The Wildfire Season Read online

  A much larger gathering than Wade’s memorial took place later the same week at Mungo Capoose’s funeral. Jackie wanted it at their house and not at the church by the river because her husband had ‘never set foot in any barn with a cross on it,’ and there was little point in starting now. The whole town came. A cross-cultural celebration that flipped between The Grateful Dead on the stereo and tribal drums, a speech by Jerry McCormack in English and a myth told by a band elder in Kaska. As the evening went on and the beer coolers emptied, the event took the form of a kind of First Nations wake, with dancing mourners spilling out into the yard and lighting a bonfire that began as a spontaneous means of staying warm but was later generally recognized as a poignant memorial to the deceased. At midnight, Crookedhead James brought over a couple of tents from the fire office. When the flames cooled, twenty guests slept outside, refusing to let the night end.

  Earlier that night, Miles had given Tom his father’s Zippo. There had been little ceremony about it, as the boy discouraged conversation at the best of times, and had been tearless but especially silent in the days after the fire. Miles had made an empty remark to fill the moment that he immediately regretted, something about how now maybe Tom might have the chance to visit New York himself, the city etched on the lighter that had been with Mungo all these years but that he had never come within an eight-hour flight of. But Tom had nodded and rubbed his thumb over the towers the same way he had watched his father do since he was old enough to take notice.

  Not long after this, Tom had started visiting Miles at the fire office. Ostensibly, it was on his mother’s orders to get out of the house and quit joysticking away entire days in front the computer. But soon, Tom started asking questions about the crew’s equipment and how fires were fought. The two of them came to form a language of mourning using hose pressures, shovel types and fire history.

  ‘The pulaski was named after a ranger who saved thirty-nine firefighters back in the Big Blowup of 1910. Led them into a mine-shaft and told them to lie down and breathe dirt. When the fire hit, one of the men panicked and tried to run out. But Ed Pulaski took out his pistol and told him he’d sooner shoot him dead than watch him burn. Now there was a guy who knew fire. Just look at this thing. Perfect for digging line and putting out spots,’ Miles would tell the boy, the two of them hacking at the earth behind the fire office. ‘Your dad knew fire, too. He would’ve come up with this if Ed hadn’t gotten to it first. Knew how to use one, that’s for sure.’

  ‘He was good?’ Tom would ask. Not because he doubted the fact but to have it repeated.

  ‘He was the best,’ Miles would tell him. ‘Next to me, of course.’

  It amazes Miles how unreadable he’d found Tom only days ago—how unreadable others still find him—and the future he can see in the kid now. Miles will recommend him for the training program in a couple of years, if Tom wants him to. A born firefighter. All bound-up intensity, a longing for escape and the desire to do something at once good and understandable. The same mischievous glint in his eyes as his father. An indication of humour that, under hard circumstances, could be translated into courage.

  Dennis Parks and two government officials arrived to conduct a preliminary investigation into the cause of the Comeback Fire.

  The Ross River attack team were interviewed first, one at a time, the little church by the river turned into an interrogation room. They asked about the crew’s whereabouts on the days before the fire’s discovery, the potential motive each of them might have had to light a smoker of their own. Little was revealed, as little was known. Miles was subject to the longest sessions, answering the same questions over and over about taking the pumper out for a drive around the time the fire would have been started, and whether he had any ‘special regrets’ about losing the kid on the Dragon’s Back years ago. Despite his frequent longing to lunge across the desk and take Parks by the throat, Miles remained calm. He told them he often took drives on his own to clear his head. His questioners nodded and looked doubtful, but it was all they could do. After a breakfast of Bonnie’s sausages and eggs the following morning, all three of them were gone.

  No one spoke of firestarters after that, though Miles knew that there was one, and who it was. A fire started not for money, he felt sure, but for the town itself. A reason for the few who found themselves at this end of the road to stay.

  Miles’s certainty on this count was based not on evidence but on instinct, the small shifts and compensations you can sense in someone you know well enough. He told no one except Alex. There were a dozen good reasons not to pursue further disclosures than this, and only one to compel him: every fire has to be started somehow, and knowing the Comeback’s cause would advance the completeness of the official record. Miles was prepared to let the paperwork show another checkmark under Cause: Unknown. He’d keep everything else to himself. Alex and Miles both.

  It wasn’t the only secret between them now.

  The doctors had recognized the injury to his shoulder as a bullet wound, and the police had been called to his hospital room to ask about it, and about Wade Fuerst. It was Miles’s first day of consciousness after twenty hours of morphined sleep, and he had yet to speak to Alex or anyone else. There could be no planned corroboration with her in advance, and he knew that whatever version of events he told them now would be vulnerable to not only the physical evidence he’d left behind but Alex’s—and perhaps even Rachel’s—statements. So he told the truth, up to a point. Wade had tracked them after the bear attack, picking up Bader’s rifle along the way. When he came upon them, he had shot Miles in the shoulder. A struggle followed. The gun spinning between them. When the stock hit the ground it fired, taking Wade’s head off his neck.

  Alex told them the same thing. The easiest and most credible fabrication had occurred to both of them without discussion. As to Wade’s motive, Margot confirmed Miles’s speculations. Wade had been a betrayed man. Denied not only his woman but the promise of a child, a family. Everyone in Ross River had been witness to his attacks on Miles. Things had escalated to gunplay. A set of circumstances hardly unfamiliar to the police.

  In his truck parked on Whitehorse’s Main Street, on a shared break from Rachel’s bedside, eating takeout sandwiches off their laps, Miles told Alex what she already knew. There was no forgiveness. No oath of secrecy. It was as it had been between them. All they were trading was the truth. And now that it was shared, they saw how it might be carried.

  Rachel shivers on Miles’s lap again. From the cabin’s back step, Alex watches the girl curl up inside his sweater, almost disappearing completely except for the top of her head that glows pale where the regrowth hair has yet to blanket her scalp. Alex smooths her own returning strands over her flame-bitten ear. Soon it will be hidden. Not for the first time she thinks that, no matter what happens, the three of them will carry the mark of fire. In plain view or not, its shape will be known among themselves.

  She listens to Miles telling the girl it’s time to put her coat on, followed by Rachel’s reply of groans, and hears it as the performance of an already old routine. Miles turns to Alex and she can make out his shrug, his helpless What-canyou—do? look through the twilight. Even before she laughs she is aware of how awake she feels in this place. Not sleepless or nervy, but open to all signals, her senses keen-edged as she imagines the bear’s had been.

  The temperature drops another degree. It’s time that all of them put on another layer before the party. It was Miles’s idea. A welcome-home barbecue in honour of Rachel’s return from hospital. All the simple, backyard rituals would be performed. Scorched patties and bottles stacked like logs between the fridge shelves. A gathering of friends to watch the night come on.

  They will soon be here. Jerry and Crookedhead, the last members of the attack team left in town (King had taken off for the new term at university), Margot, Tom, Terry Gray and Bonnie. All of them except Margot would be seeing the inside of Miles’s cabin for the first time.

  Before
he lifts Rachel in his arms and walks back into the cabin, Miles has another of his premonitions. What he envisions is nothing special, but its pleasures haunt him even before they have passed. They will eat too much, and tell stories they have all told before. Miles will be the first to notice the northern lights. He will sweep his hand over the underbelly of sky as though it is this gesture alone that creates the trailing curtains of spectral green. The aurora will fall close enough that even the adults will consider reaching their fingers up to touch it. For a painless moment they will allow themselves to remember. Runaways. Fire. They will draw their circle of chairs tighter around the barbecue’s warm ashes, quiet now, their faces flushed by the unspoken truth that they are among the lucky ones, people who know where they are and that they belong.

  Author’s Note

  Ross River is a real place. The Wildfire Season, on the other hand, is a work of fiction in its entirety. Many geographic distances, buildings, road layouts and other topographical details, within Ross River and without, have been altered from what one might find on a map or see if one walked down its streets. However, the behaviour of wildland fires and grizzly bears described here is based on the available science, reading of personal accounts, and interviews of those who have experienced contact with either or, in some cases, both.

  Acknowledgements

  First, thanks to my editors, Iris Tupholme and Julia Wisdom, as well as Anne McDermid for her early insights and enthusiasm. Readers of drafts along the way—David Rittenhouse, Sean Kane, Leah McLaren, Shaun Oakey, Lorissa Sengara—also offered helpful responses and encouragements.

  During my time in the Yukon, I received counsel, stories and companionship from many friends and near strangers alike. For setting my mind on fruitful paths, I must acknowledge in particular Jackie Bazett, Belinda Smith, Al Macleod, Julia Finlay and all who have worked to establish the Berton House Writers’ Retreat in Dawson City.

  For his Kaska and Northern Tutchone translations, I am indebted to J. T. Ritter, Director of the Yukon Native Language Centre at Yukon College, Whitehorse.

  Finally, I am grateful to Heidi Rittenhouse for riding shotgun the whole way.

  About the Author

  Andrew Pyper was born in Stratford, Ontario in 1968 and currently lives in Toronto. He is the author of the novels Lost Girls (selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and The Trade Mission, as well as Kiss Me, a collection of short stories. Lost Girls was an international bestseller, and is currently in development for a feature film adaptation.

  For three of the past five summers, Andrew has lived in the Yukon, researching and writing The Wildfire Season, which is set in the Territory.

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  By the same author

  Lost Girls

  The Trade Mission

  SHORT STORIES

  Kiss Me

  Praise

  People continue to tame and subjugate nature. But when we visit the few remaining scraps of wilderness where bears roam free, we can still feel an instinctive fear. How precious that feeling is.

  MICHIO HOSHINO (1952-1996),

  wildlife photographer,

  killed in a grizzly bear attack

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  FISRT EDITION

  First published in Great Britain by

  HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

  Copyright © Andrew Pyper 2005

  Andrew Pyper asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-34747-6

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