The Wildfire Season (22 page)

There are places that hunters go to look for different animals, according to their habitat, the season and the rumours shared over outfitters’ counters and barroom tables. Caribou a few miles up the Dempster in late autumn. Moose around Ibex valley pondsides a month before that. For grizzly bears, it’s places like this. Remote mountainsides with access to water, land uninterrupted by highways or logging for miles in any direction. This is where Margot would have brought the Baders. But from here on, Miles will have to look for the same bear sign that she would have followed, make the right guesses. Try to read Margot’s mind.

After backtracking for half an hour and starting out on a steeper game trail for no other reason than it caught his eye when he first passed it, Miles enters an alpine meadow. He is no expert at such things, but it strikes him that the place has been the scene of some recent activity. The high grasses seem crushed in spots. Farther toward the middle, Miles nearly trips over a wasps’ nest. A hole punched through its equator, leaving a roll of torn greys and black, a cast-off newspaper blown a thousand miles north. He nudges it with his boot, and what remains of its structure collapses inward.

He doesn’t notice the morning chill until it is lifted from him. After several hours of hiking the sun leaps from its hiding place to beam directly down on the top of his head. Without taking off his firepack, he digs a hand into it and pulls out
a chocolate-coated granola bar. Eating reminds him of how thirsty he is. He chugs a quart from his canteen before he can stop himself.

Granola and water. A full meal if he was on one of the crash diets he notices on the covers of tabloids at the Raven Nest’s checkout.
Forest Firefighter Loses Twenty Pounds in Just 48 Hours!
He’ll have to write in when he gets back. You never know, they might take him up as their cause. (
Next Week: The Miracle Facial That Hides His Nasty Scars!
) It would be a funny thought if he weren’t so hungry. As it is, he can’t allow himself any more food until evening. Without knowing how long he’s going to be out here, he’ll have to ration himself like he’s got a hundred miles to go. And maybe he has.

Later in the afternoon he breaks through the scrub onto an avalanche slide. The heat doubles off the black rock around him so that he can feel it reddening his bare arms.

If he didn’t kick the radio where it lay hidden among the stones he would never have noticed it. Despite its condition, he recognizes it immediately as Margot’s handheld unit. Burst open from the inside as though the transistors and wires had grown too large for their plastic casing. Not dropped but torn apart.

Miles grabs his own radio at his belt, but when he clicks the power switch there is only a sorrowful pop. He shakes it as if it may be sleeping. Whether it’s a dead battery or some other
failure, it’s about as useful now as the one smashed on the rocks at his feet.

‘Asswhistle,’ Miles pronounces, and realizes he’s borrowed one of Mungo’s custom-made profanities.

For the first time, Miles raises his head to study the slide. Perhaps fifty yards ahead, he notices a pile of clothing surrounded by strips of red ribbon. There is also something in it that makes Miles squint. Shining rivulets running through the cotton like an emptied box of silver chains.

He walks on. His boots feel five sizes too large. Without anything changing in what he sees, a wave of nausea comes upon him so fast it forces hiccups from his throat. None of it stops him from shuffling closer to what he now sees is Jackson Bader’s body.

Miles guessed right about the clothes anyway. The saggy jeans, plaid shirt and camouflage vest he remembers seeing the old man wearing only a couple nights ago in the bar. But the ribbon is in fact something else. Ripped cords of muscle. The silver Miles thought he’d seen only the glint of half-dried spouts of blood.

Without slowing his approach, Miles wonders if he is about to gag. The discovery of the grisly corpse—in films, in dreams—has trained him to expect such a reaction in death novices such as himself. The thing is, he feels fine. Or rather, he feels nothing at all. Is this shock? If it is, Miles is thankful for it. He is happy to look at what is
left of Bader’s body and, for this particular second, not have to calculate the implications.

An index finger—his, he realizes vaguely—skips down the ridgeline of his scar. With his other hand, he brushes a bottlehead fly off its flight path toward the end of one of Bader’s toes. Something in the prickly contact between the bug and his skin opens Miles’s senses fully to the scene before him. And there is the faint beginnings of a scent. One that strikes him as both remembered and new.

Instead of being sick, Miles collapses chin first on the rocks. The impact blows a cough out of him. When he’s able, he crawls away from the body on hands and knees and doesn’t look back again.

The hunting party had found their grizzly. But someone aside from Margot had done the shooting, by the looks of it. A terrible logic states itself: If a bear did this to one of them, it may have done the same to the others. That, or the animal is now hunting those who started out hunting it.

And then, a second later:
Maybe it’s still here
.

Miles struggles to focus on the edge of a shale chip a foot beneath his nose and blocks all further speculations from his thoughts.

So. What’s next?

But that isn’t the right question. People who clean up messes for a living, people like him, need to know only one thing.

So. Who’s left?

Miles lifts his head and, at this low angle, sees bootprints in the bent grass at the opposite end of the slide. The wrong way. Whoever’s prints they are, they’re going toward the fire. If he can’t catch them in time and haul them back to Ross River to make one of the last air-vacs, they’re going to run straight into the worst of it. That is, if there are any of them left to run.

Getting back on his feet is a puzzle that takes a full minute to solve. He stands and waits for his head to stop swimming. The wind grows stronger against his cheeks, stretches the clouds into translucent veils.

Far away, Alex and Rachel would be eating their dinner now. Miles hopes they’ve taken something out of his freezer or fried a couple more of Mungo’s mooseburgers instead of throwing themselves on the mercy of the Lucky China’s kitchen. He drags his hand through a patch of sage growing improbably on the rocks next to him and brings his fingertips to his nose. The whiff of savoury green is all that’s on the menu tonight. It is enough to remind him of roast chicken, which is more torture than comfort. The mere thought of cooked meat, seasoned and rich in spitting fats, only expands the emptiness within him, and Miles nearly doubles over with a stab of longing. Not for food, but to be with the two of them again. To watch them eat at his table and, perhaps, have the girl raise her plate to him to be shared.

He spits and walks on. Higher into the foothills, his ears straining to discern a human cry for help from the mocking chatter of the raven that follows him through the treetops, as impossible to escape as the eyes of the moon.

When the two of them stop it is without a glance between them. For the next minute, it doesn’t matter if the female hunter follows a hundred feet downwind. Too much has already occurred this day for them to be immediately concerned about what might be about to happen next. A short rest will help them decide.

The she-grizzly’s surviving cub, the larger of her two, slumps his head against her belly and falls into an instant sleep. Just feeling the proximity of the warm puffs from his mouth draws an ache to her teats. The smaller cub was always the stronger feeder. He would shove his brother aside for the pick of the nipples when their mother lolled onto her back and allowed herself to be fought over, tugged at, slept upon. The larger cub gained his weight not through aggression, but by suckling longer, waiting his turn and then keeping his mouth on the sow until she slapped him off. Now they are both past the age of using her this way. And now there is one, where there used to be two.

The she-grizzly stretches down to plug her surviving cub’s bullet hole with her tongue. When a wound is inflicted only from the cuts of thorns, the pressure of her licks can usually staunch the
bleeding, and the natural antibiotics in her spittle can do the job of cleaning it. But the opening in the cub’s side is too wide to be mended with her mouth. She brings her nose in close and sniffs at it. If another bear had attacked her cub, she would smell whether it was brown or black, its sex. Instead, the cub’s flesh reeks of powder and lead.

She lets her cub snore a minute longer. He will not be able to go much farther, but she hopes that breaks like this can help fool his body into thinking it has had a full day’s sleep. They allow her the chance to pull her strength together too. Since what happened on the killing ground she can barely feel anything but a hot ball in her chest, a furious concentration she knows will grow as it seeps into her fat, her bones.

At least the yellowjackets seem to have left her. As she raises her nose to read the air, only a single wasp buzzes around her head. The bear considers snapping at it and grinding it in her molars, but decides to let it return to her fur if it chooses. There is enough power left in her to carry one wasp over the mountain.

She wakens the cub, lifting him to his feet on the forklift of her claws. They continue up the slope. Around them, the trees become more stunted, the ground cover increasingly prickly shrubs in place of wildflowers. The end of the treeline can’t be much higher.

The smell of smoke grows stronger behind her. Yellow fingers reach across the sky like the hand of
a god preparing to turn the page. The fire is moving faster than she ever thought it would. It is likely a greater threat to them now than the hunters who may still be tracking them on their sideways ascent.

There is no solution aside from carrying on. Over the ridge and down the other side to the south, there is a stream where she can catch easy grayling and feed it to her cub. There, in the dappled shade of overhanging willows, she can wash out his wound in the current.

The cub looks back at its mother and takes another painful breath. He wants only to show her that he feels no fear. He will go as far as she pushes him to go.

Jerry McCormack tilts his head back to take in the sky and sees it as the smoke-curdled ceiling in the Welcome Inn on busy nights. A haze that lowers inch by inch with every exhaled breath.

‘Anything?’

Jerry hears the question but requires a second to determine if it comes from outside or within.

‘You mean the helos?’ he says finally, bringing his eyes down to Mungo standing in front of him. ‘Not a one.’

‘It’s the visibility.’

‘A bitch, for sure.’

‘How are the evac priorities?’

‘We’ve got them sorted out pretty good. For now, anyway. We don’t get some action soon, though, and people start wondering what they’re doing
standing in a field holding hands in groups of five.’

Mungo glances over his shoulder toward the softball diamond, but even in the time it’s taken him to walk over and find Jerry, the smoke has obscured it from view.

‘Terry Gray wants us at his office,’ Mungo says.

‘What about?’

‘Not a clue. Got me on the walkie-talkie and asked if we had a spare minute. I figured we did, until the birds start coming.’

‘I’ll get Crookedhead and the kid.’

Mungo takes the long way to the RCMP office, down his own street, peering through windows into living rooms he knows to be empty. More than once he catches sight of a face pressed to the glass. Children that have been left behind. Ones he had just seen waiting for the first helicopters at the softball diamond. When he starts to see them in every window he looks at, Mungo breaks into a jog all the way to Terry’s office.

‘Where’s King?’ Terry Gray asks Jerry, who is the last one in, closing the door behind him.

‘Nobody knows.’

‘Have you looked?’

‘Been a little busy around here.’

‘I’ll get to him later.’

Mungo folds his arms over his chest. ‘What’s going on here, Terry?’

‘They’ve opened a file on this fire.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘The Mounties. Me.’

‘But you’re the police. Isn’t Forestry handling it?’

‘Things have taken a turn.’

‘A turn.’

‘It’s a criminal investigation now.’

‘What’s the crime in a fire burning in a goddamn forest?’ Jerry McCormack laughs, but it’s uncertain, and dies before it has a chance to convince anyone.

‘If there’s a firestarter, there could be plenty. Arson, for one. It comes through town, and there will be property offences to add to the mix. And it’s likely to get worse than that yet.’

‘Worse?’

‘Homicide.’

‘I didn’t know anybody was dead.’

‘Ruby Ritter hasn’t made contact for over twelve hours now. They’ve made some assumptions on that down in Whitehorse.’

This silences them. Through the walls, they can hear distant shouting from the softball diamond. Already, the ordered lines for the air-vac were breaking down, nervous flare-ups more than actual panic. But that will come.

‘For fuck’s sake, Terry,’ Mungo says evenly. ‘Even if somebody started it, doesn’t mean they meant to kill anybody.’

‘Maybe not. Or maybe it doesn’t matter.’

‘Maybe you could tell us what you’re talking about.’

‘If there’s a death directly related to a fire, one
that someone started because they wanted it to kill—that’s second-degree murder right there. And even if it was for some other reason and the thing got out of hand, manslaughter is still on the table.’

‘I still don’t see what we’re doing here.’

‘They’re asking for backgrounds on you guys. Habits, changes in recent behaviour, personal circumstances.’

‘Motives.’

‘That’s right.’

Mungo laughs.

‘Not sure this is so funny,’ Terry Gray says.

‘Depends on how you look at it.’

‘And how are
you
looking at it?’

‘From over in the corner here, listening to you. Thinking that this is the first time you’ve ever sounded like a real cop, and that you’re getting quite a kick out of it. So am I.’