by Todd Borg
The mine.
The dark, gaping hole took up the entire corner of the cabin. There was a ladder that disappeared into the ground, but I would have missed it and fallen into the yawning earth, how far I couldn’t tell.
“Thanks, Street,” I grunted as I went hand over hand on the beam until I’d cleared the hole. I dropped to the dirt floor of the cabin.
The gag was an old T-shirt. It came off easily and Street coughed and gasped. I quickly kissed her and held her cheeks in my hands, then bent to the white cotton cords securing her. One went around her wrists, holding her hands in front of her and the other cord went from her ankle to a ring in the wall.
The knots were tight and I could tell by the moisture in them that Street had been working on them with her teeth. I had to cut them with my pocketknife. I helped her stand up and was about to say that I could boost her up through the roof when she collapsed. If my arm hadn’t been around her back she would have hit the dirt. As it was, I lowered her back to the dirt floor and leaned her back against the rough log wall. The bastard probably hadn’t given her any food from the beginning. She was no doubt dehydrated as well. I’d have to carry her out. Which meant I needed to widen the hole in the roof. Or kick out the plywood over the window.
“I’m going to make some noise, sweetheart.” At that I ran and jumped up to kick the plywood over the window. The jarring up my leg was a painful jolt and nothing happened. I switched to using my shoulder, but with the same result. I backed up farther and carried more speed, aiming closer to the corner to concentrate my blow in a smaller area. When I hit I felt nothing move except my shoulder bones. I did, however, hear the squeak of nails moving in the wood.
Encouraged by the sound of progress, I struck the plywood over and over, switching shoulders when I got too sore and then going back to my foot. Eventually, I popped the plywood off and the dingy cabin was suddenly filled with heat and swirling smoke and orange light from the forest fire. I climbed out the window to have a look.
I was on the upward side of the cabin, in the lee of the wind and fire. The smoke made the entire sky dark. Cinders rained like a hailstorm. When I looked around the corner the wall of fire had come to within two hundred yards of the cabin. I ducked back behind the cabin as the implications sunk in.
We were trapped.
There was no way we could outrun a fire that was coming like a freight train and was as wide as the mountain.
Trying not to think about the dogs, I climbed back through the window. “Street,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage. “There is a forest fire coming. I’m going to help you get down into the mine.”
She gave me a single, silent nod. Her eyes showed a great sadness. Her body was slack against the cabin wall.
I didn’t think she was strong enough to clamp her arms around my neck and hold her own weight, so I scooped her up over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Her arm was around one of my shoulders, a leg around the other shoulder. I put one of my arms over her leg and arm and pinned them to my chest. Then I walked over to the hole in the earth.
Despite the extra light coming in the window, I could see nothing as I looked down. It looked like the ladder descended into nothingness
I used my free hand to grab the top rung of the ladder, tentatively reached a foot out and tested our combined weight on the ladder. It held and I went slowly down into what seemed like the black heart of the earth.
We bounced a little each time I let go with my free hand and quickly grabbed the next rung. It was slow going, but I knew we’d hit something soon because the ladder, although heavy-duty, couldn’t be infinitely long.
About twenty feet down my feet hit dirt. I scraped my feet along the ground, feeling my way. There would have to be a tunnel or another hole so that one could descend in stages.
I put my hand along a rocky wall and moved sideways. When I’d gone six or eight feet and not come upon another hole I knew there was enough space for us to sit down and rest while the fire blew over.
Street slumped as I laid her down in the dense darkness. I lifted her up into a sitting position. “We’ll be safe here while the fire blows over,” I said, making it up, not having a clue as to what would happen in this hole when the firestorm torched the cabin above. I touched Street’s cheek and it was wet with tears. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, we’ll be okay.”
“But not Spot,” she said. “He’s out there someplace, isn’t he? You wouldn’t come after me without him.” Her cries were loud in the relatively quiet hole.
“I’m going up to check,” I said, my throat thick. “Don’t move.” I left before either of us could say anything more.
I found the ladder and nearly ran up it toward the dim circle of light above. I vaulted out the window and ran into a blast of heat and smoke.
“SPOT!” I yelled. “SPOT! NATASHA!”
The smoke cloud swirled down to the ground obscuring the nearby forest. I ran out from the cabin and hit the full blast of wind. Hot sparks hit my neck. I turned and saw a wall of fire rear up as if it were alive and furious at my impertinence. The heat on my skin was searing and the roar stung my ears. Then the wind reversed direction as the firestorm sucked the nearby air into a monstrous column of rising flames. The fire lifted higher and then, as if gathering strength for a strike, surged down to the ground. The flame raced toward me like a crashing wave. I jumped behind the cabin, took a breath and threw myself face to the dirt.
The wave of flame surrounded the cabin, then receded as the front of the gas-soaked cabin burst into flames. The grass nearby was burnt black. The forest above the cabin hadn’t yet caught fire, but with the next wave of flame it would all be an inferno.
“SPOT! NATASHA!” I yelled again. But it was hopeless. If I didn’t hurry, the cabin wall with the window opening would soon be in flames and I’d burn, too. The wind shifted again and smoke filled the air.
“SPOT! ARE YOU THERE? NATASHA!” Unable to see or breathe, I gave up and boosted myself up on the window sill to climb inside. Then I heard a sound.
I turned my head to hear better.
A whimpering cry.
I jumped back to the ground and ran out into the smoke, then fell to the ground and put my lips to the dirt to try to find clean air to breathe. I got some air in my lungs and lifted up to yell. “SPOT! SPOT, I’M OVER HERE. FOLLOW MY VOICE, SPOT! NATASHA, COME!”
I bent down and again breathed air next to the ground as the choking smoke raged and roiled through the air. The roar of the fire was closer. I couldn’t see the flames so dense was the smoke. But an ominous orange glow diffused through the air.
I yelled again for my dog, over and over, trying to keep talking so he could sense direction by my voice. I didn’t think a dog’s nose was of any help navigating in a forest fire. And the fire was too close now for any more chance of the air clearing enough to see.
I moved a bit farther from the cabin, reminding myself not to lose my orientation. I needed to be able to reverse direction and find the cabin in the blackout.
“SPOT! ARE YOU THERE, BOY?!” The orange glow in the air was brighter. Three or four more seconds was all I could wait. At any moment, the fire could cough another wave of flame toward me and it would be all over.
“SPOT!” I tried again.
Another whimper.
“SPOT!” I ran farther into the woods.
The whimper came louder.
To my right.
I turned and ran, screaming Spot’s name.
Movement in the forest.
Spot came slow, his breath audible before I could make him out. He sounded like he was gargling or choking, trying to suck air through a wet sponge.
Then I could see him through the smoke.
He was dragging Natasha by the nape of her neck.
Her rear legs were pushing, trying to help.
I ran to them. Spot let go and Natasha sagged to the ground, alive but severely wounded. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like her front legs were broken
. Her jaw was no doubt broken as well judging from the blood and the way it hung at a peculiar angle. She also had a wet, bloody wound on the skin around her neck, although I realized that was from Spot picking her up and dragging her all the way from the base of the cliff.
Trying to be gentle, I scooped her up. “C’mon, Spot, we gotta run or we won’t make it.”
I plunged into the black smoke, trying not to breathe, running without reference. Dead reckoning. Either we hit the cabin or we hit the fire. Or maybe the fire got to us first.
An orange glow grew bright. I ran to where I thought the cabin was. It appeared out of the smoke. It was fully engulfed. Orange flames surged out of the black sky as I jumped behind the back of the cabin. I put my jacket over the flames on the window sill and, holding Natasha tight to my chest, did a roll through it.
“Spot, are you there? Spot?” I called out into the black smoke cloud. Spot stuck his head in the window. He coughed and wheezed. “Spot, jump through. C’mon, boy, hurry!”
He pushed off the ground and put his front paws on the window sill, then pulled them away from the heat.
“Spot, you have to jump.”
He didn’t know my words, but he understood what he had to do. Whining, he took a turn back into the smoke and then came at the window with some speed, leaped and easily cleared the sill.
“Spot, come here. Lie down. I’m going down this ladder. Stay here and keep your nose on the ground to breathe.” Again, he got the gist of it and did as I said, his jowls puffing with his coughing, choking breaths.
I stepped onto the ladder and lowered myself into the black hole in the earth. “We’re okay, sweetie,” I called down.
“Street, I’ve got Natasha,” I said when I got to the bottom. “She’s hurt on her jaw and front legs, so I’m going to set her on the ground next to you. You can pet her, but don’t bump her legs.”
I scrambled back up the ladder. Spot had shifted so his nose was hanging over the edge and down into the fresh air of the hole. “Okay, your largeness,” I said, rubbing his snout and head roughly. “You’re too big to carry, so I hope you remember that time you climbed the stepladder next to the fridge and took that steak I had defrosting on top of the fridge. Remember?” I had him up and standing next to the hole. “Same principle,” I said, “but this time in reverse. Ready?”
The forest fire was on the cabin now, the roar like a train on an overpass above. Flaming chunks of wood fell from the roof, with hot sparks exploding in the air. We’d gone from a black smoke cloud to being surrounded by bright yellow light, searing like a million heat lamps.
I put one arm around Spot’s narrow abdomen and pulled him tight to my own stomach. “Okay, bud, rear feet over here on the ladder rungs. That’s right. Now the front feet. Good boy. I’ll hold you from behind and below. Down we go. Hurry or we’re going to be grilled like well-done steaks.”
Spot resisted and I had the thought that for maybe the first time in his life he was scared.
“We’ve got about five seconds left, Spot. We have to move. NOW!”
He didn’t like it, but I think he knew that if he didn’t come willingly I was going to let go of the ladder and pull him down in a free-fall. We were down maybe eight rungs, just below the grade of the cabin floor, when the roof collapsed.
It seemed as if the cabin exploded, with the heat burning us from above and pieces of fire crashing down the hole beside us.
I kept a tight grip on Spot and we continued down the ladder, half stepping, half falling.
A large piece of burning wood rocketed down right after Spot and I made landfall. I picked it up by an unburned end and used it like a torch. Its light was sufficient to see the long tunnel that went from the bottom of the hole back into the mountain. We moved back into the tunnel away from the falling debris. When my torch burned out, we sat in the dark.
I didn’t know how long Street could go without food and water, but Natasha gave her a focus and she held the German shepherd, pet her nose and whispered into her ear while I held Street with my arm around her shoulder.
The inferno roared above destroying everything in its path. After a while I heard a lot of whimpering cries coming from Natasha. As I tried to reassure the dog, I realized that some of the cries were from Street.
I tried to soothe her, but without success. When she spoke, she was largely incoherent and I knew she was in bad shape.
Twice I climbed partway up the now broken and burned ladder and was turned back by the heat.
By the glow on my watch I could see that we four had sat in the tunnel at the bottom of the hole for six hours.
Eventually, I heard the muffled thwop-thwop of a chopper.
“You guys sit tight,” I told them, speaking of them in plural in an effort to keep Street thinking about Spot and Natasha and not about the fact that we could die down inside this mountain. “I’m going to go hitch a ride.” Street mumbled something unintelligible and I crawled back down the mining tunnel and climbed up the broken, charred ladder.
The cabin was gone, replaced by a dark sky, brilliant with stars. A half mile away was a hovering chopper with a bright searchlight. The light shined on the burned-out hulk of my Jeep. Perhaps the boys in the chopper assumed that the Jeep pointed the way, for the chopper slowly came my way.
They missed me on the first pass, going by my frantically waving arms without a pause. When they came back on the second pass, they flew directly over me and I stood in the beam like a night bug blinded by a giant flashlight.
The chopper settled down on a flat spot about sixty yards away. Before it had come to a complete rest, several men rushed out, flashlight beams weaving through the air.
The first one to reach me was Diamond.
“Gringo? You okay?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Street?”
“She’s alive, in bad shape, but alive.” I pointed to the opening of the mine shaft. “She’s down at the bottom. She needs to be carried out on a stretcher.”
Diamond shouted commands to the other men and they ran back to the chopper to get a stretcher. “What about Spot?” he asked.
“He’s okay. I’ll need to help him up. But one of your men can carry the other dog, a German Shepherd. Tell whoever does it to be careful. The shepherd’s got a couple of broken legs and a broken jaw. What happened to the town?” I asked, fearing the worst.
“It is pretty bad. A lot of houses burned. But the evacuation went well. As far as we know, no one has died.”
“Except Winton Berger. He was killed by the arsonist.”
“I thought you said...”
“Frederick Mallicoff was the arsonist. He brought Winton up here and killed him.”
Diamond squinted against a cloud of smoke that wafted from the smoldering logs that once made up the cabin. “Winton was set up.”
“Yes.”
“And the arsonist?”
“Spot took him down just before the forest fire got to us. Spot made it back to cover. The arsonist didn’t.”
The men came running back with a stretcher. I led them down to Street.
EPILOGUE
The parking lots at U.C. Davis were nearly full and we had to drive to the farthest corner to find a space.
“Are you up to walking a distance in the rain?” I asked Street. “Otherwise, I can drop you off and you can wait for us.”
“I’m a little stiff, but I’ll be fine,” she said. “The walk will do me good. Besides, I love rain. Snow, too. Judging from this weather it must be snowing furiously up in Tahoe.”
I ran around to her door, opened the umbrella and held her hand as she got out.
“Look how much better he is after seeing Natasha,” Street said as I let Spot out of the back. “He’s looking around, sniffing the air, almost acting like his old self.”
“Indeed, he is. It’s like doing a live find after a dead one. Turns their spirits around.”
“Do you think she’ll be okay?”
“Nata
sha? Yes. The surgeon told Ellie that her jaw and legs should heal completely in a couple months, her shoulder a month or two after that.”
“I’m glad,” Street said.
We didn’t speak anymore as we walked across the rain-wet asphalt and then onto the gently twisting paths that wound through the beautiful campus. Street moved slowly but without much apparent pain. If her wrist bandages hadn’t been poking out from below her sleeves, she would have looked normal.
Dr. Selma Peralta showed us down to a basement room in the vet hospital. “The mountain lion is nearly healed,” she said. “Tomorrow, she’ll be transferred to a holding facility up in the mountains of Alpine County. If she does well and shows a proper aversion to humans, she’ll be released into the wild in a couple of weeks.”
“What do you think her chances are?” Street asked.
“Quite good,” Dr. Peralta said. “The best thing is that she is angry. That is a good sign. Remember that she can reach through the bars. So please stand back. She may be relatively small, but she is a powerful predator.”
We turned a corner and walked toward a room that was similar to something in a zoo before they replaced cages with more natural habitats.
Pussy Cat paced back and forth, frustration and anger emanating from her like smoke. I held tight to Spot’s collar.
Spot pulled forward when he saw her.
“Spot, that’s Pussy Cat!” Street said. Then to us she said, “Do you think he recognizes her?”
Dr. Peralta answered. “Everything about this meeting is different, but yes, he’ll still recognize her scent even without her fur being filled with smoke and ash.”
Pussy Cat paused for a moment and looked up at Spot who stood a foot taller. A low, moaning growl rose up from her throat. She went back to pacing, more intense than before.
Spot lifted up his tail, a sign of pleasure. He pulled forward against my hold, stuck his nose toward the cage and gave a small woof.