The Magician's Confession

Wren says she is forty-four years old, out loud, on the drive up, because Tobias has asked her twice to stop calling herself "an aging woman with a laptop." She is forty-four, he is forty-six, they have been together five years, and she still does this thing where she talks about herself like she is describing somebody's aunt. So! New rule, established somewhere around mile marker nine on the gravel switchbacks: she is forty-four and she is allowed to say it without flinching.

Does she flinch anyway? A little. But she says it, and Tobias whoops like she has won a raffle, and that is how they arrive at Firewatch Tower 47 in a good mood.

The tower sits on the shoulder of Mount Marek, which is a real live volcano, an actual volcano with a magma chamber and everything, and Wren finds this endlessly funny because nobody warned them it would feel like this. The floor hums. Not loudly, not all the time, but every few minutes there comes this low roll up through the wooden planks, like the mountain clearing its throat, and every single time Wren looks up to see if Tobias felt it too.

"Did you feel that?" she asks, for maybe the eleventh time since they parked.

"I felt it," he says, hauling a duffel bag up the last of the stairs. "I have felt it eleven times. It is a volcano, Wren. That is the whole job of a volcano."

The tower is two rooms, and "two rooms" is generous. There is a main room with a telescope bolted to a mount by the big window, a cot against one wall, a little propane stove, and shelves and shelves of volcanic rock samples that some long-ago ranger labeled in careful block letters. BASALT. OBSIDIAN. SCORIA, LIGHTWEIGHT, DO NOT DROP. Wren loves it immediately and completely. It smells like wood oil and cold stone and, faintly, like sulfur, which she decides is romantic rather than alarming.

(Does she actually think sulfur is romantic? No. But she is a writer, and writers lie to themselves for material all the time.)

They unpack the way they always unpack, which is badly. Tobias claims the cot for the gear bags and then unloads them onto the single chair, so now nothing has a place and everything is on the floor, and Wren stands in the middle of it with her hands on her hips like a foreman on a bad construction site.

"You brought three decks of cards," she says. "For a two-person fire watch."

"A magician does not travel light," Tobias says. He is a professional magician, has been since his thirties, and before that he was a hobbyist with a thumb scar from a trick gone wrong, and he talks about card decks the way other men talk about fishing tackle. "A magician travels prepared. What if someone visits?"

"Who is visiting a fire tower on an active volcano?"

"You came here. Somebody had to."

Fair point. She lets him have it. She sets the food box on the counter and starts putting the perishables next to the little window, because the window ledge is cold and the cold ledge is basically a refrigerator, and she is very pleased with herself for thinking of it. Five years together and she still wants to show him these small clever things, wants him to say oh nice, wants the little nod. He gives her the nod. It works every time and she knows it works every time and she does not care.

Outside, the light is doing that late-afternoon Cascade thing, long gold stripes down the slope, the forest below going blue at the edges. The volcano rumbles again, a little longer this time, and the rock samples on the shelves rattle faintly like dice in a cup.

"Okay, that one was bigger," Wren admits.

"That one was bigger," Tobias agrees, and comes to stand beside her at the window, and for a while they just watch the mountain breathe. His arm goes around her shoulders. She leans in. It is the kind of easy quiet they have gotten good at, the kind she could not have imagined at thirty-nine, standing alone at a party near the snack table, before a man with a deck of cards asked if she wanted to see one trick, just one, and she said yes to a trick and somehow ended up saying yes to everything else.

The satellite phone crackles at six.

Now, Wren has never used a satellite phone before, and the thing sounds like a robot with a head cold, and the first sentence comes through so broken she only catches the words "dog" and "gone" and "Oh God!" She holds it out to Tobias like it is a hot pan, and he takes it with the calm of a man who has performed in front of drunk casino crowds and cannot be rattled by bad audio.

"This is Tobias, go ahead."

"Tobias! Oh thank God somebody's up there!" The voice is Nadia, the observatory caretaker, sixty-something and brisk, the woman who showed them the water pump that morning and told them three volcano jokes in a row and laughed hardest at her own. She does not sound like a woman with volcano jokes in her now. She sounds wrecked. "Nutmeg. My dog. The tremor spooked her, she bolted, she went right up the slope. I saw her go, she was heading for the talus field, and I can't, I'm on the monitors, I can't leave the station unattended, there's protocol, and..."

"Okay. Okay, Nadia, breathe. She went up which side?"

"The east flank, the scree below the old flow. She's golden, she's thirteen, she's slow but she's determined, and she is so stupid about thunder, any shaking and she just runs." A breath, wobbly. "I would never ask, you're volunteers, you came to watch for smoke, not to..."

"We'll look," Tobias says. "Of course we'll look."

"Wait, we will?" Wren says, not into the phone, just to the room, and Tobias covers the mouthpiece and gives her a look that says yes, obviously, and she sighs and says, "Yes, sorry, yes, of course we will," because they will. A thirteen-year-old golden retriever is loose on a volcano. What kind of people would they be?

Nadia's voice comes back steadier. "There's a pack with a GPS tracker in the mudroom closet at the tower, red one, I left it there for exactly this. Her collar pairs with it. The slope's mostly stable on that flank but stay off the black rock, the fresh flow, that ground is hot underneath and it looks exactly like the safe stuff. And thank you. Thank you both."

"We'll call when we find her," Tobias says, and hangs up before she can thank them a third time.

Wren has already got her boots back on, which surprises her a little, since ten minutes ago she was admiring the view and thinking about dinner. But her feet decided something on their own. She digs the red pack out of the mudroom closet, shakes it, finds the tracker unit inside, and turns it on. It beeps, thinks for a long moment, and then shows a small blinking dot about a mile and a half up the east flank and, worryingly, still moving.

"She's still going," Wren says. "Why is she still going? Thirteen-year-old dogs should be napping."

"Because she's terrified and uphill is what her legs know how to do," Tobias says. He swaps his sneakers for boots, grabs water bottles, a flashlight, the emergency blanket from the kit, and last, absurdly, one deck of cards, and Wren opens her mouth to ask and then closes it, because she has learned that when Tobias packs a weird item there is usually a reason that becomes clear later, and being smug about it later is one of her favorite hobbies.

The evening air has a bite to it when they step out onto the catwalk. Below, the observatory buildings sit in their little cluster, lights just coming on, and beyond them the east flank rises, dark rock scattered with pale scree, all of it rumbling gently every few minutes as a sleeping animal that is not quite asleep.

"One more thing," Wren says, shrugging into the pack. "If we find this dog, you're doing the talking to Nadia, because I will cry, and I refuse to cry in front of a woman who tells volcano jokes."

"Deal," Tobias says. "But Wren?"

"What?"

He points up the slope, to where the last light is catching something small and gold and moving, quick and stubborn, higher and higher.

"There," he says. "She's there. Let's go get her."

They split up at the base of the talus field, because it just makes sense. The scree fans out wide up there, and two people walking side by side would cover half the ground. Tobias takes the low line along the old flow, and Wren takes the higher traverse, the one with the loose rock and the view, and they agree to yell every couple of minutes so nobody gets lost on a volcano, which is a sentence Wren never expected to say out loud in her life.

"NEGMARISOL!" Tobias bellows, which is not the dog's name at all, it is some panicked blend of Nutmeg and Nadia, and Wren laughs so hard she nearly sits down in the scree.

"Her name is NUTMEG!" she shouts back down the slope.

"I KNOW! IT'S THE ADRENALINE!"

So that is how the next forty minutes go. Two adults, forty-four and forty-six years old, yelling a dog's name up the side of an active volcano while the ground rumbles under them every few minutes like it is clearing its throat. The rumbles are gentle, more felt than heard, but every single one of them lands in Wren's chest and stays there a second too long.

The tracker helps. She checks it every couple hundred yards, watching the little dot creep upward, and the dot is maddening, because Nutmeg is not running anymore, she is drifting, stopping, drifting again, which means the poor thing is exhausted and scared and completely without a plan. Wren talks to her the whole time, out loud, the way she does.

"Nutmeg. Nutmeg, honey, you dumb sweet girl, your mother is worried sick and I am not carrying you down this hill, do you hear me? I will do it but I will complain the entire time."

And then she hears it. A whine. Faint, wind-shredded, coming from her left, from a fold in the slope she would have walked right past. She scrambles over, careful with her footing, and there, tucked into a shallow bowl of rock beside a fumarole, is Nutmeg. The fumarole is venting a thin ribbon of steam, which honestly explains everything, because the ground there is warm and the dog has found the one heated bed on the entire mountain. She is crouched low, ears flat, gray-muzzled face peeking out from under her own body, and when she sees Wren she lets out a whine that just breaks a person's heart in half.

"Hi, baby. Hi, oh my God, hi." Wren drops to her knees, keeping her voice low and silly the way you do with frightened dogs. "There you are. What a adventure you're having, huh? What a weekend for you."

Nutmeg does not come. Of course she does not come. She is thirteen, she is terrified, and she has decided this warm rock bowl is the safest place in the world. So Wren digs into her jacket pocket and finds, blessedly, the piece of jerky she shoved in there that morning at the observatory, back when Nadia pressed a bag of homemade jerky on them and said hikers never turn down jerky. Nadia, Wren decides on the spot, is a prophet.

She breaks off a corner, tosses it, waits. Nutmeg creeps forward, snatches it, retreats. Another corner. Another creep. Wren keeps talking the whole time, this low running patter of nonsense, good girl, sweet girl, your mom told volcano jokes, what is that even about, and slowly, corner by corner, the distance shrinks. On the fourth piece Wren holds it flat on her palm, and Nutmeg takes it gentle as anything, and then Wren has a fistful of collar and a face full of dog, because Nutmeg collapses against her like the whole ordeal is over and Wren is officially furniture now.

"I've got her." Wren yells down the slope. "TOBIAS! I'VE GOT HER!"

"IS SHE OKAY?"

"SHE'S FAT AND WARM AND RUDE!"

She is lying, sort of. Nutmeg is thin under the fluff and her paws are torn up a little from the scree, and Wren's hands are shaking so badly she can barely clip the lead to the collar. That is the part she notices, actually, kneeling there in the steam with a golden retriever leaning on her thigh. Her hands will not stop. She tells herself it is the climb, the adrenaline, the near-miss feeling of a lost dog almost being a dead dog. But it is not only that, and she knows it is not only that, and she files the knowing away in the drawer where she keeps things she does not say.

The walk down is slow. Nutmeg is stiff and proud and wants to lead, then wants to be carried, then wants to lead again, and Wren compromises by letting her lead at a geriatric pace. Tobias meets them at the bottom of the talus field, and the look on his face, the actual relief on it, makes Wren's throat go tight.

"There she is," he says, crouching, and Nutmeg immediately abandons Wren for him, because dogs are honest about these things. He checks her paws, gives her water from a bottle he pours