Free Day Into Night by Dave Hugelschaffer Page A

days?”
    Gabe scratches under his beard. “Not really.”
    “Get any visitors?”
    “Vistors?” He snorts, rubs a hand over the bald top of his head, like an amputee with a phantom itch, smoothing back imaginary hair. “Too many,” he grumbles. “You should see this place on a long weekend. Had one guy come walking up the hill one morning, wearing Hush Puppies and carrying a poodle. Got his motorhome stuck, rolled it halfway over a switchback. Said he wanted to camp up here. Heard the view was nice.”
    “When was that?”
    The old towerman slurps his lemonade. “About a week ago. Guy wanted me to give him a tow.” He chuckles, flops a meaty arm over the back of the bench. “Like I got some way of getting him outa there. I called the office and they called caa. Took a goddamn winch truck.” He shakes his head.
    “But you didn’t have any visitors these past two days?”
    “Just you. Heard those explosions though. Three of them. Woke me up.”
    “Did you notice what time that was?”
    “Naw. Middle of the night. Too dark.”
    “You see any smoke in the morning?”
    “A bit. Real black. Damn lucky it didn’t start a fire. It’s drier than hell out here.”
    “I’ve noticed. What’s the hazard up to?”
    Peterson shakes his head. “Been extreme damn near since the snow left. Not much of a snow pack and a dry fall. What little snow we had went into the air, not into the ground. Sublimated. If we don’t get some rain soon, it isn’t going to green up.”
    “Yeah, it’s pretty dry.”
    “Worst I’ve seen in 30 years.”
    I point across the valley. “How far do you think those blocks are?”
    “Eleven and a half miles to the top of the ridge,” he says without hesitation, like he’s making a report. Towermen have a good sense of distance. Some of them can read minds too. “A little less to the blocks. And the smoke from those explosions was even closer — about four miles.”
    “That’s close.”
    “You got that right,” he says. “Too damn close for me. With this hazard, a fire that close would be at my door before breakfast. I knew a guy in a tower up north who got burned out. Up in the sand country. Nothing but pine around him, just like here. Said he could see a wall of flame coming across the tops of the trees — like looking into hell. It’s not something I want to go through.”
    “Keane Tower. I heard about that.”
    A radio crackles over a loudspeaker, calling the tower for a weather report. Gabe swears, runs for the cabin and through the loudspeaker I hear him reading out a familiar prognosis. Moderate build-up to the west; winds light; good visibility. With the hot weather, it makes me feel like I should be working. I should head north, fight some fire, but I’m not quite ready to leave Curtain River.
    I wait long enough to thank Gabe for the lemonade, then saddle up.
    Part way down the slope, I stop and stash the bike in the bush.
    After the bike ride up the hill, it’s a long hike. My hangover has reached stage two — sheer exhaustion — but in the trees it’s shady and I take plenty of rests. Up north, you couldn’t walk through the bush without a compass and map, but here ridges and mountain peaks simplify navigation. I hike downhill for an hour, spend another hour climbing a sidehill to a lesser ridge with a panoramic view where I fix my location. Then it’s downhill again, between slender, branchless stems. A half-hour later, I hit the upper edge of the cutblock where the feller-buncher was bombed.
    The cutblock is long and undulating, the road below invisible, dug into the sidehill. I catch drifted bits of conversation, the sound of a vehicle engine, but can see little. I follow the edge of the timber toward the valley bottom, using the cover of the forest. This far in, the edge of the block is barely visible, a demarcation of openness indicated by fewer trees. Suddenly, I hear a motor very close, catch a glimpse of blue metal a dozen yards downslope and drop to