Fire Season (21 page)

Victorio’s band stayed on the move for what remained of his life. His people’s rituals and ceremonies became abbreviated, perfunctory, or were abandoned altogether. They raided. They hid in the mountains. Outnumbered by as much as twenty-to-one by his pursuers, hunted by an army of men well supplied with food and ammunition, Victorio, with the help of his sister Lozen, eluded capture for more than a year even as they traveled harsh country with elders and children in tow. Few lived to tell what they said to each other at night around the fire. Victorio left behind no letters, no journals, no speeches or statements to the press. Maybe he dreamed of victory and a final, lasting peace, a return to his home at the warm springs. Maybe he suspected his resistance was a suicide mission. Maybe he spoke of an honorable death, a noble defeat. Maybe, consumed by survival in the present, he spoke not at all of the future. Maybe he knew he had no future.

In October 1880, chased from all sides by soldiers bent on his destruction, Victorio and seventy-seven of his followers were slaughtered by Mexican militias aided by Tarahumara scouts at Tres Castillos, a group of rocky, forlorn hills in northeastern Chihuahua. Some Apaches later said Victorio committed suicide rather than face the prospect of capture. The survivors were sold into slavery. The dead, including sixteen women and children, were scalped. Soldiers paraded bloody mops of hair through the streets of Mexico City to much cheering and music, then sold them to the government for a handsome reward. Victorio’s alone fetched 2,000 pesos.

Alice and I linger awhile at the graves, then walk a little way up the ridge, looking for breastworks where the Apache snipers might have hidden themselves—though to my untrained eye nothing sticks out. The wind in the pines makes a noise I’ve heard many times in many places, but here, in this place touched by war, the gentle moan of it makes the skin on the back of my neck tingle. It is a beautiful place, but haunted by history and drenched in blood—beautiful and spooky too.

A
few miles upstream from the graves, I make camp in a meadow where two headwater streams join to form Ghost Creek. A cairn marks the spot where campers before us have warmed themselves around a fire. Their choice was sound—flat ground, ample water, plenty of firewood—so I drop my pack and lie down in the grass to rest. We have walked almost twenty miles from the lookout, and my feet are feeling it. Time to soak them for a while in the creek’s cool waters.

The vegetation here shows classic ecotone mixing. The south-facing slopes reveal a desert influence, with abundant cacti and dry-land scrub. On the north slopes red-bark ponderosa far older than the Victorio war throw their shaggy shadows on the needle-cast floor. Marking the merge point, the creek meanders in a valley that now and again broadens into half-moon meadows verdant with forbs, flowers, and bunch grasses. Cliffs of pink tuff rise above the canyon. Wild turkeys roost in old-growth ponderosa, while mule deer and elk bed down on grassy benches tucked against the bluffs. Upstream, in the cool and shadowed pools of the headwaters, trout glide with a wave of their speckled tail fins.

I unzip Alice’s pannier, scoop a handful of her food onto a rock at the edge of the cairn. The rat-tat-tat of kibbles on stone stirs a creature awake, a creature whose own sound is like dry corn husks shaken rhythmically: a snake. I push the stone aside with a long juniper stick. The rattler, a blacktail, coils like a lariat, its tongue testing the air. I scoop its midsection with the tip of my stick and flip the snake a few feet away, into the grass, where it quickly slithers into hiding. (No paradise is whole without the presence of the serpent.) Thankfully, Alice is off hunting; I’d meant to have a meal awaiting her return. Now the meal is scattered in the dirt around the cairn. I gather what bits of it I can, pile them on a different stone, add another half a handful.

For two days I fish upstream to a boulder-filled box of the canyon, return to nap around camp, explore the various prongs off the main stream, the hidden springs and tiny waterfalls. I fish again in the evening, downstream this time, catching foot-long trout on a bee, a nymph, a bead head woolly bugger. I pick a few wild strawberries for my morning granola, cook a late dinner under starlight. Alice joins me on my walks, but as soon as I toss a fly on the water she wanders off to do her doggy thing. She knows I’d rather she not participate, and there’s plenty of adventure to be had all around—elk to roust, rabbits to chase, quail and turkey to flush. I hear her off in the distance and smile to myself as she yip-yips in pursuit of game. At night she rests beyond the glow of the campfire, ears upraised to the sounds of the forest. Her guard-dog instincts allow me a restful sleep. If anything’s out there moving in the night, she’ll let me know.

On the third morning I wake to haze in the canyon and a new coolness—rain on the way, real rain by the feel of it. Traveling light, I’ve brought a tarp instead of a tent and I don’t like the thought of hunkering under it for hours on end while a storm moves overhead. I break down my camp, douse the fire, pack my food and sleeping bag, pump some water from the creek for the long hike back to the top of the Black Range. Eighteen miles to the truck. A day and a half back in town. Just long enough to sort through my mail and resupply on groceries. Then it’s back to my duties as a smoke-besotted stylite.

Partway back to the crest we pass a muddy spring where a bear has wallowed not long before us. For a while thereafter the trail is wet with the bear’s paw prints, the Gambel oak leaves smeared with mud. We find a tree the bear has scraped against, glossing it with a sheen of dried mud, leaving hairs stuck in the bark. I sing songs made famous by Frank Sinatra at the top of my lungs to let the bear know we’re coming close behind, and though we follow in its footsteps for more than a mile we do not catch sight of it.

I
t’s always good to come home to my cabin on the hill. Midway through my season of fire, my more permanent home in the world below begins to feel like a stopover, a destination I visit briefly to perform some minor upkeep on my shadow existence as a bill-paying, truck-driving citizen of the twenty-first century. I visit the Laundromat, send some checks to my creditors. I restock on fresh produce from my friends at the farmer’s market. I exchange cash for gasoline. Then I flee once more for the hills.

Morning in Turkey Canyon is a picture of loveliness on the cusp of the solstice. Sycamores and willows shade the rock-bottom creek, and woodsmoke scents the air where families have pitched their tents in the roadside campgrounds. I drive with my window down and my arm hanging out in the coolness, the air growing cooler and cooler as we climb the winding road toward the pass. Alice stands, paces, sniffs the breeze over my shoulder, thrilled to be headed back into the wild. At Wright’s Saddle I stretch my legs in preparation for the hike, gaze awhile on the dun-colored valley of the Rio Grande, beyond it the distant dome of Sierra Blanca, the southernmost peak in the United States near 12,000 feet above sea level. Then I shoulder my pack and begin the walk.

Along the way I scan the radio for news of fire. Half an inch of rain fell while I was gone, slowing the growth of the big fires, though each of them continues to smolder. The Diamond Fire has moved across 11,000 acres, the Meason close to 6,000. Typically, this time of year, managing fires that size would be a white-knuckled adventure. But the weather’s been weird this season—and advantageous for fire use.

The typical weather pattern brings one-third of annual moisture in winter, followed by a dry spring that cures the grass to golden and primes the forest to burn. Scattered storms in May and June, some with dry lightning, touch off fires that in certain years burn for months, until a persistent plume of Gulf moisture smothers their spread. Old-timers place the onset of the Mexican monsoon on or around the Fourth of July, after which a couple of months of storms bring another half of the annual precipitation. The first storms of the monsoon touch off a final spasm of fires, which rarely grow large; by August, most years, the fires are finished and the creeks run high. At Gila Hot Springs, in the middle of the forest, thirteen inches of rainfall a year is the norm, on the high peaks of the Black Range more than twenty. This year a drier than normal winter prevailed, while May proved wetter than average. June has seen some mild storms with little lightning and modest rains, enough to keep the big fires from really ripping. With all due deference to a century of averages, I’m eight years into this vocation and I’ve yet to see two years shape up the same.

I arrive on top around noon, soaked in sweat and pleasantly exhausted, having carried with me bread, cheese, chocolate, oranges, bananas, blueberries, avocados, lettuce, onions, carrots, tomatoes, green chiles, some freshly laundered clothes, a couple of books, a couple of magazines. I gorge on lunch, replenishing the calories I’ve burned and then some. I nap in the tower, a deep and satisfying sleep I feel I’ve earned for having hiked up the peak in less than two hours. Waking midafternoon, I find a hummingbird hovering at the edge of the open tower window, shoo it away with a wave of my foot. Down the sixty-five steps, back on terra firma, I hang the sun shower from a hook on the porch and rinse the salt rimes from my skin. I eat some more. In the evening, as the sun sets in the west, I climb the tower for the reliable hour of painted pandemonium in the sky above the Mogollons. Off in the other direction, the shadow of my peak stretches in the shape of an arrowhead forty miles across the desert, the tip of it touching the Rio Grande just before sunset. In the sudden but not unpleasant chill of evening, I light a fire in the stone circle, stretch out next to it, watch as the nighthawks circle the meadow feeding on miller moths.

The moths represent the adult stage of the army cutworm, so named because it’s been known to crawl across roads and fields in vast conglomerations. It feeds nocturnally on flower nectar in mountain meadows and hides by day in the cracks and crevices of human structures, or in among the rocks on talus slopes. It is fed upon in turn by birds, bears, and bats, which relish it for its high fat content—as much as 70 percent of the moth’s body weight. Those moths that avoid their predators return to the lowlands and lay eggs in autumn. The worm emerges briefly to feed, then hibernates over the winter before feeding again in spring, in preparation for its migration to higher country.

This time of year I find the moths wedged in the window frames of my tower each morning, or in the space between my dropdown map and the ceiling. Each day I unhook the map and open the windows and watch the frenzied exodus as the moths fly away on the breeze. They invade the cabin too, emerging at dusk to beat their bodies against the windows where the moonlight filters through. When I spark the propane lamp, they attack the aluminum screen that keeps them from destroying the cloth mantle white-hot with gas. Reading after dark becomes nearly impossible, since the moths swarm both my light source and the white pages of an open book. I read a sentence or a paragraph, grapple with a moth around my eyes, read a bit more, grapple again. Beyond mid-June I tend to read by daylight and spend the evenings outdoors, around the fire and away from the silken fluttering, the moist bodies, the glowing eyes of the light-maddened moths. They like moonlight and gaslight but they show little interest in an outdoor fire.

Life quickens on the mountain in June. While it’s possible, some days, to convince myself I live in a sylvan tranquility, an Eden-like innocence, all around me a predatory savagery plays out. Down at the pond one evening I see what looks like a two-headed snake, writhing upon itself like some mutant life-form. Closer inspection reveals the second head to be that of a tiger salamander. Its tail and torso already swallowed, its forelegs waving just beyond the snake’s clenched jaw, it must have been caught from behind unawares. Bit by bit the snake—a Western wandering garter—walks its jaws up the length of the salamander’s body, preparing to swallow it whole.

Closer to home, convergent lady beetles cluster on the trunks and lower limbs of white pines, turning them burnt-orange; on calm days they swarm the meadow to feed, slicing the air like sleet when the aphids take to flight. Short-horned lizards sit on the rocks near the outhouse, preying on passing ants. The lizards’ camouflage skin, adapted to local coloring, shields them from snakes and hawks—though they will puff up like spiny blowfish or squirt blood from their eyes if threatened.

One day I kick a rotten log, testing its potential for bonfire wood. Beneath it lie dozens of tarantula hawks. I gently flip the log back into place and back away. A spooky-looking creature with an iridescent blue-black body and rust-colored wings, the tarantula hawk is a wasp that seeks out, stings, and paralyzes tarantulas to provide a host for its eggs. It drags the spider, alive but immobile, back to the spider’s own burrow or some other hole. It deposits a single egg on its abdomen. When the grub emerges from the egg, it gorges on the living spider, saving the juicy organs for last, so as to prolong the life of its host and benefactor. The sting of the tarantula hawk is said to hurt more than the sting of any other insect in North America, up to three minutes of debilitating pain that feels like an electric shock to the human nervous system.

Afternoons the turkey vultures circle, indolent and bloody-headed, sniffing out the presence of death. Their arrogant flight reminds me that my time here—on this mountain, on this orb—is short. If I were to slip and fall off the lookout tower, it wouldn’t be long before I passed into a new link of the food chain. A not unpleasant fate, perhaps: beats the stuffy prison of the graveyard tomb. So many dreary neighbors. So little sunlight. We’re all carrion eventually, whether for birds or for worms. I’d rather my remnants soar over mountains than slither beneath sod.