Hour of the Crab

by Patricia Robertson

  FIRE BREATHING

  There they were. Ahead of him. Four immense black figures, curling downward at the tops, reaching out spindly crackling fingers toward him. He automatically tugged at his hose pack, but it was hopeless. –Get out! someone yelled, racing past him, –Get out, now! — it couldn’t be Ray, could it? — not Ray, of all people… The nearest black figure was toppling in slow motion, if he didn’t move now he’d be trapped —

  He woke shouting, as always, strangling in blankets. After he’d wiped the sweat off his face he stood in the cool band of moonlight, blinds raised, staring out at an ordinary edge-of-city suburb. Out there, in the hills and mountains, the black figures walked, ever closer. It was safe, for now. Safe for as long as he and his kind did what they were trained to do — hold back the wall of flame from the world.

  Over black coffee and scrambled eggs he checked his phone. No call-outs yet, just a kind of ominous silence. End of season anyway, or what used to be the end of season, though it wasn’t, not anymore. November and still over a hundred active fires in the Coastal region alone. Already there’d been snow at lower levels, melted now, but that didn’t mean he was done for the year. He paced, drinking a second cup. Stella bumped her nose into the back of his knee, triggering a bolt of pain. Walking her was usually Parveen’s job, but she was on the other side of the planet for a wedding, some cousin or other in Chandigarh, he couldn’t keep track.

  You remember, Parveen would say insistently, Kiran, the pretty one in the pink-and-gold salwar kameez, my auntie Nanda’s youngest, and he’d laugh and ask how she expected him to remember out of the fifty or sixty cousins he’d met on their honeymoon.

  It was beginning to drizzle. Typical November weather for Burnaby, if you could call anything typical nowadays. He hunched into his anorak, the much-too-expensive one Parveen had bought him last Christmas, and opened the door for Stella to go arrowing out. She’d been his own present to Parveen two Christmases ago, a wriggling lump of yellow fur from a farm in Abbotsford. Black lab and golden retriever, the ad said. No, not Christmas — Diwali, when Parveen filled the house with candles and sweets and spent three days preparing a feast for their closest friends. Yes, Diwali, of course, the festival of light. That was why they’d named the puppy Stella.

  –A puppy for Diwali? Parveen’s brother had said in mock horror. –You are worshipping dogs now?

  –Now, Dhanu. Parveen frowned at him. –Don’t tease. I wanted one, you know. Ty bought me the perfect gift.

  To her husband she had to explain that in parts of India people offered garlands and food to dogs and marked tikas on their foreheads during the festival. –Remember, sweetie, what I told you about dogs in Hinduism? They guard the doors of heaven and hell.

  No, he hadn’t. All those dizzying gods and goddesses with their multiple incarnations and avatars, their pulsating colours — how could anyone recall them all?

  –My mother always said, if your pet dog sneezes while you are going out, it’s a good omen, Parveen’s sister-in-law added. –Remember, Dhanu, that pug of hers, how she dressed it up like a baby?

  Then there was an awkward silence, because Parveen’s own mother kept asking why there was no baby yet, after eight years, when Dhanu and his wife had three, all boys.

  They had agreed, he and Parveen, there would never be a baby. How could you bring a baby into a world on fire?

  Stella was ahead on the path to the park, growling at something. This early he hadn’t bothered with the leash. –Stella! he shouted, and broke into a run. She was barking now, at what he thought was a pile of branches until it shape-shifted into a lean-to draped with a wet tarp. Under it a man, thin, aged-looking, watching Stella warily through the rain. Ty bent and grabbed her collar.

  –She’s harmless, just trying to be protective, he said as she twisted against his hold, giddy with bravery.

  –’s’okay, the man said, except you could see it wasn’t. He shook in his jean jacket, the pucker of scar on a forearm. One eye was puffy and half-shut. –You got cigarettes?

  Ty didn’t, so he fumbled for coins instead. The man held out a dirty palm, poked at the coins with a nicotined finger. –That all you got? He had the air of one perpetually disappointed in the human race, but he closed his fist around them. –I got something for you, eh? For luck.

  He pushed a crumpled paper bag at Ty. Only when he’d walked away with Stella did he look inside. A tree cutout, one of those pine-scented things you hung in your car. He dropped it in the nearest garbage can and stooped to pick up a stick for the dog.

  –Who’s Ray? Parveen said when he described the dream.

  –I don’t know. I never knew a Ray in the crews. Not that I remember.

  –Are you doing your calm breathing? He could tell she was trying hard to keep her voice level. –The way Mandy showed you?

  Yes. There were days he thought it helped and days he didn’t. It was one of the tools in the toolbox Mandy talked about, though a toolbox you couldn’t see or touch struck him as ridiculous.

  –Then call it a strategy. A technique. Parveen tightened her hands round the mug of coffee; she’d just got up. –The kids call it belly breathing.

  It wasn’t fair to burden her when caring for kids in pain was what she did for a living. She was a nurse in pediatric oncology, on twelve-hour shifts during weeks that always seemed to coincide with his own time off. They went to temple together occasionally; Parveen joked it was because otherwise he’d never see her. The days dedicated to Sri Ganesha, the elephant-headed god — lord of good fortune, remover of obstacles — were her favourites. There’d been a puja to the god as part of their wedding ceremony.

  Ganesha had once had an ordinary human head, apparently, but his own father had replaced it with an elephant’s instead out of jealousy. Parveen said the whole incident was some sort of misunderstanding. Just like all gods everywhere, forever cursing and behaving badly. He was never sure how seriously Parveen took all this, but he was happy to be with her as the tray of ghee lamps was brought round, as everyone held their hands out and brushed the light toward their eyes.

  –It’s taking the essence of the fire into your heart and mind, Parveen told him, which unnerved him. Did he need such essence, when he witnessed it every time he went to work?

  He hoped Parveen’s belief in the god who removed obstacles protected him, too.

  The call-out came on Monday. Parveen wouldn’t be back for another two weeks. He drove Stella to his niece’s, where her eighteen-month-old and the dog could tangle together on the floor, and checked the coordinates on the status website as he headed to the airport. Estimated size: 5 000 hectares. Suspected Cause: Person. Stage of Control: Active. Approximate Location: Binder Creek. It had broken out on the weekend — likely a campfire — and blown up fast. An interface fire, where cabins, houses, communication lines could all be threatened. He’d fought another fire back in the summer in the same valley, only ten kilometres from this one. An evacuation order was in place, though so far it affected only two pumice mines and a hydroelectric project.

  Ed, Ed Stefanovich, would be taking him up. Steady Eddie. He knew all the pilots; he’d been flying in these mountains for longer than he wanted to remember. –You got one of the Vulcan crews this time, eh? Ed said as they walked across the tarmac. –Skookum bunch of kids. Dave took em up last week.

  They’d told Ty that when they called him out; all the Wildfire Service crews were on other jobs. Since his back injury the year before, when he’d been off for four long months, he’d become an itinerant crew boss, flown in on relief or wherever they needed to cobble a crew together. Vulcan had a great rep; he’d heard only good things.

  –For pity’s sake, Parveen said after he’d sprained his back. –Last year your shoulder, this year your lumbar. You’ve been doing this half your life, sweetie. You’re getting too old.

  But thirty-seven wasn’t old. Some of the men he worked with were in their forties, even fifties, now they were calling out the retired vetera
ns as well. The contract crews like Vulcan’s were younger, mostly college kids, though fighting fires year-round meant there was more of a mix. Every year was worse than the year before. He’d still been in college, back in 2017, when the province had the worst season in its history: 1,064 fires scorching over a million hectares of forest. That twenty-year-old record had long receded, along with his plans to teach anthropology. Firefighting paid better and meant steady work.

  The plane was falling through the drifting smoke, the river twisting up to meet them. As silver-grey as the cutthroat trout he’d fished for here on a field trip during his student days, when he’d worked on a pit house dig near a river tributary. They’d found a seasonal camp dating back 5,500 years. What would they think, those long-ago people, of the airborne machine that dropped humans from the sky into flame?

  On a strip of pebbled beach, the helicopter was waiting for him. He and Ed high-fived and then he was dodging under the rotor blades and lifting himself into the passenger seat even as the machine rose from the ground. Last in, last out, he thought to himself — that was his role these days. The chopper pilot was new, some kid — younger man, he corrected himself — who grinned at him above his boom mike. They swung so low over the trees he saw a moose and her tiny calf in wetland below them. Smoke drifting across his vision erased them.

  The kid — man — put the chopper down like a pro in the helispot on the hillside. Crouching, Ty scrambled out, pumping his fist when he was free of the rotors. And who was coming toward him but Graham, except it couldn’t be Graham, Graham wasn’t fighting fires anymore…

  –Hey Ty, I’m Reid, they said you were coming up. Dad says to say hi.

  And the boy who’d been born in the middle of the Sicamous fire stuck his hand out, laughing Graham’s body-shaking laugh. That had been Ty’s second summer fighting fires on Graham’s crew. Graham hadn’t seen his son until he was two weeks old.

  –Dad says you’re among the best because he trained you himself. That laugh again, and the teasing, what they called fire-bagging.

  A clump of burning debris landed at their feet. –Fire whirls already? Ty said, and glanced automatically uphill.

  –Yeah, things picked up this morning, we’re getting crossover conditions, weird this time of year, huh?

  Not just weird but impossible. Who’d ever heard of it in BC in November?

  He’d met a First Nations firekeeper on that student field trip, an elder who sat silent while her son talked. Their family had been firekeepers for thousands of years, the son told the dig team. –Lines of our people walked the land beating drums. We warned the birds and the four-leggeds.

  That was their hereditary role, to renew and purify the land through fire. –My mother taught us that every fire is like a snowflake. No two are alike.

  Every fire is like a snowflake. Yes. Each fire was a live thing with a mind of its own. Fire was a divine attribute, after all, a gift of the gods, or else it was stolen from them and the thief punished. It wasn’t something you messed around with. But they’d thought themselves able to control it, white people had. They’d suppressed it for hundreds of years, and now it rose up against them, blisteringly intense, full of fury.

  The Vulcan team was working in four sub-crews that day. He didn’t meet them all until their shifts ended. Five women, the rest guys, though he soon lost track of their names.

  –Got slimed today pretty bad, one of them — Mike? — said when the first crew came into spike camp that evening. His chest heaved in spasm, choking his words.

  –Here, have some Vitamin I, Veronica said, sliding the ibuprofen bottle across the counter as the others laughed. They were at ease; they’d had a good day, a good pull, despite the fire retardant. Some people were more reactive than others, though nothing like the borate salts they’d used when he was the age of these kids. Gave you runs so bad you were pissing liquid shit for days.

  –Black coffee does it for me, Reid said. –Honest. Opens up the airway.

  –How’d you learn that already, snookie? said Jai. –Second year on crew and he thinks he knows it all, eh?

  Ty left them to the banter to find his cot and fall into comatose sleep, though not before trying, and failing, to get a signal so he could phone Parveen. Not that she’d be surprised if he didn’t. You couldn’t count on it out here. Besides, she was in that other dimension half a world away, helping choose the music, the jewellery, the lehenga choli the bride would wear. There — he’d remembered something about Parveen’s universe after all.

  On the second day he found himself in a sub-crew with Reid at the perimeter, digging a firebreak. The weather had changed, bringing rain squalls and sleet. They could focus on tactical work, get ahead a bit, though his hands had numbed with cold. Every time he turned and looked at Reid he saw Graham, that same sunburst of freckles over his nose. If it wasn’t for the flickering pain in his lower back he’d have felt years younger.

  –Don’t do this forever, he told Reid as he straightened against a muscle spasm. –Don’t trash your body like I did.

  –Oh, I’m a goner, Reid said. –Anyway, you and Dad did.

  –Yeah, and now your dad’s wearing a truss and his rotator cuff’s shot.

  The muscle seized again but he was already over the limit for ibuprofen. –How’s he doing these days? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Graham, now in a desk job at headquarters in Parksville.

  –Bored, Reid said, and laughed, and whacked at the ground with his pulaski. –Tells me how he envies me.

  Well, the old always did, didn’t they? Envy the young? If Ty had married early, like Graham, maybe he’d have chosen parenthood after all, have a son like Reid. Another would-be lifer, in love with gut-wrenching challenge. In love with fire, really, and the outdoors, and the trees themselves.

  They weren’t always menacing and spindly fingered, the trees in his dreams. In the last year or two things had changed. He had no idea why. That first time, he was in a northern forest with his hand on the white bark of a paper birch. Three eyelike knots stared back at him. The tree was trying to tell him something, and he stood there listening. The voice was brisk, eager, impatient. He was on the edge of understanding, but he couldn’t quite make it out. He woke into sheets damp with sweat, but from exertion, not fear. He lay still, puzzling, for a long time.

  Spruce came some months later, slow of speech and rather condescending. A black spruce, from those same northern forests where so much had burned in the last decade. This tree was young, not much more than a sapling, and the new growth of fireweed frothed around it. Every sound was intense: a downy woodpecker rapping on a nearby trunk, a ground squirrel chittering alarm. The spruce took its time, leaning toward him as if blown by high wind. Ty wondered if it was because he hadn’t been able to keep up with the birch. The woodpecker’s rapping was a message too, but he was too slow, too stupid. He looked down at his trenching tool and threw it away, and then he woke.

  On the fourth day the clouds blew off and the ground began drying under a sudden blast of sun. A breakout on the hillside above them was radioed in from a bird dog. A smouldering hotspot, maybe. Ty dispatched a sub-crew that included Reid and went back to trenching.

  Fifteen minutes later a call came in: Veronica, her breath ragged. They needed more personnel, fast. –We’re back into a Rank 3, she said.

  That meant open flame, the tops of trees torching. Jesus. He headed up himself with his sub-crew and another. Harder to breathe now, the smoke thickening as they climbed, their voices hollowed. The trees around them seemed to buckle in the waves of heat. A couple of his crew ran past, yanking on their hose packs. Already the flames were soaring up a hundred metres or more, the wind egging them on. Had he miscalculated? Half the hillside was jackstrawed pine, beetle-killed, which meant much greater fire intensity with the right conditions. And even wet weather didn’t dampen ground fuel these days.

  He was lightheaded and his back twinged but he plunged on. A young doe leapt past him, ears f
lat with fear. He yanked out his radio phone and called in the bambi bucket and hoped — christ — it wasn’t too late.

  He’d met the god of fire at their wedding ceremony. He and Parveen made the traditional seven circles around the altar with its consecrated flames so that Agni could witness their vows. The god had two heads and seven tongues and rode on a ram, holding an axe and a torch. When he died in the myths he was dismembered, his flesh and fat turned into resin, his bones into pine trees. He could be resurrected only by new fire, just as the lodgepole pines that blazed around Ty on the hillsides needed fire to regenerate. Only in the intense heat of a wildfire would their cones open and drop their seeds.

  They tamped it down, but only just. For the rest of the day he pulled his crew from one spot to another, helped build a firebreak for half a dozen cabins, liaised with the helitack crew that brought in equipment. The chopper brought in more fire crew as well, and flew out a rookie overcome with smoke inhalation. It was almost midnight when Ty got back to the spike camp. Only Veronica was there. Stiff, stunned, he heaped cold pasta on a plate in the kitchen.

  –You want a Coke or something? she said as he lowered himself to a chair. She passed him a can. –You don’t know when to quit, do you?

  –You ever been a crew boss? he said, mouth half-full.

  –As a matter of fact, yeah. On the big Yukon fires back in ’33. She ran a hand across a face lined with dirt and exhaustion. –Fires are changing. Everything about them’s changing. And the way to fight them.

  –We should have called in the stitch drop sooner, is that it?

  –I remember when we were up near Dawson. The rotor wash threw embers into the green, I’d never seen it catch so fast. We jumped out and started digging fireline. There were full minutes when I thought, this may be it, we may not make it.

  She was talking about this fire, earlier that day, he was sure. Every fire is like a snowflake. She was wrong, and also right, and she wasn’t shy about it. He’d pushed too hard to come back to work, probably. It was like a drug: the adrenaline, the thrill of victory.