The Wildfire Season Page 12

  The sow runs.

  As she runs now. She thinks of the hunters that killed her mate as she urges her cubs up the same slope she ran across two seasons ago. The sow doesn’t remember the details of the bearded man’s face. But she remembers the woman, her long hair swishing over her back like a tail. She didn’t see either of them this morning. But a sense that is neither sight nor smell tells her that the same two are among these hunters nevertheless.

  She will move the cubs along steadily, stay high. The sow grunts in quiet hiccups that set the pace as they traverse what she remembers more and more as a killing ground. There is no doubt that these are the same trees, the same out-of-nowhere meadows she had crossed with her mate, running as hard as she could with the cubs sloshing inside her, their tracks a clear map in the rain-softened earth.

  Unlike then, the soil they pound over now is relatively hard. And this time she knows who hunts them.

  In Miles’s experience, fire watchers come in one of two versions: the ones attracted to the job because they are unhinged, and the ones who become unhinged on account of the job. Ruby Ritter, the watcher at the Mount Locken Tower for the past three seasons, is likely both. It’s why Miles likes her as much as he does.

  ‘Pushing forty’ is all she’ll say whenever he asks her age, but he suspects she’s been pushing against the same birthday for the last five or so. A bouquet of red pipecleaners atop her head, her skin freckled like a banana left too long in the sun. Divorced. She had never admitted this directly to Miles, but it was obvious all the same. The vague, historical references to a shared domestic life, the rolled eyes to introduce anecdotes started with ‘There was a man I knew once…’ And she wrote. For as long as he knew her, Ruby was adding single-spaced sheet after sheet to a pile high enough to have required the decimation of half the forest she could see from her tower. It was the absurd arrogance of the writer in Ruby, the mad-scientist-like certainty that her bold experiment would change everything that made her obnoxious, comic and pitiable in equal turns. Any thoughts that Miles sometimes had about writing down his experiences in order to help sort them out were swept away by a single afternoon’s visit with Ruby, and for that he was appreciative.

  Miles climbs the tower’s ladder, and when he pokes through her floor, Ruby is ready with a cup of coffee so strong it brings a syrup to his eyes.

  ‘No way you’re napping on the job drinking this stuff,’ Miles says, standing above Ruby, who sits straight in her chair. He can’t help feeling like a barber readying himself to hack through her curls.

  ‘Nothing gets by me.’

  ‘The boys are itching for something to work on, but it sounds like you’ve got nothing to help us out.’

  ‘I sees ‘em, I don’t starts ‘em. But I could always send you guys out ghostchasing if you wanted.’

  ‘Standing around in a fog patch won’t get us overtime either. Though I thank you for the offer.’

  She hasn’t seen another human being in at least two weeks, and he hasn’t been here longer than three minutes, and already Ruby is distracted, her eyes pulled to the accidental shrine she has set up for her magnum-opus-in-progress. Pencil stubs, highlighters, torn bits of jotted notes all guarding the monolithic slab on the table, noticeably higher than when Miles was here at the beginning of the season. He looks at the yellow tongues of Post-it notes sticking out of it like a series of staircases moving through the text, and hopes that, for her own good, this will be Ruby’s last year on the job. That’s her brain over there, he thinks. That’s Ruby’s brain and it needs to get out more often.

  ‘How’s the writing?’ Miles asks her, as he might ask after ‘the elbow’ of someone with their arm in a sling.

  ‘I think there’s been a breakthrough.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’d been telling myself it was a novel. That it was fiction, y’know? But then I realized.’

  She pauses dramatically, her upper teeth clamped on her lower lip. Miles will have to say something for either of their lives to continue.

  ‘What did you realize?’

  ‘It was all true!’

  ‘Like an autobiography.’

  ‘More true than that. The true truth: The stuff that nobody can face straight on, because it’s too true.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The world is nothing but a marketplace of falsehoods. But I’m free of that now. There’s nobody to lie to up here.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be much point in it,’ Miles concedes.

  ‘It’s going to blow them away,’ she says, letting her eyes gaze out the window, as though the forest was seething with acquisition editors, all shaking contracts in their fists and begging for a glimpse at the truth.

  ‘You figuring to get it published?’ Miles asks, as he does every time the topic of Ruby’s book comes up.

  ‘They wouldn’t be able to handle it,’ she answers, as she does every time. ‘Besides, I’m not writing it for them.’

  ‘Who are you writing it for?’

  ‘Myself.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a small audience.’

  ‘Do I look like I care what other people think?’

  Yes, Miles nearly says. You look exactly like someone who cares what other people think. You care so much it’s made you lose half your marbles and run away to live alone in a treehouse, writing a two-thousand-page letter to yourself.

  ‘I wouldn’t know what you care about, Ruby,’ he says instead.

  Miles looks out at what Ruby looks out at every day, and suddenly wants to leave. Not that he has a place in mind to go to. It’s that, from up here, the rolling expanse of green makes him claustrophobic. So still and commanding, he can feel the time passing within him, the accelerated massing of age growing like fat around his heart.

  ‘And how are you?’ Ruby asks with visible effort.

  ‘Just fine.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘No? Well, I guess I haven’t looked fine for a while now,’ Miles says, absently cranking the Osborne Fire Finder next to him. ‘I just need a fire.’

  ‘It’s on the way,’ Ruby promises, her voice already retreating back into her own thoughts, her book, the breakthrough she is willing herself to believe. ‘Don’t you worry about it, Chief. I’ll send a good fire your way real soon.’

  Miles makes his way back to his truck and tries to close his ears to the chattering trees. Poplar leaves brush together to form words in a language he can’t understand but once could, a secret childhood code he has grown out of. He catches the gist all the same. The trees are judging him.

  As he walks, he hears the distinct thump of human footfall behind him. He swings around to see who’s there. Nothing. Before he continues on he spits, hoping to rid his mouth of the name he feels on the edge of speaking aloud.

  He works to turn his mind to something else and comes up with his crew. Even out here, not an hour passes without Miles thinking about them. More and more they arrive in the form of a horrific vision, as four grinning corpses bolting up from shallow graves of ash. Other times he is visited only by their faces, enlarged on the screen of his closed eyelids, winking and whispering, sharing their knowledge of a crime he’d so far gotten away with. Yet when he tried to remember exactly what it was that he’d done, it slipped away, returning to the shadows like a fish that’s caught sight of a glinting hook.

  When he arrived as Ross River fire chief five years ago, his crew had every reason not to welcome him. White, first time in the Territory, parachuted in by the government pencil necks in Whitehorse. And he wasn’t the friendliest guy they’d ever met, either. That nasty scar was the least of it. A distance they first read as arrogance, then contempt. Mungo alone made an effort, inviting Miles to join their table in the lounge, climbing up to the roof of his cabin armed with a hammer and a case of beer to help him repair a hole where the ice had pried up the shingles. In return, Miles had given them what he could. Not the openness that was beyond him but his loyalty.

  If he had th
e authority to sign their cheques until each of their retirement days, he would. Miles is responsible for his crew’s training and safety, but not their contracts. No amount of reminding himself of this saves him from the plain fact that some if not all of them will be without jobs next year if there isn’t a fire to write up within the next couple of weeks. The government funding that is awarded to regional attack teams depends solely on how many smokers a particular crew had to chase. There was some forgiveness for ‘wet summers,’ but not a lot. Last year had already been a quiet one for Ross River. Time’s up.

  A pink slip wouldn’t matter much to King. He was from Outside, on his way to a university degree, free of the attachments of skin or history. King wanted a fire as much as anyone, probably more. But if he was like the others of his kind Miles has worked with, he wanted it for the experience, the c.v. padding, the rush. Jerry, Crookedhead and Mungo, on the other hand, needed a fire to hold aloft their respective hopes for an almost-new truck, the return of a lost family, the survival of a cashstrapped community. If these positions dried up, there would be no transfers. Not for these guys, who clung to just the sort of term-contracts the budget cutters would love to see the end of.

  Miles’s situation is no better. If they closed down the Ross River team, he doubts that anywhere else would have him. There was the kid’s death to darken his resumé. Worse, probably, are the rumours.

  Drinks too much, I hear. And he’s got a fuse so short you only have to look at him for it to go off. Knows fire, all right. But between you and me, he’s a bad-luck kind of guy. Remember the Dragon’s Back a few years ago?

  It was for reasons like these that crewmen sometimes started their own fires. It didn’t happen all the time, but it happened. Miles could only guess at the total number of smokers he’d cut line around that had been lit by a squirt of kerosene and a dropped match. Even within fire teams, off season or on, sober or drunk, arson was not a topic for open conversation. It went without saying that, caught once, you would never work in fire again. But there were also penalties that went well beyond having to find a new job. Fines. A criminal record. Prison time. Sometimes worse. Sometimes, people burned.

  Despite this, no matter how severe the threat of discovery, crews will continue to set fires for as long as they are paid to fight them. There is overtime to claim, child support payments to catch up on, bottles to empty. The fire need not be anything serious, just enough to make the guys carry out the gear and put it to a day’s work. A few hours spent lightening the load of the pisstank on your back could justify a new contract for a full year’s salary.

  There is another kind of firestarter, spoken of even less than the ones who do it for money. Years ago, Miles had worked with a guy in B.C.—Brad, he thinks his name was—who, the following season, was sentenced to nine years for starting what grew into a thousand-acre wildfire. Eight of those nine years were the result of his conviction not for arson, but manslaughter. On the last day before the fire was rained into submission, it had taken a crazed turn toward town that swept away a dozen homes, along with the lives of three crew members, trapped in a root cellar they had baked to death in.

  Based on Miles’s recollection of the guy—the silence he’d fall into staring into the camp barbecue, the awestruck surveying of even the smallest smouldering snag—Brad started fires for a satisfaction that had nothing to do with paycheques. By Miles’s estimation, of the burns ignited by firefighters, ninetenths are motivated by money, and the rest by the pleasure in seeing the forest lit up like a giant birthday cake with your name on it.

  When Miles reaches his truck he jumps into the cab and closes the door behind him as though he’s being followed. After driving cautiously along the rutted access road for half an hour, he manages to push most thoughts of contracts and firestarters out of his mind. As a distraction, he allows himself to stop the truck to play one of his favourite games. Rolls the window down and lays on the horn. He laughs at the pathetic complaint that travels no farther than the first tangle of fallen trunks. But the laughter fails to bring him around, the sound coming up from inside him empty as the sound of the horn in the truck’s interior.

  More than anything, Miles feels awake. Everything around him overly alive to his senses, the volume cranked, colours bleeding. Even the dust suspended in the sunlit air of the cab crowds his vision. The thousands of square miles outside are no better. All the space he previously assumed to be limitless now appears two-dimensional, a shoddy stage backdrop.

  It’s at least six hours before sunset, but as he drives on into denser forest, what light makes its way through the branches above is only enough to create a dusky murk of shadows. Miles turns on his headlights for the first time in three weeks. The two cones of light excite the cloud of midges warming themselves over the hood. He flicks on the high beams, but it only brings the corner ahead of him into abrupt focus, the creeping brown veins that reach across the trail. Sound can’t penetrate it. Light won’t hold it back.

  The truck comes into a turn and Miles gears down, slapping the wheel. He makes it, then feels his rear wheels sink into a soft rut. Kicks it into reverse. The engine cries at his stomped foot.

  He lurches back, then forward so fast that mud sprayed up by the front tires slaps the windshield on its way down. Out, but now he’s blind. He flips the wipers on and keeps gunning, preferring to risk being bumped by a tree to getting stuck again.

  It takes three swipes of the blades for the glass to be cleared. And when it is, he sees a figure standing in the road ahead.

  Miles drives straight at it. There may still be time to stop before hitting whoever is there, but he keeps his foot down.

  With another blink, he recognizes who it is.

  The kid’s wearing the same fluorescent vest and green coveralls he wore on the Dragon’s Back. Now, though, much of this has been burned away, so that he is a scarecrow patchwork of nylon and charred flesh. At the sight of Miles bearing down on him, the kid raises both his arms in an appeal for him to stop. His mouth opens—to call out, to take an overdue breath—and keeps opening, until his jaw hangs flat, a black plate against his throat.

  For the first time, Miles considers stopping. A human figure stands in the road ahead, asking for help. By reflex, his foot drifts over the brake.

  But comes down on the gas.

  The truck finds drier earth and accelerates into the twenty-yard straightaway between it and the kid. Miles expects that, as he gets closer, the figure will disappear according to the normal means of ghostly departure, a blink-and-he’s-gone or puff of smoke. Instead, he only comes into greater focus, his waving more furious.

  The kid isn’t there. But Miles can’t stop himself from shutting his eyes.

  There’s a thump when he hits him. It’s only one of the thousand rocks that fly up against the undercarriage on a road like this, but it comes at the same moment the front grille would have mown the kid down.

  And keeps coming. The truck drifts on for a second or two and Miles can feel something being dragged along with it. Limbs caught in the axle. A pair of fists pounding against his muffler.

  He skids to a stop and opens his eyes. For a time, he stares ahead and wonders if this is what losing your mind feels like. Embarrassing, more than anything. A slow slide into new and more foolish situations that cannot be avoided.

  Miles checks the rear-view to see if the kid’s body lies in the road. Nothing but fresh tire tracks bathed red in the glow of his brakelights.

  ‘You should’ve remembered,’ Miles says aloud. ‘I never pick up hitchhikers.’

  He knew that seeing Alex and the girl would have its side effects. That the kid would be one of them is something of a curve-ball, but as far as he knows, this may well be the nature of shock, of grief. It likes to take you by surprise.

  Miles drives on. The road here is no smoother than a dried-out river bottom, but he jolts along faster than he should. Twice, black stars cloud his vision from his head slamming against the cab’s ceiling. His fo
ot only pushes deeper. He’s not sure where he’s going, but for the first time in what feels like forever, there’s somewhere he has to be.

  Chapter 11

  After breakfast, the hunters lift their packs and head out along the Trench’s north-facing slope. There is something of a trail for the first halfhour, but Margot steers them off it, crossing first a squishy meadow, soaked by one of the hit-andrun showers of the last few days, before taking them into an endless stand of birches, the white trunks so close it tickles the backs of their eyes to look at them.

  Margot walks in front, far slower than she’s used to. She has to wait for Bader, followed by Tom and Elsie, and Wade in the rear, head down. There are frequent stops for Margot to consult her compass and pretend to study the ground for tracks, although she knows exactly where they are and that they will not yet find what they are looking for. The pauses are for Jackson Bader’s benefit alone. Stooped over with his hands resting on his knees, a string of curses rising out of him like bubbles.

  ‘Which way do we go to find the grizzlies?’ Elsie Bader asks lightly as they enter the birches, as though inquiring after the location of the ladies’ shoe section.

  ‘First, we go to where they like to go,’ Margot says, falling back so that if the old woman insists on talking, neither of them will have to shout. ‘Then we try to find their tracks. But we have to be very quiet.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Quiet as Tom.’

  ‘Even quieter.’

  ‘Well, I certainly will be.’

  ‘It might be too late.’

  ‘Sorry?’