The Big Burn (13 page)

He knew he was dawdling but couldn't put a finger on just why.

Boone, usually impatient to start a trip, seemed to pick up on Samuel's mood. The big dog came over and leaned against him.

"You uneasy, too?" Samuel said. "We must be turning into a couple of old women."

He thought a moment. "Maybe we should leave a note for Jarrett, in case he gets back here before we do." Then he shook his head. "Guess that's not likely."

The last he'd heard, Jarrett was heading for one of the fires down in the St. Joe country and would probably stay there until rain ended the fire season.

I hope he's all rig/it,
Samuel thought,
and that he's with a good crew.

"Boone," he said, "this isn't getting our job done."

Samuel took a last look around the cabin, and when they went outside, he was careful to leave the door unlocked. Anyone coming through would know they were welcome to shelter.

Lizbeth wedged a bit of lettuce between the crossbars of the canary cage, hoping Ranger Logan and Celia would smile at how Billie nipped out V-shaped bites. "Of course, apples are his favorite," she said.

They ignored her.

Celia said, "I'm still not convinced Lizbeth and I need to leave here."

"It probably wouldn't have to be for long," the ranger said. "Those soldiers joining the firelines should make a difference, and we're due for a weather turn. I'm just asking you to play it safe."

"I am," she said. "We're safeguarding what we own."

Lizbeth noticed that her aunt didn't meet the ranger's eyes.

Why, Cel realizes she's not making sense! She just doesn't know how to back down,
Lizbeth thought. More than anybody's warning had, her aunt's uncertainty made Lizbeth consider whether they might be in real danger.

Ranger Logan, appearing to be near the end of his patience, said, "Some of the homesteaders on Pine Creek felt the same way and ended up having to flee for their lives."

"And some didn't, right?" Celia demanded. "Didn't you just bring me a letter from my friend mailed from over there?"

The ranger raised his hands as though to say, I give up. Lizbeth got the impression that both her aunt and the ranger had things to say that they didn't know how to put into words.

Instead Celia asked, "May I pack you a sandwich for the trail? I imagine you need to be leaving."

***

Lizbeth watched the color drain from her aunt's face as she read Dora Crane's letter. Then Celia put it on the table and went outside.

For a moment Lizbeth didn't move. She didn't want to think about what she'd find in the letter, because she knew it was going to be an end of some kind. Reluctantly she picked it up.

Kellogg, Idaho
August 12, 1910

Dear Celia and Lizbeth,

This is to tell you we are clearing out from this hateful country. I wish I could leave you with good thoughts, but I have none remaining and just hope you won't ever know what it is to lose all. For forty hours, Nathaniel and the children and I fought the blazes threatening at our place, until they had passed us by and we believed we were safe. Then we slept the
sleep of the dead. Although I realize it is a shameful thought, I still do not know if I am truly glad God woke us when He did, for the wind had turned and that fire come back at us.

We escaped with our lives but none else, and I fear Nathaniel's spirit is broken. Tomorrow we leave for my brother's farm in the Palouse country below Spokane, where we will try to think what to do next.

I am sorry to write this, but after receiving your loving letter, I did not wish to leave you wondering. I disremember the particulars of your circumstance, but if you can sell out now, for goodness' sake do, and get out.

Your sad friend,
Dora Crane

Lizbeth's eyes filled with tears as she tried to find in the letter's bitter words the Dora Crane she remembered. They could have been written by a stranger, for all they held any trace of the warm woman she and Celia knew. Nobody, Lizbeth thought, had loved this country more than Dora Crane had, and now she was telling them to leave while they could.

Lizbeth went outside and stood silently by her aunt. Finally Celia said, "I hope she finds things easier on the Palouse. At least she won't have forest fires."

While the forests of the Idaho panhandle dried into tinder ready to explode, in the rolling prairie seventy miles to the southwest the wheat growers of Washington State's rich Palouse country despaired for their crops. The ground was dry to the touch, dry if you dug down—dry, it seemed, no matter how deep you went.

Farmers who had thrown themselves against the bad odds of a growing season begin with little moisture knew they were losing their fight. Especially now that July and August had brought intense heat and drying winds to the battle. Looking over their land, the farmers wondered what kind of harvest there could be from fields where dust devils whirled between rows of stunted plants.

If the families of the Palouse talked at all over their suppers those bad days, it might be to say they'd heard the Northern Pacific Railway had canceled trains and laid off men because of crop failures along the line.

Mostly, those farm families had all they could do to worry about their own land and livelihoods. But if they did extend their worry to friends and relatives over in the mountains—if by chance they'd ever lived in the mountains themselves in a bad fire year—they might wonder if conditions weren't coming together for a
Palouser.

That was what the old-timers called the gale winds that occasionally formed in the Palouse country and blew into the mountains of Idaho. Such a windstorm might last two or three days, filling noses
and throats with dust carried an impossibly long distance, and with moke from any fires it passed through. When the gale winds of a Palouser blew through woods where fire burned, they could pick up pieces of the fire and shoot them ahead like flaming arrows.

In the days right before a Palouser blew, the people that it would hit usually had no idea it was coming.

Jarrett wouldn't have minded staying where he'd delivered the repaired equipment, but soon after he'd arrived a plea had come to the ranger in charge there for any firefighters he could spare. Jarrett and five others had been sent out early this morning, and they were still searching for the crew they'd been ordered to join.

It would have helped some if the land matched up better to the sketched map they'd been given, or if the trail they were supposed to follow existed as anything more than blaze marks chopped into the sides of trees. They'd about worn themselves out climbing up and down the steep drainages that fed the St. Joe River.

Finally they stopped for supper, taking time to make a small cooking fire. They fried bacon to go with the canned tomatoes they all carried. They made boiled coffee in a couple of the empty cans.

"You think we ought to sleep here?" one of the men suggested.

"Let's push on," another answered. "I'm hoping for a camp with a good cook who'll offer me a bedtime snack of hot stew and fresh biscuits. Maybe some berry cobbler."

"What I'd like is flapjacks," still another put in. "With lots of syrup."

***

Three hours later they found the spike camp they'd been hunting for located in heavy timber a mile from where it was supposed to be, above Slate Creek.

Even in the near dark, Jarrett could see it was a poor setup. Nobody had bothered to rig any shelters, except for a torn cook's tent Tools and equipment lay scattered about. No ranger greeted them, only a harried crew foreman who wanted to put them right to work.

"We've been walking all day," Jarrett said. "We could use some sleep first"

The foreman looked as if he was going to argue, but then he shook his head and made a disgusted noise. "So get it." He started away but turned back. "All of you speak English?"

Jarrett and the others nodded.

"Good. Then I can spread you out among all these foreigners I got handed. I need at least one person in each group who can understand me."

After the foreman had gone on, one of the men who'd arrived with Jarrett said, "This is where I quit" He jerked his head to indicate a dozen people gathered at a campfire. "Just listen to that babble and take a gander at who's making it."

Jarrett thought he could pick out two or three different languages. Most of the men in the group wore street shoes and city clothes, and a Chinese man was pulling off slippers. All were too clean to have been on a fireline yet

The man who'd announced he was quitting said, "You think any of them ever saw a forest fire before? You want to get killed, fighting fire with a bad crew is a quick way to do it"

Seth listened to the mumbles and snores of the seven other men in his tent and wished he could fall asleep. But being scared wasn't a thing he was used to, and the feeling shamed him and kept him awake.

The fear he'd first felt on smelling smoke in Wallace had caught up with him on the trip down here, when he'd seen smoke hide mountainsides where flames appeared without warning. The sight had made him feel like he might jump out of his skin.

And then today...

Seth thought back to the morning.

He'd gone to assembly expecting to be put to camp labor the way he'd been the day before. Only, instead, he and the others had been handed unfamiliar tools and told to be sure they had full canteens; they were going to strike a fireline to keep fires east of Avery from reaching the railroad.

"You know what a fireline is?" Seth had asked Abel, as they'd headed out.

"Guess we're gonna find out," Abel answered.

"And how about these things we got to work with? You think somebody's gonna show us how to use them?"

The tool Seth was carrying resembled a pickax, except that its heavy head came to a point at only one end instead of both. The blunted back side flattened out to a broad edge something like a hoe blade.

A Forest Service man who was going out to the woods with them heard Seth. He chuckled. "That's a mattock," he said. "You'll figure it out fast enough when you get fire licking at your feet. But so you know, you loosen stones and dirt with the one side and scrape with the other."

Seth had nodded, turned silent by an image of flames snapping about his legs.

Only, as it turned out, the flames didn't snap around him as much as roll down from above. Their fireline angled along the lee side of a scrubby ridge, and most of the fire was hidden from sight on the other side. Occasionally, though, lone trees on the ridgeline burst into flame, and branches broke off and tumbled down.

Seth's corporal didn't know any more about fire fighting than Seth and Abel did, but he passed on what he'd been told: that they were working in a good spot. The fire climbing up the other side of the hill would slow way down once it got over the top, and after it crawled down to the line they were fixing, it would go out altogether.

"Anybody tell the fire that?" Abel asked, drawing a laugh from some of the sweating soldiers nearby.

Seth, hacking into the hard ground with his mattock, didn't see how Abel could joke.

And as if to prove the fire wasn't something to joke about, a heavy burning log plummeted down and was on them almost before anyone saw it coming. It hit one of Seth's tent mates, knocking him down and leaving him gasping for breath like he'd been hurt inside.

After a party left with the injured man, there wasn't any more laughter along the fireline. Just hot, hard work done with wary eyes trained on the hillside above. Work made unbearably hotter whenever the flames got close enough that the men could feel their heat.

Seth had been so thankful when the day finally ended. And now Seth wondered how the others could sleep.

He kept remembering what that white boy had said about burned people. They got a sound, Jarrett Logan had said. They got a smell.

Was Seth the only one in the tent who knew that? Was that why the other men weren't lying awake?

Before turning in, Seth had asked Abel, "Abel, ain't you scared at all?"

"Buddy," Abel had answered, still keyed up from a walk about town, "I am saying my prayers."

Seth, confused, asked, "You mean, to keep you safe?"

"I mean," Abel answered, "you let me worry what to pray for. Didn't I say I'd take care of us? Remember, we're a team."

After hearing that, Seth couldn't tell Abel about the biggest fears he had—that maybe deep down Seth was a coward and that sooner or later he'd run from a fire and then everyone would know. What could be worse than wearing a uniform and not having the courage to go with it?

It's not like I'm Abel, wanting out of the army,
Seth thought.
But maybe it would be the right thing to do, to get out of my uniform for good before I disgrace it.

He wished he knew what Sarge would say. But Sarge had stayed in Wallace. His ankle wasn't healing right, and the surgeon had thought he'd be better off there.

The filthy sky lay so close in and low that Lizbeth couldn't see the tree line. Drifting tendrils of smoke made Celia—pacing the clearing in front of the cabin—look more like a ghost than a woman.

We don't belong here,
Lizbeth thought.
This is crazy.

Maybe if the smoke had been this thick and the fire smell this pronounced when they'd woken up this morning, they'd have taken Ranger Logan's advice after all and gone to town.

But instead, the morning air had seemed almost fresh. And when it started worsening again, it did it so gradually that there was never a particular moment when it made sense to say,
There. Now it's so bad we must leave.

She saw Celia shield her eyes. "Hello?" Celia called. "Who's out there?"