The Wildfire Season (12 page)

It is this older version of the town that his father escaped from. One of the running men. Each with their own circumstances, brooding secrecy, selfjustifying compulsions. The north is peppered with the sort of people that Miles believes his
father must have been. He knows this because he’s a running man too.

Why do they run? Miles is aware of the usual accusations. Cowardice, lust, wilful cruelty. But Miles believes that most of the time, these men are really trying to wriggle free from the constraints of who they are, the fixed particulars of identity. It’s not some other, better life they seek, but the disappearance from life altogether. They run to escape the universal burden of selfhood.

Not that this allows him any sympathy toward others like his father. Miles may have run, but he didn’t run from a child—at least, not one that he saw born and grow for the first five years of its life. Rachel doesn’t count. He tries to tell himself this as the storm blows all around him, the tower wavering in the strong wind. Miles isn’t like his father because he never left a child that he had spoken to, or held in his arms. He has gotten through the last few years on this slim distinction. Now even this has been taken from him.

With a split of thunder the storm engulfs the tower. The rain strikes the windows so hard he can see them shivering in their frames.

Miles lifts himself from the chair and stands on the steel floor. He kicks the door open and lets the rain drive in sideways, spraying the cobwebs from the corners and spinning the chair around on its pivot.

He can see the lightning getting closer. The last bolt struck a hilltop not a quarter mile away. He
grips both his hands to the metal struts of the tower’s frame and waits for the blackest cloud to find him.

Miles feels that a decision is about to be made, if not by him then by an unpredictable determination of fate. He wishes only that the storm tell him what to do. That, or flash-fry him into a pile of carbon and put him beyond decisions forever.

It comes in a rush, filling the world with shadows. The clouds tumbling lower until their underbellies could be touched with a raised hand.

Miles keeps his fingers locked around the steel struts. It occurs to him that if the lightning hits the tower, he won’t be around to hear the thunder.

There is a full minute when he stands surrounded by grey sheets of mist. When he comes out the other end, the daylight blinds him. Miles looks back and sees the cloud curl up into itself like a jellyfish making its way to the surface, its hanging tendrils of rain already fading. There is a last growl of thunder, more bemused than menacing, before the storm blows north over the Nadaleen Range.

Miles collapses back into the chair and spins around. The fire didn’t want him this time, either. He doesn’t know what this means beyond the fact that he’s still here, turning in circles, staring at the fields of green. But perhaps there is something even in that.

All three bears smell the hunters entering the woods. The sow had heard them, too, minutes
before her cubs. Twittering laughter. The scrape of camp pots. Truck doors swung shut.

She scrambles higher and at first the cubs don’t know what the hurry is. When she stops on the other side of a small ridge sprayed purple with fireweed, she turns them around to face the direction they have just come from. The hunters have come to a stop as well. The she-grizzly has the overwhelming feeling that they are close already.

The cubs pick up mostly on the delicacies they’d never encountered before in their lives—peanut butter, coffee, raisins. Each of these presents nosepuzzles to the young bears, questions of where food of this kind grew, how they might get close enough to the packs to have a snort inside. But the sow won’t allow them any more time. She walks behind them now, pushing them up the foothills in a gradual ascent.

Only the sow knows that the pack carriers are hunters. This certainty comes less from an interpretation of scent than from experience: if a group of humans enter the woods a good distance from town, odds are they mean to kill something. The she-grizzly has seen her share of harmless hikers and campers, the ones who shimmy up the swaying trunks of eight-foot-high saplings at the sight of her loping along a game trail a hundred yards away. But she has never seen those sorts in this particular territory. There’s little point in satisfying the itch of curiosity by going any closer. She has witnessed the penalty that such an interest will bring.

As now, there had been a group of them, four males and, unusual for human hunters, a female as well. The sow and her mate had come the night before for the treasures of the Ross River dump, and now dozed side by side on a mattress of grass halfway up the valley. The smell of sweat and chocolate woke them an hour before dawn.

The sow was in the first stage of pregnancy, milk-heavy and slow. Her mate stayed at her rump, calculating distances, launch pads for counterattack. The hunters were not fast, either. Yet there was a good tracker among them, one not fooled by the bears’ switchbacks and creek crossings.

The sow’s mate left her to track back to the hunters in order to mark their position. While he was gone, the she-grizzly lay down to gather her strength, her fur camouflaged among the brown bark of trunks. She wasn’t frightened of the hunters. Although she had been tracked like this before, they had never gotten anywhere near close enough for a shot. But the tiny cubs she carries roll about within her, and she interprets their sudden movement as a warning.

As she waits, the she-grizzly hears footfalls in the bush. Careful, light, singular. Coming around in a big circle, taking a place somewhere ahead on the course they were travelling on.

When the hunter comes up against the direction of the breeze, the sow smells that it is the female, tracking alone. At the same time, the sow’s mate joins her. They are now being stalked not
only from behind but from ahead. It is also clear to the sow that her mate led the female hunter directly to them.

The bears strike off in a heading not of their own choosing, down deeper into the Tintina Trench, where the woods are thicker but with fewer outlets for escape. There are no more smells to inform them. As they run, the pregnant sow imagines she can feel her cubs clawing over each other, as though drowning inside her.

It is the female hunter who finally cuts them off, trapping them in a lunar clearing of chert rock. The sow sees her first. Standing upslope, the snout of the woman’s rifle trained square at the she-grizzly’s eyes.

Before the bears even have a chance to come to a full stop, the hunter notices the sow and boar’s genders. She determines that these two must have been recently rutting, and that the sow is now likely pregnant. It makes the female hunter switch her aim to the sow’s mate. The same steady bead on the flat front of his skull.

The male hunters break noisily into the clearing. All of them fall to their knees at the sight of the animals with one exception. A bearded man taller than the others, who waves his rifle in front of him. The sow focuses on his distinct scent. His skin a rank mixture of whisky and terror.

A couple of the hunters on their knees shout something, and the female replies in calm tones. The bearded man alone refuses to listen. He raises
his rifle and, almost without looking, points it into the middle of the clearing. The barrel continues to flail around. Aimed from the hunter’s own boots, to the bears, to a patch of indigo sky.

He fires and tries to run away at the same time.

The female hunter shouts something as the bearded man stumbles backwards. It makes him lower his rifle before catching the heel of his boot on one of the upturned rocks, flipping his feet out from under him so that he lands on his back. The gun spins from his hands, clattering to the ground outside his reach.

Everyone looks to the male grizzly. He has been gut-shot—the bullet blasted through the animal’s intestines and out the other side. An injury that, for a bear of his size and age, is not immediately fatal.

The sow’s mate blinks curiously at the exit wound. With hesitation, he tries to push his insides back in with his paw. When he decides to run, he trips over his bowels, trailing out behind him like pink rope.

When the female hunter fires a bullet neatly through a point two feet below the male grizzly’s shoulder hump, something like soap pours out his nose. The bear watches the fluid drop to the stones, fascinated. He lifts his head to the female hunter and opens his mouth wide, less in threat than in the articulation of a thought that has suddenly escaped him. Discovering that he has nothing to say after all, he closes his mouth, blinking rapidly, and takes a single step toward his mate. The act
of lifting his one paw from the earth undoes the animal’s balance, and he falls heavily on his side. He inhales once, but the air passes straight through him and out the gaping hole in his lungs, making the fur around the wound dance in his breath.

The sow runs.

As she runs now. She thinks of the hunters that killed her mate as she urges her cubs up the same slope she ran across two seasons ago. The sow doesn’t remember the details of the bearded man’s face. But she remembers the woman, her long hair swishing over her back like a tail. She didn’t see either of them this morning. But a sense that is neither sight nor smell tells her that the same two are among these hunters nevertheless.

She will move the cubs along steadily, stay high. The sow grunts in quiet hiccups that set the pace as they traverse what she remembers more and more as a killing ground. There is no doubt that these are the same trees, the same out-of-nowhere meadows she had crossed with her mate, running as hard as she could with the cubs sloshing inside her, their tracks a clear map in the rain-softened earth.

Unlike then, the soil they pound over now is relatively hard. And this time she knows who hunts them.

In Miles’s experience, fire watchers come in one of two versions: the ones attracted to the job because they are unhinged, and the ones who
become unhinged on account of the job. Ruby Ritter, the watcher at the Mount Locken Tower for the past three seasons, is likely both. It’s why Miles likes her as much as he does.

‘Pushing forty’ is all she’ll say whenever he asks her age, but he suspects she’s been pushing against the same birthday for the last five or so. A bouquet of red pipecleaners atop her head, her skin freckled like a banana left too long in the sun. Divorced. She had never admitted this directly to Miles, but it was obvious all the same. The vague, historical references to a shared domestic life, the rolled eyes to introduce anecdotes started with ‘There was a man I knew once…’ And she wrote. For as long as he knew her, Ruby was adding single-spaced sheet after sheet to a pile high enough to have required the decimation of half the forest she could see from her tower. It was the absurd arrogance of the writer in Ruby, the mad-scientist-like certainty that her bold experiment would change everything that made her obnoxious, comic and pitiable in equal turns. Any thoughts that Miles sometimes had about writing down his experiences in order to help sort them out were swept away by a single afternoon’s visit with Ruby, and for that he was appreciative.

Miles climbs the tower’s ladder, and when he pokes through her floor, Ruby is ready with a cup of coffee so strong it brings a syrup to his eyes.

‘No way you’re napping on the job drinking
this
stuff,’ Miles says, standing above Ruby, who sits straight in her chair. He can’t help feeling like a
barber readying himself to hack through her curls.

‘Nothing gets by me.’

‘The boys are itching for something to work on, but it sounds like you’ve got nothing to help us out.’

‘I sees ‘em, I don’t starts ‘em. But I could always send you guys out ghostchasing if you wanted.’

‘Standing around in a fog patch won’t get us overtime either. Though I thank you for the offer.’

She hasn’t seen another human being in at least two weeks, and he hasn’t been here longer than three minutes, and already Ruby is distracted, her eyes pulled to the accidental shrine she has set up for her magnum-opus-in-progress. Pencil stubs, highlighters, torn bits of jotted notes all guarding the monolithic slab on the table, noticeably higher than when Miles was here at the beginning of the season. He looks at the yellow tongues of Post-it notes sticking out of it like a series of staircases moving through the text, and hopes that, for her own good, this will be Ruby’s last year on the job.
That’s her brain over there
, he thinks.
That’s Ruby’s brain and it needs to get out more often.

‘How’s the writing?’ Miles asks her, as he might ask after ‘the elbow’ of someone with their arm in a sling.

‘I think there’s been a breakthrough.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’d been telling myself it was a novel. That it was
fiction
, y’know? But then I
realized.
’

She pauses dramatically, her upper teeth
clamped on her lower lip. Miles will have to say something for either of their lives to continue.

‘What did you realize?’

‘It was all true!’

‘Like an autobiography.’

‘More true than that. The
true
truth: The stuff that nobody can face straight on, because it’s
too
true.’

‘I see.’

‘The world is nothing but a marketplace of falsehoods. But I’m free of that now. There’s nobody to lie to up here.’

‘There wouldn’t be much point in it,’ Miles concedes.

‘It’s going to blow them away,’ she says, letting her eyes gaze out the window, as though the forest was seething with acquisition editors, all shaking contracts in their fists and begging for a glimpse at the truth.

‘You figuring to get it published?’ Miles asks, as he does every time the topic of Ruby’s book comes up.

‘They wouldn’t be able to handle it,’ she answers, as she does every time. ‘Besides, I’m not writing it for them.’

‘Who are you writing it for?’

‘Myself.’

‘That’s a hell of a small audience.’

‘Do I look like I care what other people think?’

Yes
, Miles nearly says.
You look exactly like someone who cares what other people think. You
care so much it’s made you lose half your marbles and run away to live alone in a treehouse, writing a two-thousand-page letter to yourself.