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drapes along one wall and rolls of different-colored paper that could be lowered to make backgrounds for portraits.
    The place belonged to a photographer called Trudy Barratt who worked mostly for The Missoulian , the local newspaper. She and Connor had met two summers ago when the paper used some of his forest fire pictures and they’d started an affair that lasted the rest of the summer. It faded in the fall when he went back over the mountains, as he always did, to spend the winter on the ranch. But the two of them had remained friends. Trudy had helped get him commissions and given him a key to the studio so that he could use it whenever he liked.
    Connor let himself in and switched on the lights. The air was hot and dank and smelled of chemicals and he left the door open until he’d gotten the air-conditioning going. He took down a set of wedding prints that Trudy had hung up to dry and laid them carefully on the worktop. There was one among them that Connor knew was destined for what she called her ‘whoops album’: pictures her clients wouldn’t want to see. In this one the bridegroom was kissing one of the bridesmaids in a way that didn’t seem to impress the bride one little bit. It was an image that might prove useful come the divorce.
    When everything was ready, Connor shut the door, turned out the main lights and took the two rolls of film from his pocket. He worked carefully, taking his time. He had always enjoyed this part of photography. The womblike intimacy, the aloneness, the ghostly red of the safe light that somehow suspended time.
    He had taken pictures ever since he was a child. His father had given him a used Pentax SLR for his ninth birthday and later helped him rig up a darkroom in a corner of the barn. In those days Connor liked to take pictures of animals and when he was twelve, one he’d taken of a black bear standing on its hind legs in the creek won a competition in a wildlife magazine. In his late teens and early twenties he made a few dollars here and there selling skiing and climbing pictures to one or two magazines who liked his work. But it was smoke jumping that gave him his first big break.
    It had happened three years ago, his and Ed’s rookie season and as fine a baptism as any jumper ever had. It turned into one of the driest summers on record and forest fires became big news all over the country, especially the ones sweeping through Yellowstone Park. Connor always took a camera with him - nothing special, just a cheap pocket snapper. And one day, almost by accident, he took this breathtaking picture of Ed, alone on a ridge, swinging his pulaski, silhouetted against a wall of flames that must have been two hundred feet tall.
    Trudy Barratt put him in touch with a photo agency in New York and the picture was printed on the front page of The New York Times and in newspapers and magazines all over the world. It earned Connor more money than he’d ever seen and with it he paid off all the debts that had accumulated on the ranch and still had enough to buy himself some new cameras and lenses. The Missoulian ran a feature piece about his success with a picture of him looking absurdly glamorous in his smoke jumping gear, which earned him much ribbing from every other jumper on the base. He even got a couple of fan letters which made Ed jealous as hell. Back in Boston that fall, Ed had the Yellowstone photograph of his silhouette blown up five feet wide and hung it on his wall. He claimed it worked wonders for his love life.
    The two of them had met some years earlier when Ed was a freshman at the university in Missoula and Connor was wondering if he was going to be a ranch hand all his life. Every summer, throughout the West, the Forest Service took on casual ‘pounders’ to fight backcountry fires. Pounding was a lot less glamorous than smoke jumping but you had to do it for several seasons before you could even apply to be a jumper. It wasn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect