Sole Survivor

bright rags, threw sheets, threw great billowing sails of fire across the flank of the mountain. The pines were dry from the hot rainless summer, their bark rich with turpentine, and they burst into flame as though they were made of gasoline-soaked rags.
        Ramparts of fire at least three hundred feet across blocked the way back to the cabin. They could not get around the blaze and behind it, because it was spreading laterally faster than they could hike through the underbrush and across the rugged terrain.
        At the same time, the fire was coming toward them. Fast.
        Joe stood with Nina in his arms, riveted and dismayed by the sight of the towering wall of fire, and he realized that they had no choice but to abandon the car. They would have to make the trip out of the mountains entirely on foot.
        With a hot whoosh , roiling gouts of wind-harried flames spewed through the treetops immediately overhead, like a deadly blast from a futuristic plasma weapon. The pine boughs exploded, and burning masses of needles and cones tumbled down through lower branches, igniting everything as they descended, and suddenly Joe and Nina were in a tunnel of fire.
        He hurried with the girl in his arms, away from the cabin, along the narrow deer trail, remembering stories of people caught in California brushfires and unable to outrun them, sometimes not even able to outdrive them when the wind was particularly fierce. Maybe the flames couldn't accelerate through this density of trees as quickly as through dry brush. Or maybe the pines were even more accommodating fuel than mesquite and manzanita and grass.
        Just as they escaped the tunnel of fire, more rippling flags of flames unfurled across the sky overhead, and again the treetops in front of them ignited. Burning needles swarmed down like bright bees, and Joe was afraid his hair would catch fire, Nina's hair, their clothes. The tunnel was growing in length as fast as they could run through it.
        Smoke plagued him now. As the blaze rapidly intensified, it generated winds of its own, adding to the force of the Santa Anas, building toward a firestorm, and the blistering gales first blew tatters of smoke along the deer trail and then choking masses.
        The cloistered path led upward, and though the degree of slope was not great, Joe became more quickly winded than he had expected. Incredible withering heat wrung oceans of sweat from him. Gasping for breath, sucking in the astringent fumes and greasy soot, choking, gagging, spitting out saliva thickened and soured by the flavour of the fire, desperately holding onto Nina, he reached a ridgeline.
        The pistol under his waistband pressed painfully against his stomach as he ran. If he could have let go of Nina with one hand, he would have drawn the weapon and thrown it away. He was afraid that he was too weak to hold onto her with one arm, that he would drop her, so he endured the gouging steel.
        As he crossed the narrow crest and followed the descending trail, he discovered that the wind was less furious on this side of the ridge. Even though the flames surged across the brow, the speed at which the fire line advanced now dropped enough to allow him to get out of the incendiary zone and ahead of the smoke, where the clean air was so sweet that he groaned at the cool, clear taste of it.
        Joe was running on an adrenaline high, far beyond his normal level of endurance, and if not for the bolstering effect of panic, he might have collapsed before he topped the ridge. His leg muscles ached. His arms were turning to lead under the weight of the girl. They were not safe, however, so he kept going, stumbling and weaving, blinking tears of weariness out of his smoke-stung eyes, nevertheless pressing steadily forward-until the snarling coyote slammed into him from behind, biting savagely at the hollow of his back but capturing only folds of his corduroy jacket in its jaws.
        The impact staggered him, eighty or ninety pounds of lupine fury. He almost fell facedown onto the trail, with Nina under him, except that the weight of the coyote, hanging on him, acted as a counterbalance, and he stayed erect.
        The jacket ripped, and the coyote let go, fell away.
        Joe skidded to a halt, put Nina down, spun toward the predator, drawing the pistol from his waistband, thankful that he had not pitched it away earlier.
        Backlighted by the ridgeline fire, the