Wildlife by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

at your age it does.’
    ‘How old are you,’ I asked because I realized I did not know how old she or my father was.
    ‘Thirty-seven,’ my mother said, and looked at me sharply. ‘Does that seem like the wrong age? Would you like it better if I said fifty? Would that make you feel better?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘Thirty-seven’s all right.’
    ‘Don’t you feel protected enough?’
    ‘I haven’t thought about that, I guess,’ I said.
    ‘I won’t be this age forever,’ she said, ‘so don’t start. It’d just confuse you.’ She smiled and shook her head. I thought she was going to laugh, but she didn’t laugh. She just walked out of the room and off into her own bedroom to get ready to go.
    We drove in our family Plymouth from Great Falls, west along the Sun River and Route 200, out through the towns of Vaughn and Simms and Fort Shaw and Sun River itself, towns on the bottom edge of the wheat land beyond which were the large mountains. The light that evening was clear autumn light, and everything–the stubble, the witch grass edges, the cottonwood flats below the Fairfield bench–was gold and dry, the color of the sun. Ducks were in the river eddies, and now and then I could see a farmer cutting silagerows through his corn stand. It seemed to me an odd time for a fire to go on. Though out ahead of us, beyond the town of Augusta where the mountains commenced, smoke rose like a screen that drifted northward up the front to Canada, thick and white at the bottom but thinner and drifting above, so that as my mother drove us closer and the peaks became hidden by smoke, it came to seem that there were no mountains, and where the dense smoke began the plains and even the world itself came to an end.
    ‘Do you know what they call trees in a forest fire,’ my mother asked as she drove through Augusta, where there were only a few buildings–a hotel and some red bar signs, a service station–and a few people on the sidewalk.
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘Fuel. Trees are fuel. A fox fleeing from a flaming fuel-fed forest fire. Did you ever hear that?’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘It was just a funny joke when I was in college,’ she said. ‘Do you know what they call the trees that’re left up when the fire goes by?’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘The standing dead,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t they have an interesting terminology for things? My father told me all about it. He felt it was broadening.’
    ‘What happens to the animals,’ I asked.
    ‘Oh, they adjust, though the little ones have a hard time. They get confused. Everything happens before they know it. I used to cry about it, but my father said it didn’t help anything. He was right.’
    We drove through Augusta and out onto a dirt road that crossed a creek bottom, then went up into the white smoke. It was going nearer to dark then, and the sun was whitish behind the smoke, and north and south of us the evening sky was red and purple.
    The fire was out ahead, though we couldn’t see flames yet. Along the way, a few cars were stopped on the roadsideand people were standing in the grass or sitting on their car hoods, watching with binoculars or taking pictures. Some had out-of-state tags, and some people were holding flashlights. A few of the cars that had started back had their headlights on.
    ‘It’s a sickening smell,’ my mother said, and cleared her throat. I didn’t know if she knew where we were going. She was just driving into the smoke. ‘People get drawn to it. They don’t want it to be over.’
    ‘Why?’ I said, watching up onto the hillside. As the creek bottom grew narrower, I could see small individual yellow fires and longer lines of fire in the dark with barely distinguishable human figures moving in the trees.
    ‘Oh, I guess.’ My mother seemed annoyed. ‘I guess they think something worse is happening someplace else, so they’re better off with a tragedy they already know. It’s not a generous thought.’
    ‘Maybe that’s not