The Wildfire Season Read online

  ‘Shoo, you little devils!’ Elsie Bader squeals, jumping from the handful of yellowjackets that have come by for a sniff at the sweat at the back of her neck. ‘You’d think I’ve been dipped in honey.’

  ‘We’d better go after him,’ Wade whispers in Margot’s ear.

  ‘He’s a funny one, isn’t he?’

  ‘A laugh a minute.’

  ‘Jackson! Just hold up there!’ Mrs Bader calls to him, her voice close to breaking. Margot can hear not only the woman’s fretfulness but her dependency, the loss of bearings that comes at the same instant her husband slips into the forest’s shadow. It may be a version of love, for all Margot knows.

  As they proceed across the meadow Margot considers telling them about the bears and the yellowjackets but decides not to. She’s the one who has willed the bear into being, after all. What befalls the animal now can be viewed as her doing as well. No matter who pays, who shoots, who keeps the bones for souvenirs, this is her hunt. She will hold on to its secrets for herself.

  Chapter 13

  It has been a dry summer. Dry even by the subarctic’s arid standards, and with little meltage from the shallowest snowpack the Territory has seen in the past eight winters. Only now, in late July, have the rivers risen to normal levels. That’s why it’s so strange Miles and his crew haven’t had a smoker to fight until now.

  It’s also why this one is as noisy as Chinese New Year’s. The crack of bursting deadwood makes Miles think of bones breaking. He coughs on the smoke, and the fire seems to hear him. The flames’ reckless celebration of a moment ago is hushed to a whispered sizzling. Then, apparently not finding much threat in the five men who have come out of the woods looking half-beaten already, it snaps away even louder than before, popping knots out of pine trunks like half a dozen .22s.

  ‘Jerry. Crookedhead. King. You guys start the line here,’ Miles orders even as the others are pushing the branches at the clearing’s perimeter out of their faces. ‘Mungo is going to help me cut this snag in the centre. Work fast, and we won’t miss last call at the lounge.’

  Everyone knows this is an empty incentive. They will stay at the fire until it is mopped up, every last wisp of smoke buried or drowned by sprays from the five-gallon pisstanks the men will empty onto the fireground well into the night. But the simple idea of finally having a job to do and a reward at its completion sets the five of them to their assignments with a fury.

  They start by pacing out the fire’s borders, a quick size-up to best decide where to lay the fireline down. Miles directs Jerry, Crookedhead and King to the head, an arm of flame inching toward where they’d first entered the clearing. They’re to be the back breakers. Pressurized hoses and airdrops and parachute smokejumping rarely come into the actual work of forest firefighting. Not up here anyway, where the roads are too few to get a pumper near enough to use, the air resources too far away, the bush too unpeopled. Most of the time the job involves what King, Crookedhead and Jerry do now. Grave digging. Ripping the spadeheads of their pulaskis down to the subsoil and raking away any needles and leaves within a two-foot-wide trench around the site. What makes it exciting is the aspect of a race. If they win, when the fire reaches the line it will have nowhere to go.

  Within the proposed fireline, however, stands a second concern. A flaring twenty-foot-tall lodgepole pine, dried white and spinning coils of smoke. If its internal temperature gets too high, the trunk will explode, sending a hundred new firebrands out over the line. They’ll have to fell the snag before it has the chance.

  Miles steps into the fireground with the chainsaw held across his chest. With every step, the ash swirls up to his waist like hellish confetti. Despite his boots’ thick soles his feet cook instantly. He hears Mungo cussing behind him, an incoherent compounding of swear words that is his partner’s trademark. Assholemotherfuck. And then, as they reach the greater heat at the base of the snag, Shitpiss.

  It’s Mungo’s job to stick the wedges into place, but also to watch for falling widowmakers. Whoever handles the chainsaw never has enough time to notice a branch collapsing on him. Mungo lends Miles an extra pair of eyes, ones that always look up.

  Miles straps a Nomex shroud over his mouth and nose. Even before opening the furnace door with the first undercut, he can feel the snag throwing heat against his chest. He cuts into the wood and it births sparks into his face. Miles staggers back, but steps in almost immediately to further the cut. It takes a full minute of retreat and attack before he’s able to kick out the slab. As soon as the backcut is exposed, Mungo stands by with the wedge. When there is enough room, he pushes it into the kerf and knocks it in place with the broad side of an axe.

  ‘All right,’ Miles shouts over the idling saw. ‘Now step away so—’

  Mungo bodychecks Miles’s words out of his mouth. Both men stumble away from the snag held in each other’s arms. They turn at the same time, cheek to cheek, to see a fifty-pound branch pocked with embers fall to where Miles’s bootprints are still visible in the ash.

  Before Miles can thank him, Mungo advances on the trunk again and hammers in another wedge. In a moment, the snag topples altogether. Miles opens the gas on the chainsaw, bucking the fallen tree into two-foot pieces with Mungo following behind him, dousing them with foam. Through the process, Miles keeps waiting for a break to say something, but Mungo doesn’t stop long enough to let him, and when the snag is entirely dismembered, they both go to help the rest of the crew cut fireline. Miles had almost forgotten how it goes. You trust the men you can, and when they save your life, you get back to the job so you can be in a position to save theirs the next time around.

  By the end of the first hour, the rising sun along with the radiant heat of the fire sweats the adrenaline out of them. Miles realizes not only that he is probably too old for this but that all of them are. Except for King, of course. Yet the advantage of the kid’s youth is consistently undermined by his reveries. He could go like hell for forty minutes at a time but then, the next time you checked, he’d be frozen with his spade stuck in the earth, studying the way a breeze passes fire from one spruce crown to another.

  Like now, for instance.

  After Miles has cut his line far enough to join where Crookedhead’s started, he raises his head to find King standing straight, his pulaski leaning against his leg and one hand over his brow to block the sun. The kid’s eyes jumping between the flames. It holds Miles where he is for a moment, too. Not the fire, but the look on King’s face. The same look he’d seen years ago when he caught Brad sitting rapt by the orange tongues of a barbecue. It was only a year before the guy started a bigger one all for himself.

  ‘King!’ Miles shouts, and the kid turns to face him. Only now does Miles notice how King’s entire frame is trembling.

  A second later, the kid is at work again. Eyes down, the pulaski blade stirring the earth. Miles can’t see his face anymore, but he does his best to believe it is as it was before. Just another grave digger, burying smoke.

  They pause for an early lunch of packed rations—tins of flaked ham, a block of cheddar, saltines—all of it seasoned by an airborne peppering of ash. The fire seems to watch them as the men set the food atop their knees. But when they start to eat, the flames take the opportunity to skip ahead to the fireline. Antennae of clear gas measure the raked ground. Orange hairs the height of Popsicle sticks crop up along the line in both directions.

  It’s still a small blaze. Almost all the fuels within the clearing had been devoured, and when the team completes a line around it, it will die of starvation. Even now you could stomp the whole business out with boots if you had a dozen more pairs. A half-hour of rain would leave it a hissing patch of mud.

  And yet Miles can’t help marvelling at its defiance, the way it travels low and fast to find a way out. He knows a fire is incapable of thought. In fact, it irritates him when others think of them as possessing distinct personalities, as hunters see a human face in the animals they kill. Miles has called such thinking ‘p
yropomorphic’ in his notes. It’s mysticism, as far as he’s concerned. Which makes it stupid at best, and at worst, unsafe.

  Still, even Miles can’t help thinking that certain jobs, maybe one out of every hundred, are different. Chaos fires.

  Fighting fire is like war, Miles recalls his first foreman telling him as he swallows his one and only bite of cheese. You’re either totally in control or totally out of control.

  Even as the men drop the food from their laps and jump up to defend the line, a sudden wind from the east—then the south, then the north—breathes life into the flames.

  ‘It’s going for a run,’ Crookedhead James says, a spoonful of ham dropping from his mouth.

  The fire eats only the ground’s flashiest fuels—needles, grass nests and cones—and ignores the trees, travelling faster than it possibly could if it stopped to consume everything in its path. The attack crew stand for a moment with forearms resting on their tool handles to watch it run white tubers over the soil. In less than two minutes, it has skittered a circle around the end of the fireline they’d started on and is free.

  ‘Fast little bugger,’ Jerry McCormack observes.

  ‘No good standing here cooing at the thing,’ Mungo says, already running back fifty feet and raking out a new line of deadfall. ‘Drop the lead out and give me a hand over here!’

  They try. A hasty effort at a second line that all of them recognize won’t work even as they bend to the task. After five frenetic, useless minutes, they stop again as the fire breaches the ground they would have cut if they had another hour.

  ‘It’s coming,’ King says, more in wonder than fear.

  ‘We’ve got slopover all over the place,’ Jerry confirms.

  They keep digging at the second line only to remain busy while Miles decides what to do next.

  ‘This isn’t going to come close,’ he says finally.

  ‘We can radio in for an air show,’ Mungo says. ‘Dump half the Lapie River on the thing. See how it likes it.’

  ‘Take too long to get here to make a difference.’

  ‘Let’s stay at it.’

  ‘I didn’t say we’re quitting yet.’

  ‘What else you going to do? Try a backfire on it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The wind was weird for a second there.’

  ‘But it seems steady now. We burn out these last pines here and it might waltz right into its own black.’

  ‘How do we make sure our own fire doesn’t come round on us?’ King asks.

  ‘We do it fast.’

  As Mungo, Jerry, Crookedhead and King cut a third fireline, this one a short semicircle around the straggling pines, Miles pulls the fusees out of his pack to ignite the backfire. He tries to tell himself that this isn’t desperation but a balance of risks. If it doesn’t work, the fire they set now will join hands with the main fire, giving it a hundred yards for free and a boost of speed at the same time. On the other hand, the backfire could still burn away the fuels standing in the main fire’s path in time, denying it an escape route. Miles knows it will all depend on the wind. One more dust-up like a minute ago and it could turn round on them like a stampeding herd.

  When they’ve finished cutting a rough containment line, Miles touches the fusees to the sagewort on the other side.

  ‘Stand away!’ Miles orders them, but when he glances over his shoulder, the men are already running from the heat of the backfire. Only Mungo stays with him.

  ‘Let’s move it!’

  Mungo’s voice awakens him from the briefest of dreams. One second he is lighting the backfire and feeling the new flames singe his cheeks, and the next he’s leaping off the edge of Eagle’s Nest Bluff with Rachel holding his hand as he goes. Both of them gliding over the river with an osprey slicing the blue ahead of them, teaching them how to dive, how to use the currents to rise again without effort.

  For a time, the five of them stand wild-eyed and panting. Already, the grass backfire is racing toward the larger burn, skipping over the feathery tops of the foxtails.

  ‘Would you look at that,’ Crookedhead James says. ‘Like a baby running to its momma.’

  It’s only as they watch the backfire spread across the last green in the clearing that Miles points out they haven’t given this job a name yet.

  ‘The Comeback.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jerry says, cupping his ear to hear King’s suggestion. But Miles heard it the first time.

  ‘The Comeback Fire,’ Miles announces. ‘It’s a good name.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mungo says, slapping King on the back. ‘You’ve got the gift, kid.’

  Miles hears the strain in Mungo’s voice, a tone halfway to sarcasm. It’s probably only exhaustion, the mangling of words that must pass through a scorched throat. But for a second, as the men watch their backfire join and double the fire it was meant to extinguish, it makes Miles wonder about secondary meanings. Does the kid have the gift for naming fires or for fighting them? More than either of these, Miles hopes he possesses the gift of surviving them.

  The day is warm, but it’s the light that assaults him. Nothing like Kentucky, or anything he’d had beamed down on him in the South, either back in the days when there was an ozone layer or in the present when he’s been told there isn’t. And he could take the heat. Not that he’s been out in it much these past twenty—Christ, has it been forty?—years of office followed by rec-room cocoonage, when his only exposure to unrefrigerated air was the dazed walk from the Lincoln and across whatever parking lot he found himself in. Still, he was born in Alabama. What his daddy called the devil’s sauna. He could recall summers so hot the dog would rather shit on the floor and take a whipping than go out into the yard to do his business. Hadn’t slowed him down a bit. Jackson Bader has never fainted in his life, not from the sun or any other damn thing, and he has no plans to start now. Not in Canada, anyhow.

  It’s the light up here. He’s not showing any burn—the wide-brimmed Tilley he picked up at the airport and Elsie’s near-constant sunblock slatherings have taken care of that—but it hasn’t stopped him from being cooked alive. The light. Pure, stark, true as heaven.

  He’d heard that July days up here were long. What he hadn’t been warned of was the terrible brightness of the dusks. High noon didn’t mean a thing in the north. It was the sun’s coming-at-you-sideways five-to-nine shift that forced his eyes shut and pulled the plug on his legs, so that he could only stumble on, radioactive and blind.

  Not that he’s complaining. Not that he’s saying a word. Elsie asks him if he’s all right on the quarter-hour and he grunts her away. The Indian kid seems to be looking out for her now, which is just dandy with Jackson. As for the barfight loser, he’s got his own troubles. And the guide knows who’s signing her cheque, so what does it matter if he doesn’t feel so good? They’re tracking a big Kodiak and it’s close. He paid more for the new Winchester slung over his shoulder than the mahogany cabinets in last year’s kitchen reno, and he’s used both to the exact same degree. Not a once. But that’s about to change.

  He walks on after the others. There is nowhere to look where the brightness hasn’t laid the world bare. It’s a funny thing, but goddamn it if he doesn’t miss his own shadow.

  With every sting between her claws or on the moist puck of her nose, the bear feels whatever advantage she might have started with in the morning racing away. Not only do the human hunters pursue them now but so do a handful of yellowjackets. Circling, blinding, chainsawing in her ears. A few of them using her mouth as a fountain, licking at the saliva that foams around her chops. She is thankful that the wasps have elected to focus all of their punishments on her and leave the cubs alone.

  The wasps have come with her so far because she is carrying them. Deep in the fur at the top of her back, a queen has colonized the hump of the bear’s shoulders.

  The sow would like to stop and roll onto her back, wriggle over the blades of loose shale so that her tormentors would be sliced into a thousand
twitching bits. She’d like to drown them by running over the crest and down to the river, crouching in the cold water until their striped corpses bobbed on the surface. She’d like to howl in self-pity. But there isn’t the time to stop now, and a mountain crossing would leave them fully exposed to view for miles around. Even complaint is barred to her.

  She counts each new sting as a provocation. In time, the hunters and the yellowjackets become parties to the same offence. There will be an end to running, she knows. And when it comes, the bear is glad that there will be something left in her for them.

  Chapter 14

  She has been looking for the bear so long—not just the past ten hours but for as long as she has hunted, and possibly longer than that—that when it looms out from behind the snarled end of an uprooted spruce it is the embodiment of her whole imagination. Nothing about the animal is unfamiliar to her. Margot watches the bear enlarge as it humps in her direction and has each of its physical details confirmed one by one. The four nipples hanging from her underbelly, shiny and round as the ends of dull pencils. The way she breathes through her mouth so that her incisors are exposed in a glinting overbite. The becalmed eyes that suggest disguised madness.

  What wind there is cools the sweat on Margot’s cheeks, blowing her scent behind so that she remains undetected. At the same time, the air delivers whiffs of the animal’s fur to the back of her throat from a hundred and fifty yards away, allowing her to taste the grizzly’s cologne of wet straw and peat. Margot lowers herself until she is lying flat behind a bush of wild huckleberries. The bears’ tracks had led her higher onto a broad rockslide. It is early evening. Maybe seven, maybe eight—Margot considers checking her watch but her arm insists on staying where it is. The time doesn’t matter in any case. It is the beginning of the long end of a clear July day.