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HYDRATED, SHE MADE better time. The stream of melt water was her guide. Following the water’s course might delay her making her way back to other people, but she couldn’t abandon the life-sustaining liquid, and certainly not for a vague hope. Eventually, she knew, water had to lead to a town. Find a river, keep moving downstream, you’ll find a town, guaranteed.
Lunch was water. Supper was water. What she’d give for a handful of crackers.
In this fire-wasted land, she could see that she would find no plant food, no spring berries or miner’s lettuce. No mushrooms. Maybe root vegetables, but without their tops, there was no way to find them, even if she knew what was edible—and she didn’t. She didn’t see any animal tracks, either, though even if she had, she had no idea how she could trap or kill one. An animal certainly wouldn’t be willing to sit patiently while she beat it to death with a rock.
But she had her rod and reel and this trickle of water running away downhill, and that gave her hope of finding a bigger stream with fish.
She followed the water as it found its way to lower ground. For two more days she walked, fueled only by water and her own determination. Steadily the stream grew broader as other snowmelt trickles joined it. She expected mosquitoes to appear, but none did. In fact, she saw no sign of insects at all—not in the air, and not in the water. Maybe the heat had killed them all too. Soon, the stream grew wide enough so that, by the time the light was fading the second night, she could no longer jump across. It was an established stream, not just random melt water flow. It had carved a place for itself years before.
Bushes and small trees began to appear inside its edges, some standing in water, their bases having survived the fire. No leaf had survived. One tall pine had fallen and the fire on it had been put out, leaving its charred trunk half in the water, with unburnt wood submerged on the other side. The stream spilled noisily over it.
On the fourth morning since she had left the cave, another sizeable stream joined the one she had been following. A dark smudge of mud spread from its mouth into the main watercourse. She walked downstream of that spot and peered into the stream. There was enough water that she believed fish might be swimming in these murky pools.
When she peeled the pack off and looked at the rod. She stuck her finger into the reel, feeling a dried mess of molded plastic. She pulled out her knife and sat down, opening the reel. Carefully, she began to slice away at the melted line, hoping that deeper down, individual strands would have stayed separate.
No such luck. She had to carve away every bit of what had once been more line than she would ever need, had she fished with it to the age 100. She had that little bit of line in her emergency survival kit. That might be enough. Not for casting and reeling in, but to tie to the last eyelet of her rod. She’d be fishing as she had when she was five years old, with a simple pole and line.
She unpacked her backpack, finding the tackle box at the bottom of the bag and the black film container with its few survival supplies. She repacked everything else before she opened the tackle box.
Among her lures, she had a tiny glass jar of red salmon eggs, just bought in Wyoming at the advice of a bait store clerk. And the lures: a sculpin, a small crayfish, a silvery minnow, a purple worm, and a package of neon pink scuds.
She flipped back the second compartment of the box. Here, she kept weights, corks, leaders, a scaling knife. And—a chill of relief—a tangled mess of monofilament she’d never thrown away. Now she remembered putting it there. At a lake she’d fished in southern Montana, she had gotten her line entangled in some bushes. She felt silly—it was a novice’s mistake, and she was no novice at angling, having been taught by her mother when she was just four or five. That day in Montana, she hadn’t been paying close enough attention to her casts, watching birds fishing the lake across the way instead. Coral had been taught to take her angling responsibilities seriously, and so she had collected the knot of line. Pack all your trash out, is the rule, so she put the mess in the tackle box, meaning to toss it into a trashcan later.
Thank heavens she had not.
Coral tied on her emergency line, baited the hook, and let it dangle in the stream. While she waited for a bite, she sat cross-legged, the knotted wad of line in her lap, and began to work at untangling it. She found the two ends and worked for a while from one end, then switched to the other and worked at that. Under the gray sky, it was like trying to thread a needle in the moonlight. The chore tried her patience, but what else was there to do but stick with it? Picking at the line with her fingernails and teeth, feeding the loose ends back through knots, she gradually saw the length of line slowly emerge.
It wasn’t a lot. But it was enough to tie to the rod. She pulled in the rod, cut off the emergency line just at the grommet, and wound it back into her emergency kit. The untangled line she secured carefully to the reel, knotting it onto three grommets; she couldn’t afford to lose it. She had enough line so that she could cast across the stream now.
If, that is, she could find any living fish. After a half-hour or so of no luck, she gathered her gear and went downstream to try another likely spot.
All that day, she stopped every so often to cast her line in the stream. No fins broke the murky surface, no bubbles told of rising trout. In the muddy melt water, swirls that would have given away feeding fish were impossible to see. When she could spot a rock, she fished the eddies behind it where fish were likely to hide from the current.
Once, at a shallow bend in the stream, she waded into the water to cast into the pools at the bottom of the far bank. The coldness of the water numbed her flesh within minutes and she walked out on deadened legs, shivering for the first time in weeks. Shivering probably burned calories she didn’t have to spare. After that, she kept to the banks.
That day, she moved on as far as she could manage while continuing to fish from time to time. The temperature kept dropping, easing off from its high of several days ago, until at night she finally felt comfortable. Sleep came easier than it had in a week.
The next morning, which she thought might be the ninth since The Event, though she knew she had lost track she set off again, but her energy was low. She often felt as if she were struggling for breath, despite the flatness of the terrain here. As she walked on without food, she could feel her clothes grow looser each day. She stopped often to cast her line into the stream.
When she got her first bite, she was so surprised, she reacted too slowly. She reeled in her line but the little eggs were gone, stolen by a quick fish. Her heart tripped with excitement. She slid more of the slick red eggs onto the hook and cast again to the same spot, staring at the line and willing it to move. When fishing had been something she did for fun, it had been pleasant and slow, a meditation, and it didn’t matter if she caught fish or not. Today, knowing she was battling starvation, each cast was something else entirely, a life-and-death drama.
What felt like an eternity later, she felt another twitch in the line. She held her breath and waited, her hands quivering on the rod. Take it, fish, take it. The line jerked and she snapped her wrist, setting the hook. She reeled in the fish quickly against its slight struggles. It was a tiny trout, not even as long as her hand.
She dug out her knife and slit the fish open, scooping out the guts with her fingertips and flicking them to the ground. Slicing between the bones and skin, she laid open the meat on one side of the fish, stripping off half of one fillet. She bit into the raw orange flesh, scraping meat from the skin with her teeth and swallowing without chewing. The cramp in her belly as the food hit it felt half painful, half pleasurable. She ate the other fillet, then took the center of the fish and sucked the remaining bits of flesh off the bones, then scraped with her teeth, getting every bit she could.
The fish was gone quickly, much too soon—even the head she ate, the eyes, then the skin, cut into strips and choked down, everything but the bones and guts. She tossed the bones down and slid more red eggs onto the hook.
As she waited for another bite on her line, she used one hand to squeeze out the fish’s stomach, hoping to get a clue about what better lure or bait to use. She saw a few midges, immature mayflies, nothing she had on hand as bait or lure. The fish had been hungry too.
Coral caught four more trout with the red egg bait, eating two more and keeping the two largest fish for later. Her mind told her that she could eat a dozen more fish, but her stomach might not hold more yet. The rest of her body, deprived of food for days now, wanted more and more fuel, but she knew it might only make her sick to give in to that desperate hunger too quickly. And maybe she’d luck into some fuel, some wood that the fire had spared, so she could cook these last two.
Feeling deep gratitude, she closed her eyes and silently thanked Nature for the gift of the fish, thanked the fish for giving their lives to keep her alive. She was not the type who prayed, but in this moment, it seemed right to acknowledge the connection between her and the trout and whatever god or goddess there might be, even were that goddess the earth itself. A few moments ago, the fish had been imbued with spirit, silvery flashes moving through the deep and cold muddy water. Now they were part of her. This connection was a reality as old as life on Earth but made new for Coral today.
She decided to stay put, to rest and keep fishing here for another day. As much as she wanted to find people, to find an answer to the mystery of what was happening, eating was far more important.
No more fish bit that day, so her dinner was the fish she had saved from the morning. She refused to let disappointment in the afternoon’s angling take root; she simply sat and conserved her energy. The next morning she was rewarded for her patience when the fish began biting again in the very same spot soon after dawn
It was a good morning of fishing. She hauled in nine trout. She ate three for breakfast and cleaned the other six of their guts, then put them into the plastic bag that once held her toilet paper. That she tied onto the outside of her pack. After she broke camp, she set off downstream again, feeling more energy and hope than she had in a week.
* * *
LATER THAT DAY, IT began to rain. The splash of the rain on her face surprised her. She thought how nice it would be, a refreshing rain.
But within moments, Coral was wretched. As the rain fell through the ash, the two substances combined. It wasn’t raining water but a thin, gritty mud.
There wasn’t even a stand of fir trees to hide beneath. The canopy had been decimated by the wildfire. Coral moved to a large boulder and leaned against it, miserable, trying to find a lee side without success. The mud rained down on her, coating her clothes and her hair. Some dribbled off her hair and into her eyes. She couldn’t blink it out. The freak mud storm seemed unfair, after all she had endured. The grit in her eyes stung. She shrugged off her pack and waded into the stream.
The current swept her off her feet. In an instant, she was tumbling downstream. Her knee hit a submerged rock and she spun around. Before she could gain her feet, she was pinned against the branches of a fallen tree. Water surged onto her face, plastering her bandana against her face. She sputtered into the wet cloth, swallowing gritty water. Fumbling behind herself for a handhold, she found a branch. She pulled herself up a few inches and turned her face away from the onrushing stream. The mask made it hard to breathe. She rubbed her face against the tree until it moved below her mouth, and she hung on and breathed.
Once she had caught her breath, she pulled herself hand over hand along the tree toward the bank. Her feet hit solid surface again and she was able to stand. Mud still poured from the sky as she made her way to the shore. She reached solid ground and yanked her mask off then washed it in the stream and wrung it dry. She had no idea where her pack was. The rain came down harder.
She hung her head, letting the rain pound the back of her head. There was no protection from it, nowhere to run. All she could do was stand there and take it. “Shit,” she said. Then louder: “shit, shit shit shit SHIT!”
Yelling didn’t stop the mud from falling, but it made her feel a little better. Keeping her head down, spitting out bits of grit, she hiked back upstream until she found her pack. She sat next to it, pulling her jacket over her head as an umbrella, and waited out the miserable storm.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, SHE woke to dry skies and cooler air. The ash still filled the air, but she could see a few yards farther across the stream. Maybe the rain would be worth enduring, if it could wash the ash out of the air.
And if the airborne ash was getting thinner, that meant that whatever had caused it was over, right? Whatever The Event had been, it wasn’t ongoing, putting more of this stuff—whatever it was—into the air.
The stream ran high and muddy. She cast her line and was surprised to get a bite almost immediately. Again, she caught fish enough for that day’s meals. Raw trout was becoming tedious, grateful as she was for it. She wished she could find vegetables or fruit. If only she could find one little bit of land that had been saved from the fire, one intact house with food, or even a cache of firewood so she could cook the fish.
But she wouldn’t find it sitting still. She ate her raw fish breakfast, packed up the rest, and then moved on again, trusting she’d find another fishing spot tomorrow or the day after.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, SHE CAME to a road. She would have passed it right by, not recognizing it as road, except that at the stream’s edge there was a metal barrier meant to keep cars from driving into the stream at a curve in the road. That led her to the road.
She followed it away from the stream and walked straight ahead, trying to keep to the road by aiming at the space between the tree skeletons.
Within yards, she came to a crossroad, a patch of gravel visible under the ash at a high spot on the road. The gravel road led to her left, paralleling the stream, the gravel itself turned into a pockmarked gray corridor by the thick layer of ubiquitous ash. Ahead, the main road jogged away from the stream.
Not far from the intersection lay a dead mailbox, one of the large metal boxes with several locked slots in a grid, meant for more than a single household. Its metal post was twisted and bent. The boxes sagged to the ground. Scorch marks fanned across the surfaces. She poked at its ruin with her toe. The thin metal crumbled beneath her boot like eggshell. Anything that had been in it was ash now.
Leaving the fallen mailboxes, she continued along the road, looking for some sign of the houses she now knew had to be here. In a few minutes, the curve of what was once a driveway appeared on her left, and she followed it back.
A concrete corner of the foundation told her where the house must have stood. A low pile of ash sat where the house had once been. There was far less left of the house than seemed possible, only a couple of cracked foundation walls, some curls of metal poking out of the ash pile and a gray mound carved with runoff from the rainstorm. That was all she could see as a sign that human beings had once lived here. She made her way to the wreck of a house and stirred through the ash with her boots, but she only raised more dust. Still, she hunted a while, hoping for cans of food—but nothing like that had survived the fire. Coughing, backing away from the ruin, she felt a wave of pity for the homeowner. She hoped the house’s residents had evacuated before the fire reached them.
But to where? Nothing she had seen so far suggested there was someplace to run to. Certainly not anywhere nearby.
She walked down the little road until it seemed to end, spotting nine burned house sites along the way. Not a single house had survived. Some were left with only the square of the foundation. Two chimneys stood among the ruins. A waist-high pile of blackened fieldstone was the most intact bit of construction she found. A few house sites had a burned-out truck or car, only the metal shell remaining. The completeness of the devastation was shocking.
She wondered about the people who had lived here, those folks who had stopped by the mailbox to get their mail on the way home. Were they year-round residents or was this a summer cottage community? They had enjoyed good fishing right outside their back doors. She imagined children playing tag in the yards, grandmothers shelling peas on porches, young men and women raising hands to each other in greeting as they drove the gravel path back home. Unless they had evacuated before the fire got here, nothing was left of those lives now.
She came to the end of the little neighborhood, and of the gravel road. Turning around, she began to systematically search the rubble more carefully on her way back.
In the second house’s ruins, a short metal rod stuck out of the ashes of the house. She picked it up and used it to stir in the ashes. By this time, she didn’t really expect to find anything.
Her metal rod contacted some solid object deep in the ash. Reaching down, she groped around and found something round. Pulling it out, she stared at it for a second before she saw what it was.
A charred femur.
She dropped the bone as if it were still on fire. Then she forced herself to bend down and pick it up again. Yes, it had to be a human femur. She had taken anatomy just this spring, and the test on bones had been in mid-February. She recognized the smooth round head of the bone, the point of the greater trochanter. The tip of the distal end had been partly burned away, but she could still see the patellar surface and the dip of the intercondylar notch. There was no flesh left on it. She laid the bone carefully on the ash.
She didn’t want to stir in the ash again. If she did, she wondered if she would find the other femur, the pelvis, a skull and teeth. Maybe more. Maybe child-sized bones. No. Don’t even think about that.
Coral wondered why this person hadn’t gotten out. Had the femur’s owner stayed with the house to safeguard its contents? Had he been overtaken by the fire with no warning? Or maybe he had been injured and couldn’t get out, like an old man in a walker. Involuntarily, Coral shuddered. If that were so, she hoped the bone’s owner had been unconscious when the end came. The idea of someone having to watch helplessly as a firestorm swept over him—it was too awful to consider.
But everything she had seen was all too awful to consider. It was real, nevertheless. Death was all around her. If she stirred enough ashes, she feared she would see even more signs of it.
She wondered why she had survived. She was no more deserving of life than the person whose bone lay there, and surely less deserving than many others who had died. It seemed such a random gift, her survival. Had she not been able to get into the cave in those first seconds, she’d be dead, maybe of ash inhalation, maybe of the heat, maybe of the flames. Had the heat lasted for ten days instead of four, she’d be dead. Had she not kept her backpack ready to go, dead. Had she not found the stream, dead. Had she not found some fish, she’d be on her way to dead. At every turn, the most reasonable fate for her seemed to be death.
That she had escaped that fate was humbling. All she could do to honor the gift of her life was to go on, one foot in front of the next, trying to survive until she found her way back.
