The Wildfire Season Page 25

  ‘You’re seeing things in me that aren’t there.’

  ‘Maybe. But if I’m wrong, it’s my time to waste, isn’t it?’

  He wants to say yes. Margot was wrong about him, he felt sure. She was pegging her hopes for improvement on a man for no better reason than she didn’t know him as well as the man she was with. And if Miles had run once, there’s no way he could say he wouldn’t run again. But was it his job to refuse the good luck that came his way?

  In the end, Miles’s answer was his silence. He stepped back and his eyes turned away to slide along the Yukon’s current below, the light popping off the green surface like camera flashes. He’d never been here with someone else before, and it was a mistake. The place had the same effect on others, apparently, as it did on him. It drew out the honesty we work the hardest to fool ourselves about, the things you can face only briefly for the pain of its light, like the sun on the river below.

  ‘I hear you,’ Margot said after perhaps three full minutes.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You listened. Most wouldn’t have done even that.’

  Margot stood, and Miles thought she was about to start down the trail to the truck, but instead she came forward and kissed him. Not forgiving or grateful or friendly. Not a kiss meant to communicate something else, but a real one, flavourful and promising. It let him know what he was going to miss. And when she pulled away, he already did.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll have to dream on it.’

  She stopped and faced him. The last time she did before they made it back to town.

  ‘When I first met Wade, I thought he was going to be the one to break me in two. But I was wrong. It was always going to be me breaking him. My guess is you have some experience of what that feels like.’

  Margot was already walking away from him before Miles saw what she meant, what she’d seen in him, and that she was right.

  The great bird roars through the treetops, its song so loud and low it thumps straight through their skins. The sow leads her cub under the cover of an alder bough. If the bird sees them, she worries it will sweep down to pluck him up in its talons, as she has seen hawks do with marmots and moles.

  Neither bear has heard a helicopter before. Nevertheless, when they spot it flying across a clear spot in the branches they both recognize it as a machine. Trucks, generators, bush planes. There is never more than a moment’s mistaking these for a living thing.

  Knowing what it is doesn’t prevent the bears from being terrified. While the cub is startled by the range of noise it makes—from the guttural thrumming to the rotor’s piercing whine—the sow fears what its arrival might mean. The way the bird circles, flying low and fast over the hillside. Searching for something. Given where they are, high on the killing ground and without any sign of other bears in the vicinity, it’s probably them.

  When it finally leaves, the cub is reluctant to follow the sow any higher. A minute farther up the slope and they will pass through the end of the treeline, leaving them plainly visible on the subalpine fields. The bird is likely to return. When it does, he knows it will hunt him sooner than his mother. And he is so tired. The desire for sleep has surpassed everything now. If he could only tuck himself against her belly through the rest of the day and the night, he will cross whatever mountains she wants him to in the morning.

  The she-grizzly reads his wishes and dismisses them with another prod of her snout. As she does, she smells the cub’s blood seeping through his fur.

  She lumbers on and the cub follows. In her ears, she can almost translate the grinding echo of the helicopter into the rush of water in the creek on the other side.

  There are only six left to watch it come.

  Over the last several hours the air-vac has picked up Ross River bit by bit and dropped it on the south side of the St Cyrs. At first, the job had gone slowly but more or less calmly—only a handful had attempted to jump the line, and had been ordered back to their places without the threat of force. The helos had come and gone in regular appearances, so that a rhythm of approaching and fading rotors established itself in the afternoon’s fog.

  The last twenty evacuees, however, had longer to wait. A strengthening wind made landings trickier, the pilots sometimes requiring three or more attempts before touching down. The sounds of engines had been replaced only by the call of names, the eruption of coughing fits.

  The delay had made none more nervous than King. Right at the end the kid had showed up from wherever he’d been hiding, his face bloodless and slick. When Mungo demanded to know what he’d been doing, King claimed to be ill, a sudden stomach bug that had him bent over the toilet in the fire office. Mungo decided there was little point in voicing his doubts.

  Now the kid and almost everyone else is gone. The remaining half-dozen wait for the wind to clear the sky over their heads. For the last twenty minutes, the yellow smoke has huddled at the edge of the trees around the softball diamond like a gathering army of sand. Now, all at once, it advances.

  As it spouts through the chain link of the backstop and runs the baselines toward the last evacuees standing by the bleachers, all but one of them step closer together. They brush against each other’s shoulders so that, when the smoke passes over them, they won’t be left alone.

  ‘Stay where you are. The last two—’

  ‘Pam?’

  ‘Over here.’

  ‘I’ve got her, Jackie.’

  ‘Terry? Where’s Alex?’

  ‘Right beside me. But I don’t—’

  At first, they think their rising voices are consumed by a noise made by the smoke itself. A choir of sustained shrieks and grinding metal.

  The five who remain together link arms and shuffle back from where they believe the helo is lowering. There is little room for escape. Ten feet from where they started, their heels hit the lowest plank of the bleachers. The men tumble back hard as the women plunge their hands through the smoke to pull them up. A gust from the rotors nearly lifts all of them off their feet, breaking their grips. The helicopter takes sudden shape. Its wind pins them against the planks.

  Mungo blinks up and watches the blades lean toward him. Their rotation lends them a velvety sheen, like the LPs he used to play at the radio station before they padlocked the place. He is aware of motion all around him. A glimpse of Pam’s bare arms, waving. Alex looking around in just-dawning puzzlement.

  ‘Get down!’ he orders them against his own inclination to reach up and test the sharpness of the blades.

  With an upward suck of air the smoke is momentarily lifted away, forming a hundred-foot ceiling over the field. The visibility allows the helo’s pilot to see how close he is to the bleachers and pull back on the stick.

  But his correction is too abrupt, and the landing rails gouge into the grass. As the helo shudders back it leaves two snaking trenches in the ground. When it manages to settle it is directly on top of the pitcher’s mound, so that its frame totters slightly, see-sawing even as the engines calm to an idling roar.

  ‘Everybody okay?’ Mungo is asking even as he guides them down to the first-base line. ‘Pam? Pam?’

  He directs this at his daughter in particular because of the way she stares at the helicopter awaiting them, her arms stiff at her sides.

  ‘Keep an eye on her,’ he directs Jackie, and steps back to the bleachers.

  ‘The dog,’ Alex says as he climbs up to the step below hers.

  ‘What dog?’

  ‘Before the smoke. She was with him.’

  ‘Rachel?’

  ‘Stump. The helicopter scared him. I think she went to bring him back.’

  ‘I’ll find her,’ Mungo says, his voice even but his grip firm around Alex’s elbow.

  When all of them make it down to the grass they stand facing the helicopter. The pilot waves at them. They can lip-read his profanities through the haze.

  ‘We’ll have to go in two trips,’ Mungo says. ‘I want Alex, R
achel and Pam on this one.’

  ‘But Rachel’s not here.’

  ‘I’m going to look for her. But if I can’t find her right away, I want you out.’

  ‘I’m not leaving without her.’

  ‘You’ve got to do—’

  Before Mungo has finished, the smoke doubles upon itself, blurring the ground from under their feet. Only now do they feel the burning in their eyes. When it half clears again, they notice the tears spilling down each other’s cheeks, as though all of them have been caught in the same wash of unexpected emotion.

  ‘It’s getting messy here,’ Terry Gray says.

  Mungo glances past the bleachers at where Rachel has most likely run. When he turns back to the helo, its pilot is repeatedly jerking his thumb up and down.

  ‘It might take a minute,’ Mungo says, raising his voice and struggling to keep it flat at the same time. ‘So listen. I want Jackie, Pam and Terry on this helo.’

  ‘It should be you,’ Terry Gray says.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘That’s your wife and daughter—’

  ‘I promised him,’ Mungo hisses, stepping close so that only Terry hears him.

  He lays his hand on the top of Terry’s arm. Pushes him away. The taller man stumbles without losing Mungo’s eyes.

  Even as the three of them climb aboard, the pilot is powering the engines up to their previous pitch.

  It’s at the same time that Pam pulls the door shut behind her that Mungo feels a weight against his leg. He looks down to see Stump squeezed between him and Alex. They both swing around at once. Through the grey, they watch Rachel slapping her palms against the dog’s rump, pushing him forward like a farmer nudging a cow into its pen.

  I found him, the girl’s lips say.

  When Mungo turns back to the helo he can see that Terry Gray has spotted the girl as well and is now fiddling with the door handle to get out. Before he can, Mungo throws both hands out flat like an umpire calling a player safe at first base.

  Already, the landing rails are lifting from the pitcher’s mound. The smoke curls around the ship, obscuring the passengers’ faces in the windows. There is no time even to wave goodbye, if such a gesture had occurred to those either in the air or on the ground.

  When they can no longer hear the departing helo, Mungo directs Alex and Rachel back onto the bleachers. The smoke lowers and lifts off the softball diamond like skirts of lace.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he tells them, and in his voice he hears the false edge that comes with willing what one says to be the same as making it happen.

  When Miles drops Elsie Bader onto a cot in the fire base’s medical tent, the sudden release of weight from his arms lifts them high. Palms open, trembling. He looks like a born-again at a revival meeting.

  ‘Is she alive?’ he asks the medic, who stands stunned by their unexpected appearance.

  ‘There’s a pulse,’ he says finally, two fingers pressed to Mrs Bader’s neck. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘I think I’ve got one too.’

  ‘Have a seat.’

  ‘Me first,’ Margot says, stepping around them both to collapse into the chair the medic had offered. Tom follows, wearing the same mischievous grin Miles had seen him share with Rachel in the playground.

  Miles looks around for something to sit on, a bottle of water, anything that might be of use. The tent is suddenly too small for him. Through his weakness, he feels himself swelling with nervous might. Even now, his raised arms have come only halfway down.

  ‘Go,’ Margot says. ‘They’re out there somewhere.’

  He nods. Margot puts a raised finger against her lips. When he can’t think of any way of saying how glad he is that she is here, safe, he nods again.

  Once he’s out, the taste of smoke has intensified in Miles’s mouth. His tongue fat against his teeth. He tries calling for Alex and Rachel but it doesn’t come out right. Their pictures have been so vivid for him that assigning them names feels as though he is speaking of the wrong people altogether.

  The base is small. Maybe half a dozen wall tents set up in a rough circle, three mowed helipads, a portable radio antenna stuck to the top of a fourby—four. At the north and south ends, orange windsocks wave disconsolately on aluminum poles. Around these structures, forty firefighters and the population of Ross River wander about, helping themselves to sandwiches laid out on a tarp and shaking their heads at the trick of events that had pulled them out of their lives to drop them here, in a meadow next to the third of the three Lapie lakes.

  Miles catches sight of men he drinks with at the Welcome Inn. Bonnie waves his way and seems about to shout something but, when she opens her mouth, changes her mind. He moves through the transplanted town, absently patting the shoulders of his neighbours. Earl, the hotel manager. Then Crookedhead James and King, standing together. When the kid spots Miles he looks away, refusing to meet his eyes.

  The two faces are nowhere to be seen.

  He’s running now. Circling through the same clumps of people, casting his eyes over their heads. He notices the way they watch him, his stumbling frame interrupting their conversations. Frightening them.

  Terry Gray is the one who finally stops him. Miles is so tired that, now that he’s still, he nearly buries his cheek against the man’s chest.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Listen, there are some—’

  ‘Where are they, Terry?’

  ‘It was your dog.’

  Miles waits for him to explain, but Terry Gray looks at him as though it should be obvious how Stump would play a determining role in a situation like this.

  ‘Rachel,’ Miles says.

  ‘Your girl went to look for him right when the helo we came out on was landing. There was so much smoke and the pilot wasn’t going to wait for—’

  He pauses. Miles watches as his pupils blow up so wide the black eats all the colour around them. Your girl. He hadn’t missed that part, either.

  ‘It was Mungo’s call,’ Terry goes on. ‘Alex wasn’t leaving without her, and he wasn’t leaving without either of them.’

  ‘What about the air-vac after yours?’

  ‘It was lousy with smoke in there. And then there’s the wind. Even as we were lifting off we could feel it knocking us around. The last helo turned back at the ridge. Our pilot told us we were lucky we didn’t smash into the side of the goddamn mountain.’

  ‘Can’t they go back for them now?’

  ‘I keep checking, and they keep telling me it’s no good.’

  A new thought skips across Miles’s mind. ‘Is Ruby here?’

  Terry shakes his head.

  The helicopter engines whistle at them from the other side of the base but their rotors remain still. On standby. They could stay this way for the next six hours and not run out of fuel.

  Without knowing where he’s going or what he intends to do, Miles walks toward the idling helos. There is a vague notion that he will beat the molars out of the first pilot he sees, but even in his frustration, Miles knows it makes little sense and would do no good.

  He makes it halfway before the fire director up from Whitehorse stops him. Miles recalls that he used to like Dennis Parks. Now, something in the forced sympathy and suspiciously clean-shaven jawline of the man determines that Miles has no choice but to despise him forever.

  Parks is talking into his satellite phone and making a scribbling motion at Miles. The press want to know how the region’s biggest wildfire story of the decade is shaping up, and Dennis Parks is their go-to spokesperson. Half the continent this side of the Rockies, from L.A. to Anchorage, is burning. Amidst the inferno, Ross River’s drama has made network coverage. What’s immediately needed is some punchy, front-line commentary for the suppertime news hour. Over the longer term, however, there will be an overwhelming demand for heroes. Dennis Parks has volunteered his name for all causes.

  After a laughing goodbye, the director snaps the phone shut and returns it to his belt. Then he star
ts talking at Miles. His pink chin bouncing up and down.

  ‘This Comeback Fire of yours is something else, Miles,’ Parks is telling him, eyebrows raised but with an admiring half smile, as though he’s talking about a giant lake trout Miles has just pulled into their boat. ‘It’s breaking all the rules, that’s for sure. Definitely one for the history books.’

  ‘I couldn’t give a shit about history right now, Dennis.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘I know what we’re dealing with.’

  ‘Not sure you do.’

  ‘I was on initial attack.’

  ‘That’s right. You were.’

  ‘What’s that—?’

  ‘Then it got away from you. And now it’s doing what it wants. That’s why we haven’t been able to send a bird back in there.’

  ‘If you think I’m going to accept that as an excuse for you not doing your job, you’re way off.’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘There are still people in there. And you’re telling me how unique this fire is. Like it’s already over and there’s nothing to do but explain why we couldn’t have done more.’

  Parks looks over his shoulder and notices a dozen evacuees staring at them. The optics on an exchange of this kind leave something to be desired. He’d taken a professional development course in Vancouver at the start of the season entitled Controlling the On-Site Public Relations Environment. So far, his handling of Miles McEwan would have gotten him a flunking grade.

  There’s nowhere for Parks to go but around the back of his truck. Miles follows him. Parks would ask him to sit in the cab, but he isn’t so sure he wants to be in closed quarters with the Ross River crew chief at the moment. A growing number of onlookers still watch them through the truck’s windows, but now that they’re on the other side, Parks hopes they can’t hear what they say.

  ‘We’re doing everything we can short of endangering our own men.’

  ‘Don’t you think Mungo Capoose is already in danger? Last time I checked, he was one of our men too. Unless Indians count for less down at head office.’