The Marked Map

Under the beam of the weak flashlight, the grease-pencil marks stand out in thick white loops. Your brother circled three places: the tower, an abandoned pump shed, and an old quarry spur that should not still be passable. In the margin he wrote four words that tighten the back of your neck: Not a fire watch. A transfer point. Another mark, smaller and almost erased, traces a line behind the ranger substation and through the timber cut. He was building a route, cross-checking official maps against what he found on the ground. The circles are not random. They are parts of a system, and the tower is only one piece of it.