The Big Burn (2 page)

She chopped wood for the next day's cooking fire, hauled fresh water from the creek, and shut their rooster and five hens into the chicken house. She secured the door latch with an iron clip, something she'd been doing since the night a weasel got in and killed several chicks.

Then determined to end the evening peacefully, she returned to the log cabin where she and Celia lived. It wasn't all that much bigger than where the chickens roosted, and, except for a horse shelter and the outhouse, it was the only other structure in the small clearing.

She found her aunt sketching guidelines for a new watercolor, squinting because it was late enough that there wasn't much light coming down the lantern skylight cut in the roof. Just
skylight,
Celia called it. The way people out West talked seemed like one more thing that made Celia uneasy, their terms meaning different things from what she thought they should.

Lizbeth watched her carefully copy a magazine picture. It showed an orderly New England town where neatly dressed women visited on street corners. Lizbeth thought how different their tailored suits and large decorated hats were from her own plain gingham dress and long rough apron. Although it wasn't their clothes that set these women's lives apart from hers and Celia's as much as the way they appeared not to have things they needed to be doing. Lizbeth tucked a strand of light brown hair into the braid she wore in a loose coil above her neck.

"You know that going back, we wouldn't find it nice like that," Lizbeth said. "You married Tom Whitcomb so he'd take us away!"

"We'll find it better," Celia answered, not bothering to deny Lizbeth's accusation. They both knew the charge was true, and Tom Whitcomb hadn't deserved more. "Our timber money will see to that"

"Cel, I wouldn't want to go back if we had all the money in the world.
This
is my home, and I love it here. You would, too, if you weren't so set on closing your eyes to everything good."

"You're blocking my light," her aunt said.

"I don't want to go," Lizbeth repeated.

"You don't have a choice."

"I'll find one."

Moisture through the winter of 1909–1910 had been close to normal, and on the Coeur d'Alene Forest, it had appeared for a while that avalanches might be 1910's worst problem.

Then, in the northern Rockies, mountain grasses barely greened up in the warmest April on record. They turned brown as a dry May gave way to a drier June and then to a July in which many weather stations reported no rain at all. The fire season roared in early. New fires began springing up daily, and the U.S. Forest Service, five years old and thinly staffed, began taking on extra fireguards and crew.

Owners of private woodland took steps to protect their interests, too. Mining and logging companies shifted their employees to fire duty when needed, and railroads hired spotters to walk the rights-of-way, where many fires started. All it took to ignite one was a lightning strike or a glowing cinder from a train's stack landing in slash left from clearing and construction.

Sometimes all it took to put one out was a man wielding a shovel—as long as he got to the fire before it grew.

Less than fifteen miles south-southeast of the Whitcomb homestead, though a mountain divide away, Jarrett Logan was finishing the first day on his new job. At sixteen, he was younger than the railroad generally hired, but Pop had fixed it with Mr. Blakeney in the front office.

So far Jarrett had walked his assigned section of track without seeing so much as a hot cinder or glowing cigar butt to stomp out. He figured he had it easy because of how near his section was to Avery. Approaching engines were already slowing for the last bend before town, and engines leaving the rail yards hadn't gotten up to full, spark-throwing speed. Crews were careful, too, so close to where blame could be assigned and positions lost.

So when Jarrett finally smelled smoke, he was surprised. He moved quickly, anxious to find its source.

And then the wind shifted and blew stronger, and he realized the pungent odor wasn't coming from along the tracks but instead from the steep hills nearby. They weren't his to patrol, but a fire could blow down to the rail line. And if one did, by the time it got to him, it might be too big to handle. He wished he'd asked what he should do if fire threatened from off railroad land, but he hadn't. Come right down to it, he hadn't gotten any instructions at all, except to see the right-of-way didn't catch.

With no one in shouting distance and no way to signal for help, the decision was his: go or stay.

Shouldering his shovel, he set off toward the smoke.

***

Twenty minutes of hard hiking and a frightening jump across a rock-filled gully took him to a low ground fire wedging up from a lightning-struck snag. A long black wound marked where the snag had been hit, and now the dead tree seemed to be burning on the inside. Smoke seeped out from jagged cracks in the wood and puffed from woodpecker holes.

It must have caught fire last night and been smoldering all day,
Jarrett thought, as he tried to figure out how best to go about things. Although the ground fire didn't look to be very large, he thought that it probably posed more danger than did the burning snag, which he had no way to attack anyway. He wished the ground fire were creeping downhill instead of up, so that it might put itself out in the creek that ran just below. Shrubbery hid the stream, but Jarrett had fished its length and knew it was there.

A breath of acrid smoke set him coughing. He should have thought to ask somebody just how you
do
put out a fire when you can't get water to it But he hadn't.

Smother it with his shovel, maybe, the same way he'd step on a spark popped out the open door of a stove.

Jarrett angled his way around one side of the fire, climbing until he was above the fire's wide, leading edge. Then he slammed the flat back side of his shovel down on low-licking flames. Nearby flames, fanned by the motion, sprang higher.

Several more swings left Jarrett with a fire angrier than the one he'd started with. Ash swirled upward, filling his nose and making his eyes water.

Frantically trying to think of something else to do, he remembered about how he always shoveled dirt over a campfire, even after he'd doused it with water. He stabbed his shovel into the ground and threw everything he dug up onto the fire. Bits of flame went out where dirt hit, but other flames glowed more brightly as they gobbled up scattered twigs and pine needles.

Next time he was careful to toss mostly soil. Then he started to work out a system. He'd scrape some earth bare and toss it and a bit of the fire's front edge farther into the blaze.
It's like folding the fire in on itself,
he thought.

By now sweat was rolling down Jarrett's face and stinging his eyes, and his arms were beginning to ache with the relentless effort of stabbing, lifting, tossing, stabbing, lifting, tossing. A wind gust blew a bunch of burning pine needles from his shovel. He glanced around but didn't see that they'd caught anything.

Stab, lift, toss. The repeated motions took on their own hard rhythm.

A deep voice yelled, "Watch your back!"

Whirling, Jarrett saw a line of flame blaze up, and all of a sudden the fire had caught him between its orange-red arms.

Other men were shouting now, and Jarrett heard tools clanging against rock and wood. He could see his way out—just a dozen or so long steps, but running them he felt the flames closing in, flicking his neck and arms like pricks of hot knife blades. Then someone was reaching for him, grabbing Jarrett around the waist and roughly dragging him to safety. "You trying to get killed, going
above
a fire?" the man demanded.

Jarrett staggered and fell, landing hard, his elbow coming down on a boulder and taking most of his weight. Pain shot up his arm so intensely that he was afraid he'd pass out Or maybe he did. When his spinning vision cleared, he saw that the burned area now stretched farther down, as well as up and out The blaze appeared to be dying, though, worked by three men in miners' clothes. The nearest told him, "Go on, if you're feeling okay. We got this one."

"I'll help finish it," Jarrett said, struggling to his feet He tried not to think about how quickly the fire had turned on him, but he couldn't help seeing the charred results of its brief run. Even the snake grass along his fishing stream was gone.

"Help's probably needed more down there," the man told him, pointing to a rose-tinged column of smoke that hung over the canyon bottom, about where Jarrett's section of railroad track was.

***

"Don't bother reporting for work tomorrow," Mr. Blakeney said, paying Jarrett off on the spot "You're dismissed."

Trains had been held up in both directions for almost an hour while their crews fought a blaze that had threatened to burn the wood ties from under the rails. They'd barely stopped the fire from running wild through tangled, sawn trees along the right-of-way.

Jarrett tried to explain why he hadn't been on hand to see it start, but Mr. Blakeney wasn't interested. "Tell your father...," he began, and then broke off. "Tell him what you want," he finished. "It doesn't much matter, as long as you understand you're done here."

***

That evening Jarrett stood alone on the north bank of the St. Joe River watching lightning streak the sky. Hardly aware of the train yard noise behind him or of the loud voices and music of Avery's bars blaring from open windows, he watched bolt after electric bolt touch down on the thickly forested hills opposite. This was the third night running he'd seen rainless clouds moving above the valley, dry thunderclouds that carried fire instead of rain.

A dot of yellow appeared partway up the nearest hill, but from Jarrett's position, it looked small and harmless.

He knew better. It probably was already mushrooming into flames like the ones that had gotten away from him and might have killed him if those miners hadn't come.

He wondered if he was crazy for wanting to go meet it. Not the particular fire he'd just seen start, but ones like it, some of them burning all across the mountains. He thought of them as
his mountains
feeling their tug someplace deep inside him. In the months since he and Pop had moved out here, he'd come to care for this land in a way he'd never cared for anyplace or anybody. People were saying it might burn up, and this afternoon, he'd seen how. Flames rising without warning and destroying so fast.

He had to fight back, and joining a fire-fighting crew was the best way he could think of, though that would mean squaring off with Pop first.

An incoming train sounded its approach with three sharp blasts of its whistle. That would be his father's run. Inside one of the passenger cars, Pop would be telling the people whose tickets were for Avery that it was time to get off. Maybe he'd be helping a woman gather her belongings, or perhaps he'd be giving someone the correct time. Only when Pop had turned responsibility for his car over to a night-shift conductor would he retrieve his own travel valise and start for home.

Jarrett hoped Pop would be in a better mood than he was after his last run, when he'd returned still aggravated over a brakeman caught stealing tools. Of course, Pop had discharged him then and there.

Jarrett took a last look at the yellow glow in the distance, knowing that particular fire would be somebody else's to deal with. Then he started for home. He needed to put supper on the table before Pop got there. He hoped his father wouldn't have heard about the afternoon's disaster from someone else, before Jarrett could explain it his own way.

***

"You can't do better than heating canned beans?" Pop demanded, ignoring the platter of corn bread and fried ham Jarrett had put on the table. He blew out a breath as though to say food was only the beginning of his grievances. "I heard you ran away from a fire."

"No, I missed a track fire because I'd gone to put out another one that might have spread down."

"And did you put it out?"

"I got started, but then it began moving too fast for me. Some miners took over."

"So which was it?" Pop demanded. "You got scared off your job, or you couldn't do it? Which do you expect me to tell Mr. Blakeney? That you're incompetent or a coward?"

"I'm not either one. I—"

"Because he hired you on my say-so. Now what's his opinion of me going to be?"

"Why should it change? You weren't there today." Jarrett stopped short, feeling as tangled up as arguing with Pop always made him feel. He hadn't even had a chance to bring up his wish to take a fire-fighting job. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry. I thought I was doing right. I didn't mean to let you down."

He watched his father carry his half-full dish to the sink and thump it down in disgust. Pop pulled on his jacket and checked his beer money before swinging around where Jarrett could see his face again. "I'll go to Mr. Blakeney tomorrow morning and ask him to give you another chance. You don't want it on your record you got fired."

"Pop, he'll say no, and anyway, my
record
doesn't matter. I told you before I don't want to spend my life working for the railroad."

"The day you grow up," Pop said, his eyes glittering with anger, "you're going to realize a good job with the railroad is something to be proud of."

"When I
grow up,
"Jarrett said, "I'll find something more worthwhile to do than walk up and down passenger cars lighting lanterns and keeping order."

Pop stiffened. "Leave, then. You think you can find something more important to do with your life, go do it. But when you fall on your face, don't come back here."

Not ready to go inside, Celia Whitcomb leaned against the cabin's rough logs and listened to distant thunder. She hoped rain was finally on its way. It would be one less worry.

Of all the things that frightened her right now, the threat of wildfire scared her most. It was the one thing that could take her timber from her before she could sell it.