by Lexi Whitlow
I turn the car radio on, tuned to the public radio station in Missoula, hoping the signal holds strong for a while before it’s lost in the narrow mountain passes I’ll cross headed west.
Passing through St. Regis, the radio signal begins wavering. I slow down, stopping at an intersection just before getting on the highway. The radio signal strengthens slightly just as an emergency broadcast beacon sounds. I pause at the stop sign to listen.
“…wildfires on the eastern heights of the Mission Mountain range have crossed the ridgeline, spreading to the western slopes between Post Creek and North Crow Road… winds coming from the northeast are pushing fires into the central Mission Valley region… residents in the area are advised to immediately evacuate…”
The rest of the transmission is garbled in static. It’s followed up by a live news report out of Missoula saying that the fire is visible from Ronan, Charlo, and Post Creek, and is being pushed down the mountains by the wind, which has shifted directions and picked up dramatically.
Shit.
Oh. God. The horses.
They’re all in the stable. They’re locked up in their stalls and there’s no one there to let them out.
Cam’s horses. The ranch. They’re all right in the path of the fire.
I do a tight U-turn in the middle of the intersection while lifting my phone to power it up.
I drive fast. Faster than my little car wants to go. Faster than is safe on these narrow, winding river valley roads. When the phone is powered up I scroll for the last number that called me; Amanda.
She answers in a breathless huff. I hear Jacob in the background, whaling.
“Where are you?” she asks, skipping the formalities. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. What’s happening?”
“The sheriff’s department came. They’re making us go. Are you at the ranch? If you’re at the ranch, you have to get out. Now.”
“Okay,” I say. “Are you and Jacob okay?”
“Yeah. We’re going to my mother’s house. I turned the horses out and put the lawn sprinklers on. The horses ran off toward the river. We’ll sort them out later. Get out of there Grace. This isn’t something to mess with. Go to Beck’s. Or come with me—”
The call drops before we can finish. She thinks I’m still at the Kicking Horse. All those calls I got, they weren’t about me leaving or trying to make me change my mind.
They were about the fire.
Once I round past the tiny town of Moiese and am in the Valley, I see the fire on the high slopes to the north east. It’s a ball of red against a black sky, high above the horizon line. As I drive toward it, the ball of red spreads wide, dipping lower and lower toward the valley floor.
My Honda’s engine screams as I race toward the building inferno.
At Charlo I encounter heavy traffic heading away from the area. I pass a convoy of pick-ups with all manner of haphazardly stacked household debris packed tight in the beds, hauling horse trailers occupied by frightened animals. When I turn off Highway 93 onto Molmann Pass Trail, the entire left side of my view is filled with towering, blazing fire less than a half mile from me. I feel its heat. The wind throws hot embers across the windscreen. The air is acrid with choking smoke.
By the time I make the ranch, a blaze so intense that it spirals to the sky, roaring like a hurricane, nicks, peeling up the trees, exploding in the brush a hundred yards from the outbuildings. I pull my car right up to the stables and rushing out, I hear the animals inside screaming, beating their hooves against bolted stall doors.
I make quick work of it. Opening the west-facing, sliding stable door wide, I move from stall to stall, swinging each gate open one-by-one, as quickly as I can. The animals bolt, one-by-one, in a terrified rage, screaming, galloping out of their prisons, headed toward the open door. I count thirty-two empty stalls before I’m done, then double back, checking. Mirabel, Jack, and Stoney all ran with the rest. Even the little goat that keeps Osage company runs for all his might toward the wide valley and safety, his stunted tail flipping white with fright.
I step outside the stables and am astonished with what I see. The fire is on me. It’s here. The flames crawl up the outer walls of the stable, touching the roof, igniting beams and posts. The barn, fifty yards north, is in a full blaze. The heat is overpowering. My lungs seize with smoke. The sound around me is terrible. Cracking, sucking, breaking. The oxygen in the air is consumed along with everything else.
I look down at my feet. The ground is on fire beneath me.
The house… The house is next.
I run. With the flames chasing me, I run.
The house is already filled with smoke. Inside the air is hot, ready to ignite.
What here is precious? What can I save?
The family photos. I go to the library, piling photo albums into my arms; it’s a century or more of collected memory that I can’t allow to burn. I see the journals I read so many months ago, pulling them down roughly from the shelves. I pull photographs of Cam’s father from the walls. I throw his parents wedding pictures onto the pile. I toss all this onto the rug in the middle of the room as it fills with tendrils of smoke seeping through closed windows and under door frames.
The cellar door is in the foyer in front of the stairs. I lift the heavy thing, dragging the rug piled heaping with treasures down with me, descending into the darkness.
I go back up for towels.
Outside the windows all I can see are flames. I feel the heat pressing in.
I throw an armload of towels into the sink, soaking them with water.
Glass shatters in the windows around me. The house creeks from its outer walls in. Billowing smoke rolls inside, flooding the lower floor, surrounding me in a black shadow of choking poison. I dive into the cellar, my arms full of wet towels, and I pull the door closed tight behind me.
As the fire builds above. I lay wet towels over the rolled rug containing the Davis family history. Then I find a corner in the back of the inky black space to tuck into, wrapping myself in cold wet towels to ride out whatever is next. Above my head I hear the fire build and rage. It becomes a thundering inferno overhead, roaring like a volcano. I hear walls collapsing, glass shattering. The wind howls. The space I occupy becomes super-heated, filled with smoke. I bury my head beneath a soaked towel, heaving for breath, suffocating in the dark.
The last lucid thought that passes through my conscious mind is, I never should have left. I love him. He loves me. That’s all there is. That’s all that ever mattered.
I’m so sorry.
God, I hope the horses made it out.
Chapter 25
Camden
“It’s bad,” Amanda say, her voice breaking on the speakerphone. “It was a wall of fire. It came so quick. It spread down the mountain like a flood. I don’t know where Grace is. The call dropped, and I couldn’t get her back.”
Amanda is crying. She’s almost hysterical, but she’s safe.
I know Grace isn’t at the ranch. Mom called me this evening. Grace is gone.
At least she’s safe.
When Amanda called with the first word of the fires blowing up, Tyler and I dropped the horse trailer at the Hux ranch and turned around. That was at eight o’clock. It’s three in the morning now. We’re an hour and a half south of Missoula.
“What are you hearing?” Tyler asks. “Any word on the damage around Kicking Horse?”
“Nothing.” Amanda says. “The fire is burning south toward Macdonald Lake. But that’s all we’ve heard. They’ve evacuated everything from Ronan south to Allison Road.”
None of this sounds good. Grace left. The animals would have been put up before nightfall. No one was on the ranch. If the fire came through, it’s a total loss. Twenty years of carefully cultivated bloodlines, the best in the whole region… gone.
It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea.
“It’ll be okay,” Tyler tries to reassure me. “For sure Grace turned the horses out before
she got out.”
I draw in a breath. “Grace wasn’t there,” I say, my voice a dull monotone. “Grace left. She was hours away before the fire came down. There was no one on the ranch.”
Tyler goes quiet. He knows what I know. Decades of effort; my father’s, my own, his, have burned up in the fire. Thirty of the most precious, beautiful creatures on God’s green earth, slow roasted, terrified as they saw their demise coming, helpless to escape it.
Coming into St. Ignatius, the valley air is dense and dark, lit only by orange flame creeping up the mountains and down into the flat plain of the valley floor. Wildfires burn hot, east of us, skirting up and down the slopes. Smoke drifts due west, settling low.
We encounter emergency vehicles going both ways, but we keep our tenor north.
“Maybe it’s okay.” Tyler says, seeing the smoldering devastation ahead of us as we turn east.
It’s not okay, and I know it. I feel it in my gut.
A third of the way down Mollman Pass Trail, my gut feeling is confirmed. The landscape is reduced to a smoldering waste. There’s not a tree standing that hasn’t been rendered to char.
“Jesus,” Tyler utters, creeping the truck through the smoking, burnt-over roadway. The landscape is still hot.
The turn-off to our house at Kicking Horse is unrecognizable. The fencing is gone, laid waste to the flames. The row of trees my grandfather planted along the lane are mere poles sticking up from a gray field of ash.
I feel my heart break in my chest.
The house is gone. The stables are gone. The barn is a pile of timber ash. The only thing remaining that’s recognizable is foundation stone and chimney.
My entire spread is nothing more than a pile of smoking rubble ensconced in a gray, pre-dawn cloud.
Then I see the thing I had no idea I would see here.
Sitting near the concrete pad of all that remains of the big stables, is the burned out, grossly charred body of a Honda Civic hatchback.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I mutter, stepping out of the truck, moving fast toward the little hull of a car.
The car is burned beyond description, heaped with ash and blackened, all its windows blown out, sitting in the scorched dirt on smoldering rims
Tyler follows me. His eyes settle on the vehicle. Then his expression shifts.
“She was here,” he says. “She was here. Maybe she still is.”
I look around. If she’s still here, she’s succumbed to the inferno that took this place. The flames have consumed a century of my family’s life and work on this hapless clod of dirt.
How could she still be here?
Her car is here. She must be here. No one could have survived this.
Tyler kicks his way through the still hot debris of the stables.
“There are no horses here,” he calls out to me, nudging hot coals and black timbers with his boots. “There would be remains. There’s nothing here but burnt wood and metal.”
I’m in shock. Time slows. I see the light rising in the east, behind the mountain ridges. I see the devastation all around me, but it hardly registers.
Where is she? Where was she?
The cellar.
I move toward the spot where my house once stood. All that’s left now is a foundation with two climbing chimneys. The hanging walls that remain are reduced to charred sticks. The ground surrounding where the house, once green and covered in flowers, is black, littered with smoldering embers and shattered shards of glass. I climb up into the wreckage of what was once the living room. The floor is a blackened plain, piled with ashen refuse.
The hardwood flooring around the cellar door is singed to charcoal.
“Help me with this,” I call out to Tyler.
Together we lift the heavy door, peering down into an inky abyss. The cellar stairs are unburned, completely intact. I descend into the darkness.
At the bottom of the stairs I spy a rolled-up rug from the library, piled with family photographs, books, and other things from the shelves in the living room and my office. It’s a cache of family heirlooms dragged down here in a hurry, draped in damp towels to protect them from the flames.
She did this.
“What do you see?” Tyler calls down. “Anything down there?
I find her curled up between foundation pillars, her head wrapped in a wet towel, her skin the color of ash, black soot clinging to her eyes, nose, and mouth.
“Oh, God. Please. Please don’t let her die,” I mumble, checking for a pulse.
She’s alive; barely breathing, her pulse is fast and faint.
“Camden! Talk to me!” Tyler calls out from above.
“She’s here!” I shout back.
I scoop her into my arms, lifting her. She’s dead weight on my shoulders, as limp as a ragdoll. I haul her up the cellar stairs into the rising light of early morning, rushing her to the truck as Tyler trails me.
“Head toward Ronan,” I say, climbing in with Grace’s crumpled body in my arms. “As fast as you can get there.”
I dial 911 while Tyler drives, the charred, burnt-over landscape falling behind us, the air still dense with smoke.
“She’s not conscious,” I tell the dispatcher after giving her the particulars. “Breathing shallow. She was in the cellar of a house that burned in the fires. She’s been down there for hours.”
The dispatcher tells me to take her to the fire department in Ronan, and she’ll have an ambulance meet us as soon as possible.
“Every crew is out,” she says. “We’re stretched thin. We’ve getting support from Missoula, but all our resources are out on calls. Keep her prone and warm, head low. If she stops breathing, administer mouth-to-mouth. There might be someone at the fire department who can help you. If there’s no one there, look for an oxygen tank and mask. Administer oxygen if you can. Keep her airway clear.”
There’s no one at the fire department, but the building is open. I haul Grace inside, laying her out on a cot the volunteer firemen use. Tyler looks for oxygen while I cover her with blankets, checking her pulse again. It’s fast and so weak I can hardly feel it in her wrist. It’s stronger in her neck, but seems irregular.
“Here,” Tyler says, returning with his find. He slips a small plastic cone over Grace’s nose and mouth, turning the valve on the metal tank up to a hundred percent. “She’ll be okay. She’s safe now.”
God. Please. Please.
I find a washcloth and towel and begin clearing the soot from Grace’s face while Tyler paces, talking on the phone with Amanda. The grime covering her from head to toe is thick and sticky, and I know that this same oily scum is inside her lungs, suffocating her slowly.
She came back. She came back to save the horses. She risked her life for my ranch.
Her skin is damp and cool to the touch, ashen in color. I pinch her fingers; she has no response.
“C’mon baby, please wake up,” I beg, stroking her matted, soot blackened hair.
My pleadings go unanswered. Ten minutes later, though it seems much longer, an EMT crew arrives and starts working on her, calling in her condition to the ER in Missoula.
“…approximately twenty-year-old female… 115 bpm and tachy… can’t get a bp… no other obvious injuries… unresponsive… normal reflexes… normal neurological… acute hypoxia with likely high CO2 exposure… lungs are full, likely edema… no obvious burns…”
Half of what he says I can’t understand and the rest sounds bad.
One of the EMTs looks up at me. “You said she was in the cellar of a house. Was it burned? Was there heat down there?”
I don’t know what to tell him. “Nothing down there was burned as far as I could tell. It was too dark to see much. But the house above burned hot and fast. There’s nothing left of it.”
The EMT puts a flashlight into her open mouth, checking for something. Then the same with her nose. He shakes his head.
“Looks way better than it should.”
“She had a wet towel over her head,�
� I say. “That probably helped.”
A look of understanding crosses his face. “It saved her life,” he says. “She did everything right. Most people try to outrun a wildfire. You can’t. She went to ground. Smart girl.”
He doesn’t know the half of it.
They wrap her up, strapping her onto a gurney, then move fast toward the ambulance.
“Can I go with her?” I ask, following close.