“Just kidding,” he says, looking around again.Then he sighs.“I think she’d be pretty pissed off, too.She had a hell of a temper.”
“I can give you a ride,” I offer.
Harold doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve got the truck out there,” he says, and begins the process of standing again, leaning hard on the arm of the couch.
I just look up at him, questioningly, and I try again to swallow the lump in my throat.
“I don’t know if I can leave,” he says, looking around again.“But I’ll try.You should go ahead.”
“If you need to pack, I can help,” I offer.
Harold shakes his head firmly.
“There’s an evacuation center in?—”
“Clementine, I got it from here,” he says.“Go on.You probably have things to do besides talk to an old man.I got a daughter outside Missoula.”
“Are you sure?”I ask.
“Go,” he says, and I walk for the door, then out onto the porch.He leans out of his front door after me.
“Clementine,” he says.
I turn around.
“Thanks,” he says.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
Hunter
The guys wakeme up when it’s still dark.Something this intense, we take four-hour shifts sleeping.It can be tempting to stay awake for forty-eight hours straight, but that’s a good way to burn down the wrong part of the forest or fell a tree onto someone by accident.
As soon as I get out of my sleeping bag and stuff it away, I can tell that something’s up.The wind is slightly different, and strangely, it’s cooler.I can feel the breeze coming off the river for the first time, even though we’re fifty feet away from it, like something’s drawing it toward our encampment.
Hard to tell what exactly it is.It’s too early in the day for a thunderstorm, but there could be one building somewhere close by.The air feels charged, even though it’s cool, and the guys are a little quieter than usual.
We’re all a little uneasy, a little on edge.I grab my gear, shove an MRE into my mouth, and get back to work.
Silasand I switch off again for a couple of hours, and strange as the weather feels, nothing changes.Not yet, anyway.
After a couple hours, Dashiell, Porter’s second-in-command, comes up to us.I cut the chainsaw and Silas walks over.His hair is covered in ash, and his face is smeared with black except for where his sweat has cut tracks through it.
I probably look the same.
“Take a break,” he says.“It’s your turn for lookout.”
A helicopter whirls overhead, and all three of us look up at it until it flies behind the dense forest, out of sight.
“How’s it going?”I ask.We haven’t gotten an update in a little while, but we’ve been lost in the rhythm of our work, the noise of the chainsaw.
“Not too bad,” he says, shouting over the noise of the other chainsaws.“Fire’s slowed down pretty good.”
Silas and I grab our lunch MREs, then make our way up a steep, rocky slope until we get to a patch of boulders at the top with a panoramic view of almost the whole valley.We radio down that we made it, report on the fire, the wind direction, the air temperature.
Right away, I see it: fluffy white cumulus clouds to the west starting to gather together and darken.That’s it, the thunderstorm building.I report it to Porter, down the hill, and he goes quiet for a moment.
