The Wildfire Season Read online

  ‘Just wanted to let you know that I’ll have my radio with me if you need—’

  ‘For fuck sake, Miles. When did you get so nervous?’

  ‘I’m just keeping everybody’s head up on this.’

  ‘Consider my head up.’

  ‘Miles?’ Mungo reaches across the bench seat, gesturing for the receiver. ‘Is Tom there?’

  ‘Margot? Mungo would like to say hello to his son.’

  ‘Tell him that Tom has been a total lifesaver,’ Margot says, her voice sucking away. ‘I don’t know how we—’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘She’s cutting out.’

  ‘Listen, Miles, I gotta go,’ Margot’s voice returns, but faintly. ‘I’ve got business here, by the looks—’

  ‘Repeat. I’m losing you.’

  ‘—maybe your fire—’

  ‘Just give your position—’

  ‘—scaring the big boys out into the clear. Drinks on me, Smoky. I’ve got a helluva feeling about—’

  Miles’s ear gulps shut against a wave of static. He could try her again, but she wouldn’t answer. She’s got business. Unless she contacts him, Margot’s lost to him now. And the only way she’d call is if something got beyond her handling of it. Miles can’t imagine what shape such an event might take, and doesn’t want to.

  ‘She’s picked up something, hasn’t she?’ Mungo asks him.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘That girl doesn’t come out of the bush empty-handed too damn often. Not when there’s money on it.’

  Behind them, Crookedhead returns to sleep with a rip of snoring.

  ‘Don’t worry about Tom.’

  ‘I know it,’ Mungo says, nodding. ‘Margot’s good. The best.’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to be good today too.’

  Bears don’t leave tracks. Margot creates them. This is what a true hunter has to believe. That the animal is not discovered but summoned by will, a manifestation of her ability to envision her prey in such detail that it is obliged to exist.

  She has walked on another mile after switching her radio off, trying to clear Miles’s voice from her mind. More than any creature, a grizzly is the hardest to create. She could turn from Wade in the middle of a sentence and paint a moose standing at the edge of a marsh, or coax a buck from an aspen grove while humming the tune she heard on the radio that morning. But a bear of the kind Margot works to bring forward now will not permit distraction. Margot can’t worry about Miles, his fire, or the woman and child who have come from Outside to find him. She needs to hold the pencil in her mind now and draw. The hunter’s art requires silence, a standing apart. This is why she has hiked so far ahead of Wade and the Baders. Why she stops and falls to her knees next to a sprawling patch of saskatoon berries.

  The tracks are there, just as she knew they would be. In the soft earth of the bush’s shadow, beneath the branches bent by something at once huge and cautious. A grizzly and her two cubs, travelling west. A seven-hundred-pound sow, maybe eight. Margot’s estimate is based on the largest set of claws she has ever traced with her fingers. A bear even greater than the one she conceived in her imagination. It is as though the animal has participated in its own invention and wished itself a giant.

  Judging from the huddled pattern of the tracks, the cubs follow her closely. One slightly larger than the other, both two years old. Margot is always sorry when there are cubs involved, even when they are of an age to have a good chance of surviving on their own, as she believes these ones to be. She never creates offspring for the animals she summons. It doesn’t stop them from appearing sometimes.

  Though it troubles her, Margot is always awed by the realization that her authorship of the hunt, its story and outcome, is ultimately limited. She can make bears appear but cannot prevent them from acting in unpredictable ways. Acknowledging this is like prayer for her.

  The smallest things can be the most splendid, in the bush as much as elsewhere. Wild delphiniums stop her in mid-stride. A gliding eagle surpasses her lushest dreams of flight. More than anything, she is humbled by children. Whether born of woman or bear, they remind her that the hunter is not alone in being able to choose between taking and creating life.

  Miles knows that when they get as far on the road as the four-wheel-drive will permit, and they roll out to strap pisstanks over their shoulders and grab pulaskis from the flatbed, there will have to be a smoke break. Nothing will get done—at least nothing without Jerry and Crookedhead’s constant complaint—until the crew has huffed back a morning cigarette. It’s a ritual that Miles has come to see as a good-luck charm. Being superstitious in the way of all firefighters, he grants them the two minutes it takes to roll, lick the seam, clink open each of their lighters, and inject themselves with the only nicotine they’re likely to get before the fire’s mopped up. They’ve taught King how to roll his own along with them, arguing in favour of bagged tobacco’s freshness and economy, not to mention that smoking filtered cigarettes is ‘like trying to suck air through a tampon,’ as Jerry likes to put it. Whenever asked why he doesn’t share the habit, Miles tells them he inhales enough monoxide working wildfires to last him a pack-aday lifetime. Nobody points out that Jerry, Mungo and King are also firefighters and yet all of them smoke with grim dedication. The truth is, Miles wants to keep whatever strength is left in him. It’s not that he has a special interest in living long. It’s that if he has to carry somebody out, he has promised himself to at least possess the capacity to try.

  ‘There it is,’ Mungo announces as he slams the powerwagon to a stop. All of them pour out of the truck to get a better view of the plume of grey. Then, right on schedule, all of them except Miles pull sacks of Drum from their breast pockets.

  ‘I like it,’ Jerry McCormack says.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A fire so close we can damn near drive the pumper up and roast marshmallows through the windows.’

  ‘There’s still a walk ahead of us.’

  ‘I’ve had longer hikes to backyard outhouses.’

  ‘I guess we’re just lucky,’ Crookedhead says.

  ‘Lucky?’

  Miles steps close to Crookedhead’s face, glaring at him with an anger neither of them saw coming. He thinks that the man before him has been misnamed. For the first time, he notices it’s not that Crookedhead’s head is so crooked, but that his mouth is too small for the size of his skull. So small a thing, in fact, that it has trouble performing most of its basic functions—eating, yawning, spitting any distance beyond his own toes. Useless, really, except for talking. The man could jabber like a hand puppet with his undersized trap. At the moment, however, with Miles turned on him out of nowhere, his blab fails him.

  ‘Just that, the fire—like Jerry said,’ Crookedhead stammers. ‘It’s a good thing it’s close.’

  ‘Arson. Is that what you mean by lucky?’

  ‘Fuck no.’

  ‘Because if there were a firestarter, it would most likely be one of us, wouldn’t it? We’d have it narrowed down to five right off the bat.’

  ‘Hey now,’ Mungo says, stepping between them but speaking only to Miles. ‘All the man’s saying is that it’s a good thing our first job is going to be a stroll to get to, that’s all.’

  ‘That true, Crookedhead?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘All right, then. If we’re so lucky, let’s find the goddamn thing and put it out.’

  By the time they march into the woods the afternoon has grown cloudless, gusty and hot. Under their boots, the dried toadflax crunches like bird bones. A perfect day for a newborn fire, Miles notes to himself. He considers the likelihood of the temperature surpassing forecasted highs, wonders how the wind is going to blow through the rest of the day.

  He’d also like to know where his decision to start a pissing match with Crookedhead came from. Arson. Firestarter. He felt like a boy taking pleasure in speaking aloud the most foul of cuss words. And in a
sense, it had pleased him. Watching the sleepness drain out of Crookedhead’s face be replaced by the shock of accusation.

  What afflicts Miles now, though, is the idea that there’s a bully living in him. A dirty fighter. A running man. A borderline alcoholic and mother neglecter. He’d admit to all of these and then some. But saying shit for the sake of saying it is a new vice altogether. And he can guess where it comes from, too. No matter how quick they put this smoker out, Alex and Rachel will be on the road when he gets back. It’s the persistence of this simple fact that has raised the devil in him.

  The fire turns out to be trickier to find than they first assumed. It’s no farther than it appeared from the truck, but the character of the wind makes it seem so. Not strong, but shifty. It puts a new concern in Miles’s mind. More than the dryness and availability of fuels, it is air movement that can make a fire go on a tear. The wind can also hide it altogether. ‘The old saying is a lie,’ he tells his crew every year. ‘Where there’s smoke, there isn’t always fire.’ The fumes will sometimes lie flat and crawl for miles away from the flames, so that when an attack crew arrives in a smoke-filled valley they find only smog.

  Miles leads them, hacking through the kinnikinnick and alder saplings, tying orange trail tape to branches every hundred feet or so. He keeps his eye on the twisting pillar of smoke but, within five minutes, he has looped them back to where they started.

  All of them notice the cut branches. Sharp breaks high enough up that they were unlikely to have been made by passing animals. Bushwhacking.

  The fire crew meet eyes. In silence, it is decided to leave it alone. Someone was here. One of them, or someone else. But the implications of speaking this aloud, out here, would be unstoppable. They can see and think and conclude what they like. But words would tie all of them to something they might rather remain free of.

  ‘It’s straight that way,’ Miles says, pointing his chin. ‘It won’t get us turned around twice.’

  Miles is right. In less time than it took them to discover that their initial course was mistaken, he delivers them to the smoker. A fairly innocuous business, by the looks of it. Low flames crackling through the regrowth of a small clearing, maybe a hundred and fifty yards end to end. It’s been here a while, judging from the blackened soil and the near-complete exhaustion of the fuels within the clearing’s borders.

  The crew look around and find that they’re somewhat higher here than the surrounding forest, which exposes them to more air. The elevation, together with the tall, carbon-hardened snag in the centre, suggest a lightning strike. But there are a couple of things about the site that put it slightly outside the everyday. For one thing, all of them know there hasn’t been a lightning touch this close to town in the last month. For another, the burning that has already occurred has been unusually intense. Every step the crew take creates a highpitched crinkling of charcoal, the roots and deadfall not just burned but cooked halfway to glass. And there’s a lot more smoke than a fire of this size would normally send up. Darker, too.

  None of them remark on any of this. An involuntary round of coughs acknowledges the sore throats they’ve got coming tomorrow.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Mungo says, taking the first dig at the fireline with his pulaski. ‘Allow me to introduce you to our contract extension.’

  Along with a course of direction, speed and identity, tracks will sometimes also tell a story. Margot looks down on the papery nest, the flattened grass, the furious digging of claws, and reads the tale of the yellowjackets versus the bears. Given the signs of struggle under her boots and the breadth of strides over the diverging tracks that race across the clearing, it’s clear to Margot who won. The only thing she’s curious about is where all the wasps got to.

  She finds a stump aproned with soft lichen and settles with her back against it, lays the Remington alongside her leg. Sleep lingers nearby, darts closer and retreats, like wolves at the edge of a fire. It is no match for Margot’s alertness when she is this close to finishing a job. She keeps one hand on the rifle. With the other she shields her eyes and studies the trail exit that Wade and the Baders will eventually emerge out of.

  For a drifting second, Margot wonders what she’s doing here. Then she remembers.

  Over the past few years, she has become aware that what she sells these people isn’t the beauty of the last true wilderness on the continent. It’s not even the thrill of hunting an animal that, theoretically at least, could do you harm. Instead, Margot is in the nostalgia business. Most of her clients see the land between here and where Alaska reaches into the Bering Strait as an especially convincing theme park. The killing is only a small but essential part of the experience. Even the most politically defensive hunters know that the days of having anything of interest to blow away in the woods—even these woods—are being counted down. The big game that Margot leads them to used to number in the hundreds of thousands and over a habitat that would include all the land west of the Mississippi. It’s why the state flag of California has a grizzly bear on it, even though they had been blasted into extinction there some decades ago. It’s also why putting a hole through the skull of a moose or deer would mean little to a Jackson Bader. There were too many of those beasts still around to provide the necessary element of tragic poignancy to the moment, the bittersweetness that came with taking down one of the last of its kind. Today’s trophy hunters aren’t even especially interested in the trophy anymore. What they want is to play their part. And for $8,990 (U.S.) over ten days (local taxes and gratuities not included), Margot was prepared to sell them their walk-on roles in The End of the World.

  Here they come now.

  As Tom and the Baders make their way up to her, Margot can’t help seeing them as an odd family: the distant father, his aging wife and their adopted Indian son. While this illusion requires Jackson Bader only to be himself, there is no doubt that Elsie Bader has taken to the boy. Tom is perhaps a full foot taller than she, yet he bows close, holding her arm as they step over a patch of loose rock that threatens to take her feet out from under her.

  ‘I thought you’d gotten lost!’ Elsie Bader exclaims as she comes upon Margot, her lips puffing out from sun-swollen cheeks. ‘And then I thought, “She can’t be lost! She’s our guide!”’

  ‘I went ahead on my own.’

  ‘You sure as hell did,’ Wade says.

  The first thing Margot does is unstrap the radio from her waist and hand it to Wade. Simply carrying this connection to the Outside is a far heavier burden to her than the Remington and forty-pound pack on her back. And she doesn’t want to haul thoughts of Miles around with her anymore, either. She can feel him worrying about her from wherever his fire is and it strikes her, in turns, as irritating, touching and a cause for concern greater than the bear itself.

  The weight of the radio tugs at Wade’s arm. Margot would say he’s lost all of what remained of his colour in the morning if it weren’t for the presence of Jackson Bader, who started out crispy skinned and white as a hospital sheet and now appears to have achieved an even more ghastly pallor. He turns Margot’s mind to the way a filleted halibut looks displayed on a bed of ice in the Raven Nest, one with an ON SALE! warning flag jabbed in it. Slippery, nearly translucent. A yellow taint creeping into the bleached flesh.

  ‘You find anything?’ Bader shouts up at her.

  ‘I believe I have.’

  ‘Jackson, please. Sit here a minute,’ Mrs Bader pleads even as her husband is folding himself down in the grass, his breathing a reedy whistle. When he disappears from Margot’s view she could mistake him for a snake hissing through the wild sage. ‘You don’t mind if we all take a little break, do you, Wade?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘You’ve found tracks?’ Bader asks. The words escape him low and fast, little more than a muffled cough. He sticks his head up so that it hovers amidst the grass like a half-deflated balloon.

  ‘Been following them for a while.’

  ‘Them?’

 
‘A female. And two cubs.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘We won’t know until we see her. But she’s leaving tracks the size of dinner plates.’

  ‘So why are we stopping?’

  ‘Your wife asked.’

  Mrs Bader blanches.

  ‘Jackson, can’t we just have a drink of water and catch our—?’

  ‘Five minutes,’ he says.

  Bader slips down into the sage once more. There isn’t even the sound of his breathing anymore. But when his wife unscrews the top of her canteen, the old man gulps and gulps.

  Margot isn’t sure they can afford the time, but she’d rather let a bear slip out of range than have a client drop dead on her a full seven miles from the truck. She studies the far end of the clearing at the point where the tracks re-enter the bush. It always thrills her to follow an animal without seeing it, the knowledge that it was here before it moved on to the as-yet-undiscovered there. Sometimes, she can feel their presence more in the contour of their footprints than when she takes her knife to their skins.

  She notices Bader’s hand flapping over the grass. She walks over and is mildly surprised to find him grinning. Unfriendly, intent, flirtatious.

  ‘She’s a prize one, isn’t she?’

  ‘It’s a large bear.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Bit of a ways. But we might sight them by the end of the day.’

  ‘You find them, and I’ll bring them down,’ he says, wagging his finger at her, as though reminding a child of contractual terms, an agreement to let her go outside to play once she’s tidied her room.

  ‘Not the cubs. It’s illegal. And I don’t plan to let—’

  ‘Your five minutes are up,’ he tells her, and struggles to his feet.

  She considers reminding him that she wasn’t the one who needed to pull her lungs out of her throat, and that he’s not the one leading this party, and could never be, given that he couldn’t track a horse through wet cement.

  Instead, she watches him go. Wade, Tom and Mrs Bader watch too. The old man walking straight from the waist up but with jellied knees, carrying himself over the clearing like someone who has awakened in an alien landscape and now strikes out for home on a path he’s only guessed at.