The Wildfire Season (21 page)

‘You in charge of this whole town now?’ one of the bolder men shouts at Terry.

‘Mungo’s giving the evacuation orders.’

‘Where’s Miles?’

‘Mungo’s the chief now, and that’s all you need to know.’

Everyone looks to each other to see who will be the first to make a crack about Mungo Capoose—or any of the Ross River fire team—being in charge of anything, but nobody tries it. The stink of burning pine tells them how serious this is. Under the circumstances, they’ll sooner listen to Mungo than be the last ones in line for the free whirlybird rides.

Mungo already knows who’s going to be first. As he runs back to the fire office from the softball diamond he listens for the thump of the helos coming in, but the air holds nothing but dead heat. When he stops at the door, all he can hear is his heart.

He reaches out an upturned hand as though checking for rain. Even in the time it takes him to catch his breath, a powdery layer of ash collects over the lines in his palm.

She’s thinking of the fire. She’s thinking of how she should have left yesterday. But more than anything, Alex is thinking of the moment, only a month ago, when Rachel was born for the second time.

It had, as one says of the most unforgettable things, happened so quickly. The end of May in northern Ontario, crushed ice rattling along the shorelines like marguerita troughs. They had stopped at the edge of Lake Wawa so that Alex could scour the phone book to find the cheapest room along the bleak motel strip off the Trans—Canada. She hadn’t told Rachel to stay in the truck as, usually, the girl didn’t look for trouble, her infancy free of tongues stuck in electrical outlets or stolen mouthfuls of Javex. But on this cement-skied Monday, she decided to trot away from her mother and leap, without a glance, into eight feet of chattering slush.

Alex covered twenty feet before the receiver thudded against the phone booth’s glass wall, before she was aware of running at all. From somewhere above, a gull does the screaming for her.

As she comes to the pier’s end, Alex slides with both arms in front of her as though stealing second
base. The ice slowing the waves into twisting rolls.

When the top of Rachel’s head bobs through the surface and slips below again, Alex knows that if she doesn’t grab the girl this time there won’t be a second chance. At first, all her fingers can find is a ponytail knot. Alex slithers back along the pier, gaining inches, but with Rachel’s head still submerged. She will have to let go of the girl’s hair to grab something she can lift all at once. When she releases Rachel’s ponytail she wonders if it will be the last time she touches the girl.

There is a second when Alex is sure she is about to go over the side altogether. Her arms are in too deep to keep her balance. But she only reaches deeper yet, plowing through the oily cold.

When her hands find the girl, they lock around her chest. Now, when Alex rolls back, the girl ends up lying on top of her. Eyelids closed and bloodless.

There are other things Alex should do, and even at the time, she knows it. Turn Rachel over to get the water out of her lungs. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Run back to the phone and stab 911 out on the sticky buttons.

But her daughter is cold. Alex opens her jacket and slides her inside.

She remembers singing to her, but not the song.

After a time, she watches Rachel’s eyes open. Hot gasps against her neck. Not just alive, but born.

Alex watches Rachel breathe and sees her daughter in almost scientific terms. A link between elements. All along, she figured the main storyline of her life was made up of decisions, a series of deliberate actions. But there is only our connections to others that make any difference. Blood. Love. The shared experience of horror.

It is in this moment that Alex decides this will be the last summer she will look for Miles. It is also the moment she knows she will find him.

She is thinking once more of the blue of the child’s skin when Mungo finds her still sitting in the fire office and tells her to get over to the softball diamond.

‘We’ll wait.’

‘What do you want to do that for?’ he asks her, taken aback by the way she looks at him. A sweet thing. But hard all the way through, like rock candy.

‘There’s plenty of time. You’ve said so yourself.’

‘But Miles told me to—’

‘You’re wrong if you think I do what he tells me to.’ A pair of unflinching, it’s-as-simple-as-that dimples appear at the corners of her mouth. ‘Unless you can get Stump out early too.’

‘The
dog?
’

‘Rachel won’t budge without him.’

‘They’re not taking dogs on the helos.’

‘Not the
first
ones. But if we wait until later, they said they would.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Terry Gray. He radioed in after Rachel had a talk with him. She kind of went over both our heads, I guess.’

‘No shit.’

‘They said it would only be an extra half-hour or so. And if I tell her she can’t take Stump, she might make a run for it. I’m not as quick as I used to be.’

Mungo shakes his head. He can’t stop smiling at Alex, her green eyes estimating his resolve as the rubbery thing that it is.

‘You’re a lot like my wife, you know that?’ he says. ‘Both of you. Stubborn as wolverines.’

‘It’s a little crazy, I know.’

‘You’re not crazy. A blindfolded fool could see that. I’m just concerned for you and your girl’s safety here.’

‘So am I. I’m only asking to wait a bit.’

That’s it, then. He’s not through his first hour of being in charge and already he’s got five people out in the bush somewhere, a town waiting to be airlifted in helos that haven’t arrived, and now, a woman and her child are giving him orders.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘But I get the window seat.’

‘And I’ll buy the beers.’

‘I’m not sure if beer alone is going to cut it.’

The black bird follows him from the moment he parks the truck and strikes out on the trail. Flapping from spruce top to squirrel’s nest, nodding at his progress. Miles reminds himself to be grateful that, so far, the raven is silent. If it is the same creature from the night before and insists on tagging along to wish him the worst, he would prefer if it would at least keep its mouth shut until noon.

Miles cuts up the hillside that rises from the edge of the Lapie Canyon, a weaving slash along the valley bottom that he can catch glimpses of through the aspen leaves every couple of minutes. From this distance, the white water of the river looks to him like a braid of blond hair being pulled through the forest. At every pause in the breeze the sound of the rapids reaches him, amplified by the canyon walls. It will be lost, eventually, as he goes higher. He stops to listen now with a hand cupped to his ear as though the water is offering him its last orders.

He can smell the smoke of the Comeback as well, but it is less threatening than at the site, now just one scent competing among others. Even through the blur of his worry, the fragrances of the bush lend him a cleansing energy. Blackberry. Pine. Toasted vanilla. In the deeper shadow offered by the Engelmann spruces, there is also the mineral whiff of water that has been filtered through earth and stone. It reminds him of quarry swims when he was young. A golden truant tanned head to toe by the end of June, cutting the chains that held NO TRESPASSING signs over mud lanes. A smell that isn’t really a smell at all, nor a taste, but air in its purest state, deeply breathed. It both awakens him and invites him to sleep.

He catches sight of a lynx before it disappears into the underbrush, its tail snapping in farewell. He startles a family of ptarmigan into flight, fat and rubber-necked as dwarfish turkeys. A pair of eagles—one golden, one bald—share the sky.

With every hundred feet of elevation gain the vegetation shrinks around him. Underfoot, black earth and roots are replaced by mosses and the tiny blue and yellow faces of alpine flowers, a blanket of life over the rocks. The stunted trees refuse to protect him from the sun. Before him the north side of the St Cyr range runs off to a horizon that, in the brightness, appears close enough to hook a finger over.

He can still be shaken by how beautiful this place is. From time to time he looks about him and feels
something too large to be contained fisting its way up, a cry perhaps, or an explosion of tears, he’s not sure because so far he’s been able to choke off its escape. Even now the land can make him want to stop where he is and never move again. Just as often, it makes him want to run and keep going until the landscape collapses at his back.

Miles brings his eyes back to the trail and stops at the sight of the girl. Standing forty feet ahead, motionless but for the crosshatching of shade over her dress, her skin.

She is no more real than the kid. But like the kid, she is there nevertheless.

He looks back over his shoulder. It gives Rachel a chance to disappear. When he starts up toward where she was, the shade has dispersed in the new breeze, her outline devoured by light.

Just like when he’d seen her on the day before he left on his tour of the fire towers.

He had been standing in his kitchen, slicing a cocktail-onion, sauerkraut and gherkin sandwich in half. His regular picnic menu on his solitary hikes up Eagle’s Nest Bluff, the river cliff outside of town. (The fact is, he lives on stuff you have to stab out of a jar.)

Just as he’d pulled the blade free he glances out the window over the sink and sees the girl. Her eyes too white. Her lips parted in what could be the beginnings of a snarl.

The squeezable mustard sits on the counter beyond his reach and he slides over to grab it.
When he returns to the window, the girl is gone.

He wraps the finished sandwich and stuffs it along with a thermos of coffee into a knapsack. He’s about to grab a couple of beers out of the fridge when there’s a knock at his door.

‘Rachel’s run away,’ Alex announces when he pulls it open.

‘You think she came here?’

‘It’s somewhere she knows.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, she was here.’

‘And you just let her
go?
’

I thought she wasn’t real
, Miles is about to say, but Alex is already rushing around the side of the cabin.

He trots out and watches her cross the high grass to the edge of the forest, calling the girl’s name into the trees. He hears it three times before it occurs to him that he should look for her too.

Miles starts up a jog but, not knowing which way to go, ends up standing in the middle of the yard, his bare feet an easy breakfast for the mosquitoes. The light is so clear that it pushes his vision past its normal limits, drawing clean lines around individual willow leaves a hundred yards down the road. But no Rachel.

She couldn’t have gone far. There wasn’t time for her to accept a ride with anyone unless they were already idling in the road. And even if there had been, who would it be?

A millisecond process of elimination is all it takes for everything to change.

Wade could have driven his own truck out to join the hunting party, but turned back to town first. It would only have taken a second to grab the girl. Maybe he didn’t even have to. They had spoken before at the trampoline. He put his hand on her shoulder. Perhaps she’d mistaken him for a friend.

A month ago, he wouldn’t have thought Wade Fuerst capable of harming a child. With an instant certainty, he sees that he was wrong. What had Margot said about him?
Something bad going on in there
.

Miles slaps his pockets for the keys to his truck. Pulls them out and drops them in the grass. When he bends, the blood rushes to his head. Bites at air as he stands, and still nearly faints.

He makes a spastic run to the driver’s-side door. Jams the key in the slot only to see that the lock is already popped up.

Miles throws himself in. For a moment, the panic freezes the backs of his eyes. The result is that, for a time, he can do nothing but stare at the girl sitting in the passenger seat. His heart bangs against his chest so hard he wonders if she can see his shirt move.

Rachel shrugs and pulls the seat belt over her chest, snapping it in place.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Putting my belt on.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Momma won’t start her truck until I do.’

‘That so?’

‘It’s the
law
.’

The girl nods at him and smiles so sweetly that the sheer audacity of it makes him want to laugh out loud. But nothing changes on his face. She’s funny kid, that’s for sure. But goddamn it if Miles is going to let himself smile back at a child who, in certain respects, might just be smarter than he is.

After an awkward, unavoidable invitation—awkwardly, unavoidably accepted—for Alex to join him, and following a suffocating hour’s drive, the three of them elbow-to-elbow on the cab’s bench seat, Miles turned onto an overgrown road that nobody would notice even walking by. The truck lurches over stumps, the patches of foxtail swooning under the front grille. When he comes to a stop, he cranks the parking brake and jumps out without a word, the dog following but glancing worriedly back at Alex and Rachel as they follow.

Only a couple hundred yards in, Miles stops. Behind him a narrow trail winds its way up an abrupt slope.

‘Where’s the river?’ Alex asks him.

‘You can only really see it from the top.’

‘
I
want to see it,’ Rachel says.

‘You first,’ Miles tells the girl, stepping back to
reveal the trailhead. He hopes she will refuse such a frightening ascent altogether. Instead, she starts on her way without a glance at either of them.

Halfway up the three of them pause for a drink. The trail has lifted them above the level of the tallest trees, so that valley after valley tumbles away in every direction, daubed blue with unreachable lakes. A new quiet envelops them. The scurryings and footfalls of the bush replaced by nothing but the movement of air.

‘I’ll wait here,’ Alex says. ‘You two go on to the top on your own.’

With her announcement, Stump rubs against the side of her leg and plants himself there, refusing to go any farther if he has an excuse not to. Miles gives Alex a pleading look for her to come with him.

‘Don’t worry,’ she tells him. ‘Rachel’s as tough as you think you are.’

There’s nothing for it but to follow the girl, who is already lifting herself up the much steeper incline. As the two of them continue on, he can feel his mind pressed between attention to his environment and his fear of it. It was like this the only other time he had come here with someone else.

Miles catches his breath, blinking up at Rachel’s sharp outline against the sky. Why does he feel more dizzy looking up than down? It’s always been this way with him, a kind of reverse vertigo. And to make matters more light-headed, he can
see that the only thing maintaining the girl’s grip is her left hand clinging to a poplar root, a spindly loop that comes out and returns to the earth like an ingrown hair. If Rachel loses her hold on it, she will either tumble back straight into him or miss him and fly past. She can’t weigh much more than sixty pounds. But with a bit of velocity, the contact would likely be enough to send them both back into the last line of aspens. If the trees didn’t stop them, they would fall five hundred feet into the pretty picture below.

Then, even as he calculates the odds of it happening, the root springs from the earth.

There is no time to do anything but note her hair, a dark splash against the dome of blue.

In the next instant, her back slams into his knees.

Although he expects to, he doesn’t fall. His toes reach through his soles to dig a half inch into the shallow soil. No other part of him has contact with the earth. But it holds them where they are long enough for him to lean forward, pressing Rachel against the trail.

‘Are you all right?’ he whispers into the back of her head. He snorts out strands of her hair and it leaves the grape juice smell of her shampoo behind.

‘Fall down go boom,’ she giggles.

‘We should go back.’

‘We’re almost at the top.’

‘It’s pretty steep between—’

‘I won’t fall.’

‘C’mon—’

‘I
won’t
fall.’

‘How are you two doing up there?’ he hears Alex call from below, but from her tone he can tell she hadn’t seen the girl slip.

‘We’re
fine
!’ Rachel shouts back.

She slides out from under him and continues up the last steep third, her hind end waggling back and forth like a goat’s. Miles struggles after her. Although they aren’t high enough for the air to be any thinner, it feels to him as though it is.

‘We made it!’ Rachel is shouting when Miles is still ten feet short of the crest.

‘What can you see?’

‘The river. Momma and Stump. You. Everything! I can see
everything
!’

Miles pulls himself up over the edge with Rachel tugging on his sleeves. The bluff’s crest is a flat tabletop of moss and black stone, a nearperfect circle fifty feet across. At the same moment, Miles and Rachel collapse onto their backs in the centre, the freshened breeze drying the sweat on their skin.

‘They call this place Eagle’s Nest Bluff,’ Miles finds himself telling her once he’s caught his breath. ‘That’s the name the gold rush prospectors gave it when they came up that river a hundred years ago. But the Northern Tutchone—those are the Indians around here—they called it something else for a thousand years before that.
Tś àl Cho An. Which means Giant Frog’s Den.’

Rachel appears to be only half listening to him, peering over the cliff’s edge at the river that fires shards of sunlight up at them.

‘I have a name for it too,’ she says finally.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘The High Chair.’

‘Why the High Chair?’

‘Because it makes you feel like a baby. After you’ve been lifted from the floor.
Swoop!
You’re up. And you can
see
.’

The two of them sit there for a time without speaking. Miles is astonished to feel within Rachel the recognition that the land belongs to nobody, despite the different names we might attach to it. Land like this cannot be owned except in the moment we see our place in it, our brief and dazzled passing. Somehow, Rachel understands this even now, and as well as he does.

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asks her. He wasn’t planning the question, but now that it’s out, he finds that he really would like to know.

Rachel folds her brow into a mocking scowl. Her head shaking in the frustration of a teacher having to start again with an especially slow student.

‘I
think
I do,’ she says. ‘Dumb-dumb.’

Miles glances behind the girl at an osprey diving close enough over their heads he could have touched it with a raised broomstick. For a second it dives again, having spotted a fish jumping near
the bank, then corrects itself when it confirms the prey’s escape, floating back toward them on an updraft.

The girl has turned to catch all of this too. When the bird spirals higher and higher away downstream, she claps her hands at the show’s graceful finale. She goes on long enough that Miles can only join her in the applause.

Do you know who I am?

Miles hears his question repeated between every smack of his palms. Not only was he guilty of failing to be either subtle or direct, but now he’s not even sure if he’s been given an answer. Perhaps the girl thinks of him only as Miles, the strange-looking friend of her mother’s. Or perhaps she knows far more than this, and is granting him the adult favour of tactfulness. In either case, he cannot ask again. It would only make him appear more of a dumb-dumb than he already is.

Rachel and Miles watch the osprey shrink far down the valley until its black dot is washed out in blue. They’ll have to start back down now. And yet for a time he remains exactly where he is, his eyes on the girl, trying to breathe deeper and slower so that time might slow and deepen along with him. For the moment, he feels that it is enough. It is more than enough for Miles to have heard her say that she knows him, and for him to believe it to be true.