The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online

crew stand at the crest looking at the Mazko a half mile below and the four or five dozing spot fires where the gulch’s walls meet. The slope down is steep, but they should be able to get to the fires and back up again without climbing gear or ropes. What will slow them are the loose pieces of shale scattered over the hillside, black diamonds of sharp armour like the scales of a serpent buried just below the surface. Although there is usually some debate surrounding an initial suggestion’s merits, the kid’s first try sticks without question. The Dragon’s Back.
    Miles is reluctant to touch the dragon’s skin at all. It is one of the first principles of firefighting to avoid cutting line partway down a hill with the fire below. Better to come at it from the lower point and push it higher, the entry in this case being the banks of the river. But when Milesradioes the fire manager, he is told to continue down the slope and fight from above.
    ‘Get a jump on it and it’s simple as pissing in an ashtray,’ the manager says.
    It’s not in Miles’s nature to argue, and his men are so bored with the disappointments of a fireless season that some are already sidestepping into the gulch, shouting jokes about taking long enough to make it down that they might be in line for some overtime. Miles, on the other hand, tells himself it will have to be quick. The longer they stay down there, the more chances there are to be surprised.
    When their eyes begin to sting from the smoke, their cheeks freckled with ash, Miles looks back at the crest and judges it to be about four hundred yards up. Next, he does a size-up of what they have to face: a few spot fires, all more than twenty feet apart, licking at green stalks of cheat grass and fescue. Off to the side, a small patch of oak scrub stands untouched. They’ll take the smokers one by one and get them early enough that they won’t have to cut any fireline. Miles doesn’t want to give it that much room to play.
    ‘Split up in threes,’ Miles tells them. ‘Pick one and hot-spot it. When it’s done, hustle on to the next. By noon, the sun is going to roast us like turkeys down here.’
    The day is already showing temperatures that are well above average, and the valley walls only contain the heat, the shale a million dark mirrors magnifying the sun on their backs. Still, for thefirst half-hour, the men go at their labours with something near joy, the simple pleasure of cutting the earth with the blades of their pulaskis singing up the muscles in their arms. They complain about the work when they aren’t working, but now that they are, they bury the smoke in purposeful contentment.
    The kid is the first to hear it.
    Less a sound than its absence. Nothing like the silence that can sometimes visit a crew in the way a break in the conversations around a dinner table can leave a room in an accidental quiet. What the kid hears is not an interruption but an end. It makes him think of the project he submitted to his highschool science fair. A perfect vacuum. The demonstration involved sucking away all the air in an empty fish tank, an invisible violence taking place within. Now it’s like he’s inside the tank, looking out.
    ‘The fuck was that?’ he asks nobody in particular, but Miles hears the question. And now that his attention has been called to it, he can hear what the kid hears too. Unlike the kid, he knows exactly what it is.
    ‘Let’s move out!’ Miles shouts, circling his arm over his head, directing the men up the hill.
    For a time, they only look at him. They’ve just arrived, the spot fires not halfway to being buried. It seems the new foreman is something of a joker. One of the crew acknowledges Miles’s gestures with a honking laugh, and the rest of the men except the kid join him in it.
    ‘I’m not kidding. Take your shit and haul it on up.’
    ‘Quittin’ time already, boss?’ the first of the laughers shouts back.
    ‘We’re not quitting. We’re