Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  I set it up in a bed of sweaters and jackets in the tin bathtub. I heat some soy milk in a pan on the stove; I manage, by squeezing its jaw and tilting back its neck, to force it to swallow a little milk spooned onto its tongue. I’m scared I might make it choke, but with a little practice I become reasonably adept at making it take the milk.

  I radio the Embree work station and ask the guy there to call Gila Wildlife Rescue, to see if I can get some guidance on how to feed and handle the fawn. I know the guy who runs GWR. In fact I’d just been at his house a couple of weekends earlier, where he showed me an owl, two kit foxes, and a fawn he was nursing back to health. Unfortunately the listing for him in the phone book is out of date, so the guy in Embree calls and leaves a message with the state Game and Fish Department. After a couple of hours they call back to say they’ll send an agent out of Las Cruces to pick up the fawn. I’m surprised they don’t have someone closer but relieved at least that help is on the way.

  “Do they know it’s a five-mile walk to get here?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure,” comes the reply. “I’ll check.”

  Ten minutes later he radios back. “Game and Fish says to return the fawn to the place where you found it, leave it there, and let nature take its course.” What I am really being told, gingerly but unmistakably, is that it’s my fault for interfering in the first place. I’ve disrupted the natural order of things. I should undo my error, return it to the place of its discovery, forget about it.

  I begin to entertain a host of troubling questions: Have I doomed it merely by touching it? Will the scent of me, the scent of a human, ensure its rejection by its mother no matter what? Will its immune system have any defense for the microbes I carry? Is my own stupid sentimentality the real cause of its doom? Have I—and the dog—frightened off its mother, a doe who would’ve returned when we passed? All of a sudden I realize I don’t know the first thing about the nursing habits of newborn mule deer. What had looked so jarring to me—a little fawn alone in the woods, defenseless against all who would harm it—may have been an utterly natural occurrence. I feel the warm flush of shame at the depth of my ignorance.

  At dawn the next day the fawn is no longer in the old tin tub. I find it looking lifeless, curled under one of the bunks in the corner of the cabin, an unmoving little coil. I feel its side: warm to the touch. I heat more soy milk and forced some down its gullet with a spoon.

  In the afternoon I rouse it and carry it outside, place it on the ground. It wobbles and sways but remains upright. I walk a little ways off. The fawn begins to follow. Every moment afoot its legs appear stronger, more sure of each step, until I jog a few paces and it breaks into an awkward lope, hind legs splayed to maintain a precarious balance. I lead it around the meadow for a hundred yards, the fawn following like the obedient pet I do not want it to become.

  When we stop, the fawn moves between my legs, its muzzle in the air, searching for a nipple. What, I think, do I have that resembles a nipple? A saline spray bottle, a nasal moistener. I empty the bottle, rinse it, and realize I’ve run out of soy milk. I remember some powdered milk, years old, stowed in the back of the pantry. Insufficient, no doubt, but it’s all I’ve got. I heat water and add powder and suction the mixture into the spray bottle. I hold the bottle between my legs like a nipple. To the fawn it does not feel like a nipple, of course, but after several false starts and milk dripping down its chin it finally understands the mechanics and suckles for a few seconds on the nozzle, and I deliver perhaps half an ounce to its shriveled stomach.

  Since it seems strong, I decide now is the time to return it to the place I found it, if return it I must. When we reach the scene of our first meeting I sit on a log and wait to see if it will recognize the place. It comes toward me, jaws in search of a nipple once more, its cries louder, and all of a sudden I begin to weep. The fawn wanders unsteadily along the slope below the trail, seems to sniff at the earth in recognition, in a way I’ve never seen it sniff. It walks a few feet and curls next to a log, and there I leave it. It does not stir as I walk away up the hill.

  In the night I come as close as I’ve ever come to prayer. More hope than prayer, in the end, but fervent in the way we think of the desperate and prayerful. I wish for the fawn to be wild, to run in high mountain meadows under moonlight, to feel the cold splash of crossing a creek in autumn. To know desire, pleasure, pain. To at least be given a chance. A life. Not merely birth and death.

  Even more I wish I’d never seen it.

  The next morning I amble into the meadow to piss and I hear its faint cries. By walking in ever larger concentric circles I discover it lying next to a rock near a salt lick visited by its own kind, mature mule deer, whose droppings litter the ground there. It had walked up the hill god knows when. I did not hear it in the night. When it sees me—or maybe when it hears me, for its eyesight appears poor—it comes to me with its muzzle more insistent than ever for a nipple, its teeth gripping the inseam of my pants and gnawing, sucking. Again I fill the saline spray bottle with milk and get a little down its throat.

  I call the dispatcher on the radio, in one last effort to enlist help. I tell him to try anything to reach my friend at Gila Wildlife Rescue, to let him know I can either meet him at the pass or drive to town with the fawn. I will find a way to carry it the five miles down. Then the district office comes over the radio and says: Game and Fish instructed that you take it away from the tower, do not touch it, and let nature take its course.

  “Roger that,” I say, helpless and sick with remorse.

  That afternoon the fawn curls up beneath the sawhorse, ten feet from the cabin door, the place it seems to feel offers it a modicum of safety as its strength wanes.

  Alice is lovely with it, resisting her urge to sniff at it, paw at it, make it a plaything. The fawn even comes to Alice and crouches beneath her in search of a teat, and Alice simply stands with her legs splayed and looks at me, uncomprehending and perhaps a little scared. Much of the day she barks into the trees at the edge of the meadow, barks seemingly at nothing, at phantoms. As if to say: Do not come near the fawn. Do not prey on the defenseless.

  My radio remains quiet. I sit on the porch and watch the fawn’s torso rise and fall with each breath. In its last moments of strength the fawn lies on its side and gallops in place, all four legs churning like pistons, like a dream of running. Its cries grow louder, higher pitched, more insistent. Then all of a sudden it is still.

  To bury it or leave it as carrion would seem a desecration—either one the act of a conscienceless murderer—so I build a pyre. I’ve been saving dry wood for weeks under a tarp for late-season bonfires. I burn one batch of wood down to a flaming bed of red-hot coals and then I place the fawn on the bed and cover it with yet more wood. I stack it as high as the stone circle will allow. The flames leap and the wood crackles. Before the fire burns completely down a deluge pours from the sky and reduces it to a core of molten coals and a drift of blue-gray smoke. It rains a quarter inch in half an hour. The meadow is perfumed with the smoke, and for days afterward the memory of that smell will haunt my every waking hour.

  July ends with midnight lightning over the Black Range, anvil-headed cumulus glowing in the moonlight. Two days pass before the sleeper smokes show; in the span of an afternoon I call in three new fires. John at Cherry Mountain spots two more. The observer plane manages to find a fire deep in a canyon ten miles south of me, where smoke would have to rise 500 feet for me to see it—as it eventually does, three hours later. On the last day of July ten active fires are visible from my vantage: the Diamond, the Circle Seven, the Powderhorn, the Outlaw, the White, the Trigger, the Wily, the Hightower, the Rainy, the Thompson. The forecast calls for a spell of hot, dry weather ahead—high pressure building over Arizona. Fire season lives.

  5

  August

  I follow the scent of falling rain

  And head for the place where it is darkest

  I follow the lightning

  And draw nea
r to the place where it strikes

  —Navajo chant

  Fire myths ancient & modern * a memory of smoke in lower Manhattan * last fires & lazy days of rain * waking above the clouds * elk in the meadow * a hidden cache of curiosities * the consolation of words & the escape from words * questions for lookouts past

  In the oral traditions of Native Americans, fire often comes to us as a gift from the nonhuman world. The Nez Perce tell of the time a beaver hid below a riverbank near a stand of pines. Alone among all living beings in having access to the power of fire, the pines warmed themselves around it as they met in council. A single ember from their bonfire rolled down the bank and was captured by the beaver, who held it to his breast and ran. For a hundred miles he was chased by the trees but he couldn’t be caught, and along his journey he gave fire to the willows and birches and many other trees. Ever after, any human in need of fire obtained it by rubbing together the wood of the trees where the fire was stored.

  In the stories of the Cherokee, fire came to earth when lightning struck a sycamore tree on an island. All the animals could see the smoke across the water; they met to plan a way to get the fire off the island. Raven volunteered to fly across and bring the fire back; when he landed on the tree his wings were scorched, and ever after he was black. The screech owl tried next, but a blast of heat and smoke nearly burned out her eyes when she looked down into the tree, and ever after her eyes were red. Many others tried unsuccessfully, until the water spider came up with a plan: she would skitter over to the island, spin her thread into a bowl, place an ember in the bowl on her back, and recross to the mainland. When she returned, she shared fire with all the animals and humans.

  In similar stories from other cultures, teamwork is often required among the animals. They take fire from its original owner, a species of tree or animal or even a band of humans that previously held a monopoly on its use. An arduous journey is usually required, as are cunning and stealth. Sometimes the animals pass fire one to the other as if in a relay race; they conspire to spread fire far and wide among their fellows, littering the land with it as they fly and run. Often the ultimate beneficiary is humankind, for whom the acquisition of fire represents a great leap forward. In many myths, humans only become fully human once they possess fire.

  In modern times, our culture’s most powerful fire myth is printed in bold letters beneath the picture of a friendly-looking bear, and the motifs are neatly inverted. Instead of fire coming to humans as a gift from the plant and animal worlds, fire comes to plants and animals as a scourge, and only the intervention of humans can prevent catastrophe.

  Smokey Bear first appeared in the 1940s, a creation of the Wartime Advertising Council. After a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field on the California coast in 1942, not far from the Los Padres National Forest, the government feared that incendiary weapons could touch off fires in the woods along the Pacific. With the number of wildland firefighters depleted by the war effort, the Forest Service sought to involve the civilian public in a campaign to prevent wildfires. The Ad Council coined several slogans—“Forest Fires Aid the Enemy”; “Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon”—and early posters in the campaign showed an image of Bambi. But Walt Disney authorized use of the fawn for only one year, and when the license was up, the Ad Council and the Forest Service invented Smokey Bear.

  In 1950, the agency found a real-life mascot. While fighting the Capitan Gap Fire in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest, a group of firefighters retreated from a blowup and took shelter on a rock slide, covering their faces with wet handkerchiefs to avoid being burned. When the smoke cleared, the only living thing in sight aside from themselves was a bear cub clinging to a charred tree, its paws and hind legs singed by flames. The firefighters rescued the bear, its burns were treated, and afterward it was sent to live out its life in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The little cub was an instant media sensation, a living emblem of the pernicious evil of wildfire and the benevolent hand of man. Smokey’s admonition—“Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires”—would become one of the most recognizable slogans in the history of advertising, his friendly mug inseparable from the idea that fire had no place in a healthy forest. Schoolchildren were urged to write letters to Smokey after hearing his message in speeches and videos, and they responded in such numbers that Smokey was assigned his own zip code. His presence nowadays is more muted, his message updated with modern lingo: “Get Your Smokey On.” Were he given the space needed to articulate it, his more honest assessment might read something like: “Remember—Only YOU Can Prevent Your Cigarette or Campfire from Starting a Wildfire We Are Forced By Long-standing Protocol to Suppress with Every Available Resource so as Not to Encourage Promiscuous Pyromaniacs; On the Other Hand Some Fires Started by Lightning Ought to Be Allowed to Run Their Course, for Reasons of Forest Health and Ecological Renewal—Fires We Call Wildland Fire-Use Fires Managed for Resource Benefit… ”

  The area encompassing the McKnight Fire, for instance, considered at the time a catastrophe beyond all others in the annals of Southwestern wildfire, now represents some of the finest bear habitat in the Black Range. I see evidence of their presence all over—tracks in the pond muck, scat on the ground, overturned rocks where they’ve scraped for worms and grubs, trees they’ve rubbed against leaving telltale hairs behind, some of them brown, some of them red, some of them almost blonde. Acorns and raspberries—their abundance a result of fire opening the conifer canopy and exposing the earth to sunlight—entice them in the late summer.

  One evening I return from a hike with Alice and sit with her in the meadow, scratching her belly and whispering nonsense in her ear. On the edge of my vision I see something small and black and fuzzy moving. I heed my instinct to hustle Alice into the cabin. I step back outside and tiptoe toward the bonfire ring, moving in the direction I saw the bear—a cub, it turns out, maybe sixty pounds, about the size of Alice. It ambles along the tree line on the peak’s east slope, nosing along, briefly unaware that someone’s watching. I pause and remember mama must be near. The cub’s furry little head appears around the edge of a rock outcropping; it lifts its snout in my direction. Maybe it smelled me. Maybe it saw the blur of my movement. Alerted to potential danger, it turns and trundles downhill, Ursus americanus, king of these woods and cohabitant with fire.

  We too were once cohabitants with open flame. We let it loose on the land to reshape vegetation to our liking, preparing the land for agriculture. We used it to make our food more palatable. It lit our camps at night and held the mysterious dark at bay. Now, of course, it is unwelcome in the places where most of us live. An urban people, we are ever more removed from its workings. We do the vast majority of our burning now in secret. The flame has been hidden in internal combustion. We burn fossilized vegetation that did not burn however many million years ago; we suck it from the seabeds and drill it from the plains and mountains, we refine it, we burn it, and mostly we don’t even see the smoke. The by-products of this burning linger in our atmosphere and seem likely—by warming the average temperature of the surface of the earth—to exacerbate the drying of the planet’s flora, increasing the occurrence of catastrophic wildfires. When fire makes an appearance in our cities nowadays, the word we often use for it is terror.

  Ironically, after all my years as a lookout, the one big fire I’ve seen up close—so close I inhaled its visible particulates—was a fire of the kind that exploded our invisible burning into a horrific tableau. One bright morning in September 2001 I received a call from a friend in New York who knew I lived without a television. She told me, in a voice wracked with panic, that the World Trade Center towers had been hit by airplanes. I put on my suit jacket, left my apartment, and ran to take a subway to my job at the Wall Street Journal. I was on journalistic autopilot: the biggest story in the world was happening right across the street from my workplace, and therefore I had a professional obligation to get there, even if I usually copyedited pieces about theater and books. I strongly suspect
ed my superiors would find a better use for me that day.

  Partway to the office, my train stalled and didn’t move for an hour and a half. Since we were stuck underground, we had no way of knowing the severity of the situation downtown, and when at last we were discharged from the train at Union Square, I continued the journey to the office on foot. In Chinatown, the police had cordoned off the streets. No one was allowed any farther. The towers, in the distance, were swathed in a cloud of black smoke; still stuck in a news vacuum, my mind couldn’t comprehend that they were no longer standing. I did know that if I was intent on getting to the office, I had but one choice. I would have to reenter the subway system and walk through the tunnel.