Fishing In Fire, page 7
The fire took mere seconds to bite into the shrubs and pine debris all about, pausing as if to savor the new food, before reaching out again for more and more. Pure white-hot flame swirled and roared, rejoicing in its destructive dance across two hills. It grew stronger, spread faster, burned hotter, and raged, hungrier and hungrier to consume, to burn everything it could possibly touch.
CHAPTER 7
At the top of the ridge overlooking the valley in which her friends were fishing, Yumi paused to look back. There they were, having a great time, two by two, without her. She had told them all to stay, said she’d be fine, and she would be fine. She thought about Annette in particular. Why couldn’t they get their friendship back to the way it used to be? Annette had barely tried to persuade Yumi to stay. Worse, Hunter had made even less of an effort.
Oh no. Am I being a drama queen?
Yumi took a deep breath and turned away from her friends down on the bridge, her footfalls crunching on beds of dry pine needles. She would not be one of these crybabies who always made a big deal out of everything. Morgan Vaughn was the worst of them. She could never seem to get through a school day without crying and making a giant dramatic issue out of something. She’d sit with Swann at lunch, and then cry because she hadn’t sat with McKenzie. The next day, she’d sit with McKenzie and then cry because she’d left out Swann. Yumi had wanted to grab the girl by the shoulders and shake her, like, It’s just lunch! It’s not that important. Almost nothing is that important. Pick a table and sit down to eat.
“Make a decision and stick with it,” Yumi said aloud, in part wishing Morgan could hear her, but more to herself. She had decided to leave. Annette and Hunter hadn’t told her to go. She was pathetic to be sad because none of them had thrown a big enough fit over her decision to leave. What did she expect? That the four of them would be down on their knees, hands pressed over their hearts or held together as if in prayer, crying and begging Yumi to stay? No. Of course that was crazy.
“Enough!” She set off again at a brisk march and would not go back. The top of the ridge was wide, but Yumi crossed it quickly, a few quick steps and a jump up onto the side of an old fallen tree. A jump back down, six fast steps, and she ducked beneath the low branches of a large wilted bush.
Alone and determined, she hurried through the woods and returned to the hill overlooking Painted Pond in much less time than it had taken her group to reach Annette’s river fishing spot.
But at the south edge of the top of the ridge she slowed down. For over a week the skies around McCall had been tinged with a faint smoke haze. Nothing too bad. They were stuck in the stage when, if your weather app hadn’t told you it was smoke, you might have thought it was a sort of fog. But in the near-distance there was a thicker cloud. Cloud of what? It was the time of year when McCall didn’t see a lot of clouds, but they weren’t impossible.
Yumi bit her lip. If that gray column was smoke, how close was it? Judging the location of things from a distance was tricky. If that was smoke, it could be ridiculously far away and someone else’s problem. And it might not even be smoke. She sniffed deeply, but that was useless. During fire season the air almost always smelled a little smoky.
Should she go back and warn her group? But warn them about what? It might be nothing. If she ruined their happy couples’ fishing day over what turned out to be nothing more than a cloud, they’d think she ruined everything because she was the odd person out and felt jealous.
Was she jealous?
The sound of giggle-screams and laughter from down below interrupted her thoughts. She saw them, the other side of the war, down on the crude beach. They’d clearly given up on fishing. McKenzie and Morgan, already soaking wet, acted like they were oh-so-afraid as they tried pushing each other into the water. They were in swimsuits, which they must have worn under their clothes. Had they ever had any intention of fishing at all?
“No!” Morgan squealed. McKenzie had picked her up, baby-cradle-style, and was hobbling out deeper into the pond. “Don’t! It’s too cold!”
It was late August, temperatures had been in the upper nineties or lower hundreds for over two weeks, and Painted Pond wasn’t that deep. There was no way that water was cold.
McKenzie stumbled and both girls laughed and screamed and splashed, flopping around like freshly released fish.
But now that she thought about fish, where was Mason? Yumi shielded her eyes from the hot sun, and finally spotted him on the far side of the pond, arms folded. She couldn’t make out his expression very well way up here with the sun beaming down on her, but from his posture she could tell he wasn’t happy.
He’d come all the way out here to fish, and these clowns were messing around. He wasn’t going to catch anything with the other two stirring up the whole pond.
She glanced at the ominous new cloud again. “Come on, Yumi. Move!” She hurried down the rocky slope toward Painted Pond. “Hey, you guys!” she called out as she neared the bottom.
“Well, look who it is,” McKenzie said. “Yooooomee.”
McKenzie liked to exaggerate the You sound in Yumi’s name. Maybe the mean girl thought it would hurt her feelings, trying to make fun of her half-Japanese background? Yumi shrugged. She liked her name. But she said nothing until she’d reached the beach. She pointed south. “Hey, you all see that? Is that smoke?”
“Is what, what?” McKenzie laughed, as though mocking Yumi for saying something ridiculous.
What was wrong with these girls? Yumi nodded toward the cloud and spoke extra-loudly and slowly, the way some jerk people did to foreigners or people like Yumi and her mom when they thought they were foreigners. “Is. That. Smoke?” She pointed. “O-ver. There?”
“Why do you people have to come ruin our fun?” McKenzie asked. “Where’s the rest of your stupid group?”
“They’re still fishing,” Yumi said. She nodded as Mason approached, his gear all packed up and an angry scowl on his face. But did his expression lighten when he saw Yumi?
“Who knows what that is, Yumi?” Morgan, who had swum out a few strokes into the pond, finally emerged from the water. “Could be smoke, but it’s probably hundreds of miles away in, like, Montana or someplace.”
“Yeah. Like, for sure,” Yumi said with a big fake smile. “Except that’s like south, not east, so unless Montana picked itself up and moved to Utah, that cloud is, like, totally not coming from Montana.”
“OK, Geography Jones!” Morgan flipped water out of her hair.
“Are you kidding me?” Mason snapped. “This could be serious, and you’re making fun of her? Just because she knows directions and where the states are?”
Yumi and Mason exchanged a brief look, and in that moment Yumi felt something she’d never experienced before. A tightness in her chest, but not from pain. A little tingle went up the back of her neck. Why? Because this guy had agreed with her and defended her? First of all, she, Yumi Higgins, space warrior princess tougher than any she’d read about in her manga books and daughter of an American Army combat veteran, did not need anyone speaking for her or defending her. Second, why should she care what this boy thought? She didn’t care. Just because he was the best fisher in the school and one of the best in a big-time outdoor sports town like McCall, and his eyes were an almost supernatural deep blue. She squeezed the handle of her fishing pole. She didn’t want to be like the girls in those fake fairy-tale love-story romance books. Then why am I thinking about this now?
“We need to go check out what’s going on,” Yumi said.
“It’s not even that smoky out here,” McKenzie said. “It’s been a lot smokier when the fire was nowhere near McCall. So if it’s hardly smoky at all, whatever you think you’ve seen must be forever away. Sorry, Yuuuumee. You’re not going to ruin our awesome day.”
Mason glanced at McKenzie and shook his head. To Yumi he said, “You ready?”
“Yeah.” Yumi took off down the rough trail toward the Gator.
“Oh come on, Mason!” McKenzie called after them. “Don’t leave us! We were having fun!”
Yumi ignored them, moving as fast as she could through the woods. She took a sip from her drinking tube. Hiking could be hard work. It was a lot harder when she was trying to move quickly. Once she stopped to look back and check on Mason. He was three paces behind her. When he smiled he had this dimple and Yumi turned away at once.
“I’m right with you, Yumi,” Mason said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with those two back there. McKenzie came up to me at the dance, said she and Morgan and some others were going fishing and would I like to go along.”
“Naturally you said yes, because you’re a fishing pro,” Yumi said. She tripped over a rock and might have fallen, but Mason quickly dropped his fishing pole and seized her arm to prevent her from going down.
“Thanks,” she said, feeling stupid for stumbling and feeling the press of his fingers on her arm long after he’d let her go.
“The others McKenzie had hinted about either backed out or were never really invited, because it was just those two girls and me, catching a ride from McKenzie’s older sister and then walking forever. All that way and they hardly cared about fishing. The worst part was they took up the old debate about if fishing is really a sport, going on about how fishing can’t count as a real sport because there is no competition, no winners or losers. But anyone who says that hasn’t faced the challenge of figuring out how to catch a champion-weight bass. If you ask me, fishing is more of a sport than anything at school.”
“Oh yeah,” Yumi agreed. “But do you see, they’ve caught you just like you’ve hooked a largemouth bass.”
“What?” Mason said.
“We’ve all been taught to worship sports, as if they are the best things in life and the highest praise for something is calling it a sport. That’s crazy. You love fishing. I love video games. Swann has this great library, I guess, and she loves reading. Annette lives to write. Sports are no better than anything else, and if you look at the way some of the athletes in our school act, sometimes sports make things a lot worse. Why should we care if people call things sports or not?”
Mason was quiet for a while. Yumi could hear the crunch and scrape of his shoes on the dry pine needles and loose rocks. Had she offended him? Was he mad because he thought that she didn’t consider fishing a sport? Not for the first time that day, she told herself that she didn’t care what Mason Bridger thought.
“You’re right,” he said slowly. He let out a short little laugh. “Who cares if something gets called a sport?”
The forest began to thin out as they approached the wide rough clearing where, earlier that morning, Annette had parked the Gator. The two of them quieted down, noticing the sound of crackling and popping. The smoke—there was no denying now that it was smoke—was much thicker. Yumi blinked against the sting. They summited a little rise, and a wave of heat pushed against them, more intense even than the blast one felt when opening a hot oven. The trees on the far side of the wide clearing roared with fire. One with a small-diameter trunk snapped in half and crashed to the burning forest floor. The fire blazed in a slowly but steadily advancing ring of white-red flame. Fire slithered up the trunks of one tree after another, the needles at the tops seeming to explode all at once before the fire even touched them.
The John Deere Gator was parked at least a full thirty feet from the wall of fire. But its bright yellow foam seats darkened like toasted marshmallows. Then they bubbled and finally burst into flame, and in seconds the entire machine burned.
“There goes our ride,” Yumi whispered. Her legs felt weak, shaking. “What are we gonna do? Should we backtrack to warn the others, or should we go back to town and get help? But how could we even get to McCall? I guess we could cut over to the right. No fire over there. Head west to get around it and then keep going south.”
Mason pulled her down into a crouch where the air was a tiny bit cooler and less smoky. A very tiny bit. He pointed to the top of the low ridge over in the area Yumi said they might go. “See the smoke? The wavy heat lines? It’s burning on the other side of that rise. We go over there to get around this, we’ll run right into the fire and then this could spread behind us and we’d be trapped.”
Yumi whipped out her phone. “We’re closer to town.” But there was no signal. She shook her head. Mason tried his without success. “Out of range. Why do we have to live in the last place in America with no cell service?” Yumi slipped her phone back in her pocket. “The fire’s between us and home. We’re cut off. We can’t go around it, and we definitely can’t stay here. That leaves just one option.”
“We go north,” Mason agreed.
Yumi nodded. “Let’s get the others and find a way to safety.”
Mason snapped a photo of the inferno. “They better believe us now.”
Yumi put her hand on Mason’s shoulder, surprised to find it so firm. She could feel the muscle there. It must have been from all that arm work fishing. Stop it, Yumi! “Remember how we were talking about sports?”
“I don’t think now’s really the time to be worrying about—”
She forced a smile through her terror. “You ever think about going out for track?”
Mason shrugged. “We’ll be track stars today!”
They took off running. After a hundred yards or so they were both breathing heavy and coughing from the smoke, but they kept moving as fast as they could, running for their lives, and for the lives of their friends.
Sheriff Hank Hamlin sat in the front of his cop SUV, parked south of town in a little lot with trees all about, waiting to catch some speeders coming into McCall. He closed his eyes as he cracked open an ice-cold can of Mountain Dew. If you’re tired and need a boost, get a cup of coffee, his wife Emily always said. She didn’t want him drinking all the corn syrup. But the one thing she couldn’t seem to understand was that the soda wasn’t about waking him up. He’d already stopped by Sharlie’s Coffee Shop when he’d started his shift. His midday Mountain Dew was all about the flavor. “Anyway, Emily,” he said quietly, as if she could hear, “I hardly ever have these anymore. It’s been a tough week.”
He always felt bad parked with the engine idling, wasting the county’s fuel, so the truck and its air conditioner were shut off. He pressed the cool can to his face in the heat. It had been a rough week. Not one, but two fights at the Bear Stone Brewery. Drunken tourists. A kid nearly drowned in the lake. This was his last day on the job before a week’s vacation. The family was heading down to California to visit the big mouse. The kids were getting a little too old for some of that princess stuff, but they’d asked for Disneyland for years. It would cost a fortune, but Emily reminded him the kids were growing up and would be moving out sooner than he thought. So Disney. Legoland. Maybe he’d make a fool of himself and try surfing. Family time. It would be good.
“About five hours to go,” he said quietly.
A guy in a slick yellow Dodge Challenger with a black racing stripe zipped by doing fifty-four in a thirty. Hank started his truck and flipped on his lights. “OK, Dale Earnhardt. Let’s get you stopped before you hit some kid walking with an ice-cream cone.” He pulled out of the lot onto Highway 55, heading north.
Deputy Abrams came on the radio. “Sheriff Hamlin, this is dispatch.”
Bad timing. He radioed back. “Hank here. Go ahead, over.”
“Smoke spotted north of the lake. Eastside Drive. Got a report it’s bad. Fire’s on its way. Forest Service notified.”
Sheriff Hamlin sighed and radioed back. “Darn it, Jaylen. Didn’t I say no fires, no missing persons, no nothing? I’m almost on vacation.” He sped up. The racer in the Challenger pulled over. Hank squawked the sirens and pointed at the guy. “Ease off the gas, high-speed.” The guy in the Dodge couldn’t hear him, but he hung his head, getting the message.
Hank radioed dispatch. “Jaylen, Hank. What are the odds this is just a nice easy little ditch fire we’ll have out in—” He reached a more open spot on the highway, free of trees and buildings. He had a better view north. The column of smoke rising up there was thick and dark. Hank cursed, keeping the mike keyed. He wanted to believe this was nothing, but with twenty-three years in Idaho law enforcement, this was certainly not his first fire season. He cursed again. “Jaylen, could you call my wife? Tell her the vacation’s probably postponed.”
“You got it, boss.”
Hank fired up the siren and hammered on the gas to hurry north through town as fast as he safely could. Two fights, a near-drowning, and now a fire. This was a bad, bad week.
Yumi could hardly breathe by the time she and Mason returned to Painted Pond. It had been hard to run that far, and even worse running with her fishing pole and thermos. They jogged to a halt on the beach, both of them panting and coughing.
“What’s up with you two?” McKenzie said, sitting up from where she and Morgan had been sunbathing on towels. Some of the edge in her usual mocking tone was gone.
Morgan rolled onto her side. She looked worried. “Did you figure out what’s going on?”
“Well, that smoke’s not coming from MontanUtah,” Yumi said sharply. It was stupid to be bitter, and they didn’t have time for snarky remarks, but those two had been mean and, worse, they’d wasted a lot of time.
Mason was more efficient. He put his fishing gear down and held up his phone, showing the picture of the blaze. “Fire. A big one. Wind’s blowing it right for us. We gotta get out of here.” He coughed and spit.
