Joan Kilby - Home to Hope Mountain

Adam’s steps slowed, then stopped altogether. “Holy shit.”

“No kidding,” Hayley said grimly.

He glanced back to the untouched forest a mere hundred meters away. “So how did it happen? How did your property get razed and mine escaped with barely a singed leaf?”

“A fluke of nature.”

“Tell me more. All I know is that the wind pushed the fire up the mountain.”

“That’s right.” Hayley didn’t like to relive that day. She actively tried to cast it out of her mind, but the stark landscape never let her forget. “The wind was blowing steadily from the northwest, seventy miles an hour and gusting up to ninety, ninety-five. Leif led his firefighting crew down the slope below Timbertop, clearing and back-burning to create a firebreak. During the afternoon the wind veered around to the northeast.” Just as the Bureau of Meteorology had predicted. “It pushed the fire in the other direction.” She swallowed. “Toward the volunteer fire crew.”

For a moment she couldn’t speak and the taut silence stretched.

“It’s okay,” Adam said. “You don’t have to talk about it. I get the picture.”

“The fire roared up the mountain like a freaking freight train,” Hayley said, barely hearing him. “Jumping the break and taking out everything in its path.... Including Leif and his crew. They...they were dead before they could retreat.”

Her halting recitation of the details stalled on the choking pain in her chest. Breathe, just breathe. After a few seconds she was able to go on. “The fire continued to advance this way. There was no one to stop it. My house and outbuildings were burned to the ground. Leif sent me a message about an hour before he died. He couldn’t get out. He wanted me to head into town and stay with his parents. But I couldn’t leave the horses.”

Why hadn’t Leif listened to the weather bureau and positioned the firebreak on their side of the ridge? Was it because the fire was heading toward Timbertop and he wanted to help their neighbor? It had been a judgment call. A fatal one.

Damn Leif. Always had to be the hero.

“Where were you when the fire went through?” Adam asked.

She turned her gaze toward him but she wasn’t seeing him, she was seeing the black sky and hearing the unearthly roar of the fire, breathing in the choking smoke. “I was in the dam. Shane and I got in the dam, right out in the middle where I had to stand on my tiptoes. Shane kept wanting to swim to shore. I had to hold him in my arms. Hold him up so he could breathe. There were only three inches of air between the surface of the water and the smoke. We stayed in the dam for four hours.”

Adam swore. “That must have been awful.”

“I was lucky.” He looked surprised. She went on fiercely, “When people commiserate and tell me how sorry they are for me, losing everything, I say, no, I was the lucky one. I’m still alive.” Whenever she started feeling sorry for herself she thought about Leif, caught out in the bush with no protection from the inferno racing up the mountainside.

She had the garage to live in and her horses had shelter, albeit temporary. One day, the house and stables would be rebuilt. She would have a home again.

She started Bo walking again, and soon they came to the paddock. It was black and barren all the way from here to the garage, three hundred yards on the right.

She and Adam didn’t speak again until they approached the horse shelter, a three-sided corrugated iron box. Major emerged and whickered to Bo.

“What are your horses grazing on?” Adam said. “There’s not a blade of grass in there.”

“I buy timothy-hay and have it trucked in.” It was expensive, but she was used to most of her income going toward the horses. Some days the road back to solvency and a normal life seemed like a mountain she was climbing, but there was only one way she could go—onward.

She slid off Bo, removed his bridle and replaced it with a halter before letting him into the paddock. She would brush him down later.

“Did the horses get into the dam as well?” Adam asked.

“No. When the fire got close I opened the gate and let them out. They ran around the yard for a bit and then headed into the woods.” She still had nightmares about hearing their screams as burning shards of the barn’s corrugated iron roof rained down. One had struck Asha in the neck.... “Four of the five I have left came home one by one over the next week. Blaze was found months later. The rest I never saw again.”

“Do you think they’re alive somewhere out there?”

She cut him a scathing glance. “I’m too old to believe in fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.” She’d tried to find her horses. For weeks she’d gone up to the high country, scouting the alpine meadows and talking to the ranchers and park rangers.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

There was that pity again. Pity and charity. They had to be the two worst virtues in the world. They reminded the person on the receiving end that they needed help. That they were victims.

Brushing past him, she strode toward the garage at a fast clip with Shane at her heels. “I’ll get you that sugar.”

He caught up with her halfway across the yard. “Why don’t you sell up and move?”

“If you have to ask that, you don’t know me,” she said, opening the unlocked garage door.

“No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

She tossed her hat on a hook beside the door and toed off her boots. She could give him an impassioned speech about how she grew up riding in these woods, how Hope Mountain was in her blood, how she couldn’t conceive of ever living anywhere else. But she didn’t know him, so she wasn’t about to tell him her innermost thoughts and feelings. They wouldn’t mean anything to him. So she shrugged it off. “Guess I’m just stubborn that way.”

Adam stood in the doorway, blatantly cataloguing the sparse furnishings. The shabby recliner, the old tea crate she used as a coffee table, the Indian bedspread she’d hung on the wall for color, the battered two-seater table and chairs and her pull-out couch with the extra blanket folded over the arm. If he said something cheerful about how cozy it was she just might pull out her rifle and shoot him.

“My paddocks are full of long grass,” he said instead. “You’re welcome to bring your horses over to graze.”

“That’s kind of you, but I can fend for myself.” She washed her hands, then rummaged through the cardboard box that held her supply of canned goods and packets of dry food.

She felt his skepticism and ignored it. She didn’t want to be beholden to the man who’d indirectly been responsible for her husband’s death.

“You’d be doing me a favor,” Adam went on. “I’m trying to clear away excess fuel and make Timbertop fire-safe. The grass is way overgrown. If you don’t bring your horses over I’ll have to get a flock of sheep.”

She got an image of him herding sheep in his fancy suit and polished leather shoes. Hiding a smile, she said, “That much feed is worth a lot of sugar.”

“I’m not offering it as some sort of repayment for services rendered, either now or in the future. I thought the creed of the bush was that everyone helped each other.”

She straightened, holding two partial bags of sugar, one white and one brown. “True, but you’re not part of the local community. You don’t have any responsibility to help.”

“My daughter lives here.”

So she did. And Adam had dumped four hundred dollars into the community center fund. Hayley felt ashamed. Why was she pushing him away so hard? Where was her tolerance? Another creed of the bush was “live and let live.”

Maybe he didn’t want anything from her. Maybe he was simply being generous because he could afford to be. And maybe that was why she was so prickly. An urbane, sophisticated man like Adam Banks couldn’t possibly be interested in a scruffy mountain girl like her except as a charity case. Not that she was ashamed of who she was. No, sir. If anything, she felt sorry for him because city folks were soft. Put Adam Banks in the bush without his smartphone and he would be lost within minutes.