Fire at Gray Wolf Lookout (Firehawks Book 8)

  Fire at Gray Wolf Lookout

  a Firehawks romance story

  by M. L. Buchman

  1

  The view of the Lolo National Forest on the Idaho-Montana border spread for a hundred miles in every direction. And Gray Wolf Summit fire lookout tower commanded one of the most beautiful and most remote regions of the forest. From his perch Tom Cunningham could see much of the Lolo, a big chunk of the Clearwater, and even the north tip of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

  Despite being in his mid-twenties, he felt like the luckiest kid in the U.S. Forest Service. No one was watching, so what the heck, he spit off the edge of the tower. Like a twelve-year old, he watched it was the light breeze carried past the cliff and down into the canyon—he watched it as long as he could.

  The whole acting-his-age thing had never really worked for him anyway, and someday he’d have to apologize to his parents for that. Both professors at the University of Washington—English lit Dad and Mom the chemist—and Tom had used his degree in geology to be an auto body shop mechanic.

  His rut was obvious, didn’t need to be on the outside to see it, Tom could feel it from the inside just fine. Like the crippled vehicles that streamed through his shop door, he couldn’t seem to drive straight down any path…and that was on the rare occasions when he got running at all.

  Screw that!

  Last winter he’d gotten so sick of himself that he figured the best solution was to get away—way away!

  He’d grown up in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, side-by-side housing that would be suburbia if it wasn’t now tucked well inside city limits. It was also saved from that awful fate because the houses were fifty to a hundred years old rather than tract built pillboxes.

  However, his experience with the great outdoors was limited to a couple of trips out to Snoqualmie Falls, a two hundred-and-fifty foot waterfall up in the Cascades. A good place for taking a girl on a nice date as the lodge had an excellent brunch.

  His present situation, atop a Montana fire lookout tower, had been Lucy’s idea. After six months of sharing a bed most nights she’d told him to go jump into a fire—not her exact words. Something about his total lack of either direction or ambition. Hearing this from his parents he could tune out. Hearing it from a hot brunette as he watched her fine behind departing his third-floor apartment for the last time, that was a bit harder to ignore.

  He’d hopped on the Internet. And when he’d looked up fire—for lack of anything better to do—an image of wildfire had caught his attention. Somehow, that single glimpse had led to enrolling in a fire lookout certification course and quitting his job as a car mechanic.

  “Now you’ve done it, buddy,” Tom looked out at the view and decided that whether stupid, whimsical, or psychotic, it had been a damn fine decision—perhaps the first good one in his adult life.

  He clamped his hands on the heavy wood rail and gave it a shake—not even a wiggle. His new home was as solid as the rock it stood on.

  The Gray Wolf Summit lookout tower was perched at over seven thousand feet. The valleys fell away on three sides down to three thousand feet and then soared vertically back up, though few of the peaks reached his lofty height. To the north, the ridge descended less dramatically, giving him a long slope of hikeable terrain.

  He’d never done much hiking, but couldn’t wait to try it out. Per Forest Service training, he had his bear-sized can of pepper spray, supposedly the safest and most effective solution to stop a bear. Same size as a can of spray paint, it shot a cloud of pepper that was the most effective way to stop a charging bear—far better than a big gun, the numbers said. He still would have liked a big gun, but since he’d be as likely to shoot himself as the bear, he’d decided against it.

  Beneath his boot soles, he stood on a planked walkway twenty-three feet above the rocky summit ridge; the true summit—a rounded crown of rock—lay fifty feet west and half as high as his tower. The forest fire lookout tower that would be his home for the next five months was a heavy wooden structure. Massive beams of rough-hewn dark wood formed the crisscross framework that supported the tower. Thirty-seven steps made of two-inch thick planks of Douglas fir led up to the fourteen-foot square glass-windowed “cab” that was now home. Those old Depression-era CCC guys really knew how to build something to last; most of the towers and lodges in the Pacific Northwest and Montana had been put up by those “back to work” crews.

  He breathed in the air and held it as long as he could. He wanted to savor its taste, its clarity, the complete absence of any hint of civilization or old motor oil. He was so sick of all the people who thought their car was so darned important. It’s a machine, people, use it, don’t marry it. He was glad to be away from them.

  He was almost as sick of them as he was of himself, which was really saying something.

  The true extent of his aloneness he was less comfortable with.

  Tom’s next nearest neighbors were Tess and Jack on Cougar Peak lookout fifteen miles to the north, Swallow Hill twenty miles to the southwest, and—according to his radio plan—Old Crag equally far to the east.

  Gray Wolf Summit wasn’t on some through-trail, or a trail to anywhere at all except Gray Wolf Summit. It had been a long eight-mile hike with a gargantuan pack that had him cursing in the first mile as he crested a thousand-foot climb only to descend into an even deeper valley.

  Vic, the Forest Service ranger in charge of the Selway-Bitterroot and Lolo lookouts, had warned him that his likely visitors over the summer would be the mule skinner who delivered the bulk of his supplies, his substitute who would come up for two days out of every two weeks, and one or two extreme fire-lookout tourists. Gray Wolf, perched at the end of a dead-end trail, was a brutal enough hike to discourage all except the most dedicated.

  “Well,” he told a turkey buzzard soaring on the high winds with its wing-tip feathers spread like fingers—the bird was probably the only one he’d be talking to most of the time. “If you’re seeking something that died, you can cart off the Old Me.”

  He didn’t know who he’d be by the end of the summer, that’s why he was up here. But he knew he wasn’t going to be the wandering soul who was presently standing on the lookout tower.

  It was going to be an interesting summer.

  2

  Patty Dale hiked up the narrow trail. She’d been looking forward to this summer for four years now. Sure, it was the ass end of wildlife biology—first-year field work—but she didn’t care. Being paid to tramp over the mountains and valleys of the Lolo for the next year was her idea of heaven.

  She’d absolutely paid her dues.

  “No one,” her parents had told her, “no one does Army ROTC as a wildlife biologist.” Her fellow cadets agreed, but she’d known what she wanted to do since the first reintroduced wolves were released into Yellowstone Park on her sixth birthday—March 21, 1995 after a seventy-year absence.

  “Just watch me,” though she’d said it only to herself at the time.

  Now, after four years in the Army, she’d have said aloud, “Who the fuck do you think you are, judging my ass?”

  Patty liked the self-confidence she’d learned in the military, though she was going to have to clean up her language—another gift of her military service—now that she was an academic, working for the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

  An academic—first in her family past high school. First not to work in the open-pit copper mines of Butte, Montana. Busted flat when the operations closed down for several years in the ‘80s and again when she was in her teens. She was the only one to make it out.

  Now, at twenty-six she’d done her time and survive
d her two full tours overseas. For the rest of her life, she would get to do what she wanted to. And right now that included hunting gray wolves—the largest of the wild canines—with a camera and a notebook.

  It seemed cliché, but two wolf packs had bred in dens on the mid-level slopes to either side of Gray Wolf Summit. The chance to study two packs simultaneously was almost unheard of. Her rookie year was going to fucking rock…to seriously rock. Whatever.

  Patty would be spending most of her time down in the forest, but the chance to sit on Gray Wolf Summit before she did was too perfect to pass up.

  Shaded north sections of the trail were still covered with snow. Typical June in Montana. Portions of the mountains were still thick with winter, while in other sections the aspen and maple leafed out in a hundred shades of bright green. The dark spruce and Douglas fir grew bright fingertips at the end of every branch making the mountainside glow with new life.

  She took her time hiking up the trail. Rabbit pellets and deer scat littered the trail here and there. Wolf tracks crossed the trail in a section just a half-mile long, this is where she’d start tomorrow. A single massive bear’s paw print, in the mud close beside a racing stream of snowmelt runoff, was the first she’d ever seen on her own. She took a photo of it next to her own size six hiking boot. It would look great on her wall, if she ever got a place of her own.

  Right now, home was a barracks in Helena, two hundred miles to the east. She didn’t plan on being there much this year.

  She filled her water bottles, dropped a purification tablet and an electrolyte packet into each one, resettled her pack, and continued up the trail.

  Patty made it to the peak after full dark. The fire lookout tower was a blacked-out silhouette against the stars. She dropped her pack and sighed, glad to be free of the load. Using only the starlight, she rolled out an air mattress on the lichen and climbed into her sleeping bag on the very summit. She lay awake a long time after finishing an energy bar and an apple for dinner. Her contentment reached far and wide, watching her breath turn to mist before dissipating against a wilderness of stars.

  She knew a lot of the constellations, but the old stories never seemed to fit. Well, now they had plenty of time to become friends. She had been planning to pick up a book, or at least one of those charts with the pretty drawings so that she’d really know the constellations by summer’s end. Then she decided that she’d rather make up her own mythology, reinvent herself in the here and now.

  She’d never really seen the big bear of Ursa Major in the Big Dipper. It was just a dipper. From now on, it would dedicated to her first drink of stream water now that she was free.

  Hercules was high in the sky, a wasp-waisted group of stars with a sword raised high. She renamed it Warrior Patty. Four years she’d fought for the U.S. Army. Before that she’d fought against the vortex of her family’s history that had threatened to suck her down into the copper mine as well.

  She fell asleep before she’d decided how to rename Cygnus the Swan flying up over the eastern horizon.

  3

  Tom woke in his lookout “cab” disoriented by the soft dawn light in such a foreign place. His body felt like he’d been battered by the night. The silence was so deep that his ears had rung loud enough to keep him awake. And no matter how deeply he tucked into his sleeping bag, he couldn’t seem to get away from the cold.

  And there had been the noises.

  With the sunset, the world had gone silent, every bird asleep, his buddy the buzzard nesting somewhere in the trees far below. Not a breath of wind.

  Then, he’d heard animals rustle about outside and imagined the worst. After a loud thump and strange, soft call like a sigh, there had been slick, snake-like sounds he couldn’t identify. Torn between cold and fear, he’d decided that getting up to lock his front door situated at the top of thirty-seven stairs really wasn’t necessary—not if he wanted to have any self-respect in the morning.

  On the verge of getting up to lock it anyway, a wolf howl lifted into the night. He pictured a entire pack storming his tower if he made the slightest noise. The single cry was far off and left him awake and shivering for hours.

  With large windows encircling his cabin in the sky—his tiny summer home was almost entirely glass from waist to head-high—the low sunlight was rapidly heating it up from sub-Arctic to toasty. Around the edges it had a bed, desk, two comfortable chairs, and a long worktable with a pair of stools facing an amazing view. The entire view was amazing. He could see no signs of civilization in any direction and he was above the whole forest.

  Up above the wrap-around windows was an outlined drawing that was a map of the surrounding terrain and named every peak and valley for three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. In the center stood a raised cabinet topped by the Osborne Fire Finder for locating a burn if he saw one.

  The first thing Tom did after crawling out of his sleeping bag was to pick up the big binoculars and scan the horizon and the trees for smoke. His training had made sure he remembered to look both near and far—to scan the nearby slopes as well as the distant peaks. The fire season didn’t officially start for a few days and he knew that it could be weeks before he saw his first one, if he saw one at all.

  Three-quarters of the way around, he yelped.

  Smoke!

  A huge plume of it.

  Still holding the binoculars, he waved his other hand around reaching for his radio when he caught a view of something silver.

  Tom peeked over the top of the binoculars, but couldn’t see any fire down toward Cougar Peak or in the valley directly below.

  But the thing had been massive.

  And then he looked closer.

  A woman with light-colored hair was sitting cross-legged in front of a small fire that occasionally released a little puff of smoke. The flash of silver was a small cooking pot. Even as he watched, she tipped it into a mug and then dumped in a slim packet of—he adjusted the binoculars’ focus—instant coffee.

  He swung the glasses up to see her face…and she was looking right at him.

  Okay, voyeuristic. He lowered the glasses and waved before it could become voyeuristic in a bad way. She didn’t wave back.

  He stepped out the door onto the walkway around the cab.

  “Sorry,” he called out. “I thought you were a forest fire.”

  “Well, that’s a new one.”

  At just fifty feet away he could see she sat on a heavy field pack. She wore a thick jacket, messy light-brown hair ruffled down to her collar. Looking at her all wrapped up, he suddenly realized he was freezing his balls off. He looked down.

  Briefs and binoculars.

  “Holy crap!” he hurried back inside to the sound of her snort of amusement.

  4

  About the time Patty finished making her oatmeal in the same pot she’d made coffee, the lookout guy emerged again. This time he was wearing enough layers to look like the Michelin tire man.

  Too bad. He’d looked good in just his tighty-whities. He wasn’t macho-soldier strong, but he was close.

  She’d done her best not to think about men since she’d gotten her commander court-martialed for thinking he could take liberties. It had led to her complete isolation by the men in the unit, and by the women as well—a lot of whom were screwing other soldiers, married and not. Totally gross.

  Mr. Fire Lookout stood about six feet and didn’t move down the stairs like an athlete or a soldier. He moved like a geek. Even though he now carried a mug of his own, he didn’t approach her campfire until she waved him over.

  Man unsure of himself. That was a new one. Most guys, especially the ones without a clue, moved with a self-entitled assuredness and bravado that only served to piss her off.

  He moved close to the fire but didn’t sit, instead looming above her. Well, she wasn’t going to crick her neck for any male of the species.

  “Sit down or shove off,” she pulled out a squeeze bottle of maple syrup and drizzled a scant teaspoon on her oatmeal to
make the syrup last.

  “Sorry,” he sat. So not a total write-off.

  Patty hadn’t really wanted company, but then again, she was the one who’d camped by a lookout tower—you get what you pay for. “Got a name?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  She almost spewed her first mouthful of scalding oatmeal in his face along with her barely contained laughter.

  Handsome unsure guy with a sense of humor?

  “Sure,” she kept eating and they shared a smile. “They’re useful things to have…at times. I’ll just call you Fireboy.”

  “Works for me.” Still he didn’t ask her name and she could no longer conveniently ask for his. Instead he sipped his coffee and stared out at the sunlight-etched shadows as sunrise moved across the tree-dark slopes.

  This was why she’d come here, to watch daybreak sweep over the rugged mountains.

  It certainly wasn’t to be studying the profile of the man etched against the softening blue sky.

  5

  Tom stared into the distance and struggled for something to say. Though women didn’t make him tongue-tied, he knew that he wasn’t the smoothest guy around. Now Jimmy at the auto-body shop could talk female clients out of their BMWs and straight into a hotel room, but Tom had never figured out how.

  But after convincing himself that he was alone in the wilderness, then flashing himself at a woman camping at the edge of a thousand foot drop-off, he didn’t know what to say. She was pretty, at least her face and hair were. Her fingers were fine and strong. The rest of her was covered in a thick jacket, many-pocketed camo pants, and heavy hiking boots.

  The women he knew were the sorts who wanted to hit a movie or go out drinking. Outdoorsy ones would play Frisbee on the lawn at Gasworks Park overlooking Lake Union and downtown Seattle.

  This one was sitting on a pack that looked heavier than his had been and was cooking breakfast over an open campfire a dozen miles from the next nearest living soul.