Summer of Fire Part 6

"Pleased to meet you," Steve replied, hoping Mason didn't catch the tremor in his hand. He had slept in his truck last night at Old Faithful, too drunk to drive.

He looked past the Secretary at fire general Garrett Anderson, moving with startling agility down the steps of the TW Services bus. The big man wore a ball cap decorated with a flaming tree and the words Rocky Mountain Incident Mgt. Team. Last night after Clare had walked away, a firefighter had told Steve she was a friend of a friend of Garrett, who'd pulled strings to get her an employee cabin at Old Faithful.

Steve looked up from the roadside parking lot at Roaring Mountain, a bare, bleached slope that smoked from hundreds of steam vents. It always came as a surprise, after driving for miles through the unrelenting corridor of pine, to come upon the scar that looked as though it had been quarried.

A cl.u.s.ter of press piled off the advance bus. The Was.h.i.+ngton contingent looked as though they'd bought their stylish outdoor clothing at Abercrombie and Fitch just before boarding the plane. The press corps, mostly westerners, wore rugged jeans and scarred footwear that was suitable for rough terrain.

Secretary Mason smiled at the reporters.

A lanky cameraman with an untidy coffee-colored pony-tail stepped in closer. The stocky young woman with him thrust her mike at the Secretary's face. "Carol Leeds, Billings Live Eye." Her mane of red hair spilled over the shoulders of her denim jacket. "Is it true the Park Service made a serious error in judgment when they let the fires burn out of control in the park?"

Garrett Anderson murmured to Steve, "Cutting right to the chase."

Mason studied Carol Leeds with sharp blue eyes for so long that the group of reporters broke ranks.

"Mr. Secretary . . . "

"Secretary Mason . . . "

"Do you support the Park Service . . .?"

Mason raised his hand and waited for quiet. "Certainly, I support the men and women in whose hands lies the stewards.h.i.+p of Yellowstone, our national's crown jewel."

Steve thought that he could never be a politician. He would have told them wildfire was natural, that in Yellowstone man had been just standing in the way of the inevitable since before the turn of the twentieth century.

For when Native Americans dominated the land, the Smoky Bear phenomenon hadn't existed. They used fire to clear fields and forest undergrowth and early settlers followed their lead. How ironic during this season's blowup that Yellowstone had been the first place in the nation with fire patrols, set up by the U.S. Army in 1886. Fire suppression for a hundred years had let the forests grow until the level of fuels was at an historic high.

"What's going to happen at Old Faithful?" blurted the freckle-faced journalist Mason chose next.

Garrett Anderson interceded. "Mr. Secretary, if I may?"

Mason nodded.

"We've got a thousand firefighters digging line and setting backfires west of Old Faithful," Garrett told the press. "For the time being, I feel safe to say the danger to the complex has been averted."

Impatient to get his part of the program over, Steve took the lead onto a foot trail that wound along the base of Roaring Mountain. Park Superintendent Tom King, a beanpole of a man, fell into step, his neatly pressed uniform of gray jacket and darker pants made a sharp contrast to the Secretary's vacation wear. The press followed like a pack of hounds.

As the hill steepened, Steve felt the incline. His heart started to pound and his dry mouth made him aware of his hangover. Garrett Anderson caught up with him. The thick-waisted fire general put it on Steve as they continued to climb. "You met Clare Chance," Garrett said in the soft accent of a fellow southerner.

"Things were happening a bit fast for us to be properly introduced the day that chopper crashed." He failed to mention how he'd distinguished himself last night at the Bear Pit.

"Clare's quite a gal."

"I thought so." Steve tried not to sound out of breath.

Garrett smiled. "Friend of mine at the Texas A & M fire school recommended she train the troops to fight fire."

Clare went up another notch in Steve's estimation. Last night he'd been looking at her bare shoulders and legs and thinking she looked all woman. Now, he was reminded how she'd saved him from the Shoshone and realized if she were going to train the military, she must be one tough woman.

"If we have to bring in soldiers," Steve tempered.

"When."

He figured Garrett had the experience to be a reasonable judge.

"Next week we're bringing in the experts at predicting fire behavior." Garrett removed his cap and mopped his head with a bandanna. "But you mark my words." He swept his arm to encompa.s.s the pine-studded plateau. "If we don't get rain soon, all this will look like that."

He pointed to the smoking ruin of Roaring Mountain.

Steve chewed on that while he made it to the place he'd planned to show the visitors.

"Are you ready for your fifteen minutes of fame?" Superintendent King asked with a flash of smile.

Through his now-throbbing headache, Steve grinned back. Park HQ at Mammoth was a small town and he knew Tom King well.

Stepping into the middle of a clearing on the backside of Roaring Mountain, Steve waited while the press fanned out. Secretary Mason wore an attentive look on his hawklike face.

Raising his voice for the crowd, Steve began, "Nine years ago, a lightning strike started a fire here." Long trunks of the fallen lay scattered, and a few silver ghosts still stood, having weathered the weight of snows and the ravage of high winds.

"It looks like h.e.l.l to me." The heckler seemed to be part of the press.

"We call these doghair thickets." Steve pointed to patches of seedlings that grew cheek by jowl. "It takes a fire to open the cones of the lodgepole and release the seeds. When it happens, every hundred to four hundred years, many thousands of small trees grow back right away."

"Who'd want to vacation here, though?"

Steve saw him this time, the ponytailed cameraman from Billings.

"Many burned areas don't look this bad," Steve tried. "Often the debris on the forest floor smoulders slowly, leaving the mature trees with damage only to the lower branches, like over here."

There was no response from either the press or the visiting entourage. So, how many laymen were interested in listening to a biologist blather?

Steve faced the crowd squarely. "What's at stake in Yellowstone this summer is a basic question of how to manage wildfire. In the northern Rockies, the climate is too dry and cold for decomposition, so the fuels continue to build until there's a fire. After nearly a century of suppression, in 1972 the park decided to manage its resources differently. That meant no putting out natural fires, those started by lightning."

"So what happened?" Carol Leeds from Billings asked.

"Very little." He gestured toward the burn he'd been showing them. "Between 1972 and 1987 around thirty-four thousand acres, or less than three percent of the park was renewed. Until this summer."

"I believe that this morning's report tallied over eighty-eight thousand acres," Garrett Anderson spoke up.

As Steve started to lead the way to another section, he noticed that the Secretary of the Interior seemed most impressed with this last statistic.

Three hours later in Mammoth, Steve opened the bas.e.m.e.nt door into the Yellowstone Park archives. Upstairs, in the stone headquarters building that had once been Fort Yellowstone's bachelor officers' quarters, tourists studied exhibits of old uniforms and weapons.

"Everybody buy your story about fire being natural, like granola and alfalfa sprouts?" Walt Leighton asked from inside his office.

"What do you think?" Steve shut the door harder than he'd intended.

Walt, the park historian, uncoiled his long frame. He came out of his closet-sized office into the main room lined with filing cabinets. "I'd say the important thing is whether Randolph Mason bought it." His bushy brows knit above his narrow nose.

Steve leaned against a table topped by a microfiche reader and looked up at Walt, who was easily six-four against his own five-ten. "What can Mason do? Superintendent King decided days ago that this season's fires would not be allowed to burn free."

"The Secretary of the Interior can change policy for the long term." Steve recognized Harriet Friendswood's voice and turned.

She came out of the back room where historic doc.u.ments were stored. Meticulously, she stripped off white cotton gloves that kept skin oils from antique papers and looked at her purple plastic Timex. "Quittin' time."

Steve smiled and her soft brown eyes lighted. Harriet wasn't bad, early thirties, medium build, and shoulder length chestnut hair. Although she had been pursuing Steve in earnest for the entire six months she'd been here, he figured that if there were a spark he would have known right away.

"I've got a roast in the oven." She gave a come-hither look. "Plenty for two."

He'd tried one of her dinners and come home with the conclusion that he was the better cook. "Oh, no thanks. I'm just gonna go through some doc.u.ments here."

"Your loss." Harriet secured her purse, told Walt good evening and walked out with her shoulders square beneath her flowered print dress.

Steve watched her go and found the historian's sharp eyes on him. For years, Walt had been trying to get him to come out of his sh.e.l.l as far as women were concerned. Now he said nothing as he prepared to leave for the day. Although the archives were officially closed, Walt seemed to understand that Steve's fascination with history kept his mind off his lost wife and child.

He wondered what Walt would think of him comparing Clare Chance with Harriet. If Clare had invited him to dinner, he might have gone.

With careful hands, he opened a filing cabinet. The familiar and ordinary folders inside held treasure that could never be measured in dollars and cents. His cotton-gloved fingers skipped across the tabs that revealed the vintage of the ancient doc.u.ments, primary sources of historic information. Here were the records of the military commandant of the park in the year 1892, handwritten notes that mentioned the grand opening of the new Lake Hotel, with a lavish party thrown by its owners, the Northern Pacific Railroad.

By 1900, park headquarters had acquired a typewriter and carbons. Tissue thin papers revealed a long correspondence with an eastern procurement officer, an effort to put the soldiers who patrolled the park into Norwegian cross-country skis. The letters began politely enough in January, but by April a single terse sentence appeared beneath the salutation-Send skis now.

With a grin, Steve opened the next file of letters. He turned a nearly translucent page and noticed a fresh wave of the familiar, faintly musty smell of the bas.e.m.e.nt archives.

Beyond the windows, golden afternoon beckoned, so he took the folder to a picnic table beneath a spreading cedar. There, he immersed himself in the life of the old fort, where horses and Army wagons had used the very path he sat beside.

Half an hour later, a shadow fell across his notes. He heard a pressurized pop and release and looked into the label of an Olympia can. Walt, wearing jeans instead of his ranger uniform, slid a hip onto the table and climbed up, propping his booted feet on the seat. "Beer?" He set down a paper bag that looked to contain the rest of a six-pack.

Steve had never heard of Oly when he was growing up in North Carolina, but he'd learned to appreciate the finer things of the West. He could just about taste the clean effervescence as he reached.

"Why are you doing this to yourself?" Clare Chance had surveyed him coolly, with eyes that reminded him of the finest amber liquor. She was something else, as he'd realized last night lying in the bed of his truck, and again when Garrett Anderson had praised her on the trail up Roaring Mountain.

With his fingers almost touching the sweating can, Steve stopped.

A puzzled expression gathered on Walt's sharp features.

With an effort, Steve lowered his hand to the weathered boards. "No," he said roughly, "thanks."

"Haywood turns down a brew?" Walt's brows lifted.

Both men went silent as a pair of young male tourists, identified by their name brand sportswear and the fact that they were strangers, pa.s.sed the picnic table. They started across the street toward the open field that had once been the parade ground for Fort Yellowstone. With the ancient letters still on his mind, Steve envisioned the afternoon review of cavalry and infantry while wives, camp followers, and guests of the huge wood frame National Hotel looked on. How different the Mammoth of today was, with its eclectic mix of ancient and modern architecture.

When the tourists had gone, Walt sipped from the beer he'd offered Steve. "When I went home, I happened to catch the national news."

Steve tensed. "The fires are a regular six o'clock circus."

Walt nodded. "Secretary Mason took a chopper ride with Ranger Shad Dugan and saw that the Clover-Mist really exploded today. When Dugan mentioned we've suspended letting natural fires burn, Mason said that after all this settles down, the entire park policy on fire would require review."

"d.a.m.ned bureaucrats. Thinking they know what's right for the forest because they were elected or appointed." The bag ripped as Steve pulled out a beer.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

The terrain south of West Yellowstone was relatively flat, making it a good place to acclimate the soldiers to the forest. Clare was pleased that her first group of forty troops from Fort Lewis, Was.h.i.+ngton, seemed to be in reasonable shape. They'd hiked several brisk miles with full packs, a gallon of water, and heavy Pulaskis.

In an area that had been clear-cut for timber, Clare stopped the column. As typical young people, the soldiers broke ranks and milled about in the midafternoon sun.

Time to talk safety, and these kids had no idea how dear that subject was to her heart. Rather than tell her own and Frank's story of how quickly dreams could become disaster, she began, "Edward Pulaski, the inventor of your fire tool, was a Forest Service ranger in Idaho back in 1910. One day, he and forty-five men got caught, surrounded by fire."

Some restlessness and murmuring continued. Sergeant Ron Travis, the troops' bantam leader, stood at parade rest, making Clare suspect he was permitting the lax behavior as a insult to her. All day he had been disdainful, walking a fine line between accepting her authority and laughing when she'd only halfway turned her back.

She determined to plow on. "Pulaski led his men to an abandoned mine, the War Eagle. They wet themselves down with water from a seep and hung dampened horse blankets across the tunnel mouth."

The troops showed the same reluctance to listen as the high school students Clare used to have in P.E. Today, she wasn't going to blow a whistle, but tell a story that might reach them.

"The firestorm of 1910 was the worst in the history of the West. Three million acres of western Montana and Idaho burned in two sweltering August days. The fire generated hurricane force winds that rushed up the hill and filled the mine with smoke."

Some of the soldiers fingered the bandannas she'd told them were to go over their noses and mouths under smoky conditions.

"Those men wept, and not because their eyes stung. The air grew fouler, until prew an audible breath.

"Everyone pa.s.sed out. The next morning, they awakened one by one . . . The last five did not. Pulaski lay by the entrance and they thought he was dead, too. Then he spoke to them."

Clare had the troops' attention. "When we go out to the fires, you're going to see small flames creeping along the ground, but don't ever forget you're here because over one hundred-fifty thousand acres, almost ten percent of Yellowstone has burned." Her mind spiraled down a vortex into a raging inferno, a blazing apartment superimposed over the awesome might of the Shoshone firestorm. "Never lose sight of how quickly disaster can strike."

She let a moment of silence pa.s.s. In her mind, it was a memorial to both the fallen men of Pulaski's group and to Frank Wallace.

Sergeant Travis looked bored. If she had wanted to slap him earlier, now her palm fairly itched. Instead, with the efficiency she used to set basketball players running laps, she called, "Now you're going to show me how fast you can make a fire line."

She bent to demonstrate how the Pulaski was used. "Everybody works in a row. You 'strike', turn the sod, and keep moving. I'll be checking to make sure you clear down to a mineral soil that won't burn."

The team lined up, spread out, and began to emulate her motions.

"I want it two feet wide, from here down to that dead tree." She pointed. "And I want it in ten minutes." A good hotshot team could do the deed in five.

As the troops worked, Clare paced their ranks. "You want to watch out for wind s.h.i.+fts that can send fire speeding in your direction. If flames catch up to your line, you see if it holds. If not, fall back to another position." She stopped and cautioned a young man, "Hold your Pulaski tighter. You're going to get a blister."

She raised her voice. "When you're on a fire, you may find yourself working up to fifty hours straight without a trip back to a camp. You'll sleep where you drop, leaned against a tree or stretched out in the dirt of a fire line."

That was something Clare had yet to experience, but the troops didn't need to know. It gave her a sense of satisfaction to see Sergeant Travis look unhappy. She hoped the next group would come with a more enlightened commander.

"Snags are standing burned trees," she went on. "You'd be surprised how slight a breeze can bring one down without a sound. When you're digging, keep up your awareness of everything around you. Somebody is killed by a snag every season."

She moved down the line without speaking. A soldier with his head bent over his work formed an attractive target. "Gotcha." She tapped his shoulder.