‘You have two things to take care of out here, Mr McEwan,’ the pulp company guy says at the end of the interview, the only time he speaks at all. ‘The trees and the men. Just know that the company owns the trees.’
‘What about the men?’
‘They’re all yours.’
Miles never thought of the crew as his, but he felt his responsibility as its leader at every moment, not so much a weight but something added to his blood to thicken it. It made it easier that Miles liked them, especially the kid. Another pyro-nerd in the making. Asking questions about the origins of pulaskis, the combination rake-hoes designed for cutting fireline in different ground conditions. Volunteering for the nastiest tasks—staying the night to keep an eye on spot fires extinguished the day before, axing a snag into pieces to see if the smoke had hidden inside it, manning the radio when everyone else opted to make a dent in the beer stocks. He did all of this not to seek approval but because he wanted to see how it was done. The rest of the crew liked him for this, too. Not only because the kid relieved them from unpleasant work but because he so plainly loved doing it. It was hard even to make fun of someone like that.
Miles also admired the way the kid could spend time with him without disturbing his thoughts. As a result, he spoke more freely with him than with anyone else on the attack team. Although Miles never brought up the topic of their friendship, he knew that this is what they had found together. Alex asked after him in every phone conversation they had. She always called him Tim.
‘There’s a pattern to every crewman’s career,’ Miles remembers telling the kid on one of their long drives between watchtowers. ‘The first year you learn, the second year you complain, and the third year you actually enjoy yourself. There’s almost never a fourth year.’
‘How long have you been doing it?’
‘Five years,’ Miles says, laughing. ‘But I’m still learning. With fires, there’s always something you think you know but don’t.’
What Miles neglected to add is that without fires to work on, there’s not much to learn anything from. This year, June and most of July turn out to be curiously uneventful months, despite the above-average heat and string of eighteen days without rain. Aside from a handful of smouldering snags lit up by lightning, and a burning garbage can at a roadside picnic area fifteen miles to the south, the camp is fire free.
The crew spend the time inventing increasingly complex practical jokes, eating too much, pretending to be soldiers. Miles has experienced stretches like this before, though not nearly as long, and is coming to the end of make-work tasks. The two pockmarked pickups had been waxed into glittering auto show pretties. The cache’s store of tools were sharp as butcher’s cleavers, the other supplies hung upon hooks or lined in straight aisles according to an ‘attack priority sequence’, just like the manual dreamed it might be. The bunkhouse was painted top to bottom four times, followed by a poll on each colour’s aesthetic merits. By the middle of July, it was neon pink. A unanimous vote (Miles abstaining) determined it would stay this way for the rest of the season.
It isn’t until the first week of August that they receive notice from a spotter plane of a smoker at the bottom end of a gulch funnelling down into the Mazko River, two hundred miles north. Miles had known that something was there for the past twenty-four hours, as the spotter had to pass the site twice to determine whether it was an actual fire or merely a ‘ghost,’ the mist that can rise in locations near water. The delay in identifying the fire hasn’t allowed it much growth, though—the plane’s last report was of a tight congestion of small spot fires, each one no bigger than the smouldering sticks left behind at morning campsites.
There is a tradition among attack teams of naming a fire they have fought on, large or small. Most of the time it arrives at the end, after mopup is completed and some detail of the location or episode that occurred over the course of the job lends itself. But when they disembark from the helicopters in the lee of the smoke-fogged valley, the kid tosses a name out right away. The crew stand at the crest looking at the Mazko a half mile below and the four or five dozing spot fires where the gulch’s walls meet. The slope down is steep, but they should be able to get to the fires and back up again without climbing gear or ropes. What will slow them are the loose pieces of shale scattered over the hillside, black diamonds of sharp armour like the scales of a serpent buried just below the surface. Although there is usually some debate surrounding an initial suggestion’s merits, the kid’s first try sticks without question. The Dragon’s Back.
Miles is reluctant to touch the dragon’s skin at all. It is one of the first principles of firefighting to avoid cutting line partway down a hill with the fire below. Better to come at it from the lower point and push it higher, the entry in this case being the banks of the river. But when Miles radioes the fire manager, he is told to continue down the slope and fight from above.
‘Get a jump on it and it’s simple as pissing in an ashtray,’ the manager says.
It’s not in Miles’s nature to argue, and his men are so bored with the disappointments of a fireless season that some are already sidestepping into the gulch, shouting jokes about taking long enough to make it down that they might be in line for some overtime. Miles, on the other hand, tells himself it will have to be quick. The longer they stay down there, the more chances there are to be surprised.
When their eyes begin to sting from the smoke, their cheeks freckled with ash, Miles looks back at the crest and judges it to be about four hundred yards up. Next, he does a size-up of what they have to face: a few spot fires, all more than twenty feet apart, licking at green stalks of cheat grass and fescue. Off to the side, a small patch of oak scrub stands untouched. They’ll take the smokers one by one and get them early enough that they won’t have to cut any fireline. Miles doesn’t want to give it that much room to play.
‘Split up in threes,’ Miles tells them. ‘Pick one and hot-spot it. When it’s done, hustle on to the next. By noon, the sun is going to roast us like turkeys down here.’
The day is already showing temperatures that are well above average, and the valley walls only contain the heat, the shale a million dark mirrors magnifying the sun on their backs. Still, for the first half-hour, the men go at their labours with something near joy, the simple pleasure of cutting the earth with the blades of their pulaskis singing up the muscles in their arms. They complain about the work when they aren’t working, but now that they are, they bury the smoke in purposeful contentment.
The kid is the first to hear it.
Less a sound than its absence. Nothing like the silence that can sometimes visit a crew in the way a break in the conversations around a dinner table can leave a room in an accidental quiet. What the kid hears is not an interruption but an end. It makes him think of the project he submitted to his highschool science fair. A perfect vacuum. The demonstration involved sucking away all the air in an empty fish tank, an invisible violence taking place within. Now it’s like he’s inside the tank, looking out.
‘The fuck was that?’ he asks nobody in particular, but Miles hears the question. And now that his attention has been called to it, he can hear what the kid hears too. Unlike the kid, he knows exactly what it is.
‘Let’s move out!’ Miles shouts, circling his arm over his head, directing the men up the hill.
For a time, they only look at him. They’ve just arrived, the spot fires not halfway to being buried. It seems the new foreman is something of a joker. One of the crew acknowledges Miles’s gestures with a honking laugh, and the rest of the men except the kid join him in it.
‘I’m not kidding. Take your shit and haul it on up.’
‘Quittin’ time already, boss?’ the first of the laughers shouts back.
‘We’re not quitting. We’re pulling back. Right fucking now.’
All