He is a mixed-blood from a tribe farther north where he knew an old woman who was able to stop fires. He had forgotten about her, but now she comes to mind and he calls home and has them fly her in. He picks her up at the airport and drives the distance to Dark River. She arrives in town and eats a hamburger and then he takes her to the fire and she says, after she looks over the situation, slowly, “Okay now, you go away,” and he does as he is told, though he is afraid to leave her alone. But all the while he waits, he remembers the Hawaiian queen who stopped the volcano. First, they had to take her to Hilo and put her up in the most expensive hotel, then feed her the finest of meals. Then she instructed the needy people to bring her bed and some other furniture along, including her special pillow, filled with the softest bird down. Well fed, happy, not in a hurry, she had them place her bed in the path of the volcano and sure enough the lava ended right where she slept.

And so this old woman from the north, not having such a bed, lays her large body down on the ground in the direction fire is traveling and she begins singing and talking to the fire and the fire dies out just before reaching her withered old body, so like an ancient tree itself. But no one knows anything about how the fire ended, just that it must have run its course. Dick Russell and the woman celebrate that evening with halibut chips in the local tavern and she is nearly toothless, too, but still wants corn on the cob. Then she wants to see her relatives at the old white houses and, because of the drought, Randall drives his dune buggy across the bay to the old people, who laugh when they see the Fire Extinguisher, as they call her.

“So, it was you. We were getting so worried.”

The sheriff found what the boys left behind, Ruth’s wallet, proof of her tribal identification, driver’s license, some cash, insurance card, boat license, and other information.

A few weeks later a rainbow curves overhead. The people who have remained go out to look at it. Clouds float over, but they are thin and high, with no rain.

“Aye,” says Wilma. “It must be raining high up. It’s a shame it passed us over. Oh, we need it. Come down, cloud. Come to us. Our plants are dried yellow. Our houses are ugly and dusty. Our fish are gone. Our cousins and friends have gone away.”

That afternoon a stranger comes to town. He rents a room at the Midtown Motel, where the yellowed ceiling had already started to leak even before he arrived. “You gotta see this,” Al, the owner of the motel, said to his wife Thelma the previous Thursday. He had examined the ceiling, the roof, and the plumbing. There wasn’t any possible place to leak. “Damn. It’s supernatural,” he said to her.