When We Were Wolves by Jon Billman Read Free Book Online

bitch.” And he’ll do it.
    The Mormons will talk prophetically of select revelations, earthquakes, and visions. And I will be as alone as I have ever felt.

    But if you could have been around Hams Fork a hundred and fifty years ago, and passed through the landscape as a beaver-trappingtough with Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith, before coal barons, before Mormons, soda ash, and oil, before you could stand outside and watch satellites pass through the night sky or silhouettes kissing in warm apartment windows, when this history was wild and new, you could have just pointed and named something of permanence, a mountain, a river—at least a creek—after yourself. Or they would have named it for you, a permanent mark, just for being here.
    Wayne Kerr will continue to shake this little town like a ball bearing in a paint can.

urt Strain was being sent to a ghost fire. The Monday before Thanksgiving he received orders from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise to act as Incident Commander on a large project fire in the Sioux Ranger District of the Custer National Forest, Camp Crook, South Dakota. He had just returned home to Wyoming from a controlled burn to manage chaparral in central California, thinking his season over. Global warming, he thought. A swamp fire in the South maybe, but South Dakota? Custer Complex, the fire the computer was sending him to now, had burned two years before. Now the Custer Complex was cold as a file cabinet: sixty thousand acres of charred snags, ash, and snow.
    They sent resources anyway; the computer had the final word. Logistical arrangements had already been made before the situation could be confirmed by a staff or committee of human beingsin the brass echelons of Forest Service management, several of whom were halfway through double Johnnie Walker Reds and a tray of stuffed mushrooms at the Occidental Grill in Washington, D.C., when the order went out. Strain was a computer ghost himself now because the computer was the only commander that kept track of his whereabouts. But he was a good firefighter and he had experience. The season should have been over for him, but instead he was being called to an old fire that had burned out two years ago; he didn’t know this, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. Strain wondered how much longer he would be able to put up with the bureaucracy. He repacked his fire gear, including the six-weight Orvis Western Traveler fly rod and box of nymphs and drys; he planned on digging in.

    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 onthe 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