One Careless Moment Read Free Page B

ask.
    â€œOf course,” he says.
    Together, we track the progress of the dozer, listen to the progression of toppling trees. My gaze wanders toward the trail, to the crew bus and lowboy with its waiting driver. Boxes of hose and spare hand tools neatly stacked out of the way. Something along the edge of the trail catches my eye — red and barely discernable at this distance. It’s probably nothing, but I go for a look. I recognize it before I get there.
    It’s a fusee cap, its pull-strip curled back.
    A fusee is a red, cylindrical flare used by firefighters to burn out fuel between a fireline and the active edge of a fire, thus robbing the fire of potential intensity so it can’t jump the fireline. It’s also handy to burn a safe area in case of an emergency, as Wag Dodge did on the infamous Mann Gulch fire.
    It’s too early in this fire for anyone to have need of one, so I lift my radio and call around, just to make sure. “Galloway, this is Cassel. Have any of your people used a fusee on the fire?” There’s a pause; the answer comes back negative. Same answer from Brashaw.
    I stand on the trail a moment longer, pondering the little red cap. Most arsons are started right from the edge of a road or trail, with the arsonist nervous and wanting a quick getaway. But this fire was started deeper in the bush, which takes time, walking both ways. This probably means it wasn’t a hot start but was rigged as some sort of time delay. The arsonist placed the device in the bush so no one would see it from the trail, then got careless with the cap — flung it aside or dropped it shoving it into his pocket. But why walk so far into the bush? Maybe he thought the distance from the trail would be less obvious and no one would look too hard for the cause.
    He’s wrong.
    I call Brashaw and Galloway, tell them to be on the lookout. Then I head into the fire.
    The engine crew is already at work, hoses run from where the engine sits on the dozerline, water soaking the perimeter. This is where I go in, stepping over slippery black logs, pushing aside the barbed, black swivel sticks of the burned understory fir. I go in about forty yards and look around, taking note of the charred tree trunks, the burn pattern on deadfall. A fire always points to where it’s been and, if you can read the signs, you can usually get a pretty good idea of where it originated. You start with the knowledge that fire burns outward from its point of origin, its behaviour modified by fuel, weather, and topography. A fire in calm weather conditions, in continuous fuel, will burn a perfect circle. A wind-driven fire will form an ellipse, the width-to-length ratio a function of wind speed. But that’s under ideal, predictable conditions. A fire in a canyon, with erratic winds, variable fuel, and unknown moisture conditions, can be a little more challenging.
    I walk slowly, watching the ground, watching tree trunks, checking scorch patterns on rocks. The fire cleaned out the understory, reducing fir and brush to slender spikes. There’s a certain voyeuristic aspect to walking in a freshly burned forest — a sudden, injured nakedness; trees stripped of their foliage. Solitary old growth larch, blackened but not entirely burned, stand like tall, determined, survivors. Deadfall, normally hidden and treacherous, forms a crisscross pattern like a relief map. My eyes track across smouldering devastation, thinking about the fusee. It would have been planted in duff or dry litter — fine enough fuels to easily ignite — and positioned securely so it wouldn’t topple as it burned down. Either way, it wouldn’t be set far from the road. A fusee burns for a maximum of thirty minutes, and the arsonist would want a quick, clear route back to his waiting vehicle. He must have made a dash for the trail then driven like mad, because we didn’t meet any vehicles on our trip in.
    Maybe the fire was started