The Big Burn

by Jeanette Ingold

  He wished he knew what Sarge would say. But Sarge had stayed in Wallace. His ankle wasn't healing right, and the surgeon had thought he'd be better off there.

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  August 19, Afternoon

  The filthy sky lay so close in and low that Lizbeth couldn't see the tree line. Drifting tendrils of smoke made Celia—pacing the clearing in front of the cabin—look more like a ghost than a woman.

  We don't belong here, Lizbeth thought. This is crazy.

  Maybe if the smoke had been this thick and the fire smell this pronounced when they'd woken up this morning, they'd have taken Ranger Logan's advice after all and gone to town.

  But instead, the morning air had seemed almost fresh. And when it started worsening again, it did it so gradually that there was never a particular moment when it made sense to say, There. Now it's so bad we must leave.

  She saw Celia shield her eyes. "Hello?" Celia called. "Who's out there?"

  A voice shouted back, "Fire crew," and as Lizbeth hurried to join her aunt, a man emerged from the haze.

  "Can you tell us what's going on?" Celia asked.

  He stared. "Lady, there's a forest fire burning just over that ridge. Why are you here?"

  "We ... that is, I thought..."

  He interrupted. "You've got ten minutes to get out I can't have my men choose between taking care of you and keeping themselves alive." As he turned to leave, a loud craaack tore the air.

  "Wait!" Lizbeth said. "What was that?"

  "Probably a tree exploding," he told her. "Make that five minutes." Bits of things—pretty bits, like dusty, huge snowflakes—began floating down from the sky. Ash. "I'm sorry I can't stay to help you."

  Celia hadn't moved, and now Lizbeth gave her a little push. "You hitch up the horses, and I'll gather what I can from the house."

  Lizbeth ran inside, where she threw clothes and Celia's pocketbook and some cookware onto the bed and bundled the quilt around them.

  Glancing through the window, she saw Philly and Trenton skittering away from Celia's efforts to buckle on their harness. Another craaack sounded, and another. Lizbeth grabbed the quilt bundle and ran out to help.

  Bigger pieces were coming down now, not just ash but pinecones and sticks still ablaze.

  When she and her aunt had the horses and wagon ready, they scrambled onto the wagon seat and Celia snapped the reins. Then she pulled back. "Where's Billie?"

  "I'll get him," Lizbeth said, and jumped down and ran to the house.

  Then she saw his empty cage, its door still tied back from when they'd opened it to give him flying time. Now he perched out of reach above the suspended shelf.

  Lizbeth called to him and grabbed a piece of bread and held it up, but he didn't budge.

  "Oh, Billie," she said, tears in her eyes. "I'll leave the cabin open so at least you won't be trapped." Then she fled.

  ***

  At the creek she and her aunt climbed down from the wagon long enough to soak their straw hats and cotton dresses. Celia looked back. "Do you think we'll ever see our place again?"

  "I don't know," Lizbeth told her. "Cel, hurry!"

  The next minutes became a nightmare as they raced out of the narrow gulch through a shower of burning debris. Only their wet hats kept cascading embers from catching their hair afire. They clung together, hung on to the wagon seat, strained to keep the horses from running wild, breathed through an apron when the air became too thick with smoke to take in raw.

  And then they rounded a curve, climbed a small rise, rounded another curve, and emerged into air as fresh as they'd breathed that morning. It seemed unbelievable.

  The horses slowed to a walk. Lizbeth saw blood return to Celia's hands as her aunt relaxed her grip on the horses' reins.

  "I could have killed us," Celia said.

  Then she leaned over the side of the wagon and was sick.

  ***

  Celia said nothing else until they reached the turnoff to the Cool Spring Ranger Station. "Would you mind if I stopped August 19, 1910 by the station?" she asked. "I want to get Samuel Logan's scrapbooks for safekeeping."

  Lizbeth drew in her breath. "Cel, I'm sorry. I should have brought your pictures instead of pots and pans."

  "His are better," Celia said. "I should have told him so."

  North of the St. Joe River

  August 19, Evening

  Lying atop his blanket beneath a darkening sky, Jarrett wondered if the day could have been any more unsatisfactory. It had begun with the crew foreman pointing to the Chinese man and telling Jarrett, "You and Rolling Joe there, re-supply water."

  All morning they'd fetched water from a tiny stream, ferrying it a half mile up a shotgun trail, making trip after trip with five-gallon bags on their backs.

  "That's your name, Rolling Joe?" Jarrett asked once, and, getting a nod, told the man his. He also learned the man spoke English. The boss just hadn't bothered to find out.

  They drank scalded coffee and ate undercooked potatoes and bread for lunch. Then they spent several hours on an irritating, sluggish blaze that wrapped the bull nose of a hard-to-work hill.

  Dinner had been the same menu as lunch, and then Jarrett had gone to his bedroll hoping for some rest.

  Now Jarrett laughed to himself, thinking what Samuel would say to this outfit Or what Mr. Polson would say. Or Jarrett's boss from Graham Creek. Or Elway.

  "Hey, Logan!" The foreman came over. "That fire is doing something different, and I can't tell what I want you to take Rolling Joe and a couple of the Italians to see if it's threatening to cross the fireline past where you were working it today. If it is, stop it"

  Jarrett stood up wearily. An image of the injured man, Benny, that he and Elway had taken to Wallace came to mind. "I'm pretty beat," he said.

  "And the rest of us aren't?" his boss demanded.

  "I really don't think I should take a crew out," Jarrett told him. "I've never led one, and I don't have a feel for the terrain or where this fire's burning."

  "Nobody's asking you to think or feel, either one," the foreman said. "Just make sure that fire doesn't cross our line."

  ***

  When Jarrett's crew got to the fireline, they found the fire had already crept across it but not gone much farther. Jarrett set everyone to beating back the low flames. The situation didn't seem particularly dangerous, but heavy smoke, combined with growing darkness, kept him from seeing what was going on any distance away.

  Visibility decreased further as they smothered the fires that were providing most of the meager light by which they worked. The smoke, which boiled more and more thickly, reeked of pine tar and made breathing hard.

  Then, in just moments, a thick, filthy cloud engulfed Jarrett, leaving him unable to see his hand held out at arm's length. Frightened, confused shouts told him the cloud had also surrounded Rolling Joe and the Italians, Angio and Vito.

  "Keep together," Jarrett called, frantically hunting for a way out of the smoke. He almost stepped into a low bank of fire before seeing its edges. "This way's blocked," he called, his words choking off in a fit of coughing. He could hear others coughing nearby.

  From his right came the dull thuds of a shovel, and Rolling Joe shouted, "Not this way! Not this way!"

  "Keep together!" Jarrett yelled again. "All of you, stay with my voice." Not knowing if the Italians could understand him, he shouted their names over and over. "Angio! Vito!"

  As Jarrett tried to punch his way out of the smoky cloud pressing in on him, he held tight to the idea that staying together was the most important thing.

  He didn't know how long they wandered in the sickening cloud. Sometimes they walked what seemed like a long way before coming to something that forced a turn. Other times they went just a few feet before having to change direction.

  Finally, though, Jarrett glimpsed the dim shape of a tree and then those of several more, and he realized the trees had to be outside of the smoke cloud. "This way!" he yelled, his voice hoarse.
"Here's the end of it."

  Rolling Joe and Vito quickly found him but arrived without Angio.

  Cupping their hands to funnel their voices, they all shouted his name over and over, until he, too, finally stumbled out.

  And then two more figures, one tall and one small and both looking like scarecrows, took shape in the smoke. As the figures came toward him, emerging into the faint glow of firelight reflected down from the sky, Jarrett realized the smaller was a young boy carrying a charred carpetbag.

  The taller one, a man covered with soot from his singed-off hair to blackened boot toes, tripped and sprawled headlong. Jarrett, reaching down to pull him up, saw the man's eyes were swollen nearly shut No wonder he tripped, Jarrett thought He can't see.

  "Who are you?" he asked. "And where did you come from?"

  The man mumbled incoherently, but the boy answered. "I'm Henry Reese and that's my pa. We got burned out from our homestead..." He counted on his fingers. "Three nights ago."

  "You've been walking three days and nights?" Jarrett echoed, horrified. "Were you lost?"

  "I was," the boy said, "and I couldn't get Pa to say if he knew where we were." He paused. "Where are we now?"

  "Within a mile or two of Slate Creek, I think," Jarrett said. He was lost himself, with no idea how far his crew had traveled in their haste to get out of the smoke cloud. He didn't know in what direction camp lay, or if they were still in the same drainage. He had just a vague sense that they'd moved more downhill than up and that the fire was probably above them.

  "We better drop a little farther down and then find a spot level enough we can get some sleep," he said. "Then tomorrow we'll find our way back to camp."

  He looked at the five faces around him. Probably Rolling Joe and the boy are the only ones who understand what I just said.

  He wondered what he could do about Mr. Reese, but Rolling Joe solved that problem by taking the homesteader by the elbow and telling Jarrett, "We'll follow." Jarrett was relieved to see Angio and Vito nod.

  ***

  For the next hour Jarrett picked his way by instinct as much as by sight. He did his best to keep his little group moving downhill, hoping he was right in thinking the fire wouldn't be likely to travel downhill after them. He wondered if the others sensed his uncertainty.

  He'd half expected that by now they would reach the stream where he and Rolling Joe had got water, but they hadn't. So, perhaps they were in a different drainage.

  Finally he stopped. "Here," he said, indicating that everyone should lie down and get some sleep.

  Jarrett tried to think out their situation, but he was too tired to keep his thoughts focused.

  He jerked awake. He should set a guard. You never, ever let a crew turn in without posting someone to watch for fire.

  That was what he needed to do....

  Part Three

  Wallace

  August 20, Morning

  As he often did when looking at his fire map, Mr. Polson pictured a firefighter. Sometimes the imagined man would be a middle-aged immigrant in shabby clothes, sometimes he'd be a young man out to prove himself, sometimes he'd be a settler carrying a pocket watch with a photograph of his family fitted inside its case. Always, he had ash in his hair and soot ground into his skin, and he was hot and tired and hungry and thirsty, and always, always, in harm's way.

  Mr. Polson had found that the worse a fire season got—the. faster fires multiplied and the bigger the fire-fighting force grew—the more he had to reduce the fight to numbers and resource allocations and symbols on a map. But in the early morning, before a day could get away from him—that was when he reminded himself of the people behind those numbers. Of the individual firefighters who might be anywhere on the steep slopes or in the densely wooded gulches of the Coeur d'Alene Forest.

  His map showed the waterways most clearly. Creek after creek fingered down from the divide, flowing south to the St Joe River or north to the Coeur d'Alene. They lined up like the wrinkles around an old person's mouth. Fires often took their names from the creeks they burned nearest, and fire bosses thought in terms of who had which crews on what creeks.

  That pin far to the left—that stood for Lee Hollingshead, who had sixty men on the west fork of the Big Creek that fed the St. Joe.

  John Bell had another fifty on that Big Creek's middle fork.

  East of John Bell and closer to Wallace, Ed Pulaski was in charge of 150 men spread out for miles along the divide between the St. Joe's Big Creek and the Big Creek of the Coeur d'Alene. They spilled over into Placer Creek, where the Twenty-fifth Infantry's I Company had been sent.

  And farther east still were James Danielson with eighteen men on Stevens Peak, S. M. Taylor with another sixty on the Bullion fire along the Montana-Idaho border, and Joe Halm with eighteen men far to the southeast.

  Mr. Polson's gaze swung back to Avery. Two pins stuck in a little to the left of the town's name designated William Rock's and Ralph Debitt's seventy-man crews, both situated a half dozen miles up Setzer Creek. The Twenty-fifth's G Company had been sent to Avery and would also be on the lines near there.

  And of course, northwest of Wallace, Will Morris still battled the Graham Creek fire.

  Mr. Polson shook his head, frustrated that for all his map conveyed, it left a lot more unreported. It didn't have a pin for every ranger and fireguard running a crew. It didn't show the spike camps and makeshift shelters used by men working far from their bases. It couldn't show the whereabouts of the firefighters who, for one reason or another, were out on their own.

  His map couldn't say where, at that very moment, the fires were advancing fastest or dying back. Or where winds were changing direction. Or where smoke had settled in so thick that a man could get turned around because he couldn't see his crewmates or a trail or the top of a landmark mountain.

  His map couldn't say where, at any particular moment, the greatest danger lay or who would have to meet it.

  North of the St. Joe River

  August 20, Morning

  When Jarrett jerked awake again, there was daylight. The guard. I didn't set a guard. He looked anxiously about for signs of fire and then relaxed when he didn't see any besides the ever present smoke.

  The others still slept. Jarrett wondered how he'd ever come to be responsible for a half-blind and shock-numbed man, a young kid, two Italians who understood only a little English, and a Chinese person who called himself Rolling Joe.

  Of all the jobs he wasn't prepared to handle...

  One thing was for sure. The sooner he could get everybody to the fire camp and turned over to the crew foreman, the happier Jarrett would be.

  The boy whimpered and flung out an arm that landed across Jarrett's chest. Then he opened wide, worried eyes.

  "How are you doing this morning, Henry?" Jarrett asked.

  "I'm okay. I wish Pa was."

  "I think once he gets his sight back he'll get better," Jarrett told him, trying to sound reassuring.

  "I got a baby brother, but he's with my ma," Henry volunteered. "They went to Spokane to be safe, but Pa said I was old enough to stay and help him keep our place from burning up." He paused. "It burned up anyway."

  "I'm sorry," Jarrett said.

  "Yeah, me, too."

  After a moment the boy rolled over, and Jarrett turned to thinking about his options. From where he lay he could see a good-sized blackened area studded with partly burned trees halfway up a steep hillside. If he took everyone up there, they'd be visible to a search party and probably safer than here. Jarrett remembered Samuel saying that fires don't usually waste their time on old bums.

  Before they set off he'd drop down to the gulch bottom and fill their water bottles, assuming he found a creek down there. He again wished he knew if they were above the gully he and Rolling Joe had pulled water from the day before. If so, they must be well to one side or the other of the spot, because Jarrett didn't recognize any of the surrounding terrain.

  Avery

  August
20, Morning

  Seth's day began at 5:15 A.M., when the bugler sounded reveille. He delayed a moment getting up, wishing he could put off going back to the woods. But the army's morning routine moved along just as sure in the field as it did in garrison on a regular post. He had to assemble with the others at 5:30, make mess call at 6:00, line up for sick call at 7:15 if he wanted salve for his blisters.

  There was a different bugle call for each thing, different notes and different rhythms, and sometimes Seth thought how he was probably waking up to the same sounds soldiers were waking up to all over. The sounds his father probably had woken up to at all those posts he'd been on and countries he'd gone to. Seth liked thinking on that better than he liked thinking about the day in front of him.

  Drill call was at 8:00 A.M. and another assembly at 8:10. Ten minutes after that he shouldered his mattock and again headed to the fires that threatened the rail line. The fires were hard to get to, tucked away as they were in a confusing canyon of deep ravines and steep, rocky faces. Even from a distance he could see the fires were flaming higher than they had the day before. The smoke churned thicker, clogging his head; a stiff wind ground gritty ash into his eyes and plastered his flannel shirt against his arms.

  He set to work where he was told, but it took all his willpower to hack at the fire trench when he saw glowing brands roll down on it Especially when one of them ricocheted up, searing his fingers with a sharp bite of pain. And no matter how hard he tried not to think about the danger around him, there was no ignoring the bright streamers that flared at the edge of his vision.

  One time, startled by a tree torching so close that the sudden brightness almost blinded him, he did turn and start to run away. Then, ashamed, he continued on to a large boulder and stood facing it, hoping anybody who'd noticed would think he'd left to relieve himself.

  Returning to the fireline, he saw he hadn't fooled Abel.