A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

  To the north now, on the mid-forenoon horizon, Beidermann saw thin gray skeins like wisps of river fog in autumn. They lay off toward Schneider’s place—unlucky Schneider. The plain that inclined for miles in that direction dipped enough to hide signs of Schneider’s buildings—if that was where the smoke came from.

  He was as edgy as the mare now, uncertain whether to go on to old Praeger’s place to fetch the boys for help on his irrigation flue, or turn aside and ride down to where the river bowed west, to see what was down there.

  It seemed to him unlikely that the fire had hit Schneider’s place or even come close: there would have been some alarm—shots fired, riders afield. But it was quiet on all sides, except for the whistle of the wind and the mare’s blowing.

  Now the few gray wisps he had glimpsed tattered in the wind, and he watched to see if they would reappear. The odor of smoke faded, too, and the mare calmed down. Beidermann waited, looking down the long slope. . . .

  IF IT WAS what it looked like, Schneider could file another notch in his bad luck streak. Two years in a row. Last fall, no more than two miles south, Beidermann had helped one of Schneider’s boys drag a fresh-split steer across a tenacious seam of fire that moved through the blue-stem grass nearly as fast as the horses—with a rope from each saddle-horn tied to a rear leg of the cadaver—could haul the bleeding baggage. He’d grabbed one of Krupp’s ponies, having left his team tied far downwind to hasten afoot when he spied Krupp and Schneider and his two boys slapping gunnysacks to no effect on the furious blaze. When the worst of it was knocked down and he had cut his rope from what was left of the steer rather than knock through the crusted blood to find the knot, he turned the horse back to Krupp. The stunned beast hobbled away with charred and stinking hooves: a near cripple ever since, grumbled Krupp, who, even though the flames weren’t near his place that time, came away a two-way loser: a crippled horse; and it was his steer that young Clarence Schneider had shot, it being the nearest and fattest. It took a while before old Schneider, distracted as he was by the loss of his last hay cutting, remembered to make up Krupp’s loss, Krupp carping all the while, of course.

  Although he told no one, Beidermann suffered a loss of his own in that fire: his wool britches grew so overheated that the threads in the seams turned to fluff, and at home that night when he stretched to get off his horse, damned if his pants didn’t fall half to pieces. . . .

  He had come up on that fire while on his way to the Widow Jenssen’s place—just as this time he was headed for Praeger’s: best he stay home in fire season—and by the time they’d knocked it down, the forenoon was completely shot for plowing the Widow’s new firebreak, as he had promised to do. Years before, her late husband, Swede, had put one in, but the Widow worried that it was too narrow and too close to the house anyway, what with the fires getting more and bigger every year. Beidermann offered to expand it, an easy job for his big team; for although the Widow and her girls, with the help of one drunken hired man or another, did most of the work on her place, sod-breaking was one thing she traded for.

  Although it was too late for Beidermann to do the job that day, he came to do it two days later, bringing with him a few yards of brown cloth he had traded for in the spring with a peddler out of Minot who needed shoes on the shambling gelding that pulled his high-sided wagon, which reminded Beidermann of his mother’s old kitchen cupboard, but on wheels. . . . From that stiff material the Widow had sewn him a pair of pants nicer than the ones he’d burned off in Schneider’s fire. . . .

  . . .

  THE SMOKE HAD DISAPPEARED. Beidermann saw only the cloudless sky. He pulled the black mare around, onto the path toward old Praeger’s place, and set off, the suspect piece of landscape over his left shoulder: he kept glancing back, but there was nothing but miles of downward slope.

  There could be good reason there was nothing to see now, he thought: in the first place, it might not have been a fire he’d seen. . . . Or even if it was, it had burned itself out, having started in some area without grass enough to sustain it. . . . Or perhaps Schneider or someone had already knocked it down. . . . Or it was Schneider’s boys firing up an old straw stack or heap of this-tles. . . . Or it might be some old line cabin or wood fence set afire by renegade Indians—there was always talk of that possibility, although he hadn’t seen any of it.

  For a half-mile or more, casting a look back from time to time, he went along toward Praeger’s. He knew how fickle those bastard fires could be. In one, the smoke might carry from one horizon to another, warning everyone for miles to wet down the chicken-house roof and bury the family Bible in the root cellar. In another, it might sneakily hide itself, and a man might look up from hoeing his potatoes and a dozen rods away discover his whole wheat field afire, so close he could feel the heat against his head.

  Or a man’s animals by queer behavior might give him warning—or they might not. Beidermann recalled a time cutting hay when the smell of smoke was strong in his nostrils, and he tied up his team to run to the top of the nearby bluff for a look. Unalarmed, his horses dozed in the cottonwood shade; and presently he found that he had smelled smoke from an old put-out fire, far off, that no one need worry about anymore. It seemed to him that his horses had known that from the start. . . .

  His dogs, however, were as good at warning of fire as they were at everything; it hardly mattered what. Any tiny noise brought the pair of them instantly awake and on their feet; and even anything unheard by Beidermann which somehow intruded on their sleep would cause one eye to slowly open, muzzles elevated a half-inch off the outstretched forelegs; and in one soft movement, a single impulse moving the two, no sound made, they took their full height, their shoulders halfway to Beidermann’s hip, and began to pace in a steady pattern, nearer and nearer to Beidermann, their bodies growing stiff if he failed to notice their alarm. But never did they set up the frenzied whining and barking other men admitted their dogs did, as if to boast that such fluster was a mark of quality.

  This pair had gone through no fires with him yet, but one of his old man’s dogs had, a big old mixed-blood wolfhound that they called Spades because that was what the old man said he was as black as the ace of; the dog following Beidermann and his pony Buster one fall afternoon and chasing whatever they scared up, although there was little life afield in that hot sun. He rode Buster up out of a draw where they had been fooling around in a muddy creek bottom, chasing dragonflies and such, and as the three of them came up the steep side of the ravine onto the gradual slope of the plain, they found themselves square to a line of flame racing out of the northwest.

  Just short of panic, young Beidermann started Buster straight east, but smoke lay so thickly around them that they looked to be cut off. Beidermann had heard what to do in such a case; and he laid into Buster until they were mostly free of the smoke, then hauled the pony up and jumped off. From a waxed paper folded in his pocket, he took a match and quickly set a small fire in the scrawniest piece of grass around, hoping it would burn off rapidly, which it did, helped by the same wind that drove the big fire toward them. Beidermann scampered onto the burned-over plot, Buster’s reins wrapped around his wrist and hanging on to Spades for dear life. Neither animal, for all the smarts they showed otherwise, was inclined to stay put on this hot and sooty circle, where Beidermann scuffed away an inch or two of hot topsoil, from which tendrils of smoke still rose, to get at cooler depths for them all to stand on. He felt the heat through his boot soles, and he crouched with Spades in his arms, for anytime the dog’s paws touched the baked earth he leaped in pain, though never whimpering—the old man wouldn’t tolerate a whiny dog. Quickly the fire swept past, not looking all that dangerous from the backside, with foot-high flames and smoke blowing away. But they were safe, and where that vagrant blaze came from and where it went, Beidermann never knew.

  When he got home, riding most of the way across the burned-over prairie before reaching the angle where the fire had veered far north, far from the old man’s plac
e, he was in such a flurry he could scarcely find words to describe the event. Pa pushed away Spades when he came close, saying: “Now that damn dog’s gonna smell like smoke for a month. What business you got out there anyways?”

  HE WENT ALONG toward Praeger’s but kept looking back. There was nothing to see but the long brown grass slope, although soon in the sky just above the horizon there formed a long, low and thin white cloud. Perhaps not a cloud.

  Once more, he pulled the mare around: it wasn’t what she had in mind and she fretted. But Beidermann could no longer tell himself that it was no prairie fire down there. It damned well could be, and having admitted that much, he got busy calculating: What did he have for use on it? Not much—no gunnysacks, no shovel, and there was no water down there where the river bowed out nearly three miles.

  But what was down there he wasn’t sure. There might be a touch of water—some old line-camp dugout by a spring; or even a sump well.

  Now his own mind wanted satisfying far more than he needed the Praeger boys’ work on his flue. He jabbed his heels to the black mare, and she stepped out grudgingly. There was no real smoke to be seen, only that long white cloud, which might be. . . . He told himself that after a mile, two miles, if he saw nothing worse, he’d turn back, ride on to Praeger’s with no more than an hour lost.

  IT WAS OFTEN A SURPRISE, what came through as clear memory out of the fog of ill feeling he had for his old man. . . . Every night before he turned in, as he stood splay-legged aside the woodpile relieving himself, Beidermann took full and careful measure of the horizon around; the sky nearly always the same slate dome with wispy rainless clouds abounding, and stars like sparkles left by Fourth of July rockets; the horizon even-edged all around except at the jagged span of badlands and the bulge of cottonwoods at the river.

  It was exactly the same half-minute’s study that his old man had conducted nightly too, when they lived on the north border before Ma died. Young Leo, eight or nine then, watched each night at the time it got fully dark, and the old man, already half asleep, roused himself to go outside, unfastening his britches as he went and with the little finger of his free hand hooking the used-up chaw out of his bottom lip. His narrow eyes peered around under the moon, and Beidermann figured they sought signs of rain, or maybe he cocked an ear for the creaking sound of a late-traveling freighter, whiskey aboard. He never was the kind of man to tell his boy what he hoped for.

  Beidermann was eighteen or so, bedding down his own bull trains in the ebony nights and casting his own narrowed eye around to see what was out there, before he realized he was looking for the same thing the old man was.

  He thought about it. The old man must have known his neck to bristle a time or two as he watched the midnight horizon grow rosy-fingered, or he wouldn’t have been so keen in his nightly look-around. How that worked in a man Beidermann knew more about now: a fellow taking a peaceful leak and on the horizon a dozen miles distant comes a gloomy illumination, changing its shaky shape as smoke dives thick across its front: a sight to block the flow of even such a tough nut as the old man, who knew as well as lesser mortals not to tease disaster with puny bait. . . .

  RELUCTANT ENOUGH WHEN BEIDERMANN headed her west, now the black mare turned downright stubborn—a snorting toss of the head, working to grab the bit, a sideways prance when there was nothing spooky in the grass, no snakes, no gopher holes, no grasshoppers even.

  This time she picked up the smell of smoke before he did, but he knew what she had found, and it was no surprise. He had only to ride a little farther to see that the thin strands he’d seen a half-hour before from the road here had fattened to lay a mass across the horizon, held in place by a top wind, the smoke whirling sideways and down, as if seeking to hide until the last moment from snoopers such as Beidermann.

  “Goddamn it all to hell,” Beidermann yelled, his heart sinking. He prodded the mare forward: she preferred to move sideways, and he dragged her head around with some impatience. He was getting close. The cloud lifted enough to reveal a long line that was its source; it headed far west, maybe across the bow to the river itself. Certainly it was no isolated thistle burn, or haystack or corral fence set afire by Indians disgruntled at another late beef allotment. . . . He hoped to God someone was down there working it, but he saw no sign of that. Himself, he thought, one man, what could he do? Nothing to fight it with . . . His deerskin jacket rested in a roll behind him, but he’d be damned if he’d us that for a gunnysack. There was the mare’s heavy saddle blanket, but he’d sure hate to ruin that either. . . .

  The fire gave him no good look at itself; only the smoke. He goaded the mare along another half-mile before he caught sight of the flames, although in the bright forenoon sun he saw not flames but the black tips of them, where they turned into smoke. A thin white ash fell.

  Now he made out the shape of the fire line. The end of it, nearest to where he came down the slope, popped out of nowhere, boiling from an expanse of charred gray out of which it somehow found grass enough to fuel itself. From that point, it ran far south; Beidermann could not tell how far, but it advanced apace through the abundant blue-stem, which after its springtime fullness had dried to promise fine winter fodder for Schneider’s cattle—if this was still his property; somewhere along here ran Krupp’s line.

  He was close enough now that a little puff of wind sent smoke to envelope him and the mare, to her extreme discomfort. Beidermann cast up and down the line, looking for a gap, a dead spot, where perhaps someone was working; but he saw no one. He had the whole fire to himself.

  HIS FIRST PRAIRIE BLAZE had swept down from the northern border through fields of wheat and rye and nearly up to the old man’s woodpile, where it furiously burned itself out, stymied by the ground of the yard tamped iron-hard by years of mule traffic. Terrified, Beidermann watched its arrival—the old man being off in Buford or somewhere soaking up the skimpy profits of a summer trapline—and it was nothing he ever forgot. . . . Ever since, that bright wall had flamed at one edge of his consciousness—no particulars, only the idea, the flame. . . .

  Among the odds and ends that he remembered from Ma’s Bible readings, fire and flood stood out, always menacing . . . fire and brimstone, lakes of fire, fiery pits. Once Ma gave as his lesson the tale of the Seventh Seal. A little of it still stuck:

  The fire of the altar was cast into the earth . . . and the third part of

  all green trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. . . .

  Even in cloudbursts, a part of his mind called up fire, for the lightning could set off a blaze, and if the downpour failed to put it out, it might fester in a rotten oak or cottonwood log waiting until everyone thought themselves safe, when it would shoot up to prove them deadly wrong.

  All water reminded him of fire: a flood was no more than God’s generous offering to extinguish fire. In the heavy winter storms, with snow banked halfway up his door, central to his mind was the fear of burning out, for the cobs and hay twists stuffed into the cast-iron stove fed a flame that not only warmed Beidermann and his curled-up hounds but heated as well the stick-and-mud chimney, to send it into an internal glow, to set the roof smoldering, all to leap afire when a man fell asleep. He’d seen it happen. . . . And in Skiles, every damned year on the Fourth of July, he saw a fire. Nobody learned. Fireworks everywhere, and then the sudden blaze, the boys with the water-wagon surprised to be called by the gong away from the speeches and pie-eating contests, to gallop to this year’s blaze in one vacant lot or another—from which all day earlier had been shagged guilty-looking youngsters, the strings of smoke from their punks trailing behind them as they ran to hide.

  THE MARE STILL HAD HOPES of going home. Beidermann bullied her into standing as he watched the line advance. It moved, he judged, about as fast as a healthy baby crawled. Impeded somewhat by the down slope, the wind was not its remorseless self, leaving the fire to set its own pace, and it came forward in measured advance—though at times flashing ahead with a bright orange and b
lack twirl of smoke as it discovered a fat piece of greasewood.

  Wiping his smarting eyes with his sleeve, Beidermann considered what stood before him. The fire wanted to come east, where the blue-stem grass grew thickly; and that it seemed to move with little urgency was a delusion, he knew—he could be surrounded in a minute. . . . He found himself reckoning where he could jump in, and what good he could do. But he did have his rifle, and he untied it from beside his leg and fired up a shot, quickly reloaded, and sent off another—for whatever good it might do: someone too far off to see the smoke still might hear. He knew that old Praeger and those tough boys of his would be there soon enough.

  It took some muscle now to hold the mare, further unnerved by the shots. Beidermann pointed her east, and she made off in her long-legged lope for a quarter-mile until he drew her up, well above the angle at which the fire seemed headed, and tied the reins to a scraggled sage trunk, anchored well enough to hold her.

  Uncinching her saddle, he dragged it clear of the reach of her wild circling, his deerskin coat folded atop. He crammed the damp and heavy saddle blanket under one arm, his rifle under the other to send off additional summoning shots presently, and trotted back to address the line of flames; as the little licks came at him, he whaled away and flattened them to ashes.

  The Fourth with Beidermann et Al.

  1887

  JULY 4. Nary a cloud mars the morning heavens. Were this only another day in a string of hot days in our drouthy summer it would be cause for continued lament, but with the singularity of the occasion, the fierce sun is tolerated; for even as winter’s frozen drifts befit celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus, this bright and shining orb suits our observance of the birth of our Nation. Patriotic weather, sniffs Ma, her garden slowly withering.