Fear pressed her on, as gravity pulled her down the trail.
The afternoon clouds went dark. The celestial fire that they had obscured was hidden even from them. It had set behind Dennison Ridge, though it must still have been high above the horizon—that imaginary line that was likewise driven from reality by the mountain. The clouds that had threatened with their roiling charcoal grays and blacks were now upstaged by a ubiquitous absence of light.
Night Fire in Sequoias
A flash of alarm shot up her nape and charged her scalp. Cindy could feel the spirits lurking in the shadows; those nocturnal fears that still haunted her species from the depths of its primeval roots.
She hadn’t noticed that the trail was no longer descending. It was climbing.
She ran on, hunted by the howling packs of anxiety. She stopped to catch her breath, looking back through the dark forest, expecting the light of flames to creep out from the deep shadows between the dark lodgepole trunks. She turned and resumed her flight, stumbling, gasping, and striving to ignore the alarms of her body. The weakness in her knees. The rawness in her throat. The fire in her lungs. The light-headedness. The dizziness.
As the trail passed over a low saddle, Cindy raised her eyes. The trail seemed unkempt; faded into the forest litter, like a forgotten cemetery.
She looked back and saw her footprints. No naked trail ahead, nor even deer tracks. This wasn’t the trail. She’d been watching for obstacles. She’d failed to watch the course of the trail. How far had she gone?
She stood in place and glanced left and right, caught between her fears of bright fire and dark forest.
She felt a slight tingle in her scalp and along her arms—it wasn’t adrenaline. She felt her hair lighten slightly as if it were holding—a static charge. She thought lightning and bolted toward an outcrop for shelter, and as she leapt across a low-lying manzanita, something slammed against her back with a bright flash and a deafening, cracking explosion.
She convulsed as the burning, humming presence took hold of her, hurling her body down the slope.
Cindy lay breathing among pine needles, on a steep slope of forest floor. Her backpack lay next to her, one strap still holding its arm.
She opened her eyes. No pain.
Smoke hovered several feet above her. She briefly wondered where she was. Flames danced, whispered, and chattered through the veil of smoke. She gazed to her side at the gathering flames, entranced. The fire gyrated, lustrous and luminous, and she gazed at its astonishing beauty, wondering how she had failed to notice it before—it was an intimate beauty, a pacifying, maternal beauty. Flames curled around forest limbs in an embrace of color, slipping along in a soft, transparent, merging caress.
Her vision darkened. Her vision returned.
The flames, she remembered. The smoke.
She looked out through her eyes as though they were the eyes of another. Clouds hung low against the ridge. Daylight remained but dimly. Snowflakes absently drifted down around her. A smoking tree trunk lay fallen nearby.
West Kern Fire
Cindy felt the crystalline chill of the snowflakes settling on her skin. She tried to look up, but an intense shock of pain crossed her head and body when she moved. She lay in the collecting snow, waiting for the pain and the daylight to fade. She waited there until a blanket of snow had collected around her and upon her clothes and pack. Starlight sprinkled through the deep canopy, down onto the sparkling snow. She strained to lift her head, and found her muscles and nerves had grown a little more cooperative. She rolled her skyward eye to heaven, and she noticed that the starlight that broke through the canopy was strangely bright. Then she saw that stars were going black and reappearing. She saw a pattern to their disappearance. The shape of two great wings was sweeping across them.
The dark wings revolved counterclockwise among the stars above her, their wingspan—the clock hand—spreading across her vision until it ceased to spiral, blocking out the heavens and the forest canopy with its deep shadow.
Cindy rolled onto her belly, futilely but noiselessly clawing the snow and pine needles for traction as she felt his talons sting her shoulders. The pressure of her weight against the earth vanished. Her hands and feet were suddenly dangling, toe-tips dragging through snow and smoke and flame as the great wings labored effortlessly above her, and she was pulled away from the world.