The Big Burn (6 page)

They sounded like brave words, but Lizbeth caught the glances the ranger and his brother exchanged.
Two women alone...

"Look," Lizbeth said, "tell us what we can do. We can't lose this place."

"There's really not much," Ranger Logan said. "Clear trees away from the house..."

Celia interrupted him. "It's not the house I care about!"

"Be careful of cooking fires..."

She cut him off. "That's pap. I need real ideas. Would clearing firebreaks around our place help?"

"A firebreak around a hundred-sixty acres?" the ranger asked incredulously. "Mrs. Whitcomb, to cut a swath even a few feet wide—do you have any idea how much work that would be?"

"Lizbeth and I will do what we have to," Celia said, her voice snapping.

"Well, I can guarantee you can't do that," Ranger Logan snapped back.

Their arguing embarrassed Lizbeth, and she could see it was making the ranger's brother want to bolt. "Jarrett," she said, "would you like to see the rest of our place?"

***

They returned to the corral, where Lizbeth whistled for Trenton and Philly to come and be admired. "They're sweet horses," Lizbeth said. "Though they're getting older, of course. One of these days I'd like to build them a proper barn to replace that open shelter they've got."

"Do you have neighbors to help?" Jarrett asked.

"I can build it myself."

"Including lifting the logs?"

"I know how to rig a pulley."

That made him grin. "Is there anything you and your aunt
can't do?
"

"Well, we
can't
agree on much," Lizbeth said, the words out of her mouth before she realized she was going to say them. She'd have stopped there, if it weren't for how Jarrett was waiting, as though he was really interested in hearing whatever she might say. "I mean," she continued, "Cel and I want different things. She wants to sell the timber off this place and get out, and I want to stay."

She turned to face him, letting her words tumble out "I can't imagine anyplace in the world would be as nice as this is right here, and I'll die if I have to leave." She stopped short, mortified she'd paraded her feelings that way.

"I know what you mean," Jarrett said. "I wouldn't want to leave either, if this was my place."

***

Later on, when Lizbeth was lying beside her aunt in the pole bed, listening to an owl and coyotes and knowing her aunt was awake, too, she said, "Cel, you could have been a little nicer. The ranger was just doing his job."

"Which he gets paid for doing."

"They were the first visitors we've had since that other ranger came through in the spring. I'd like to see them again."

"They weren't
visitors,
Lizbeth. You were forward to invite them inside."

"No, I was polite. Or have you forgotten what that means?"

"Don't be fresh," Celia said.

"You're the one that was fresh." Lizbeth turned her head away. "I bet they don't come back."

Seth peeled carrots while Abel poked among the slatted wooden crates lining the walls of the company cook tent. Cook himself had taken off after ordering them to prepare stew vegetables enough for fifty men. So there'd be no misunderstanding how many vegetables that was, Cook had stacked up the crates he wanted done. The two of potatoes, the one of onions. "And find the canned tomatoes, too," he'd said.

"You know," Abel told Seth, "there's other food here wouldn't take all this work."

They'd been pulling details together enough that they were getting to know each other's ways. Seth realized he did more than his share, but he was glad for how Abel put a gloss to things. Abel saw to it that their work—and the two of them—looked good, and for the first time, Seth was feeling and getting treated like the soldier he wanted to be.

Now, though, looking at the huge chore in front of them, Seth was impatient. "You gonna help?" he asked.

"Sure," Abel answered. "Here, I found the tomatoes packed in with some pickles and stuff." He put an opened crate atop the stacked crates. "Hey," he said, "hand me your knife."

Seth watched him carefully slit under the flap' of a box marked with a skull and crossbones. "What's that?"

"Rat poison," Abel answered. "Folks ought to be careful where they put this stuff." He tilted the opened box so its powdered white contents sprinkled down through the vegetables.

"What the hell are you doing?" Seth demanded. "You want to kill somebody?"

"No, I'm taking care of us." Abel placed the rat poison box in with the tomatoes. Then he pulled out a jar of pickles, loosened the lid, and poured the juice on the box.

"By ruining all that food?" Seth said. "No washing will make it safe now."

"The army won't miss a few vegetables," Abel said. He poked at the box until the cardboard gave way and juice and more white powder dripped down into the crates below. "Leave it," he said. "I got to go tell Sarge we got us a problem."

***

Seth couldn't raise his gaze up, not when his only friend was busy telling Sarge such barefaced lies. Seth was just waiting for Sarge to bellow,
You expect me to believe that?

Only, Sarge didn't. After asking a few suspicious questions, he seemed to buy the whole story, right down to Abel's saying the grocer who'd packed poison in the same container with canned goods ought to make good on all the spoiled food.

"Cook didn't say to start anything else," Abel said, "but there's canned beans and bread enough for one meal. 'Course it's too soon to pull 'em out."

"Clean up here and haul this stuff off for burning," Sarge said. "Then I guess you two can take off." Only then did he throw Seth a troubled look. "Strange," he said.

***

Seth told Abel, "That wasn't right"

"Nobody got hurt," Abel answered.

"How about the store man who's going to have to pay for that stuff?"

"The army won't track him down. Anyway, what do you care about someone you don't know?"

"What we did was wrong," Seth said.

"And making us peel vegetables when everybody else was off wasn't?" Abel demanded. "Let's go. I want to get to the baseball game in time to play some. Once people see my pitching arm, won't neither of us never have to work when there's a game on."

"I'm not that good a ballplayer," Seth said.

"They want me, they get you," Abel answered. "It's you and me, right? We're a team."

Samuel finished the previous week's worth of notes.
Liars diaries,
the rangers called the reports they were supposed to keep up daily but rarely did. Since the reports were more often done in chunks of a week or two at a time, the facts had a way of getting mixed up. Also, everyone had heard the story about an honest ranger who once wrote that torrential rain kept him idle for a day. Supposedly the Forest Service had docked him the day's wages, with the result that ever since, a ranger with no other official business to report either "patrolled" or "maintained equipment."

Samuel considered what details to put in the current day's report.
Patrolled. Cleared trail. Warned folks about fire danger.
Same as most days. He knew that Jarrett, after just a week, was already chafing at the monotony of it.

A marauding bear had left the springhouse in need of re-roofing, and he'd suggested Jarrett might tackle that job. Instead of welcoming the change, though, Jarrett had seemed to think the task was a demotion. The thought was clear on his face, though he'd set about the work without a word of protest.

That one keeps his own counsel,
Samuel thought.
Maybe none of us Logans are good at saying what's on our minds.

He put the report away and turned down the wick in the kerosene lamp. He was remembering the ride back to the station from the Whitcomb place. Jarrett had asked a dozen questions about homestead laws without once mentioning Lizbeth, but Samuel was sure that's who all the questions revolved around. "What did Mrs. Whitcomb mean about doing their six months and a day?" Jarrett had asked.

Samuel had explained that one of the requirements for proving up a homestead was living on it for more than six months a year. "Probably in the winter they stay in Wallace."

"It must be hard to keep up a place like that," Jarrett had said. "Two women alone, I mean. And lonely, too."

"I reckon." Samuel could have added,
Of course, men get lonely, too,
except there was no way he'd admit that to anyone.

Maybe that lonely side of ranger life was why he'd never quite got around to taking down that Wife Wanted poster. The rangers who put it up had meant it for a joke, but Hank Sickles, his best friend among them, had said, "Leave it for a while," and Samuel had.

Not that he really did want a wife. But the station sometimes seemed awful empty with just him by himself. Especially on evenings after he'd seen something extraordinary, like the time he'd watched a pair of half-grown, playful fawns snatch crab apples from their mother's mouth just to tease her. When you see a thing like that, you want to tell somebody.

Samuel had tried to sketch the scene into one of his notebooks, but although he could draw an apple that would pass scientific scrutiny, and do a passable deer, too, he didn't have the skill to put the story together right. That kind of drawing took talent like Mrs. Whitcomb's, though he couldn't see her painting deer, playful or otherwise.

He chuckled. Maybe he ought to be glad that poster hadn't brought results. What if he'd ended up with a wife as sharp-tongued as that one?

Distant thunder interrupted his musings. Boone came over to lean uneasily against Samuel's legs. "What do you think, boy?" Samuel said, rubbing behind the dog's ears. "Do we get along pretty well without a woman here?"

The next peal of thunder sounded closer, and the next one closer still. A bolt of lightning briefly turned the cabin bright as midday, and Boone tried to squeeze between Samuel's legs and the chair. Then a
craaack
many times louder was followed by the sounds of tearing wood and a tree crashing down through other trees.

"Jarrett?" Samuel called. "You awake?"

"Are you kidding?"

"We better go see if we've got us a fire to put out."

The threat of dry lightning nags in the mind of a firefighter who guards acres of unburned fuel or struggles to bring control to land where trees already burn. He watches for clouds that might be forerunners of lightning storms. He frets over sullen weather that squats in a ragged gray heap on the southwestern horizon. He worries that a cold front is about to move in and bring him new problems.

Much of the year, over much of the earth, the thunderstorms that come with moving weather fronts carry enough rain to quench fires ignited by their lightning.

But sometimes, especially in a summer of drought, over parched land, thunderclouds form with only the barest amount of moisture. Enough moisture to put into motion the electrical imbalances that create lightning, but not enough moisture to make rain.

A fire must have heat to start. A bolt of lightning streaking down at temperatures hotter than the sun's surface bring? far more than enough.

Jarrett's leg muscles ached and his lungs felt ready to explode as he fought to maintain the pace Samuel set. They went on foot, tools and knapsacks on their backs, hacking their way through trailless wilderness that horses couldn't negotiate. Tree branches swatted Jarrett's face and brambles scratched him as they climbed to a spot where they had glimpsed a small glow. Electricity in the close air made his skin tingle, and in the brightness of a lightning flash he saw the hair on his arms, below his rolled-up sleeves, stand up.

When they finally reached their destination, they found a meager fire lazily licking along the split trunk of a lodge-pole pine. Half the tree angled down from the break to within arm's reach, and Jarrett hurried to it, assuming that's where they'd start.

"And what are you going to do if that other piece crashes down, and then a wind comes along and scatters flames everywhere?" Samuel asked.

Jarrett, not knowing what he was supposed to answer, remained silent. "The first thing you do on a fire is figure out how you can get away from it if need be. Here, we're not far from a ridgeline that we could probably walk down. And in a pinch that clump of boulders we passed might make a decent shelter."

Samuel took off his knapsack before adding, "Running down the way we came would be tempting, but when a fire blows up, whatever you do, you don't want to get trapped in some gully."

He unstrapped his one-man saw and told Jarrett to pick up his ax. Then he pointed to a stand of skinny trees and shrubs that grew within the area where the burning pine might fall. "We'll down these first and drag them out of the way," he said. "Then dig a fireline and see what we've got."

Working in the poor light given off by the flickering flames, they chopped and sawed for an hour, clearing the area of wood and most other fuel. Then they worked another smoky hour to cut a foot-wide, bare-dirt line around what was left.

They smothered small spot fires inside the perimeter by breaking them up and spreading out the heat. The strategy wasn't too different from what Jarrett had figured out for himself, back on the Avery fire he'd tried to handle alone. Now, though, imitating Samuel's efficient moves, Jarrett gradually learned to make every shovel motion count. And after a while he was hardly wasting any muscle or wind at all on shallow scrapes and wild throws.

By that time the fire in the pine had about burned itself out.

Samuel straightened up, studied the scene, and nodded. "I think it's safe to go on. Ready for the next one?"

Jarrett, too exhausted to spend breath on words, just nodded.

"By the way," Samuel said, "you caught on fast, almost like you'd dug fireline before. Good work."

***

They repeated the routine at the site of a second strike, this one in a lone snag that they reached just as the first light of dawn broke. Here, before they got started, Samuel pointed out a large patch of ground scorched in some previous fire. "That would be a place to escape to," he said. "Fire doesn't usually waste its time on old bums."