Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 7-1

Chapter 7

Macy could still feel that kiss as she lifted the LongRanger from the Ladd Airfield runway and turned northwest to begin her standard loop that she’d dubbed the Great Village Circle Route, because it ended at the town of Circle on the Yukon River.

It started at Stevens Village, which with a population of eighty-seven was the largest of her stops. Stevens was twenty miles from the nearest road and sixty northwest of Fairbanks. After that she’d travel generally eastward stopping at over a dozen roadless villages until she was northeast of Fairbanks at Circle, which had been isolated all summer due to a shift in the Yukon River that had erased the only road access.

Her lips were sore from the power of Tim’s, her head was spinning…and Baxter sat happily on the copilot’s seat beside her looking out at the sunny summer day and the green forests rolling by below, interrupted only by glittering lines of the Yukon River and its tributaries.

She was still trying to piece together quite how that had happened.

Tim had delivered the all-time, history-making, dumbest, post-amazing-kiss line. Ever.

Then he had opened his mouth to say something that was bound to be even stupider, if possible, when feet came pounding up behind her.

“Tim!” It had been Hank Hammond. “You’re still here. Great! I can’t find Tony anywhere and we’ve got a call. Please say you’ll jump with me. It’s a hot one deep in the ANWR. We’ve got to stop it before it gets down to Arctic Village.”

Arctic Village was about the farthest out village anywhere in Alaska. A fire could burn almost anywhere in the massive Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and affect only wildlife, and not much of that. By pure chance a wildfire was threatening the only small community for a hundred miles around.

Tim had at least had the presence of mind to look at her in confusion.

“I…We…” he stuttered like an airplane piston engine with a failing magneto.

“…need to…”

“…talk….”

“…don’t we?”

At least he got that much right.

“Come on, man,” Hank pleaded. “Tony’s our lead, I’m second-man on his stick, not a lead. I need the Two-Tall Harada magic.”

Macy had thumped her forehead against Tim’s shoulder one final time in frustration and then given him a hard shove that sent him stumbling in Hank’s direction.

Then he’d done the goofiest thing. He’d moved back to her and brushed his fingertips from her temple to her jaw, kissed her on the forehead, and then sprinted toward the smokejumper hangars. He’d called back for Macy to tell his mom he’d be fine.

She didn’t even remember letting Baxter move to the front, or taking off and heading north. She could only hope that she’d cleared properly with the tower.

Macy was climbing out of Stevens when her second radio, that she’d tuned to the Bureau of Land Management fire frequency, crackled to life.

She’d been hoping for a call for her services, she could be there in a couple hours, or could have been. If she was called now, she’d have to double back to Larch Creek for equipment, refuel in Fairbanks, and then fly two hours north. But no call came in.

The transmission was from the Sherpa which had taken an hour to even reach the fire because Arctic Village was so near the edge of the map even by Alaskan standards.

“We’ve got two hundred acres involved, spreading before a thirty-knot wind.” Despite the crackle of radio signal breaking up across the three hundred miles that separated them, she recognized that it was Tim’s voice reporting, not Hank’s.

He sounded different as he called out a plan to the two SEATs—Single Engine Air Tankers—that were following the Sherpa jump planes northward. This wasn’t Timothy Harada—her sorta older brother. It was completely the man who had just kissed her silly. This was Two-Tall Tim, premier smokejumper. His low voice was deeper, clearer despite the distance.

All that uncertainty that he’d been displaying around her all morning was gone. No awkward stammers. No allusions to it being a Stupid Day whatever he’d meant by that.

He called out jump coordinates and multiple attack vectors the way she’d call out a lunch order at French Pete’s, as if it was all second nature.

She overflew the next village and had to circle back several miles.

Well, that kiss hadn’t been second nature for either of them. Maybe she should cut Tim some slack. Macy had imagined kissing him since she’d decided kissing anybody could possibly be a good thing.

Of course she’d come to the idea probably later than most. She’d read one of her mom’s books with an aliens-having-s*x scene when she was nine and been so weirded out by imagining her mother writing a s*x scene that she hadn’t recovered for a long time afterward. And by the time she’d warmed up to the idea, she’d been in junior high and Tim had been a high school junior dating Sally Kirkman. It would have helped if Sally had been more unlikable, or less well endowed.

Then he’d gone Lower Forty-eight for school. Somehow her fifteen-year-old brain hadn’t caught up with quite what that meant until he was gone. Even that first summer, when anyone else would have come home, he was working wildfires and only made it back once for two days.

“The way I see it,” she told Baxter as she lifted out of Alatna and headed for Allakaket—the two towns separated by a couple hundred meters of muddy river. “Tim gets one ‘Get Out of Dork-Jail Free’ card. He’d better de-Dork by the time he gets back from this fire.”

And a sudden rage swept through her, so badly that her hand was shaking on the cyclic as she struggled to land at Allakaket. He was here a week at most—that was all she’d have him for before he returned to Oregon and his easy-women-filled life. One week, and he was off jumping a fire over Arctic Village for who knew how many days.

God damn it. When did life start being fair?