The Big Burn (31 page)

Brands showered down on them as they retreated toward the water. Trees, aflame and scowling, fell in the near distance. One man screamed and ran. He was a giant of a man, as the crew recalled him, a big Swede. Halm raced after him, losing his gun in the sprint. He caught up with the Swede and tried to coax him back. The big man was crying like a child, crying because he said he could not face death. Halm led him to the creek. They tried to lie calmly in the water, blankets overhead, but trees splashed down onto the little sandbar where they burrowed. One man was hit and went under. He was pulled up and set on the side. Soon all of them rose, because to stay in the water meant being crushed by burning snags weighing five times more than the big weeping Swede. Reaching for buckets, they threw water on other snags closest to the stream, an attempt to create a wet buffer.

***

The rangers in charge of the national forests on either side of the Bitterroot divide would not give up on Halm. After three separate search parties had come back without finding a trace of the men, one last rescue effort was mounted. Roscoe Haines, a deputy supervisor under Weigle, volunteered to go to the St. Joe headwaters. At a time when newspapers were printing lengthy obituaries of Halm, Haines was confident he could navigate the fire lines to find a fellow ranger. He said he knew the territory better than anyone.

Nearly a full five days after the winds lifted flames throughout the northern Rockies, Haines and his two rangers started hacking their way east. They had traveled by horse along a grey creek, then left their mounts with packers and started up on foot, following the Joe—they vowed—until it ran out of water, until they were up against the wall of the Bitterroots. Along the way, every few miles or so, Haines fired his pistol into the air. His signal shots rang through the still-burning woods, upward along the ash-choked Joe, and with every press of the trigger, he waited for a boomerang of hope.

At night, the fire passed over the sandbar, and trees no longer fell in the clearing. When the flames died down, temperatures plunged. Men shivered in their wet clothes, shaking as they nursed burned skin and coughed on smoke from the backed-up and slow-burning timber just upstream from them. They stumbled from the creek and found little clearings where they tried to sleep under damp blankets. Some slumped in a haunch, chewing on tobacco retrieved from watery pockets. In the morning, Halm did a head count: he had not lost a man. He could not account for others who had broken away the night before. But from his immediate crew, all were alive. The big Swede who had run into the woods presented a gun to Halm.

"It yours. You lost her in the creek last night," he said.

Over the next few days, Halm guided his men through the ruin of the forest, downhill, the only direction he could follow. For a forester, a man trained in the intricacy of arboreal life, it was a walk through a graveyard. "The virgin trees, as far as the eye could see, were broken or down—devoid of a single sprig of green," Halm recalled. "Miles of trees, sturdy, forest giants were laid prone. Only the smaller trees stood stripped and broken." When they reached the supply camp where they had left their packers, they tried to decipher the scene. A mass of cans littered the seared ground. Farther away, they saw what looked like a pack saddle, the leather burned, and then another saddle, melted. Close by, Halm was sickened by a big black carcass—a horse, burned to a crisp. "We hastened on," Halm wrote, finding "more horses and more saddles." And now, of all things, the wind picked up again, just enough to stoke coals that had died down in the hollows of trees. Halm guided his men to a cave in a rock face, an area already burned by the storm of Saturday night.

In the predawn darkness of the following day, with the wind back at ease, Halm's men set out again. "Torn and bleeding we hurried on," he said, "lighted only by the myriads of fires, I picking the way, the foreman watching for falling trees." They passed more evidence of the packers, more horse carcasses. But no humans. While they descended a steep slope, a large tree creaked and moaned as it fell, then rolled toward the men. "We ran for our lives, but the whirling trunk broke and lodged a few feet above." They paused to rest and regain their senses. Parched and hungry, they talked obliquely of the missing packers, wondering what it must have been like for men to die as those horses had died—skin burned off the bones. Still, since they had yet to find a human body, there was hope.

In daylight, Halm's men continued their search for the packers, but the going was slow, walking a few gingerly steps, dodging obstructions. They had to saw and chop through downed timber, much of it still hot to the touch. Halm parked his men and broke away at a level spot, which he recognized as a junction to some homestead claims. He wanted to check on a prospector a mile from the trail,
a man he knew as "a cripple," as he said, panning for his one shot at making a buck in the high country. The cripple's cabin was an earth-covered dugout; it had survived the fire. Halm went inside, expecting to find a body. He found no clues of whether the prospector had stayed or fled.

Back with his men, Halm made camp along the creek and tried to put together a meal from the wet remains of their cache. As they sat grim-faced around a campfire, they spotted two more large animal carcasses—one looked to be an elk, the other a deer. A live grouse, its feathers burned off and missing a foot, hopped around their camp, "a pitiful sight," Halm said. Death was everywhere, the smell of it in the air, the look of it on the ground, the feel of it in the surreal mood of the woods. It was hard to be Joe Bunch, upbeat by nature and reputation, hard to see renewal or nature at work in the blown-down, burned-out remains of the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, especially here where the forest was at its greenest and richest. Halm's men were dehydrated, yet they could not drink from the little stream. "The clear, pure water running through miles of ashes had become a strong alkaline solution, polluted by dead fish," Halm said.

The next morning, hungry and exhausted, the fire crew followed Halm's exhortation to continue on rather than sit and wait for help. This was the sixth day of their wanderings, the sixth day since the big storm had flashed through on Saturday night, sending them into the creek in a fight for their lives. Late in the day, they met up with another animal—a white horse, alive. This they recognized by the brand as one of the packers' animals, and it gave them some hope, though the horse had been badly lashed by flame, its snow-white coat grey with smudge and dirt.

Downslope, separated by miles of blowdown and a ridge fire-shorn of all its trees, Ranger Haines shot a grouse for food. It was Friday, and his supplies were low. This shot was heard by a man named Frank Mills, one of the lost packers. He met up with Haines and
told him other packers were not far away. They had been wandering all week, lost, scared, hungry, burned. But where, the ranger asked immediately, was Joe Halm? And where was the rest of the crew, the firefighters? This question Frank Mills could not answer. But Haines surmised a rough idea of their whereabouts, based on conversations with the surviving packers, and sent a messenger uphill.

Late in the afternoon, the messenger met Halm and his crew along the creek. Halm's men were overjoyed. Now they needed only to keep going a small way, a zigzag through a graveyard of big trees, to find the ranger who had never given up on them. By early evening, Rangers Haines and Halm met face-to-face, brothers of the woods. Sure, Haines said, he never lost faith that Joe Halm was alive because the kid was something special. Haines let him know that his death notice had been written up in Missoula and Spokane and even in some of the big papers. Joe Halm, star athlete, had died a hero in the Big Burn. Probably President Taft himself had heard about him and Pulaski.

Halm was starved for information. What happened to Grand Forks? Burned to the ground. What about Taft? Gone, also burned to the ground. Avery? Saved by the colored troops. Other fire crews? Terrible, terrible. At least a hundred dead, he was told, and many more still missing. Bill Weigle? Burned on his hands, neck, parts of his head, hair flamed off. Weigle had been trapped above Wallace just as the city caught fire, Halm was told, took refuge in a mine tunnel that collapsed when the supporting timbers caught fire. Weigle had at first kept this detail to himself. He was nearly buried alive. And Ed Pulaski? Perhaps the sorriest of the rangers, Pulaski took a faceful of flame on Saturday night, burned over many parts of his body, the skin so raw and festered, blind in one eye, unable to see very well in the other, now in the hospital in Wallace. Pulaski had saved all but six of his men. They would have died had he not forced them at gunpoint to lie face-down in the mineshaft,
the ranger said. And what about Wallace, Halm asked; what happened to the town he now called home? It was evacuated, and after a long night, the trains arrived safely in Missoula and Spokane. Most people in town got out alive. But the city itself had suffered a frightful blow, more than a hundred buildings reduced to ashes, homes gone, streets full of rubble.

From Haines, Joe Halm also heard about the packers they had been looking for all week. Turned out, they bolted on Saturday night, scattered with fourteen horses. Hours later, they panicked, fearing the horses would keep them from ever getting out alive, and so they cut their animals loose. But they held on to one horse, hoping it would lead them out, as if by a superior instinct. With one man holding the tail of the mare, the packers followed it uphill. On the ridgetop, the line of the Montana-Idaho border, they ran out of ground, but also found a place that was indeed free of fire. From there, over the next week, they crossed down and back several times—once making forty miles in a single day, they said, until they heard the single shot when Ranger Haines fired at a grouse. Every packer lived, as did the lone horse that guided them.

While the packers' story was encouraging, Joe Halm remembered the prospector who lived in the earthen dugout. Before going home, Halm insisted they make one last effort to find him. For the next three days, Halm looked for the old man, returning to smoking mountains and creeks full of belly-up, rotting trout. On the afternoon of the third day, Halm found a lump of what appeared to be burned flesh—"ghastly remains, burned beyond recognition." He was not sure about the corpse until he found the prospector's glasses and a cane. "In a blanket, we bore the shapeless thing out to the relief crew," Halm said.

While Halm was searching for the prospector, Roscoe Haines led the other men toward Avery, sawing through downed timber to find their way. In town, when he reached a working telephone, with some of the lines restored by rail crews, he placed a call to Weigle in Wallace. Joe Halm was alive, he said. After days of walking, the kid had made it out with his men. Alive. All of them.

For Weigle, it was the first good news in the week since they had found Ed Pulaski. The forest supervisor had been visiting Pulaski in the hospital and was concerned about his lack of progress. His burns were not surface injuries, and the pain made it difficult to get any rest. More than a hundred people were hospitalized alongside him, undergoing treatment for everything from smoke inhalation to burns that covered large portions of their bodies. A few beds down from Pulaski was a young Irishman, Patrick Sullivan, perhaps the last person to be hired by the Forest Service before the blowup. A miner between jobs, Sullivan was put on the payroll Saturday, August 20. He worked not even a full day. Sullivan was on Stevens Peak, about ten miles east of Wallace, with a crew of eighteen. They raced up to the timberline, burned an opening in the beargrass, and fell to the ground, hoping that by the time fire ascended the mountains, there would be no fuel for it in their refuge. The roar and hot blast came quickly, carrying a wall of flame up and over the mountains, never subsiding as it hit the bald opening on the peak.

One man died on the spot, his lungs seared; nearly everyone else was burned. The skin had melted off Sullivan's hands and arms, and he needed extensive care. He cried for something to ease the pain—whiskey, opium, anything to give a few moments' relief. After surface-dressing Sullivan's wounds, though, doctors and nurses would no longer treat him. They did not have authorization, they said; there was no contingency money for the injured. When word of this reached Pulaski, he was infuriated. Couldn't they see the man had nearly died for his country? How was this different from a soldier wounded on the battlefield? Hell, he would pay the man's doctor bills out of his own pocket, Pulaski said, if it came to that.

So once again the rangers felt obligated to cover the cost of what had been placed in their stewardship, the human and the natural world. A hollowed-out Forest Service had lived with daily humiliations, but this was a new low. Hospital bills mounted, upward of $5,000 for the injured in Wallace alone. The Red Cross raised $1,000, leaving the rest of the debt to the Little G.P.s. Just as congressmen had shortchanged the rangers of shovels, axes, and trail-building funds, charging them for the cost of horses and mules, and, in the case of Lolo National Forest, essentially forcing them to pay firefighters out of their own pockets, they stiffed the rangers again on medical costs. All these men, their fingernails melted off, skin raised and infected, lungs permanently compromised by smoke, joints strained and bones broken, muscles torn and hair lost, were left to fend for themselves. Give the enemies of the Forest Service credit, a few rangers noted—their antipathy was consistent.

A
T DAY'S END
, there on the horizon, a surprise: puffy clouds without the smear of smoke, fresh formations all, crowding tighter as they moved. Clouds of dreams and serenity. Clouds of security and hope, familiar. As with most weather systems in that part of the world, this column of clouds came from the west, birthed in the cold Pacific in the last days of August, hurdling the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades in Washington before regrouping in the Bitterroots. Water, the master architect of the Pacific Northwest, was here again from the sky, here to the rescue of people who thought their world was at an end. Rising over the blackened, still-burning Rockies, the clouds bunched, cooled, and opened up, the bottoms shredded. It was what people had wished for all summer, what artillery from ships at sea and cannons from the ground had tried to induce — rain.