Chapter Text
The grinding of the chainsaw was completely tuned out at this point, the only thing I was hearing was the sound of my own thoughts screaming at me to find heat. I was freezing, the shed may have been protecting me from the wind, but it was well below zero at this point, and I could feel the sting of it on my fingers as they held onto the metal of the chainsaw. Idling slightly before completely turning off. Throwing my hands into the air with a sigh of frustration, "damn it," I said. I took off my safety goggles and sat back on the workbench.
Kootenai National Forest was known for its remoteness, something that I needed. Something that I craved. I liked knowing that even the largest towns in the area would be small enough to get out of quickly if I needed to. But I still chose the ranger station with the least amount of traffic. The silence was like a soothing cool towel on a fresh burn, turning off the idea that the entire world was out there, and I was here. That was all that I needed.
In the summertime, Kootenai was beautiful with fresh rivers and streams filled with bass and trout that made fishermen flock to the area. The spruce trees grew tall, but the mountains grew ever taller. Grizzly bear cubs wandered around in the wilderness like the rest of the world didn't exist. It was one of the few places on earth that the world still seemed untamed. But the winter was brutal, the snow would fall for days at a time, keeping the sun behind hooded dark clouds for what seemed like years to me. It was cruel, but the few of us that stayed out this far made the most of it. David was the ranger, he stayed in the ranger house not far from the station while the rest of us lived in the town of Libby about 40 minutes away. But on days like this, I would set up my cot inside the office at the station, there was no way I would be able to make it home with the impending blizzard.
The knock on the shed door knocked me out of my general pouty attitude, "yeah?" I said as the door slid open. David walked through the shed door, his large Carhartt jacket making him look like the king of the marshmallow men. "You've been out here too long," he said, closing the shed door harshly.
"I'm gonna get this workin' even if it kills me," I said with my best impression of David's southern accent. He chuckled and looked at his watch a second time after entering the shed.
"Is there any way that I can convince you not to sleep here tonight? The snow isn't that bad right now, you could still make it," David begged, putting his hands on his hips. But he knew better than to start with me, once my mind was made up, there was no changing it.
"I have work to do," I said plainly as I frowned over the broken chainsaw.
"There is no way you're going to get to those polygons after the snow tonight, you should go home and hunker down like the rest of us," he argued, stepping closer. But being stuck inside my little log cabin sounded like a prison sentence, not when there would be perfect hunting up on the mountain after the snow cleared.
"There will be wolves and deer to track after this storm," I said, not looking up at him, but he understood what I was saying. "The plows won't come through until Friday morning, and I won't be driving in this snow tomorrow to get back here."
David sighed and turned back around as I pulled the crank on the chainsaw, which weerrrrred gently before spinning out and dying again, "son of a bitch!" I yelled and tossed the wrench I was holding down on the ground.
"It's too cold," David said, pulling open the shed door again, "come back to the office, work on those coordinates and I'll make us a warm cup of coffee."
Coffee sounded amazing, a habit I had not picked up until I started working for the Forest Service but most animals that I tracked were early risers, therefore I was also an early riser. I didn't mind though; I had been waking up before the sunrise for most of my life.
I remembered the fresh smell of coffee in the early mornings that my father would wake me up for a hunt. The first time I had stayed awake the entire night in anticipation, watching my bedroom window, looking for the slightest lightening of the sky. When my door finally opened, my father stood with his cup of coffee, his unshaven face gleaming down at me.
"Let's go pumpkin," he said to me as I shot out of bed and ran to my closet. My mother had just bought me an entire hunting kit. Camo boots, sweater, and trousers, along with a hat with a highlighter pink deer printed on the front. My older brother, Hayes, was already dressed in his hunting gear outside in the hallway. This was far from his first hunt, but he saw the smile on my face and beamed at me.
The morning was crisp and dark, not even the crickets had fully awoken. I could see my breath in the near morning starlight. My mother stood in the mudroom doorway with a hand on her growing belly, tears in her eyes as she watched my father sling the massive Winchester .223 bolt action rifle around my young eleven-year-old shoulders. She knelt next to me, her face close to mine, "you don't come back until you show these boys how to do it, ok?" she said to me.
I nodded with a heavily feminine smirk on my face. Hayes gave our mother a kiss on the cheek before he smiled down at me, "come on," he said, taking my arm into his. I went along with him; the morning excitement was almost uncontrollable in my heart.
As the three of us wandered along the forest trailed off West Virginia for what seemed like hours to me, the only thing that was on my mind was how damn heavy the gun around my shoulders was, but I didn't dare complain. I wouldn't let Hayes, or my father know how I was struggling, both had done this hundreds of times, it was my turn to prove myself now.
"Jamie," my father said to me in a whisper, I looked up at him with my eyes watering from the exhaustion, "are you ready?"
This was it, I looked in the direction that he was looking in and saw it. It was buck, big enough to win awards. Hayes' eyes went wide as saucers, flinching to take the gun from my hands and do it himself. But I got down on my knees, the way my father had practiced with me in the comfort of my living room many times. Crawling silently up to him, I saw the deer in its full form. Counting the horns on its head I couldn't believe my first was going to be eight points. "Jamie, you have to be sure," my father said, looking deeply in my eyes next to me. I swallowed, coming to the realization that I was going to have to take life, but I remembered me fathers and grandfather's words over dinner for years now. We take from the world what we must, and the world takes from us when we die, returning to the ground our ancestors came from. We had been hunting for thousands of years, there was no shame in doing what humans must.
Slowly and silently, I dropped the gun from my shoulder, aiming it at the majestic creature, "now pull the trigger Jamie, if you hesitate, you'll miss." I took a long and deep breath; the air was so cold. Inhale, exhale. I was ready.
Then the buck's head swung around, and its eyes met mine, like he was saying goodbye to the world, pleading with me to remember his beautiful antlers and muscular body. The trigger was heavy for my little fingers. That was the thing I hated most about triggers, I pulled and pulled and pulled on it, thinking there was something wrong with the gun until it released, and the bullet was gone. My father had once said that you had to squeeze a trigger like you were getting it pregnant, slowly, and then all at once. My mother had slapped him with a dish towel when he said that, and Hayes had turned bright red. All I knew was that my mother was pregnant again, I had hoped that it didn't have anything to do with guns to get her that way.
The buck dropped in front of my eyes, and I felt a pang in my chest. I had taken life; the act was done. Feeling my eyes water, I tried as hard as I could to not let Hayes or my father see, but I let out a sniffle and they both turned to me. Bending down to look me in my eyes his words were soft and stalled my tears, "taking life isn't a good thing, sweet Jamie," he said and at first, I thought he was going to punish me but then his eyes turned sincere, and his hands found my face, "but we do what we have to do to live and provide for our families."
"We give and we take," I said through my tears, my father smiled and chuckled as he hugged me.
"Yeah, baby girl, you got it," he said. The three of us walked over to the dead deer and I looked at the blood. It didn't scare me or make me feel sick, I had seen my father dress and cut several farm animals and deer in the shed before. I noticed that the blood was coming from a bullet wound directly under the armpit. Heart shot. "Well, I'll be damned," my father said.
"I'm gonna tell momma that you swore," Hayes said, thumping my father on the shoulder.
"She won't care when I tell her that her baby girl hit a perfect shot on an eight-point buck," my father huffed as he dipped his hand into the pool of blood on the buck's shoulder. "Jamie come here," he said, it was an order not a suggestion.
I knew what came next, I had seen it on Hayes face a few years before after he was taken on his first deer hunt.
I had cried when I saw it, but then my father explained what all hunters must do, it was a rite of passage. I stepped up to my father and looked up into his kind blue eyes, not watching as he spread the blood across my cheeks. "You're a huntress now Jamie, thank the deer for the nourishment it will provide your father, mother, and brother, and future brother."
I looked down at the deer, its eyes still open and its tongue sticking out of its mouth. It felt silly to talk to something that couldn't hear or see me, but I knelt next to the deer, feeling my heart race for some unknown reason. I had seen hundreds of dead deer before, but this one was mine, this one was dead because of me and that made my stomach flip inside me. "Thank you for the nourishment you will bring to my family."
"Jamie?" David's voice called me from my daydream.
"Sorry, what?" I said, clawing at the boiling cup of coffee on my office desk.
"I asked if you wanted any creamer or sugar," David stated and I scoffed.
"What a perversion of one of life's greatest gifts to man, black coffee."
He sneered and made himself a cup, "you're such a hardass Jamie."
"Thank my father for that," I said, David cocked his head to the side in curiosity and I already wished I could take the words back.
"How is your father?" He asked as he sat down in the cubicle chair next to me.
I huffed and ran my hands through my hair, only to get them tangled in the windblown locks, "the same I guess, my mother hasn't updated me since the summer."
"Jamie, you need to go visit them. It might be the last time you get to see your father," David said, knowing the situation was a touchy subject. David was the only one who knew about the Dementia that was setting in my father and he was the only one who knew that going to see him was so difficult for me. It was a mistake I couldn't uncommit, that I couldn't take back and my mother would make it known to me if I even tried to go see him.
"I know, maybe I will once the weather lightens up," I said, it wasn't a full lie, but I knew I would easily distract myself with more work before I made it come true. The wind picked up and whistled outside and David threw back his coffee with a loud thump, looking over to me while I sipped mine far more casually. My eyes stayed on the rim of the cup, despite having paperwork in front of me, my mind stayed on the memory of my father in the woods on that first hunt.
"You know, Amy will understand if you want me to stay up here with-"
"Never," I said sharply, almost cruelly. After a moment I looked up at him and smiled gently, "I'm sorry, but you know I relish in the isolation."
He lifted himself from the chair with a groan and patted my leg, "I'm well aware," he said as he left to put on his coat and hat and scarf and earmuffs. Thank God that the office had geothermal heat. "I'll tell Amy and the kids that you say hello, I'll be 10 minutes away if you need me." he said as he unlocked the front office door.
"Please do!" I called back to him. I heard the front door slamming shut and my mind finally went blank with the sound only the wind calling through the windowpanes. God, I loved that sound. I was in my element now.
Opening my drawer to reveal a fresh roll of quarters, "booyah!" I exclaimed as I rushed off to the vending machine. Oreos and a fresh bag of Ruffles chips, my favorite dinner. I flipped the decade old iPod nano open and blasted "California love" by 2pac. I began to spin around like my head was made of helium, letting the music take me to another atmosphere.
I clamored into my cot next to my desk, still wearing my cargo pants and Air Force sweatshirt. It was like I was back where I came from, a campsite in the open woods, only now I was inside an office hidden from the rest of the world. I smiled as the whistling wind drove me to sleep.
It was the sound of clunking helicopters, extremely close helicopters, that woke me in the pitch darkness of the ranger station office. The dim light of the computer "power button" above me gave me just enough light to find the floor and then the window. I looked at my watch that lit up, looking at it, 5:14 in the morning.
A second helicopter flew overhead, I cranked open the small window blinds in my desk space. I could see their lights up in the sky, they were maybe a mile away, hovering for a moment before moving on. "Forest fire?" I asked myself. Then panic set in, I needed to get on the Satellite phone if there was a forest fire happening. This was one of the reasons why the Ranger always had to be close to the office, always on Firewatch. Those helicopters needed to come down in this blizzard, what on earth were those operators thinking?
This snow offered an unusually eerie light to the morning darkness, and I could see the helicopter much better as it floated down under the snow drifts. It was a tandem-rotor helicopter, and to my knowledge no wildland firefighting crew had one of those. The second one floated down not far from the other one, before both took off in the direction that they came from. I looked at my watch again, the time hadn't moved. Lord, I must have been dreaming. Choppers in the middle of a snowstorm, not even the most skilled wilderness rescue crews would risk something like that.
Grabbing the satellite phone and looking at the numbers in the computer light, I thought once about calling David. But then my thoughts turned to a more professional approach, I dialed up the Bickel Fire tower around 60 miles north of the Station, directly across the border of Canada.
The answer was instant, as Grim usually was awake already for his shift, "Grim this is Ranger 1, how copy?"
"Good copy Ranger 1, you're up early," he said. "You stayed at the office last night, Jamie." His words were silky and flirtatious. As always.
"Yes, just checking in. Snow clearing up out there?"
"It's still snowing, but the wind has died down. Big flakes that just float down from that big blue expanse up there," Grim was the kind of guy that could make paint drying sound magical. Which is why he was such a talented writer. When he took the fire watching job, it was because he said it helped him focus on his writing while watching the rest of the world be still.
"Good, I think things are gonna be settling down here too, the wind isn't quite as strong," I said, pulling the covers around myself. I felt the pull of my cot drag me back down onto my side, a yawn forming at my lips. "Grim?" I said after a few moments of silence.
"Here," was all he replied.
"Have you seen any helo's this morning?"
"Like Helicopters? In this mess, it would be a death sentence," he chuckled before he went silent again.
"I could have sworn I heard one and saw one flash by not long ago," I said. I spotted my watch again, 5:16, the sun would be awakening soon. "It was less than 30 seconds, and the snow was blocking my full vision but..."
"You need to stop eating chocolate and chips before bed, Jamie," he said, and I smiled. Grim was one of the few people I gave a shit about anymore, and what made our friendship work even better was the fact I never saw him. Only a few calls a week to check up on him and to bring him supplies every other month. He was an isolator like me, enjoyed the silence of not being anywhere close to the world, fighting off the continued growth from the old world to the new.
My eyes became heavy as I sank back down onto my cot and let the next hour go by, never hanging up on him.
I was dressed and on the hiking trail the next morning, my father's Winchester .223 slung over my shoulder and a pair of snowshoes strapped to my feet. Although the wind was gone, flurries still dropped from the sky, slowly like Grim had said to me only a few hours before, floating down in the silence of the briskly cold morning. If I hadn't hiked this trail before I would have easily gotten lost, as the trail markers on the rocks and ground were completely hidden.
It was when I finally found the droppings of a deer that my heart began to race, the memories of my first kill radiated in my mind. This was it. I followed the tracks, silently moving off the trail path and up the snow drifts to the mountainside. I stopped every mile or so to record the path I had taken.
On my fourth mile I found gold, big footprints with four distinct pads. Wolf tracks. When I found the second pair, I couldn't contain my excitement. Loading my gun with ease as my heart raced, I didn't want to get caught up in the euphoria and get hunted by a couple of wolves. Snickering to myself, this is what I thrived on, this was my job and passion. At least, I thought it was. The tracking, the hunting, the feeling of reaching into my ancestors' memories and pulling them into my own mind, doing what humanity had done since the beginning of time. This was it.
Following the tracks for another mile or so, I could feel them close. I pulled my pack and got out a small spray bottle. Baiting was illegal, but it didn't hurt to get a little dirty. I sprayed the snowbank with week old dog piss, a gift from the local bar owner in Libby. Every three hundred meters I sprayed a little more, marking my territory in their territory was a surefire way to get them on my radar. The smell would carry, and they would come to me.
I followed the tracks until I found myself at an opening. This wasn't normal. The snowbanks had been sprayed in a circular pattern, the ground was even visible in the center of the circle, like the snow had been lifted and put down far away from the middle. Looking at the ground I saw the unfamiliar pattern of twigs littering the circular pattern, branches had been ripped from the surrounding trees like a tornado had come through here.
No. Not a tornado. A helicopter. I would know.
Stepping over the snowbank into the middle of the circular pattern I was horrified to see boot patterns in the snow. Big boot patterns. Why would a helicopter land in the middle of the forest in the middle of a snowstorm and then leave. If it was rescuing someone, I would have been alerted on the satellite phone, since I was the closest station to this area, I would be the best point of contact if someone was hurt.
This is where my tracking training really came in handy, I looked down at the pattern of the boot and then at another, different pattern. There was more than one. I stepped around the tracks, making sure not to disturb them. I was playing with fire here, hunters with a chopper? Not smart to mess with them. I found a third pattern of boots and then a fourth, four of them. I bent down and traced the final pair of tracks with my finger. Following them to the bank north of me, they crawled over the snow drifts, but as I climbed up as well, I noticed that on the other side was a steep hill, not one that someone could easily get down without being extremely careful.
Walking back over to the first two pairs of tracks that followed west, I noticed one had far longer strided than the other, he was taller and heavier. I looked up at the gray sky. "What the fuck?" I said to myself.
There were only two reasons for helicopters to be out this far in the middle of a snowstorm: fires, and rescues. Neither one of them seemed to be the reasoning for the insanity that I was seeing in front of me
"Put the gun down now," I heard a voice say from directly behind me. I had not heard the crunch of the boots on the snow, nor the cocking of his gun, it was like he had wafted up to me like a ghost. The barrel of a gun pressed into my back. Too shocked to even think straight, let alone listen to the voice giving me orders. I nearly jumped out of my skin before I was knocked to the ground, "I said put the motherfucking gun down!"
I did as the voice said, noticing his extremely thick British accent, my hands were thankfully covered by gloves that were now soaking wet from the snow. Other hands gripped my shoulder as my father's Winchester was ripped away from me. Fear held my tongue as I was on all fours on the ground, I couldn't form words.
"Get up, slowly, hands behind your head."
I complied, leaning back still towards my burglar, "please, it's my father's gun-"
"Shut the fuck up," he growled. "Turn around, slowly."
Turning, I saw the most terrifying thing I had ever seen in my life. A man towered over me, dressed completely in white except for a black and white skull that covered his face. I blinked as the tears welled in my eyes as I looked down at the giant sniper rifle that he had pointed at my heart. Unsettled breaths filtered from my lips before I blubbered something not even I could understand. My mind went blank as my body overcame my mind and I screamed as loud as I could. No one would hear me this far out in the wilderness, but it was all I could think to do.
My burglar lunged at me and stuffed his gloved hand over my mouth, to which I writhed against him. "Bloody fucking hell!" I heard him grumble as a gun clicked directly next to my temple and I froze. My eyes caught his, blurred from your fountain of petrified tears.
"Shut the fuck up or I swear to God I will pull this fucking trigger!" he said, still covering my mouth with his hand. I began to think through my options and opened my mouth, remembering my training from years ago. "Don't!" He said, seeming to read my expression and mind. I extinguished the bite I was preparing and allowed my muscles to relax. I was going to die, I needed to accept that. The sensation of fate rolled through my body, turning my legs to noodles and my heart into a race car engine. Things blurred more, had he pulled the trigger? Was I the deer staring into the eyes of a hunter, begging to be remembered?