The Wildfire Season

by Andrew Pyper

  What’s the worst thing about this woman? Margot wonders, and knows the answer even as she asks it. It’s that everything is ‘wonderful’ to her. The word is so liberally sprayed through her musings that it makes Margot’s teeth ache. By the time the truck pulls over at the trailhead, Elsie Bader has singlehandedly managed to bleach all the wonder out of the world. And not just the formerly wonderful things one might discover on this particular morning, but forevermore, as though her southern-fried burbles have veiled what was in fact a sinister incantation, a black spell released into the air.

  Things are a little better once they start into the woods, though Margot can tell the going will be slow. She could hear Mr Bader’s laboured breathing within the first hundred yards. This, coupled with his disturbing refusal to talk, has contributed to a pall being cast over the hunting party before they put the first half mile behind them. It’s obvious that Wade isn’t about to be of much assistance, either. As a result, Tom shoulders more weight than any of them, though the kid doesn’t seem to mind. Every time Margot glances at him he’s keeping stride next to Elsie Bader. The two of them have become fast, if inexplicable, friends.

  They stop early for breakfast. Mrs Bader pulls all the food out of her pack and sets to laying out a lavish picnic of their rations. Wade starts a fire and puts a pot on for coffee before splaying out on his back, his arm covering his eyes. ‘I’ll fix us a wonderful brunch in a jiffy!’ Mrs Bader calls out, and for the first time, Margot finds herself a little grateful for the woman’s presence. The old lady’s got pep, you had to admit.

  Her husband, on the other hand, shuffles over to Margot where she stands out of hearing of the others, his complexion showing only slightly more colour than the bark on the trunks of birch that surround them.

  ‘How do we get them to come to us?’

  ‘We don’t. We go to them.’

  ‘I read that they can smell us from miles off,’ he says, sniffing. ‘Why not just spray around something they like and pick ‘em off when they show up?’

  ‘It doesn’t work that way. A bear smells us and goes in the other direction more often than it comes any closer.’

  ‘Unless they’re hungry enough. Or if what they smell is fear.’

  ‘A bear doesn’t smell fear. It smells you. To a bear, people are nothing but fear.’

  ‘That’s funny. It’s a view I subscribe to myself.’

  Margot doesn’t laugh, because he isn’t joking. Jackson Bader had been the president of the fourth-largest steelmaker in the Midwest over the twenty-five years that America needed steel more than anything else, more than Japanese computer engineering or million-dollar slogans brainstormed by Ivy League marketing brats. They were the last of the good times, as far as Bader is concerned, or at least the comprehensible times. The days when what was manufactured were hard things—cars, girders, missiles—instead of fluffball ideas. There were few better than he at what he did. And what was that? More than anything, his job was to put people in their place. He’s aware of the accusations of coldness. Even he can’t deny the sweeping layoffs, the unforgiving suppression of boardroom coups d’état, the union busting. But Jackson Bader would identify his principal talent not as heartlessness, but courage. He was among the rare company of men possessed of the true leader’s capacity for making unpleasant decisions, the tough-loving patriarch able to hand down the punishments required in keeping an orderly home.

  Even though they have lingered in the breakfast camp for a quarter-hour already, Bader continues to swallow air in gulps. To Margot, what’s worrying is not so much his lack of conditioning—she’s dealt with worse clients on that count—but that he seems to be fighting something within him. He breathes like a man who has forgotten how.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself about me, Miss Lemontagne,’ he says, pronouncing it Lemon Tang.

  ‘I just need to know if you can make it to where we need to go.’

  ‘You must have learned a thing or two about nature in your time out in this shit.’ He steps forward and grabs her forearm. Close enough that she can smell his breath. Wet straw and Pepsodent. ‘People got to take care of themselves, don’t you think?’

  ‘Get your hand—’

  ‘So all you got to worry about is finding us some big footprints. How’s that?’

  Margot jerks her arm free. Without it to hold on to, Bader instantly shrinks. The brief show of strength is gone, and he’s a bloodless old man again, spinning his head around to find his wife.

  Margot watches him go and wishes her feelings about Jackson Bader were more consistent, a dislike on all fronts. But the fact is, there is something in the way he speaks to her that she can’t help but be a little interested in listening to. It’s there in the worldly gravel at the back of his throat: conspiratorial, teasing, letting her in on an indecent joke that she alone could appreciate. The effect he has on her puts Margot in the strange (but not entirely unfamiliar) situation of seeking approval from a man she has little respect for.

  It may only be that he’s a good-looking son of a bitch for his age. That’s what Wade had said about Bader when he first showed up. Margot felt it was an accurate enough description. She did find Jackson Bader handsome, in the bullheaded way of grown-up GIs or college football stars. The slightly ridiculous Robert Mitchum squint. But it’s none of these assets that prevent Margot from hating the old man. It’s that he doesn’t care what she thinks that makes her curious about him. He’s come out here for a reason that has only a secondary relation to bringing down a Boone and Crockett grizzly, and she’d like to know what it is.

  When Margot returns to the camp’s fire, Elsie Bader asks another of her tour-bus questions.

  ‘Margot! I was wondering how many bears there would be in the Yukon. Tom says he couldn’t guess.’

  ‘Nobody knows the exact number. But most have it that there’s twice as many grizzlies living outside of Whitehorse as there are people.’

  ‘Oh, Jackson!’ Mrs Bader exclaims. ‘We’re outnumbered!’

  Bader opens his mouth and shows his teeth. A store-bought smile of new dentures, vacant as an ice tray.

  ‘It’ll only make it easier for them to find us, dear,’ he says.

  Miles’s plan is to visit two towers, each about fifty miles apart as the crow flies. Normally, he looks forward to these tours—talking to the watchers who spend four months straight on their own doing little aside from looking out over the endless north, people who, like Miles, treasure their loneliness. He likes visiting the unmanned towers even more. He usually lingers on these trips, enjoying the fulfillment of responsibility while taking pleasure in being left to his own devices. But this time he keeps moving. The first tower is vacant, and he hopes to check on it and head out again before nightfall, sleeping midway between it and the next. It may not be so easy. Through the rearview mirror, a black thunderhead pursues him.

  When he parks a mile from the first tower and hikes in to its base, frigid drops are already slapping against his forehead. It makes the climb up the ladder chillier than he would like. He wishes he’d brought his gloves. The aluminum rungs bite through his palms. He makes himself confirm every new grip by sight.

  By the time he climbs onto the deck, the thunderhead has become enormous on the horizon. Miles steps inside and closes the door. The wind whispers threats through the glass.

  Even when fully functional, the only piece of operating equipment on hand aside from a radio is an Osborne Fire Finder, which hasn’t been removed from this tower yet. Miles strokes its rotating metal ring, the handle that turns its sight around 360 degrees to spot smoke from any direction. A solid, useful thing. As is the tower’s only place to sit: a swivel captain’s chair, its legs wrapped in layers of chipped-glass insulation. During periods of lightning, the watchers sit in this ‘safe seat’, so that if a bolt strikes, the charge will pass through everything but them. Miles counts two zigzags touch the earth in the time it takes him to catch his
breath.

  He settles himself in the grounded chair and sends his mind out toward the approaching storm, circling over the crowns of black spruce. There is something in the spongy, coastal sky that makes him think of his mother, sitting alone in her rainstained bungalow near the tracks in the south end of Nanaimo, studying the next chess move she will record on a postcard to mail to her runaway son. She would have the window open, letting in the intermittent whiffs of salt water, petrol and salmon emptied onto the docks. Now his mind has no choice but to stay with her. Floating over the town he grew up in and where his mother will be buried, trapped in a spiral of memory.

  After his father left, Miles was a bad kid here. His crimes were soft-drugged, vandalizing, splitlipped. Yet they were serious enough to flirt with lengthy visits to juvie detention centres and to leave his mother in a state of near-constant worry. He’s sorry about this as much as anything.

  All this was before the fussily landscaped condos were built next to the port, before the pedestrian signals were outfitted with timers that count down from thirty so that the arthritic gentry could calculate the pace of their crossings for raisin buns at the ‘cappuccino bistro’ where a bar called the Bucket of Blood used to stand. Miles looks down and sees that other things haven’t changed at all. The cracked concrete snaking away from the harbour and falling past the Commercial Hotel. The twinkling of Fiesta Square Bowling’s rotating F, towering over everything as though it was Nanaimo’s principal claim, the promise it wished to beam out to the ships that might spot it as they found their way in from a furious sea.

  It is this older version of the town that his father escaped from. One of the running men. Each with their own circumstances, brooding secrecy, selfjustifying compulsions. The north is peppered with the sort of people that Miles believes his father must have been. He knows this because he’s a running man too.

  Why do they run? Miles is aware of the usual accusations. Cowardice, lust, wilful cruelty. But Miles believes that most of the time, these men are really trying to wriggle free from the constraints of who they are, the fixed particulars of identity. It’s not some other, better life they seek, but the disappearance from life altogether. They run to escape the universal burden of selfhood.

  Not that this allows him any sympathy toward others like his father. Miles may have run, but he didn’t run from a child—at least, not one that he saw born and grow for the first five years of its life. Rachel doesn’t count. He tries to tell himself this as the storm blows all around him, the tower wavering in the strong wind. Miles isn’t like his father because he never left a child that he had spoken to, or held in his arms. He has gotten through the last few years on this slim distinction. Now even this has been taken from him.

  With a split of thunder the storm engulfs the tower. The rain strikes the windows so hard he can see them shivering in their frames.

  Miles lifts himself from the chair and stands on the steel floor. He kicks the door open and lets the rain drive in sideways, spraying the cobwebs from the corners and spinning the chair around on its pivot.

  He can see the lightning getting closer. The last bolt struck a hilltop not a quarter mile away. He grips both his hands to the metal struts of the tower’s frame and waits for the blackest cloud to find him.

  Miles feels that a decision is about to be made, if not by him then by an unpredictable determination of fate. He wishes only that the storm tell him what to do. That, or flash-fry him into a pile of carbon and put him beyond decisions forever.

  It comes in a rush, filling the world with shadows. The clouds tumbling lower until their underbellies could be touched with a raised hand.

  Miles keeps his fingers locked around the steel struts. It occurs to him that if the lightning hits the tower, he won’t be around to hear the thunder.

  There is a full minute when he stands surrounded by grey sheets of mist. When he comes out the other end, the daylight blinds him. Miles looks back and sees the cloud curl up into itself like a jellyfish making its way to the surface, its hanging tendrils of rain already fading. There is a last growl of thunder, more bemused than menacing, before the storm blows north over the Nadaleen Range.

  Miles collapses back into the chair and spins around. The fire didn’t want him this time, either. He doesn’t know what this means beyond the fact that he’s still here, turning in circles, staring at the fields of green. But perhaps there is something even in that.

  All three bears smell the hunters entering the woods. The sow had heard them, too, minutes before her cubs. Twittering laughter. The scrape of camp pots. Truck doors swung shut.

  She scrambles higher and at first the cubs don’t know what the hurry is. When she stops on the other side of a small ridge sprayed purple with fireweed, she turns them around to face the direction they have just come from. The hunters have come to a stop as well. The she-grizzly has the overwhelming feeling that they are close already.

  The cubs pick up mostly on the delicacies they’d never encountered before in their lives—peanut butter, coffee, raisins. Each of these presents nosepuzzles to the young bears, questions of where food of this kind grew, how they might get close enough to the packs to have a snort inside. But the sow won’t allow them any more time. She walks behind them now, pushing them up the foothills in a gradual ascent.

  Only the sow knows that the pack carriers are hunters. This certainty comes less from an interpretation of scent than from experience: if a group of humans enter the woods a good distance from town, odds are they mean to kill something. The she-grizzly has seen her share of harmless hikers and campers, the ones who shimmy up the swaying trunks of eight-foot-high saplings at the sight of her loping along a game trail a hundred yards away. But she has never seen those sorts in this particular territory. There’s little point in satisfying the itch of curiosity by going any closer. She has witnessed the penalty that such an interest will bring.

  As now, there had been a group of them, four males and, unusual for human hunters, a female as well. The sow and her mate had come the night before for the treasures of the Ross River dump, and now dozed side by side on a mattress of grass halfway up the valley. The smell of sweat and chocolate woke them an hour before dawn.

  The sow was in the first stage of pregnancy, milk-heavy and slow. Her mate stayed at her rump, calculating distances, launch pads for counterattack. The hunters were not fast, either. Yet there was a good tracker among them, one not fooled by the bears’ switchbacks and creek crossings.

  The sow’s mate left her to track back to the hunters in order to mark their position. While he was gone, the she-grizzly lay down to gather her strength, her fur camouflaged among the brown bark of trunks. She wasn’t frightened of the hunters. Although she had been tracked like this before, they had never gotten anywhere near close enough for a shot. But the tiny cubs she carries roll about within her, and she interprets their sudden movement as a warning.

  As she waits, the she-grizzly hears footfalls in the bush. Careful, light, singular. Coming around in a big circle, taking a place somewhere ahead on the course they were travelling on.

  When the hunter comes up against the direction of the breeze, the sow smells that it is the female, tracking alone. At the same time, the sow’s mate joins her. They are now being stalked not only from behind but from ahead. It is also clear to the sow that her mate led the female hunter directly to them.

  The bears strike off in a heading not of their own choosing, down deeper into the Tintina Trench, where the woods are thicker but with fewer outlets for escape. There are no more smells to inform them. As they run, the pregnant sow imagines she can feel her cubs clawing over each other, as though drowning inside her.

  It is the female hunter who finally cuts them off, trapping them in a lunar clearing of chert rock. The sow sees her first. Standing upslope, the snout of the woman’s rifle trained square at the she-grizzly’s eyes.

  Before the bears even have a chance to come to a full stop, the hunter notices the sow and b
oar’s genders. She determines that these two must have been recently rutting, and that the sow is now likely pregnant. It makes the female hunter switch her aim to the sow’s mate. The same steady bead on the flat front of his skull.

  The male hunters break noisily into the clearing. All of them fall to their knees at the sight of the animals with one exception. A bearded man taller than the others, who waves his rifle in front of him. The sow focuses on his distinct scent. His skin a rank mixture of whisky and terror.

  A couple of the hunters on their knees shout something, and the female replies in calm tones. The bearded man alone refuses to listen. He raises his rifle and, almost without looking, points it into the middle of the clearing. The barrel continues to flail around. Aimed from the hunter’s own boots, to the bears, to a patch of indigo sky.

  He fires and tries to run away at the same time.

  The female hunter shouts something as the bearded man stumbles backwards. It makes him lower his rifle before catching the heel of his boot on one of the upturned rocks, flipping his feet out from under him so that he lands on his back. The gun spins from his hands, clattering to the ground outside his reach.

  Everyone looks to the male grizzly. He has been gut-shot—the bullet blasted through the animal’s intestines and out the other side. An injury that, for a bear of his size and age, is not immediately fatal.

  The sow’s mate blinks curiously at the exit wound. With hesitation, he tries to push his insides back in with his paw. When he decides to run, he trips over his bowels, trailing out behind him like pink rope.

  When the female hunter fires a bullet neatly through a point two feet below the male grizzly’s shoulder hump, something like soap pours out his nose. The bear watches the fluid drop to the stones, fascinated. He lifts his head to the female hunter and opens his mouth wide, less in threat than in the articulation of a thought that has suddenly escaped him. Discovering that he has nothing to say after all, he closes his mouth, blinking rapidly, and takes a single step toward his mate. The act of lifting his one paw from the earth undoes the animal’s balance, and he falls heavily on his side. He inhales once, but the air passes straight through him and out the gaping hole in his lungs, making the fur around the wound dance in his breath.