Wildfire by Mary Pauline Lowry

Author:Mary Pauline Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

D

OUGLAS CAME BACK TO THE CREW AFTER his morning briefing with Command. We all knew that any time we were away from a shower for more than a few days, his neck became a torment of red, viciously itching ingrown hairs that he battled meticulously. So before he called for us to gather up, he hung a little shaving mirror from a tree and stood in front of it for twenty minutes, prying them free with the sharpened tip of his knife. When he finally yelled for us to gather, I stared with fascination at the little wounds he’d dug into his neck, the only chink in his armor of fastidiousness. He reported that we were being dispatched to another, smaller fire about a hundred miles away.

“Whoo-wee!” Rock Star yelled. “Get us off of this dead ass fire. I’m ready to dig me some hot line!”

“We’ll be spiking out,” Douglas said, and we all cheered. Spiking out meant we’d be alone with just a couple of other crews, our only connections to the wider world the radio and the helicopters that sling-loaded in food each evening. Spiking out seemed so clean to us, without all the slamming shitter doors and little tent cities of fire camp.

Helicopters flew us in before dusk. As we rose I could look out the window and see the Salmon River Mountains, their craggy slopes running down to disappear in the flowing waters of the river. Squat hackberry trees and mountain mahogany clung to the riverbanks. The chopper lowered us into a little basin, covered in lush grass and encircled by lodgepole and Douglas fir, set like a bowl in the middle of a ring of small mountains.

There were already two crews spiked out there, the Logan Hotshots and a prison crew called the Flame ’n Gos. That night our three crews stayed separate, each sleeping in a scattered group of sleeping bags. Crews didn’t mix on the fire line, that’s just how it went. We woke in the early morning dark, packed up our red bags, and ate breakfast as the first light of dawn brought an empty gray color to the sky. As the sun began to appear, so did the beautiful green hues of the mountains and the blue of the sky. We hiked out, each crew going to its own section of the fire.

Our hike in was long and the landscape dense with towering ponderosa and singing streams, which we crossed on the slick backs of fallen logs.

At the fire line we broke into squads. “Huddle up,” Sam said, and Rock Star, Archie, Hawg, and I gathered around him. “Okay, squad, who needs to take a grumpy?” I waved my hand above my head with the rest of my squad.

Before I started work on the Pike, it would’ve been a chance to sneak away into the woods and throw up my breakfast, but now the thought barely crossed my mind. It was truly all about the privacy of the grump.

By then

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