The Wildfire Season. Andrew Pyper
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tall, Miles can see that it belongs to a young man. A kid stretching his neck to show a face burned black. And smiling. His teeth long and shining as ivory keys.
With a spastic lurch Miles swings around on his stool. He pounds his fist against his chest to show the room it’s only a swig of beer that’s gone down the wrong way. Even when the others return to their conversations Miles refuses to look beyond the pool table.
‘Nice one.’
‘She is.’
‘Where’d you get her?’
‘Come up on a flatbed to Carmacks.’
‘Used?’
‘They’re all used. But this one’s not as used as others.’
Without asking, Miles knows that Wade and Crookedhead are talking about trucks. Men speak of half-tons up here in the same covetous, technical way that others might speak of power tools, laptop computers or women. Everything else that happens in Ross River might ultimately boil down to a tale of foolishness or mild humiliation to cling to its subject for years, but trucks alone are taken seriously. If he closes his eyes and listens selectively to the drinkers around him, Miles can pick out the names of the Big Three manufacturers, each brand spoken with reverence, as though ancient gods. Dodge. Ford. Chevy. Once, and only once, a Toyota made an appearance so scorned that its owner, Crookedhead James, was compelled to drive it to Whitehorse and sell it, coming home on the once-a-week bus with a hangover that made his nose run, four hundred dollars, and a gym bag of newish skin magazines.
‘Nice truck,’ Wade says again, although this time about a new arrival in the parking lot.
‘Wade?’ Margot calls. ‘Bring me and the Baders here another round, would you?’
After a time long enough to let Margot know she will later pay for addressing him in this way, Wade turns to the bar and leaves Crookedhead to follow whatever movement there is outside.
‘Thank you, Wade,’ Mrs Bader gushes. ‘I’m not sure when I last had so much beer to drink. I mean, usually I just have a single gin, and that’s only at functions!’
Jackson Bader says nothing. Everyone in the room except for his wife has heard someone at the door, and they have shifted in their seats to see who will open it.
‘Oh, Margot. You’re so lucky to live way up here, where you can do things like this all the time—not just drink beer, but enjoy the real things. The wilderness. Cowboys and Indians! Good heavens. You’re not supposed to say Indian anymore, are you? And most of you are—well, I only meant—’
Elsie Bader’s face is slashed by the light coming in through the open door. It is against this illumination that two strangers appear. A woman in her late twenties holding the hand of a little girl.
The two of them come inside but the door remains jammed on a raised crack. The woman lifts her sunglasses. Without a change in either of their expressions she spots Miles and, after the most brief of pauses, the two step toward him.
The Welcome Inn patrons are a transfixed audience to their march. Everyone hopes, no matter what is about to take place, that the woman doesn’t ask Miles about the mottled burns that, in the sudden light, look like crimson ink splashed from his temple to his shirt collar.
Miles’s eyes won’t leave the little girl holding the woman’s hand. Her just-brushed hair shining blue against the twilight. A summer dress patterned with strawberries down to her mosquito-bitten knees. Maybe five. Maybe six.
He doesn’t recognize the woman next to her. Not at first. But although Miles is certain he’s never seen the girl in the strawberry dress before, she smiles his way, and without thinking, without touching his scar, without the ongoing work of forgetting what demands to be remembered, he smiles back.
The girl smiles at him and he smiles back and he knows.
Less than fifteen miles away, where the even ground outside Ross River gives way to the first sloping of the St Cyr foothills, a cold rain falls windless and straight on the deadfall. For the past three weeks there has been little other precipitation than this. Dark clouds that cluster and begin their low murmurings, and within seconds the air drops three degrees, leaving a bristling anticipation in the spruce needles. When the rain comes, it does not fall so much as collapse. The air crushed with white noise in which anything from whispered voices to gunfire can be heard.
And then it’s over.
The rain had soaked the bear through to the skin, but her fur is already dry, porcupined in dark spikes. She has marched close enough to town to detect traces of the man-made: diesel exhaust, woodsmoke, the sugary temptations of the dump. It keeps her nose low. Inhaling the clean, mineralized scent of soil turning to mud.
Behind her, two male cubs follow. They are no more than twenty months old but are already bigger than sheepdogs. And yet the length of the sow’s stride requires an awkward half-run of the cubs to keep up. Two sulking brothers with ears standing atop their heads like a pair of children’s mittens.
Faraway sheet lightning casts its shadows across the wall of pine trunks. The three animals shuffle diagonally up the slope, their movements deliberate but weary. They have come from elsewhere but the sow has been here before, though her memories of it only make her want to move farther on.
She stops as abruptly as the rain. The cub closest to her bumps his head against her hind legs and she swings around, demanding attention. Water bends the branches lower and spills off their ends so that, for the first minute, there is no sound but a chorus of pissing.
The she-grizzly slowly rises. Her nose stretched high, the tip of a shaggy antenna. When she is standing at her full height, towering ten feet over her cubs, she swivels her head and takes in so many small sniffs that, when she exhales, it comes out in a grunt. With eyes closed she holds herself still. Her nostrils stretched wide, tasting the new, almost undetectable breeze from the south.
The sow recognizes something in it that her cubs have never smelled before. The odour of a danger equal to the burnt-butter stink of men.
She smells smoke.
As she steps toward him, Miles notices how the child’s knees poke out below the hem of her dress, one and then the other, like turtle’s heads. It’s been so long since he’s seen a girl of her age in a dress that it looks like a costume to him. Among the details he’s lost hold of in the last few years are holidays—what dates they fall on and whether the Raven Nest Grocery will be closed on account of it. Because of this, and because of the dress, Miles has an idea that the girl is about to pull a pillowcase from behind her back and demand ‘Trick or treat!’
The Welcome Inn drinkers lift their heads to take a measure of the newcomers, studying the woman and girl without the reluctance to stare that one finds elsewhere. All of them notice how the woman’s eyes don’t move about the room. Instead, she raises her chin half an inch and peers straight ahead. It may be a way of seeing into the dark, or a gesture of confirmation, or fearlessness. Whether reflex or signal, she steps forward with her face lifted to them, which allows everyone to note the length of her neck as well as the colour of her eyes, green as quarry water.
The woman and girl breach the invisible circle usually afforded the fire supervisor and stand within handshaking range, though no hand is offered. Miles inhales and takes them in. A flavouring of citronella insect repellent and sweat.
‘Rachel,’ the woman says, pulling the child forward to stand in front of her. ‘This is Miles.’
The man with the scarred face and the girl in the strawberry dress nod at each other, once, at the same time.
If forest firefighters are asked why, among all the kinds of physical labour a person might do for money, they chose this particularly wilting, occasionally life-threatening work,