When We Were Wolves (8 page)

The season had started in April, southern Arizona, when two nine-year-old boys soaked a Gila monster in gasoline and lit it on fire. The lizard skittered into the juniper, and nine thousand acres later Kurt Strain, the saw boss, found himself supervising four sawyers— out-of-work loggers who knew a great deal about power saws and dropping large trees, and very little about fire behavior. Strain’s objective there had been simple: make sure the sawyers don’t get burned over.

In the desert short-pine savannas of the Southwest they had worked at night, by headlamp and moonlight. The humidity would rise however slightly, the temperature would drop, and the fire would lie down until midmorning. Strain loved night duty, fishing at night with the scorpions and bats. He spoke to himself in the darkness, “Kurt Strain, common tree shrew, learns to fly like the Mexican fishing bat.”

Forest Service records showed that Strain had been officially reprimanded for, among other acts of insubordination, fishing on
the job. He lined his crew out on a detail, then rigged up the fly rod he kept in a map tube in his fire pack. The Fire Safety Officer and Division Group Supervisor were not impressed by the rumors, though Strain was somewhat of a cult hero to the firefighters, the ground pounders. He rarely ate MREs, the Forest Service’s surplus military rations: Strain ate fish grilled over the coals of whatever conflagration he happened to be on. In Arizona he had caught endangered Gila trout and Apache trout, a threatened species. These fish he released unharmed, opting to eat the more prevalent rainbows and cutthroats.

An old regulation, still on the Forest Service books, allowed for one bottle of beer with lunch. This didn’t include fire duty, though it wasn’t unusual for beer to get packed into Strain’s spike camp with the water, saw gas, fusees, and bar oil; this was the West, the Forest Service, and drinking beer was not drinking.

Strain’s insubordination started after a campaign on a series of high-desert fires in western Colorado. A unit of hotshots was sent to a mountain to control a fire in heavy piñon juniper and bur oak—nothing salable. Their safety had been sacrificed for a public-relations stunt. Residents of a small subdivision five miles away were watching operations with binoculars from their patios. The prudent thing would have been to let the fire burn up the ridge, then over and down to a Cat line on the other side. It was all desert and didn’t need to be saved. The order went through to stop the fire’s run before it torched out at the ridge. Strain’s crew had been choppered in to help retrieve the fourteen bodies, most of them college kids.

At thirty-six, Strain now realized that the Forest Service was less an overevolved branch of the Boy Scouts than a branch of the military. Catch 22. Once you started questioning logic, nothing on a
project fire made sense, and it became very difficult to work six-teen-hour days and nights, taking inane orders, accomplishing little other than comforting a public raised on Smokey Bear. He began fishing. Carrying a concealed fly rod was not legal grounds for dismissal; his supervisors never caught him blatantly fishing on a shift. They knew he did, but couldn’t prove it, so they busted him down to a seasonal firefighter from his full-time position as a timber sale manager. They were sure this would cause him to quit. Instead each fire season got a little longer and he readily made enough money to do nothing other than hunt, ski, and fish all winter long. His true life’s work. Let some Fucking New Guy or lifer charge hell with a bucket of water.

An unprecedented buildup of forest fuels, a severe drought, and consistently dry storm systems that contained much ground-to-cloud lightning had resulted in five million acres burning left of the ninety-eighth meridian by mid-July. Strain was convinced of global warming and he planned to adjust by spending more time fishing. The geographical frontiers gone, he believed the next frontier would be weather: hurricanes, blizzards, monsoons, infernos. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina
does
cause a tornado in Texas; we wouldn’t win the war against the elements. When things got bad enough, he would drive to Baja, live off the gutted peso, and take up marlin on the fly.

According to the Forest Service, the world would end in fire. The flammable buildup came on the skids of years of successful fire suppression. Now the fires—most ignited by lightning—burned hotter and faster than ever before. A thick haze hung in the sky over two time zones, and the eastern vacationers stayed on their side of the river and attended ball games and theme parks, played golf, and motored through Civil War battlefields with the windows up. The western smoke reached even the easterners, intensifying their sunsets, turning them a deep salmon, the color of steak closest to the bone.

In August Strain worked as a crew rep, a liaison between three twenty-man Bureau of Indian Affairs handline crews and the fires’ Incident Command teams. Crew reps were minor administrators, glorified baby-sitters, politicians. They made sure the Montagnards carried their fire shelters, washed their feet, and didn’t suck a bottle. Strain slowly led the Indian crew, following lightning fires up western Colorado and back into Wyoming, where they’d started. The Indians, who were often aloof and laid-back to a point of being dangerous to themselves and others, quickly tried his patience, and for Strain the assignment became a painful endurance event. The
next time I’m mobilized as a crew rep
, he wrote in his post-incident evaluation,
I’d better be in charge of real firefighters or a company of sorority pledges from Michigan.

The all-white crews he led approached forest fires as if in war. It had occurred to Strain years before that the white people would never live with the West the way natives could before the advent of the reservations. They would always be battling droughts, floods, snow, cold, heat, infestations, wildfire. He realized he was more like the Indians, in it for different reasons than saving the West’s precious timber resources for Boise Cascade and Georgia Pacific shareholders to get richer. Given the choice between summer camp and all-out war, he’d be roasting marshmallows. Call it selfish.

The government policy of suppressing Indians like they suppressed fire was simple on paper, but it went against every natural law, and in turn cost the taxpayers billions. But fire is fire and Strain was indispensable in a tight spot; the men who worked with him knew it.

By October things had cooled considerably and he began a series of controlled burns, pyratory exercises that burned tracts of heavy fuels to improve vegetation and lessen the chances of an uncontrolled, unpredictable fire later. It was doing Gods work in
hasty catch-up fashion. The Forest Service had dipped into Smokey Bear funds to run a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to inform the public about the need for these controlled fires. As he sorted beadhead nymphs and stoneflies and tucked the aluminum fly box into his redpack, Strain remembered thinking a good idea would be to wait for an easterly wind, run a hot line from southern Oregon to Mexico, and burn out the entire state of California. In November his mucus turned from black back to clear. He flew back to Dubois, where he thought he’d have a winter season of fly tying and reading.

A man in a Stetson rancher, jeans, and green Forest Service shirt arrived for Strain in a mint-green pickup. They were headed to the blue-and-orange Bell Jet Ranger on the grass tarmac in a pasture at the edge of town. The chopper was taking Strain to South Dakota to the ghost fire.

In the pickup, Strain studied the faxed incident report. The driver briefed Strain as they drove.

“Where are my resources?” asked Strain.

“Right now? My guess is the casino bar. Initial resources have been ordered. Looks like you’re getting reservation handline crews from Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Standing Rock. They’ll be there as soon as they can sober up and get on the bus, I guess. The pilot’s name is Sherman Two Crows. We call him Mayday. He’s been flying fire all summer. Knows what he’s doing.”

The tail of the chopper read:
TOMAHAWK CHARTERS AND HELI-SKI.
Mayday was a mercenary. The belly of the craft was smoked black. The Forest Service cowboy walked up to the bubbled window and banged on it with his fist. Mayday started awake. “Yeah, okay,” he said. He had long, oil-black hair and a sparse goatee of long, threadlike whiskers, like a catfish. He wore his headset over a
Spokane Indians baseball cap, a Nomex jumpsuit, bright orange like a prisoner’s, and logging boots. Mayday gestured for Strain to throw his redpack in the back and get in the other side.

“Good luck,” said the cowboy.

The big turbine whined and struggled to take. Mayday smelled of garlic and Jet-A fuel. Mud-caked floor panels. Strain had seen cleaner bulldozer cabs. The windows were scarred and the insides covered with the hulls of sunflower seeds. Between the front seats stuck the battered, oily twenty-eight-inch bar of a Stihl 044 chain saw, stained red with slurry or blood. A couple of grasshoppers caromed off the insides of the windows, “What’s the chain saw for?”

“To cut trees with,” Mayday said. “Why do you have it beside you?” “Sometimes you gotta cut your way down.” Good Lord, Strain thought.

The rotors took and beat the stiff wind. Mayday pulled on the collective with his left hand. The ship rose five feet in the air. He twisted the cyclic between his legs as if it were the handle on an antique coffee grinder. Seams creaked.

“What year is this thing?” asked Strain. Untrimmed, the ship spun 180 degrees on an axis of cold, dry air, rose, and nosed east, with the wind.

“‘Seventy-six,” Mayday said. A brown grasshopper landed and stuck against his forearm. “Eighteen seventy-six. Custer wishes he would have had this son of a bitch at the river.”

After a turbulent jump over the Shoshone and Bighorn ranges they flew in silence over the Powder River and the sage country of eastern Montana, dusted white with what little snow could cling to the prairie in the cold late-autumn wind. The bird flew over the Seventh Cavalry’s route to the Little Bighorn from Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota.

Mayday looked bored and hungover. He sipped from a plastic Mini Mart coffee mug and chewed sunflower seeds from a big bag stuffed into a slot on the instrument panel that once housed something electronic.