The Wildfire Season Page 30

  If it struck at half this pace it would be enough to crack the aspen in two. But as it enters the bush it is forced to weave around other trees first. It slows the animal so that, when it meets the aspen Alex has climbed, its impact is little more than a nudge.

  The bear sighs. Looks up at her feet, still kicking at the bark. It could rise up on its hind legs and yank her down without stretching.

  ‘C’mon!’ Miles is screaming now. ‘What about me? Take a step this way and I promise you, I will—’

  The bear spins around. The return of her eyes on him leaves Miles gasping. He looks away to see Mungo and Rachel struggling through a dead patch halfway up the spruce, the top swaying wildly. When he swings back to the bear’s position, it’s already on the trail.

  The bear remains focused on Miles alone. It lowers its head so that its chin hovers inches off the ground. A sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun.

  None of them hear it. But when the grizzly comes, she comes as though in flight.

  Miles watches her skin rippling under her fur, reaching forward. It enlarges her even more.

  From somewhere behind and above, Rachel shrieks.

  Whether it is the pitch of the child’s voice or the way Miles shakes his hands in front of him but stands his ground, the bear stops. Close enough that Miles need only lean forward to touch its nose.

  The bear blows spit. White bubbles over his boots.

  The echo of Rachel’s scream now a school bell rattling miles deep in the valley. Each time Miles inhales it fills him with a new undercurrent of the bear’s odour. Straw. Fermented berries.

  He can hear Mungo still scrabbling at the spruce’s bark. Without turning his head away from the bear, Miles slowly backs up to join him.

  ‘Get up there,’ he whispers when he stands beside Mungo, holding him around the waist with his good arm to give him a boost.

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Just hug it tight and I’ll push you.’

  When Mungo and Rachel have made it up as far as they can go, Miles finds his own tree and tries to pull himself up using only one arm. The bear walks over to get a better view of his struggles. He swings for a moment before hooking his bad elbow over the lowest branch. Uses it to winch his feet off the ground.

  He presses his cheek to the bark. The bear moves between their trees, snorts the air beneath their dangling feet. When she has confirmed which of them remains, she sits. Looks down the slope to watch the fire coming up at them. All of them do. An audience stilled by the same dancing forms.

  Chapter 26

  They might have already figured out it was him.

  He’s not sure how, whether by a witness he was unaware of or evidence he was fool enough to leave behind, but in any case, he blames the firestarter. Not only for doing what he did but for failing to protect him from the consequences.

  All the firestarter had to do was carry the memory of what was done, yet it is too easily distracted even for this simple job, and leaves him with himself more and more. In fact, he thinks the firestarter may be leaving him for good now. A creation meant to do things, not weigh them, not rationalize their harm. The firestarter is gone and he is alone with the knowledge that he will never be what he was before.

  It didn’t matter what he’d meant the fire to accomplish. Not now. This was his real crime, more fundamental than the incidental destruction, worse even than the killings. He had been guilty of thinking he could determine the intent of fire simply by igniting it with his own intent. It was an offence to nature. In a different time, according to a different religion, it would be the sort of thinking to anger gods.

  Now they were coming for him. Not for the firestarter, not an excuse stuffed with straw, but him.

  He’d been wrong to think he could divide himself as he’d tried to do. A man may be capable of any number of things, but even the most surprising of these only confirm the truth of who he’s been all along.

  Chapter 27

  Don’t look.

  Below them, the bear whoofs. Pacing between the trees they cling to, knocking her head against their trunks as she goes. Even this much of her weight pulls white roots from the ground.

  Bears are like bumblebees. If you ignore them long enough, they go away.

  Miles sends mind-messages out to the girl. It is only an excuse to stay where he is with his eyes closed a moment longer. But he’s convinced that she can hear him anyway.

  You’re still looking, aren’t you? Cheater.

  The scaly bark leaves smears over the length of his scar. Lipstick kisses.

  I’m going to count to three and open my eyes. If I catch you looking, you’re in big trouble. Got it? One, two—

  Miles opens his eyes. He finds Rachel immediately, awake in Mungo’s arms. And she is looking. Not at the bear, but at him.

  He looks away. The bear is still there, waiting for them to come down on their own. That, or weaken and fall. It would be a game they might have a chance of winning if it weren’t for the fire, now charging uphill toward them, less than a hundred yards away. Miles had almost forgotten about it. After Bader, after Wade, after his long march there and back and nearly there again over the St Cyrs—he had earned a slice of time in which all of it could be misplaced. He’d hugged the tamarack and breathed its cologne of green tea and tarragon and thought of nothing.

  It was Rachel who had brought him back. The girl sending out messages of her own.

  She’s not leaving. Like a whisper in his ear, but closer. She’s waiting for us, isn’t she?

  Don’t look. Bears are like bumblebees.

  From his elevated position, Miles can see the end of the treeline. After that, the ridge is only another couple hundred yards farther through the high grass, although the last ascent is at a much steeper grade.

  ‘We have to go,’ he says.

  His words halt the bear. She looks up at him, head cocked.

  ‘Is it gone?’ Mungo asks.

  ‘She’s here. So is the fire.’

  ‘It’s coming up all around us.’

  ‘I’m going down first,’ Miles says, directing his words to the bear as much as to Mungo.

  ‘Rachel?’

  ‘Mungo’s got her, Alex. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Just drop after I do. I’m the last back. Mungo, are you sure—?’

  ‘I can take her.’

  For a time, nothing happens. Even the orange cinders falling about them hang suspended.

  It’s Miles’s hands. They won’t let go of the branches that hold him against the trunk. One more thing. He has to speak to his fingers directly before they loosen their grip. After this, we’re done. I promise. Just let me go.

  He watches his white knuckles turn pink. The return of blood down his arm brings the first real flare of pain to his shoulder, and with it, Wade’s face. Coughing on the rifle as it was slammed against the back of his throat. His eyes laughing.

  Miles hadn’t paused. When he knew Alex, Mungo and the girl could no longer see him, he’d squeezed off the shot without having to tell himself that it was the only way, that six years of practised nothing had brought him to this.

  This could have been you.

  He’d read Wade’s mind as he reads the girl’s now, and this is what he wanted him to know, the thought he found so funny with a gun in his mouth. And Wade had been right.

  Miles watches his fingers lifting away from the branch, so that he wonders what’s holding him up at all. In the same instant, there’s a sound like ripped denim. His boots scraping two lines of bark as he falls.

  When he hits the ground his arms swing out for balance but he’s already on his back. The bear watching him.

  Oh, what a big lady you are.

  The grizzly comes forward until she looms over him. Her nostrils recording him in swift, audible sucks.

  And what a big nose you have.

  Without looking back at the bear, Miles gets to his feet and limps a few steps higher.


  He waits to hear the bass tremor of the animal’s charge, to feel its skull knock the last air out of him. It makes him go farther than he intended. He’s supposed to stand here, act as a distraction for the others. Instead he’s stumbling away.

  Again, he has to speak to his body to make it stop.

  It’s not about you. Nothing matters now but what you do for them.

  Miles skids on one foot and nearly loses his balance. It turns him around to face back down the trail. The grizzly hasn’t moved. For now, the clown show he’s putting on is too good to miss. Her teeth displayed in a malicious smile.

  ‘Now, Alex,’ Miles says.

  In his peripheral vision, he watches her shimmy down without hesitation. She doesn’t look back. As she walks past him, he hears the tin whistle of her breath.

  The bear stretches its neck to look around Miles at Alex putting distance between them on her way up to the ridge. Takes a single step forward. Alex hears the animal’s movement and stops.

  ‘Miles?’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘But you’re—’

  ‘Go.’

  Alex starts up again. Her departure from the circle of trees momentarily confuses the bear more than enrages it. What appeared to be a smile is gone, at any rate. In its place the sow curls out her lower lip as though savouring a taste of delicate flavour in the air.

  Miles hears the snap of dead branches. A fucknuts spoken under jagged breaths.

  ‘Mungo?’

  ‘Just got to get my arm out of—’

  As Mungo drops, he keeps one arm around the girl. Presses her to his chest and leans back to protect her from impact.

  The ground punches a word out of him. ‘Oh,’ he says, and lies still.

  The bear throws itself around to face them, its front paws scratching loose rocks aside. The noise of Mungo and Rachel’s fall has started a process in her mind that had been stalled in their time in the trees. Each of the animal’s breaths is a little bark, so that it sounds like she is mumbling to herself.

  Mungo bends up at the waist. He didn’t think he could move at all, but he’s rolling over, using his free hand to push off from the pine needles he’d landed in and the other to hold Rachel close. When he makes it to his feet he starts out after Alex.

  The bear lowers her chin. A short grunt escapes her. Quizzical, considered. Her anger has returned. All of them can see it. It’s in the way her eyes have been emptied. The three of them look into her and, for the first time, see nothing at all.

  The bear leaps. When she lands, she holds her snout a forearm’s length from Mungo’s face. Slowly, so he can see everything that it means, she opens her mouth wide.

  A hot breeze gusts up the slope. The flames passing from crown to crown. Lighting the candles.

  Into this silence that would be total were it not for the cracking of the fire rolling up at them, Rachel makes a sound so small only Mungo and the bear can hear it.

  ‘No,’ the girl says.

  Not pleading, not a reflex of terror or denial. She says it more as an acknowledgement of something already shared between the animal and the girl. The concluding word in an ongoing conversation.

  The bear examines her. Traces its eyes down the length of the seeping burn on her side.

  As slowly as she’d opened it, the sow closes her mouth. With the heat of the Comeback pressing on the back of his neck, Mungo steps around the bear and keeps going.

  Although all his legs want to do is carry him back up to join them, Miles forces himself to remain with the bear. He knows he has to because he tells himself so out loud.

  ‘It’s got to be you, Smoky. So just hang around with the big lady here awhile. Looks like there’s going to be some pyrotechnics in a minute. Should be one hell of a show.’

  The bear has turned around to listen to him. The loose skin over her eyes drawn up, incredulous.

  ‘Sure wish we had some marshmallows,’ he tells her. ‘I’d have shared them if I did.’

  A standing sleep comes over him. His vision narrowed so that all he can see is the bear.

  She is beautiful, Miles thinks, though not in the usual sense. A mystery not in the shape of her thoughts but in their irreducible simplicity. There is nothing within him to match the fineness of the bear’s mind.

  All he can do is return the memory of the girl’s fingers on his cheek. He lets the animal read his scar with her eyes as Rachel had with her touch. And as he does he feels the relief, the unexpected buoyancy that comes with being known.

  Chapter 28

  He hears his name and it sounds odd to him. A measure of distance. Not a man, not him. The voice that speaks it far away, as though to illustrate what his name truly means.

  When he can’t hear Alex anymore, he awakens.

  Everything has changed. The bear is still there. The fire. The blur of smoke. Yet his brief sleep has added design to the world. A visible code he stands a chance of figuring out.

  The bear’s eyes, for instance. Miles can see colour in them again. Something that he recognizes in the sow, a sharing of base priorities. The things that, when applied to animals, go by the name of instinct. The survival of children. Revenge. Mercy.

  Of these, Miles doesn’t know which he sees. All he knows is that the bear is letting him go. He steps back and her only response to his movement is a doleful grunt. He hobbles away up the hill. Tells his legs to reach farther.

  Alex and Mungo turn to watch him come, but he waves them on. They bend to stroke their fingers over the slope once more. Now he can see Rachel. Her chin on Mungo’s shoulder. The only one of them who looks back and meets the eyes that stare after them.

  The animal appears so small to her now, a fuzzy outline against the towering trees, their height doubled by top hats of flame. Smoke cascades over her, shading her from view.

  Before she disappears completely, the animal turns to face the oncoming fire. Her head pitched high as if recognizing something in the flames.

  Though she tries, the girl can’t see what the animal sees, whether it is her cubs, her mate, something remembered or dreamed. In any case, it’s not meant for her. Even Rachel, a child, knows that love is a kind of secret. One kept from yourself as often as from others.

  The bear sits up on hind legs as she does to detect a distant scent. If her own secret lives in the fire, it is about to be revealed.

  Every few seconds the smoke parts to let them look through at the ridgeline above. Close enough to see the shaved edges of individual rocks sitting on the crest. Past it, a blue sky so rich in colour it appears as an upturned lake. Then the smoke closes and the world is taken from them again.

  Orange strings have made their way through the grass. Now they branch off in both directions, connecting with other strings on their way up, so that it builds a narrowing web around them. It forces their line of ascent into zigzags.

  Only fires and bears run faster uphill than downhill.

  The adage returns to Miles now, as it had on the Dragon’s Back. The difference is that, over time, his memory of his run with the kid had been obscured by bit-by-bit revision, the layered varnishings of denial. Now there is no buffer to hold the fear at a distance. All the mirrors he has avoided looking into since he was burned have been turned on him, so that everything in the moment—Mungo’s and Alex’s backs struggling against the slope, his arms rubbering between them, the fire coming round on all sides—is cast back in a thousand reflections.

  More than anything, he’d forgotten the noise the wildfire makes. It strikes him as both familiar and otherworldly. The voice of madness. An immense choir of despair, deafening and tuneless. Within it, Miles can pick out a handful of sounds he’s certain he hears but, at the same time, knows he couldn’t. Stump’s bark. The clacking of the bear’s teeth. A chainsaw biting into the side of a snag.

  Ten feet higher, Mungo runs with Rachel held against him and feels every part of him grow weaker except for his arms. The weight of the girl reminds his muscles of carrying his own kids wh
en they were little. It’s the way a child gives itself to its carrier that he finds impossible to forget, its exquisite trust. Tom had been the clingier of his two. Hard to believe given how faraway the boy has become. Now it is Pam who comes home from school to reward her father with unasked-for kisses, and Tom who barely turns his head at the shouting of his name. So what’s it prove? Nothing, Mungo thinks, aside from the fact that you can’t tell a thing by the way they are when they’re small as this. A necessary deception. But what he finds funny about it is that, no matter the complications and defiance that show up over time, it is ultimately just as simple to love them now as then.

  Alex feels the girl’s weight too. A thrumming cord of sensation that makes her glance over with every third stride, only to be surprised each time not to find her hand holding on to the child’s.

  Rachel sees all of this as it happens and more. On each side, tunnels open and close in the smoke like a swallowing throat. Through one, she sees a white timber wolf with its tail and ears singed off. Through another, a sheep with spiralled horns lying on its side, legs thrashing.

  Then, in a single surge, fire crests over their heads.

  It takes Mungo’s legs out from under him. When the girl meets the ground, she tumbles backwards through the brittle mountain avens, so that she is out of his reach before he recognizes she’s gone.

  Miles watches but doesn’t stop. As Rachel rolls back at him he lowers his good right arm and snags her around the waist. With another three strides, he throws down his left and hooks Mungo’s elbow.

  The pain forces Miles to let him go. Yet the contact is enough to force Mungo forward, caught between falling and crawling on hands and knees. The two men bump together and swing apart like homeward drunks.

  Miles scans up at what remains of the slope. There is still grass ahead of them that must be crossed. The web of flame runs through most of it now, working back to devour the patches it bypassed a minute ago.