Sure, Mike tended to be the quiet, serious type. But time after time, she'd seen how even-tempered and calm he remained in situations when she was cussing up a storm and ready to pull her hair out.
After working with him through seven fire seasons, she had also come to realize that he might not be the one cracking loud jokes and barking orders, but he was always there whenever one of his teammates needed an assist—or just a listening ear.
No bullshit. No ego. Patient. Kind. And able to give you his full attention when you talked to him.
Kara hadn't met many people—men or women—with the ability to focus like that. Most people—and she included herself in this assessment—tended to multitask with a phone in one hand and an ear kept perked for interesting conversations happening nearby.
"I—" she began, ready to spill her bleeding heart to him.
Then she got a grip on herself. This wasn't the time or the place. "I'm fine," she lied. "It's nothing."
But she couldn't lie to a fellow shifter, not with scent and other factors to betray how upset she was feeling right now.
To her relief, though, Mike didn't push.
"Okay." He just gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "Let me know if you want to talk."
She nodded, and instantly began missing the comfort of his touch when he withdrew his hand.
Chapter 3
Pack-Out
As Kara expected, she and the other Rocky Mountain Smokejumpers flew out to the McKinley Fire an hour after roll call.
Conditions were calm as the airplane approached the jump point.
When it was her turn to jump, Kara sat in the open doorway at the rear of the plane and gazed down at a vast, uninhabited landscape of forests, wide grassy clearings, braided streams in wide gravel riverbeds, and steep, snowcapped ridges.
She spotted—and smelled—dense smoke rising in a vast column from the slopes below.
Her heart was pounding with combined nervousness and excitement, and she was finally able to stop thinking about Ed and that text message.
Thor, who had jumped ahead of her, was still in the air, his round blue-and-white parachute floating some distance below the plane as he headed for the designated jump point.
"Did you see the streamers?" Tom Murray shouted over the roar of the engines coming through the open door. He was one of the veteran Alaska Smokejumpers, and serving as spotter on this jump.
Kara nodded. Murray was referring to the weighted crepe paper streamers he had tossed out of the plane a few minutes earlier. They had fluttered down into the wilderness below, the long lengths of brightly colored paper revealing which direction the winds were blowing at various altitudes during the descent.
"Did you see the jump spot?" Murray shouted.
Kara nodded again. For once, she'd be jumping into ideal conditions. The jumpers already on the ground had used chainsaws to enlarge a natural clearing in the dense forest to serve as a helispot, so that helicopters could deliver additional supplies and heavy pieces of equipment and then lift them out again.
Murray continued, "There's about two hundred yards of drift. Wind is mostly out of the south."
Kara nodded again and performed her final pre-jump check of her parachute release handles, the connections to her reserve chute, and her cutaway clutch.
The plane came around on its final lineup and leveled out.
She kept her eyes fixed on the horizon, feeling calm and focused at last, and waited for the signal to go.
Sitting with the slipstream rushing past her boots like a fast-moving river, and a vast wilderness of rugged mountains, forest, and shining lakes spread out below, made Ed and her life back in Colorado feel like something that had happened years ago and a million miles away.
Murray leaned over her shoulder, peering down, studying the terrain unrolling below. "Get ready," he shouted.
Grabbing both sides of the plane's doorframe, Kara waited for the signal to go.
Murray slapped her right shoulder, which was the jump signal.
She launched himself forward, into the empty sky, and began counting down. "Jump-thousand, look-thousand, reach-thousand, wait-thousand…"
As she'd anticipated, it was a smooth jump. Her parachute deployed flawlessly, and she drifted down, surveying the landscape below the soles of her boots, using her toggles to steer for the jump spot.
When she hit the springy grass of the clearing, she tucked and rolled in a Parachute Landing Fall, as she'd been trained.
Then it was time to strip off her helmet and big padded jumpsuit and get to work.
For the next nine days, Kara and her fellow smokejumpers worked at "digging line." This backbreaking task was vital in controlling fire by creating a ten-foot-wide firebreak through forest, scrub, and clearings.
First came the team of sawyers with their chain saws. They were aided by swampers, who hauled the cut material out of the way. Then it was the diggers' turn to wield a variety of hand tools to remove every bit of flammable material down to bare soil.
Aiding the firefighters on the ground was a steady succession of air tankers, which targeted the worst sections of fire by dropping thousands of gallons of water.
Kara was one of the diggers. After the sawyers and swampers had finished their work and moved on to the next section of the line, she and her fellow diggers got to work wielding shovels and Pulaskis, which were a combination axe and wide-bladed pick.
Whenever the diggers reached a burned area, their job was to turn over every square foot of soil in the blackened patch four times to ensure that no hot coals or smoldering materials survived to reignite the fire.
On the first day, the steady, relentless rhythm of the work gave Kara too much time to think.
As she dug and scraped and hacked at stubborn roots, she replayed every conversation and every bit of time that she and Ed had spent together. She found herself arguing with him in her thoughts and pleading her case for a second chance.
That evening, after finishing a sixteen-hour shift, she refueled with a lukewarm dinner of Beef Stroganoff Meal Ready to Eat, or MRE, before she crawled into her sleeping bag and fell asleep almost immediately.
If the breakup that had haunted her thoughts all day pursued her into her dreams, Kara couldn't remember it when she woke stiff and sore in the cold gray light of dawn.
Because of the extreme fire danger in the park, the smokejumpers had been told not to light any campfires. Which meant no hot coffee. Dammit.
After downing a cold instant coffee beverage and a breakfast MRE of cinnamon-apple oatmeal and peanut butter crackers, Kara took her place in the line of her fellow smokejumpers and got back to work.
Normally, she spent the hours of digging line joking and exchanging sarcastic banter with the other smokejumpers in her vicinity. But today, her thoughts occupied by analyzing the failure of her latest relationship, she didn't have the mental energy to spare.