions were right.
Swiveling the Osborne on its post, he put his eye to the telescope and compared the bearing of the suspected newcomer with the known positions of the Shallow and Fern.
He thumbed the radio mike. “West Yellowstone, this is Washburn. New smoke to southeast, vicinity of existing Fern Fire. I make it near . . . “ He consulted the topographic map. “Looking Glass Lake.”
“Roger, copy, Washburn.”
Recognizing the voice of Garrett Anderson, Steve asked, “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Got a room at the Stagecoach Inn ah don’t see much.” Despite the radio’s thinning effect, Garrett’s deep baritone resonated. “When we get an exact fix, we’ll send the Smokejumpers. As her daddy, do you care to name our newest fire?”
Steve looked out through the sparkling windows and studied the faintly rising wisps. Full day had dawned, the promise of morning richly recognized. From behind the eastern wall of smoke, a solid orange disc rose.
“If I hadn’t been in the right place at the right time,” he proposed, “I’d never have seen it at all.” Carefully, he drained the last of his coffee. “Let’s call this one Chance.”
Clare stepped out of Old Faithful Lodge and found herself alone with the geyser and the morning. Water gushed away from the flattened cone where an eruption had just ended. Sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, she followed the boardwalk. At just past six, the only people she’d seen were a few joggers and TW Services workers.
She extended her free arm over her head to stretch out her side. She’d already run two miles in the gray dawn light, trying to erase the fact that she’d dreamed again of losing Frank. How many times had she been through it now, a hundred, a thousand, in sleep and awake? Each night came with the fear of a dragon, waiting in darkness.
Clare deep-breathed and tried to focus on the contrast between the remembered holocaust and the placid solitude at Old Faithful. The inn rose in stately majesty, an impossibly overgrown Swiss chalet. Bare flagpoles studded its roof deck, but as she watched, a member of the bell captain’s staff raised the flags of the United States, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.
Forest ringed the geyser basin, in contrast to the two