The Big Burn (4 page)

The men of the Twenty-fifth came from many backgrounds, but most had been born in the rural South. The army offered a way out from lives of endless farmwork, often on fields they didn't own. The soldiers looked to the army for adventure, steady pay, and dignity.

"Burn, baby!" Abel said, moving a lighted match along heaped trash: He jabbed a rake into the pile and stirred it up.

"Hey, careful!" Seth told him, as a gusty breeze carried off ashy bits of paper. Seth chased after a newspaper sheet, causing Abel to laugh. "What's so funny?"

"Just you running your scrawny tail off for nothing."

"But we just got done policing up, and now stuffs blowing all over."

"Seth, buddy," Abel said, "no one's looking. It ain't blowing back to
our
company area, and that's all we got to see to. That and getting done here without taking all day."

***

Abel was rig/it,
Seth thought, as they stood at attention. The corporal was happy because their squad had been the first lined up for inspection. Sarge, walking beside a lieutenant, appeared pleased, though no smile broke the military set of his charcoal-dark face.

And when the inspection broke up, Sarge even mentioned how good the company area looked. "The new man's doing," the corporal said. "His and Brown's."

"If they're a good team," Sarge said, "keep them together."

***

"Cards later on?" Abel asked Seth, coming into their tent. "Some of the guys are getting up a game."

"Prob'ly not. I'll still be getting ready for tomorrow." Seth was using the free minutes before lunch to clean his second pair of shoes.

"Toss me one of those," Abel told him. "We can get you done."

"Besides," Seth said, "that card game's been going on for weeks, and ain't anybody said anything to me about playing." He grew embarrassed under Abel's sharp gaze. "I ain't much good at mixing in."

"How do you know? You can't just wait around to be asked."

Though that's where Abel proved wrong. In the mess tent, one of their tent mates hailed them. "Abel! Junior!" he called. "Here's seats."

Seth couldn't remember that happening before, his fitting into any army place that easy.

Near Placer Creek, on the Wallace side of the Coeur d'Alene divide, Jarrett strode into a forest clearing where an American flag flew at the peak of a log cabin. A huge, barking German shepherd ran out and took a menacing stance between Jarrett and the building. Jarrett halted and yelled, "Hello!"

It appeared that Sam, or at least someone, was around. A cabin window stood open, and a harness and some leatherworking tools had been left by a rocking chair on the porch. A couple of axes leaned against a grindstone mounted on a three-foot-wide stump.

Jarrett was near enough the building to read posters nailed up beside the front door. One of them, made on a printing press, said
WARNING: PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
. The other notice, hand-lettered, read Wife Wanted. He guessed the second must be a joke.

"Hello!" he yelled again, causing the dog to break into a fresh round of barking.

Someone whistled from the direction of the corrals, and a firm voice called, "Boone! Stand down!"

The broad-shouldered man who walked out to greet Jarrett looked so much like Pop that Jarrett took an involuntary step back. Jarrett had expected the Logan hair, but Sam also had Pop's wash-blue eyes and bushy mustache. He'd be twenty-eight now—Jarrett had figured that out on his trip up from Avery—but he seemed to wear authority as though he were older.

"Jarrett," he said, making it a statement. He put out a hand to shake.

"Sam."

"I go by Samuel now."

For a moment it seemed to Jarrett that maybe they'd just said all they had to say to each other. Then he managed, "The people in Avery told me you're a ranger."

"That's right."

"I met them when I went to sign up for fire fighting."

"Yeah. They said." Samuel seemed stuck for talk, too, until he asked, "You hungry? Thirsty?"

"Not really," Jarrett answered, beginning to wish he hadn't come here. "Thanks anyway." This man really
was
a stranger. "I just stopped by ... I mean, I'm my way up to Wallace..."

Samuel's eyes flickered amusement. "And you don't have time for a cup of coffee?"

***

While Samuel heated water, Jarrett looked around the main room of the station, where his brother apparently lived as well as worked. Samuel had put bearskins on the floor and moose antlers on the walls. Stuffed birds and piled-up books and a framed photograph that Jarrett recognized as his parents filled a shelf. By a curtained-off doorway that probably led to a bedroom, a telephone, a tacked-up map, and a desk stacked with papers formed an office area.

"I didn't guess you'd have a telephone out here," Jarrett said.

"It's new," Samuel said. "This is one of the first stations to get one."

"You like it?"

"It's a change."

Along the opposite wall, where Sam—
Samuel,
Jarrett reminded himself—was working, a sink with a hand pump, a woodstove, and a screen-covered pie chest made a kitchen.

A round table, a few wooden stools, and a comfortable-looking reading chair took up pretty much the rest of the room. Samuel pushed aside scrapbooks to make space for coffee mugs, and then he set out a box of crackers. He said, "I've never been much for cooking, and these days, with fires acting up all over, I'm too busy to do any at all."

"Crackers are fine," Jarrett said.

The talk bumped along as the two of them felt each other out.

Samuel asked, "And how have things gone for you?"

"Not much to tell," Jarrett answered. "After Mother died, Pop and I moved around the Midwest with his transfers. Then after the Milwaukee line pushed through the St. Joe, Pop took a senior job when one opened up in Avery. He even bought a house."

"Up till then you were still boarding?"

Jarrett nodded.

Samuel looked away. "Pop ever remarry?" he asked, his voice flat.

"No."

"So how is he?"

"You're asking someone too mad at him to give a fair answer. The way I see it, all he thinks about is his railroad job, and how everybody else's work is to see he gets to do his."

Samuel laughed without sounding as though he found Jarrett's statement one bit funny. "Yeah, that always was his take. How'd you get him to let you come up here?"

"I didn't tell him."

Samuel's eyebrows rose. "Unless Pop's changed, you're in for a bad time when you go home."

"I'm not going back," Jarrett said. "I already told you, I'm heading into Wallace to sign on a fire crew." Jarrett fiddled with the crackers, buying time while he turned over a half-formed idea. "Unless, of course, you need a hand here? I want to help out in the forests, but I don't care
which
forests."

When Samuel didn't answer immediately, Jarrett quickly said, "Never mind. I'll sleep here tonight, if that's okay, and then head to town in the morning."

"Sure," Samuel said. "Headquarters will be glad to get you."

***

It wasn't until hours later, when Jarrett was carrying his blanket up to the cabin's half loft, that Samuel asked, "You know how to ride a horse?"Yes."

"Because I was thinking, if you want you can ride patrol with me tomorrow. Maybe help me with trail work that needs doing, and we can see how things go." Samuel handed up a pillow. "Of course, I couldn't put you on the payroll, at least not till I can get to town and okay it there."

"No matter about the money," Jarrett answered. "I wouldn't have anything to spend it on anyway." He paused. "You don't have to do this."

"I can use the help."

"Because I don't want make-work," Jarrett said. "If the fire danger is really as bad as everybody's saying, I want to be doing something that'll make a difference."

"The danger is that bad," Samuel answered, "and the worse it gets, the more important patrol becomes."

Someone who knows the signs can read the history of a land in thin layers of charcoal buried in soil. The story lies in the maturity of tree stands, in blackened patches called cat-faces hollowed into bark, in the kinds of grasses that grow, and in the fuel available to feed the next fin. A forest fin leaves signs that can be nad decades later.

People moving into the Northwest in the late 1800s and early 1900s looked at what had once been Indian land and saw that fires had moved through it time and again. The newcomers came to two different conclusions.

Some—especially settlers accustomed to fire being as much a tool as their plows and hammers—looked at hundred-year-old trees growing in recently scorched ground and said perhaps the Indians had known what they were doing, setting fires annually when the seasons were right. Such light burning, they said, not only opened up forage land for game animals and encouraged the growth of desirable plants like berry bushes, it also got rid of unwanted fuel before it could build up to feed unfightable wildfires.

Others—most others—looked at blackened hillsides and concluded that the only safe way to control fin was to not let it burn in the first place.

The professional foresters of those early days sometimes used fin against itself, but they didn't trust it. They might battle a wildfire by lighting another fire—a backfire—to consume fuel the wildfire
would need. They might widen an encircling fire trench by burning a black line alongside its inner edge. But, regardless of whether they occasionally enlisted fire's help, most early foresters belonged to the faction that believed fire was primarily an enemy to be vanquished.

The differing views caused dissension, but the foresters who thought fire was best abolished had law and regulation on their side.

"Cel, we don't have to do this," Lizbeth said. "We
shouldn't
do it."

"After all the work we did getting ready?" her aunt demanded.

Lizbeth felt like saying,
And I told you that was dumb.
She bit back the angry words. After all, once she'd let Celia talk her into preparing an area where they could experiment with brush burning, she'd thrown herself into the effort as though it had been her own idea.

Celia had said that if Lizbeth wouldn't help, she'd do it alone.
And really burn the place up,
Lizbeth had thought.

Between them they'd cut away low limbs and small shrubs to clear two narrow firebreaks twenty feet apart, running from a gravel face on the edge of their property down a hundred feet to a small stream. Celia's idea was to carefully burn the underbrush between the breaks, with her working one side and Lizbeth the other to keep the fire from spreading.

Now, seeing the inadequate barriers in the pale light of predawn, Lizbeth renewed her arguments. "This might have been okay in the spring, before the weather turned so hot and dry, but—"

"That's why we're out here this early," Celia answered. "The morning cool is on our side." She pulled out a match. "We'll start small, and we'll keep it small," she promised again. "Just do this section today, and if it goes the way I think it will, then we'll start on another tomorrow. You ready?"

Lizbeth picked up a shovel. "Not too late to change your mind..."

But her aunt was already holding the lighted match to a clump of weeds. For a moment the parched blades blackened without igniting, and then the grass took, and then a small bush caught, and another.

Lizbeth and Celia flapped gunnysacks and used their shovels to herd the blaze, carefully driving it before them, leaving black ground behind. Lizbeth worked with her skirt tucked up high, heat piercing the soles of her shoes and her heart beating wildly. It seemed impossible that this was working.

And then, when they'd almost reached the stream, the fire jumped and caught the shoulder-high branches of a young cedar. "Use water!" Lizbeth shouted, running ahead to wet down her gunnysack and then back to beat at the flames with the soaking cloth. Somehow, between them, she and Celia quenched the blaze just when it seemed about to stretch beyond reach.

Meanwhile, the ground fire had gotten to the creek and was threatening to jump over. Only the water slowing the fire's advance allowed the women to put out the flames.

Then they sank to the ground, faces bright red and chests heaving. The scare they'd come through had left Lizbeth so angry she couldn't find words strong enough to throw at her aunt. She knew the two of them were plain lucky they hadn't burned the whole forest down.

Celia pointed her chin at the sky as though she was mad at God himself for threatening her trees. "Whatever you're thinking to say," she told Lizbeth, "I don't want to hear it."

Jarrett, finishing a breakfast of cold biscuits, bear jerky, and eggs, watched Samuel pin on his ranger badge. "Want me to pack grub for the day?" Jarrett asked.

"For two days," Samuel answered, putting on his brimmed ranger's hat and feeling for the fishhook in its band. His badge and pistol, and that hat, with its crown peaking over four precise dents, seemed to be his only uniform. "Don't dawdle. I want to be riding by dawn."

Jarrett gathered up canned beans, canned tomatoes, and the last of the biscuits he'd made the night before. His brother had been grateful for the biscuits, saying they went a long way to improving the taste of bear. "I can't see wasting meat when I got to kill any animal," he'd said, "but some kinds do seem to last forever."

Outside, Jarrett helped him strap shovels, axes, and a two-person saw onto a pair of packhorses. They also loaded up newspapers, a rake, and a sack of flour to drop off at various homesteads. "Is that part of your job?" Jarrett asked.

"No, but it eases the part that is," Samuel answered. "As far as homesteaders are concerned, I'm the law, which, alone, isn't always so welcome."