The Big Burn Read online

  It must have caught fire last night and been smoldering all day, Jarrett thought, as he tried to figure out how best to go about things. Although the ground fire didn't look to be very large, he thought that it probably posed more danger than did the burning snag, which he had no way to attack anyway. He wished the ground fire were creeping downhill instead of up, so that it might put itself out in the creek that ran just below. Shrubbery hid the stream, but Jarrett had fished its length and knew it was there.

  A breath of acrid smoke set him coughing. He should have thought to ask somebody just how you do put out a fire when you can't get water to it But he hadn't.

  Smother it with his shovel, maybe, the same way he'd step on a spark popped out the open door of a stove.

  Jarrett angled his way around one side of the fire, climbing until he was above the fire's wide, leading edge. Then he slammed the flat back side of his shovel down on low-licking flames. Nearby flames, fanned by the motion, sprang higher.

  Several more swings left Jarrett with a fire angrier than the one he'd started with. Ash swirled upward, filling his nose and making his eyes water.

  Frantically trying to think of something else to do, he remembered about how he always shoveled dirt over a campfire, even after he'd doused it with water. He stabbed his shovel into the ground and threw everything he dug up onto the fire. Bits of flame went out where dirt hit, but other flames glowed more brightly as they gobbled up scattered twigs and pine needles.

  Next time he was careful to toss mostly soil. Then he started to work out a system. He'd scrape some earth bare and toss it and a bit of the fire's front edge farther into the blaze.It's like folding the fire in on itself, he thought.

  By now sweat was rolling down Jarrett's face and stinging his eyes, and his arms were beginning to ache with the relentless effort of stabbing, lifting, tossing, stabbing, lifting, tossing. A wind gust blew a bunch of burning pine needles from his shovel. He glanced around but didn't see that they'd caught anything.

  Stab, lift, toss. The repeated motions took on their own hard rhythm.

  A deep voice yelled, "Watch your back!"

  Whirling, Jarrett saw a line of flame blaze up, and all of a sudden the fire had caught him between its orange-red arms.

  Other men were shouting now, and Jarrett heard tools clanging against rock and wood. He could see his way out—just a dozen or so long steps, but running them he felt the flames closing in, flicking his neck and arms like pricks of hot knife blades. Then someone was reaching for him, grabbing Jarrett around the waist and roughly dragging him to safety. "You trying to get killed, going above a fire?" the man demanded.

  Jarrett staggered and fell, landing hard, his elbow coming down on a boulder and taking most of his weight. Pain shot up his arm so intensely that he was afraid he'd pass out Or maybe he did. When his spinning vision cleared, he saw that the burned area now stretched farther down, as well as up and out The blaze appeared to be dying, though, worked by three men in miners' clothes. The nearest told him, "Go on, if you're feeling okay. We got this one."

  "I'll help finish it," Jarrett said, struggling to his feet He tried not to think about how quickly the fire had turned on him, but he couldn't help seeing the charred results of its brief run. Even the snake grass along his fishing stream was gone.

  "Help's probably needed more down there," the man told him, pointing to a rose-tinged column of smoke that hung over the canyon bottom, about where Jarrett's section of railroad track was.

  ***

  "Don't bother reporting for work tomorrow," Mr. Blakeney said, paying Jarrett off on the spot "You're dismissed."

  Trains had been held up in both directions for almost an hour while their crews fought a blaze that had threatened to burn the wood ties from under the rails. They'd barely stopped the fire from running wild through tangled, sawn trees along the right-of-way.

  Jarrett tried to explain why he hadn't been on hand to see it start, but Mr. Blakeney wasn't interested. "Tell your father...," he began, and then broke off. "Tell him what you want," he finished. "It doesn't much matter, as long as you understand you're done here."

  ***

  That evening Jarrett stood alone on the north bank of the St. Joe River watching lightning streak the sky. Hardly aware of the train yard noise behind him or of the loud voices and music of Avery's bars blaring from open windows, he watched bolt after electric bolt touch down on the thickly forested hills opposite. This was the third night running he'd seen rainless clouds moving above the valley, dry thunderclouds that carried fire instead of rain.

  A dot of yellow appeared partway up the nearest hill, but from Jarrett's position, it looked small and harmless.

  He knew better. It probably was already mushrooming into flames like the ones that had gotten away from him and might have killed him if those miners hadn't come.

  He wondered if he was crazy for wanting to go meet it. Not the particular fire he'd just seen start, but ones like it, some of them burning all across the mountains. He thought of them as his mountains feeling their tug someplace deep inside him. In the months since he and Pop had moved out here, he'd come to care for this land in a way he'd never cared for anyplace or anybody. People were saying it might burn up, and this afternoon, he'd seen how. Flames rising without warning and destroying so fast.

  He had to fight back, and joining a fire-fighting crew was the best way he could think of, though that would mean squaring off with Pop first.

  An incoming train sounded its approach with three sharp blasts of its whistle. That would be his father's run. Inside one of the passenger cars, Pop would be telling the people whose tickets were for Avery that it was time to get off. Maybe he'd be helping a woman gather her belongings, or perhaps he'd be giving someone the correct time. Only when Pop had turned responsibility for his car over to a night-shift conductor would he retrieve his own travel valise and start for home.

  Jarrett hoped Pop would be in a better mood than he was after his last run, when he'd returned still aggravated over a brakeman caught stealing tools. Of course, Pop had discharged him then and there.

  Jarrett took a last look at the yellow glow in the distance, knowing that particular fire would be somebody else's to deal with. Then he started for home. He needed to put supper on the table before Pop got there. He hoped his father wouldn't have heard about the afternoon's disaster from someone else, before Jarrett could explain it his own way.

  ***

  "You can't do better than heating canned beans?" Pop demanded, ignoring the platter of corn bread and fried ham Jarrett had put on the table. He blew out a breath as though to say food was only the beginning of his grievances. "I heard you ran away from a fire."

  "No, I missed a track fire because I'd gone to put out another one that might have spread down."

  "And did you put it out?"

  "I got started, but then it began moving too fast for me. Some miners took over."

  "So which was it?" Pop demanded. "You got scared off your job, or you couldn't do it? Which do you expect me to tell Mr. Blakeney? That you're incompetent or a coward?"

  "I'm not either one. I—"

  "Because he hired you on my say-so. Now what's his opinion of me going to be?"

  "Why should it change? You weren't there today." Jarrett stopped short, feeling as tangled up as arguing with Pop always made him feel. He hadn't even had a chance to bring up his wish to take a fire-fighting job. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry. I thought I was doing right. I didn't mean to let you down."

  He watched his father carry his half-full dish to the sink and thump it down in disgust. Pop pulled on his jacket and checked his beer money before swinging around where Jarrett could see his face again. "I'll go to Mr. Blakeney tomorrow morning and ask him to give you another chance. You don't want it on your record you got fired."

  "Pop, he'll say no, and anyway, my record doesn't matter. I told you before I don't want to spend my life working for the railroad."

  "The day you grow
up," Pop said, his eyes glittering with anger, "you're going to realize a good job with the railroad is something to be proud of."

  "When I grow up,"Jarrett said, "I'll find something more worthwhile to do than walk up and down passenger cars lighting lanterns and keeping order."

  Pop stiffened. "Leave, then. You think you can find something more important to do with your life, go do it. But when you fall on your face, don't come back here."

  Homestead off Placer Creek

  July 13, Evening

  Not ready to go inside, Celia Whitcomb leaned against the cabin's rough logs and listened to distant thunder. She hoped rain was finally on its way. It would be one less worry.

  Of all the things that frightened her right now, the threat of wildfire scared her most. It was the one thing that could take her timber from her before she could sell it.

  She hated feeling so helpless, watching the weather and not being able to do a thing to change it. She should have listened last spring to that old-timer. He'd said she should take the Indian way and burn while she could do it on her own terms. In the spring, burning underbrush had seemed like an unnecessary risk, but now she was considering it.

  One more thing to argue about with Lizbeth, who said light burning might have been all right in April, when melting snow was still running down from the mountains. But, Lizbeth said, in the middle of a dry July they might as well throw flaming torches into the woods.

  Lord knows Celia hated arguing with her niece, but it seemed that's all they did these days. Maybe because Lizbeth was so much like she herself used to be, thinking she could mold the world to her liking. When Celia's sister had died, leaving twelve-year-old Lizbeth an orphan, Celia hadn't hesitated to take her in.

  But then the girls' school where Celia was working closed, and no other nearby school needed a female art teacher good at penmanship and simple arithmetic. Tom Whitcomb had seemed like a blessing, sweeping in with promises he'd take care of her and her niece. "We'll go out West," he said, "where people become rich just by living. You claim a forest homestead, prove it up, and five years later sell the timber for a small fortune."

  Celia had said, "But if we need to clear the land for crops as part of proving up, then we won't have timber left to sell."

  How he'd laughed. "We'll put in a garden just big enough to say we did. Maybe, along with a cabin, it'll take two acres out of the hundred-sixty acres I can claim. And, of course, we'll put you in for another hundred-sixty in your own right"

  By the time she learned that making people rich off timber wasn't the intent of the homestead laws, Celia was in the land office in Wallace, Idaho, officially Mrs. Tom Whitcomb.

  Tom Whitcomb had stayed around just long enough to build the poorest excuse for a house that would pass for the required improvement, and then he'd taken off on the first of his many absences.

  And Celia, alone with Lizbeth in a wilderness canyon, a long ride from town and other settlers, was left with lots of time to figure out where she'd gone wrong. She decided it must have been when she agreed to leave New England, and so gradually she fixed it in her mind that going back was the only thing to do.

  Tom Whitcomb's accidental death—if getting so drunk he drove a team of horses over a cliff could be called that—had just left her more determined. Of course, the government took back the hundred-sixty acres that he'd claimed and not lived long enough to get the patent on, but Celia still had her own land. A quarter of a square mile of the most beautiful white pine and larch growing anywhere. At today's prices it would fetch maybe even ten thousand dollars.

  Enough to return East and live for years on, and Lizbeth with her as long as her niece wanted. Although, Celia supposed, once Lizbeth began living like a young lady instead of like a farmhand with tanned skin and muscled arms, suitors would come swarming. Goodness knows, Lizbeth's fine-boned features and dark eyes made her pretty enough, even if Lizbeth herself didn't seem to know it.

  The only thing Celia hadn't foreseen was Lizbeth's mistaking this place for a permanent home.

  That, and the possibility of fire coming through. Celia had tried to put it from her mind, but there was no ignoring either the super dry ground or the rainless lightning these recent nights had brought.

  A shooting star arched overhead, reminding her of how Halley's comet had trailed through the sky a few months earlier. Some had said it portended the coming of glory, and others had said it was an omen that something bad lay ahead—very bad.

  Maybe tomorrow she'd again talk to Lizbeth about their starting some small burns to get rid of underbrush that would be fuel in a wildfire. If she kept calm, maybe for once she could make her niece see reason.

  Cool Spring Ranger Station

  July 13, Evening

  In the yellow light of a kerosene lamp, Ranger Samuel Logan looked at the small photograph of his parents. It showed his father, straight backed and proud in his railroad uniform, standing beside Samuel's seated mother.

  If he remembered right it had been taken two or three years after his brother, Jarrett, was born, and before Mother's sickness had taken full hold. Not much later, Samuel had left home. Leaving was the first and only time Samuel had ever defied Pop and got away with it He'd wanted to work in the woods, instead of for the railroad. He'd been fifteen, old enough to do odd jobs at one of the lumber camps that dotted Minnesota.

  His mother, thin and fragile as a blade of alpine grass, had swayed before the force of Pop's anger but taken Samuel's side. "It's Samuel's decision, Mr. Logan," she'd said. That's what she called her husband:Mr. Logan not Ian and to this day, Samuel would lay good money Pop had never asked for different "You can't decide Samuel's calling for him."

  When she died the next year and Samuel returned for her funeral, it seemed to him that Pop believed her death had somehow proven Pop right in a long-running disagreement. There was no hint of grief in his unforgiving face. Or of welcome for Samuel.

  Samuel had never gone back again.

  And now, just this morning, he'd learned from an angry ex-railway worker that Pop and probably Jarrett were living in Avery, a few hours' ride away.

  The man had been applying for a job with the Forest Service when Samuel had checked in at the Wallace office. The man picked up on the Logan name and probably on how closely Samuel resembled his father, with his bushy hair the color of red sand and the height that made Samuel tower over everyone. "If you're related to the Logan conductoring out of Avery," he said, "you tell him to watch his back. Twenty years I was with the railroad, and he fired me for one slipup and blacklisted me, too."

  Studying the man's shifting, belligerent gaze, Samuel had guessed there'd been more than just one slip, though that was not his worry.

  So, Samuel thought now,the question is, Do I git in touch? I could ask one of the men at the ranger station down there to go look them up for me. Even though Samuel still had no wish to see Pop, he would like to know that Pop was okay.

  And Jarrett was a different story altogether. Nearly a stranger, but also Samuel's only brother.

  It was just unfortunate he'd got news of them right at this time. Samuel didn't need a distraction when he had his hands full trying to keep fire off the thousands of acres he was responsible for.

  FIELD NOTES

  Perhaps the ancients had it right, honoring and giving the keeping of fire to gods and goddesses—to Rome's Vesta, India's Agni, the Greeks' Hephaestus. Fearing its mighty power for destruction when it trailed the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  Now we understand fire as chemistry. We know it to be combustion, a chemical change that occurs when oxygen combines with another substance. Fire requires the presence of heat to get started. But then fire is combustion happening so fast that the reaction itself causes heat and light to burst forth.

  Only, that's like defining people as composites of water and minerals, without mentioning the life inside them. Life that requires air to breathe and food to eat, and that has a mysterious soul at its core.

  To
stay alive a person needs air that's about 21 percent oxygen, and that's about what a fire needs, too. Rob fire of the air around it and it dies.

  And just as a person can be killed by starvation, so can a fire be killed by depriving it of fuel.

  Two facts—a fire can't start without heat, and a fire can't keep going without oxygen and fuel—are all any firefighter has to work with. Those, and a harbored respect for the capricious life inside flame.

  Avery

  July 14, Morning

  Jarrett had lain awake most of the night, scared at what he was setting out to do. Scared that he didn't know what he was getting into, volunteering to fight fires that might be measured in miles instead of fractions of an acre. Scared that Pop might know him better than he knew himself. Jarrett didn't think he was a coward, but how could a person know that for sure until the time came to prove it?

  That remark Pop had made about how Jarrett needn't come back—Jarrett guessed he shouldn't have expected anything else, but until he heard it said, he hadn't realized just how final his leaving would be.

  When morning came, though, he shoved aside his qualms. He put together traveling food, wrapped spare socks and an extra shirt in a blanket, and put two dollars on the table to pay for what he was taking. It left him with only pocket change, but he'd have gone with no money at all before he'd have taken off without setting things square.

  He found the ranger station on its hillside perch above town already busy, even though it was still early. Men wearing Forest Service badges gave him a real welcome when he said he'd come for a job. One told him, "We were just talking about putting together a fire crew to send over to Big Creek." He pulled out a hiring log and dipped a pen in an inkwell. "Name?"