第5章 Embers Over Dunlin Creek

The spotting began again at dusk, and this time it came to the town. Bryn was on the school roof when it started. She had gone up there with Tova and a pair of binoculars to get a line of sight over the smoke to the ridge, and the smoke had thinned for a moment at sunset, the way it sometimes did when the day's convection collapsed, and for a few minutes she could see the fire's head clearly on the far crest, a bright ragged line in the last light. She watched the embers come off it. They rose in a loose column, hundreds of them, and the upper wind took them and bent them east and drove them out over the drainage in a long bright ribbon that crossed the sky above the town and began, patiently, to fall. "Get down," Bryn said. "Radio." They got down. By the time they reached the truck, the first embers were landing on the ballfield, tiny points of orange that glowed for a second on the grass and died. Then more. Then enough that the field began to look like a thing with a fever, points of light winking out wherever the grass was too green or the sprinklers had been running, holding and growing wherever the grass was cured and dry. "Call it in," Bryn said, and Tova called it in, and Bryn drove. She drove east along Dunlin Creek, following the embers, because the embers were the best forecast she had, a live map of where the fire wanted to go. They landed on roofs and in gutters. They landed in a pile of dry firewood behind a shed and Bryn stopped the truck and kicked the pile apart with her boots and stomped the embers out, and the wood beneath was already black at the edges and smoking. They landed in the dry grass of a ditch and she watched a spot the size of a dinner plate take hold and begin to move, crawling into the cheatgrass, and she put it out with the truck's water can and stood over it breathing hard. "Two miles," Tova said. "At least two miles. Maybe more." "At least two." Bryn looked up. The ribbon of embers was still coming, and it had gotten wider. "That's the number command doesn't believe. They've got the old spotting table in the plan, the one that says a mile and a half on a bad day. This is past the table. This is a pyroCb dropping fire out of a thunderstorm." A call came over the radio from a division on the east flank. Spot fire, half an acre, in the timber above the road. Then another, from the dozer boss down the valley: spot fire on the far side of Coldbrook, moving into the grass. Then Junia, on her phone, patched through by Gerta: smoke on the roof of the co-op, and would somebody come look. "Tova, take the truck, go to the co-op." Bryn pulled her pack onto her shoulders. "I'll take the creek side on foot. If the co-op catches, that's the grain elevator and the whole north end of town. If the creek side catches we lose the road." "Bryn—" "Go. We don't have a crew for every spot, so we become the crew." Bryn handed her the radio. "Channel four. Call if you get more than one." Tova went, and Bryn went the other way, jogging along the ditch with a Pulaski on her shoulder and a water can in her hand, and for the next hour she fought fire the way a person fights fire when there is almost no one to fight it with, which is to say badly and constantly and on the run. She caught three spots before they were a room in size. She missed one, and it grew into a hundred-foot finger of flame climbing a cottonwood, and she used her last water on it and then used dirt, kicking and shoveling and beating at the roots with the flat of the tool, and it went out and stayed out. A woman came out of a house with a garden hose and helped her on the fourth, and a boy on a bicycle with a two-gallon pump sprayer worked the edge of the fifth, and between them they kept the creek side from catching. At full dark the wind died and the embers thinned and finally stopped, the ribbon closing up like a wound, and the town sat in a hush with small smokes rising all around it, each one a fire that somebody had caught in time or that had caught itself on ground too green to burn. Bryn walked back to the school with her clothes scorched and her arms trembling, and found Tova sitting on the tailgate of the truck with a blistered glove in her lap. "Co-op's fine," Tova said. "Gutter fire. I got it with the ladder and the can. Junia's husband was on the roof with a leaf blower, which I told him was a terrible idea, and he did it anyway, and it worked." "Does it always work?" "No," Tova said. "It worked tonight." Bryn sat down on the tailgate beside her. Across the valley, up on the ridge, the fire glowed in the dark, a low red line under the smoke, and above it the plume still rose, and inside the plume the pale light still flickered, the lightning going on and on in a storm that had nowhere to be but over its own fire. "Do you think they believe us now?" Tova asked. Bryn thought about Rennick at the board, and Cassia with her clipboard, and the young man with the beer. "Some of them," she said. "The ones who saw the embers land. Embers are hard to argue with." She looked at the flickering light in the cloud. "That's the part I can't make them see. Tonight was the warning shot. Tomorrow the storm over the fire stops behaving like a storm and starts behaving like a bellows. When it does, the distance between the fire and this town gets small very fast." "How small?" "I'll know better in the morning." Bryn slid off the tailgate and stood. "What I know now is that the fire has shown me its reach. It can put embers over this valley tonight. Tomorrow it will be able to put fire over it." ---