The Wildfire Season

by Andrew Pyper

  He slows at the sight of a shoe a half-dozen strides ahead of him. Its human incongruity standing out against the unmarked hillside. Little of it remains but a white loop of canvas, blackened holes for absent laces. Wade bends to pick it up and it audibly crinkles in his hand. He brings it closer to his eyes and is able to make out the material’s pattern of laughing penguins wearing bow ties and top hats.

  It must have dropped from the girl’s foot, but not long ago. And whether walking or carried, she would not be alone.

  The tattered loops of the child’s sneaker strikes Wade as the best luck to come his way in some time. For one thing, it provides him with the knowledge of where the three of them are, and that they are not far. It also promises an opportunity to put Bader’s rifle to use before exhaustion or smoke claims him. Even in his condition, he should be able to catch up. And given the Winchester’s range, he won’t have to get too close, though he thinks he might like to. In Wade’s experience, the real pleasure of the hunt lies in the unexpected ways the animal comes down.

  He starts off again with something like elation, the world viewed through a shimmery film. He’d whistle if he could remember a tune. A salute to his second life, his after life, one destined to deliver the clear results that his first time round had denied him. It’s a comfort to think that perhaps his true talent has been waiting for him all along. Here on the barren slope, in the daylight murk of the underworld, in death.

  They run on coals red as chimney brick. Heat cuts through the soles of their feet, eats their toes. It removes all balance from their strides, so that they hobble forward on what feels like open stumps. On fires such as this, Miles has worked on crews who have risked being swallowed by a fast-moving line in order to take off their boots and pour the last of their water in to cool them. None of those were as hot as this.

  He spins around to check on Rachel and catches sight of her sprinting legs, her one remaining playground sneaker. Only now does he recognize the little black cartoon figures on the canvas as penguins in tuxes. She runs in the middle of the line they have formed, behind him and Alex but ahead of Mungo. He considers picking her up, but he’s not sure he could carry her for long, and for now, she seems to be managing as well as the rest of them.

  They dodge around trees dripping sap like candle wax. Even as she runs, Alex watches as floating sparks land in the lichen hugging their trunks. The moss flares, then immediately extinguishes, using up all the oxygen around it in a flush. If there isn’t enough air to burn tinder—she wonders almost idly, already losing connection to her thoughts—how much could there be for them to breathe?

  Something grips them by the ankles, a loop of muscle that forces each of them to stop. Glued to their places in a marshy pond. One that may have been as much as a foot deep a week ago, but the heat has evaporated all but an inch or two in its centre. At first, they can only move their heads, scanning the soft edges, where panicked game have left a tattoo of prints in the earth. The water that seeps into their socks the temperature of stock left to simmer on the stove.

  ‘My head,’ Mungo says. His voice so soft it’s not really there.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m upside down. I think I’m—’

  Mungo interrupts his own whispers by vomiting what looks to Miles like a quart of milk over his boots. When he’s finished, the older man nods, as though it was an event he’d seen coming for some time. His face so evenly pale it appears powdered with icing sugar.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ Miles says, not sure if this is good advice or not.

  It’s enough to send Mungo stumbling on again with the girl in front of him. Before he joins them, Miles steals a glance at the fire reflected in the marsh’s water. Torches held by a thousand invisible marchers, making their way down in deepening circles beneath the surface.

  ‘We’re going in goddamn circles!’ Mungo is shouting.

  We’re going where it wants us to, Miles says, but not even he can hear.

  The fire closes tight all at once. A patch of foxtails embosomed in a dry creek bed lights up in front of them, fizzing like birthday sparklers. Miles urges the three of them back, but the same foxtails they just passed through are already alive with light.

  Miles raises his arms to make them watch him. When he has their attention, he points into the seething foxtail.

  And runs into it straight.

  The girl watches him go. To her, he holds open a velvet curtain. One that has hidden a secret mirror-world from view.

  The bear reaches the ridge of the St Cyrs alone. From here, she commands a view over the killing ground and watches it being devoured. The town she knows to be down there cloaked by clouds that have fallen to earth. Nothing moves over the slope but a line of goats inching along the crest, uncertain which descent is the safer of the two.

  Closer, her cub’s body lies on the rocks. The scent of his death is already being picked up on the wind. She considers staying if for no other reason than to chase the scavenging eagles off when they come, but she has been moving for so long that her body demands to continue.

  She starts down the other side to the south. Though the fire is evident in this valley as well, she can see a route linking corridors of green that will take her to the river. Half a day’s travel, probably less. Once she reaches the cover of the treeline, she can finally disappear.

  But the sow goes no farther this way. Instead, she climbs back to the ridge. Without pausing to read the air, she walks in the same direction she had come with her cub and toward the fire they had raced to stay ahead of.

  Her head is empty of intent. Something awaits her here and there is only the need to meet it. A summoning, as it was when she answered the call to mate. Until an hour ago, instinct had governed every action of her life. Now she is guided by grief alone.

  Inside the inferno, there is nothing but white noise. A hateful buzzing, like a swarm of yellowjackets spewing from their nest. They clap palms to the sides of their heads but the most persistent still manage to wriggle in, lancing their eardrums.

  Snags fall across their course. Twice, a branch holds Alex beneath it, cooking her on the whitened duff. Smoke pukes from the tops of their trunks. Each time, Miles stops to help Alex and Mungo picks the girl up, as much to know where she is as to protect her from falling widowmakers. Miles lifts the branches back with his bare hands and feels the skin there curl away.

  You okay? he asks her.

  Alex looks above him, through him. He circles his right ear with an index finger. She shrugs, uncomprehending. If she can’t feel the missing half of the ear she’d planted on the burning earth, he’s not going to explain it to her.

  There is only enough time for Miles to recognize that his next actions will be his last. After that, the wasps will take their time to feed on all of them. If he didn’t know as much about what such an experience would entail, he might welcome, after everything, the rush of surrender.

  From somewhere far off, he hears the cacophony of an orchestra running scales in different keys.

  Some time—a click of fingers, a night’s sleep—passes. It’s impossible for Miles to guess. He feels nothing but the urge to cough.

  Without turning, he learns that Alex and Mungo lie next to him. It’s their touch that tells him. Brushing the sparking wisps off each other’s clothing.

  All of them but the girl.

  ‘Rachel?’

  Alex speaks her name with tentative recollection. To Miles, it sounds as though it is something she had been trying to locate for hours that has only now been returned to her. A town they had holidayed in, or an exotic vegetable she had once been served in a restaurant.

  She turns to Miles and says it again. A storm builds in the dark crescents under her eyes. Runs fingers around her wrists as though checking to see if she wears a watch. All the while she is oblivious to the smouldering bald patch at the side of her head. Her long hair now falling over only one of her shoulders to reveal the black plug of her ear.
/>   ‘Rachel?’

  Miles takes a breath of updrafting carbon and holds it. Inside his head, a violin sings the note that all other sound must be tuned to.

  Then, before he can bring his own name to his mind, he lifts himself to his feet and walks back into the swarm.

  Chapter 24

  She tries to follow him. When her arms refuse to rise she pounds her forehead against the soil and uses it for leverage. It gets her on all fours for a second before she collapses on her side, knees up. Her body has betrayed her and she considers ways of leaving it behind altogether. Flight, above all. What she wants is to search for her daughter from the air.

  Alex lies curled in the toasted grass and thinks, again, how Rachel had changed everything. This is what they say about children. Before Rachel was born, she had been told to expect the worst. Still young then. Unmoneyed, abandoned.

  And what everyone said had turned out to be right: there had been changes. They came so hard and without interruption she hadn’t the time to resent them. It was simply her life. Her new, nogoing—back-now life.

  There may exist a kind of love that one recovers from, but Alex has never known it. She would go to both of them now if her body allowed her. Instead, she can only search the flames for their shadows and wait for the new everything to arrive.

  He calls out the girl’s name even as he knows she can’t hear it. He can’t hear it himself. And yet, somewhere not too far off, he feels the vibration of Rachel’s voice. A wordless howl, lost in the shifting labyrinth of fire.

  He remembers something that, even as it occurs to him, he feels there isn’t the time for. He remembers it anyway. How once, years ago, he’d been picked from the audience to be hypnotized onstage at a nightclub some friends of Alex’s had taken them to. It was supposed to be funny. The hypnotist had made others before him quack like ducks and sob like sissies at nothing at all. When he started on Miles with the Look deep into my eyes and counting backwards from a hundred, something about the encroaching deadness had made Miles feel as if he was suffocating. He’d snapped out of it and run back to his seat, waving his hands in the air when the hypnotist shouted at him to come back. It had gotten the biggest laugh of the night.

  It is how he feels now. The fire is trying to put him under and he’s not going to let it. There’s something he’s got to do. There’s someone.

  A breeze too high for him to feel passes through the upper leaves of an unburned clump of birches. He risks a glance against the heat. It looks to him like an audience clapping a thousand green hands. Rachel listens to the fire as she runs. It makes a scary music. Jangling and mean. Fingers drawn over piano strings with a toy fire engine holding down the sustain pedal (her preschool teacher hates it when she does this). Music that’s hard to get out of your head once it’s found its way in.

  She knows that Miles is here with her, moving but coming no closer. Once or twice, she thinks she’s heard him calling. But that’s not how she knows.

  Little Red Riding Hood. She was lost in the woods too. Rachel doesn’t wear the cape that the pictures in the book showed—and which Rachel begged her mother for—but when she glances at the skin on her arms she sees that it has turned the same colour. Aside from these details, Rachel’s and Red’s stories diverge. There is no grandmother’s house. No wolf. Though there is the same anticipation of a bad ending.

  The girl bats at the fire that reaches up her legs like dogs jumping for food in her hands. Dogs that bite.

  She swipes her hand down her side and it comes away wet.

  Maybe it’s raining.

  He swings his arms in circles. It’s all Miles can do to search for something when he can’t see anymore.

  When he makes contact, he’s not sure his senses have got it right. Was that skin? Or wood? Grabs for it again and finds the girl’s arm. He knows because it’s so small. Its pulse.

  When he falls the girl lands on his back, knocking the breath out of him. Wherever he is, it’s cool enough to open his eyes. Rachel’s head rests next to his. All of her hair has burned off, leaving only her pincushioned scalp for him to stroke.

  Miles looks about him but can’t find Mungo or Alex. Something drops from his lashes into his eyes, stinging them more than the smoke. When he draws his finger across his lids and inspects what he’s wiped away, he sees that it is blood. Not his, but Rachel’s. The whole of the girl’s right side has been burned. Miles studies her wound like a map, seeking the extent of its borders. As he looks at what shock prevents her from feeling yet, his own scar alights with pain.

  ‘Miles!’

  ‘Over here.’

  ‘How bad is she?’ Mungo asks, looking down at the girl with an expression that answers his own question.

  The girl whispers something in Miles’s ear.

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  ‘He’s in there.’

  ‘We’re out of it.’

  ‘Not us. Him,’ she says before blacking out.

  ‘What’s she saying?’

  Alex kneels beside the two of them. The freckles on her cheeks conjoined into a purple birthmark.

  ‘She’s in trouble,’ Miles tells her.

  ‘It was only a minute.’

  ‘It got her.’

  Alex pushes his arm away. She is too strong for him to shield her from seeing where the fire had touched the girl.

  ‘Oh my God—’

  ‘I’ll carry her.’

  ‘She’s bleeding. My baby’s bleeding!’

  ‘That’s why we’ve got to move now.’

  Alex’s eyes turn to glass. She’s not here anymore and, for the moment, Miles figures this is better than if she were.

  ‘You want me to take her?’ Mungo asks, meaning the girl.

  ‘I’ve got her.’

  ‘You sure? You don’t look—’

  ‘I’ve got her.’

  Miles places Rachel on the grass next to him and lifts what’s left of his undershirt over his head. Using the sleeves as straps, he fits it as best he can around the girl’s wound. Before he’s finished, glistening polka dots have already seeped through the cotton.

  ‘We have to run,’ Mungo says, not taking his eyes off the fire.

  Miles holds the girl against his chest and struggles to his feet. The shakes invade his legs before his first step.

  ‘Miles?’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘That’s good. Because this son of a bitch looks like it wants a race.’

  Chapter 25

  The bear eats only to clean the ash from its mouth. When she discovers a thatch of buffalo berries growing next to a creek, she crackles inside and lies down. She picks the last traces of colour off the largest bush in less than ten minutes. The creek is close enough to roll over and drink from. Its water numbs her tongue.

  Sleep sings around her like mosquitoes, but she resists its invitation. The work involved in stripping each branch of its fruit keeps her awake. She lingers long enough that, when she’s finished, crimson juice drips off her muzzle.

  She crosses the stream and the current pulls out stones embedded between her claws. Climbing up the bank, she lifts her head to see the mountains, the alders, the taffy clouds, all redrawn in sharper lines. Her nose returned to its flaring survey of whatever moves for miles around.

  She cracks through a thicket of devil’s club, and its thorns comb dead yellowjackets from her fur. When the ground opens up again, her feet sink into the cushion of a wide peat meadow. The fire has come closer even since lunch. An inky haze climbs five hundred feet above the larches that border the field. An elk stands with its hindquarters only a few feet from a spot fire, seeking relief from the bog’s blackflies, choosing to be seared instead of bitten for a change. Where the runoff collects in pools, mallards and pintails fidget through the reeds.

  As soon as she reaches the shade on the meadow’s opposite side she picks up their scent. Not the same ones she’d met on the rockslide. Not the female hunter, but unmistakably human. A half mile off at the m
ost. She can feel a weight lifting from her great shoulders, lengthening her stride. The hunt focuses her.

  A plume of smoke rising from a log ahead signals that she may be cutting too close to the fire. As she passes, she sees that it is only a nearsolid cloud of gnats evicted from a fallen snag. Loud as a buzzsaw. An echo of the fury in her own ears.

  She moves with eyes closed. There are always the infinite shadings of brown and green and black to camouflage the truth of where a thing stands. But nothing could ever be confused with the candied odour she follows now. It fills the bellows of her lungs. Its taste so purely imagined that when she swallows, she swallows blood.

  The three of them come into view through the birches. Following the same creek he does. Maybe two hundred yards away. He would have seen them earlier if it weren’t for the smoke.

  Wade tries to narrow the distance between them by running along the grassy bank, but the ground is too soft for anything more than the foot-sucking march he’s managed for the last halfhour. It forces him into the trees. Here, he moves faster but struggles to keep a line on the creek between the trunks.

  When he figures he’s made up enough ground, he cuts back to the right to meet the creek again. Finds that his run in the trees had pulled him off course, so that now he’s gained no more than a hundred feet on them. His chest hurts. He bends on one knee to clear his vision. Figures he might as well try to hit them from here.

  The telescope fits his eye socket so snug it steadies the rest of his body. The lens flattens Mungo and the woman against the slope, so that their backs appear, touchable. He pulls the scope over each of them in turn and feels its crosshairs tickle between his own shoulder blades.

  It’s only when he gets to Miles that he notices the girl. Resting her head against his neck, looking back. Her eyes blink in short-circuited jolts. But in the brief seconds they stay open she reaches directly into him.