Something is leaving fires on the mountain.

Small ones. Careful ones. Cedar bark burning in deliberate circles at the mountain’s most storied spots, gone cold before anyone arrives. No damage. No witnesses. No explanation that makes sense in the modern world — only one that makes sense in a much older one.

Leo, Duck Creek Village’s self-appointed social media chronicler, and Cody Westbrook, Cornell ornithologist and reluctant mountain resident, find themselves drawn into a trail that follows the Southern Paiute legend of Coyote’s theft of fire — a story in which cedar bark carries an ember across this exact landscape, passed from hand to hand, through rain and pursuit, to a sheltered grove where the last coal is saved from going out forever.

The trail is real. The sites are deliberate. And someone calling themselves @Jackrabbit is watching Leo’s posts about it, leaving comments that suggest they know things that aren’t in any book.

But Cedar Mountain has a second mystery running alongside the first — one that has nothing to do with ancient stories and everything to do with the crew of the Cedar Mountain Service District, whose emergency supply caches have been going quietly missing. Someone has been treating the district’s critical equipment as a personal supply depot, and the captain wants answers before the next fire call finds a cache that isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

Leo and Cody will solve the mundane mystery. The other one — the fire trail, the cedar grove, the ember that keeps being saved — that one belongs to the mountain.

All proceeds from the sale of this book benefit the Cedar Mountain Service District.