They give you a book before they give you the keys. Weather at the top of every watch, smoke by bearing and distance, any person who climbs the seventy-four steps to say hello — and there are none, which is the whole point of the Vantage. It stands alone on the bald head of the ridge, above the last of the trees, and from its catwalk you can see forty miles of forest in every direction. My job is to look at all of it, all day, and write down the one thing that should not be there. I took the season because I wanted to be somewhere nothing could reach me. I want that written down, near the front, in my own hand, before anything else is.
The book is the tower's, not mine. It goes back lookouts and lookouts. I have been reading the old hands to learn the shorthand, and they are good company — dry, funny, worn smooth by the same long empty hours I am learning now. I will try to keep it as plainly as they did.
Dusk is the hour the ridge earns its name. The light goes long and low and every trunk throws a mile of shadow, and for a few minutes the forty miles of forest look like one dark animal breathing. I have started to love it, which I did not expect. Tonight I was sweeping the north treeline with the glasses, out of habit more than duty — there is no smoke at dusk in a wet June — and there was a person standing in the trees.
Not at the edge. Back in, among the trunks, where the dark starts. Tall. Pale at the top, the way a face is pale. Standing the way you stand when you have been standing a long time and mean to stand longer.
I lowered the glasses to find the bearing plate — you fix the bearing before anything, it is the first thing they teach you — and when I raised them again it was farther along the line. Not walking. I did not see it walk. It was simply at a new trunk, the way the moon is at a new window when you have looked away and back. I told myself: a hiker, the light, tired eyes at the end of a long watch. I wrote nothing in the smoke column, because it was not smoke, and there is no column in this book for a standing man.
Clear dawn. Nothing in the trees but trees. I walked the full catwalk twice with the glasses and made myself name it fatigue, and the naming held right up until I came back inside and found, in the old hand, near the end of the book, a single line in the margin of an ordinary weather entry. No date beside it. Pressed hard enough to score the page.
Don't stop looking at it. That's the whole of it. Don't stop.
I have read a hundred pages of that hand by now. It logs hail like a shrug. It does not write like that about anything. I am leaving the glasses on the north sill tonight.