Thunderheads drifted through the summer afternoon, their shadows darkening the ridges of the Pine Forest Range. Peggy sat at the kitchen counter, coffee and a cigarette in front of her. Two four-year-old boys, my son and her grandson, played in the shallow ditch just outside the window, building endless mud pies. I watched while Peggy folded laundry. We talked and talked the hours away, as she broke an egg into a bowl of flour, stirring up a batch of rolls for dinner. She set them on the pilot light to rise and put the laundry away. We had another cup of coffee. Merv was only a little late. It wasn’t near time to get worried. Still, her blue eyes scanned the ridge every few minutes.

Merv snaked the big bay colt down over the rocky, brush-choked trail, through the lightning-blackened pines rimming the cirque’s headwall ridge, slopes masked by mountain mahogany and aspen. The trail had led him from the headquarters west, up a rocky canyon, across a high meadow, a little soggy even this late in summer; and up again, out of the sagebrush and into the pines. He had a pretty good scatter on the cattle: fifty head each in the several basins on the eastern side, fifty head over the ridge. It was a good place to get a horse started, and he was happy with this one.
The glacial lake was dark green at midday, and mossy light brocaded the jumble of granite boulders beneath the surface. Merv stepped off in a grassy place near the icy water and cautiously slipped the hobbles around the colt’s hocks. He stood, and stretched. He walked to the shore through the skiff of long pine needles over fine sand.
Swifts skimmed the wavelets, hunting the afternoon hatch. The wind freshened. The grizzled cowboy breathed, lifting the terrible, old, used-to-be-white hat off his forehead.
A couple of fly fishermen eyed him curiously, a figure out of a Western novel riding into the Twentieth century. The fishing population here had changed since the government had declared this a wilderness. Not many locals chose to hike the jeep trail they’d driven in years past, and these men were from someplace else. One of them came over.
“How’s the fishin’?” Merv inquired politely, fishing his own can of Copenhagen out of a blue shirt pocket. They discussed the merits of angling in the middle of the day, dubious at best, and shot the breeze for a while. The fisherman said he’d better work his way around the backside.
He eyed the bay, half asleep in the warm sun as he passed by. “What’s your horses’s name?”
“Roller.”
Merv did not explain to this man how the horse had earned his name. The colt loved his life, loved his work. He loved to chase cows, and worked up a pretty good sweat doing it. When the saddle came off at the end of the day, he would roll and roll in the pasture, as many as six or seven times.
“Nice horse,” the fisherman commented, walked past, and smacked him on the rump.
Merv’s eyes widened as Roller—still hobbled—came out of his doze with a snort. He took one, then two sideways jumps toward the lake. Merv moved as carefully as he could toward the colt’s head, but Roller was panicked, and too quick. Every yank on those hobbles scared him worse. Next thing Merv knew, Roller had bucked himself, saddle, snaffle bit, hobbles and all, into the icy green water.
Glaciers carve a steep profile, and the water is deep close to shore. The terrified horse lunged, struggling for his life. The hobbles kept the colt’s front hocks close together: handcuffs. Waves surged from his shoulders as he heaved against the weight of the soaked saddle and blankets, the split reins tangling around his feet. Easy enough for him to tip over and drown. Merv could only stand helplessly on the shore, watching, “Goddammit, Roller…” he cursed--or perhaps it was closer to prayer.
The colt’s eyes showed white. He snorted and coughed, kicked and kicked at the hobbles. Finally, somehow, he broke free. Still hauling the heavy blankets, the soaking wet saddle, he lunged through the hidden underwater boulders toward shore. Power doubled, he clawed his way back up through the rocks until with one final desperate heave, he stood, dripping and quivering on the grass.
Merv reached out slowly, took the reins, eased off the cinch and slid the sopping saddle to the ground.
For a while he didn’t say anything. Then, “Well, hell, Roller. Might as well have a little siesta while these blankets dry, and then ease on home.” He looked at the trail leading up the headwall ridge, seeing the trip back across the big meadow, across the far side of the mountain toward home, and sighed. Roller shook his massive shoulders like a dog, and sighed too. He dropped his head to the grass. He was hungry.

The sun had left Peggy’s lawn, and the children played horses on the living room rug. Peggy took one deep breath as she saw Merv and the big bay colt emerge from the shadows of the rocky canyon. She poured out her cold coffee and turned the dough out to punch down into rolls for his dinner.
Merv shook his head as he finished telling his wife the story of his day. “That old Roller. I thought I was gonna lose him, by God. By God, colt’s got some heart to him, don’t he.”

Roller was still alive in 2001—he would have been twenty that year. He worked for Merv on high desert ranches for years, branding running mustangs, chasing cows, until Merv retired. Merv’s son Gary had him for awhile, then passed him to granddaughter Lacey. Last she had heard of him, he was traded to team penners from California.

There were unconfirmed rumors that some of the crew were actually thrown into a bulldozer by the whirlwind. Other unconfirmed rumors circulate about one guy healing up at the Winners Inn Casino in Winnemucca after being treated and released from the local hospital, where locals bought him a few well-deserved cool beverages. Can't say enough about these kids who risk their lives for us every day during fire season. Buy 'em a drink if you have a chance.

Tuesday morning, August 3, hot and quiet, heavy summer.

It is breathless, sultry at ranch headquarters. Time holds its breath, waiting for something.

At 2:30 pm, lightning strikes near the road to our summer sheep camp and at Deep Creek, high on the ridge.

The fire is a wicked red smile at the base of the half-circle of volcanic hills we call the Horseshoe. The Denio fire truck is there when we arrive. Someone calls the BLM. “We can't tell you not to fight it, the dispatch lady says, “but we have no resources available right now.” There have been thirty-two lightning strikes right around town.

We're on our own.
The fire swirls a small circle in a fickle wind, only a few acres across. It moves east toward the canyon, then north. Denio Dan takes the fire truck, loads up cowboys and shovels, and drives to the other end of the fire; it is still several hundred yards north of the road, and burning parallel to it in basalt boulders and sagebrush. Hard to get to in the little truck. Not big, not yet.

The road’s ungraded shoulders are full of dry weeds, but the firetruck wets them down. It will probably stop the flames. The wind changes again, the fire backing south and west. Smoke rolls dirty, opaque.
We move the vehicles. Sam and I find a pipe wrench and drive to the windmill a quarter mile away downwind. We lift the heavy iron pipe and force it, the metal shrieking, into the rusty connection that will bring water to the two big round troughs. The fire truck only holds 250 gallons of water. It can refill here.

The sheep camp road turns south below the windmill and runs for several miles before turning west at the hot springs and connecting to the highway that divides our valley. Pickups gather below the windmill, their drivers watching. Curious humans, fascinated by fire. A stinkbug crawls across the gravel. I watch him for a minute, then pick him up and toss him into the back of the truck. Cows and calves gather in the corner of the crested wheat field, nervous at the smell of smoke.

The fire eats a fencepost, crosses into the seeding, into the main chute of the valley. Here, convection currents make invisible ferris wheels, cycling hot summer air high up into the atmosphere, bringing cool air down; dust devils dance along the meeting line of the convection cells. On any late summer afternoon, this valley is a wind furnace. Tim has decided to open the gates, just in case. He bumps off west across the field.

We watch, mesmerized: in the wind tunnel of valley air circulation, the fire grows, in a moment, into a flame-cored whirlwind sixty feet tall. It sucks the smaller flames into itself, black smoke towering and turning in a slower column around it. It is a live thing, beautiful, terrible.
Antonio leans on his shovel at the bend in the road, one elbow on the old wooden sign that points the way to Lovely Valley. He is silhouetted by smoke--and then suddenly, by flame. The whirlwind roars, blowing the heat south. The tongue of fire that has run west across the fenceline into the seeding turns, full on us.

The pickups easily outdistance the flames, but the big vehicles, the water truck and the grader, are slower. I drive south with my thirteen-year-old niece, Magen. She has come with her dad, now piloting the water truck. The red whirlwind paces us, cutting southwest across the flat. This is when I get nervous, and I tromp the accelerator of the quirky old truck that doesn't always start, and sometime dies on you. It will be good to be out of the way of this thing, I think.

Jackrabbits dash back and forth in front of us. The dust is bad; we roll the windows up. The sky darkens. We cannot see the sun.

The gravel road turns west across the fire's path to reach the highway. We beat the fire there, but not by much, and turn north. It is then I see the cattle, close to the highway, running before a wall of flame, coming fast. We drive, against the wind. Two small parcels of land where horse people have moved in crouch in the fire's path: doublewides, new barns, corrals, trucks. One man is driving out with his horses loaded, two vans following, full of stuff.

We pass a woman on a three-wheeler with a shovel, looking at us over her shoulder. A man with a little Bobcat loader is making tiny circles around the power poles in the path of the wall of fire. Several carloads of tourists, looking startled. Cows and calves, running down the shoulder of the road, all backed by the red tower of smoke and flame. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. We are all displaced; the rules are all different inside a twister.

When it seems like we are behind the fireline, I pull over to the shoulder of the highway. As soon as I stop, Tim's brother Hank is at the door, grabbing the radio.
"Antonio, Antonio," he shouts into the mike.
"Antonio, did you get through?" No answer.
"Antonio, where is Dan?"

Nothing. Black smoke has rolled across the road. Some of the vehicles in the racing caravan must have turned the other way. We can't see them, and the fire has jumped the highway. It has split into four fires, burning in all directions, unstoppable, it seems, until the wind dies.

The waving grass
conceals his journey
across the field as he changes water,
A tiny figure
Wading to his shoulders in meadow hay,
A ripple sliding
Across all things standing still.

He surfaces,
The flash of his shovel blade
Like a fish jumping in a green sea.

Sam (on the right) sliding down 250 feet of rope, this time into a mountain meadow, but maybe next time into a blazing forest.

When you look back on the paths your children have chosen, sometimes you can see how they got where they are. There was a day in 1993 that Sam rode with the US Fish and Wildlife Helicopter pilot when they gathered wild horses from the Sheldon Refuge, and another few days in 1999 when our world seemed that it would be consumed by fire...

...and I wonder, as these firefighter kids watch their dads walk back across this beautiful Garden Valley meadow, where they'll be in twenty years.

Water still standing in the Gorilla Fields in June makes the grass grow tall. Little frogs are everywhere, and baby birds forage the puddles with their parents. There is a family of them hiding in these reeds, but I wasn't quick enough to catch them on camera. This is haying time: the alfalfa fields are cut first, then the meadow hay. It'll be mid-July before the hay crew can risk cutting this field. CKD photos

For an explanation of how the Gorilla Fields got their name, check out Fifty Miles From Home: Riding the Long Circle on a Nevada Family RanchUniversitiy of Nevada Press, 2002.

We watch the otters catch their lunch in the afternoon. All learning is experiential.

The children have studied rocks all through the month of May and now it's time to show them some. We pile them into Suburbans on the last weekend of the school year and drive to Bend, Oregon, or several days, to visit some real live volcanoes. We are twenty-one students and nine adults, and our first stop is a hike through a real lava tube at Newberry Crater National Volcanic Monument.

We are, of course, looking for bats.

In preparation for our end-of-the-year school field trip, Denio School gathers at Quinn River Ranch on Friday morning June 2nd to receive words of wisdom from Stephanie Leslie and her assistant Chelsea in the biology of our population of small mammals, reptiles, bats, birds, and what-have-you. The Bat Girls, as we have begun calling them, are University of Nevada-Reno graduate students recreating a biological survey done in 1909 in this area. They've earned their nickname because of their nocturnal habit of lurking by our gravel pit, trying to net bats as they come in for water.

Stephanie shows us the proper way to capture a mouse. CKD phto

The children tie wishes to helium-filled balloons after the program and try to figure out which way the wind will carry them. CKD photo.

The community gathers under low clouds for a post-graduation barbecue of carne asada and grilled chicken. The rain holds off, and it's 9:30 pm before they are all ready to go home.

They leave before the crack of dawn. I drive up later, just at sunrise, with the breakfast fixings: big folding table, seven dozen eggs, bacon, sausage, chorizo that Linda has cooked already at the house; red wine, salami, yellow cheeses, French bread. There are fifteen pounds of parboiled potatoes to be sauteed in the giant paella pan with the sweet red peppers in the shelter of the sheepwagon. There are at least twenty-five of them this year, Linda says, and quite a crop of trainees--shall we say sheep-handler interns??--Basque guys from town who are brining their sons to see how it was done years ago, how it's still done today, twice a year in the chilly mornings of spring time.

Julia does her part. CKD photo

It rained steadily last night, but there's a breeze and the sunshine loosens everyone up. They devour the mountains of food we prepare, and more that they have brought, cookies and doughnuts and coffee. The sun warms their stiff arms and hands as they relax after this day's hard work, over by noon.

Ryan Dufurrena and Don Jones enjoy a break in the action. CKD photo.

I see the first antelope twins of the summer on the way back.