The Big Burn Read Free Page B

backed and proud in his railroad uniform, standing beside Samuel's seated mother.
    If he remembered right it had been taken two or three years after his brother, Jarrett, was born, and before Mother's sickness had taken full hold. Not much later, Samuel had left home. Leaving was the first and only time Samuel had ever defied Pop and got away with it He'd wanted to work in the woods, instead of for the railroad. He'd been fifteen, old enough to do odd jobs at one of the lumber camps that dotted Minnesota.
    His mother, thin and fragile as a blade of alpine grass, had swayed before the force of Pop's anger but taken Samuel's side. "It's Samuel's decision, Mr. Logan," she'd said. That's what she called her husband:
Mr. Logan
not
Ian
and to this day, Samuel would lay good money Pop had never asked for different "You can't decide Samuel's calling for him."
    When she died the next year and Samuel returned for her funeral, it seemed to him that Pop believed her death had somehow proven Pop right in a long-running disagreement. There was no hint of grief in his unforgiving face. Or of welcome for Samuel.
    Samuel had never gone back again.
    And now, just this morning, he'd learned from an angry ex-railway worker that Pop and probably Jarrett were living in Avery, a few hours' ride away.
    The man had been applying for a job with the Forest Service when Samuel had checked in at the Wallace office. The man picked up on the Logan name and probably on how closely Samuel resembled his father, with his bushy hair the color of red sand and the height that made Samuel tower over everyone. "If you're related to the Logan conductoring out of Avery," he said, "you tell him to watch his back. Twenty years I was with the railroad, and he fired me for one slipup and blacklisted me, too."
    Studying the man's shifting, belligerent gaze, Samuel had guessed there'd been more than just one slip, though that was not his worry.
    So,
Samuel thought now,
the question is, Do I git in touch? I could ask one of the men at the ranger station down there to go look them up for me.
Even though Samuel still had no wish to see Pop, he would like to know that Pop was okay.
    And Jarrett was a different story altogether. Nearly a stranger, but also Samuel's only brother.
    It was just unfortunate he'd got news of them right at this time. Samuel didn't need a distraction when he had his hands full trying to keep fire off the thousands of acres he was responsible for.
FIELD NOTES
    Perhaps the ancients had it right, honoring and giving the keeping of fire to gods and goddesses—to Rome's Vesta, India's Agni, the Greeks' Hephaestus. Fearing its mighty power for destruction when it trailed the horsemen of the Apocalypse.
    Now we understand fire as chemistry. We know it to be combustion, a chemical change that occurs when oxygen combines with another substance. Fire requires the presence of heat to get started. But then fire is combustion happening so fast that the reaction itself causes heat and light to burst forth.
    Only, that's like defining people as composites of water and minerals, without mentioning the life inside them. Life that requires air to breathe and food to eat, and that has a mysterious soul at its core.
    To stay alive a person needs air that's about 21 percent oxygen, and that's about what a fire needs, too. Rob fire of the air around it and it dies.
    And just as a person can be killed by starvation, so can a fire be killed by depriving it of fuel.
    Two facts—a fire can't start without heat, and a fire can't keep going without oxygen and fuel—are all any firefighter has to work with. Those, and a harbored respect for the capricious life inside flame.

Avery
July 14, Morning
    Jarrett had lain awake most of the night, scared at what he was setting out to do. Scared that he didn't know what he was getting into, volunteering to fight fires that might be measured in miles instead of fractions of an acre. Scared that Pop might know him better than he