Looking for the Fire

by M. L. Buchman

  Looking for the Fire

  a Firehawks romance story

  by M. L. Buchman

  1

  Tess Weaver had been waiting for this moment for months. Like a racehorse out of the gate she’d counted down; seasons, weeks, days, hours…

  She hadn’t slept a wink last night, caught in some half-waking nightmare that the freedom that beckoned from so close by would be torn away.

  But the morning shone bright with that crystalline blue that could only exist above the Lolo National Forest which thrived along the Idaho-Montana border. The snows had released their stranglehold on the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness and the trails were finally open to her favorite season of the year, fire season.

  Always sounded crazy that way, but since it was only inside her head, it didn’t really matter. Did it?

  Tess left behind the main roads, then the paved ones. Soon she was winding her little pickup along a narrow forest road. The only tracks were the team that had come up to inspect for washouts and clear downed trees. Now it was just her.

  She was done with the seven grinding months of working Missoula bars. Six beers, four shooters. Another round of eight Jell-O shots and a pitcher of something dark—that table wouldn’t know the difference anymore if she shit in the pitcher rather than filling it with the most expensive stout on tap. (Sometimes her sense of humor was the only thing that survived those nights.) Five orders of, Hell no, I’m not going home with you. Two scotch rocks neat. And if you call me “Hey, Blondie!” once more you’ll be wearing this pitcher rather than drinking it. Three more pints of lager, one of pale ale, and a whiskey sour. Two more servings of Hell no…

  Her looks earned the attention, and more importantly the big tips, but that didn’t mean she was going to choose herself a man that even thought of coming near a place like that.

  No idea where else she was going to find “him,” but it wasn’t at the Spotted Pony Bar.

  For seven months she’d done her servitude in the kick-ass cowboy bar in Missoula filled with broke college students and rich skiers come to conquer Montana Snowbowl by skiing all thirty-nine trails without dying in the process. Half of the runs were “Black Diamond”—most difficult—trails; that should kill at least of some of these dweebs, shouldn’t it? Few made it more than a dozen runs before getting trapped in the swirl of this bar and a dozen more just like it that lined the road from the mountain into town—a strip locals avoided like the plague around two a.m. last call. Even the cops were careful driving this stretch after midnight.

  Tess was finally done with bowing to the holy paycheck and getting home at three a.m. after clearing out and cleaning up the place before she could finally take off her mandatory cowgirl hat—at least the damn thing didn’t have to be pink though a lot of the waitresses went that way at the Spotted Pony. The last time an Appaloosa had been near the place was probably during the 1877 retreat of the Nez Perce peoples; it was just that authentic.

  Tess parked Snow Cone, her battered white Toyota pickup truck that no longer had a third gear, but thankfully second and fourth were still going strong, at the very end of the fireroad and took a breath.

  Then another.

  The city did that to her, even a small city like Missoula.

  Made her cynical when she least expected it.

  She was always torn that way. The social whirl could be fun and it was nice to be able to get a decent burger or a slice of pizza when you wanted to. Catching an action flick on the big screen had its points as well.

  But it was the shorter half of the year that she lived for.

  For the next five months she’d be queen of one of the least accessible fire lookout towers anywhere in the Idaho wilderness. Far enough out that the only visitors were either crazy, or crazier.

  She climbed out and leaned back against her truck, closing her eyes and just letting the thick forest air wash the city off her.

  The merely crazy people who’d reach her tower atop Cougar Peak—eight miles from the nearest road and 8,859 feet into the sky—were very like her; out to walk, fish, and camp in one of the toughest and wildest forests left in the lower forty-eight states. The Bitterroots might top out around nine and ten thousand where the Beartooths to the east and the Lemhis to the west in Idaho cracked twelve, but for expanse and ruggedness and sheer cussed toughness of country, she’d vote for the Bitterroots any day. So, the merely crazy folks might stop for a day if they reached her lookout.

  The crazier people would whip through in an hour. They were the ones walking the CDT. The Continental Divide Trail was way high and seriously tough. The southbounders still had a month before the snow in Glacier Park backed off enough to begin their trek from Canada to Mexico.

  The northbound walkers wouldn’t reach her until later in the fire season because they’d begun back in March or April down where Mexico shared her border with New Mexico, a hundred miles into the harsh desert south of the Gila National Forest. By the time they’d spent six months afoot, they’d be racing the snows to the Canadian border. They blew through the Lolo so fast that she sometimes didn’t even have a chance to come down from her lookout tower to greet them before they were gone again from her small meadow.

  That meant, for five months, the vast quiet would be hers. She couldn’t wait.

  Two weeks up, three days down in town or off camping in the wild while a substitute came in. Repeat until the end of the fire season chased her back down, at times barely steps ahead of the first heavy snow. Over the last five seasons she’d ridden out plenty of early blizzards while still monitoring fires as they chewed through the valleys that spread thousands of feet below her. Only once had she been caught by a true snow and that had been seriously bad; a mistake she wouldn’t make again.

  Tess shouldered her pack and took a deep breath. The tang of hot engine metal from the slow climb up the forest road that was little more than a dozer track. And…

  There it was.

  Nothing like it down in the valleys. High forest, bright with pine and sunshine but still thick with fern, berry, and sumac undergrowth. You could practically smell the wildlife watching her from the trees, assessing this new intruder.

  Not new, she reassured them. Same chick as last year and the one before. Back to watch the fire.

  The distinct “pik” call and hard rattle of a downy woodpecker somewhere back in the trees released the other birds and the woods came back to a symphony of life that had been momentarily frozen by the wheezing arrival of her truck.

  Her pack weighed fifty pounds and would be grueling by noon when she’d hiked the last five thousand feet and seven miles up to her lookout. She really shouldn’t have bagged out on her winter workouts so often. She’d be hurting by the time she arrived.

  Didn’t matter, she was headed into the hills.

  Another three hundred pounds of supplies remained heaped in the truck bed under a tarp. In a couple days a mule team, who made much of its spring income ferrying stock up to the lookouts, would come by and do the heavy lifting for her.

  Tess patted her truck on the hood where it would sit and wait for ten days and turned toward the perfect solitude of the trees.

  2

  Jack Parker waved as Burt drove off. An arm raised casually out the window, a downshift to ease around the first curve, and his buddy was gone.

  Jack stood by the trailhead. They’d unloaded a huge mound of supplies at the head of the road, which thankfully wasn’t his task to buck up to the lookout. He pulled on his pack and faced the great unknown. Fir trees towered above him so tall they looked ready to topple down and kill him where he stood.

  Stoopid!
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br />   Clarie and Mitch always made their summers up here sound so friggin’ romantic. So, when Clarie found out she was pregnant and would be delivering right in the middle of the summer, he hadn’t put up too much of a fuss about taking their place for a season. Not as if he had anything better to do.

  He was used to living a little rough.

  Retired Army, four years in the dustbowl. All of it living in CHUs with a couple hundred other grunts assigned to the Containerized Housing Units—which was just as luxurious as it sounded. Living rough wouldn’t be an issue.

  And landing in Montana due to lack of any other prospects was eating at his ego and his body. Burt, his college roommate, had given him the couch space cheap. But after two months it had given him a permanent kink in the back and he still didn’t know what to do with himself.

  So, he was going to sit by himself, stare at empty wilderness for hours waiting for a puff of smoke, and get his head screwed back on straight.

  Yeah, that made perfect sense. Not.

  Clarie said the trailhead was easy to find. After fifteen minutes of floundering through blackberry thorns and checking his cell phone a half dozen more times for signal strength that it didn’t have the first time, he finally stumbled on it. It was easy to find, once you found it. Standing a few feet apart, two knee-high boulders marked what might be the entry into Mirkwood—an evil forest grown even more dire since the hobbits voyage on the way to slay the fire-breathing dragon.

  Fire.

  He was headed to the top of a mountain to face a forest that breathed fire.

  “Okay, Mirkwood. Here we go.”

  He resettled his pack with a grunt; he hadn’t done a long hike with a full ruck since Basic. He’d been driving a MaxxPro MRAP for the last four years, and better yet, lived to tell about it. Wished he could have brought his fifteen-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected beast home. Blown up seven times and only lost two guys total out of a half jillion trips with ten troops typically onboard for each ride. An IED had blown out half their tires, then been followed up by a couple of T-men lying in wait for them to dismount. Two Army and two Taliban was the body count for that day—only deaths in the whole theater.

  Still, it had gotten pretty shaky there toward the end. As the troops drew down, those remaining were blown up more often. Three of the IED strikes had been in his last three weeks in. And the T-man, with fewer targets, was shooting a lot more lead at his MRAP’s armor hoping to find a hole. When he lay down to sleep at night, he could still here the deafening rattle of the gunfire pinging off his vehicle.

  Not there anymore. Now here. He’d been saying that to himself a lot lately.

  The pack. The trail. Hold the focus. Get your heavy-ass load moving.

  Of course now, without the “Three A’s” of ammo, armor, and more ammo—which still felt weird as hell, like he was walking around naked—the weight he carried wasn’t all that different.

  He’d grown up in downtown Phoenix. Going to college in Missoula hadn’t exactly turned him into an outdoorsman, neither had driving an MRAP. Most of his time in the wilderness had been during Basic in the swamps and hills of South Carolina.

  He inspected the forest as he began the long climb through it. Fir trees, maples, and ferns; those he knew. And blackberry thorns; his arms still itched from all the scratches. The white bark was either birch or aspen. After that, there were bushes and there were trees—his two primary classifications of stuff that grew outdoors. Flowers didn’t really count as they mostly grew in expensive florist shops and in girlfriend’s vases, while they lasted. There’d been plenty of girls who hadn’t lasted as long as the colored blooms.

  What had he been thinking? Jack Parker. Wilderness.

  Well, at least this trail was clearly marked. He checked his GPS, which suggested a shortcut that Claire had warned him against.

  “Your machine doesn’t know about the landslide that wiped out that trail three years ago. We had to cut in a new path that summer.”

  He stuck with the double-white trail blazes Mitch had sprayed on the trees every hundred yards or so.

  3

  Tess kept her eyes on the trail, not looking at the view. Not yet. Saving that.

  Cougar Peak tower was a two-story ten-by-ten foot building perched atop a broad pinnacle of rock.

  The only approach was across a small meadow. Beyond that, she hiked the last hundred feet along the guide chain up the bare rock to the mountain’s peak.

  She entered the lower cabin first.

  The cabin only had a normal winter’s worth of bug corpses to sweep out; no mice or squirrels had gotten inside to nest this last winter, thank god. They could really mess a place up, leaving stinking patches where the mice peed in their own nests. That took a lot of bleach to clear away.

  The water cistern was full to overflowing with rainwater and snowmelt off the tower roof. Best water in the world—tasted of cold sunshine. She dumped out the last of her city water, good riddance, and refilled her bottle from the cistern.

  She could feel she was still moving at city pace as she unloaded most of her pack into the rough shelves that were her cupboard. Whatever internal switch that eventually shifted to “move slower” hadn’t yet been thrown.

  With the cabin squared away and airing out through the open door and four small windows, Tess went back outside and climbed the exterior ladder. It led up to the narrow walkway that encircled the tower’s upper story.

  She circled the tiny deck that surrounded the tower on all sides, lifting clear the heavy shutters, feeling the sun’s warmth radiating off their rough surface. They had protected the big, wrap-around glass windows through the brutal winter storms, but now, for five months, those windows were for her to see the world.

  Duck inside—definitely needed to oil the lock—a quick floor sweep and it was all in order.

  Out of the small pack she’d brought up from the cabin, she unloaded the last of it. Her radio, spare batteries, solar charger set to one side. Binoculars and the refilled water bottle to the other. Ammonia in a spray bottle and a squeegee. She took her time removing a season’s worth of wind-borne mud and dust off the glass.

  Then she stood in the center of the tower, the center of her world, and braced her hands on either side of the Osborne Fire Finder.

  And let herself look up.

  The world slapped her, just as it always did. In some directions she could only see a dozen miles before a ridge or peak blocked her view. In other directions a hundred miles of National Forest sprawled over knife-edge ridges and slashed canyons.

  Ten miles to the east lay State Route 12, thankfully invisible at the bottom of a valley. Past that, her view continued in an uninterrupted vista eighty miles to Flathead Lake and the Flathead National Forest beyond.

  In all of the 360 degrees, even with her binoculars, the only human habitations she could actually see were two distant cabins and three even more distant lookout towers.

  Once her survey was complete, by naked eye and binocular, she grabbed her radio and dialed in the Forest Service frequency.

  “Dispatch. Over.”

  “Dispatch here. Go ahead. Over.”

  “Cougar Peak in service.” You always reported by your location. Tess liked that. As if she herself embodied the mountain and she could leave her own name mostly behind for the rest of the summer.

  “Roger that, Cougar Peak. Glad to have you back, Tess.”

  “Thanks, Vic. Glad to be here.” Vic was the base commander for the whole area.

  Tess kicked the single mattress on the narrow bunk, causing it to unroll. She usually slept in the tower, only her supplies below.

  She collapsed on it face down. Though the official start of fire season was still over a week away, her internal alarm snapped her awake after only an hour’s rest to scan the trees for a telltale puff of smoke that indicated a new fire.

/>   4

  “Uh, hello? Testing?”

  Tess glared at the radio and wondered what idiot was on the freaking Forest Circus frequency. And more amusingly, just what Vic was going to do to them. This early in the season he was probably going to play nice.

  “This is dispatch,” Vic always gave someone the benefit of the doubt. That’s why he was Dispatch and Tess was locked away in her steel gray-and-wood tower all summer. She wouldn’t trade places for the world.

  “This is Jack, uh, I mean Gray Wolf Summit.”

  “In service,” Dispatch prompted.

  “Yeah, right. In service.”

  “Roger that, welcome aboard, Jack.”

  Wait!

  Gray Wolf Summit?

  Not stopping to think, she grabbed up her radio, “Who the hell is this?”

  Vic knew better than to answer.

  “You. Gray Wolf. Who is this?”

  “This is Gray Wolf Summit, go ahead.”

  “Where’s Clarie and Mitch?”

  “She’s having a baby. I’m Gray Wolf for the summer.”

  Shit! Tess didn’t like it. For the next five months her world was made up of the five closest lookout towers—two of which she couldn’t see from here but had important overlapping sightlines for pinpointing a blaze. Beyond that there was only Dispatch and the occasional firefighting crew.

  And all that was just the way she liked it.

  Now, with no one asking her, no warning at all, this new guy. It was like coming home on college break only to find out that your best friend had moved away from next door to Texas or some such ridiculous place.

  “Uh, welcome.” She did her best not to sound too upset but expected that she didn’t really pull it off.

  “Is this Tess Weaver?” the radio voice asked. It sounded amused with itself.

  “Cougar Peak to you.” That didn’t come out sounding as funny as she intended.

  Laughter came back over the radio. A guy who laughed at her joke rather than assuming she was just plain nasty. Another chunk of city-born bitch shield slid off Tess and tumbled off the tower to shatter on the rocks below.