off their ends so that, for the first minute, there is no sound but a chorus of pissing.
The she-grizzly slowly rises. Her nose stretched high, the tip of a shaggy antenna. When she is standing at her full height, towering ten feet over her cubs, she swivels her head and takes in so many small sniffs that, when she exhales, it comes out in a grunt. With eyes closed she holds herself still. Her nostrils stretched wide, tasting the new, almost undetectable breeze from the south.
The sow recognizes something in it that her cubs have never smelled before. The odour of a danger equal to the burnt-butter stink of men.
She smells smoke.
As she steps toward him, Miles notices how the child’s knees poke out below the hem of her dress, one and then the other, like turtle’s heads. It’s been so long since he’s seen a girl of her age in a dress that it looks like a costume to him. Among the details he’s lost hold of in the last few years are holidays—what dates they fall on and whether the Raven Nest Grocery will be closed on account of it. Because of this, and because of the dress, Miles has an idea that the girl is about to pull a pillowcase from behind her back and demand ‘Trick or treat!’
The Welcome Inn drinkers lift their heads to take a measure of the newcomers, studying the woman and girl without the reluctance to stare that one finds elsewhere. All of them notice how the woman’s eyes don’t move about the room. Instead, she raises her chin half an inch and peers straight ahead. It may be a way of seeing into the dark, or a gesture of confirmation, or fearlessness. Whether reflex or signal, she steps forward with her face lifted to them, which allows everyone to note the length of her neck as well as the colour of her eyes, green as quarry water.
The woman and girl breach the invisible circle usually afforded the fire supervisor and stand within handshaking range, though no hand is offered. Miles inhales and takes them in. A flavouring of citronella insect repellent and sweat.
‘Rachel,’ the woman says, pulling the child forward to stand in front of her. ‘This is Miles.’
The man with the scarred face and the girl in the strawberry dress nod at each other, once, at the same time.
If forest firefighters are asked why, among all the kinds of physical labour a person might do for money, they chose this particularly wilting, occasionally life-threatening work, the answer offered more than any other is that they love it. More odd is that if they are then asked to substantiate this love, they will have little, if anything, to offer. Most end up shrugging. Always the same shrug, one that makes it clear that there is no single reason they could state and at the same time believe to be true.
Miles thought he might have been slightly different on this count. He loved the job no less than the other men and women he has worked with, but he believed that in his case he could take a stab at explaining why.
‘Fire isn’t like us,’ he would tell Alex when she asked what he saw when he came closest to the flames. ‘It never forgives.’
Sometimes, when he watched how a low, desultory smoker would tiptoe far enough along to touch off a dry thicket, Miles could see himself in the orange spirals, his own hunger devouring the arthritic limbs. He had heard fires described as cruel but he never saw them that way. What he recognized instead was how they were destructive only because they could be, the flames liberated by perfect indifference. Even before he was burned, he had this same talent himself.
This is why he’d come to this place out of all the end-of-the-world places he could have run to. There was nobody here that he knew, to remind him of who he was. Nobody he’d made a promise to or ever would. And there was fire.
For a while, though, he considered other options. For the better part of his first year on the road, driving from prairie town to prairie town across Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, Montana, Alberta and back again in a flat, pointless circle, he thought about bartending. He was spending most of every night in bars at the time anyway, and could see himself on the other side of the divide, pulling the taps and free pouring the rye, keeping an eye on the loudmouths and, when need be, directing the worst of them out the door with the end of his boot. There wouldn’t be much trouble on his shifts, at any rate. He found that the scars did a lot to maintain order all on their own. There was a warning in the marks on his cheek that common, hayseed pugilists had to take into consideration. But even with all of these qualifications, Miles knew he wouldn’t last a week. It wouldn’t be the job, but the temptation to talk. He might be invited to barbecues or bowling tournaments or waitresses’ rented rooms, and be asked questions that, over time, he would allow himself to answer.
For these reasons, Miles knew that if he wanted to run away he’d have to come back to fires. To his surprise, this was fine with him. Even after what had happened he still loved them, his dreams recalling the purposeful digging at the feet of a blaze he’d arrived at early enough to contain at least as often as the Mazko River blowup, the one fire he had ever been caught in. Alex knew all of this about him. It was the only clue that, once he was gone, she believed might lead her to him. And now it has.
‘Have you been here the whole time? In this town, I mean?’
They are the first words either of them has spoken since they walked out of the Welcome Inn. The sun had not yet surrendered to the reach of the hills, and there was enough light left in the evening sky to blind them. For the first few minutes the three of them could only shuffle, stunned, through the gravel streets.
‘Ross River,’ Miles says.
That’s it. I saw the name on the sign.’
‘Five years.’
‘You must like it.’
‘Five years isn’t that long.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Not so long that you have to like where you spent them.’
Alex and Miles walk with their heads down, the girl running ahead and back again like a herd dog, circling behind and nudging their calves. They take the road down to the river, past the tiny, unpainted church, with its steeple of shining aluminum. Beyond it, they find the path through the empty lot where Lloyd’s Gas & Tackle once was. Miles glances up at the one remaining pump standing crooked, its glass face cracked, and sees it as a bespectacled man struggling to his feet after a beating.
When they reach the banks of the Pelly they watch the lengthening curls and peek-a-boo whirlpools of the current. The water heavy as oil, a glinting purple that conceals its depths. There are no sounds except for the buzz of the first mosquitoes awakening from the reeds, along with the river’s gulps and spits.
In the absence of words, Miles feels the first tickles of the moment’s strangeness. It seems to him that the woman and girl stand unnecessarily close, and a flurry of options occur to him. He might fall to his knees and explode into tears. Beg forgiveness. He might swing out his arms and knock them back.
All he can think of to hold off some show of madness is to keep talking. He tells them of how, last summer, he had been standing where they are now watching Margot play fetch with her dog, Missie. Over and over Margot would throw a stick out, and each time Missie would leap in, snatching it and cutting back to shore. Once, Margot threw the stick ten feet farther than before. Missie splashed into the swirls. This time, when she turned around with the stick in her mouth, the current grabbed her from
