English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  The three of us stopped at the west end of the camp. Above us the fire had on its night face yet, bright, pretty. No hint whatsoever of the grim smoke and char it showed by day.

  “Mac, I’m sorry as all hell to butt into your war council, there. I hate to say anything about procedure. Particularly to you. But—”

  “But you’re determined to. Stanley, what’s on your mind?”

  “The idea of tackling the fire down here on the creek, first thing in the morning.” Stanley paused. Then: “Mac, my belief is that’s not the way to go about it.”

  “So where would you tackle it?”

  Stanley’s Stetson jerked upward, indicating the slope of grass across the North Fork from us. “Up there.”

  Now in the lantern light it was my father’s eyes that showed the hurtful squint Stanley’s so often did.

  The thought repelled my father. The fire doubling its area of burn: both sides of the North Fork gorge blackened instead of one. More than that—

  “Stanley, if this fire gets loose over the slope and up into that next timber, it can take the whole goddamn country. It can burn for miles.” My father stared up at the dim angle of the slope, but what was in his mind was 1910, Bitterroot, Selway, Phantom Woman, all the smoke ghosts that haunt a fire boss. “Christamighty,” he said softly, “it could burn until snowfall.”

  Jerking his head around from that thought, my father said: “Stanley, don’t get radical on me here. What in the hell makes you say the fireline ought to be put up there on the mountain?”

  “Mac, I know you hate like poison to see any inch of the Two go up in smoke. I hated it, too. But if you can’t hold the fire at the base of the gulch, it’s gonna break out onto the slope there anyway.”

  “The answer there is, I’m supposed to hold it.”

  “Supposed to is one thing. Doing it’s another.”

  “Stanley, these days we’ve got what’s called the ten A.M. policy. The Forest Service got religion about all this a few years ago. The Major told us, ‘This approach to fire suppression will be a dividend-payer.’ So the rule is, try to control any fire by ten the next morning.”

  “Yeah, rules are rules,” agreed Stanley. Or seemed to agree, for I had heard my father any number of times invoke the second part of this ranger station catechism: “And fools are fools.”

  My father pulled out a much-employed handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose. Among the aggravations of his day was smoke irritation.

  “All right, Stanley,” he said at last. “Run this by me again. You’re saying give the fire the whole damn slope of Rooster Mountain?”

  “Yeah, more or less. Use the morning to backfire in front of that rocky top.” Backfiring is when you deliberately burn an area ahead of a fire, to rob its fuel. It has to be done just right, though, or you’ve either wasted your time or given the fire some more flame to work with. “Burn in a fireline up there that hell itself couldn’t jump.” Stanley saw my father was still unconverted. “Mac, it’s not as nasty a place as this gorge.”

  “Christamighty, I can’t pick places to fight a fire by whether they’re nasty or not.”

  “Mac, you know what I mean.” Stanley spelled it out for my father anyway. “That slope is dry as a torch. If you put men down in this gorge and the fire sets off that slope behind them too, you’re going to be sifting piles of ashes to find their buttons.”

  I could see my father thinking it: nothing in the behavior of the Flume Gulch fire to date supported Stanley’s picture. If anything, this slow downhill fire was almost too slow, staying up there in wicked terrain and burning when and where it pleased. He and his crews had been able to work right up beside the fire; it was the geography they couldn’t do anything about. True, the fire’s behavior could all change when it reached the gorge, but—“I can’t see how the fire could set off the slope across this much distance,” my father answered slowly.

  “I can,” Stanley said back.

  Still stubborn as a government mule against the notion of voluntarily doubling the size of the Flume Gulch burn, my father eyed back up at the slope of Rooster Mountain. “Hell, what if we’re up there merrily backfiring and the fire doesn’t come? Goes down this gorge instead, right through this camp and around that slope? Then’s when we’ll have a bigger mess on our hands.”

  “That’s a risk,” admitted Stanley. “But my belief is it’s a worse risk to tackle that fire down in here, Mac. Up there you’d have a bigger fireline. And rocks instead of men to help stop it.”

  My father considered some more. Then said: “Stanley, I’d rather take a beating than ask you this. But I got to. Are you entirely sober?”

  “Sorry to say,” responded Stanley, “I sure as hell am.”

  “He is,” I chimed in.

  My father continued to confront Stanley. I could see that he had more to say, more to ask.

  But there I was wrong. My father only uttered, “The slope is something I’ll think about,” and set off back to the boss tent.

  • • •

  Stanley told me he was going to turn in—“This cooking is kind of a strenuous pastime”—and ordinarily I would have embraced bed myself. But none of this was ordinary. I trailed my father to the war council once more, and heard him say as soon as he was inside the tent:

  “Ideas don’t care who their daddies are. What would you guys say about this?” And he outlined the notion of the fireline atop the slope.

  They didn’t say much at all about it. Kratka and Ames already had been foxed once by the Flume Gulch fire. No need for them to stick their necks out again. After a bit my father said: “Well, I’ll use it all as a pillow tonight. Let’s meet here before breakfast. Meantime, everybody take a look at that slope on the map.”

  Paul’s voice finally came. “Mac, can I see you outside?”

  “Excuse us again, gents.”

  Out came my father and Paul. Again I made sure to catch up before the walking could turn into talking.

  At the west edge of the camp Paul confronted my father. “Mac, whichever way you decide on tackling this fire, I’ll never say a word against you. But the fire record will. You can’t get around that. If you don’t have the crew down here to take the fire by its face in the morning, Sipe is going to want to know why. And the Major—if this fire gets away down the gorge and around that slope, they’ll sic a board of review on you. Mac, they’ll have your hide.”

  My father weighed all this. And at last said: “Paul, there’s another if. If we can kill this fire, Sipe and the Major aren’t going to give one good goddamn how we did it.”

  Paul peered unhappily from the flickering crack in the night on the Flume Gulch side of us, to the dark bulk of the Rooster Mountain slope on our other. “You’re the fire boss,” he said.

  • • •

  I am not sure I slept at all that night. Waiting, breath held, any time I imagined I heard a rustle of wind. Waiting for the morning, for my father’s fireline decision. Waiting.

  • • •

  “Christamighty, Stanley. Twenty loaves again?”

  “Milk toast instead of mush to start with this morning, Jick,” confirmed Stanley from the circle of lantern light where he was peering down into the cookbook. “Then after the bread, it’s ‘Place twenty cans of milk and the same of water in a twenty-quart half-oval boiler.’ ”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me get the damn slicing done first.”

  My father and Ames were the first ones through the breakfast line. Ames’s men had come off the fireline earliest last night, so they were to be the early ones onto it this morning. Wherever that fireline was going to be.

  I was so busy flunkying that it wasn’t until a little break after Ames’s men and before Kratka’s came that I could zero in on my father. He and Ames brought their empty plates and dropped them in the dishwash tub. My father scrutinized Stanley, who was lugging a fresh heap of fried ham to the T table. Stanley set down the ham and met my father’s regard with a straight gaze of his
own. “Morning, Mac. Great day for the race, ain’t it?”

  My father nodded to Stanley, although whether in hello or agreement it couldn’t be told. Then he turned to Ames. “Okay, Andy. Take your gang up there to the top and get them started digging the control line for backfiring.” And next my father was coming around the serving table to where Stanley and I were, saying: “Step over here, you two. I’ve got something special in mind for the pair of you.”

  • • •

  Shortly, Wisdom Johnson came yawning into the grub line. He woke up considerably when my father instructed him that the tall, tall slope of Rooster Mountain, just now looming up in the approach of dawn, was where his water duty would be today.

  “But, Mac, the fire’s over here, it ain’t up there!”

  “It’s a new theory of firefighting,” my father told him. “We’re going to do it by mail order.”

  Kratka’s men were soon fed. It transpired that my father himself was going to lead this group onto the slope and supervise them in lighting the strips of backfires.

  First, though, he called Paul Eliason over. I heard him instruct: “Have Chet tell Great Falls the same thing as yesterday—‘No chance ten A.M. control today.’ ”

  “Mac,” Paul began. “Mac, how about if I at least wait until toward that time of morning to call it in? I don’t see any sense in advertising what—what’s going on up here.”

  My father leveled him a stare that made Paul sway back a little. “Assistant ranger Eliason, do you mean to say you’d delay information to headquarters?”

  Paul gulped but stood his ground. “Yeah. In this case, I would.”

  “Now you’re talking,” congratulated my father. “Send it in at five minutes to ten.” My father turned and called to the crew waiting to go up the mountain with him. “Let’s go see a fire.”

  • • •

  “Stanley, this makes me feel like a coward.”

  “You heard the man.”

  It was well past noon, the sweltering heart of so hot a day. The rock formation we were perched on might as well have been a stoked stove. Pony and the buckskin saddle horse were tethered in the shade of the trees below and behind us, but they stood there drooping even so.

  Stanley and I were chefs in exile. This rock observation point of ours was the crown-shaped formation above the line cabin where the two of us sheltered during our camptending shenanigan. How long ago it seemed since I was within those log walls, bandaging Stanley’s hand and wishing I was anywhere else.

  I had heard the man. My father, when he herded the pair of us aside there at breakfast and decreed: “I want you two out of here this afternoon. You understand?” If we did, Stanley and I weren’t about to admit it. My father the fire boss spelled matters out for us: “If the wind makes up its mind to blow or that fire takes a turn for some other reason, it could come all the way down the gorge into this camp. So when you get the lunches made, clear out of here.”

  “Naw, Mac,” Stanley dissented. “It’s a good enough idea for Jick to clear out, but I—”

  “Both of you,” stated my father.

  “Yeah, well,” I started to put in, “Stanley’s done his part, but I could just as well—”

  “Both of you,” my father reiterated. “Out of here, by noon.”

  The long faces on us told him he still didn’t have Stanley and me convinced. “Listen, damn it. Stanley, you know what happened the last argument you and I had. This time, let’s just don’t argue.” Then, more mild: “I need you to be with Jick, Stanley.”

  Stanley shifted the way he was standing. Did so again. And finally came out with a quiet “Okey-doke, Mac,” and headed back to his cookstove.

  My father did not have to labor the point to me. I knew, and nodded it to him, that the other half of what he had just said was that I was needed to be with Stanley. But he stopped me from turning away to my flunky tasks.

  “Jick,” he said as if this had been stored up in him for some time. “Jick, I can’t risk you.” His left eyelid came down as he forced a grin to accompany his words: “You’ve earned a grandstand seat this afternoon. Lean back and watch the event.”

  • • •

  Thus here we were. Simmering in safety on this rock outlook, barbecued toes our only peril. At our angle the fire camp at the mouth of the gorge was in sight but Flume Gulch and the fire itself were just hidden, in behind the end of Roman Reef that towered over us. The cloud of smoke, though, told us the fire was having itself a big time.

  The grass slope of Rooster Mountain lay within clear view. A tan broad ramp of grass. If Pat Hoy had had Dode Withrow’s sheep in a scattered graze there they would have been plain to the unaided eye. In fact, at first it puzzled me that although even my father agreed this rock site was a healthy enough distance behind the fire for Stanley and me, the slope seemed so close. Eventually I figured out that the huge dark dimension of the smoke made the distance seem foreshortened.

  I had snagged the binoculars again from the boss tent, and every few minutes I would squat—as with the slope yesterday at this time, our island of stone was too damn hot to sit on—and prop my elbows on my knees to steady the glasses onto the fireline work.

  The brow of the slope, between its rocky top and the grass expanse stretching down to the North Fork, by now resembled a reflection of the devastation in Flume Gulch opposite it. All morning until about ten o’clock, when the day began to get too hot for safe backfiring, my father’s men little by little had blackened that area. First they trenched the control line along the ridgetop, then the careful, careful burning began. Four or five feet wide at a time, a strip of grass was ignited and let to burn back uphill into the bare control line. When it had burned itself out, the next strip below it was lit. Down and down, the barrier of scorch was built that way, the dark burn scar at last inflicted across the entire upper part of the slope. And even yet at the edge of the forest atop the skyline, crews were cutting down any trees which stood too close behind the backfired fireline, other teams were hauling the combustible foliage a safe distance into the rocks and timber. My father’s men were doing their utmost up there to deny the Flume Gulch fire anything to catch hold and burn when it came. If it came.

  Even Stanley now and again peered through the binoculars to the fireline preparation. He wasn’t saying anything, though, except his appraisal when we climbed onto the sun-cooked rock: “Hotter than dollar chili, ain’t it?”

  • • •

  The event, as my father called it. Can you believe: it took me by total surprise. After all that waiting. All that watching, anticipating. The human being is the world’s most forecasting damn creature. Yes, my imagination had the scene ready as if it were a dream I’d had twenty nights in a row, how the fire at last would cross from Flume Gulch and pull itself up out of the gorge of the North Fork onto the slope, vagrant ribbons of flame at first and then bigger fringes and at last a great ragged orange length climbing toward the fireline where my father’s men waited to battle it in any way they could.

  Instead, just this. Nothing seemed imminent yet, the smoke still disclosed the fire as only approaching the creek gorge. Maybe just brinking down onto the height between the gulch and the gorge, would have been my guess. I deemed that the next little while would start to show whether the fire preferred the gorge or Stanley’s slope. So I did not even have the binoculars to my eyes, instead was sleeving the sweat off my forehead. When Stanley simply said: “There.”

  From both the gorge and the bottom of the slope the fire was throwing up smoke like the chimneys of hell. So much smudge and smear, whirling, thickening, that the slope vanished behind the billowing cloud. It scared me half to death, this smoke eclipse.

  The suck of fear that went through me, the sweat popping out on the backs of my hands as I tried to see through smoke with binoculars. I can never—I want never—to forget what went through me then, as I realized what would be happening to my father and his fire crew if they had been in the gorge as the avalanche of
fire swooped into it. The air itself must be cooked, down in there.

  Then this. The smoke, all of it, rose as if a windowblind was being lifted. Sixty, eighty feet, I don’t know. But the whole mass of smoke lifted that much. Stanley and I could look right into the flames, abruptly they were as bright and outlined as the blaze in a fireplace. The fire already had swarmed across the gorge and was stoking itself with the grass of the lower slope. Just as clear as anything, that aggregation of flame with the smoke curtained so obligingly above it, as much fire as a person could imagine seeing at once. And then, it awes me to even remember it, the fire crazily began to double, triple—multiply impossibly. I was told later by Wisdom Johnson: “Jick, this is the God’s truth, a cool wind blew over us right then, down into that fire.” A wedge of air, it must have been, hurling itself under that furiously hot smoke and flame. And that air and those flames meeting. The fire spewed up across the slope in an exploding wave, a tide. The crisp tan grass of the slope, going to orange and black. In but a minute or two, gone.

  The smoke closed down again, boiled some more in a gray heavy way. But then there began to be clefts in the swirl, thinnings, actual gaps. The binoculars now brought me glimpses of men spaced along the backfired fireline and the rock summit of the slope, stomping and swatting and shoveling dirt onto flame wherever it tried to find fuel enough to catch. But more and more sentrylike watching instead of fire combat. Watching the flamestorm flash into collision with the backfired barrier or the rock comb of Rooster Mountain, and then dwindle.

  • • •

  These years later, I wish I could have those next minutes back to makings. Could see again that slope battle, and our fire camp that the sacrifice of the slope had saved. Could know again the rise of realization, the brimming news of my eyes, that the Flume Gulch fire steadily was quenching itself against my father’s fireline, Stanley Meixell’s fireline.

  I couldn’t speak. For some time after, even. My mouth and throat were as dry as if parched by the fire. But finally I managed:

  “You knew the slope would go like that.”