When We Were Wolves (11 page)

George, the tavern owner and Camp Crook Volunteer Fire Department chief, radioed for help to Buffalo. “Complete conflagration” was the term he used. “That’s it for the old school,” he said. “Too late for the bucket brigade. Horton’s inside.”

A Powder River charter bus full of Type II firefighters from Pine Ridge Reservation idled in the street. It was one of the many crews ordered three days earlier to help put out the same Custer Complex that had gone out two years before.

Strain thought about his duties, then about Horton inside, where the old man burned like a Molotov cocktail. For the first time in his career, he balked at fire. There was a realism of consequences and an urgency to this fire he’d never experienced before.
What would Horton Wynn do in my boots?
He looked down at his boots, the steel showing through at the toes where the leather had been eaten by the lye made from ash and water. He thought of the Apache and Gila trout he’d caught during the past fire seasons that had melted together into one long sortie in his memory. He thought about bats. Kurt Strain learns to fly: Go Fish. He reached for the pis aller, his fly rod, which leaned against the fender of the volunteer engine. Then he met the strike-team leader in the yard. “Have your men put a line around it before it gets into the grass. Mop up when it cools. Don’t forget to fill out your crew time reports. You’re on your own for chow. De-mob when you feel you’re finished here.” He called the dog, who was running frantic circles at the edge of the intense heat, and headed back toward the Little Missouri.

“Sir,” said the strike-team leader, “where are you going? I mean, is there anything else?”

The Indian stared at the burning house as Strain looked past him. The Lakota man knew he was witnessing the passing of more
than one ghost. In Washington, D.C., this incident wouldn’t amount to a cigarette burn on the circus-tent-sized corporate canvas. Strain stopped and turned, meeting the man’s eyes. “I’m gonna fish through.”

At night, on fires, Strain had often thought about what burning to death would be like. Not as immediate as an unsuccessful cavalry firefight, not as peaceful as the latter stages of drowning. “Down here,” he mouthed to Mayday, who leveled the ship out at the Cottonwood tops and hovered over the river. Strain cupped the hard hat containing the sample of Horton’s ashes—mixed with ashes of newspaper, MREs, propaganda posters, lumber from the old school—and opened the door. “Care to offer an Indian prayer for the soul of this good man?” Strain asked the pilot.

Mayday just stared at the few working gauges on the instrument panel. “He sure burned hot,” he said.

Strain hesitated. He should say something, but what? It was like having to pitch himself out the door. “Go with God,” he said and flipped Horton into the rotor blast. The flakes of carbon blew back through the door, floating around the cockpit like confetti, then settling in the cabin’s seams and cracks. “Goddammit,” Strain said. The two had ash on their faces, in their laps.

Chances were a few of the ashes had made it to the river, where they would join the Missouri in North Dakota, then drift south to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. But a month later most of what remained of the old man would ride with the rich skiers into the untouched backcountry powder of western Montana and northern Wyoming. Then, when the snow turned to fire, Horton would fly fire for as many seasons as the Jet Ranger kept from wearing out or burning up.

Which happened, a year and a half later, on the Fourth of July.
The ship’s bucket cable caught a utility pole. The cable snapped and backlashed into the rotors, shattering the blades and fire-branding Mayday two hundred feet upside down into the south face of a mountain northwest of Buffalo. The explosion lit the night sky like a Roman candle, the humidity dropped, and the wind picked up. That evening Kurt Strain, saw boss on a fire north of Cora, Wyoming, landed two limits of brook trout and the second-or third-largest rainbow of his life. The next Monday the Data General report listed in boldface Horton and Mayday’s ten-thousand-acre, multimillion-dollar complex.

ubert de Sablettes hunted rabbits, on foot, with only a knife and a basset hound in tow. He was a runner. He ran every day—an addiction—even on the coldest winter mornings, twenty, thirty below zero, leaving at dawn his home on Klondike Street that was once the Methodist church, watch cap, a water bottle belted to his waist next to the knife, and a buffalo-horn
cor
to sound the
trompe de chasse
, calling Perch, the hound that ran behind, who could barely keep up. Hubert, gaunt and sinewy, ran up hills, over snowdrifts, into the sagebrush desert until he flushed a snowshoe hare. Then he would chase the white animal, sometimes for hours, until it became too exhausted to go on and just lay there waiting for the knife, or died of an exploding heart.

That was the hunt, the run, as described by the children who claimed they had seen it themselves. Everyone wanted to have seen it, but the hunts took place well away from town, on the vast
wastelands good only for gas wells and sheep grazing. Hubert would sometimes run for five or six hours until his workout ended with the kill. Then he would dogtrot back to town, Klondike Street, carrying the limp hare by its hind legs, grimacing from the pain in his own bramble-scarred legs. Some days he would stop in the Hams Fork River and wade in the cold water until the swelling in his legs subsided. This even in winter.

Rumor around Hams Fork, Wyoming, is treated with the courtesy of truth, and rumor here had it that Hubert was a rich count and that he was holing up in town, hiding in the high desert, a refugee from France, where he had killed his wife by running her through with a well-honed bayonet after hunting her in a frantic chase in the forest. Around Hams Fork, Hubert was known as the Count. It had become a childhood act of bravery to creep down Klondike Street, into the churchyard at night, friends watching in the bushes across the street, and peer into the lighted stained-glass windows, pretending to be able to see more than vague shadows inside. The metallic kitchen sounds were real: knives on sharpening steels and stones, the basset howling, and the tinny buzz of late-night AM radio. And the smell was real, certainly, the smell of garlic and hot goose fat and wild game frying.

Lizabeth Tanner lived next door. Sometimes at night she could see the shadows of children chasing through the yard. The window-peeking was childish, but she too smelled the food and heard the hound and wondered what life in the church was like. Some days she would see the Count walking and would notice the color of his hair in the sunlight: grayish-white, like a summer coyote’s. Perch knew Lizabeth and liked her because she would sometimes lean over her fence and treat him to a raw hot dog.

She was a carpenter. Thirty-four and single, she had made her
living following the ski-town booms. Now she was a contractor, mostly doing remodeling work on the older homes in town, though the mine had recently laid off a hundred or so and work was slow. She had time to remodel her own home, do some fishing, read some of the books she had always promised herself she would, and build a dogsled. The sled she donated to the charity auction that followed the Calcutta, the sled-dog-team auction where gamblers wagered on their choices for the upcoming race.

Like the gypsy circus in the days when Hams Fork had been merely an ashen coal camp, the dog race came to town each February. The day before the Hams Fork leg of the race, pickup trucks with mobile kennels containing the yelping spitz dogs paraded into town, sleds on top, straw and muzzles poking out of the whiffled boxes. The Calcutta had become Hams Fork’s winter version of the Kentucky Derby. Residents would eat from a prime-rib buffet, then bid on their favorite sled teams. Some of the lesser-known teams would go for a mere hundred apiece. Winners would receive a 30 percent cut of the money raised. The bulk of the money went to pay immunization costs for poor children. Chances of winning weren’t great, but in a state with fewer than half a million residents and no lottery, the Calcutta was still the social event of the winter. Following the auction was the dance.