Firestorm-pigeon 4 Read Online Free PDF Page B

bus."

"Spike medical," she answered.

"We've got an injury. A log rolled down on Newt Hamlin. Looks like a busted knee. Closed but bad. He's hurting. We're going to need you, Lindstrom and the litter to carry him out."

"Affirmative." Anna got an exact location from him and signed off.

"Looks like we've got to work for our suppers today," Stephen said.

"Who's Hamlin?"

"A swamper with the Forest Service out of Durango, Colorado."

"Brown hair, buzz cut, looks fresh off the farm?" Anna asked cautiously.

"That's right. The big guy. The really, really big guy. Monstrous. An ox."

"Any place to land a helicopter below the line?" Anna radioed.

"Too rugged," LeFleur replied.

Anna made two more radio calls requesting a chopper at the heli-spot near spike. "Looks like we haul him up the hill," she said.

Lindstrom groaned. "We should've gone into pediatrics."

SPIKE CAMP was located on a ridge that ran north and south. To the east the slope was relatively gentle and the vegetation thinned from an old burn. Partway down a heli-spot had been cleared on a natural shoulder in the hillside. A wide sandy creek bottom, dry this time of year, cut a white ribbon through the valley floor. The west side fell away steeply into a narrow canyon. Near the bottom, about a mile from camp, the San Juans were building line. The Jackknife had burned most of the opposite slope. The new line was to stop it once it crossed the gully.

Stephen started down, litter on his shoulder. Anna, wearing the yellow pack and hard hat required on the fireline, carried the jump kit. There was no trail to speak of. At six thousand feet the mountains were choked with ponderosa, Jeffrey, sugar pines and white fir. The few open areas were nearly impassible with manzanita, a sturdy bush with tangled arms clothed in red bark and shining green leaves.

Facing west, the slope caught the full force of the afternoon sun. Needles, twigs, downed timber, gooseberry, ceanothus: the mountain was solid fuel and so dry the dust pounded up by each bootfall tickled Anna's nose till it ran. Deer flies, fat and sluggish in the heat, took bites from thigh and back, the protective clothing apparently no deterrent. Anna swore under her breath, afraid to open her mouth lest one crawl in. Though it would've been poetic justice: a bite for a bite.

Trees grew close with dog-hair thickets of young sugar pines fighting for sunlight in the patches of land that in past years had been montane meadows. But for dust and the all-pervasive smoke, Anna could smell very little. Too many summers without rain had baked the juices dry. All that remained was the faint smell of vanilla given off by the burnished bronze bark of the Jeffrey pines. To be in the midst of a conifer forest and not breathe in the heady scent of pine put her off balance. As if one stood at the seashore and couldn't taste the salt air.

A thick blanket of duff crackled underfoot. Coupled with the racket of breathing it was deafening. In places the hillside was so steep Anna slid down on her butt, preferring the occasional stickers to falling.

Suddenly Stephen stopped and she smacked her head on the end of the litter. "Signal, for Christ—" she began, but he cut her off.

"Lookie there." He pointed to the base of a sugar pine. Still as a statue in the almost realized hope of going unnoticed was a ringtail cat. Wide, dark, lemurlike eyes stared up from a little triangle of nose and ears. Its long striped tail was curled in a question mark behind it.

"First one I've ever seen," Stephen whispered.

Anna had seen a couple when she'd worked in Texas. They were nocturnal and terribly shy. It was unsettling to see one so close and in the light of day. Unnatural.

"Displaced by the fire," Stephen said.

" 'The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.' " Anna quoted from Hamlet.

"Cut that out."

"Right."

The cat seemed paralyzed and a man with a broken leg was waiting, so they pushed