The Big Burn (3 page)

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.

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.

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.

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?"

"Logan. Jarrett Logan."

The man looked up in surprise and then said, "I should have guessed it from that mop of rusty hair." He put down the pen and reached for a paper. "This message about you just got relayed down."

Jarrett struggled to take in the words he read while the man went on talking. Finally Jarrett asked, "And you're saying you know my brother? That he's a ranger and living near Wallace?"

"That's right. He's got the Cool Spring Station."

The others were also looking at Jarrett curiously now. "Funny you didn't know," one said.

"I ... we lost track of him years ago," Jarrett said, wondering if his face showed how his mind was reeling.

The men took it as natural that Jarrett would wish to visit his brother before doing anything else. "Hate to lose you here," the man at the desk told him, "but if you still want to fight fires, you can get on in Wallace. That's where forest headquarters are anyway."

"I'll remember," Jarrett said.

***

The route north took him through the blackened area where he'd failed so badly at his job, and then into country he hadn't explored. For the first several miles, he followed rail bed carved into mountainsides high above the St. Joe River's north fork. Where the steep hills flattened into narrow benches, he slowed to look at the maintenance shacks and tiny houses that were squeezed into every available space. Spare rolling stock—crane and dump cars, shop cars and a snowplow—took up siding tracks that curved close to sheer drop-offs.

Where the railroad spanned the canyon, he saw teams hauling earth fill for trestle bridges that were still so new their wood hadn't weathered. He stopped for a while to watch a crew bolting together huge timbers to make a snow shed at the end of a tunnel.

Then, to make up time, he cut through a tunnel instead of going around. Midway in, the rough-sided vault curved and shut out light, and Jarrett had to feel his way along wet rock. And then, at the tunnel's far end, he and a train came dangerously close to meeting, and the engineer leaned on his whistle in a long blast of reproach.

Jarrett's heart pounded hard a good while after that.

He ate supper where the railroad tracks veered east to the Idaho-Montana border. Then he started up the trail that climbed north to cross the divide at Moon Pass. By then Pop and Avery and just about everything else Jarrett had known already seemed far more than a day's hike behind him.

He spent the night high in the mountains at Moon Pass, watching dry lightning in the distance and thinking about what lay ahead.

He wondered what kind of man he'd find his brother to be. Surely Sam couldn't be as worthless and irresponsible as Pop maintained and still hold down a job as a ranger. "He's gone and good riddance," Pop used to answer, back when Jarrett still asked why Sam had left.

Jarrett thought about the fire-fighting job that was still his main aim. He hoped he'd be good at it.

They were called the buffalo soldiers. The name was a proud one, given to the black cavalrymen and foot soldiers who manned territorial forts and fought the Indian wars. One historian computed that if you met trouble in the days of the Wild West and the military rescued you, there was a one-in-five chance your rescuer would be black. He might have been one of the eighteen buffalo soldiers who would, before 1900, earn Medals of Honor. Once he was done saving you, he'd have gone back to a dusty adobe or log fort, where he'd likely have hauled water, chopped wood, pulled guard duty, or hoed a vegetable garden.

With the Indian wars a memory, the buffalo soldiers moved on to other duty. In the early 1890s the black soldiers and white officers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry brought order to labor strikes in the Northwest. Some of them made newspaper headlines in 1897 when their experimental bicycle corps pedaled from Montana to St. Louis, drawing crowds and cheers.

As the century closed, the Twenty-fifth's soldiers carried their flag—dark blue background, a fierce eagle—on campaigns in the Philippines and Cuba. Back home again they patrolled the borders between the United States and Mexico. They were jolted when racial strife escalated and a 1906 shooting incident in Texas ended in 167 of them being summarily discharged. They rallied for another stint in the Philippines.

In 1909 the Twenty-fifth returned to take up garrison in Washington State, and in July 1910 the regiment's various companies left their barracks for maneuvers at summer training camp at American Lake, south of Seattle. By then citizens frightened by spreading forest fires were beginning to ask for the military's help.

***

The buffalo soldiers varied in the skills and hopes they brought it to the army. Many couldn't read, but that was true across the enlisted ranks then. Some would learn, taught in army classrooms. Some would come to care deeply for the service and make long careers of it. Others would desert, although the desertion rate among black troops was substantially lower than in white units, and morale was often higher.