by Andrew Pyper
‘This is too stupid for words,’ Jerry McCormack says, his courage dimly flaring.
‘Speaking of stupid, I wanted to ask you about that truck of yours,’ Terry Gray says, addressing Jerry without taking his eyes from Mungo’s. ‘Who did you say you got that loan from?’
Jerry punches Crookedhead, a vicious jab in the shoulder.
‘You told him?’
‘I didn’t say shit!’
‘You say nothing but shit. Well, how’s this,’ Jerry says, turning to Terry and pointing at Crookedhead. ‘This guy has been driving out of town on his own after the bar closes the past couple of weeks. Wandering around in the bush drunk as a donkey, crying for his kid and girlfriend.’
‘Who told you that? Not that it’s true,’ Crookedhead says. And then: ‘What’s wrong with going for a walk? I could say a lot more about you than you could ever—’
‘Shut up,’ Mungo says, quietly, though all of them hear it just the same. ‘You’ve left out King and the chief.’
‘King isn’t here,’ the Mountie says. ‘As for Miles, I’m not sure what I’m going to say about him yet. Any suggestions?’
‘That’s it,’ Mungo says, taking a step out the open door so that one of his legs is bleached with light, the other remaining in the room’s shade. ‘Time’s up. You know, Terry, I could have used my break for a cigarette. Now we might have to wait till tomorrow to have a smoke.’
Jerry McCormack follows Crookedhead James out. Mungo goes after them, but not before he gives Terry Gray a look that he hopes makes his position clear. Don’t. Not a threat. A request between friends. Don’t take this any further.
Terry shrugs. An acknowledgement of his powerlessness in the matter, something Mungo knows well enough himself. Once the worst suspicions are made official, they are as impossible to stop as a fire picked up on the wind.
Chapter 19
It amazes him every time. The way the mountain treeline is so abrupt, the division between the last spruces and the rock as neat as the line between farmers’ crops. Miles walks from one and onto the other. The unfettered wind buffets his chest. Looking straight up the incline, he can clearly see what has caused the burning in his thighs. The wavering path had appeared gentler under the camouflage of shadow. Now, the stretched-out colonnade of the St Cyr hills reveals their steepness. Even his eyes encounter resistance as he pushes them up to squint at the distant ridge.
The trail ahead is little more than a winding staircase of rubble. Centuries of passing goat and Dall sheep have worn smooth hoof-prints into the rock. If he’s right in thinking Margot would have proceeded higher up after the bear attack, this is the way she would have come. He wishes he’d brought his binoculars. Out here, he could look for miles and spot anything that might be making its way over the mountain face.
For the first time, it occurs to Miles that Margot may still be hunting the bear. Whoever survived whatever happened on the avalanche slide would want only to escape. But if Margot is alone, she would be relieved of her responsibilities as guide and be thinking only as a hunter again. If this is the case, her route would be more unpredictable, determined by her prey alone.
Miles looks once more along the treeline pulled straight out in front of him, the forest spilling down from the jaw of stone like a green beard. From this height he can now see the almost solid wall of smoke that separates him from where Ross River would be to the north. Even in the few seconds he watches it surges closer, a grey storm dancing toward him.
When he turns to continue he notices a boulder rolling down the slope. Maybe a mile off. Unmistakably bumping over the stone, the only moving thing he can see aside from the smoke. Miles stops to watch it, expecting it to displace the smaller rocks around it, bringing on a whole new slide. He wonders if it will make enough sound for him to hear.
He waits a second or two before he determines that the boulder moves too slowly for the grade of the hill, staying at the same pace as when he’d first spotted it. He shields his eyes with his hand to sharpen its position.
The boulder is slow because it isn’t a boulder at all. Something that isn’t rolling downhill but walking steadily up toward the ridge.
He can see nothing of its details, but instantly recognizes that it could be neither Margot nor Mrs Bader. There is an element missing from human locomotion, a push-and-pull between head and feet, that makes it clear it is an animal that walks on four legs, not two. The colour is wrong for a goat or sheep or even a dog. And the thing must be big if he can see it at all from this far off.
Miles adjusts his course into as straight a line toward the bear as the rocks permit. A fresh excitement opens his lungs. The sight of the animal confirms he’s going in the right direction. Whether Margot is hunting it or it is hunting Margot, he will eventually come upon them so long as he keeps moving.
A broad gulch opens at his feet. He decides to go straight down and up the other side without taking the extra half-hour he guesses would be required to climb around the top of its cut. For the first twenty yards he manages to keep his balance. But with each step, his weight loosens the stones behind as well as ahead and the ground shimmies under him. He slides the last hundred feet on his ass, the pebbles lacerating the skin through his pants.
To reach the relative flat at the top of the gulch’s side, he has to scramble up the incline using his hands as well as his feet, throwing gravel between his legs. When he gets there he lies on his back, as useless as a turtle flipped upon its shell.
He blinks ahead to locate the bear again, but the mountain has turned white with smoke during his time in the shadowed cleft. The only moving objects he can see now are three figures. No more than a quarter-mile off.
‘Margot!’ he shouts, or tries to shout. It comes out as a bubbly apology, the sound a person makes as they rush to the bathroom to be sick.
It’s easier to get to his feet again and jog after them. As he goes, the peaks on the horizon seem to approach more quickly than the three figures in the middle distance.
Margot walks alone ahead of Tom and Elsie, the two of them clinging to each other as they go. It’s unclear who is helping whom. But Miles can see by the way both sets of their shoulders weave side to side that if it weren’t for the one, the other would fall.
Even as he sees the black smear of Margot’s hair and Mrs Bader’s camouflage scarf around her neck, Miles finds it difficult to believe that there are people here, on this slope, with him. It is a place where you could only be alone. A grizzly on the opposite mountain, a herd of indifferent goats, yes. But not another stumbling soul.
‘Margot!’ he tries again when they are only a hundred yards up from him, and this time it comes out as he intended.
The three stop but don’t turn. Miles keeps scuffling toward them, hands held out as if to catch them if they fall. As he comes close enough to see the trembling in their legs, he stops too.
Maybe they’re dead.
This idea comes out of nowhere, but once it arrives, it bears the weight of certainty. The three figures before him are as dead as the kid. And now they have joined him in populating the bush with zombies.
‘It’s me,’ he says instead of touching them.
At the sound of his voice, Elsie Bader spins her head halfway round. The inside of her mouth a wet pocket in her bloodless face.
‘Jackson?’
‘It’s Miles McEwan, Mrs Bader. We’ve got to—’
‘Jackson!’
The old woman’s shivering turns into an unwholesome dance, a rubbery twisting that leaves her head still facing him. Miles can see no sense in it, or in her.
‘Help me,’ Tom says.
Miles pries Mrs Bader’s fingers off Tom’s shirt before the old woman slumps to the ground, her other hand still clinging to a sleeve.
‘You alone?’ Margot asks. He can’t meet her eyes. He’s never seen her look scared before.
‘Just me.’
‘We found our grizzly.’
‘You sure did.’
>
‘But we’re in some deep shit now.’
‘Well, I’m in it with you. If that’s any consolation.’
It appears it isn’t. She makes no motion to welcome or dismiss him. Miles gazes back the way he’s come. When only smoke shows itself there, he turns again and pretends to be absorbed by something over the others’ shoulders. He runs his eyes along the rock horizon just a few hundred feet away. If Margot, Tom and Mrs Bader have been struggling along in this bowl for as long as he thinks they have, there’s no way they could have seen the bear.
‘Bader took the shots,’ Margot says, her lips squeezed thin. ‘Killed one cub, gut-shot the other. Now she’s up ahead somewhere.’
‘You’re still hunting it?’
‘I’ll shoot her if I see her. But I’m just trying to get us to the other side. Find some water. Wait for a spotter plane. Or you.’
‘You saw me?’
‘I know you.’
Miles tells them his radio has been eighty-sixed. Because he didn’t inform anyone of his route in advance, there would be no search and rescue for them any time soon. Not that there is much in the way of available air resources anyway. Every helo and bush plane within a day of Ross River would be working the fire or the air-vac for the next twenty-four hours, probably longer. If the four of them are going to get off this mountain, it has to be on their own.
Margot and Miles decide that their best option would be to continue up over the crest and down to the fire base on the south side. It will take all night. A difficult hike under ideal conditions, and something approaching impossible with little food or water and Elsie Bader to drag between them. And then there’s the cold. At this elevation, the temperatures regularly sink to freezing within an hour of sunset. They will have no choice but to walk straight through the darkness. So long as Mrs Bader carries at least half her weight, they have a chance of coming within a couple miles of the base by morning.
Far too late, he remembers to ask about Wade.
‘Stupid bastard,’ she says, and he hears how close to emotion she is, thumping up beneath the ice of her closed face. ‘Today of all days he decides he’s going to be the hero.’
‘He tried to save Bader.’
‘I guess that was the plan. But the old man was already—’ She stops at a round of coughing from Mrs Bader. ‘The bear gave him a hell of a swat, is all I know. When I went back to look for him he was gone.’
‘And he wasn’t on the slide when I came through.’
‘You saw what she did?’
‘I saw.’
Miles feels Margot turn away from him. Ducking his head low, he wraps Mrs Bader’s free arm over his neck and lifts her from her knees. Without a word, he pulls her up the slope, the old woman’s sobs turning to grunts of effort. Tom stays close on her other side. He can hear Margot shuffling after them, hiding her tears from his notice.
He closes his eyes against the last of the sun.
By morning, on the other side of the mountain, they will be waiting for him. It’s all he can think of to make his body do what he needs it to. Their faces are all he can see whether his eyes are open or closed.
There are more people in the stands today than for the final game of last year’s softball tournament. Ross River, the host community, had made it all the way against Mayo, mostly on the strength of Jerry McCormack’s hot bat and some favourable umpiring from Terry Gray, who was assigned the task on the wrongful assumption that an officer of the law could be counted on to be objective. Half the Yukon seemed to be here, along with a busload of thirsty Alaskans. Before the game even started the visitors drank the Welcome Inn dry—something the locals alone hadn’t managed after years of strong efforts. In the end, the home team lost. Hardly anyone noticed. For a day, Ross River had been visited by the carnival.
Now, the softball field is surrounded by those waiting to be taken out by air-vac helicopters that have yet to appear. Mungo Capoose circulates among them, trying to look busy, though in fact there is little to do now but wait. There is calm among the evacuees for the moment, though he knows it won’t last long. When the first round of helos come and go, they will figure out how long it’s going to take to clear all of them out. Then Mungo and the fire team will have some real crowd-control duties to tend to.
In the meantime, he searches for King. He hasn’t seen the kid for the past half-hour. Before that, he’d noticed him off on his own behind the dugout, switching his view between the ashen sky and his boots. Now he’s gone. Though Mungo has no specific task in mind for him, it would be nice to know where the hell the kid’s gotten to. Probably off in the woods hugging a tree.
As he looks around he notices Alex’s girl sitting on her own at the end of the bleachers, staring up at the backstop. Mungo walks toward her and waves, but she doesn’t move her eyes. When he looks up he sees a raven chattering down at her. A series of heh-heh-hehs. The laughter of a cartoon villain twirling his moustache.
‘Your mom know you’re here on your own?’ he asks when he sits next to her. The girl shrugs. ‘Where is she?’
‘Mr Raven doesn’t like dogs,’ Rachel says, and for the first time, Mungo notices Miles’s mutt curled up under the bench at the girl’s feet.
‘They’re funny about who they like and don’t like.’
‘Miles said they tell stories.’
‘They sure do. Never shut up. It’s why there’s so many Indian stories about them.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, let’s see. There’s one that has to do with a raven and fire. The world’s first fire, back when the earth was cold,’ Mungo tells her. ‘Lightning started a smoker in a dead tree on an island in the middle of a lake. When they saw it, all the animals got together to try to figure out how they could bring a piece of the fire back to the shore so they could warm up a little.’
‘This is a long time ago,’ Rachel clarifies.
‘Oh yeah. Spirit time. The first fire ever.’
‘When animals could talk.’
‘It weren’t yesterday.’
‘So how’d they touch the fire without getting burned?’
‘It’s a myth. Things don’t always make sense. And there’s a million different versions of each one, so you can never know how the story’s going to turn out.’
‘But you said there’s a raven in it.’
‘There’s definitely a raven in it. He was the first volunteer to fly over to the island and bring back a hot chunk of wood. But when he was circling over the tree, the smoke covered him in soot and turned his feathers black, the same as they are today. Like greased-up coal.’
‘He was white before?’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘He must be scared of it.’
‘The raven’s not scared of shit, pardon my Dutch. He’s a trickster. A shapeshifter. He can turn into different animals—snakes and bears and fish. Even people. Don’t worry about him. He’s not scared of a thing.’
‘I’m scared.’
‘That’s because you’re smart.’
‘Mungo’s not your babysitter, honey,’ Alex says, coming around the corner of the bleachers smacking the bottoms of two apple juice bottles. When she sits next to them, she screws the cap off one and hands it to the girl, who gulps at it before opening her mouth wide and uttering a thunderous belch.
The three of them turn to watch the smoke rising over the hills at the town limits, a rope of knotted whites and greys and blacks. For perhaps an hour it has rested there, growing higher and shrinking again as though catching its breath. But for now, it doesn’t advance any farther toward the town’s apron of forest and buildings. The only remaining fuels for it to consume to the north.
‘I don’t see the fire. Only smoke,’ Alex says.
‘The fire is always the last thing you see.’
‘But it has to come down here sometime.’
Mungo studies the line of hills as though he’d glimpsed a familiar face in a crowd.
‘Mungo?’
‘It’s going to burn this whole valley clean, isn’t it?’
‘They’ll get us out of here before it does.’
As though in rebuttal, even as Mungo speaks, the fire bares its orange teeth over the crest. A dozen crowns fired in spontaneous fury that reminds Alex of telescopic images of the sun, the flares that reach out into space like yearning arms.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispers. She reaches around Rachel’s chest and locks her fingers together.
‘The river’s no good,’ Mungo says in answer to the question he knows Alex is about to ask.
‘Why?’
‘It’s too high, too fast.’
‘But we could stand in it if we had to.’
‘Not for long,’ Mungo says with a sigh that tells Alex he’s already tried it in his head. ‘That water is cold. If you stood up to your knees in it you’d buckle under within two minutes. Step in any further and the current will grab ahold and take you with it.’
‘Look, Momma,’ Rachel says.
Alex searches the riverbank, hoping the girl has spotted something that she’s missed. ‘What, baby? I don’t see anything.’
‘Not there. There.’
Alex swings around to where Rachel is looking. The raven, flapping off its perch on the backstop and toward the fiery ridge.
‘It’s so fast,’ the girl says.
‘That’s right. It’s a fast old bird.’
Mungo and Rachel share a glance that Alex doesn’t notice. He understands that the girl is not speaking of the raven, but the fire.
What a day, Mungo thinks. Not yet four o’clock and he’s already made two promises, one to Miles, one to his girls. This from a man who learned early on that the best way to avoid disappointing others is to teach them to expect nothing of him. And now? Now he’s marching across the infield to find his own family and offer a whole new round of assurances. He hopes that the night is long. Sleep is out of the question now anyway. Mungo has struck a deal with himself. He will let his eyes close only after he sees his word kept in every case he’s offered it.
