The Wildfire Season Read online

  The phone rings three times before Miles figures out what it is. When he answers his voice sounds drugged, his tongue thick.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Looks like our ship’s come in.’

  The only way Mungo would be awake before noon is if he’d worked the overnight shift in the radio shack.

  ‘The plane spotted it?’ Miles asks.

  ‘Not this time. It was Crazy Ruby, of all people. Put her pen down long enough to spy us some smoke.’

  ‘No chance it’s a ghost?’

  ‘The spotter did a fly-over and it’s a for-sure hot spot. Looks like we’re going to need your signature on a few forms.’

  ‘Call the others,’ Miles says. ‘I’ll be down there in five minutes.’

  He sits up and notices his feet again, even uglier now, pale and cold looking after being stuck out over the end of the bed the past hour or two. And it would only have been that long, even less, since Alex had lain gently snoring next to him.

  Miles suddenly recalls his own voice. Words spoken on another morning, another planet altogether.

  So much happens when you’re asleep.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got your fire,’ Alex says.

  Miles realizes he’s still holding the receiver and places it back in its cradle. Outside, Rachel is shouting sternly at the sky. That’s not very nice, Mr Raven! Alex stands fully dressed now, arms crossed. The fire has come and it’s time to say goodbye. Stump’s not a dumb dog! Soon he’ll be himself again, the foreman with the bad-luck face, cutting line. It’s all moving fast, like the river after the ice breaks in the spring. You can be my friend too, if you want to, Mr Raven. It’s going fast and he’s caught in the current and in minutes the future will be here.

  ‘It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for,’ Miles says.

  Chapter 12

  ‘I think we might have got it early,’ Miles is telling Alex, unable to stop the tickertape of his thoughts. Look at us, he thinks as he blathers on. The perfect pretend marriage. Hubby late for work and the missus searching for his socks on the floor. ‘My guess is we’ll have it under control within the first twenty-four hours, if it takes even that long. A couple of guys will have to sleep with it overnight. But Mungo sounds sober, and the rest of them can only be so hungover without him sitting at their table.’ This is just what it would be like, isn’t it? Someone to show your naked self to, and a stream of blah-blah-blah to swim along on. ‘Ruby Ritter was the one to spot it. It’s nutty as a squirrel’s nest up in that tower of hers, but she’s got a pair of the best eyes in the Territory.’ I’m talking nothing but shit and I still can’t shut up. That’s Alex for you. The only person I’d pull the cork out for. ‘I bet King is kicking his heels together right now! That kid’s been waiting for a real-life fire to—’

  ‘Miles?’

  ‘—come along and shake us awake—’

  ‘Miles?’

  Alex has stepped forward to place her hands on the tops of his shoulders, and it is this touch, and not his name, that silences him.

  ‘You have to do something.’

  ‘Name it,’ he says, losing balance, thrashing his trapped foot around within the maze of his trousers. ‘So long as it can be done within the next ninety seconds.’

  ‘That’s all it’ll take for you to say goodbye to Rachel.’

  ‘Sure, yeah. If it’s so important to you.’

  ‘Funny you should put it that way,’ she says. ‘My thinking was that it might be important to you.’

  Miles buttons his shirt, digs around the bottom of the closet for the fluorescent orange vest that must be worn on jobs, all in an effort not to meet Alex’s eyes. As strange as seeing her again has made the last couple of days, he has accepted her as truly real only in the last ten minutes. Her voice, her body, even the dark-haired girl in the strawberry dress—all of it shrouded in the disbelief of a dream.

  ‘You okay for money?’ Miles asks, his head still lowered over the closet’s piled sneakers and baseball caps.

  ‘There’s enough.’

  ‘Because I’ve got savings I don’t plan to—’

  ‘That’s not why we’re here.’

  ‘I’m just offering.’

  ‘And I’m just declining.’

  He finds the vest and slips it over his shoulders. The light glances off its reflective surface and throws orange juice over the bedroom walls. For a moment, Miles is shining.

  ‘You’re not going to be here when I get back,’ he says.

  ‘No more, Miles.’

  ‘No more. No.’

  Rachel is still talking to the raven in the tree. He can hear her making sounds that might be words. Nonsense that means something only to her.

  ‘She’s waiting for you,’ Alex says.

  What is the best way to leave? It’s something he’s given more thought to than most. From what Miles can tell, once the decision to run has been arrived at, it all becomes a question of style. A note on the fridge, a slammed door, a Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. The usuals. Miles has already tried the disappearing act. Now he’s left with walking out to another fire with even less to say that might last or help or leave a print behind.

  ‘She’s waiting,’ Alex says.

  He finds the girl outside the cabin, staring up into the treetops, listening to the strangely human mutterings of a raven that peers down on them both. Stump sits next to her, his tail raking the lawn around his rump. Rachel hasn’t noticed Miles behind her. She hasn’t looked anyway, though Miles can sense her awareness of an audience. As he comes closer he can hear her whispered replies to the raven. Squeaky croaks and groans in an unnatural mimicry of the bird’s language.

  Stump isn’t scared of you, Mr Raven, he hears her say. The bird struts along its branch in outraged response, clucking at her. No, I’m not scared of you, either.

  ‘I hope that dog of mine is sticking up for you,’ Miles says.

  Stump turns to him, head cocked. The girl doesn’t seem to hear, although she and the raven stop their conversation at the interruption of his voice.

  ‘You and that old bird seem to be having a good chat,’ he tries again.

  When Rachel finally turns, he has a chance to study her face. It seems to Miles that she is touched by wildness. There is a feral bottomlessness to her eyes that makes him feel that they are constantly calculating his distance, resolve, the true intent behind each of his gestures. She’s reading him, not what he says, which makes Miles think of her as possessing the most sharply intuitive of animal qualities.

  ‘Mr Raven has a lot of stories to tell,’ she says.

  ‘Ravens always do.’

  Miles kneels before the girl, so close he can smell the soap on her skin. He searches for something to say, but it is Rachel who speaks first.

  ‘We’ve looked for you so long,’ the girl says. There is no pleading in her voice, only the flat declaration of fact.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to look anymore. After this, you can stay in one place instead of hanging around lousy campgrounds and lumber towns with just your mom to keep you company, and you can forget about this weird-looking man you’ve been hunting for. Okay? You can go home now and not—’

  He is stopped by the motion that Rachel makes with her right hand. A swift swing toward his eyes that he takes to be an oncoming slap. But instead, the girl lands her fingers softly against the top of his cheek, running them down the length of his scar, light as the step of a spider. It makes him lose all his words. She seems to be measuring him with her touch, both the ridges of his burn as well as what lies beneath it. With her fingertips, the girl gauges whether he is so far away he cannot feel what it is to be discovered by another.

  Nobody has touched his face since the fire, not even Alex. His own fingers are numb as cigar butts when he strokes the burn. Yet there is something in the girl’s feathery explorations that sends a pulse deep within him. As she continues down, Miles feels that she is filling the grooves in his skin with a cool putty, le
aving him smooth.

  It is her turn to ask the question he had attempted two days before on Eagle’s Nest Bluff, but that she now puts to him with her hand alone.

  Do you know who I am?

  Miles doesn’t answer. He kneels before the girl with the sun thrown over him like a dazzling sheet, holding open the uglier half of himself to be studied and touched as she pleases. The light paints a bending stripe across her hair. He feels lean, beer-buzzed, shameless. He’d nearly forgotten what sharing a secret can do.

  She remembers this meadow. Ablaze with paintbrush and Labrador tea, the slant of the valley’s side showing itself in an optical illusion of gentleness. Under different circumstances, the bear would see it as a field to linger in. There would be relief from the roots and shale edges that rib the forest earth, and in their place would be a thousand beds waiting to be made in the beardtongue. More than broad enough to allow any wind they might have heard in the treetops to descend and curl about them, the sun warming the silver tips of their fur. But nothing can be permitted to slow them now. Today, as it was when she stopped here with her mate two seasons ago, it is the meadow’s assets that worry her.

  They could circle the open ground, staying under cover of the midget dogwoods crowded along the circumference, but it would take three times as long as a direct crossing. Although she is sure that the hunters have not closed any of the distance between them since morning, the sow is less certain about the female among them. At points over the last couple of hours, the bear had thought she could pick up the lead hunter’s scent. It came from different directions each time, the sources so distant that it would require the speed of a hawk’s wings to fly between them. The she-grizzly knows that she is only anticipating the female hunter’s scent—recollecting it, creating it—rather than reading it in the air. She is making small mistakes already.

  The bear stands at the green edge of the meadow and considers it afresh. To cross it, she and her cubs will be exposed on all sides.

  She starts out at a full charge.

  As they scramble after her, the cubs’ initial honks of confusion become a terrified bleating. She tells herself to think of nothing but the simple thing. For now, it’s reaching the far side of the meadow. She will comfort the cubs once they get there. But as long as the light makes them visible, she must keep her stride long, drawing the earth behind her with her claws.

  She ignores the first screech from her cub. It’s the voice of the bigger one, stronger but more timid than his brother. The sow assumes that his crying is only a renewed attempt to make her stop. She pounds ahead another hundred feet before the cub’s second scream reaches her. This time, she hears the unmistakable shock of pain in it.

  The she-grizzly skids and leaps backwards in a single motion. Her smaller cub has stopped next to the larger one, sitting up on his haunches. She tries to see if the larger cub is moving or not, but from where she is, he appears to be on his side. The sow whoofs a warning to whatever threat that stands, unseen, in the trees that ring the meadow.

  When she comes upon her fallen cub, she expects to see him opened at the side as the gunshot had split apart her mate. She can’t smell any of the hunters, but the female must have travelled faster than the sow had guessed. And now she’s firing upon them from the shadows. From anywhere.

  She’s surprised not to see any blood in the grass. The larger cub mewls up at her and, using her paw as a spatula, she flips him over to his other side. Nothing stains, nothing seeps. The cub paws at the exposed pink of his jowls, whimpering.

  Not shot, but stung. Around him, a thousand yellowjackets disgorge from the rupture in their nest. A giant paper egg that the cub had run over, having taken it for a mound of sand.

  There is a moment when the wasps hang in the air between them, undecided. The sow feels a number of them settle between her ears, tickling the whiskers along her snout. Their wings so close she sees the world through a flickering filter of grey.

  When she can be still no longer the sow takes a step back and, at first, the yellowjackets only follow her in the same drifting flight patterns, as though attached to elastic bands. With each retreat, the cubs follow. Only when a pair of wasps wriggle up the sow’s nostrils does she bark. And then they sting.

  The bear’s voice excites the meadow into a flurry of motion. She rolls side over side in an attempt to crush the yellowjackets buried in the fur on her back, but they only jab at her belly instead. At the same time, the cubs run toward the end of the field, one high and one low, so that their pursuers are divided between them. The wasps kamikaze the bears’ eyes. Buzz their bums.

  By the time the she-grizzly finds her feet, her nose is swollen shut. It forces her to breathe through her mouth, now opened so wide that the yellowjackets plant stingers at the back of her tongue. The sun is clouded over by furiously dancing bugs. When she coughs, a handful of dead wasps spray out.

  The shade blinds the sow before she realizes she’s made it to the meadow’s far side. She stops to find her cubs. The sudden cool of the forest calms the wasps. They drift up and away as though awakened from some hypnotic command to violence. Many float back into the meadow. A homeless stream returning to their broken nest to start building again.

  The cubs come to her from opposite directions. A quick inspection shows them to have been more startled than hurt. The big cub in particular refuses his mother’s attentions, shamed by his fear of so small a predator. She leads them on again, plowing a course through the hemlock.

  Although her cubs’ screams were not caused by any hunter’s shot, it has reminded the bear that the chances of being found are far greater when they enter the broad canvas of fields, or the bare rocks above the mountain’s treeline. They will have to shrink themselves from now on. Move unnoticed as yellowjackets do, instead of as three brown giants, visible for miles in open land. And like any prey, large or small, they must be prepared to sting. It took more than an hour for the Ross River attack team to stir themselves from rye-soaked dreams, load the powerwagon with gear and head out of town toward the first real smoker of the season.

  The men arrived one at a time. King first, eyes twinkly with excitement, followed by Crookedhead James, busily replacing a broken lace in his boot with the cord that hooked his VCR to his TV. And last, Jerry McCormack, pulling into the lot in the Ford pickup he’d gone ahead and splurged on the day before.

  ‘Couldn’t resist,’ Jerry said, beaming, as he stepped down from the cab.

  ‘Thought you didn’t have the money,’ Crookedhead pointed out.

  Jerry shrugged. ‘I will now.’

  ‘You a fortune teller or something?’

  ‘Just an optimist.’

  ‘Maybe your nose can smell smoke a day before Ruby can see it.’

  ‘It’s only the smell of money.’

  Normally, Miles would take the opportunity to remind his crew that their response time was roughly four times longer than it should be, and that the crew cab’s interior is a far more comfortable place when not smelling like it’s been reupholstered with Welcome Inn beer mats. But instead he lets Mungo drive (a privilege nearly always reserved for himself) and sits in a denser silence than his standard, smoothing his hand over the map that will guide them down the Lapie Canyon Road four snaking miles, and another bushwhacking hike to the fire. On the rear bench, King sits sandwiched between Jerry and Crookedhead, the only one of the three with eyes open. More than open, Miles notes each time he glances back in the side mirror. Bedazzled, egg white.

  ‘This is where Margot takes her clients, isn’t it?’ Miles asks as the road narrows and rises into the more crowded forest of the foothills.

  ‘I’m not sure she works according to a system. Not as we would understand it,’ Mungo says, grinning the eroded ruins of his teeth out at him. From the moment they shook hands at the fire office this morning, Miles couldn’t help noticing that the prospect of fire has lifted twenty years from the older man’s shoulders and emptied the grey sacks atop his cheeks. ‘From
what I can tell, that girl just wakes up and smells whatever she aims to shoot.’

  ‘Most of the time it’s along here though, right?’

  Mungo nods. ‘If it’s a grizzly she’s after. This would be it.’

  Miles lets another few minutes pass before pulling the receiver from the truck’s radio and checking for Margot. If she’s done what he asked her to do, she’ll have her own radio open to calls. He’d put the chances of this at fifty-fifty.

  When she finally answers, Miles can hear the depth of her breathing, along with the wind that blows across the mouthpiece. The sound of distance.

  ‘Hey there, Smoky.’

  ‘Wasn’t sure you’d answer.’

  ‘You’re in luck. I’m a mile ahead of the others. So we can talk in private.’

  Although her voice makes it clear that she’s only joking, Miles reddens. Even Crookedhead pops open one of his eyes.

  ‘You find any tracks?’

  ‘Won’t be too long.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘A girl knows these things.’

  Miles tries to remember what he wants to tell her, but it skitters away, so that the radio crackles for a time with him staring out the window at the sun, already high and enraged over the Anvil Range. The problem is that he really wants to be speaking to Alex. Not to deliver any specific message, but to hold her in place with words. With her, he would be speaking right now because, no matter what dribbled out of him, it would be understood.

  ‘Where are you?’ Margot asks.

  ‘In the pumper.’

  ‘You got a fire.’

  ‘Looks that way. And not too far from you.’

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘By all reports, no.’

  ‘Is that why you’re scaring all the bears away? To inform me that you’re going to stomp on a leftover campfire?’