Nobody wanted to go fast. It was nice among the big trees, and the smoke in the air was less, though they could still smell it and it made the sun dim. They found a little stream, clear and sweet, untainted by ashes. They drank and washed all the mud and soot out of their fur. Everybody felt much better.
He began hearing aircar sounds again, very far away, but many of them, and also machinery sounds. Pappy Vic and his friends must have come and brought machines to help them put out the fire. He remembered all the things he had seen at Yellowsand, how they were digging off the whole top of the mountain. They would have no trouble putting out a fire even as big as this one. He wanted to go in the direction of the sounds, but he knew that the fire was between.
The ground sloped up, but his compass told him that they were still going south; it seemed to him that the land should slope down in that direction. Then they came to the top of a hill. When they went forward they could see a lake ahead and below, a very wide lake. They stopped at the edge of a cliff, higher than the highest house in Wonderful Place, as high as the middle terrace of Pappy Ben’s house in Big House Place, and right at the bottom with no beach at all was the lake.
“Not go down there,” Lame One said. “Not even if foot not hurt. Too far, nothing to hold to, not climb.”
“Go down, get in water,” Stabber said.
“Water deep down there. Always deep, place like that,” Wise One added.
Other She looked apprehensively at the great round clouds of smoke rising to the north.
“Maybe fire come this way. Maybe this not good place.”
He was beginning to think so himself. The fire had stopped at the long-ago-burned place, but he didn’t know what it was doing at the other side. Still, he didn’t want to leave this place. It was high, and the trees were not too many. If somebody came over the lake in an aircar, they could see and come for them. He said so.
“Why not come now?” Other She asked. “Not see Big One flying things anywhere.”
“Not know we here. All work hard put out fire. Is always-so thing with Big Ones; hear about fire in woods, go with machines to put out.”
He opened his pouch to see how much tobacco he had left. He had been careful not to waste it, but it had been two hands, ten, days ago since he fell in the river. There was only a little, but he filled the pipe and lit it, passing it around. Stabber, who hadn’t liked it before, thought he would try it again. He coughed on the first puff, but after that he said he liked it.
When there was nothing left in the pipe but ashes, he put it away, and then looked to the north. There was much more smoke, and it was closer. The sound of the fire could be heard now, and once he thought he could see it over the tops of the trees. The others were becoming frightened.
“Where go?” Fruitfinder was almost wailing. “Is far down, water close, water deep.” He pointed to the east. “And more fire there. We not go anywhere fire not be.”
He was afraid Fruitfinder was right, but that was not a good way to talk. Soon everyone would be frightened, and frightened people did foolish things. Being frightened was a good way to make dead. He looked to the east where the cliff ended in a promontory that jutted out into the lake. It was hard to tell; far-off things always looked little, but he thought it was less high there. For one thing, smoke was blowing past it out over the lake.
“Not so far down that way,” he said. “Maybe can get down to water; fire not come down.”
Nobody else knew what to do, so nobody argued. To the north, he could now see much fire above the trees. Krisa-mitee, he thought, now makes sunnabish treetop fire; this is bad! They all hurried along the top of the cliff, near the edge. Once they came to a place where a piece of the cliff had slid down into the lake; it looked like the place where Pappy Vic’s friends had been digging at Yellowsand, where they had found no shining stones and stopped, and where he had gone down into the deep place. They all ran around it and kept on. By this time the fire was close; it was a treetop fire, and burning things were falling and making fires under it on the ground.
He thought, Maybe this is where Little Fuzzy make dead!
He didn’t want to die. He wanted to go back to Pappy Jack.
Then he stopped short. He was sure of it. This was where Little Fuzzy and Wise One and Stabber and Lame One and Fruitfinder and Stonebreaker and Big She and Other She and Carries-Bright-Things would all make dead.
In front of them was a deep-down split in the ground, down as far as the cliff itself, and at the bottom of it a stream rushed out into the lake, fast and foam-white. He looked to the left; it went as far as he could see. Behind, the fire roared toward them. It seemed to be making its own wind; he didn’t know fire could do that. Bits of flaming stuff were being swirled high into the air; some were falling halfway to them from the fire and starting little fires for themselves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE SMOKE OF the fire wasn’t visible at all when Jack Holloway came in. Yellowsand looked quiet from the air, the diggings empty of equipment and deserted. Every machine must have been shifted north and west to the fire. He saw a few people around the fenced-in flint cracking area, mostly in CZC Police uniform. The Zebralope was gone, probably sent off for reinforcements. He set the car down in front of the administration hut, and half a dozen men advanced to meet him. Luther McGinnis, the superintendent; Stan Farr, the personnel man; Jose Durrante, the forester; Harry Steefer. He and Gerd got out; the two ZNPF troopers in the front seat followed them.
“We have Mr. Grego on screen now,” McGinnis said. “He’s in his yacht, about halfway from Alpha; he has a load of fire-fighting experts with him. You know what he thinks?”
“The same as I do; I was talking to him. Little Fuzzy got careless dumping out his pipe. I have to watch that myself, and I’ve been smoking in the woods longer than he has.”
Gerd was asking just where the fire was.
“Show you,” McGinnis said. “But if you think it really was Little Fuzzy, how in Nifflheim did he get way up there?”
“Walked.” Jack gave his reasons for thinking so while they were going toward the but door. “He probably thought he was going up the Yellowsand till he got up to the lakes.”
There was a monster military-type screen rigged inside, fifteen feet square; in it a view of the fire, from around five thousand feet, rotated slowly as the vehicle on which the pickup was mounted circled over it. He’d seen a lot of forest fires, helped fight most of them. This one was a real baddie, and if it hadn’t been for the big river and the lakes that clustered along it like variously shaped leaves on a vine, it would have been worse. It was all on the north side, and from the way the smoke was blowing, the water-barriers had stopped it.
“Wind must have done a lot of shifting,” he commented.
“Yes.” That was the camp meteorologist. “It was steady from the southwest last night; we think the fire started sometime after midnight. A little before daybreak, it started moving around, blowing more toward the north, and then it backed around to the southwest where it had come from. That was general wind, of course. In broken country like that, there are always a lot of erratic ground winds. After the fire started, there were convection currents from the heat.”
“Never can trust the wind in a fire,” he said.
“Hey, Jack! Is that you?” a voice called. “You just get in?”
He turned in the direction of the speaker whence it came, saw Victor Grego in bush-clothes in one of the communication screens, with a background that looked like an air-yacht cabin.
“Yes. I’m going out and have a look as soon as I find out where. I have a couple more cars on the way, George Lunt and some ZNPF, and three lorries full of troopers and construction men following. I didn’t bring any equipment. All we have is light stuff, and it’d take four or five hours to get it here on its own contragravity.”
Grego nodded. “We have plenty of that. I’ll be getting in around 1430; I probably won’t see you till you get back in. I hope the kid
did start it, and I hope he didn’t get caught in it afterward.”
So did Jack. Be a hell of a note, getting out of Yellowsand River alive and then getting burned in this fire. No, Little Fuzzy was too smart to get caught.
He looked at other screens, views transmitted in from vehicles over the fire-lines — bulldozers flopping off contragravity in the woods and snorting forward, sending trees toppling in front of them; manipulators picking them up as they fell and carrying them away; draglines and scoops dumping earth and rock to windward. People must have been awfully helpless with a big fire before they had contragravity. They’d only gotten onto this around noon, and they’d have it all out by sunset; he’d read about old-time forest-fires that had burned for days.
“These people all been warned to keep an eye out for a Fuzzy running around?” he asked McGinnis.
“Yes, that’s gone out to everybody. I hope he’s alive and out of danger. We’ll have a Nifflheim of a time finding him after the fire’s out, though.”
“You may have a Nifflheim of a time putting out the next fire he starts. He may have started this one for a smoke signal.” He turned to Durrante. “How much do you know about that country up there?”
“Well, I’ve been out with survey crews all over it.” That meant, at a couple of thousand feet. “I know what’s in there.”
“Okay. Gerd and I are going out now. Suppose you come along. Where do you think this started?”
“I’ll show you.” Durrante led them to a table map, now marked in different shadings of red. “As nearly as I can figure, in about here, along the north shore of this lake. The first burn was along the shore and up this run; that was while the wind was still blowing northeast. It was burning all over here, and here, when the Zebralope sighted it, but that was after the wind shifted. We didn’t get a car to the scene till around 1030, and by that time this area was burned out, nothing but snags burning, and there was a hell of a crown-fire going over this way. This part here is an old burn, fire started by lightning maybe fifteen years ago. There was nobody on this continent north of the Big Bend then. The fire hasn’t gotten in there at all. This hill is all in bluegums; that’s where the latest crown-fire’s going.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
They went out to the car. Gerd took the controls; the forester got in beside him. Jack took the back seat, where he could look out on both sides.
“Hand my rifle back to me,” he said. “I’ll want it if I get out to look around on foot.”
The forester lifted it out of the clips on the dashboard; it was the 12.7-mm double. “Good Lord, you lug a lot of gun around,” he said, passing it back.
“I may have a lot of animal to stop. You run into a damnthing at ten yards, seven thousand foot-pounds isn’t too much.”
“N-no,” Durrante agreed. “I never used anything heavier than a 7-mm, myself.” He never bothered with a rifle at a fire; animals, he said, never attacked when running away from a fire.
Now, there was the kind of guy they make angels out of. That was all he knew about damnthings; a scared damnthing would attack anything that moved, just because it was scared. Some human people were like that too.
They came in over the lakes a trifle above the point where the fire was supposed to have started and let down on the black and ash-powdered shore. A lot of snags, some large, were still burning. They were damn good things to stay away from. He saw one sway and fall in a cloud of pink spark, powdered dust, and smoke. He climbed out of the car, broke the double express, and slipped in two of the thumb-thick, span-long cartridges, snapping it shut and checking the safety. Wouldn’t be anything alive here, but he hadn’t lived to be past seventy by taking things for granted. Durrante, who got out with him, had only a pistol. If he stayed on Beta, maybe he wouldn’t get to be that old.
It was Durrante who spotted the little triangle of unburned grass between the mouth of the run and the lake. At the apex a tree had been burned off at the base and the branches lopped off with something that had made not quite rectilinear cuts — a little flint hatchet, maybe. The fire had started on both sides of it, eight feet from the butt. He let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. Up to this, he had only hoped Little Fuzzy had gotten out of the river alive and started the fire; now he knew it.
“He wasn’t trying to make a signal-fire,” he said. “He was building himself a raft.” He looked at the log. “How the devil did he expect to get that into the water, though? It’d take half a dozen Fuzzies to roll that.”
Under a couple of blackened and still burning snags he found what was left of Little Fuzzy’s camp, burned branches mixed with the powdery ash of grass and fern-fronds; a pile of ash that showed traces of having been coils of rope made from hair-roots. He found bones which frightened him until he saw that they were all goofer and zarabunny bones. Little Fuzzy hadn’t gone hungry. Durrante found a lot of flint, broken and chipped, a flint spearhead and an axehead, and, among some tree-branch ashes, another axehead with fine beryl-steel wire around it and the charred remains of an axe-helve.
“Little Fuzzy was here, all right. He always carried a spool of wire around with him.” He slung his rifle and got out his pipe and tobacco. Gerd had brought the car to within a yard of the ground and had his head out the open window beside him. He handed the remains of the axe up to him. “What do you think, Gerd?”
“If you were a Fuzzy and you woke up in the middle of the night with the woods on fire, what would you do?” Gerd asked.
“Little Fuzzy knows a few of the simpler principles of thermodynamics. I think he’d get out in the water as far as he could and sit tight till the fire was past, and then try to get to windward of it. Let’s go up along the lake shore first.”
Gerd set the car down and they got in. Jack didn’t bother unloading the big rifle. West of the little run, the whole country was burned, but that must have happened after the wind backed around. The lake narrowed into the river; the river twisted and widened into another lake, with a ground-fire going furiously on the left bank. Then they came to a promontory jutting into the water a couple of hundred feet high. On top of it a crown-fire was just before burning out, with a ground-fire raging behind it. They passed a narrow gorge, just a split in the cliff, with a stream tumbling out of it. Things were burning on both sides of it on the top.
He had the window down and was peering out; a little beyond the gorge he heard the bellowing of some big animal in agony — something the fire had caught and hadn’t quite killed. He shoved the muzzle of the 12.7-double out the window.
“See if you can see where it is, Gerd. Whatever it is, we don’t want to leave it like that.”
“I see it,” Gerd said, a moment later. “Over where that chunk slid out of the cliff.”
Then he saw it. It was a damnthing, a monster, with a brow-horn long enough to make a walking stick and side-horns as big as sickles. It had blundered into a hollow, burned and probably blinded, and fallen, until its body caught on a point of rock. The sounds it was making were like nothing he had ever heard a damnthing make before; it was a frightful pain.
Kneeling on the floor, he closed his sights on the beast’s head just below an ear that was now a lump of undercooked meat, and squeezed. He’d been a little off balance; the recoil almost knocked him over: When he looked again, the damnthing was still.
“Move in a little, Gerd. Back a bit.” He wanted to be sure, and with a damnthing the only way to be sure was shoot it again. “I think it’s dead, but…”
Somewhere a whistle blew shrilly, then blew again and again.
“What the hell?” Gerd was asking.
“Why, it’s in the middle of that fire!” Durrante cried. “Nothing could live in there.”
Wanting to get as much for his cartridge and his pounded shoulder as he could, he aimed at the damnthing’s head and let off the left barrel with another thunderclap report. The body jerked from the impact of the bullet and nothing else.
“It’s up that gorge. I told you Little F
uzzy knows a few of the rudiments of thermodynamics. He’s down under the head, sitting it out. You think you can get the car in there?”
“I can get her in. I’ll probably have to get her out straight up, though, through the fire, so have everything shut when I do.”
They inched into the gorge. Twenty-five width would have been plenty, if it had been straight. It wasn’t, and there were times when it looked like a no-go. Ahead, the whistle was still blowing, and he could hear calls of “Pappy Jack! Pappy Jack!” in several voices, he realized, while the whistle was blowing. And there was yeeking. Little Fuzzy had picked up a gang; that was how he was going to get that log into the water.
“Hang on, Little Fuzzy!” he shouted. “Pappy Jack come!”
There was a nasty scraping as Gerd got the patrol car around a corner. Then he saw them. Nine of them, by golly. Little Fuzzy, still wearing his shoulder bag, and eight others. One had a foot bandaged in what looked like a zarabunny skin. A couple had flint tipped spears and flint axes, the heads bound on with wire. They were all clinging to an outthrust ledge, halfway down to the water.
Gerd got the car down. Jack opened the door and reached out, pulling the nearest Fuzzy into the car. It was a female, with an axe. She clung to it as he got her into the car. He picked up the one with the bandaged foot and got him in, handing him forward and warning Durrante to be careful of the foot. Little Fuzzy was next; he was saying, “Pappy Jack! You did come!” and then, “And Pappy Gerd!” Then he shouted encouragement to the others outside until they were all in the car.
“Now, we all go to Wonderful Place,” Little Fuzzy was saying. “Pappy Jack take care of us. Pappy Jack friend of all Fuzzies. You see what I tell.”
HE SAW GREGO’S maroon and silver air-yacht grounded by the administration hut as they came in. Gerd, in front, had already called in the rescue of Little Fuzzy and eight other assorted Fuzzies. There was a crowd; he saw Grego and Diamond in front. Gerd set down the car and Durrante got out carrying the burned-foot case. He opened the rear door and waited for the other survivors to pile out under their own power. Those who could speak audibly — Little Fuzzy seemed to have been teaching them to talk like Big Ones — wanted to know if this place Hoksu-Mitto. They were given an ovation, Diamond rushing forward as soon as he saw his friend. Then they were all herded into the camp hospital.
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