Ranger

The paramedic looked at my arm.

Six stitches.

They flew me off the peak with Mark in the back of the helicopter."

A replacement lookout came up two days later to finish out my season.

I didn't go back up to finish it myself.

Mark's real name was not Mark.

I'm not going to tell you what it was.

You can look it up if you want.

He was a 54-year-old man who had been arrested 21 years earlier on a charge that had not led to a conviction because the witness in that case had moved away and stopped responding to subpoenas.

The witness had been a fire lookout in a different state.

She had reported a man harassing her on a peak during her second season.

She had never said exactly what he had done.

She had quit the work after that season and moved somewhere else, and the case had gone cold.

After his arrest at my tower, they searched and found his camp.

It was four miles from my peak, on the north side, in a drainage I'd looked down into maybe a hundred times that summer.

It was a small tarp rigged under a rock overhang.

He had been living there for most of the summer.

He had two changes of clothes, a camp stove, a sleeping bag, a month of dehydrated food, and a notebook.

The notebook, according to the deputy who told me about it, had a lot of information about me in it.

My schedule, my habits, my radio times, the angle I walked when I went down to the spring, the position of the cabin relative to the tower, the hours I kept the tower lamp on at night.