Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: The Line

They came across the ford at a run, twenty men in yellow shirts with tools over their shoulders.

The water was low from the long dry week.

It only came to their knees.

Fraser came out first, onto pack land, in front of anybody who cared to look.

Nobody shot him.

Every wolf on that hill was too busy watching the fire come down.

He found me by the engine and didn't waste a word on hello.

"Talk to me. Where's it going?"

I breathed.

"South wind, steady now. It'll push straight down the draw behind the school. Ten more minutes of this, then it gusts."

"Can you smell when it gusts?"

"About a minute before."

"That's all I need."

He turned to the crew.

"Line from the creek to the road, right behind the playground. Saws in front. Dig it to dirt. Go."

They went.

I'd watched them on the West Fork, but that had been a small fire on a quiet slope.

This was something else.

Two saws screamed through the brush behind the school fence.

The men behind them cut and scraped and threw, fast and low, never talking.

A strip of bare brown earth opened up behind the playground.

The volunteer chief stood beside me with his mouth open.

"How are they doing that?"

"They do it all summer," I said. "For money. Mostly in places that don't hate them."

The teenagers on the brigade drifted over to watch.

Then the kid in the yellow shirt yelled at them to grab a shovel and get in line, and they did.

The smoke came down over the school roof, thick and orange.

Inside, the children were crying.

The day camp woman had them lying on the gym floor under wet towels.

I could smell them from the yard.

Forty small wolves, terrified, and under it the sour milk smell of very little ones.

"Gust," I said into the radio. "Coming now."

"Everybody down!" Fraser shouted.

The wind slammed into the trees above the line.

The fire stood up on its back legs.

It ran down through the pines in one long roar and hit the bare strip and stopped.

It just stopped.

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