The Big Burn (17 page)

He's remembering he's got a wife and kids, and I've neither,
Samuel thought.

Hank gave a quick nod. "Then I'll do my best," he said. "But if you haven't caught up by the time I've got everybody safe, I'm coming back."

"Fair enough," Samuel told him. He briefly considered asking Hank to take a message back to Jarrett for him: tell his brother he was proud of him.

Except, that would seem like tempting fate—his or Jarrett's, he wasn't sure which. And as for sending word to Celia—Hank didn't even know who she was, and there wasn't time to tell him.

"Fair enough," Samuel repeated. "But if we don't get moving, we're going to give that fire enough time to
walk
in on us." He reached for Thistle. "And stop worrying! I'd be a poor ranger if I couldn't handle a little backfire."

Then he rode to meet the front, knowing he hadn't fooled his friend for one moment.

"What the hell is going on?" someone asked.

"I wish I knew," Elway answered. "If it gets any darker, we're gonna wish we had lanterns to show us the way back."

He and the others were trudging up a narrow trail to their fire camp, where they should find supper waiting. He ought to be hungry enough, after a long day patrolling fire trenches, but he didn't seem to have any appetite.

The way his heart was pounding and his breath hard to catch, he wondered if something was wrong with him. He was getting too old to push himself so hard day after day. Maybe after this fire season ended, he'd start looking for work that didn't take so much muscle and lung. Though what that would be, he didn't know. Swinging a logger's ax, slamming a sledgehammer against a miner's drill, breaking rock for railway bed—when had he ever learned a job that didn't start with muscle and end with aching, sweaty exhaustion?

He wished he'd told young Jarrett to set himself up so people would have a use for what he knew, instead of just for the labor he could put out. Maybe once this fire season ended, Elway would find the kid and tell him just that That if Jarrett wanted to become more than an old fire bum, he ought to get himself some schooling.

One of the men walking behind Elway said, "At least the wretched wind is letting up."

Elway, who'd been lost in his thoughts, realized it was true. The wind that had been pushing at them all afternoon had disappeared into a moment of odd calm. And then it whipped again, but from the other direction, and its rush left Elway gasping for breath.

Maybe some water,
he thought tilting his head back to swig from his canteen. What
was
going on? The air around him felt ready to explode. And what was that he was hearing? Rolling thunder?

An instant later he placed the sound. He'd heard it once before, when a fire he'd been working had blown up.

He turned to warn the men behind him, but they were flailing away at a shower of glowing bits. And then, beyond them, on the left, he saw a line of trees explode into flame. For a moment he halted, too surprised to move. Then another wall of fire torched up on the slope opposite and still another broke out far below, in the bottom of the overgrown canyon.

Running pell-mell with the others, he tore up the trail in the only direction not blocked by the growing inferno. The conflagration filled his eyes with scorching smoke and his lungs with choking gases and his ears with the pops and crackles of branches burning and tree trunks snapping.

A flaming log rolled down the slope, and he turned in time to see it sweep one of the men into the burning chasm. Elway paused, realized the man was beyond reach, and resumed running.

The heat on his back became intolerable, and when he glanced over his shoulder again he saw that the flames were advancing much faster than he and the others were moving up the trail. The fire would overtake them in minutes, maybe sooner, if they didn't somehow stop it.

With no place to retreat to, Elway and the men with him turned to meet the pounding blaze head-on. He rammed his shovel under a chunk of burning wood and heaved it into the wild flames. He saw the others fan out to each side as they all desperately tried to hold a line that they might live behind. But the flames burned too hot and too close, and moment by moment the men were forced into an ever tighter knot.

One man broke, running headlong into the raging front.

"No!" Elway shouted.

Elway saw another man, maybe a dozen feet away, collapse as his clothes burst into flames. The handle of the man's pickax, dropped to the burning ground, caught fire.

Elway had one more fleeting thought of telling Jarrett to fear the fire that couldn't be fought
This is the fire I was talking about.

As the flames of the gnat blowup swept across Idaho and into Montana, gathering strength and speed and size, the people caught before them ran to whatever shelter they could find. Railroad tunnels, mine adits, creek beds, caves, storage pits, old burns, gravel bars—whatever was at hand; whatever they could get to. Wherever they could make a stand; wherever they might be safe until the flames had swept by.

On the west fork of the Big Creek, above the St. Joe, Lee Hollingshead led most of his crew to a previously burned area, while nineteen of his terrified men ran to a tiny cabin used to station packhorses.

Men from the John Bell crew on the middle fork took refuge in a homestead clearing, where some of them lay down in a stream and others crammed into a root cellar.

On Setzer Creek, William Rock led his men to a part of the forest that had been burned the day before; twenty-eight men from Ralph Debitt's crew fled to the next drainage. The rest of Debitt's men had heeded a warning he'd sent earlier that they should return to Avery, but those twenty-eight had chosen to ignore it.

West of Placer Creek, Ed Pulaski gathered about forty men who'd been cut off by the flames and eventually got them into a mining tunnel that had a small stream running through it. He dipped water to throw on the burning timbers of the entrance, and he held back at pinpoint those who became so frightened that they tried to bolt.

On Stevens Peak, James Danielson had his men burn over a field of bear grass, and when the flames of the blowup began to reburn what they'd just blackened, they pulled blankets over themselves and waited.

S. M. Taylor, on the Bullion fire, took men into a mine.

Joe Halm and his crew sought refuge on a sandbar at the mouth of a creek miles southeast of Avery.

Will Morris led his men on a nighttime fight from their Graham Creek camp. They hiked through burning forests until they'd put enough miles behind them that he thought it was safe for them to sleep.

And other rangers across hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness also did their best to keep alive their crews and anyone else they happened to be with.

The fires ravaged parts of forest after forest—the Clearwater, the Pend Oreille, and the Nezperce; the Cabinet, the Kaniksu, the Koote-nai, and the Lolo; some of Glacier National Park—but no place suffered more than did the country of the Coeur d'Alene and St. Joe.

No place saw more people die.

Official counts would put the death toll from the blowup at about eighty-seven, but that's a number based on bodies found and people known to be lost. Certainly a true count would be higher. Regardless of the total, the majority—seventy-five at least—died on the Coeur d'Alene. Most were firefighters, untrained temporaries caught when their jobs turned deadly.

Who they were—where they were—what had happened to each man and to all the crews: It would be days before anyone would know the greater part of that.

Lizbeth returned to the Forest Service office Saturday evening in time to hear someone demand to see Supervisor Weigle. The supervisor, the person got told, still hadn't returned and word hadn't come in where he was. "Though with Placer Creek blown up," Mr. Polson said, "I hope to God he's found shelter. That they all have. There are so many..."

Placer Creek blown up,
Lizbeth thought.
Cel's and my place really is gone.
The information seemed unimportant. Because she'd already known it? Because it
was
unimportant compared with the people who were caught in the fires.

"Things are burning up all over..." Mr. Polson looked at Lizbeth a moment before seeming to recognize her. "I'm sorry about your place," he said. "I wish I could take time to talk now."

The evacuation bell began to ring, and Lizbeth was swept up in a rush outside.

She saw that smoke no longer hid the mountains southwest of town. Now, flames sharply outlined them.

***

Within minutes, as the bell continued clanging and trains sounded their whistles, people began hurrying to the stations. They came first in straggling groups, mothers pulling along children, and then in a swelling throng.

Lizbeth tried to think what to do—her aunt had said she might walk down to check on Philly and Trenton, so Celia might already be in town. But Lizbeth couldn't go looking for her and go after Mrs. Marston at the same time. And of the two, Celia was the more able to take care of herself.

Running against the crowd, Lizbeth hurried to the hillside stairs and climbed them as quickly as possible, squeezing past those coming down. She passed a man packing things into a hole dug in a rose bed while a woman struggled to replace them with items of her own choosing. She passed a young girl frantically calling, "Duke!"

At the boardinghouse Lizbeth saw that Mrs. Marston had gotten herself, creaky bones and all, up onto the roof and was watering it down with her garden hose. "The evacuation trains are going to leave!" Lizbeth yelled, hoping she could be heard over the fierce wind. "You've got to get on board!"

She saw Mrs. Marston start to shout an answer and then lose her balance and slide down the steeply pitched roof into shrubbery. Lizbeth ran to her.

Mrs. Marston, her face pale, ordered, "Help me up," but then her legs wouldn't support her weight. "What an old fool I am," she said, "hurting myself at a time like this! Lizbeth, you take that hose and get up where I was. Only, you be careful..."

"We've got to get you help," Lizbeth said. "And get you on an evacuation train."

"Nonsense," Mrs. Marston said. "I'm not leaving my home."

Exasperated, Lizbeth said, "You told me no place is worth dying for. Didn't you mean it?"

"I meant it for you. Not for me!" Mrs. Marston paused, looking at her house as though she was seeing more than white clapboard and a front window with stained glass panes. She nodded. "You're right, of course." Then her face turned white as the shock of her fall set in.

***

A next-door neighbor was too busy corralling children to help, but Mr. Denbury, the elderly bachelor who lived across the street, swept clothes off the seat of his one-horse buggy. Between him and Lizbeth they got Mrs. Marston onto it, and Mr. Denbury started for town. There wasn't room for Lizbeth to ride with them, but since the buggy was slowed by the crowd in the street, she was able to keep up with them on foot.

They reached the flat and were headed for the Northern Pacific station when Mr. Denbury called to her that Mrs. Marston had lost consciousness. "She needs carrying to the hospital!" he shouted, pulling his horse into a turn.

And then someone ran by and knocked Lizbeth down, and by the time she'd scrambled to her feet, wagons and hurrying people hid the buggy from her. And then she couldn't find it again.

Mr. Denbury hadn't told her which hospital he meant, but she assumed it was Wallace Hospital, on the west end of town. That was closest.

She ran the blocks to it and found a line of livery cabs waiting to take patients to safety. She didn't see the buggy, and Mrs. Marston wasn't in any of the cabs. A nurse at the hospital door said no new patients had come in. "Perhaps your friend went to Providence Hospital?" she suggested.

"That's clear on the other side of town."

"Right," the nurse said impatiently. "And without fires threatening to sweep down on it, the way they are here."

***

Lizbeth dodged between people rushing to the evacuation trains. They lugged coats and pets, boxes and bags, china teapots. She heard snatches of plans they were making—how fleeing wives would send word of their whereabouts back to husbands staying to defend Wallace.

Usually she didn't think of Wallace as being very big, but that night, the way across the city seemed endless.

As she ran burning embers began falling like scattered raindrops, some flying in sideways and some so big they fell straight despite the driving, swirling wind. She saw an especially bright brand fall and then flames lick out from the windows of a newspaper office, and then she heard a roar of explosion. Within moments other buildings had caught.

"The town's afire!" someone yelled.

"We're going to die!" she heard.

"Bring hoses!" a man shouted, and other men rushed to obey.

For a moment Lizbeth paused, caught up in the sights and sounds. Then she started running again. Already the fire was spreading across the city, the winds that pushed against her back driving the flames eastward.
That nurse was wrong,
she thought.
It's Providence Hospital that's in danger.

When she arrived there, out of breath and with her side aching, she found that a train engine, tender, and caboose had been diverted to where tracks ran closest. Nuns and a doctor were frantically loading patients into every free space. One nun, who was struggling to lift a man twice her size, asked Lizbeth for help.

"I'm looking for a woman who'd have just come in," Lizbeth said, as they hoisted the man onto the back platform of the caboose. "Can you..."

Then she saw Mrs. Marston watching from just inside the car. Slipping in next to her, Lizbeth said, "Thank heaven! I was so worried."

Mrs. Marston looked at her with bewildered eyes.