Rain of Fire (24 page)

No markings were apparent near the summit.

“Kids,” said Nick.

“We were young once.”

Nick dropped his side of the map and let her struggle to fold it. “You and I were never so young not to climb to the top of the mountain and check it out.”

“Come on.” She focused on cramming the map into her pack. “We made our own mistakes.”

“Guess I deserve that one.” He pushed to his feet. “At any rate, I think we’re seeing evidence that this mountain was born yesterday.”

Once more, her spine prickled. “The plumbing’s still down there … waiting to be used again.”

A
t midafternoon the next day, Kyle rode Strawberry out of a narrow canyon onto a wider, brush-covered slope above seismic station two. She dismounted and took a replacement data drive from one of the weather-resistant bags behind the saddle.

The little roan nickered and nudged Kyle’s shoulder, sending a gust of warm alfalfa breath down her neck. Kyle set the equipment down and stroked Strawberry’s horsy-smelling nose. “You think so?” she murmured.

The horse pawed the ground.

“Well…” Kyle dragged out the word. “Okay.” Digging out a carrot from a plastic bag, she offered it.

Strawberry tossed her head and neighed, her strong white teeth crunching the slightly withered vegetable as though it were ambrosia. “You’re a good girl,” Kyle enthused.

Turning her attention to the seismic station, she pulled back the tarp and opened the weather-resistant box. After activating the quick release on the cables, she disconnected them from the working drive and replaced it with the substitute.

A closer look at the solar array revealed a few rips in the plastic coating, but it had been that way when deployed. As long as they were seventy percent effective, the panels remained in use. A problem she did see was a healthy dose of bird droppings on the cells. Using a cloth from her saddlebag, she scrubbed away the material that would keep sunlight from the panels.

Putting the data drive into the saddlebag, Kyle checked the sun angle. If she didn’t want to be caught by darkness, it was time to head up the trail.

With a flick of the reins, she urged Strawberry toward the patrol cabin. Once in the canyon, the path wound among tall trees, and the earth was spongy beneath the horse’s hooves. Afternoon shadows lay deep.

As Kyle drew closer to the cabin, she wondered if Nick would get back before Wyatt. If he did, would he keep up his artful distance, or had yesterday’s time alone on the mountain broken the ice once more?

Though the thought of Nick made her pulse accelerate, shouldn’t Wyatt’s angry and protective reaction be a warning about jumping back into a relationship with a man of Nick’s track record?

Last night, during one of his field tales, Nick had said that in the course of his two failed marriages he’d been careful not to tell his wives how much fun he had in the field. And this right after a story of his being in a small plane headed for one of the Aleutian volcanoes. In near zero visibility, past the point of no return on fuel, he admitted to writing a farewell note to his current spouse, then crumpling it and burning it upon a safe landing.

Deep in the canyon, Strawberry picked her way daintily, but just before the trail wound down into a hollow, she stopped without warning, ears cocked.

Kyle tensed, while not even birdsong broke the quiet. As she scanned the woods, Strawberry pawed the earth and tossed her head toward a five-foot high outcrop of black basalt.

There. Kyle spied a deer, lying on its side with the unmistakable boneless look of recent death. The buck’s rack would have pleased some hunter.

Strawberry snorted.

Perhaps a poacher waited in the rocks for them to go away. On the other hand, there was no sign of a bullet wound. No marks of a predator’s teeth or claws, but Kyle needed to dismount to be sure.

A gentle nudge sent Strawberry forward. Perhaps the buck had broken its leg on the rocks and died of dehydration. But wouldn’t she have noticed it when she came down the canyon earlier?

Strawberry stopped and refused to move into the low area.

Then Kyle caught the stench of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide, a deadly poison heavier than air, tended to pool in topographic depressions. Colorless, the gas’s only warning was the few seconds in which its victim could smell before the scent receptors in the nose burned out.

Less than thirty feet away Kyle spied another dead deer, this one a doe.

Choking, she jerked the reins.

Strawberry wheeled and ran up the rise. Though she hated to do it, Kyle dug in her heels, spurred and yelled.

Once over the rise and again on the downhill, they galloped around a curve, where a deadfall they’d circumvented earlier lay across the path.

Forced to rein in, Kyle inhaled carefully. The air bore the moldy aroma of moss and autumn leaf litter. Two breaths, three, and she didn’t feel dizzy or nauseous. Strawberry stood steady.

Yet, as the sunless chill in the canyon deepened, Kyle wondered what to do. The narrow trail through steep rock walls was made impassible by the gas.

On the south side was the boulder field. Even if Kyle could climb it, she would have to leave Strawberry behind. That would spell certain doom if the sweet animal tried to follow and broke a leg.

She tried repeatedly to radio Wyatt or Nick, but the canyon ramparts interfered with the signal. Though Nick had said he would be on the east side of the mountain, Wyatt had gone down the canyon.

The thought seized her that if the gas had been there this morning, he and Thunder would have died like the deer. This was further proof that the seep had begun only a few hours ago. It reminded her ominously of David Mowry diving into a spring turned scalding overnight.

Checking her watch and the sky, Kyle figured Wyatt and Thunder should be headed back this way. Though it would be dark soon, she decided she must backtrack to the canyon mouth and wait to warn him. Together they’d try circling up over the smoother face of Little Saddle and down to the cabin.

Fifteen minutes later, she was on the open slope. Wyatt still did not answer his radio. Neither did Nick. On the next try, her batteries gave up.

Two hours later, Kyle watched the light fade over the broad bowl of the Yellowstone caldera. The stack of firewood she’d gathered ranged from kindling to stout branches. Now she looked with dismay at the size of the pile and calculated it might last a few hours at most. She had two flashlights, but she’d not brought extra batteries for what was supposed to be a day hike.

Despair washed over her. Oh, to be a normal person who enjoyed touring caverns, who laughed when they turned out the lights to show total darkness. With mounting dread at the gathering twilight, she looked around for more wood.

In the canyon, deadfalls lay at haphazard angles, some propped up by others, but there was too much danger of starting a forest fire if she lit off a blaze in so much dry wood.

On the grassy slope, she located a likely length of pine, sun-bleached silver white. It was about a foot in diameter and ten feet long, and with some wrestling, she got a rope around it. With the horizon dimming from scarlet to ultramarine, Strawberry dragged the log to Kyle’s makeshift camp.

In the last light, she spread her sleeping bag and ground cloth, thankful that the team always took bedding as a precaution when they rode out. From her daypack, she pulled high calorie trail munchies.

She scraped away the grass to bare soil in a circular area and ringed it with chunks of rhyolite. Tearing a few blank pages from her field notebook, she crumpled them, put on small sticks of kindling and applied a wooden match from her kit.

She felt foolish. Wyatt had probably circled around and was already back at the cabin. Right now, he and Nick were no doubt bickering over who should take her turn at cooking while she sat alone. Though she didn’t want to think about it, tonight was the dark of the moon, a night when only stars cast illumination.

Her small smoky fire was a nice touch, but it couldn’t hold back the vast ink of sky. She raised her eyes to blacker shadows of mountains that were always thrusting up and eroding away. In the canyon, gas must still be seeping.

Strawberry nickered from where she was tethered.

“Sorry, girl, I haven’t any food for you.” Or water. Her canteen contained less than a pint.

Out in the darkness, a coyote howled.

With a struggle, Kyle got the pine trunk almost to her fire. Then it hung up on a stub of branch and refused to budge. She sat on the ground and tried to use the power of her thighs.

The approaching clop of hooves came from the trail. “Need help?” Wyatt asked gruffly.

She turned and saw a dark shape on an even darker horse. The brimmed hat made it a scene from a Western movie.

Urging Thunder into the ring of firelight, Wyatt slid easily out of the saddle. “You’re the last thing I expected to find out here.”

“The canyon’s off limits.” She pointed uphill. “H
²
S killed two deer right on the trail.”

He looked thoughtful. “You could have died if you’d ridden too close.”

“Lucky for me, Strawberry smelled it and we turned back. I was afraid you would come along in the dark.”

Wyatt looked at her little fire and the bigger log she was trying to burn. “You waited here for me? At night?”

“You could have died,” she echoed.

He slung an arm around her shoulders and gave her a hard squeeze. “Come on, let’s build a blaze we can read by.”

Half an hour later, by the light of a bonfire, Kyle sat on her sleeping bag and watched Wyatt radio Nick. After explaining tersely about the gas seep, he listened for a few minutes and then signed off. “Nick wasn’t surprised about the gas … said it goes along with a volcano awakening.”

Kyle hugged her knees and shivered despite the flames that had her front side baking. “Yesterday, when we climbed to the top, he talked about this being a volcano. I guess I’d been thinking of it in more passive terms, like volcanic terrain, or dormant.”

“I have, too.” Wyatt set aside his radio. “But there’s a reason this expedition includes a volcanologist.”

“I wonder how extensive the gas seeps are. How many more…?

He put out his hand in a stop gesture. “Don’t go there. We need to get through this night without giving ourselves the heebie-jeebies.”

Kyle took a bracing breath of smoky mountain air. “You’re right.”

Wyatt spread his sleeping bag on the opposite side of the fire and took a seat. “Nick didn’t sound pleased about our being out here together.”

Wyatt didn’t sound happy either.

She leaned forward and felt the fire’s heat further warm her cheeks. “Look, about Nick and I …”

“I don’t need to know your business.” Wyatt spoke stiffly, but the expression in his eyes gave away some essential vulnerability.

“I want you to.” Maybe if she could make him understand, he’d settle back into being the friend she needed.

A line appeared between his brows. “If you have to say something, I’m listening.”

Now that she’d waded out this deep, she had to think a moment for the right words.

“Let’s say your wife Marie dropped back into your life without warning. Wouldn’t you feel something? Nostalgia, curiosity, the old what-if?”

Wyatt shook his head. “Bringing up Marie is not the way to make me understand.”

“All right then, Alicia … somebody you care for a lot.”

Wyatt looked at her for a long moment, and his expression softened. “I imagine this is tough on you … but I think I’d be clear on who dumped who. And make damned sure not to play the fool a second time.”

Their eyes locked across the flames.

Wyatt’s gaze broke away and he got up to put more wood on the fire.

“You go on to sleep,” he said. “I’ll make sure you don’t wake up in the cold … or dark.”

N
ear noon the next day, Kyle and Wyatt rode into sight of the cabin.

When they drew closer, she caught sight of a beard-stubbled, tousle-haired Nick at the corral fence offering Gray a feed bucket.

Wyatt clucked to Thunder. Kyle nudged Strawberry into a trot to keep up with the longer-legged stallion.

Nick met them; his eyes flicked from one to the other. “You two keep warm last night?”

“Snug as bugs,” Wyatt retorted.

He’d been as good as his word, keeping the fire stoked so Kyle never opened her eyes to darkness.

Wyatt got off Thunder and began to unload the data drives.

To Kyle’s surprise, Nick did not escalate a confrontation. Instead, he led the other two horses into the pen and offered food. Both animals bypassed the bin for a drink from the trough.

Nick headed toward the cabin, pausing to pick up some of Kyle’s gear. He stopped about halfway there and pointed to a nearby rock. Atop it lay two dead ground squirrels and one of the usually vibrant gray and black birds known as the Clark’s Nutcracker.

Kyle looked at the carcasses. “Where did you pick those up?”

“Not close by or we’d be leaving.” Nick gestured east along the valley between Little Saddle and Nez Perce. “Found them over there when I was mapping a fault this morning.”