When she ran from the house, she approached Lucky who sat patiently beside Shiloh.  The dog whined nervously and the horse whinnied.  Shiloh’s eyes were wide in fear, his nostrils flared.  The smell of smoke was summoning an instinctive urge in the horse to break and run, to escape.

Doni put her foot into the stirrup and pulled herself up into the saddle while Shiloh nervously danced in a circle, pawing eagerly at the ground.  Once in the saddle, she placed her arms through the straps of the backpack and hefted it up onto her back before spurring the anxious horse into action.

Shiloh quickly followed her command and carried her through the dense smoke that clung to the ground now.  Doni headed the horse toward the familiar path that led to the crags with Ginger following closely behind and Lucky taking up at the rear.

The air was so thick with smoke that it caused Doni’s eyes to smart and further stung her throat and nostrils. She wasn’t able to see the flames, but she could hear them crackling and advancing nearer.  The heat was becoming intense as firebrands of flaming debris dropped to the ground all around them, inciting a stabbing sense of panic.  The airborne flaming debris indicated that the fire might have already crowned and was traveling high in the trees’ canopy above them.

Shiloh stumbled along the path that was becoming more obscured; the impenetrable smoke nearly impossible to see through.  The roar of the flames was deafening.  Angry, red-orange tongues became visible over a slight rise down the hillside from behind them when Doni took a fleeting glance back over her shoulder.  Flames were licking up through the black plumes of heavy smoke.  The firebrands raining down were being driven by high velocity, erratic swirls of wind.

As Shiloh labored along the path, Doni removed the backpack and withdrew the protective Nomex tarp from the outer pocket.  While she unfolded it, the fire-generated wind attempted to snatch the feather-light fabric from her.  She managed to hang onto the tarp and she spread it over her head and shoulders, just as a scorching wave of heat hit her from the side with such force that it took her breath away.  The noise around her rose in a crescendo of sounds like a freight train, and her mind reeled.  They appeared to be in the middle of a firestorm creating its own wind.  She knew the flames would be moving at break-neck speeds; she was now smack dab in the mouth of the proverbial holocaust often described as the dragon.

The air was so thick with smoke that Doni had to hang her head near to the stirrup in order to see the path as she coaxed Shiloh forward.  If they could make it to the creek she felt they might have a chance.  She prayed Ginger and Lucky would be able to follow.  The heat was so intense that it singed the hair flailing across her face despite the fire retardant tarp.  They were in imminent danger of being swallowed by the inferno rushing up toward them as though a locomotive from below, gathering strength as it came.

Through the veil of thickening, black smoke, Doni caught a glimpse of the stream immediately ahead where the path meandered along its bank.  She knew that just a few hundred feet farther up the path was an overhang, a steep ledge, where the creek cascaded over a precipice from above.  If they could make it to that point, the cascade of water was high enough to crowd Shiloh beneath the stream that would shelter them both from the flames and the intense heat.

“If we can make it that far,” Doni silently chanted, gasping for a breath, “If we can make it that far!”

Chunks of flaming twigs and bark the size of a man’s fist rained down and she frantically slapped away those that landed on the horse’s hide and the exposed legs of her jeans.  The erratic wind tugged at the tarp, but she clung to it with a vise-like, white-knuckled grip.  Her lips were becoming parched, cracked, and grossly swollen from the intense heat.  She could feel her eyelids becoming puffy as well, producing thin slits and making her vision more difficult.  When she brushed her hand across her eyes, she could feel the stubble of her lashes protruding like small, sharp, pebbles; singed into tight, little nubs against her swollen lids.  She knew the fire’s front was approaching when the sounds of a locomotive became louder.  That sound assured her that she was still facing the devouring breath of the beast.

Shiloh’s breathing was coming in heavy, heaving gasps now, as was Doni’s.  The horse continued to inch forward up the path, seeming to sense where she needed him to go.  The dense smoke clogged her lungs and caused her to cough uncontrollably in painful spasms now.  She could feel the cinch of the saddle tighten with each of Shiloh’s inhalations as he tried to pull in more air, and then he exhaled loudly, coughing deeply, his head held near the path.

Suddenly the waterfall miraculously came into view through the thick veil of smoke and Doni coaxed Shiloh down the embankment and into the creek, where the horse waded through the now warm stream toward the cascade of water.  Burning debris rained into the water all around them with flaming limbs and twigs sizzling and hissing like angry snakes. 

Once they reached the waterfall, Doni dismounted and was taken aback by the painful knotting of her muscles.  She hadn’t realized she’d been standing tensely in the stirrups, cramping the muscles of her legs.  Sloshing through the water that felt uncharacteristically tepid, she led the horse under the cascading stream, crowding him against the rock face so that the water flowed over him, drenching his entire body as well as the saddle.  She crowded beneath the ledge of cascading water beside the horse as well, just as Lucky suddenly appearing at her side.  At first she didn’t see Ginger, but soon the horse appeared through the thick blanket of smoke like an apparition, standing in the water near the trio.  With Doni coaxing her closer, the horse finally managed to stand near enough to the waterfall to receive splashes of the cascade from above.

As the sounds of the fire became deafening, Doni knew its front was no longer approaching; it was overhead and crowning above them.  The air suddenly became depleted of oxygen as hurricane force winds sucked it away, drawing it greedily into the roar of flames high up in the treetops, feeding the dragon.

The inferno above them ripped the breath from her body, and with lungs feeling as though they would explode, she gasped for air in rasping, rattling, rales.  When she became dizzy, she threw the backpack into the stream in front of her and quickly removed a hand towel kept in the emergency pack.  She dampened it and placed it over her mouth, praying she wouldn’t suffocate before the conflagration passed over.  She was becoming increasingly light headed and weak.  She fell to her knees in the rocks and shallow water of the stream, gasping for air as the flaming world appeared to spin around her like a whirling dervish.

“God help me,” she prayed, “Please, God, don’t let us die out here, not like this.”

The sounds of the inferno became faint, and then fainter still.  Doni felt as though sinking into a dense, dark chasm, as though she was sinking deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth through the bottom of the creek.  With a sense of falling, spinning, whirling, she closed her eyes and an intense feeling of peacefulness came over her, a strange sense of calm, almost euphoric.

“So this is how it feels to die,” she thought, her brain giving way to unconsciousness in an oxygen-deprived state.  Even the pain of her struggling lungs seemed to dull and fade as she sank into the lightless chasm, the vacuum she assumed was death.

Doni wasn’t aware of how long she lay in the stream after the fire passed overhead before she opened her swollen eyes to total darkness.  Her head rested on a cluster of rocks and there was the definite feeling of something lying over her face.  In a state of confusion at first, she lay listening to the sounds of the waterfall.  There was a sensation of coolness around her feet.

When Doni moved her hand it felt stiff and painful.  She immediately became aware of a sandpaper roughness stroking her opposite hand that brought her attention to a sliver of light that sneaked beneath the Nomex tarp that covered her.

The rocks of the stream bit painfully into her back and right hip as she attempted to move from the position she’d fallen.  It was then that the cobwebs cleared from her mind and she realized where she was and what had taken place.

She struggled to sit up and gripped the edge of the tarp, jerking it from over her.  The air was no longer intensely hot, even though there were dog-hair stands of burning trees all around her.  The smoke was thinner as well.

Doni pulled a deep breath into her parched lungs.  The hand Lucky stroked with her tongue was swollen, and the hair was singed from her fingers that appeared as though pudgy, fat, sausages.

Lucky’s fur was singed; she was barely recognizable as the dog Doni knew.  The dog licked her hand again and the singed, matted fur of the dog’s tail wagged as she realized her mistress was still with her.

Follow the members of a community In The Path of the Dragon as they recover from the devastation of a wildfire, uncovering the devious purpose of the destruction, and surprisingly who was at the root of it.