Read Online Hotshots by Judith Van Gieson - Free Book Online

see him. “Hogue,” I yelled, but he didn’t answer. There were tree trunks in the black, but I couldn’t see them either until I collided with one. My forehead smacked into a trunk. My ears were ringing, my eyes were stinging and tearing, my face was bleeding from the tree I’d hit. I was eating, drinking, sweating, and coughing up smoke. Death by smoke inhalation was making death by fire look downright appealing. At least fire was quick. I was desperate to escape from the heat and the smoke. I had an all-consuming thirst that only an IV could fill. I felt nauseous and dizzy, so I got down on my hands and knees and vomited smoke. “Help,” I called until my voice became a pathetic croak. There was some sort of answer, but my brain wasn’t able to process it. “Here,” I gagged.
    There’s a place where heat turns to cold, fire to ice, legal business to dreams, and that’s where I was headed. In the lore of ice and snow there’s always the story of an explorer or skier who becomes crazed by the cold, thinks she’s burning up and throws her clothes off. That the opposite could occur in fire was my last thought before I entered the kingdom of snow and came out on a perfect winter day, crisp, clear, freezing. Cold bit my nose and I could see the shape of my breath. The air was clear, but so cold it hurt to breathe. The only way to get warm was to ski fast and hard. The sky was as blue as it ever gets in the East. The snow sparkled like Ivory flakes. There were six inches of new powder, and I was skiing the Rumble alone. It was a side trail where no one could see me, but that didn’t matter; I wasn’t performing for anybody on the lift. I was out here for Joe and myself, skiing the fall line in linked turns. The snow came over the top of my boots; all I could see of my skis in the fresh powder was the tips. The turns flowed into one another, smooth, quick, easy. I only had to flex my ankles and shift my weight. I was in the zone, queen of the hill, master of my sport. The pain that Joe wasn’t alive to enjoy it was the long shadow I was trailing, but if I skied fast enough I could stay ahead of it. I looked down and saw him waiting for me at the bottom of the Rumble. He was wearing a plaid jacket and smoking a cigarette. The smoke expanded, slipping through the trees, billowing, smothering, making me gag and cough.
    A voice brought me back to the harsher reality of heat and smoke. “You will be all right,” it said. “This is good black. It won’t reburn. The fire cannot reach you here. I’ll wrap you in this to keep the heat off and the smoke out. Stay inside. I will come back for you when the danger is over.”
    It was a cocoon, a space blanket, a fire shelter. The arms that wrapped me in it were firm and strong. The voice I heard belonged to a woman.

8
    W HEN I WOKE up I was still seeing white, not the blinding white of snowfall or the searing white of smoke but the antiseptic white of a hospital room. A nurse was adjusting the IV I’d been craving. A stern and fit doctor came in to tell me I was suffering from smoke inhalation and dehydration and that he wanted to keep me in the hospital for a few days for observation. I looked up at the dull white ceiling, heard the woman in the next bed gag and throw up, listened to the clatter of food trays in the hallway, and decided that if I was going to be sick I wanted to do it in my own bed, looking at my skylight, listening to the sounds my house made. When I told the doctor I didn’t have any insurance, he said he’d consider releasing me the next day.
    As soon as the doctor departed an investigator for the Forest Service entered and sat down in a chair beside my bed. His name, he said, was Henry Ortega. He had a long face and a mustache that nestled above his lip like a large, brown moth.
    â€œWe’re very glad you are going to be all right.” He sighed.
    I answered with