Cindy rode up Sierra Drive alongside the whales at the edge of the Sink. She’d seen smoke rising above the Range, and her curiosity drew her toward the source of the smoke. She’d figured out the general location of the fire—maybe Paradise Ridge, just south of the prominent Moro Rock. After riding up Mineral King Road and a back road to the Oriole Lake area, she found that she’d figured right. She parked the bike and hiked to the edge of the dying lake and soaked her boots. Then she hiked up into the burning grove.
She walked amid the chattering fire, following paths of stone, ash, and naked soil until she found a shelter—the black maw of a red Giant. She wondered whether that prophet she’d heard about in church—Jonah—had felt like this. He had been in the belly of a whale, immersed in a sea of water, whereas she rested in the mouth of a Giant, looking out into a sea of flames. Of course Cindy’s red Giant was much larger—and far more ancient—than any oceanic whale, but it had its commonalities with those sea-faring leviathans. As the oceanic whale is adapted against the cold of the ocean, the red whale’s bark is so much blubber against the fires of the Range. And like the oceanic whale, this Giant had its own pod of red, arboreal siblings. In its resistance to fire, it tended its own fire-nest; a dark, silent cave that permitted little other life but fire and Giant. It laid scaled eggs that would open only to fire, and hatchlings that would thrive on the naked minerals of post-pyrotic soil. In its alien way, it depended on the fire that would happily consume it, just as the whale, that mammal gone to sea, depends upon the very sea that would fain drown it.
Cindy reclined against the Giant’s black scar, smelling the drifting smoke and feeling the waves of warmth from the safety and comfort of her tree-pouch. She fell asleep before long, and woke up as the dawn light found her lying on a bed of old ash within the Giant.