She fell into a silent, almost meditative state as she dug and scraped, dug and scraped.
The other jumpers on her team noticed that something was up, of course. You couldn't hide anything from shifters.
Thor and Steve, being guys, did what Mike had done earlier. They asked Kara if she was okay and then left her alone when she growled that she was fine.
But Felicia Concolor, a tawny-haired cougar shifter and the only other female smokejumper in the Rocky Mountain Smokejumpers, didn't let Kara off the hook so easily.
Kara dodged most of Felicia's questions while they were digging line side-by-side, but she finally broke down over their second night's dinner of Chicken Fettucine MREs.
They were seated on stumps around a large LED lantern that subbed as a campfire. Kara was just happy that the MREs each came with their own chemical heating packs, though the entrees never actually got very hot.
Overhead, the sky was filled with the dense, sparkling carpet of stars that you never saw anywhere outside of the wilderness.
All around them, tired firefighters dressed in dusty, sooty yellow fire shirts were seated around other lanterns, eating and talking and playing cards. Someone had hooked up a pocket-sized speaker to their phone, and the sound of a classic rock n' roll song drifted through the camp. Their enemy, a line of red and orange fire, traced the outline of steep slopes east of the campground.
Acutely aware of the many listening ears nearby, Kara told Felicia about the breakup.
Felicia immediately put down her food, turned on her seat, and gave Kara a hug.
"Oh, Kara, that sucks," she said softly into Kara's hair. "I know this doesn't help now, but back in high school, whenever a boy broke my heart, my grandmother would always tell me, 'If he doesn't want you, he can't have you.' Well, Ed's a fool if he didn't want you."
Her hug turned fierce before she released Kara and turned back to retrieve her half-eaten dinner.
Kara sighed. "I don't want to have to choose between smokejumping and finding a mate," she said. "I mean, look at Thor. Why can't I find a mate like he's got?"
She had always wondered how Thor had managed to spend long period of time away from his mate over the past two fire seasons. Cassandra Long-Swanson was a graduate student at University of Colorado at Denver, so Kara imagined that between teaching undergraduate biochemistry classes and working on her doctoral thesis, Cassie managed to keep herself busy in Thor's absences.
"I know what you mean," Felicia sighed. "But I believe that if it's meant to happen, it will. You've just got to have faith, Kara."
The next eight days passed in a mind-numbing cycle of dig, eat, sleep, repeat.
Having spent a day-and-a-half chewing over everything that had happened and holding mental arguments with an imaginary Ed, Kara slowly began to emerge from her post-breakup funk. He began to fade from her thoughts, banished by the sheer physical effort required to dig line from first light until it got too dark to see.
And Kara drew comfort from Mike's quiet, steady presence as he dug line next to her.
In the evenings, they usually ended up sitting together by one of the lanterns, eating MREs and playing cards with the other smokejumpers.
Mercifully, despite some searching glances, Mike didn't ask any further questions about how she was doing. Instead, he spent mealtimes staring down at his e-reader, usually propped up against a rock or a stump, and steadily shoveled food into his mouth.
Kara was glad of his undemanding company, especially since Felicia was always talkative.
Late on the ninth day, the smokejumpers received word via radio that the fire had been fully contained, and all smokejumpers were being released from the McKinley Fire.
Kara and the others spent the rest of the day making sure that every hot spot in the burned areas was well and truly extinguished, turning over mounds of dirt and ash to thoroughly smother any remaining live coals.
Midafternoon, a helicopter flew in and dropped a cargo net on their jump spot. The copter would return in the morning to pick it up. Kara and the other jumpers worked late into the night to pack as much gear into the cargo net as they could, since they would have to carry any remaining items in their pack-out bags.
The next morning, she rose at dawn. Her muscles and joints ached, and no matter how many times she rinsed out her mouth, she still tasted smoke.
After a quick breakfast of yet more lukewarm instant coffee and an MRE, she rolled up her sleeping bag, gathered her personal items, packed everything in her big pack-out bag, made a final check of the campsite, and then headed out.
Most of the other smokejumpers were packing out in groups of two and three, having been spooked by the warnings about bears in the park.
But the Rocky Mountain Smokejumpers were the exception in preferring solitary pack-outs. All of them were shifters and were confident about handling anything that the untamed Alaskan wilderness wanted to throw at them.
Kara's beast form was the smallest and lightest of these shifters, but she opted for a solitary pack-out as well. She was a member of Coyote Moon Clan, after all, and confident that she could avoid trouble either by avoiding, outsmarting, or outrunning the park's megafauna.
Besides, she was carrying a canister of bear spray in a holster clipped to her belt.
Feeling lighter in spirit than she had since the breakup, Kara set out for the rendezvous spot, which was a campground located along the park's single unpaved road. There, the smokejumpers would board buses for the long ride back to Ft. Wainwright.
After nearly two weeks of living and working in close proximity with a large group of her fellow shifters and Ordinary firefighters, she was really looking forward to a little peace and quiet. She was also dying to breathe clean air again after days of smelling and tasting nothing but smoke. And she really wanted to go swimming in one of the lakes or streams she'd seen on the flight in, and to wash the dust and soot out of her shoulder-length hair.
As she left the campsite, she began composing a revised ShiftMatch ad for when she returned to Denver.
She had met Ed and her two previous boyfriends through the online dating and mating service for shifters, and she hoped that if she was able to fine-tune her ad, she might meet another coyote shifter who understood the unique demands of her career—and more importantly, who was willing to deal with her extended absences.
She was sick of being the one expected to change everything for a man. Why were her career and her priorities always less important than his? It was unfair.
At first, everything on her hike was awesome. The late summer morning was perfect: sunny, mild, and windy enough to keep mosquitoes and other biting insects at bay, so that she didn't have wear the annoying head-net.
So far, the terrain wasn't too bad for hiking, alternating patches of dense conifer forest and sunny clearings filled with wildflowers and berry bushes, with the occasional stands of scrub birch and willow.