Fire Season Read Online Free Page A

from this vantage is an endless field of white broken only by tree trunks, and I possess neither her agility nor her lightness of foot.
    After a twenty-minute crawl I reach the clearing at the top. Normally I would rejoice in this moment—home, home at last, mind and body reunited on the top of the world—but my hands are raw and red and clublike from the cold, and my pants are soaked from crawling in snow. The sun is dropping fast and with it the temperature. If I don’t change clothes and warm up, I’m in trouble.
    The cabin is filthy with rat shit and desiccated deer mice stuck to the floor, dead moths by the hundreds beneath the windowsills, but these are problems for later. I start a fire using kindling gathered late last year with precisely this moment in mind. I strip off my pants and hop into dry ones, never straying far from the pot-bellied stove.
    Once I’m warmed through, I tend to the next necessity: water. Just outside the cabin is an underground tank, 500 gallons of rainwater captured by the cabin’s roof and funneled through a charcoal filter into a surplus guided-missile container. It’s the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted, despite what holds it, and to keep it that way I lock the ground-level lid for the off-season. This winter, I discover, someone tried to get at it and broke off a key in the lock. Why a visitor thought he could open a U.S. Forest Service padlock—it is stamped USFS , unmistakably—is difficult to fathom, but I’ve spent enough time here to know that people do strange things alone above 10,000 feet. Maybe it’s simple lack of oxygen to the brain.
    My water supply shall remain, for now, inaccessible. The snow I so recently cursed is my savior. Melted in a pan on the woodstove, strained of bits of bark and pine needle, it tastes nearly as sweet as I remember the cistern water, with just a tincture of mineral earth. My thirst quenched and my hands warm, I heat some snowmelt and freeze-dried minestrone to head off the roiling in my stomach.
    The sun drops over the edge of the world. The wind comes up, gusts to near forty. I jam the stove with wood, unroll my sleeping bag on the mattress in the corner, and free-fall into untroubled sleep.
    F ive hours later I wake to find Alice has joined me in the bed. I can’t say I mind the added warmth of her next to me. It is still only 2 a.m., but the stove has burned out. I revive the fire from the ashes of itself, drink some more snow water. Outside the wind screams in the night, gusting now to fifty, buffeting the cabin like some rude beast up from the desert. I pull on an extra pair of wool socks, a down vest, a stocking cap, gloves. Time for a look around.
    Some of my fellow lookouts live in their towers, spacious rooms with catwalks around the exterior. My tower is small and spare, seven-by-seven, purely utilitarian—more office than home. It can hold four people standing, assuming they’re not claustrophobic. At fifty-five feet tall, it is one of the highest lookouts still staffed in the Gila. It had to be built high to offer sight lines over the trees—my mountaintop being relatively flat—and in my more poetical moods I think of it as my mountain minaret, where I call myself to secular prayer.
    Near the top the wind grows fiercer. I grasp the handrail, climb the last flight of stairs, shoulder my way through the trapdoor in the floor, and there it is: my domain for the next five months, a stretch of earth cloaked in the mystery of dark, where the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts overlap and give out, where mountains 35 million years old bridge the gap between the southern Rockies and the Sierra Madre Occidental, and where on the plains to my north the high-desert influence of the Great Basin can be felt. I am perched on the curving southern spine of the Black Range, with a view all the way up its east side. The range runs almost straight north and south and for much of its length marks the Continental Divide. The waters on the east