The Wildfire Season Read Free

of strangers slightly absurd, useless, an expenditure of energy on those who, in all likelihood, you will never see again. Miles meets the man’s eyes and wonders if Bader has identified the same distance in him.
    Now that he thinks of it, Miles has to concede that everyone here likely sees him as Bader does: the near-silent burn victim, friendless and grotesque. What people wonder about more than anything else are his scars. The muddy splotches that spill down the one side of his neck, his rib cage, and disappear below his waist. All anybody is sure of is they have reason not to ask him about it. Within months of his arrival, Miles earned a reputation as a merciless barfighter on the nights when the drink goes down him the wrong way, or if provoked, or if merely spoken to in what he interprets to be an unfavourable tone. Currently, he is one victim short of sending an even halfdozen down to Whitehorse on free medevac rides.
    On these occasions, Miles spends the night under Terry Gray’s watch in the single cell of the RCMP office, apologizing for keeping Terry up late, and Terry telling him that he’s a lousy sleeper at the best of times and that he’d rather type up the assault charges against Miles than lie awake all night in his trailer. Most recently, it concerned a visiting miner who had affronted Ross River’s meagre charms by saying of Bonnie, ‘There’s better-looking barmaids back in the goddamn hole,’ referring to the all-male open pit mine in which he’d spent the last three weeks. For this offence, Miles had beaten the man into a long and dreamless sleep.
    Terry Gray has started getting calls. ‘Hear you’ve got a real wild man on your hands up there, Sheriff,’ the superintendent down in Whitehorse will jokewith him, but Terry knows it’s getting less funny all the time. He also knows about the stories. Tales of a monster whose rage has pursued him to the end of the world. He killed a pregnant woman in Prince George. He scarred his face blowing up a Hells Angels clubhouse in Edmonton, and a pack of murderous bikers have been spotted as far north as Carcross, asking after a guy with a fucked-up face. And a dozen other improvised myths. In fact, the Welcome Inn has become as famous in the rest of the territory for the brooding fire ranger who drinks in its bar as for its mouldy, overpriced rooms.
    Mungo Capoose sees his boss differently.
    ‘Miles McEwan? He’s not so mean,’ is how Mungo likes to conclude any conversations concerning his boss’s character. ‘He’s just running away.’
    ‘From what?’ someone will ask.
    ‘From his face.’
    ‘But you can’t run from that.’
    ‘That’s why he’s gone as far as he has.’
    There is also a figure visible to Miles alone. Standing in the shadows on the far side of the pool table that’s been too slanted to play an honest game on since Miles piledrived Wade onto it the first and only time he called him Scarface. Miles couldn’t say how long the figure has been there. It’s only when he stares at the one spot for a while that he can make out the outline of a person at all. The slumped shoulders. The pale reflection of unblinking eyes.
    It stays where it is long enough that Mileswonders if it is only his own idle creation. Yet the figure is too inarguably there for him to pretend it couldn’t be. Its stillness prevents it from being wholly alive. This is what Miles tries to tell himself. The man in the shadows will remain a shadow until it can move.
    And then it moves.
    As it slides toward him, Miles counts the ways the shadow takes on colour. Khaki work pants splashed with what looks like machine oil. Eyes showing themselves to be unnaturally wide and red-rimmed. The head so bald it’s missing ears as well as hair.
    Miles watches the man emerge from where there was nothing before, as though stepping out of the wall itself. When the tips of his boots slide into the light cast by the bare bulb nearest him, he stops.
    Although the figure is