The Horse Whisperer (49 page)

He was twenty-six years old and his name was Connor Ford and though he was tired and sweaty and dirty and his lungs were sore from the smoke, there was nowhere in the world he would rather have been. It was his first jump of the season. Squatting in the doorway of the DHC-6 Twin Otter a few hours earlier, watching forest and mountain and canyon tilt as if unhinged from the earth fifteen hundred feet below and seeing the blue and white and yellow canopy tops of those who had jumped before him drifting down and away, he had felt something not far short of ecstasy. And then the slap on his left shoulder from the spotter telling him to go and leap into the blue infinity, tucking himself in and counting to five and then the jolt as the chute snapped open and there he was, suspended in that wondrous arc of silence, neither man nor bird but something of sky and flesh and earth combined.

The water in his canteen tasted warm and metallic. It was only the end of May but it felt like high summer and Connor figured the temperature had to be well into the nineties. It had
barely rained an year ana the air was as dry as tomb dust. It things kept on this way it was going to be one hell of a summer for fires. Back at the base in Missoula, some of the jumpers were already fantasizing about how they were going to spend all the overtime and hazard pay. He’d called Ed in Boston two nights ago and told him to put down a deposit on the new car he’d been promising himself. Ed and that fabulous girlfriend he’d been going on about for months were arriving in Montana the coming weekend. It was the first time ever he’d missed the start of a fire season, which only went to show what a sorry effect a woman could have on a man.

From above him up the slope now he heard Hank Thomas, the incident commander, give the word to move on. Connor took one last swig from his canteen then fastened and stowed it. He was about to shoulder his pack when he heard a strange sound. It was only faint, like a strangled cry, and it seemed to come from over the ridge where the fire was. He looked and for a moment saw nothing. Then, just as he was about to pick up his pack, he saw what at first he took to be a flaming branch rise above the pale spine of rock. It took him several seconds to recognize that it was no branch.

It was a large bull elk, but like no elk Connor had ever laid eyes on. Every hair of its coat had been burned and its skin was charred black. Its great rack of antlers flamed like a torch. The animal scrambled up onto the ridge, dislodging a clatter of falling stone, and just as it found its footing it saw him.

For a long moment the two of them stood quite still, staring at each other. Connor felt like a pagan before some ancient demigod or devil summoned from a world beyond. He felt the sweat chill on his neck.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he reached for the small Leica that he kept in his pocket and at the same time felt the wind around him lift and swirl and he saw the flames on the elk’s antlers dance and fan sideways and he heard the fire beyond it bellow as if in some dread conspiring chorus.

The animal was in his viewfinder now and
it
raised its muzzle proudly as if posing for a portrait, and suddenly it occurred to Connor that there was a message here, though what it was and for whom he had no idea. He pressed the button and at the sound of the shutter the elk turned and vanished
and Connor stood wondering if it had all been but a trick of his imagination. Distantly he heard a voice calling him.

“Hey, Connor! We got a fire to fight here”.

He looked up the ridge. The other jumpers had gathered their gear and were ready to move off. Nearest to him was Jodie Lennox, a tall, red-haired midwesterner who’d been in the same rookie class as Ed and Connor two years earlier.

“Did you see that?” Connor asked quietly.

“See what?”

He paused. It seemed that the message, if that’s what it was, had been for him alone. He picked up his pack and swung it over his shoulder.

“See what?”

“Nothing. Let’s go”.

   That night they snatched a couple of hours sleep in a sheltered shoulder of the mountain through which the fire had already passed. They worked shifts, checking for hot spots where the fire still smoldered in roots and stumps and crevices. The beams of their headlamps sent shadows jagging on the blackened earth as they made their slow patrol among the barbed wire tangle of charred scrub, scanning the ground like ghouls and scavengers in a war zone. And all the while the fire kept up its muffled roar around the corner of the mountain, telling them it was not yet done.

Connor woke around one o’clock, feeling hungry and cold. Two hours earlier the sky had been choked with orange clouds but while he slept the wind had shifted, carrying the smoke away and now the universe spread unraveled above him. He pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders and lay on his back, deciphering the constellations in the way his father had taught him.

He found the Pole Star and traced the spine of the Little Bear. From there it was only a hop to her big sister who Connor always thought looked more like her other names, the Plow or the Big Dipper, but which his father always called the Great Bear. Then in turn he traced her spine to the Northern Crown with her trailing kite and Arcturus at its point burning like a torch. Then he followed the broad river of the Milky
Way until he found Scorpius who had stung Orion, the great hunter, which was why you couldn’t see him anymore. Another hunter was there instead, Sagittarius, who was half man and half horse and was standing there in the water, getting ready to shoot his bow and arrow while Aquila the eagle flew away in fear downstream.

“The sky’s full of stories,” his father used to say. “Thousands of them. All you have to do is look up there and read them”.

Connor remembered that first lesson when he was only four years old. His father had woken him in the middle of the night and told him to get dressed and to be quiet as a mouse so as not to wake his mother. The two of them walked out under the stars in their stocking feet to the corral where his father’s bay mare stood waiting and his father hoisted him up into the saddle and told him to hold on tight to the horn while he swung himself up behind. They rode at a slow walk up through the meadows with the cattle moving away like shadowed ghosts and the cottonwoods along the creek glowing silver in the starlight and stirring not a leaf in the still night air.

His father had to reach around him to hold the reins and Connor felt warm and safe yet full of adventure and could even now, all these years later, almost summon the smell of the man, of leather and hay and cows and sweat and tobacco, in a blend that was all his own. They rode to the crest of the butte where you could look down on the little ranch house and there they left the horse to graze while they lay side by side on their backs and studied the stars with the smell of fresh sage wafting sweet and smoky around them and an owl calling somewhere below in the trees.

Connor was fourteen when his father died, leaving him and his mother greatly in debt. But there wasn’t a day since gone by that he hadn’t thought of him and felt the loss of him nor a night such as this when he hadn’t traced the stars and recalled their stories with the echo of his father’s voice to guide him.

The image of the burning elk had haunted him all night. He had fallen asleep thinking of it and now it came to him again, imposing itself upon the stars. It bothered him that the animal’s antlers had been so big, for by this time of year
it
should have shed them and any new growth would be much smaller.
Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but still he couldn’t stop wondering what the apparition might mean and why he should think it had meaning at all. His father had never had much truck with superstition and Connor himself had never felt the need of it either. The here, the now and the visible seemed sufficient. His mother, on the other hand, was a walking almanac of omens. She said it came from her Irish ancestry and that her parents and grandparents before them had been worse with it than she was.

In her day she had been a minor celebrity on the women’s rodeo circuit and before every ride invoked a litany of ritual and incantation to keep bad luck at bay. Even now the sight of a lone magpie sent her into an elaborate mutter of exorcism which involved asking after the creature’s health as well as that of its absent partner and offspring. She always burned a sprig of sage the night before Connor left for his summer of firefighting and once he had overheard her quietly reciting some kind of prayer over it. She pretended it wasn’t serious, but he knew it was. So it bothered him that he felt the way he did about the elk. Perhaps some ancient Celtic gene had woken in his veins and he would forever, like his mother, be its slave.

The sky was starting to fill again with clouds. They were sliding in like a vault from the west and the nearest were already tinted amber by the fire on the mountain. Connor studied the slow eclipse of the stars. He wondered if the elk had lived and if so what lonely vigil it now kept and where. Then he cussed himself again for allowing it such rampant access to his thoughts.

It was with relief that he heard Hank Thomas starting to wake those who were still asleep. Connor sat up and rubbed his eyes. He fitted his headlamp and switched it on, then hauled himself out of his sleeping bag and set about organizing his gear.

“How you doing, cowboy?” Hank called.

“Okay. I could handle a steak and a beer”.

“I’ll get on the radio right away”.

Others chimed in with their fantasy orders while they packed their gear. Ice cream, pizza, chocolate milk-shakes.

“So when’s that lazy good-for-nothing musician friend of yours going to grace us with his presence?” Hank asked.

“Flies in Saturday”.

“I hear he’s in love”.

“I figure he must be. He’s bringing her with him”.

“Poor dumb bastard”.

“Poor dumb woman,” Jodie said. There was a cry of sisterly support from Donna Kiamoto, a “snookie,” of second-season jumper, from Wisconsin.

“Is she a firefighter or what?”

“Got enough on her hands fighting Ed off,” Donna said.

“No,” Connor said. “She’s a teacher. She’s going to be working on some wilderness program or something. Kids who’ve gotten in trouble with the law”.

“I know it,” Hank said. “Out of Helena. They’re a good outfit”.

Hank’s radio squawked into life and everyone hushed to listen. A helicopter was on its way to make a water drop on the flank of the fire nearest to them. Hank reported that he and the crew were moving out to cut another line. Soon they were all packed and ready to hike. Their headlamps angled fitfully while they checked each other over, the beams panning and shafting the charred darkness around them, glinting on their tools and sometimes catching the white of an eye or a flash of teeth in the black of their faces.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Hank said. “Unless anyone wants a shower from that helicopter, I suggest we get our backsides out of here. I want to be home for breakfast”.

   They didn’t make it back to Missoula in time for breakfast. Nor for lunch nor supper. Once the fire was dead, it took them three hours to hike out with all the gear to the nearest road where the bus stood waiting and by the time it dropped them back at the base it was just before midnight on Friday. Driving back into town Connor was so tired he almost fell asleep at the wheel of his truck. He collapsed on his bed still wearing his clothes and boots and reeking of fire and slept the dreamless sleep of the dead for twelve hours.

He and Ed were renting the same apartment they’d taken
the previous summer. It was on the top floor of a ramshackle pale blue clapboard house on the east side of town, just over the river from the university. It was two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom and even a tourist from another galaxy might have guessed that for the rest of the year it was inhabited by students.

The floorboards creaked, the doors didn’t shut properly, the plumbing had a mind of its own and the walls were all scarred with Scotch tape and painted in various combinations of deep blue and purple, except for the bathroom, which was entirely painted black. When Connor arrived the previous week, the only residents of the monster antique refrigerator had been an onion in its seventh stage of growth and a tub, of apricot yogurt with enough green fur on it to upholster a small sofa.

He opened his eyes just past noon and found himself again under the scowling scrutiny of his least favorite rock group. They were on a poster he kept forgetting to take down. He’d never heard of them but they were clearly exponents of some dark and esoteric zone of metal. They were all half naked and pierced in so many peculiar places with rings and chains and studs and bolts that it made you wince even to look at them. They didn’t look too happy about it either.

Connor got up and walked to the window. It was another hot and cloudless day but at least there was a breeze ruffling the cottonwoods along the Clark Fork. Through a gap in the flutter of leaves he could see an old man in the shallows teaching a young girl to cast a fly. The sun was bouncing off the water behind them and it looked pretty enough to send Connor off to get his new Nikon. He changed the lens to a 200mm zoom and finished the last few frames on the roll. It reminded him that the roll of film he’d shot with the Leica on the mountain was still in his pocket. Maybe he’d have time to go to the studio and process both rolls before Ed and Julia flew in.

He took off his smoke-scented clothes, showered, shaved and dressed again in some old but clean blue jeans and a white T-shirt. And after he’d made himself some coffee and then cooked a death-defying brunch of ham and eggs and fried potatoes, it was getting on for two o’clock.

Outside the heat was shimmering off the sidewalks. He dropped a bundle of dirty clothes at the Laundromat by the
gas station. Mrs. Tyler, the old woman who ran it, had a collie-cross that Connor always made a fuss of and he spent a few minutes hunkered down, stroking the dog’s stomach and telling the woman about the fire on Iron Mountain.

“They say it’s going to be another big year for fires,” she said.

“It’s getting pretty dry out there”.