The Wildfire Season

by Andrew Pyper

  He waves his arms over his head. Calls the animal the same name, over and over. Above him, she still holds Bader in her jaws. Shaking him now. Parts of him fall off, slapping against the stones. Raggedy Jackson.

  All at once, the sun brightens even more. The bear catches Wade’s eye.

  ‘You,’ he says.

  The animal’s only response is to commence another flaying of the old man’s body. Within seconds, all she holds is a loose assembly of white ligament and bone.

  He’s not sure why he does it, but Wade comes at the bear. Six feet below it now, shouting with a courage he doesn’t feel, has never felt. Only as the sow drops Bader and brings a forepaw back to swing at him does Wade realize his intent isn’t to save the old man but to give Margot enough time to run.

  The bear’s strike is faster than any of the barroom roundhouses Wade has watched swing his way. Still, he has time to notice how the open forepaw looks like a catcher’s mitt. One with blackened steak knives where fingers should be.

  But in the sliver of time between the claws’ coming and going, the bear misses him altogether.

  And yet he’s airborne.

  His feet pedalling air like that time he got on the trampoline on his way home from the lounge before Terry Gray showed up to tell him to knock it off. It’s only just before his back meets the rocks twenty feet down the slide that the first tingling in his chest arrives. His head rolls on his neck to deliver glimpses of sky, the jagged ridgeline. A musical staff of five neat cuts seeping through his shirt.

  Elsie Bader doesn’t stop screaming. She doesn’t stop climbing, either.

  ‘One more,’ Margot orders her.

  It’s been perhaps a minute since the last of Wade’s shouts. At first, she thought it was she he was calling bitch. Then nothing. Too abrupt an end for Wade to have silenced himself.

  ‘Hold it tight,’ Margot tells her. ‘I’m going to check on the others. Just hold it.’

  Margot scrambles back up the rockslide. The rocks screech under her boots. It seems to take several hours to get high enough to look down into all of the chute’s ledges and dents.

  She nearly steps on Bader before she sees that it’s him. A coil that has already attracted a party of bottlehead flies. She looks away, scanning the treeline, the ridge above. Wade and the bear are gone.

  Margot runs the length of the slide’s treeline, calling out for him. She searches for a trail but there is no blood to follow, and the bear would leave no tracks behind on the shale. The only sign that Wade had been here at all is the radio. Lying a few feet from Bader’s body, its casing split open and the wires gutted.

  Mrs Bader continues to scream.

  Keep it up, Margot can’t stop herself from thinking. You can do the wailing for both of us.

  Not that it matters. Not compassion, manners, love or anything else. There is only where they are. She knows the place, but might as well be lost for all the difference it makes. Caught between the smoke in the valley and the daytime moon. A doll’s face, sitting on the crest of the hills.

  Chapter 15

  ‘It’s coming,’ King says.

  In the time it took Jerry McCormack to take a nervous leak against the tree nearest him and zip up again, the fire has nearly doubled in size. The other three could only watch how it was done. How they’d helped it.

  At the same time King stepped back, Miles saw the backfire lose its initial speed, so that when the main fire joined it, their own blaze showed it the way out. Mungo was the only one to speak. Buggernuts, he said.

  ‘It’s coming,’ King says again, this time without his earlier wonder, only dread.

  The five of them stand spellbound. It lasts a few seconds but feels much longer, like the time between being launched over the handlebars and your chin finding the pavement.

  ‘Let’s move it back,’ Miles says, waving them down the path that had brought them here. ‘King? Are you with us?’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A little walk. Pick up your tools.’

  ‘Fucksake, Miles,’ Jerry says, still unable to pull his eyes from the blaze. ‘Maybe we better just—’

  ‘I’ll tell you when to drop your gear, and it’s not now. We are walking out of here.’

  Miles looks back into the clearing once more to gauge the fire’s direction and speed. Already, the original fuel of ground cover within the clearing is being replaced by the lodgepole pines of the surrounding forest, and the resulting heat lashes out at them a hundred yards away. Miles watches how the flames are emboldened with oxygen the higher they climb. A crown fire. One that turns the trees into candles, red leaping from wick to wick.

  ‘We can still handle this thing,’ Mungo says, putting his hand on Miles’s arm.

  ‘I doubt that. But it doesn’t make a difference. We’re leaving it. Come back before dawn when it’s asleep.’

  ‘If we just—’

  ‘We’re going, Mungo.’

  Miles looks at him, and without another word, Mungo leads the way down the trail. He knows that Miles will be the last one back. If the fire is to catch any of them, the crew boss will be first.

  Behind them, the fire proceeds at the highest and lowest extremes. As the crowns light up thirty feet over their heads, the forest floor thrums with a million small ignitings of timber litter—shrubs, conifer reproduction, anything rotten or dwarfish. Mungo sets a pace that is as fast as walking permits while carrying pulaskis and pisstanks on their backs.

  It isn’t far to the truck. Miles would guess no more than half a mile. They should be able to make it without running so long as they don’t lose the trail. That’s why Miles won’t let them go any faster than they are now. For the moment, the risk of panic and one of them cutting back into the fire is higher than its overtaking them. He hopes he’s right about their distance from the truck.

  Miles counts out every passing of a trail tape tag. He’s pretty sure he tied five orange bows between the truck and the smoker, but right now, he’s seen only two whip across his arm, fluttering like Day-Glo butterflies. Once, King turns his head to check on the fire’s progress, but whatever expression Miles shoots back at him—or whatever the kid sees in the face of the fire—returns his eyes to Jerry McCormack’s shoulders in front of him.

  When they pass the third trail tape, Miles glances back himself. He can’t see or hear the fire anymore, only feel it, a papery breath of heat that glues his lips shut. He looks straight up into the canopy to make sure the crowns have not yet ignited, and thinks he catches a flash skip across a patch of sky. But when he stops to confirm it, he sees that it was only the fourth knot of trail tape he’d spotted in his peripheral vision as it flapped by.

  Even as the fifth tie smacks Mungo’s shoulder, Miles wonders if they should break into a sprint. He doesn’t trust this fire. The way it’s faster than it has a right to be. The way it hides. Perhaps it has come around them in a circle that, at the last second, will cut them off from the road. Perhaps it’s already there.

  ‘The road toad!’ Crookedhead shouts as pixels of brown paint and chrome assemble into the crew truck through the aspen leaves.

  Miles hadn’t noticed the gully they had come down when they started out from the pumper. A thirty-foot rise between them and the road. It adds an extra minute to the calculations Miles has already made in his mind. Two if they hang on to all their tools.

  At the head of the line, Mungo hits the slope and it immediately bends him over, his hand clutching at roots to gain purchase on the grade. Jerry and Crookedhead fan out on either side of him. Miles watches the three men stiffen, fighting for every inch like beetles on a sand dune.

  Then realizes there are only three.

  He squints into the trees they have just passed through and sees that many of them are already hissing back at him. Directly overhead, the crowns wave orange flags.

  Halfway up the gully, Mungo turns. Miles waves him on.

  King, his lips say.

  When Miles steps down to find
the trail again it is dappled with cinders. Fireflies of ash lighting in the air, circling. Resting on his arm to bite through hair.

  He drops the chainsaw. His arm tingles with the release of weight. Swings it forward to get the feeling back and decides the direction it accidentally points in will be the one he follows.

  The kid must have cut off to the side when Miles was counting the last of the tags, which means he couldn’t have gone far. But it needn’t be far for both of them to be caught now. The trees sprouting heads to make a continuous rooftop of fire, leaving it nowhere to go but down. If it does before they’re out, Miles knows he and the kid will suffocate before they burn. He can only pull in inadequate half-breaths as it is. Searing his insides like gulps of boiled water.

  He keeps to the line he’s struck on. Neither he nor King would be capable of speech in the airless heat, so he doesn’t bother trying to call. If he doesn’t catch sight of the kid he won’t find him at all.

  It occurs to Miles that maybe he’s already passed him. King could be with the others at the pumper right now, joining them in the debate over how long they could afford to wait before being forced to drive on. If this is how it goes, he hopes at least that one of them will go down to pick up his saw. A Stihl 044 he’d oiled and sharpened back from the grave. He really liked that saw.

  When he first sees the kid he thinks he’s part of the fire. Standing in the middle of aspens with flames wriggling out from within the bark. His fluorescent vest marking him as a burning tree among trees.

  Miles waves him over. The kid doesn’t move. His eyes flicking between the treetops and his own boots, fascinated by the shrinking distance between them.

  To get to him, Miles walks straight through a thatch of flames. On the other side, his bootlaces and sleeves bring some along with him. He doesn’t bother trying to put them out. Instead, he circles behind the kid and knocks him forward with both hands.

  They aren’t following any particular route this time. Miles keeps pushing, and the kid’s head keeps whiplashing back. They will make it to the gully and up to the road, or they will not. But Miles will not let the kid space out again either way.

  ‘Over here!’

  Miles hears Crookedhead James’s voice before he notices that he and the kid are now on the slope. Mungo and Jerry come down to help them, but Miles flinches from their touch. It leaves the two men to take the kid by the shoulders and drag him to the top.

  At the pumper, Miles looks back and sees the forest they have emerged from thicken with fire. They have to roll out of here. But first, he asks a question of the doubled-over King.

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hey, King?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Look at me.’

  The kid takes some time to raise his eyes.

  Miles throws a straight jab to his mouth. So fast none of them are sure it’s even happened, including the kid. All he can do is smack his lips, tasting the instant, coppery seep from his gums.

  ‘Listening?’

  King blinks.

  ‘Why would you stop out there?’

  ‘The fire. It was just flying—’

  A forearm, hard, to King’s chin. It snaps his head back to bounce off the pumper’s roof rack and return to bobble atop his neck.

  ‘Wake up.’ Miles hits him again before King can reply. ‘Hello?’ A slap that turns his ear white, then red. ‘Hello?’ The other ear. ‘Wake the fuck up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay what?’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘That’s good. Because the next time you fall asleep, I’m going to let you burn.’

  They drop their gear in the back and get in. Miles thinks of going back for the saw, but the idea of getting himself killed on account of King at this point only makes him more angry. He climbs behind the wheel and takes it out on the gas, roaring the engine until the hood almost jumps free.

  After he’s bounced them a quarter-mile farther away from the site, Miles gets on the radio. His first request is for an air drop. The denial from overhead comes faster than usual. All air support is currently committed to fires at Dawson, Haines Junction and Atlin. Given the remoteness of the Comeback Fire, and its relative smallness, they shouldn’t expect a reconnaissance fly-over, let alone a water bomber, for at least the next twelve hours.

  Miles checks his watch. A quarter past seven. He decides there’s no point in all of them staying out here scrunched up in a crew cab until nightfall, when the fire might have settled down in the cooler temperature and they could have a chance of giving it a second size-up. He calls in to the RCMP office and asks Terry Gray if he can come out and take men back into town to get a few hours’ sleep. Mungo requests to stay with the truck, but Miles pretends not to hear him. Instead, he tells Terry that there will be four going back and one staying. It’s clear to everyone who the boss intends to remain.

  Finally, Miles tries to reach Ruby Ritter on the radio. He wants to hear for himself what she spotted of the Comeback, but only static greets his repeated attempts at contact. Next, he calls Margot on her frequencies. There are any number of harmless explanations as to why neither of them are answering, but Miles refuses to believe any of them.

  Alex wonders whose move it is. She stands over the chessboard with Stump’s tail slapping against her leg and feels her own heartbeat quicken to match its rhythm. She guesses he’s playing white.

  At first, she thought of shifting his rook around and putting him in checkmate, so that when he returned he would understand that she had left him a message. It even crosses her mind to pick up one of the pieces—the white queen—and slip it into the pocket of her jeans as a souvenir. But without him in it, the cabin feels too empty, too much like a sad museum of his solitude for any playful riddles or thefts. She’s not surprised that she misses him a little. It’s how quickly the disoriented longing invaded her spirits that she hadn’t seen coming. Watching him dress in the morning, talking about the fire as his voice squeaked with emotion he seemed unable to hear, his eyes electrocuted—she assumed that Miles would be so much worse off than she.

  And it was true that, for the first hour after his departure, she felt only a dull, philosophical regret, at the same time entertaining optimistic calculations of the long-term good she’d done. It almost worked. Then she made the mistake of noticing his details. The musk of beer and woodsmoke rising out of the laundry hamper. The ancient bottle of mouthwash she’d heard him pull out from under the bathroom sink when he had gotten up in the night and returned to kiss her neck with minty lips. The coloured tissue paper, Magic Markers and scissors left on the kitchen counter that he used in making postcards. All she had to do was open herself to these bits and pieces to feel the blade go in.

  What made it worse is that she had watched Miles and Rachel’s goodbye through the bedroom window. The way her daughter had touched his face as though to protect him from further injury.

  Alex had followed Miles as he stood up from Rachel, walked around to the front of the cabin and started his truck. When she could no longer hear the crunch of gravel under his tires, she told herself that this was the scene she had come here to witness. With this pantomime of farewell, all their loose ends were tied. Surely now, with no more than life’s usual bittersweetness, the three of them could carry on knowing that all that could be done was done.

  Then an alternative view arrived. It came hard and very fast. She was a fool.

  She called Rachel and Stump in from outside. She cranked the living-room window open to let the birdsong in. She rang the guy Mungo had asked to fix the grinding in her transmission to confirm that it was ready to pick up. She ate a four-egg, Cheez Whiz and onion omelette. None of it could prevent her from finding herself here, scraped clean from the inside out, frozen over the chessboard.

  ‘Momma?’ Rachel says, having joined Stump in beating against her leg. ‘Momma?’

  ‘Yes, baby?’

  ‘Are we really goi
ng away?’

  ‘In the morning. First thing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s time to go home.’

  ‘Can we bring Stump with us?’

  ‘Stump belongs to Miles, sweetheart.’

  ‘Can we bring Stump and Miles?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they belong here.’

  It’s so simple, Alex thinks, and decides to pocket the queen anyway. It’s so simple once you say a thing to see it as true.

  Aside from running away, Miles had kept his other secret to himself until this morning. Over the last five years, he’d thought it might have been Ross River’s only one. Now, he’d told Alex about Margot and him without needing to, without anything bargained for in return. It wouldn’t change anything, of course. That Miles had slept with the black-haired hunting guide within the first month of arriving in town, and had continued to, at the ritualistic rate of twice a year since, wasn’t even very interesting as a stray piece of gossip. What he didn’t tell Alex was how what he had done came to turn another man’s soul to ash. There are even times when Miles wonders if he has had a hand in two deaths, not one.

  ‘It’s Margot,’ she had said over the phone when she called. The first of the twotimes she ever has. ‘We met at the lounge last night.’

  Miles remembered. He had played darts with her boyfriend, Wade, a friendly giant who insisted on paying for all their beers and who had a startling memory for jokes involving a talking frog in a Mexican whorehouse. Margot had come along later. Miles felt her staring at him, at his scar. What was unusual was how her staring seemed an expression of approval.

  ‘I think I owe your boyfriend a few rounds.’

  ‘Wade’s just happy to see another white guy in town who isn’t a cop.’

  ‘I’ll get him next time, then.’

  ‘Actually, I’m calling to ask if you’d like to come over.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What are you guys up to?’ Miles asked, knowing what was coming next. Wade would be out of town. There would be no dinner, no party. It would be drinks, just the two of them.