The Wildfire Season Read online

  Although she couldn’t see anything at first, it was this place that told Margot she had caught up with the bears. Now her hand rests on the stock of her rifle, but she makes no effort to raise it. Wade, Tom and the Baders are still five minutes behind her. She pulls her arms in tight and digs her chin into the sphagnum moss carpeting the ground in an effort to disappear. Her goal has nothing to do with deceiving the bear. Not for the first time, Margot wishes to be here and not here, a state beyond invisibility. She’d give all she has to see how a wild thing as fine as this moves without it being hunted or watched.

  Margot has dreamed of this bear. Not as a vague objective or trophy weight, as a bear like this one, but the bear coming at her in this exploding moment of particularity, as unmistakable as identifying one’s own child among others in a crowded playground. If she thinks hard enough about it, all of Margot’s dreams have had this animal lurking around the edges, sometimes taking an active role but more often standing just offstage as a threat, a savage angel. A magnificent silver-tip no less than eleven feet from snout to tail. Every time the sow picks up her feet Margot measures her claws, and every time, she adds another inch to her estimate. Four, five, six.

  All at once, the bear launches back on its rump and starts batting at the sides of its head. Margot can’t help thinking that the animal is trying to jar a memory loose, just as Margot does with a smack to the forehead whenever she forgets to make a payment on her truck. The bear gives itself a beating that thuds against the rocky slope and echoes back, deep as the rolling approach of a thunderhead. Then Margot sees the yellowjackets. Spinning around in a tormenting carousel, faster and faster. The great forepaws flail about in an already flagging counterattack, useless as shaking your fist at the sun to stop it from shining.

  It’s only when the sow gives up on the wasps altogether that the cubs join her. A pair of two-year-olds, just as Margot had guessed from their tracks, but bigger than she pictured them to be. The smaller one might be a hundred and forty pounds, but its bigger brother has to be close to two hundred. They inch closer to their mother with uncertain steps, wondering if her rage at the yellowjackets might be redirected toward them if they approach at the wrong time.

  Ten feet short of the sow, the two of them fall back on their rumps just as their mother had and raise their noses to the air. Already they know to be wary of open spaces, even when under the close protection of the she-grizzly. The cubs sniff for their pursuers first, then for food. Neither seem to be anywhere near. The breeze is light but remains steady against Margot’s face. So long as Wade and the Baders keep their mouths halfway shut, the bears won’t know they’re here.

  ‘Just like you said,’ a voice says, so close that Margot takes it to be coming from within her. ‘A big old Boone and Crockett.’

  Margot shifts her view from the rockslide to take in Jackson Bader lying next to her. For the first time since they stepped out of the truck this morning, the old man’s breathing is steady. In fact, he appears not to be breathing at all. His eyes agog, a bloodshot map. She watches his trembling fingers wipe the moustache of salt from his lip.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Coming up. Your man Wade a bit behind.’

  ‘Let’s wait for them. The wind’s against us nice. Take our time.’

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

  For a second that nearly springs a laugh from her chest, Margot mistakes his remark as being directed at his wife, who joins them now on her hands and knees, with Tom sliding down next to her. But of course he means the bear. He doesn’t even turn when Elsie strokes his back. Then Mrs Bader sees the animals as well.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  For half a minute the four of them watch the cubs circle round their mother, standing on their hind legs to bat the yellowjackets from her flank. When she tires of this play the sow takes a long stride away from them, and shows the full length of her side to the hunters. But the cubs stay close, wriggling under her, so that the target appears as a single boulder balanced on the slope.

  Without hesitation or instruction, Jackson Bader sets the butt of his rifle to his shoulder. The Winchester strikes Margot as too pretty to be used. She has never seen a firearm so clean. Waxed, almost. An artifact you’d see laid upon a velvet pillow in a glass case.

  ‘Wait a second,’ Margot whispers to him sharply.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’re too close together. And you’re not even holding that gun right.’

  ‘I got ‘em.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Not until I tell you, you don’t.’

  ‘I got—’

  Bader fires twice.

  The shots’ concussion lifts the old man clear from the ground. He is in the air for less than a second but Margot is able to note how every part of him twists away from the rifle as he goes, pushing it off him, as though a snake has come alive in his hands.

  When he meets the earth again it lays him out in the shape of a horseshoe. Too small for his clothes. The breath coming out of him in little burps.

  ‘Jackson?’

  Margot hears Mrs Bader’s voice, though she’s surprised she’s able to, as the ringing in her ears from Bader’s gun snuffs out all other sound. A whisper of perfect disbelief. The utterance that comes before terror, before recognition, before the first tally of how terribly things have changed. It’s the only word she knows.

  ‘Jackson?’

  ‘Hold on. We need to—’

  ‘Jackson!’

  Mrs Bader goes to her husband in a lunge so sudden that Margot believes the woman intends to strangle him.

  ‘Wade! We got some trouble here,’ Margot shouts. ‘Wade?’

  A dial tone in her ears. An angry yellowjacket lands on the back of her hand. Stings three knuckles in a row.

  Without knowing why and before going to check on the old man or even turning the other way to see if either of the shots had found the bears, Margot picks up Bader’s shining Winchester and pumps out the remaining cartridges, watches them roll between pads of lichen, and disappear. It’s a light gun, all right. When she throws it behind her it tumbles bore over stock before clattering to the end of the avalanche chute. For a second, Margot, Tom and Mrs Bader look down at where it has come to rest and are blinded by it shining up at them.

  Bader’s cough brings them back. It lifts his chest a full two inches off the ground before it crunches down on a bed of stones. After this, Margot sees a shiver run down the old man’s back and out to the ends of his limbs. The tiny ripples scuttle under his clothes so that she expects to see a thousand ants rush out from his collar and sleeves.

  ‘Where’s Wade?’ Margot asks Tom.

  ‘Back there.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘Took one look at the bear and just sort of—’

  ‘He ran?’

  Tom nods.

  Another cough from Bader. Less forceful than the first, but with a wet rattle at the end.

  In the next instant, Mrs Bader has her hand in her waist pouch, searching. Speaks her husband’s name again, this time as a lover would. Lies down to stroke the back of her hand over his cheeks.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Margot says.

  ‘He needs his pills.’

  ‘What pills?’

  ‘His heart, his heart, his heart.’

  ‘What about his heart?’

  ‘It was his birthday.’

  Although it will do no good, Margot considers striking the woman. Before she knows it, she has raised her hand at an angle to deliver a downward slap. Elsie Bader sees it and pouts.

  ‘He wanted a bear for when he turned seventy,’ she says. Her face swollen. It’s enough to lower Margot’s hand. ‘He said he’d be okay so long as I came with him. It had been so long since he’d asked me for anything. I told him of course I would. I’d go anywhere he wanted me to. And I would. I—’

  ‘Can you give him his pills now?’ Margot interrupts, looking down at Bader as though calculating whether he
could be folded up and stuffed in her backpack.

  ‘He said he’d be fine.’

  ‘But he sure as hell isn’t fine now. So can we slip him some of those—?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re gone,’ she cries. ‘The hills. Up and up and up. There’s been too many hills.’

  Margot turns away from the Baders to look out over the killing ground. One of the cubs, the smaller of the two, lies still on its side. The other gut-shot but alive, limping in a dazed circle. The she-grizzly is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘We’ve got to move.’

  ‘Can’t we wait?’ Mrs Bader says, stroking her husband’s hair flat against his head.

  ‘He shot that cub. And looks to have done some damage to the other one, too.’

  ‘Where’s the big one now?’ Mrs Bader asks, turning to look behind her.

  ‘I don’t know. But she’s not going to stay away from her cubs long.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a birthday without a surprise, would it?’

  Margot has pulled the Remington off her shoulder and pumped a cartridge into the chamber before she registers the sound of crunching steps approaching off to the right. She rolls onto her side and steadies the site on the dark shape slumping out of the brush twenty yards away. It’s a poor position to shoot from, but she could hit a yellowjacket out of the air at this range.

  ‘For fuck sake, it’s me.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘No you goddamn weren’t.’

  Wade steps forward and only now does Margot lower the gun. He looks past her at the Baders, curled side by side on the rocks.

  ‘Did you know about his pills?’

  ‘His what?’

  This proves it, Margot thinks. I’m living with the worst liar that’s ever had reason to tell one.

  ‘I think he’s having a heart attack. That surprise you?’

  ‘I saw him take something. I didn’t know what.’

  ‘Thanks for letting me know, partner.’

  ‘I couldn’t—’

  ‘And then you run off at the first sight of a bear.’

  ‘I backed around to get a different angle from up in the alders.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t hear you shoot.’

  ‘It nearly ran me over. All I could do is try to get clear. And then you’ve got your rifle pointed in my face.’

  Margot stands and notices that the injured cub has disappeared from the slide. From her new height she can make out the full shape of the smaller cub lying still. The spray of blood exited from the back of its head.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go but back the way we came,’ Margot says.

  ‘I can carry him.’

  ‘You take one arm and I’ll take the other. Tom, you help Elsie. We’ll leave our packs here. They might slow her if she wants something to beat up on when she comes back.’

  She puts a hand against the back of Mrs Bader’s neck and the old woman spins around as though touched by ice.

  ‘We’ll take your husband. You just follow us close. Tom will be with you. You got that?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, in the same tone she would use to accept an offer of ladyfingers with her tea. ‘Yes, yes.’

  Wade and Margot step to each side of Bader’s body and yoke his arms over their shoulders. He emits a sigh that could be an expression of either resignation or pain. Margot counts aloud over top of it and, on three, they raise him to his feet. The toes of his boots dragging over the alpine blooms. Indian paintbrush, saxafrage, glacier lilies.

  Margot lifts her head long enough to judge the treeline to be five hundred yards away. It will take them all the hours of the night and some of the morning to reach the truck. In the meantime, she will be grateful for the cover of the spruces, a net of shade between them and the hard twilight.

  They don’t even make it that far.

  One of Bader’s sighs turns into a word.

  There.

  They keep pulling him forward, but Margot is sure of what she heard. She lifts her head again. Fifty feet away, the she-grizzly stands astride the trail. Glaring at them with eyes pulled halfway back into her skull.

  Margot releases Bader’s arm. The doubled weight forces Wade to let go of him as well, so that the old man falls face first into an embroidered square of rosewort.

  ‘The fuck?’

  At the sound of Wade’s voice, the bear takes a step forward, hackles raised. Swings her head low from side to side. Like it’s lost its contact lenses, as Margot’s father had put it on their first and only hunting trip together before the Mounties took him away for good. Margot had smiled as she thought she was expected to, but it was meant as a warning more than a joke. When a bear moves like that, you get your gun ready. And if you don’t have a gun, climb a tree. Margot had asked what to do if there weren’t any trees around. Play dead? The old bastard had laughed. You won’t have to play dead, girl.

  Even as she replays this loop of her father’s voice Margot is reaching back to pull the rifle off her shoulder. The sow’s head stops swinging. From somewhere behind her, Mrs Bader states her husband’s name once more.

  The rifle’s butt trips along the length of Bader’s back on its way up into Margot’s hands. Before it gets there the bear barks once and charges.

  All of them pitch off the trail, slipping down the rockslide with knives of shale cutting the backs of their ankles. Wade lets go of his shotgun and it clatters ahead, disappearing in a snarl of saskatoon bushes. The grizzly covers the ground between them in three strides. If she stops, turns and heads down the slide she would be upon the four of them before they could find their balance. Instead, she keeps running.

  Jackson Bader can only watch it come. The bear advances on him sideways. Taking her time. She allows him to appreciate her size, the futility of attempting anything now but the observation of her whims.

  When she stops, she stands directly over him, blowing foul air over his face. It forces his eyes shut, but only for a second. Bader wants to see. He wants to touch, too. He sits up on one elbow, but the animal’s chest is so high that even if he had the power to lift his arm straight up he couldn’t reach its chin.

  For a moment, the bear sniffs at the air over the old man, taking in whatever lifts off his skin. The deodorant he smeared on this morning. The deep-fried sweat. The powder from his gun’s empty shells.

  There might be time for Margot to take a shot, but something prevents her. Instead of trying to stop what she knows is to happen next, she feels only the need to prevent Bader’s wife from seeing it.

  Margot turns, expecting to see Elsie frozen behind her. And this is what Margot sees. Mrs Bader’s face at once blank and reflective of a hundred instantaneous, colliding thoughts. Fear is not among them.

  ‘Elsie?’ Margot says, reaching for her. But the woman is already turning away. Putting both her hands on Tom’s shoulders and shaking him.

  ‘This way,’ Elsie Bader says to the boy. ‘That first tree. Now run. Run.’

  Margot watches Mrs Bader grab Tom’s hand. It keeps them both on their feet as they scramble down the slope toward the treeline. Without pause she turns her back on her husband to guide her adopted son to safety.

  The old man closes his eyes so as not to look directly down the bear’s throat. It doesn’t prevent him from smelling the hot gusts of its breath. Stewed berries, copper, rancid lettuce. It reminds him of the one and only time he stuck his head into Elsie’s compost bin back home.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  Even now, the broken squeak of his voice fills Jackson Bader with regret. He should have said nothing. He wishes he could pull his shaking hands away from his face. Not to see what the bear is going to do to him but to show that he isn’t afraid. Yet not even his pride can stop him from begging.

  ‘No,’ he says again, though he and the bear alone hear it this time.

  The only resistance he is capable
of is a jerking tremor in his legs. The bear comes close to sniff at a flailing boot. She seems to consider what she will do next from a number of alternatives. As she does, the boot glances harmlessly off her snout. It decides the matter for her.

  With a grunt, she steps on both of Bader’s legs until they are calmed. The bear drags her claws up until her front paws rest on his chest. When she finds her balance, the bear opens her mouth wide and lowers it over his.

  There is a succession of pops that, from where Margot stands, sound like stepped-on bubble wrap. The bear is patient. When she pulls back, Bader’s jaw hangs flat as a door knocker.

  The pain is so stunning and complete it closes his throat to any noise that might escape it. The bear continues to stand on him, so that his protest is limited to a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. Aside from this, he can do nothing but blink. It puts a flickering screen between the present moment and the next, cutting the bear’s motion into primitive animation. A flip book.

  Through it, he watches the animal come down on him again. With a dip of its head, the bear takes the top of his skull in its teeth and jerks it back. There is a single, hollow crack. Even Bader recognizes it, though nothing can be felt where it occurs, nothing anywhere.

  The bear grips him by the throat. In a fluid motion he is hauled into the air, his feet kicking over the rocks. When she sits back on her hindquarters, the sow rakes her claws down Bader’s body. Each stroke carves off another inch.

  Margot knows what is happening without looking.

  Fifty yards down, Elsie Bader knows too. Yet she doesn’t turn, doesn’t stop pushing Tom up the black spruce they have come to. It is only when he is fifteen feet up and hugging the trunk after her whispered urgings—Higher, Tom. That’s it, higher—that she allows herself to scream.

  It brings Margot down to her. Directing Elsie Bader over to the spruce next to Tom’s and lifting her up around the waist.

  ‘Grab that branch there,’ Margot tells her. ‘That’s right. Now pull. Up, up, up.’

  On the rockslide, Wade hasn’t moved. He watches the bear turn its attention to Margot and Mrs Bader and feels the moment as one that ushers in the unstoppable.