Gabe had spent enough time with the Lakota, who had a special relationship with the Navajo, to understand that Belcourt was thanking the old man.
Smoke stinging his throat and eyes, Gabe walked with Chaska to the entrance, fumbling through the camp’s rack of climbing gear in search of something to hold the blanket in place.
Belcourt used the flashlight on his cell phone to examine the rock, coughing hard. “There’s a … crack here. Any … small cams?”
Gabe handed him the smallest cam he could find, then held the blanket in place, shutting out light and smoke, while Belcourt jammed the device into the small crack as far as he could.
One of the camp counselors held something on an outstretched palm. “I’ve got a carabiner on my keychain.”
“That just might work.” Gabe took it, held the blanket in place while Chaska searched for another fissure in the rock.
Gabe saw it—a narrow crack. “Here.”
Belcourt took the carabiner, picked up a rock, and beat the metal loop into the crack. “If this doesn’t hold…”
“It won’t—not for long.” Gabe turned to face inward, pressed his back against the blanket where it overlapped with rock, then stepped carefully onto the bottom of the blanket to keep out as much smoke as he could.
Belcourt put away his cell phone and did the same, leaving them in the dark, the two of them standing only two feet apart, the fire raging below, drowning out the sound of coughing.
“We don’t have to stay long!” Gabe shouted. “Just till the fire passes!”
That’s when it hit him, like a fist to the stomach.
Fear.
Kat. Alissa. Nakai. Noelle.
He loved them more than life itself.
Had they made it back to Scarlet? Was the fire about to catch them on the road?
Gabe closed his eyes, sent up a silent prayer.
Creator, keep them safe.
Then, in the darkness … a drum beat.
The deep thrum of the drum was audible above the roar from outside. Gabe could almost feel it in his chest, like a heartbeat—strong, steady, sure.
Then the old man started to sing.
“Wakan Tanka, Tunkasila/Wakan Tanka, Tunkasila/Pilamayayelo he…”
Grandpa was thanking the Great Mystery for providing this cave, for giving them the skills to reach it, for keeping them safe.
Belcourt began to sing along with his grandfather. The camp counselors joined in, too, their voices stronger together, rising in the darkness, chasing away death, banishing fear. Then above the other, deeper voices, Gabe heard it.
Little Dean was singing, too.
Joaquin rodein the back of the truck, the mood somber since Hawke had gotten the call on the radio about the kids’ camp—and his missing friend. Brandon Silver had explained the situation to Joaquin quietly.
Hawke had asked his best friend, a park ranger named Austin Taylor, to search for someone named Bear. The fire had burned through the area where Taylor had gone, and no one had heard from him since. The fire had also burned through a canyon where more than sixty people, most of them children, had been trapped. The people Hawke had sent to rescue the kids hadn’t been heard from either.
Madre de Dios.
Joaquin didn’t want to imagine what might have just happened—people, including children, dying of smoke inhalation or being burned to death. The thought put a knot in his stomach, the mental images it conjured too horrible even to consider.
He turned his mind back to his work, scrolling through the images on his camera. Firefighters using drip torches to start the backburn, the sky beyond them gray with smoke. An exhausted firefighter taking a drink, sweat beading on her soot-blackened face. Firefighters looking up at the helicopter as it arrived for its first water drop.