saw only the worst. It was a pain she lived with, one so old it was comfortable.
Shaking her head, she went back to her weeding.
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Sam continued to be troubled by the occasional whiffs of smoke he detected and the haziness to thewest. Finally he called dispatch and asked if anyone had reported a fire.
Nary a whisper about one. But he couldnât escape the feeling that something was wrong, so he told the dispatcher that he was going to drive up Reservoir Road and take a look.
The reservoir had been built to provide water to Denver and in return had provided a great recreational area for visitors and the residents of Whisper Creek. The road looped around the entire perimeter of the reservoir, a man-made lake that looked as if it had been there forever. Campsites and picnic sites abounded, and the fishing was pretty good. Branching off the loop was a rutted dirt road that headed up to the pass between the two highest peaks visible from town. From there he could see the valley beyond.
As his car ascended, bumping all the way, the air grew cooler and thinner, taking on just the suggestion of a chill. Pines shadowed his way, hinting of ancient mysteries in their depths.
Every time he got out in the woods like this, he found himself thinking of what it must have been like a hundred years ago for the first settlers. Theyâd come looking for gold but had found silver. When silver prices crashed, theyâd suffered until the next big boom. Right now they were getting by on jobs at a molybdenum mine and the surrounding resorts. It had been a while since times had really boomed.
But the first settlers must have thought that abright future lay here. And certainly in the summertime the place was hospitable. Plenty of water, plenty of sun and shade, but cool enough for a person to work hard. Of course, at this altitude there wasnât a whole lot you could grow in the way of crops, but there had always been plenty of deer and elk.
It was easy to imagine setting up camp away from everything and just getting by on the land, maybe trapping beavers for their pelts. He could see why people had come and stayed.
Hell, people still came and stayed. People who wanted to live apart in small houses in the woods. People who were more interested in privacy and freedom than neighbors. People looking for a place where they could be unconventional, or a place where they could walk out their own back doors and ski in the winter. And so many of them came with dreams, just like the first settlers.
His car jolted in a deep rut, shaking him out of his reverie. Better pay attention. The pass was up ahead, but the higher he went, the worse the road grew, because it was so rarely traveled. The only things up here were a couple of microwave repeaters and the kind of woods he always thought of when he read that Robert Frost poem.
The smell of smoke was getting a little more noticeable, too. When his car bottomed out in another rut, he turned it around carefully and parked it toone side on a bed of pine needles. Better to hoof it the rest of the way.
Heâd come up another two thousand feet, and he could feel the difference as he hiked up the road. He was well above ten thousand feet now, at a place where even his altitude-adapted lungs labored more than usual.
Most summers, the sky would have been overcast by now, heralding a thunderstorm so regular you could set your watch by it. Not this year. This year the sky stayed perfectly blue from sunrise to sunset, unmarred by so much as even one little puff of cloud.
He was approaching the tree line now, and after climbing another fifty feet he had an unobstructed view of the valley and lake behind him. Another fifty feet upward and he reached the pass.
His puffing lungs forgot to breathe as he saw the smoke filling the valley on the other side of the mountains. Ignoring his fatigue, he trotted forward along the vanishing road until he could look downward.
There was a fire at the north end
Pearl Bernstein Gardner, Gerald Gardner