The Wildfire Season (29 page)

‘If I gave you this gun back, what would you do with it?’

‘I’d shoot you in the face.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I’d do the same for your sweetie pies and Tonto up there.’

‘And if I kept it and just walked away?’

‘I’d get it back.’

‘I believe you.’

‘You should.’

Miles watches the first embers skipping over the creek a hundred yards down. He thought the narrow breadth of water might slow it down for a minute or two. Now he can see it would take him longer to jump over than even the slowest pitching flame.

‘If we stay here we’re both going to burn,’ Miles says.

‘You think I give a fuck?’

‘I guess not.’

‘That’s right. You know why? I’m already dead. I’m a goddamn zombie. I just keep coming and coming.’

‘I can’t let you do that.’

Miles knocks the end of the Winchester against Wade’s forehead. His eyes cross. Squints the rifle’s black mouth into focus.

‘I’m not scared,’ Wade says.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘
You
would be, though. If this was you.’

‘You’re right. I would be,’ Miles says, and slips the bore past the kneeling man’s lips. ‘But I’m not the one who’s already dead.’

The shot is close but the bear stays where she is. Even through the smoke, human scents are all around her. Some heading higher up. Some staying behind.

It’s the smell that finally forces her to move. The sharp discharge of powder. Opened skin. Coming from down the creek, she knows. But as she pounds into the cover of trees, she feels it lifting up around her, as though exhaled from the earth itself.

Miles watches Wade’s face spray out the back of his head. He hears the crack of the rifle only after he sees what it does. Wade leans forward, headless, as though trying to find what he’d lost in the grass at his knees.

Miles stumbles back to the creek’s edge. When Wade finally collapses onto his side, his body is suddenly too close. It forces Miles to shuffle sideways until he has the room to turn his back on Wade.

When he looks up the slope he’s glad that he can’t see them. The fire is already circling around on its way up the last of the St Cyrs, but maybe enough time has passed for Mungo, Alex and the girl to have made it beyond its grasp. He feels the
force of the rifle’s concussion in his legs. A gelatinous tremor he can’t think his way out of. He realizes he’d dropped the Winchester immediately after firing it.

He tries at a run and finds it easier than walking. An effort not to put what he’d done behind him but to see if he can catch them before he falls.

She heard the bullet that hit Miles. A cottony thud like a punched pillow next to her ear. Then Mungo picked her up and she heard the other. But it isn’t the gun that opens the girl’s eyes now. It’s what she knows is going to happen next.

Rachel can sense it coming closer without seeing it. Like her dreams of falling in dark water, she was born with a knowledge of the bear. The weight of the fat it carries. The pigeon-toed feet. Along with Mr Raven, the sow is a character in a play she has anticipated before ever coming to this place. The farther north her mother took her each summer, the more specific shape the drama took. By the time they arrived in Ross River it was only a matter of waiting for the opening scene. Miles. The burned man. She had seen him in her sleep too. And not the smooth-faced photo her mother had shown her, but after his fire. A sad monster.

‘Shush now,’ Mungo soothes the girl.

‘What’s wrong?’ Alex asks, coming up alongside him.

‘She’s just being squirmy.’

For a second, both of them watch the chase going on behind the girl’s eyelids. It allows them to look at something aside from each other while they catch their breath. To not have to mention the sound of the shot.

They continue on side by side for another minute before they stop to look back for Miles. And he’s there, hobbling through a patch of beardtongue. When he is close, he stops and looks up the slope.

At first, Alex thinks he doesn’t meet her eyes because of what he’s done. But it’s something behind her he has settled on.

Alex turns in time to see the grizzly squeezing out from a tight stand of jackpole pines and onto the trail. She makes a quick guess at how far ahead it is. Fifty feet. Close enough that she can see the sow breathing through her open mouth, the gums smooth and shining as enamel. The bear swivels its head from side to side with surprising fluidity. As it moves, Alex sees that her eyes are brown, and not the unreadable black she had assumed. There is as much life in them as in her own.

‘Back up.’

She hears Miles through what could be tin cans connected with string.

‘Get off the trail. Don’t run when you do it. Climb the first tree that can take your weight. Do it now.’

When Mungo starts, the bear stops swaying its
head and stares at him. Takes a step forward. The mouth closes and opens again, closes and opens. Clacking her teeth in warning.

‘She’s not going to let me.’

‘Don’t look at her. Alex, you too.’

But Alex can’t stop looking at the bear. There is an expectation that the animal is about to reveal its true opinions of them. No matter how terrible the performance of her hate—if hate is what has brought her here at all—Alex feels an undeniable privilege at being a witness to it.

There is this transfixing curiosity, but ultimately what prevents Alex from attempting escape is the immensity of the animal’s need. She watches it breathe, the smoke rattling deep inside it, and knows it is alive for a single reason. They are equal in this respect, if none other. Alex would have quit long ago—searching for Miles, running from the fire, holding back the tickling urge to scream—if it weren’t for a prevailing imperative to hang on to. We survive not for ourselves, but for others. And now she watches the bear and tries to read its justification for coming as far as it has.

‘Momma?’

Alex sees the child clinging to Mungo’s neck. Eyes darker than the bear’s, fighting not to let her mother blur away.

‘It’s all right, honey.’

‘Momma?’

‘Mungo’s got you. You hang on to him tight,
okay? I’m going to be right over here,’ Alex says, stepping off the trail as she speaks.

The animal watches the three of them retreat with an almost detached interest. Although Miles still stands on the trail, it appears not to notice him. Instead, it watches Mungo fight for a grip on the lower branches of a spruce, one hand snapping around above him and the other propped under Rachel. There are a number of boughs sturdy enough to support their weight, but dozens of smaller twigs form a barrier around the trunk, pushing down on Mungo’s head each time he tries to jump up. The bear studies their efforts. Panting, teeth bared.

‘Hey there, big lady!’ Miles addresses it, trying to turn its attention away from Mungo and Alex, who is now scraping the bark off the aspen she hugs.

His voice draws no more than a glance from the bear. It returns its attention to Alex. Miles realizes that, as he was speaking to it, he’d been looking into its eyes. It has prevented him from noticing that the bear is on the move. Dragging its claws over the settled ash.

‘
Now
, Alex.’

The bear charges as Alex’s feet leave the ground. Its weight pounds the earth so that a low drumroll pushes out through the porous wall of trees. Every time its front paws meet the earth, it whoofs.

If it struck at half this pace it would be enough to crack the aspen in two. But as it enters the
bush it is forced to weave around other trees first. It slows the animal so that, when it meets the aspen Alex has climbed, its impact is little more than a nudge.

The bear sighs. Looks up at her feet, still kicking at the bark. It could rise up on its hind legs and yank her down without stretching.

‘
C’mon!
’ Miles is screaming now. ‘What about me? Take a step this way and I promise you, I will—’

The bear spins around. The return of her eyes on him leaves Miles gasping. He looks away to see Mungo and Rachel struggling through a dead patch halfway up the spruce, the top swaying wildly. When he swings back to the bear’s position, it’s already on the trail.

The bear remains focused on Miles alone. It lowers its head so that its chin hovers inches off the ground. A sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun.

None of them hear it. But when the grizzly comes, she comes as though in flight.

Miles watches her skin rippling under her fur, reaching forward. It enlarges her even more.

From somewhere behind and above, Rachel shrieks.

Whether it is the pitch of the child’s voice or the way Miles shakes his hands in front of him but stands his ground, the bear stops. Close enough that Miles need only lean forward to touch its nose.

The bear blows spit. White bubbles over his boots.

The echo of Rachel’s scream now a school bell rattling miles deep in the valley. Each time Miles inhales it fills him with a new undercurrent of the bear’s odour. Straw. Fermented berries.

He can hear Mungo still scrabbling at the spruce’s bark. Without turning his head away from the bear, Miles slowly backs up to join him.

‘Get up there,’ he whispers when he stands beside Mungo, holding him around the waist with his good arm to give him a boost.

‘I can’t do it.’

‘Just hug it tight and I’ll push you.’

When Mungo and Rachel have made it up as far as they can go, Miles finds his own tree and tries to pull himself up using only one arm. The bear walks over to get a better view of his struggles. He swings for a moment before hooking his bad elbow over the lowest branch. Uses it to winch his feet off the ground.

He presses his cheek to the bark. The bear moves between their trees, snorts the air beneath their dangling feet. When she has confirmed which of them remains, she sits. Looks down the slope to watch the fire coming up at them. All of them do. An audience stilled by the same dancing forms.

They might have already figured out it was him.

He’s not sure how, whether by a witness he was unaware of or evidence he was fool enough to leave behind, but in any case, he blames the firestarter. Not only for doing what he did but for failing to protect him from the consequences.

All the firestarter had to do was carry the memory of what was done, yet it is too easily distracted even for this simple job, and leaves him with himself more and more. In fact, he thinks the firestarter may be leaving him for good now. A creation meant to
do
things, not weigh them, not rationalize their harm. The firestarter is gone and he is alone with the knowledge that he will never be what he was before.

It didn’t matter what he’d meant the fire to accomplish. Not now. This was his real crime, more fundamental than the incidental destruction, worse even than the killings. He had been guilty of thinking he could determine the intent of fire
simply by igniting it with his own intent. It was an offence to nature. In a different time, according to a different religion, it would be the sort of thinking to anger gods.

Now they were coming for him. Not for the firestarter, not an excuse stuffed with straw, but him.

He’d been wrong to think he could divide himself as he’d tried to do. A man may be capable of any number of things, but even the most surprising of these only confirm the truth of who he’s been all along.

Don’t look.

Below them, the bear whoofs. Pacing between the trees they cling to, knocking her head against their trunks as she goes. Even this much of her weight pulls white roots from the ground.

Bears are like bumblebees. If you ignore them long enough, they go away.

Miles sends mind-messages out to the girl. It is only an excuse to stay where he is with his eyes closed a moment longer. But he’s convinced that she can hear him anyway.

You’re still looking, aren’t you? Cheater.

The scaly bark leaves smears over the length of his scar. Lipstick kisses.

I’m going to count to three and open my eyes. If I catch you looking, you’re in big trouble. Got it? One, two—

Miles opens his eyes. He finds Rachel immediately, awake in Mungo’s arms. And she is looking. Not at the bear, but at him.

He looks away. The bear is still there, waiting for them to come down on their own. That, or weaken and fall. It would be a game they might have a chance of winning if it weren’t for the fire, now charging uphill toward them, less than a hundred yards away. Miles had almost forgotten about it. After Bader, after Wade, after his long march there and back and nearly there again over the St Cyrs—he had earned a slice of time in which all of it could be misplaced. He’d hugged the tamarack and breathed its cologne of green tea and tarragon and thought of nothing.

It was Rachel who had brought him back. The girl sending out messages of her own.

She’s not leaving
. Like a whisper in his ear, but closer.
She’s waiting for us, isn’t she?

Don’t look. Bears are like bumblebees.

From his elevated position, Miles can see the end of the treeline. After that, the ridge is only another couple hundred yards farther through the high grass, although the last ascent is at a much steeper grade.

‘We have to go,’ he says.

His words halt the bear. She looks up at him, head cocked.

‘Is it gone?’ Mungo asks.

‘She’s here. So is the fire.’

‘It’s coming up all around us.’

‘I’m going down first,’ Miles says, directing his words to the bear as much as to Mungo.

‘Rachel?’

‘Mungo’s got her, Alex. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Just drop after I do. I’m the last back. Mungo, are you sure—?’

‘I can take her.’

For a time, nothing happens. Even the orange cinders falling about them hang suspended.

It’s Miles’s hands. They won’t let go of the branches that hold him against the trunk.
One more thing
. He has to speak to his fingers directly before they loosen their grip.
After this, we’re done. I promise. Just let me go
.

He watches his white knuckles turn pink. The return of blood down his arm brings the first real flare of pain to his shoulder, and with it, Wade’s face. Coughing on the rifle as it was slammed against the back of his throat. His eyes laughing.

Miles hadn’t paused. When he knew Alex, Mungo and the girl could no longer see him, he’d squeezed off the shot without having to tell himself that it was the only way, that six years of practised nothing had brought him to this.

This could have been you.

He’d read Wade’s mind as he reads the girl’s now, and this is what he wanted him to know, the thought he found so funny with a gun in his mouth. And Wade had been right.

Miles watches his fingers lifting away from the branch, so that he wonders what’s holding him up at all. In the same instant, there’s a sound like ripped denim. His boots scraping two lines of bark as he falls.

When he hits the ground his arms swing out for balance but he’s already on his back. The bear watching him.

Oh, what a big lady you are.

The grizzly comes forward until she looms over him. Her nostrils recording him in swift, audible sucks.

And what a big nose you have.

Without looking back at the bear, Miles gets to his feet and limps a few steps higher.

He waits to hear the bass tremor of the animal’s charge, to feel its skull knock the last air out of him. It makes him go farther than he intended. He’s supposed to stand here, act as a distraction for the others. Instead he’s stumbling away.

Again, he has to speak to his body to make it stop.

It’s not about you. Nothing matters now but what you do for them.

Miles skids on one foot and nearly loses his balance. It turns him around to face back down the trail. The grizzly hasn’t moved. For now, the clown show he’s putting on is too good to miss. Her teeth displayed in a malicious smile.

‘Now, Alex,’ Miles says.

In his peripheral vision, he watches her shimmy down without hesitation. She doesn’t look back. As she walks past him, he hears the tin whistle of her breath.

The bear stretches its neck to look around Miles at Alex putting distance between them on her way
up to the ridge. Takes a single step forward. Alex hears the animal’s movement and stops.

‘Miles?’

‘Go.’

‘But you’re—’

‘Go.’

Alex starts up again. Her departure from the circle of trees momentarily confuses the bear more than enrages it. What appeared to be a smile is gone, at any rate. In its place the sow curls out her lower lip as though savouring a taste of delicate flavour in the air.

Miles hears the snap of dead branches. A
fucknuts
spoken under jagged breaths.

‘Mungo?’

‘Just got to get my arm out of—’

As Mungo drops, he keeps one arm around the girl. Presses her to his chest and leans back to protect her from impact.

The ground punches a word out of him.
‘Oh,’
he says, and lies still.

The bear throws itself around to face them, its front paws scratching loose rocks aside. The noise of Mungo and Rachel’s fall has started a process in her mind that had been stalled in their time in the trees. Each of the animal’s breaths is a little bark, so that it sounds like she is mumbling to herself.

Mungo bends up at the waist. He didn’t think he could move at all, but he’s rolling over, using his free hand to push off from the pine needles
he’d landed in and the other to hold Rachel close. When he makes it to his feet he starts out after Alex.

The bear lowers her chin. A short grunt escapes her. Quizzical, considered. Her anger has returned. All of them can see it. It’s in the way her eyes have been emptied. The three of them look into her and, for the first time, see nothing at all.

The bear leaps. When she lands, she holds her snout a forearm’s length from Mungo’s face. Slowly, so he can see everything that it means, she opens her mouth wide.

A hot breeze gusts up the slope. The flames passing from crown to crown. Lighting the candles.

Into this silence that would be total were it not for the cracking of the fire rolling up at them, Rachel makes a sound so small only Mungo and the bear can hear it.

‘No,’
the girl says.

Not pleading, not a reflex of terror or denial. She says it more as an acknowledgement of something already shared between the animal and the girl. The concluding word in an ongoing conversation.

The bear examines her. Traces its eyes down the length of the seeping burn on her side.

As slowly as she’d opened it, the sow closes her mouth. With the heat of the Comeback pressing on the back of his neck, Mungo steps around the bear and keeps going.

Although all his legs want to do is carry him back up to join them, Miles forces himself to remain with the bear. He knows he has to because he tells himself so out loud.

‘It’s got to be you, Smoky. So just hang around with the big lady here awhile. Looks like there’s going to be some pyrotechnics in a minute. Should be one hell of a show.’

The bear has turned around to listen to him. The loose skin over her eyes drawn up, incredulous.

‘Sure wish we had some marshmallows,’ he tells her. ‘I’d have shared them if I did.’

A standing sleep comes over him. His vision narrowed so that all he can see is the bear.

She is beautiful, Miles thinks, though not in the usual sense. A mystery not in the shape of her thoughts but in their irreducible simplicity. There is nothing within him to match the fineness of the bear’s mind.

All he can do is return the memory of the girl’s fingers on his cheek. He lets the animal read his scar with her eyes as Rachel had with her touch. And as he does he feels the relief, the unexpected buoyancy that comes with being known.