Free The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans Page B

with his head held high and a permanent lopsided smile. Julia watched him across the fire and the sight of him made her feel warm inside. It was what she had always loved most about this job, seeing the self-confidence of these damaged young souls being built brick by brick with such modest acts of achievement.
    Lester was fifteen years old and, with both parents shuttling in and out of jail, most of those years had been spent in institutions of one kind or another. Julia had read his case notes. How he’d stolen and wrecked his first car at the age of ten, how he’d started doing drugs then tumbled rapidly and predictably into a spiral of theft and fraud to fund his habit. Two years ago he had overdosed and spent three days in a coma that had left him permanently damaged. He slurred a little when he spoke and sometimes his mind seemed to crash like a computer while he was doing some simple task, like tying a shoelace, and he would stay frozen until someone came to help. There was a naive sweetness to him, though when roused, his temper could be wild and both these traits made him a target for teasing. Mitch, predictably, was the expert. He did it so subtly that Julia sometimes wasn’t aware of it until Lester exploded. But tonight you would never have guessed any of this. Lester Whaley had made fire using just a few bits of wood, and he sat basking in his own reflected glory, beaming at the world, the undisputed King of the Bow Drill.
    He was sitting between Mitch and Katie, a bouncy and slightly irritating P.E. student from Billings. She was the least experienced of all the staff but talked more than any of them. She was telling everyone about the night last summer in Yellowstone Park when a group she was with hadn’t hung the bear bags high enough in the trees.
    ‘One of the kids on this group was really big, you know, two twenty pounds, more maybe. His name was Brett and he was always hungry and forever moaning on about how there was never enough to eat. Anyway, in the middle of the night, I wake up and see there’s someone over by the bear bags, so I think, uh-huh, it’s Brett having a midnight feast. So I get up real quietly and tiptoe over and I’m, like, just a few yards away and about to say ‘Okay, buddy, you’re busted,’ when he makes this grunting noise and turns around and it’s this ginormous grizzly bear, like three times Brett’s size.’
    ‘So what did you do?’ Byron asked.
    ‘Well, I just got him in an armlock, wrestled him to the ground and gave him a good talking-to.’
    ‘You did not!’ Lester said.
    Mitch gave a mocking laugh and was about to make some smart remark until he caught the look Julia shot at him.
    ‘No, I’m just kidding. I yelled. The bear was more scared than I was and took off. He’d trashed the whole bag but it was weird, all he ate was a tube of toothpaste.’
    All of them laughed. All except Skye. She was sitting between Byron and Scott and was staring into the fire as if she wished it would consume her. Scott was a philosophy major from Denver and had done three seasons with WAY in Colorado. He had a wise and gentle manner that the kids related to. During supper he had been quietly trying to engage Skye in the conversation. But she was having none of it. In the glow she looked so sad and beautiful that Julia had to fight an urge to get up and go over and hug her. Normally she wore her long black hair in a ponytail but tonight it hung loose and shone in the firelight as did her big black eyes. Since Lester succeeded in making his fire she hadn’t spoken. When it happened, amid the whooping and cheering, Julia had looked around and seen on Skye’s face the realization that she was on her own now: the only obstacle between the group and a hot meal every night.
    Tonight’s meal had now been cleared away and it was time for ‘group,’ the nightly huddle around the campfire. Sometimes they went straight into discussing the day or an issue that was bugging someone.