Fire Season (26 page)

She aims, slides the safety switch off, squeezes the trigger. The gun bucks in her arms; the empty shell twirls into the air. Her shot misses high, peppering a shrub behind the TV.

“Holy cats,” she says. “My ears are ringing. And I think I bruised my shoulder.”

“Let me see.”

She opens the neck of her shirt. The print of the gun butt is visible against the flesh below her collarbone. I trace the raised and reddened outline of it with my finger.

“That looks painful.”

“I’ll be all right. I just want another shot at that TV.”

B
y the third week of July, with the days calm and sunny, the Wily Fire burns along at a modest pace, now 35 acres. I give smoke updates to dispatch twice a day, and the other lookouts do the same for various fires around the forest: the Scott Fire (three acres), the Turkey Fire (220 acres), the Moore Fire (1,700 acres). Every morning I discover a new wildflower in bloom, and beneath the densest forest, where the earth remains moist, mushrooms have begun to sprout.

Martha spends three days on the mountain, three days of delicious domesticity. We bake peanut butter cookies and banana bread. We take warm baths in the tin tub, scrub each other’s backs with soapy water. We sit on the porch watching the riot of hummingbirds swarming the feeder, thrilled to discover among them a single calliope—the smallest breeding bird in North America. Although the rufous hummers have arrived to stake their claim, they’ve yet to intimidate their rivals, the broadtails, into moving on: some days three dozen birds buzz the porch at once. In the tower one afternoon we see a storm hammer the wilderness to the northwest, and after it clears a new smoke appears. I call John at Cherry Mountain for a cross. We triangulate our azimuths and place the fire above Salt Creek. The Salt Fire: a single snag burning feebly on a south-facing slope. It’s so far away—twenty miles—and so small it’s barely visible to the naked eye; it takes me a minute to explain to Martha where it is. She’s seen her share of fires on her visits here and is unimpressed by this one. By the next morning, when a helicopter goes looking for it, it will be dead out.

After dark Martha and I sit around the bonfire in council. Our lives are about to change, now that she’ll be a nurse and not a student. For starters, we’ll get our dental work done on this side of the Mexican border, and with any luck I won’t have to return to the trenches of the wine and spirits industry, hustling for tips and swapping quips with the tipsy. The size of her paycheck will determine my options. No matter what, we decide, we’re retiring the Shaggin’ Wagon, the maroon Dodge Caravan that no longer runs in reverse. Mere mention of it triggers a story.

“Remember that time I came to pick you up at the pass and you weren’t there?” she asks. I do. This was in the days when Martha used to shuttle me to the trailhead and then return to pick me up for my days off. We had our rendezvous carefully planned, but once when the relief lookout hiked in a few hours early I decided to hit the trail and spare Martha some of the drive. At the pass I hitched a ride sixteen miles out of the mountains to the Hot Springs turnoff. There I would wait until I saw her coming, flag her down as she passed. After about forty-five minutes I saw the van coming down the hill into the valley. I stood on the shoulder next to my pack. As she drew near I waved a couple of times, thinking she’d slow as she saw me. But she didn’t slow, and my waves grew frantic, and then she was upon me and I saw, as she passed, that she was fiddling with something on the seat beside her and wasn’t looking my way at all. Then I was staring at the back of the van as it motored through the valley and up into the foothills, aware I’d made a huge mistake.

Three hours, a long walk, and a hitched ride later, I was back at the pass, back where I’d started. I walked up the short dirt road to the supply shack at the trailhead. Martha was nowhere to be found. I could see her tire tracks where she’d parked and waited and finally turned around and left, and there was a note stuck to the door of the shack saying she’d been there at four o’clock. I was glad she hadn’t started hiking up the trail in search of me. She must have gone down the other side of the mountains into Gaylord to use the phone.

I sat at the pass and waited. Another half an hour passed. By now it was almost seven o’clock, and I was worried she was rounding up a manhunt to come in search of me. I heard a car coming so I jumped back into the road. Tourists, it turned out, a couple from Vermont. They said they’d give me a lift down to Gaylord, so I could look for Martha there. We got half a mile down the road when we saw the van coming toward us. They flashed their lights, pulled over. Martha took one look at me getting out of the backseat and shook her head. Thinking I would save her an hour of driving, I’d cost her three hours of searching. She kept shaking her head the whole time I explained what happened.

“I thought maybe you broke your ankle hiking out,” she said.

“Nope, I’m just a dumb shit,” I said.

“Can’t argue with you there.”

Now, thankfully, we can laugh about it, and our laughter leads to still other stories of the past that distract us for a while from our future uncertainties, but eventually our conversation turns to the subject of her father and his health. His final days may be upon us; any moment now Martha could get the call from her brothers telling her it’s time to come home. She will want to be there if worse comes to worst, doing what she can to ease his passage. That will mean asking for indefinite leave or giving up her job entirely, potentially kicking the breadwinning back to me. I’ll go with her to Massachusetts and find a job or help her family around the house; I’ll stay in New Mexico and tend the hearth with the dog until she returns. Whatever she needs.

I sit behind her as she sits Indian style, my arms wrapped around her, both of us silent, eyes drawn to the mesmerizing flames of the bonfire, the night around us cool and calm, the dog curled up in the meadow nearby, the stars gone crazy in a moonless sky, our future unknown but our present no way other than we’d wish it.

A
lone again, I walk the next evening with the dog down the southwest slope of the peak, hoping to forestall the deep blue funk that always comes upon me in the hours after the departure of my closest friend in the world. Watching Alice hunt as she wanders to and fro off the trail lifts me out of my interior dramas, places me back in the sensual world of squirrel tail and bird wing, color and movement, shadow and light.

A mile down the trail she stops, ears upraised, tail suddenly still. I crouch behind her for a view from her level, but before I’m able to see what’s got her attention she’s off at a dead sprint, barking and yipping. Out ahead of her I hear the low moan of a cow, and another, and another.

I hustle after but I can’t keep up. I hear her barks echoing down the mountain as she chases the cattle into the upper reaches of Apache Creek. Soon I come upon evidence that several cattle have been munching on the grass, their piles of dung still wet. They’ve strayed several miles out of their owner’s allotment on the forest to the west, probably through a broken fence. These four-legged locusts, with their shit-smeared rumps and moon-eyed stares, flies orbiting each of their orifices, have done more than anything else to inflict widespread damage on the public lands of the American West. Yet given the power and persistence of the cattlemen’s lobby, they continue to graze on the public domain, trampling riparian areas, hastening erosion, pulverizing wildlife habitat, disturbing the fire regime, and generally wreaking havoc on the land wherever they roam.

The faithful insist this sort of public-lands ranching is “a way of life,” but for certain species in these parts it’s more accurate to call it a way of death. For thousands of years the Gila country was home to grizzly bears, but no more. Hide hunters, cattlemen, and their mercenary hired guns took care of that. Once, too, the Mexican gray wolf thrived here, but ranchers in partnership with government exterminators wiped them out north of the Mexican border. There was a time when such developments were trumpeted under the banner of human progress, but Aldo Leopold helped us see them for the tragedy they were. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” he wrote, elucidating his land ethic. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” By this measure, public-lands ranching in the West has been, for the most part, deeply wrong.

Eighty years ago the decline in wolves led directly to the biggest permanent wound ever inflicted on the Gila Wilderness: the construction of the North Star Road. Many justifications were made for this breach of Leopold’s roadless reserve: improved communications between remote ranger stations, quicker response time by firefighters, easier access for ranchers. Some also argued the scenery wasn’t that great anyway—who cared about dry and dusty piñon-juniper steppe? But the major clamor for it came from deer hunters too tender to stray from their automobiles in the pursuit of big game. They and the Forest Service had their eyes on an alarming explosion in the deer population along Black Canyon Creek and the East Fork of the Gila River. Deer had multiplied beyond the carrying capacity of the land because large predators—principally the Mexican gray wolf—had been poisoned, trapped, and shot to near extinction, in part to make the country cozier for cattle. In his early days as a forest ranger in Arizona, Leopold himself had gunned down a wolf, an incident about which he writes with rueful poignancy in
A Sand County Almanac:

We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

By 1919, ten years after the fateful encounter, only a dozen wolves remained in New Mexico, and in Arizona they were gone altogether, with terrible consequences for the health of the land. Without predators to cull the sick and the weak, herd size increased and deer starved from lack of forage. Late in life, Leopold was haunted by his early advocacy of killing predators to protect cattle and expand game herds. About that road which sheared off one-third of his original roadless preserve—severing the Black Range from the rest of the wilderness to the west—Leopold would eventually concede, “I was hoist of my own petard.”

Leopold didn’t live to see the Mexican gray wolf listed under the Endangered Species Act, in 1976. Soon thereafter, U.S. and Mexican officials began a cooperative program to breed the wolves in captivity, having captured five survivors deep in the Sierra Madre. In 1998 eleven wolves were released into the Blue Range Recovery Area, just across the state line from the Gila. More wolves were released in subsequent years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had hoped to see a population of a hundred healthy wolves in the Gila and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests by the end of 2008. During a 2009 survey their numbers stood at fewer than half that. By all accounts the recovery program has been an abysmal failure. Many ranchers think the subspecies should have been allowed to die out or remain in zoos; conservationists had hoped for a bigger, healthier population of wild wolves.

The wolves’ tenuous toehold has been a symbolic blow to a ranching culture long buttressed by a sense of entitlement and a righteous nostalgia for a time when the national forests were carved into a series of private ranching fiefdoms and anything that stood in the way could be crushed by political power or simply shot on sight. To the eyes of an outsider it verges on the tragic to see members of an iconic American livelihood reduced to curdled bitterness and benighted propaganda in their public statements, even if the iconography never did square with reality. When you drive around the Gila you’re bound to encounter homemade placards warning you that wolves are on the prowl nearby, hungry for your pets and even your children, never mind that wild wolf attacks on humans are practically nonexistent in the historical record. (By contrast, between 2006 and 2008, eighty-eight people died from dog attacks in the United States, and more than a thousand Americans visit the emergency room each day for dog bites.) The most vociferous voices in the ranching community claim the wolf-recovery program is a government conspiracy to run them out of business, even though more than 95 percent of their livestock losses result from other reasons—lightning strikes, falls off cliffs, mountain lion predations, disease—and Defenders of Wildlife runs a compensation trust that pays ranchers full market value for a confirmed wolf kill of a cow. Some modern cattlemen proudly proclaim their descent from the pioneers who settled the region in the face of renegade Apaches and cold-blooded criminals, while at the same time they complain to the local newspapers about the psychological trauma and sleepless nights they and their children suffer after hearing a wolf howl. They’re either the toughest people on earth or the most timorous, depending on the proximity of
Canis lupus baileyi
.