Chapter Text
May 31, 1988
Grian remembers it because it’s 7:30 PM on a Tuesday evening, and he’s sitting at his desk in front of the window trying to catch the early evening slanted sunbeams on his sketchbook. The light is golden on the page and his hand casts a shadow on his work.
That’s when Mumbo crashes through the front door—quite literally, too. The door swings shut with a bang. It’s a heavy door prone to closing on its own.
Without looking up, Grian calls out, “Remember not to slam it! Mrs. Grant complained last week, you know.”
“Right! Right, sorry!”
“Bad commute?” Grian asks.
He hears Mumbo drop his bag in the corner with a sigh, and the sound of him flopping down on the couch. Grian turns around to look at him sympathetically. Mumbo has dramatically put his palms over his eyes, slowly dragging them down his face.
“Ugh,” he groans. “It was the worst. Someone wrecked on 25.”
“That sucks.”
“Oh, shut up,” Mumbo says. “How long have you been sitting here? All day?”
“Nuh-uh, I had a meeting today with Mr. Perry.”
“Did that go well?”
“Yeah,” Grian says, lying through his teeth. But only just a little.
Mumbo hops up off the couch and walks over to Grian’s desk. “Is that what you’re drawing now?” he asks. He picks up the sketchbook.
“Yes,” Grian says sagely. “I have many ideas.”
Mumbo squints at the page. “You’ve only got a tree, Grian.”
“Hey!” Grian says, snatching his sketchbook back. “Look around! There’s plenty of trees out here! Well, maybe not on this street specifically, but give me like 20 minutes and I’ll drive you to a big forest.”
“Oof. Make it an hour. The traffic’s awful today, I told you.”
Grian and Mumbo stare at the tree drawing for a few seconds. “Is it at least a nice tree?” Grian asks.
“You’re supposed to be drawing houses, mate,” Mumbo says, amused. “Your meeting went terribly, didn’t it?”
“I have absolutely nothing,” Grian says. “Zilch! Zip! Nada! Empty brain. I can tell you there will be at least one tree next to his house, though.”
“Imagine that,” Mumbo says. “Million dollar house on a mountainside. One tree guaranteed.”
It’s Grian’s turn to use the shut up line. “Shut up,” he says.
There’s something ticking in Mumbo’s brain, and Grian can tell. He looks past Grian through the window with the streaming gold light, out at the mountains in the not-so-far distance. And Grian remembers it, even when he doesn’t want to.
“We should go camping,” Mumbo says. “Get out of the city for a few days. See some trees with no houses next to them. Get away from all that highway traffic.”
“Yeah, that sounds nice,” Grian says. “This weekend? Do you want me to call and see if I can reserve a spot in the national park? Or a little more west and hit a national forest?”
Mumbo screws up his face a little at that. “Let’s go a bit further this time,” he suggests. “Do several days instead of just a weekend. We could even leave the state. Go someplace we haven’t already been a million times. Maybe even a little more remote.”
“When?” Grian asks.
“Is next week too soon? I could just take off midweek and we could go drive somewhere. Please? Think of all those early summer wildflowers up in the mountains.”
“Dude, I can’t take off mid-week,” Grian says sharply, suddenly feeling very frustrated. “You know that. I need to be finishing these designs! You gotta give me more notice than this, Mumbo.”
“Right,” is all Mumbo says, and he looks so tragic that Grian already feels bad for snapping at him.
“Is it that bad at work?” he asks.
Mumbo looks away, past Grian back back out into the mountains in the distance. “I just don’t know if I can take another week,” he admits. “I need to take some time off. And hey, maybe he’ll even fire me this time for giving him only a week’s notice that I’m taking vacation time!”
“You need that job for your visa,” Grian points out softly.
Mumbo rolls his eyes. “Fine, I’ll try to keep my job I guess. No trying to get fired. I’m still taking that time off though.”
“He wouldn’t fire you anyway,” Grian says. “You’re much too useful.”
That causes Mumbo to crack a little, and he starts to smile again. “Yeah, mate, that place’ll burn down without me. If I leave for a week they’ll be begging me to come back and fix everything that went wrong.”
“If anything, that’ll just ensure your job security!” Grian says. “Hey, maybe you could just go without me. I’d love to go, I really would, but I can’t lose this deal with Mr. Perry. I’m the project leader this time and he’ll likely drop the whole project if I don't so much as answer the phone on the first ring…”
“Rich people,” Mumbo says with a nod.
“Ugh, yes, rich people,” Grian says, and throws his head down on his desk for dramatic measure.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Mumbo says. He thinks for a moment. Grian lifts his head and watches the way contemplation flashes across Mumbo’s face.
“Dude, just go by yourself,” Grian urges. “I can’t stand to watch you drive yourself insane another week. You’ve done it before, right? And why don’t you bring the bike? That way you can do all those difficult trails you’re always trying to drag me down without worrying about me wrecking it.”
“Should I?”
“Yeah,” Grian says, and he remembers this too, for as long as he lives, “I bet it’ll be fun.”
June 16, 1988
Grian is bouncing his leg, trying to bleed off nervous energy with every shake. He’s bouncing his leg because at least his leg is hidden under the table he’s sitting at, whereas the pen he’d been tapping earlier was about to have resulted in an annoyed client and lost job.
The table is large, and oval. He’s in some weird conference room-home office place in Mr. Perry’s gigantic house, discussing the floor plan for yet another gigantic house Mr. Perry wants to build. Mr. Perry, of course, hates half of the floor plan Grian has proposed.
Grian hasn’t quite figured out why Mr. Perry needs two gigantic houses, but it really isn’t his business considering he’s being paid. And he’s being paid very well for this. It’s probably the best job he’s landed since he started and he’s grateful his boss let him take this client, annoying as he is. This newest house would be within walking distance of a ski lift though, and this house isn’t, so Grian can at least see the value there.
He bounces his leg. He tries to count how many times he bounces it in a minute, only to find that he can’t really keep up with the passage of time, number of bounces, and the bouncing itself all at the same time. He loses track instantly. But if he can just get through this meeting, then he can make an excuse to go home. Only 4,000 leg bounces until he’s passed enough time to leave. He’ll be out of this stuffy room like a bullet.
He’s thinking so hard about leaving this meeting and going home that he forgets that he has to actually be in the meeting first.
“Excuse me?” Mr. Perry says sharply. “Did you hear any of what I just said to you?”
“Hm?” Grian says back, before suddenly being slammed back into reality. “Oh, apologies sir. Can you repeat that, please? I must have been a little distracted.” He gives a wan smile.
Mr. Perry gives him a long look. “I was saying that I don’t think I like the placement of this room.” He jabs a finger at the blueprints. “I mean, who needs a parlor these days, let alone a second parlor? I want to change it.”
Grian squints at the room in question. “I think we could open it up to the kitchen and living room,” he offers. “Open concept and all that. There’s a lovely view to be had that’s being blocked by the walls right now.”
“Let’s make it a pool room,” Mr. Perry says.
“Uh, a pool room sir? On the second floor?”
“Not an entire pool, that’s nonsense,” he says. “Just a large indoor hot tub. It’ll be cold out when I’m visiting this house.”
“I…I think I can do something like that, sir,” Grian responds. “We’ll just ensure that the engineers clear it for the amount of water weight it would put on the floor and add extra support if needed.”
“Can there be some windows or screens in the room?”
“You mean on the inside wall?”
“Yeah. So I could see the hot tub from the living room if I wanted.”
“Um, sure. We can do that.”
He sneaks a glance at his watch. Only 35 minutes to go now.
He just…doesn’t want to think about it. He just needs to leave. He’ll get home, make the phone call, and it will be okay and he’ll feel silly. But every second he’s stuck in this godforsaken massive house is just another second he has to spend knowing that he’s delaying something very, very important.
If he thinks about it, he’s going to spiral, so instead he keeps trying to channel every bit of the nervous energy into his right foot.
“Grian,” Mr. Perry says, and Grian snaps his head back up from the blueprints, a little surprised that the man has used his first name.
“Yes?”
“Would you like to leave early?” Mr. Perry asks. “Since you clearly have somewhere else you want to be.”
Grian freezes. “My apologies sir, I’m not trying to make you feel rushed in this process. It’s very important to me that you feel like everything in your future home is exactly how you want it, no matter how many tries it takes for us to get to the perfect result.”
“I don’t appreciate it when my employees lie to me, you know,” Mr. Perry says. “Save the corporate spiel for later. You’re making me exhausted just looking at you. I think if you bounce that leg any faster it’ll fly off.”
“Oh,” Grian says with a hint of a nervous chuckle. “Suppose that’s true.”
“You can go home now,” Mr. Perry says. “You’re not paying attention anyway. Just get me some new ideas for that hot tub room and we’ll reconvene on Monday.”
“Yes sir, thank you so much,” Grian blurts, and grabs his papers off the desk, and tries to walk out of the door at a normal speed instead of sprinting.
He arrives home a little after 3:30 pm, tossing his bag and papers haphazardly on the couch as soon as he runs in. The door accidentally slams again, but he doesn’t really care what Mrs. Grant thinks today. His goal is the phone on the table by the kitchen; even all the way across the room he can see the message light blinking on the answering machine next to it.
He pulls the phone off its rack and presses to listen to the message on the tape. It plays, and…he sets the receiver back down.
It’s just his landlord, calling to say that he won’t be around to fix the door for another few days.
Grian paces once around the living room, then twice.
He pauses in front of the window. It’s clear and sunny out, with very little smog on the horizon. The mountains are in clear view.
Grian returns to the phone, and dials 411. Directory assistance. He’s not quite sure the number he needs to call for this, and his local phone books are of no use for out of state numbers. An operator picks up.
“Hello? Yes, I’d like to place a call to the Shoshone National Forest Ranger Station. Location? Uh, I think it’s in Cody, Wyoming. Yes, thank you.”
A minute or two later with the correct number for the office scribbled on a notepad, Grian is patched through. A young woman answers the phone.
“Good afternoon, how may I help you?” she asks.
“Erm, hi,” Grian says. “I’m calling because I’m worried about my friend. He was in the National Forest and he’s missed his check-in.”
“How long has it been since he missed his check-in window?”
“Several hours at least,” Grian answers. “He told me it might be late, or really really early, so I was expecting a call last night or this morning. But I didn’t receive one. I left for work early, thought maybe he’d taken a bit more time than he told me, but it just nagged at me. It was supposed to be hours ago. When I came home just now there’s no message on the answering machine.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, darling,” the ranger says. “Can you please give me some information about him? Full name, age, appearance, vehicle, license plate if you know it, and the trails or locations he told you he would be hiking in? We can pass that information on and begin a search.”
A knot in Grian’s throat forms at the word search . “Of course,” he replies.
He rattles off the information as she asks for it, from Mumbo’s somewhat rickety AWD sedan that he was always convinced he could drag down any road he wanted, to his dark hair and mustache. He gives her Mumbo’s full real name, and feels a little silly when he includes the nickname right along with it, but he figures Mumbo might appreciate it. He tells her what trail Mumbo was going on, and how many days he planned to spend hiking.
“He brought his mountain bike too,” he says. “I don’t know if he took it with him on any overnight hikes but he had a setup for that, where he could strap his pack to the bike.”
“Thank you,” the ranger says. “Being on a bike could extend the range he could be in, but it could also limit it due to the terrain. Here, I’m going to patch you into the local Sheriff’s office to make a report too, is that okay? I’ll call some of the field offices and get some rangers on this. We’ll start by checking for his car at the trailheads.”
“Thank you,” Grian says.
He calls the Sheriff’s office and makes a report. He tells them much of the same information he told the ranger, and the second time repeating it only makes it seem more macabre. He answers all the questions to the best of his ability. Yes, Mumbo was an experienced hiker. No, he was not having a personal crisis, just wanted a few days off work to unwind.
And then he sits and waits. The whole process had only taken a little over an hour.
He paces some more for a while. He goes to the kitchen to get some water, drinks that, and finds it only killed a couple minutes, so he goes and paces some more. He stares out the window for a while again. Then, he organizes some of the papers he hastily threw down when he got home, because it’s still probably not a good idea to risk losing or bending any of Mr. Perry’s documents.
He gets another call around 8 pm.
“We found his car,” the ranger says. “It's still at the trailhead.”
“So he never made it back to his car last night.” So he’s not just a spoon who forgot to find a payphone and give his friend a call.
“I’m afraid not.”
“So…so what now?” Grian asks.
“We’ll start sending some rangers and volunteers down the trail to look for him, in case he’s hung up somewhere and needs a little help. His bike wasn’t in his vehicle, so he must have had that with him.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Please keep me updated.”
That night, Grian doesn’t sleep, and the next morning Grian doesn’t go into work. He’s already driving northwest.
May 1989
11 Months Later
He’s grateful when he finally rolls up to the trailhead after being jerked around on the rocky, uneven road for the last 19 miles. He’s the only one in the small lot, which is less of a parking area and more of a clearing at the terminal point of the road.
He lays his head back on the headrest for a moment just to rest, eyes closed, and sighs. The sun through the windshield is warm on his forehead, but the day outside is pleasantly cool with the bite of winter still on the wind. There’ll still be snow on the mountaintops for a while yet.
It’s noon. He spent the night in Cody, in an old motel but different room and left in the morning with his whole life packed in a bag. He has a long hike ahead of him this afternoon, and he won’t get there tonight. But he might as well start.
Grian gets out of the car and inspects it. It’s a 1978 Chevy Blazer he picked up two weeks ago when he realized he was going to need a 4x4 to even make it to the trailhead and traded in his old sedan. Its red and white paint is covered completely in a coat of dust and topped off with several mud splashes from snow meltwater on the road.
Fortunately, nothing rattled off the vehicle during its inaugural off-road journey, so Grian is just left to hope it still has air in its tires the next time he hikes back out. And that might not be for a while, so he’s stocked it with a spare and patch kit. He has an elementary knowledge of how to fix a tire but he figures the motivation of being stranded 19 miles back on this empty road will breed enough desperate ingenuity to fix any problems he encounters.
Grian grabs his pack from the backseat, and starts down the trail.
Grian loses himself for a while during the hike. It’s easy to do that—to just walk and turn your brain off completely. One foot in front of the other over and over. The motions over and over tune the rest of Grian’s brain into a nice numbness. He listens to his boots crunch gravel and dry leaves. He looks at how the sun dapples the trail.
He hikes onward.
The forest is loud in a way the city isn’t. It’s not the type of loudness that announces itself, but the longer Grian hikes onward and alone the more its presence makes itself known. It’s like Grian’s brain is getting rid of the noise that’s filled it for so long and allowing him to really listen to the sounds of life.
The wind whistles through the trees, shaking the pine needles. It doesn’t blow on Grian; the taller trees around him shield him from the gusts. He hears the light gurgle of a creek well before he comes down a hill to cross it, and when he approaches it a frog leaps away from the bank.
At one point, Grian’s dragged out of his silent contemplation by the commotion of rattling leaves in the undergrowth next to him. It spikes his heart rate and he freezes in place, until a medium sized brown spotted bird explodes out of a bush at the side of the trail and flies away, low to the ground.
He smiles a little to himself. Just a bird, startled by a person. He is trespassing, in a way, it seems, to intrude his presence upon such a wild area. This is the bird’s home, not his. He’s just being offered a place in it to protect it.
He hikes onward as the sun dips lower in the sky.
June 17, 1988
Grian arrives at the Forest Service office in Cody, Wyoming at half past ten in the morning. The sky is blazing blue and cloudless, but there’s haze on the horizon.
He stumbles into the office, brushes a piece of greasy hair that’s fallen on his forehead back up, and tells a slightly-startled looking lady at the front desk: “I’m here to join a volunteer search. My friend’s missing.”
She looks him up and down with a critical, yet sympathetic eye. “What’s your name, sir?” she asks, in a way that suggests she might already know.
“Grian.”
“Grian, where did you drive in from?”
Grian stares at her. “Denver. Why?”
“Denver’s eight hours away,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t see why that’s relevant.”
She sighs, and gives him a look. A pitying one that he hates. “Darling, how much sleep did ya get? It’s not even noon yet.”
Grian huffs. “I don’t know. An hour or two. I’m fine!” He looks at her pleadingly. “Please, just let me know where I can go to help out.”
She just shakes her head, and picks up the phone on her desk. Grian watches her dial it, and hopes for a second she’s calling another ranger to come escort him or something, but that hope is crushed the moment she speaks again.
“Hello?” she asks on the line, and waits while the other person answers. “Yes, I was wondering if you had a room available. You do? Good. I’m going to send someone over your way. Yeah, I’m doing good, how are you? Glad to hear it. Thanks, darling. Yeah, he’ll be coming in a bit.”
She hangs up and scribbles something on a notebook, before tearing out the page and handing it to Grian. It’s got a short list of directions. Down the road two miles, turn right on the second road after the bridge.
“It’s a nice little motel not too far from here,” she says. “They’ll give you a room and you can get some rest.”
Grian shoves the paper back across the desk at her. “No. Tell me what I can do to join the search for my friend, please.”
She smiles saccharine-sweet and hands the paper back to him again. “Take it. I don’t want to see you back here for at least another few hours. In fact, I won’t give you any information unless you come back in a few hours. Get some sleep, you stayed up all night and just drove eight hours straight. You’ll be much better equipped to help out if you aren’t too tired to hike.”
Grian feels frustration well up in his chest, consuming the ball of anxiety in his chest. It threatens to break him too, so he looks away from the ranger and at the floor instead, though. Finally he speaks again. “My friend,” he whispers. “Will he be okay?”
The woman answers, “All our rangers are trained in search and rescue. They’re professionals. This is what they do, Grian, and they’re good at it. They’ll do everything in their power to find him.”
Grian nods tightly.
“Now get some sleep, darling.”
May 1989
It’s night when Grian arrives at the tower, on his second day of hiking. He’s been backpacking many times before, but the rough terrain on this hike is still a surprise. It’s difficult to scale rocky hills with a bulky pack, and his shoulders are sore and his walking is slower now—so it’s night by the time Grian arrives at the place that’s going to be his home through October.
It’s a wooden tower built on a hill. A staircase winds itself around, leading to the top where there’s a single room surrounded by boarded up windows. Nearby on the ground is an outhouse, small storage shed, a generator, a water tap, and nothing else.
Well, at least he’ll have electricity. He’ll have water too, but it seems like he’ll have to haul it. He knows from his lookout orientation a few days ago that there’s a water tank with rainwater catchment and filters, but there’s no way to pump it 30 feet to the top of the tower.
Grian turns on the generator, and heads up the steps with the single-minded determination of an exhausted man who knows there’s a bed waiting for him. When he arrives at the top he throws on the lights, tosses his pack down, and surveys the place.
He was expecting it to be pretty dusty and ill-maintained, but it seems pretty clean. There’s bedding folded up neatly on the mattress—Grian had been expecting to just use his sleeping bag. It looks like someone had been sent to the tower recently to clean and stock it in preparation for his arrival, which he appreciates.
He’s not really sure the level of effort it takes to maintain this place out here in the wilderness, and his mind goes down a brief rabbit hole. How was all this wood hauled out here? What about the nails, the rivets, the glass, the tanks? Was it hauled up on the same trail he just spent a day and a half walking down? They must have used horses to carry materials but someone still had to assemble all this. He has a lot of respect for that.
Grian is just starting to lay out the bedding when something over on the table begins to crackle. He walks over to inspect it. It’s a small black handheld radio sitting on a charging stand. He was told he’d have one of these.
It’s not set on the frequency he was told to keep it at, but before he's able to tune it to the correct one, it crackles to life anyway.
“Two Forks, Two Forks come in! This is KSNF, broadcasting to you live from Thorofare. Your host on this fine spring evening is-”
Grian picks up the radio. “Hello?”
“-none other than Scar.”
Grian sighs. Of course, this is a two-way radio. He can’t respond until the other person on the line has stopped talking. He waits as the so-called Scar keeps going. It occurs to him that he might be trapped out here all summer with this guy.
“He’s brilliant, he’s handsome, and he’s calling you dear listeners, hoping to hear your thoughts. What ails you tonight? What are your hopes, dreams, loves, losses? Or perhaps, what is your name, Two Forks?”
Grian, sensing the pause, jumps in. “Um, hi,” he says. “This is Grian. The new lookout at Two Forks. And you must be…Scar, I presume?”
“Grian!” the radio chatters. “What an interesting name. Yes, I’m Scar. I’ll be your supervisor this summer, ‘cause I’m so good at this. I’m also practically your next door neighbor.”
Grian looks out the window, but it’s dark and the windows just reflect himself. He looks away. “Uh, yeah. How did you even know when I got here? Where are you?”
“I saw your lights flick on,” Scar replies. “Been keeping an eye out for when you’d arrive. Go outside, you’ll see my lookout to the north.”
Grian steps outside, feeling the chill in his bones again. Once he stopped hiking and rested for a few minutes, the warmth from the movement wore off and he’s reminded again how cold spring nights in the mountains are. Sure enough, out in the distance, snuggled amongst the dark peaks, is a tiny orange light.
“Oh,” he says. “There you are. I see your light too.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Scar says. “We’re the only lights out here tonight. Nothing else for miles around. Not even a campfire—well, of course not, ‘cause those are banned right now. Please report any of those you see.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Grian says. “That is the job, is it not?”
“Oh, we've got a smart one,” Scar replies, and it’s a sentence that would probably sound acerbic in anyone else’s mouth, but Grian detects no sharpness in the words. Just friendliness.
There’s an awkward few moments on the radio, before Grian speaks again. “Okay, erm, I’m gonna call it a night, then. See you in the morning.”
“Goodnight!” Scar calls, and then, “Wait, wait, don’t go yet. Your radio, um, write down the frequency band we’re on right now. Keep that.”
“Um, okay,” Grian says. “It’s different from the one I was told in orientation.”
“Yeah, we’ll use that one too. That’s the one you need to report on. This one’s just for us. You don’t want the whole Forest Service to hear us chatting all the time, do you?”
Great. This guy wants to chat with Grian.
“I guess not,” he says finally, not untruthfully. He doesn’t really want anyone to overhear him talking, because he doesn’t really feel like talking to anyone in the first place. Half the point of taking this job was the distinct lack of human contact in every possible aspect, after all.
“Good! Anyway, talk to you tomorrow, um….Grian. Your name was Grian.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the mosquitoes bite, Grian!”
He steps inside and sets the radio back on its stand before Scar can say anything else, and runs a hand tiredly through his hair. This might be a long summer, and he cannot allow this guy to distract him from the other half of the reason he took this job:
He’s here to save Mumbo.
“Two Forks! Two Forks come in!”
Grian wakes up to the tinny sound of his radio across the room, and streaming golden sunlight over his face. But mostly the radio.
“Oh wonderful lookout of the tower over yonder, wake up! It’s a beautiful afternoon today, the sun is shining, and I can let you sleep no longer! Alas, our duty calls. Two Forks, answer your radio.”
Grian rolls over and puts a pillow on his head. Scar continues.
“Perhaps this is like a fairytale,” Scar muses. “Are you sleeping beauty, locked away in your tower, desperately waiting for true love’s kiss? Well, I can hardly speak for your true love, so you’ll have to settle and wake for me instead. Do you like Disney, Two Forks? What’s your favorite movie?”
Grian kicks his blanket onto the floor and slides unceremoniously out of bed. He sways for a moment. His legs aren’t really sure they’re ready to support him today, not after all the mountain climbing he did the other day. Then he strides resolutely to the other side of the room, picks up the radio, and turns the switch off.
Ah, peace.
Grian wanders over and sits on the bed for another few minutes, letting his mind spin out and gain traction again. He takes his glasses out of their case beside the bed and puts them on. The sun is bright and high in the sky, so it’s not early. It casts the room in a nice light, and Grian takes his first opportunity to look over his new home. It’s painted an old and slightly chipped white, with little posters and photos pinned to open spaces on the walls. The room is mostly filled by its spacious windows. They frame every side of every wall, almost as if Grian is living in a glass house.
The view is, of course, spectacular.
The mountains are both jagged in some places and rounded in others. He can see hills upon hills for miles, wrinkling out into the horizon like a piece of crumpled paper. There’s pockets of meadow and open woodland that contrast with thicker pine forests, creating a patchwork. The hillsides are painted in different greens—an aspen grove there, fir here, golden spring grass, or the bright spring flowers he can see coloring patches of the meadow. The sky is a blazing blue, and there is no haze on the horizon.
It would be spectacular, wouldn’t it? Something so beautiful would have to be so cruel. Grian is already familiar with these views in the way of someone scorned. He’s been here before, and this time he isn’t leaving without dragging the secrets from the darkest valleys.
Grian stands up again, a little more clear headed, and heads to the stove. It’s propane powered, and he’s grateful it exists at all. He takes out a small metal pot and, upon finding it dusty, casts it aside and pulls his own camp pot from his pack. He’ll wash things later. He pours some water in it, sets it to boil, and tries to figure out where he’s set his tea.
With a mug of tea in hand—tragically no milk and a supply of sugar he’s decided to use very, very sparingly—and the radio in his other hand, Grian steps out onto the wraparound walkway at the top of his tower. It makes for a nice deck.
Lazily, he flips the radio back on. “This is Two Forks,” he says smoothly. “I’m awake now, what do you need?”
“G-man!” Scar nearly shouts on the other end. “It’s great to hear your voice this afternoon.”
“Ugh, afternoon,” Grian groans. He checks his watch. “It’s what, 12:30? Lunchtime? Already?”
“You’ll be okay,” Scar says. “You’re not really officially on duty until tomorrow anyway. I always like to check on the new lookouts on the first day anyway, though. You doing good?”
“Fine.”
There’s a pause, like Scar was clearly waiting for more than that. Grian is giving him nothing. After a moment he gets the memo and proceeds.
“Good to know, good to know. So, G-man,” he starts. “You’re a lookout now. That means your only job, from now until October, is to keep an eye on this forest for any fires. If you see a fire, report it to me, or to the rangers on the official channel. I’m talking campfires, fireworks, lightning strikes, everything. You got that?”
“I believe I can handle it,” Grian says drily. “I’m pretty good at looking out windows.”
“Do you see the round thing on a table in the center of the room?” Scar asks. Grian does not, because Grian is outside on his deck, but he’s seen it before already and doesn’t feel like walking back inside to play along. “That’s your Osborne Fire-Finder. I assume they taught you how to use that?”
“Yeah. Always keep it calibrated, locate the fire in the rotating sight, and use the tool’s measurements to determine its location and precise angle.”
“Wow, you’re going to put me out of a job!” Scar says, and somehow Grian just knows he’s genuinely beaming on the other end of the line.
“I can’t be in two lookouts at once, now can I?” Grian says, words sharp. It doesn’t phase Scar.
He continues. “The only other real thing is that you need to report daily first thing in the morning with the weather conditions at your tower. This helps us keep track of what the fire danger is on any given day or week, so I expect you to take that seriously. Additionally, you’ll be expected to keep logs of conditions in your area. Anything else, well, I’ll just help you with it if it comes up!”
“Cool.”
“Any questions, G-man?” Scar asks.
“Um, yeah,” Grian says. “Just one. Have you been calling me ‘G-man’?”
“Yep!”
“Alright, follow up question. Can you stop?”
“Nope!” Scar says brightly. “Every lookout needs a nickname, it’s only fun. I suppose if you had a nickname you’d rather be called though, I can consider it.”
“Uh, no,” Grian says. “I don’t have another nickname for you to use.”
“Aw, too bad. I guess it’ll just stay G-man, then.”
Grian is nearly overcome with annoyance for a moment, and, despite the objectively peaceful surroundings, desires to tear his hair out. He does not. Instead he replies, in his most carefully snarky tone, “Fine. Is Scar your nickname, then? What’s your real name?”
“Grian!” Scar exclaims, in mock offense. “I’ll have you know that this is my legal name, thank you very much.”
“I have so many reasons to doubt that.”
“I would never lie to you, G-man.”
Grian rolls his eyes at that, but he can’t stop the corner of his mouth from turning up. He takes a sip of his tea. It’s nice in his hands, warm, and the smell alone is making him feel more at home. There’s silence on the radio for a long time, and Grian almost assumes that Scar has gone. He’s fine with that being the end of their discussion for the day.
Scar isn’t gone, though, and after a while the radio crackles again. “Say, G-man,” he starts. “Now that you’ve asked me your questions, mind if I ask one of my own? A little equivalent exchange, you know.”
“Go ahead.” Grian sips his drink.
“Where are you from?”
“Denver.” It’s not untrue.
“Um, I don’t mean to be rude,” Scar says tentatively, “but…where are you from before that?”
Grian sighs. “England.”
“ I knew it! ” Scar cries. “Uh, sorry. Didn’t mean to shout, there, my bad! It’s just interesting to me, that’s all! You’ve got such a lovely accent.”
“I guess,” Grian says. “You never met a British person before?”
“Oh, sure,” Scar says. “I’ve met several tourists from the UK. But between you and me, most people flyin’ across the ocean for a vacation tend to just stop at Yellowstone or Grand Teton instead of here. And the ones that do don’t stray too deep into the Forest.”
“Yeah, well, s’bit far back here. Took me two days to hike in and then I slept until noon afterwards.”
“Yeah, that hike tends to beat people up,” Scar says. “So. What on earth brings someone from England to Colorado to Wyoming?”
“Maybe I just like the mountains.”
“You don’t have mountains in England?” Scar gasps in horror. “Oh my goodness, that’s a tragedy. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
“No, it’s like, well—we do have mountains in England. It’s just, well, they aren’t exactly like this are they? It’s a different sort of landscape. And besides, the place I grew up in just had hills.”
“Oh,” Scar said. “You know, I’ve never been to England. Never really left the western half of this country, actually. Is it pretty there?”
Grian thinks back, to cobblestone streets in town and misty mornings. He thinks of the way everything was just drenched in vibrant green in the summers. He thinks of old churches with ivy on the walls and fields of grass hemmed in by stone fences.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s pretty there.”
“Man,” Scar says. “I’ll have to go one of these days. I am wondering, though—it’s not, uh, very common to meet, um, someone from another country working this job. Since the Forest Service is a federal agency, you know.”
Grian scoffs. “Isn’t this line of question a little forward for a first introduction?” he asks. “Whatever. It’s not like they didn’t poke into my background enough during the hiring process. I have dual citizenship—free, clear, whatever you wanna call it, to work for the US government.”
“That’s so cool ,” Scar says. “So does that mean you like, came here and applied for citizenship and got it or—or were you like born here, and then moved to England. Or, even, you got it through marriage? Are you married? Like how does this work?”
“I’m not going to tell you all the details of my life.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Scar says.
“It’s fine.”
“Hm,” Scar says. “You know, it’s interesting that I met you, almost like a coincidence, right? I remember hearing about another British guy in the park last summer—a tragedy, I tell you. I heard the rangers still haven’t—”
Grian’s blood instantly runs cold at the mention, and the warm mug in his hands isn’t doing enough to pull the heat back into his body. For a moment he wants to dash the mug onto the ground dozens of feet below, and cut his hands on the ceramic when he goes to pick up the shattered remains— leave no trace —on the forest floor, dripping blood onto the leaves.
He doesn’t do that. Instead, he flicks the radio off with shaking hands, cutting Scar off mid-sentence, and stalks back into the cabin.
Grian’s sitting on a rock next to a lake. The sun is slanted now, casting golden orange rays across the water. The air is crisp and, although Grian hasn’t touched it, he knows the water is cold. It’s snowmelt-fed, afterall.
He turned on his radio again an hour or two after he turned it off earlier, once he’d recovered enough to have a normal conversation. Scar had been worried, but he’d accepted Grian’s excuse that he’d left some water boiling on the stove and needed to attend to it immediately. He hadn’t known Grian long enough to see through his excuses yet, unlike Grian’s old supervisor.
Scar had been quiet the rest of the afternoon though, as soon as Grian told him that he was going out to explore. Grian appreciates the peace.
He pulls a map out of his bag to study it. It’s not the map he was given of his lookout area when he started. No, this one is worn on the edges from countless foldings and unfoldings. It’s not so much a map as it is several maps—it’s several detailed topo maps taped together into a square.
In one map, the Two Forks lookout is circled in red marker. Grian did that a few weeks ago, when he’d learned which lookout he was assigned to. It’s a beacon on the page, his new base of operations for the next few months. And it couldn’t be in a better location.
The rest of the map is marked-up too. There’s highlighter along some trails, penciled in areas of interest, and shaded areas. They’re search areas. It’s not the first time Grian has been here.
He examines the maps, cross referencing his with the topo map he was given as a lookout. The Two Forks domain covers much of the locations that Mumbo’s search did last year, but more. There's still a lot of blank space on the maps, especially in areas that were inaccessible by the trail he was on.
Grian takes a pencil out of his bag and begins to mark up the map once again. It’s something he’s done before, and there’s spots on the map where his eraser has rubbed off part of the ink. He pours over the contours, thinking, this valley has shelter from the wind, or there’s a source of water here.
When he’s finished he stares at the page for a long moment, and then back out at the lake in front of him. The shadows are even longer now. On the other side of the lake, the ground is cast in shadow already, with the sun disappearing early behind a mountain.
Did Mumbo enjoy these views, too? Was he here?
Grian would ask him when he found him.