"Who said I want out? Anyway, I got two years to go," Seth told him.
"You think that matters?" Abel laughed softly. "You and me decide we want out, then we get out."
"I already said that ain't what I'm after," Seth said. But he couldn't stop himself from asking, "How?"
Abel laughed again. "Thought that would get you. I got plans."
"What plans?"
"In time, buddy. In time."
***
As soon as Seth's relief took over walking the sentry round, the white boy from the fight appeared. He must have been waiting, Seth figured.
"You're the soldier who helped me today, right?" the boy asked. "I want to thank you."
"Wasn't nothing," Seth answered.
"It was to me! You get hurt bad?"
"No. Look, I got to report back."
"Then I'll get going," the boy said. "I just came by now because I've got to leave early tomorrow for a fire camp." He held out his hand. "I'm Jarrett Logan."
Seth hesitated and then, hoping he was doing right, he completed the handshake. "Seth Brown," he said.
"Nice to meet you," Jarrett said. "Thanks again." He started to leave.
"Wait," Seth said. "You said you're going back to a fire camp? You're a firefighter?"
"Yeah."
"Because, I was wondering what it's like, stopping a forest fire."
"You don't stop them," Jarrett answered. "You just try to keep them from running away. And as for what it's like—it's not been too bad for me, but I haven't been at it long. For some others, though..." He shuddered. "It's not something you ever want to see, how somebody who's been burned looks."
Seth was astounded to see tears well up in the boy's eyes.
"Or how he smells or what he sounds like—" Jarrett broke off. "I shouldn't have said that. Most times, fire fighting is no worse than other kinds of hard work. Just hotter."
"I can handle hot," Seth said.
"Then I reckon you'll be okay. You know what fire you're going on?"
"They said I Company's staying here, and G Company—that's mine—is going down to some railroad town."
"Avery, then," Jarrett said, remembering what Mr. Polson had told him. "That's a division town on the Milwaukee."
"You know it?"
"I used to live there, and my father still does. He's a train conductor."
"Mine was a soldier," Seth said. "Look, I really best be getting back before someone comes after me."
"Good luck down in Avery, if that's where you go," Jarrett said. "I hear the fires all along the St. Joe are heating up, so I know you're needed."
Wallace
August 16, Morning
Jarrett found Mr. Polson already at work when he got to the Forest Service office at 7 A.M., after sleeping under a baggage cart at one of the railroad stations. Jarrett told him about the threats from Tully's friend, about what Tully might do. "I don't know the man's whole name, just Tully, but he was the same one who..."
"I know him," Mr. Polson said. He put a reassuring hand on Jarrett's arm. "I'd guess that was bluff yesterday, but I'll send word down to the Avery sheriff so someone can warn your father and keep an eye on his place. And I'll warn Samuel when he returns."
"You want me to go check on the Cool Spring Station?"
"You're needed more on the firelines." Mr. Polson hesitated. "But no one would blame you for going down to Avery to make sure things there are okay."
Jarrett thought, And Pop would think I was using the threats as an excuse to go home. He'd laugh in my face, before slamming the door on me.
The force of the anger surging through Jarrett surprised him, since he'd hardly thought about Pop the last few weeks. He'd been too busy.
"Thanks," he told Mr. Polson, "but I want to see the fire season through, now I'm this far in it" He waited while Mr. Polson studied him.
Then the Forest Service man told him, "Well, like I said, you're needed." He went over to the wall map, where he indicated one of many pins clustered along the drainages feeding the St. Joe River. "Now, this is where you're going to deliver that equipment."
Cool Spring Ranger Station
August 18, Morning
Samuel checked the supplies he'd packed into his saddlebags. He hated to again be leaving his territory to someone else's care while he helped with fire crews farther out. Maybe one good thing that would come of this summer's wildfires would be the Forest Service getting money to hire more rangers.
Anyone with half a mind could see they were needed, along with a lot more firefighters who actually knew what they were doing.
He worried about the woods being full of men who had no idea how a wildfire might act or how fast one could move. Men who had no idea that the only thing completely sure about any fire was that it was unpredictable.
"Want to see if we forgot anything in the cabin?" he said to Boone.
Inside, Samuel telephoned headquarters to report that he was on his way but planned a short detour by the mail drop and to check on a couple of homesteaders. He fastened the pie-chest door securely so he wouldn't come back to mouse-eaten cornmeal. He squared his stack of scrapbooks.
He knew he was dawdling but couldn't put a finger on just why.
Boone, usually impatient to start a trip, seemed to pick up on Samuel's mood. The big dog came over and leaned against him.
"You uneasy, too?" Samuel said. "We must be turning into a couple of old women."
He thought a moment. "Maybe we should leave a note for Jarrett, in case he gets back here before we do." Then he shook his head. "Guess that's not likely."
The last he'd heard, Jarrett was heading for one of the fires down in the St. Joe country and would probably stay there until rain ended the fire season.
I hope he's all rig/it, Samuel thought, and that he's with a good crew.
"Boone," he said, "this isn't getting our job done."
Samuel took a last look around the cabin, and when they went outside, he was careful to leave the door unlocked. Anyone coming through would know they were welcome to shelter.
Homestead off Placer Creek
August 18, Afternoon
Lizbeth wedged a bit of lettuce between the crossbars of the canary cage, hoping Ranger Logan and Celia would smile at how Billie nipped out V-shaped bites. "Of course, apples are his favorite," she said.
They ignored her.
Celia said, "I'm still not convinced Lizbeth and I need to leave here."
"It probably wouldn't have to be for long," the ranger said. "Those soldiers joining the firelines should make a difference, and we're due for a weather turn. I'm just asking you to play it safe."
"I am," she said. "We're safeguarding what we own."
Lizbeth noticed that her aunt didn't meet the ranger's eyes.
Why, Cel realizes she's not making sense! She just doesn't know how to back down, Lizbeth thought. More than anybody's warning had, her aunt's uncertainty made Lizbeth consider whether they might be in real danger.
Ranger Logan, appearing to be near the end of his patience, said, "Some of the homesteaders on Pine Creek felt the same way and ended up having to flee for their lives."
"And some didn't, right?" Celia demanded. "Didn't you just bring me a letter from my friend mailed from over there?"
The ranger raised his hands as though to say, I give up. Lizbeth got the impression that both her aunt and the ranger had things to say that they didn't know how to put into words.
Instead Celia asked, "May I pack you a sandwich for the trail? I imagine you need to be leaving."
***
Lizbeth watched the color drain from her aunt's face as she read Dora Crane's letter. Then Celia put it on the table and went outside.
For a moment Lizbeth didn't move. She didn't want to think about what she'd find in the letter, because she knew it was going to be an end of some kind. Reluctantly she picked it up.
Kellogg, Idaho
August 12, 1910
Dear Celia and Lizbeth,
This is to tell you we are clearing out from this hateful country. I wish I could leave you with good thoughts, but I have none remaining and just hope you won't ever know what it is to lose all. For forty hours, Nathaniel and the children and I fought the blazes threatening at our place, until they had passed us by and we believed we were safe. Then we slept the sleep of the dead. Although I realize it is a shameful thought, I still do not know if I am truly glad God woke us when He did, for the wind had turned and that fire come back at us.
We escaped with our lives but none else, and I fear Nathaniel's spirit is broken. Tomorrow we leave for my brother's farm in the Palouse country below Spokane, where we will try to think what to do next.
I am sorry to write this, but after receiving your loving letter, I did not wish to leave you wondering. I disremember the particulars of your circumstance, but if you can sell out now, for goodness' sake do, and get out.
Your sad friend,
Dora Crane
Lizbeth's eyes filled with tears as she tried to find in the letter's bitter words the Dora Crane she remembered. They could have been written by a stranger, for all they held any trace of the warm woman she and Celia knew. Nobody, Lizbeth thought, had loved this country more than Dora Crane had, and now she was telling them to leave while they could.
Lizbeth went outside and stood silently by her aunt. Finally Celia said, "I hope she finds things easier on the Palouse. At least she won't have forest fires."
FIELD NOTES
While the forests of the Idaho panhandle dried into tinder ready to explode, in the rolling prairie seventy miles to the southwest the wheat growers of Washington State's rich Palouse country despaired for their crops. The ground was dry to the touch, dry if you dug down—dry, it seemed, no matter how deep you went.
Farmers who had thrown themselves against the bad odds of a growing season begin with little moisture knew they were losing their fight. Especially now that July and August had brought intense heat and drying winds to the battle. Looking over their land, the farmers wondered what kind of harvest there could be from fields where dust devils whirled between rows of stunted plants.
If the families of the Palouse talked at all over their suppers those bad days, it might be to say they'd heard the Northern Pacific Railway had canceled trains and laid off men because of crop failures along the line.
Mostly, those farm families had all they could do to worry about their own land and livelihoods. But if they did extend their worry to friends and relatives over in the mountains—if by chance they'd ever lived in the mountains themselves in a bad fire year—they might wonder if conditions weren't coming together for a Palouser.
That was what the old-timers called the gale winds that occasionally formed in the Palouse country and blew into the mountains of Idaho. Such a windstorm might last two or three days, filling noses and throats with dust carried an impossibly long distance, and with moke from any fires it passed through. When the gale winds of a Palouser blew through woods where fire burned, they could pick up pieces of the fire and shoot them ahead like flaming arrows.
In the days right before a Palouser blew, the people that it would hit usually had no idea it was coming.
North of the St. Joe River
August 18, Evening
Jarrett wouldn't have minded staying where he'd delivered the repaired equipment, but soon after he'd arrived a plea had come to the ranger in charge there for any firefighters he could spare. Jarrett and five others had been sent out early this morning, and they were still searching for the crew they'd been ordered to join.
It would have helped some if the land matched up better to the sketched map they'd been given, or if the trail they were supposed to follow existed as anything more than blaze marks chopped into the sides of trees. They'd about worn themselves out climbing up and down the steep drainages that fed the St. Joe River.
Finally they stopped for supper, taking time to make a small cooking fire. They fried bacon to go with the canned tomatoes they all carried. They made boiled coffee in a couple of the empty cans.
"You think we ought to sleep here?" one of the men suggested.
"Let's push on," another answered. "I'm hoping for a camp with a good cook who'll offer me a bedtime snack of hot stew and fresh biscuits. Maybe some berry cobbler."
"What I'd like is flapjacks," still another put in. "With lots of syrup."
***
Three hours later they found the spike camp they'd been hunting for located in heavy timber a mile from where it was supposed to be, above Slate Creek.
Even in the near dark, Jarrett could see it was a poor setup. Nobody had bothered to rig any shelters, except for a torn cook's tent Tools and equipment lay scattered about. No ranger greeted them, only a harried crew foreman who wanted to put them right to work.
"We've been walking all day," Jarrett said. "We could use some sleep first"
The foreman looked as if he was going to argue, but then he shook his head and made a disgusted noise. "So get it." He started away but turned back. "All of you speak English?"
Jarrett and the others nodded.
"Good. Then I can spread you out among all these foreigners I got handed. I need at least one person in each group who can understand me."
After the foreman had gone on, one of the men who'd arrived with Jarrett said, "This is where I quit" He jerked his head to indicate a dozen people gathered at a campfire. "Just listen to that babble and take a gander at who's making it."
Jarrett thought he could pick out two or three different languages. Most of the men in the group wore street shoes and city clothes, and a Chinese man was pulling off slippers. All were too clean to have been on a fireline yet
The man who'd announced he was quitting said, "You think any of them ever saw a forest fire before? You want to get killed, fighting fire with a bad crew is a quick way to do it"
Avery
August 18, Night
Seth listened to the mumbles and snores of the seven other men in his tent and wished he could fall asleep. But being scared wasn't a thing he was used to, and the feeling shamed him and kept him awake.
The fear he'd first felt on smelling smoke in Wallace had caught up with him on the trip down here, when he'd seen smoke hide mountainsides where flames appeared without warning. The sight had made him feel like he might jump out of his skin.
And then today...
Seth thought back to the morning.
He'd gone to assembly expecting to be put to camp labor the way he'd been the day before. Only, instead, he and the others had been handed unfamiliar tools and told to be sure they had full canteens; they were going to strike a fireline to keep fires east of Avery from reaching the railroad.
"You know what a fireline is?" Seth had asked Abel, as they'd headed out.
"Guess we're gonna find out," Abel answered.
"And how about these things we got to work with? You think somebody's gonna show us how to use them?"
The tool Seth was carrying resembled a pickax, except that its heavy head came to a point at only one end instead of both. The blunted back side flattened out to a broad edge something like a hoe blade.
A Forest Service man who was going out to the woods with them heard Seth. He chuckled. "That's a mattock," he said. "You'll figure it out fast enough when you get fire licking at your feet. But so you know, you loosen stones and dirt with the one side and scrape with the other."
Seth had nodded, turned silent by an image of flames snapping about his legs.
Only, as it turned out, the flames didn't snap around him as much as roll down from above. Their fireline angled along the lee side of a scrubby ridge, and most of the fire was hidden from sight on the other side. Occasionally, though, lone trees on the ridgeline burst into flame, and branches broke off and tumbled down.
Seth's corporal didn't know any more about fire fighting than Seth and Abel did, but he passed on what he'd been told: that they were working in a good spot. The fire cl
imbing up the other side of the hill would slow way down once it got over the top, and after it crawled down to the line they were fixing, it would go out altogether.
"Anybody tell the fire that?" Abel asked, drawing a laugh from some of the sweating soldiers nearby.
Seth, hacking into the hard ground with his mattock, didn't see how Abel could joke.
And as if to prove the fire wasn't something to joke about, a heavy burning log plummeted down and was on them almost before anyone saw it coming. It hit one of Seth's tent mates, knocking him down and leaving him gasping for breath like he'd been hurt inside.
After a party left with the injured man, there wasn't any more laughter along the fireline. Just hot, hard work done with wary eyes trained on the hillside above. Work made unbearably hotter whenever the flames got close enough that the men could feel their heat.
Seth had been so thankful when the day finally ended. And now Seth wondered how the others could sleep.
He kept remembering what that white boy had said about burned people. They got a sound, Jarrett Logan had said. They got a smell.
Was Seth the only one in the tent who knew that? Was that why the other men weren't lying awake?
Before turning in, Seth had asked Abel, "Abel, ain't you scared at all?"
"Buddy," Abel had answered, still keyed up from a walk about town, "I am saying my prayers."
Seth, confused, asked, "You mean, to keep you safe?"
"I mean," Abel answered, "you let me worry what to pray for. Didn't I say I'd take care of us? Remember, we're a team."
After hearing that, Seth couldn't tell Abel about the biggest fears he had—that maybe deep down Seth was a coward and that sooner or later he'd run from a fire and then everyone would know. What could be worse than wearing a uniform and not having the courage to go with it?
It's not like I'm Abel, wanting out of the army, Seth thought. But maybe it would be the right thing to do, to get out of my uniform for good before I disgrace it.
The Big Burn Page 10