The Wildfire Season. Andrew Pyper
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is the only one who makes her living at it. Margot and Wade Fuerst run Ross River’s one registered guiding business, catering to the occasional hunters from Outside who come in search of moose, Dall sheep and, most prized of all, the last of the giant inland grizzly bears on the planet. It is also generally admitted that she is the best tracker in town. This praise would be surprising if only because Margot is a woman but is even more remarkable when that woman is thirty-two, and a Métis without any local Kaska relations.
Although he sits outside her peripheral vision, she feels Miles’s eyes on her and abruptly turns to face him. She neither laughs nor smiles, but to Miles the effect is as if she had. Her brown eyes lively. The brows pulled high in mock surprise.
It’s looks like this—semi-secret, girlish, vaguely flirtatious—that Wade feels he doesn’t get as many of as he used to. They are also expressions he finds increasingly hard to tolerate Margot’s offering other men, especially Miles. Soon after he arrived in town, alone, and with that scar glowing down his face that both threatened others and acted as a beacon for sympathy, Wade knew that Miles would be the one to somehow bring about the end of his brief dream of contentment. It has proved a rare instance of Wade’s instincts being not wholly wrong.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that Wade Fuerst is at heart a bitter, irredeemable son of a bitch, Miles can’t help but like him some. It may be for no better reason than Miles is, at heart, an irredeemable son of a bitch himself. Under different circumstances, this might have made them brothers of a kind, a pair of feared and unloved outlaws. And it’s true that during his first couple of years in town, Miles could feel that male hunger for friendship radiating from Wade, a furtive longing to stand next to someone and know there is agreement between them on matters that they, men of similar age and experience, considered of real importance. But not now. Not after Miles had done what he’d done. They have never spoken of it, though the crime travels through their glances all the same. It’s why Wade wishes him dead and, in part, why Miles sometimes wonders if it would be better if he were.
‘Isn’t that right, Jackson?’ a voice calls out. Female, American, from one of those midwestern states close enough to the South to get half-mired in drawl. Elsie Bader’s voice. Wife of Jackson Bader, to whom she is now repeating herself. ‘Isn’t that right?’
As has become his habit over the last twenty years of marriage, Jackson Bader looks at his wife but does not answer her. When he was still working he loved to talk, to yell, to make those who entered his office at Louisville Steel feel like old friends or the newly unemployed. Even now, three days shy of his seventieth birthday, he can still summon intimidating glares that remind lessers of who they are, of the lengths to which a cloudy-eyed retiree like himself is prepared to go in the name of realizing his whims. His wife may be the only person left he would never level such a look at. He loves her, and supposes that’s why he doesn’t. He still loves her, yes—in a grateful, loyalty rewarding way—and doesn’t want to frighten her. But sometimes he wishes she would only twitter on to herself and not ask him questions, which require a response from him, and because he hadn’t really been listening, he has nothing to say.
The Baders are here to hunt. That is, Jackson Bader is here to shoot one of what he calls ‘those Boone and Crockett Kodiaks,’ and Elsie Bader is here to take the photos when he brings the animal down. It’s all he talked about at his retirement party. ‘What are you going to do now that you’ve got the time, Jack?’ his successor, a boy with a head stuffed with nothing but bleached teeth and a Stanford MBA, had asked him while lifting a glass of white wine—white wine!—to his lips, and Bader had silenced the pup by growling, ‘Thought I’d go up to Canada to bag me one of those Boone and Crockett Kodiaks.’ Three years passed without his mentioning it again. Then, one morning this past November, he had abruptly muted the recroom big screen—an unheard-of interruption of a Vikings vs. Redskins game—turned to his wife and said, ‘You want to go hunting with me in the spring?’ It had been so long since her husband had surveyed her wants that she had said yes and giggled with an overflow of pleasure before she wondered if she actually wanted to witness somebody kill a bear or not.
Miles watches Jackson Bader look about him distractedly, pale and string-necked, and has the impression that the old man isn’t sure what he’s doing here. It’s not the confusion that comes with age or with discovering oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Bader is simply the kind of man who finds the company of strangers slightly absurd, useless, an expenditure of energy on those who, in all likelihood, you will never see again. Miles meets the man’s eyes and wonders if Bader has identified the same distance in him.
Now that he thinks of it, Miles has to concede that everyone here likely sees him as Bader does: the near-silent burn victim, friendless and grotesque. What people wonder about more than anything else are his scars. The muddy splotches that spill down the one side of his neck, his rib cage, and disappear below his waist. All anybody is sure of is they have reason not to ask him about it. Within months of his arrival, Miles earned a reputation as a merciless barfighter on the nights when the drink goes down him the wrong way, or if provoked, or if merely spoken to in what he interprets to be an unfavourable tone. Currently, he is one victim short of sending an even halfdozen down to Whitehorse on free medevac rides.
On these occasions, Miles spends the night under Terry Gray’s watch in the single cell of the RCMP office, apologizing for keeping Terry up late, and Terry telling him that he’s a lousy sleeper at the best of times and that he’d rather type up the assault charges against Miles than lie awake all night in his trailer. Most recently, it concerned a visiting miner who had affronted Ross River’s meagre charms by saying of Bonnie, ‘There’s better-looking barmaids back in the goddamn hole,’ referring to the all-male open pit mine in which he’d spent the last three weeks. For this offence, Miles had beaten the man into a long and dreamless sleep.
Terry Gray has started getting calls. ‘Hear you’ve got a real wild man on your hands up there, Sheriff,’ the superintendent down in Whitehorse will joke with him, but Terry knows it’s getting less funny all the time. He also knows about the stories. Tales of a monster whose rage has pursued him to the end of the world. He killed a pregnant woman in Prince George. He scarred his face blowing up a Hells Angels clubhouse in Edmonton, and a pack of murderous bikers have been spotted as far north as Carcross, asking after a guy with a fucked-up face. And a dozen other improvised myths. In fact, the Welcome Inn has become as famous in the rest of the territory for the brooding fire ranger who drinks in its bar as for its mouldy, overpriced rooms.
Mungo Capoose sees his boss differently.
‘Miles McEwan? He’s not so mean,’ is how Mungo likes to conclude any conversations concerning his boss’s character. ‘He’s just running away.’
‘From what?’ someone will ask.
‘From his face.’
‘But you can’t run from that.’
‘That’s why he’s gone as far as he has.’
There is also a figure visible to Miles alone. Standing in the shadows on the far side of the pool table that’s been too slanted to play an honest game on since Miles piledrived Wade onto it the first and only time he called him Scarface. Miles couldn’t say how long the figure has been there. It’s only when he stares at the one spot for a while that he can make out the outline of a person at all. The slumped shoulders. The pale reflection of unblinking eyes.
It stays where it is long enough that Miles wonders if it is only his own idle creation. Yet the figure is too inarguably there for him to pretend it couldn’t be. Its stillness prevents it from being wholly alive. This is what Miles tries to tell himself. The man in the shadows will remain a shadow until it can move.
And then it moves.
As it slides toward him, Miles counts the ways the shadow takes on colour. Khaki work pants splashed with what looks like machine oil. Eyes showing themselves to be unnaturally wide and red-rimmed. The head so bald it’s missing ears as well as hair.
Miles watches the man emerge from where there was nothing before, as though stepping out of the wall itself. When the tips of his boots slide into the