The Fire Wolf's Mate

The man's mouth was on my throat before I had my boots off.

"Rhea," he murmured against my skin, and his hands found the hem of my county jacket and pushed it off my shoulders. It landed somewhere in the dark of the cabin with a sound like a dropped newspaper.

I had spent the whole day telling people where to go. North on the highway, east past the fairgrounds, not the river road, never the river road. My throat was raw from it. Now I let someone else do the talking.

He was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the August heat sitting in the valley like a lid on a pot. His palms slid under my shirt, rough at the heels from years of gripping an axe handle, and I arched into it and heard myself make a noise I would have denied in daylight.

"Slow down," I said, though I did not want him to.

"No." He kissed the corner of my jaw. "You slow down. You have been running since five this morning. I can smell the smoke in your hair."

"You smell like a campfire yourself."

"Then we match."

I laughed, and it came out unsteady. His fingers found the clasp of my bra, and the room was dark enough that I could pretend I was someone else, someone who did not have a radio on the kitchen counter hissing with the county frequency, someone who did not have to be back at the evacuation center by dawn.

He turned me toward the window. Moonlight came through the glass and lay across the floorboards in a pale bar, and I watched his reflection behind mine, sandy hair falling over his brow, the amber of his eyes catching the light. I knew those eyes. I had known them for fifteen years and had spent most of that time not looking at them.

"Rhea," he said again, softer this time, and his hand came up to my face and turned it toward him. "Stay."

I woke in my truck.

The radio was going. It had been going for a while, I think, and the dispatcher's voice had reached some part of my brain that did not require consciousness to obey.

"Unit seven, do you copy? Unit seven, Canyon Creek Road is closing. Repeat, Canyon Creek Road is closing."

I sat up. My neck had a crick in it from the window glass, and my jacket was bunched under my shoulder, and the cab smelled of old coffee and the pine air freshener Nell had hung from the mirror three years ago. My strawberry blonde curls had come loose from the clip and were stuck to my cheek. I pushed them back and grabbed the mic.

"Seven copies. Where are we on the east side?"

"Fire jumped the line at Baker's Ford twenty minutes ago. It's moving north. You have got maybe forty minutes before it reaches the cabins at the top of Canyon Creek."

Forty minutes. I looked at the clock on the dash. Four fifty two in the morning, though the sky above the Sapphires was already going the color of an old bruise.

I had evacuated Canyon Creek twice in the last week and both times the fire had turned away. People had started to treat me like a weather forecast they did not like. The Hendersons had told me on Tuesday that their grandfather had built their cabin and no fire was going to take it, and I had stood on their porch and said I understood, and then I had gone back to my truck and written their names on the list anyway.

"Seven is moving," I said into the mic, and pulled the truck onto the road.

The canyon road climbed through lodgepole pine and the burnt skeletons of the nineteen ninety nine fire, and every few hundred feet the trees gave way to a gap where the land fell off toward the creek. The smoke had settled into those gaps like water. Sometimes I could see the fire itself, a red-orange shiver in the trees on the far ridge, and sometimes it disappeared and there was only the smell, that sweet resinous reek that got into the lining of my jacket and would not leave.

I had been doing this job for six years. Before that I had done dispatch, and before that I had waited tables at the diner in Hamilton and answered the phone at the clinic where my sister worked. I knew every road in this valley. I knew which bridges washed out in spring and which driveways were too steep for the county plow, and I knew, the way you know your own hand, that the Hendersons would not leave their cabin on the first knock.

I parked across the road from their gate and got out. The air was hot already. It was four in the morning and the air was hot.

"Mrs. Henderson!" I shouted. "It's Rhea, from the county. You need to come out now."

The porch light came on. The door opened a hand's width, and Irene Henderson's face appeared in the gap, sixty eight years old and set like concrete.

"We talked about this," she said.

"We talked about it on Tuesday. The fire is at Baker's Ford. That is two miles from your back porch, Irene. I am not asking you to move the cabin. I am asking you to get in my truck."

"Ray won't leave the horses."

"Then Ray can ride in the back with me and we will take the horses down to the fairgrounds, and I will personally sign the paperwork. You have my word."

The door closed. I stood in the yard with my hands on my hips and counted slowly to ten, and behind me the sky above the ridge had turned the color of a lit cigarette.

The door opened again. Irene came down the steps with a canvas bag in one hand and a small brass birdcage in the other, and behind her Ray Henderson was pulling on his boots and muttering about the government.

"Thank you," I said, and took the bag. "Where is the boy?"

"Wes is with his mother in Missoula. I told you that on Tuesday."

"You told me a lot of things on Tuesday."

We got the Hendersons into my truck and their three horses into the Hendersons' own trailer, and Ray drove the trailer himself because he did not trust the county to do it right, and I followed them down to the fairgrounds and watched them park, and then I turned the truck around and went back up the canyon because the radio was saying there were more.

By six the sun was up and the sky was the color of a peach that had been left too long on a windowsill. By seven the wind had come up out of the south, and the fire was running.

I want to be clear about something. I have been around fire my whole adult life. I know what it does to a hillside and what it does to a town, and I know that the word "running" does not mean what people think it means. It does not mean the fire is hurrying. It means the fire has stopped being something you can push against and has become a thing with a mind of its own.

At eight my radio cracked and Tessa's voice came through, and she did not bother with the county script.

"Rhea, you need to get out of there."

"I have got two more cabins on the upper road."

"There is a spot fire at the switchback. Bryan says it came out of nowhere."

Tessa had been my best friend since we were both nineteen and working the same diner counter, and in twenty two years she had never once told me to leave before she thought it was genuinely time.

"I hear you," I said. "Two cabins, Tessa."

I got the first cabin out. A retired couple from California who had bought the place in March and were already talking about selling it. The second cabin was empty and had been for years, and I stood in its overgrown yard for a moment and looked up the slope toward the switchback, and that was when I heard the sound.

I have heard a lot of things in a fire. Trees exploding from the inside. Metal warping. Once a propane tank went and I felt it in my chest for an hour afterward. What I heard was a child.

It was a thin sound, a few notes, like something being torn. It came from the trees above the switchback where the fire was coming down the slope, and I stood there with my radio in my hand and the whole valley roaring and I thought: that is a kid.

"Unit seven to any unit," I said. "I have a possible child in the trees above the switchback. I am going in."

The radio spat at me. Tessa said my name twice. I dropped the radio into the truck and started up the slope.

The fire was above me and to the left, and the smoke rolled down through the trees in gray curtains that came and went. I had my bandana over my mouth. My eyes were streaming. The ground was hot through the soles of my boots, and every so often a pine would go up somewhere close and throw a wave of heat against the side of my face.

I heard the child again. Closer.

Then I saw the wolf.

It came out of the smoke ahead of me and stopped in a clearing between two burned trunks. It was gray, the gray of ash before the wind takes it, and it was large, larger than any wolf has a right to be, and it was carrying a child by the back of the shirt the way a dog carries a puppy.

I stopped walking. The wolf looked at me.

I have seen wolves in this valley. I have seen them at a distance, moving through the trees, and I have always had the same feeling in my chest, a kind of recognition that I never let myself examine. This was different. This was a wolf standing in the middle of a burning forest with a human child in its mouth and looking at me as though it had been waiting.

It came toward me. It did not run. It walked, deliberately, through the smoke, and it did not stop until it was close enough that I could see the child's face. A boy, maybe four years old, red-cheeked and limp but breathing. There was a burn on his wrist.

The wolf lowered its head and set the boy down at my feet.

I crouched. My hands were shaking, and I did not know whether it was the smoke or the wolf or the child, and I gathered him up against my jacket and felt his small chest move. He was burning up. He was alive.

"Where did you come from?" I said, to the boy, to the wolf.

The wolf was still there. It was looking at me with eyes the color of a low sun, and its ears were up, and I had the sudden, ridiculous certainty that it understood every word I said.

"Go," I said to it. "Get out of here. The fire is coming down the hill."

The wolf's head tilted. And then, because I was not moving fast enough, it took two steps forward and pressed its muzzle against my hand.

I felt the touch go up my arm like a current in a wire. There was a sound in my head, a long low howl, and it was not coming from the trees or from the fire or from the radio I had left in the truck. It was coming from somewhere under my own ribs, from a place I had walled off and paved over and told myself did not exist.

My knees went. I got one hand on the ground to keep from dropping the boy, and the wolf was gone, and the smoke came down over the clearing, and I was on my hands and knees in the ash with a child in my arms and a sound in my head I had not heard since the night my sister died.

I staggered down the slope. I do not remember most of it. I remember the heat on the back of my neck and the boy's breath against my collarbone and the trailer of a county truck appearing out of the smoke, and someone's hands pulling the boy out of my arms, and someone else's hands on my shoulders, and then I was sitting on the tailgate with a bottle of water being pressed into my hand and a paramedic calling me ma'am.

The boy went into an ambulance. I watched the doors close on him. Then I stood up and walked away from everyone and around the side of the truck, where the fire was visible above the trees and no one could see me, and I leaned against the metal and put my hand over my mouth and tried to breathe.

Something had woken up inside me. It had been asleep for fifteen years, since the night my sister died, since the night I ran out of the Bitterroot Valley with my sister's blood on my shirt and a hole in my memory and a promise I had made to myself, and it was awake now, and it was hungry, and it knew the wolf that had carried the child. It knew it the way you know your own name.

"Ma'am."

I looked up. A man was walking toward me across the gravel, tall, with sandy hair falling over his forehead and the strap of a fire shelter bag across his chest. The smoke had painted his jaw dark. He was thirty feet away and I could smell him, and that was wrong, because there was smoke everywhere and nothing else should have been able to reach me.

Then he stopped. He was close enough now that I could see the amber of his eyes, and those eyes were not looking at me like a stranger looks at a county officer.

"Rhea," he said. His voice was quiet and careful, and it broke in the middle of my name.

I had not seen Dane in fifteen years. He looked older. There was a line between his eyebrows that had not been there, and there was a mark on his forearm that I had put there myself, one night in a cabin at the edge of the valley, with my teeth.

He took one more step and stopped, and his jaw was tight, and I watched him fight something and lose.

"It is you," he said. "I thought the scent on the ridge was a memory. I told myself it was a memory."

"Dane." My voice came out flat and strange. "What are you doing here."

"Fighting a fire." He looked at the trees, at the ambulance, at my hands. "That boy. There was a report of a wolf on the slope. A big grey one. It carried him out."

"There was no wolf," I said.

The line between his eyebrows deepened.

"Rhea," he said, "I know what I smelled. I have known that scent since I was twenty four years old. Do not stand there and tell me there was no wolf."

My radio went off on my hip, and Tessa's voice cut through the gravel and the smoke and the fifteen years between us, and I did not look at the radio. I looked at Dane, and he looked at me, and somewhere above us a pine went up with a sound like a door slamming.

"They are saying the boy was bitten," he said. "They are saying the wolf bit him on the wrist before it carried him out. Rhea, the boy is one of mine. The boy is pack. And the only wolf on that slope this morning was me."

I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong, and then I remembered the burn on the boy's small wrist, and the way the wolf had set him down at my feet, and the howl that had gone off in my chest.

I knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with evidence, that the wolf had not bitten the boy. The wolf had marked him. And I knew that whatever had been asleep in me was awake now, and it was looking at Dane, and it wanted something, and it was not going to go back to sleep.