第15章 Walking the Black

There was one answer, and it was the worst one, and it was the only one. "We're going down through it," Bryn said. Emmet Danner, who had spent his life in this timber, looked at her as if she had lost her mind, and then looked at the fire below them, and then looked again, and Bryn watched him do the same sum she had done and arrive at the same place. "It just burned," he said slowly. "The head's moving up toward us. Behind it is black." "Behind the head is black," Bryn said. "Everything the fire has crossed on this slope is burned ground now, and burned ground won't carry a fire. We go down the front of it, not around it. We walk the edge of the black and we stay on the black side of the line, and we let the fire come past us uphill while we go downhill behind it." "That's putting forty-four people inside a fire." "That's putting forty-four people in the one place on this mountain the fire cannot burn again." She turned to the group. "Everybody hear me. This is important and I am going to say it once. We are going to walk down this slope. There will be fire on your left, and it will be loud and bright, and it will be close. You will want to run to the right and away from it. Do not. To the right is the unburned timber and that is where the fire is going. Stay on the road, stay in the middle, stay quiet, and keep moving. If your clothes feel hot, that's the air, not the fire, and the air will cool as soon as we drop below the flaming front." She looked at the road and down at the boots of the people nearest her and added the last piece, the one she had learned in a class she never expected to use. "The ground is hot. Not the surface, the ground underneath, because it's been cooking all night and the duff still holds it. Don't sit down on the black unless I tell you to. Don't put your hand flat on the ash. Walk on the roadbed where the gravel is hard and cool, and when we get to the black we walk on the road, not beside it." They went down in a column with Bryn at the head and Emmet at the tail, and the road took them out of the green timber into the burned, and the burned looked at first like nothing at all, a dark plain of ash with stumps standing in it and a low smoke drifting across. Then the details came clear as her eyes adjusted. The stumps were not dead. Each one had a color of its own at the base, a dull red like a coal in a hearth that has banked for the night, and the smoke that drifted across the road was not from the burning front ahead but from the ground under their feet, from roots burrowed deep and still working. The heat came up through the soles of her boots, not hot enough to burn, hot enough to notice, and she could feel it through the gravel when she stopped, and there was a smell on the air that she had never found a word for, sweet and mineral, like the inside of a kiln. They went down. The road was an old logging grade, wide enough for a truck, and for the first two hundred yards it was in green timber and the fire was a brightness ahead and to the left, working upslope toward them, and Bryn kept them to the uphill side of the road so that the fire had to cross the road to reach them, and the road was their line. Then they came to the black. It began at the road edge as a stripe and widened, and then the whole downhill side of the road was burned, black and smoking, and the fire was in front of them now, a wall of flame standing at the leading edge and going up the slope, and the wall was between them and the fire that had already passed, and they were walking straight at it with the wind off the unburned side pushing ash into their faces. Bryn put herself at the front with Emmet, and the group strung out behind her along the road, and for ten minutes they walked with the wall of flame to their left, close enough that the heat came in waves and the road itself was smoking under their boots, and the smoke overhead was black and low and full of sparks, and it was the loudest thing Bryn had ever walked inside. A snag came down. It was a big one, a burned pine on the downhill side, its roots cooked through, and it fell across the road fifty feet ahead of the group, and where it fell a shower of embers went up and the road caught in a line of small fires. Emmet saw it first and shouted and the line stopped, and for a second the whole group stood frozen in the smoke with fire ahead of them and fire to their left and fire catching behind them on the road. "The black, get on the black!" Bryn shouted. "Everyone off the road to the downhill side, onto the burned ground, sit down!" They went. Forty-four people and three dogs sat down in the ash on the burned slope while the snag burned across the road and the embers fell on them and the unburned side of the road began to burn, and Bryn walked the line of them, checking faces, checking feet, counting, counting again. Judd was sitting with his grandfather's coat over his head. The children were sitting in twos with their arms around their knees. Mrs. Caird had her mask on and her eyes open and was breathing. The terrier was quiet. The smoke rolled over them and the ash fell and nobody stood up, because Bryn had told them not to, and they did not stand up. And the fire, having nothing to eat on the burned ground, went around them and up the slope above the road, and left them sitting in the black on the downhill side with the wall of flame moving away, uphill, toward the crest they had come over. Bryn got up and looked down the road, past the burning snag, to where the grade ran out of the timber and into the open and the river valley lay below in the last of the gray, and she said, "It's clear below. On your feet. We walk." They walked down out of the fire into the open, and the air went from black to gray to a strange, flat light, and then they came around a bend and there was the Pellmar River, and there was the road along it, and there were headlights on the road moving toward them, three sets of them, coming fast. ---