Kindling

As the stars vanished and the sky began to turn blue, Sam teetered into Walker’s camp, doing his best to keep upright against the swaying motion of the mare’s gait as she negotiated the trail. He watched Sue walking ahead and below, leading the other horse. The cowboy appeared and laid out some bedding for Sam, and then he helped Sue lower Sam off the mount.

“Stay,” Sam whispered, gazing out at the sky over the opposite side of the canyon. Sue followed his blank gaze and saw only the mountainside and a lone vulture. “I love you too, milkman. Now get yourself some rest,” Sue amorously mocked and commanded, and led him to a ground sheet laid upon a bed of pine needles.

Armen wandered in after a while, damp from the showers that concluded the conflagration. As he approached, the cowboy greeted him with a tip of his hat and said, “Grab a stump.”

“Thanks,” Armen replied, but he didn’t approach the fire. Instead, he sat down to rest against the trunk of a ponderosa pine just beyond the perimeter of the clearing.

“What did you two find?” the cowboy asked as he turned to Sue.

“Oh, that—over there.” She nodded in Sam’s direction.

“No sign of the girl?”

“No, and I can’t say I’m surprised. … Oh—Heard a gunshot; a couple shouts. Saw a camp; a couple tents; nobody home.”

“That ranger’s party. Didn’t see any sign of them?”

“Saw a few tracks. Couldn’t see much with all that ash.”

“Huh.”

Sam reclined against a pine trunk, watching the fire and the sky beyond. Something caught his attention, and he struggled to get to his feet. Sue, grooming the palomino coat of her quarter horse where she could keep an eye on Sam, noticed his efforts to regain his legs.

“Need something?” Sue called over to him.

“She—she’s back,” Sam answered as he struggled.

“You reckon that’s her?” the cowboy replied as he walked out of the trees with a load of firewood.

Sue turned to meet his line of sight from her location, and saw what seemed to be a vulture soaring against the afternoon sun.

“A vulture?” she asked while swinging her gaze between Sam and the westering sun.

“Huh?” Sam replied obliviously.

The cowboy set the wood down by the fire and peered out at the bird. “Condor,” he noted. “Steady wings. Don’t teeter. Didn’t know there were any left ‘round here.”

“Condor, eh?” Sue echoed, turning to Sam.

The cowboy continued. “Firebird.”

Sam threw a glance at the cowboy.

“Firebird?” checked Sue. “You mean like a phoenix?”

“A phoenix? I s’pose you might call it that, rising from the ashes like she does.”

“Rises from the ashes?” Sue replied. “Ah, you mean she shows up after fires.”

“Yup. What better time for a reaper to gather the dead?”

“Gather? Reaper?”

The cowboy shrugged. “Well, uh—for lack of a better word.”

“I see.” Sue nodded and shot an ironic glance the cowboy’s way.

“ ‘t ain’t nothing to be afraid of.”

“Yeah, Sue chuckled under her breath. I know. Don’t fear the reaper. I’ve heard the song, Frank.”

“Song?”

“You can’t fool me, Frank. I know you’ve heard the song.”

“It ain’t just the reaper. It’s the fear. Nothin’ so much to be feared as fear.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one too. Nothing to fear but fear itself, right?”

“Oh, I dunno. I don’t think I’d take it that far.”

“Suit yourself, you old contrary.”

“Coming—coming” Sam muttered as he struggled to get his balance. “Pack—where’s my pack?”

Sue turned to Sam. “You won’t find your backpack around here, hon’. It seems you left it in the fire.”

“Oh,” Sam muttered thoughtfully. He hadn’t left it in the fire, but the fire might have got to where he left it. “I need to go check where I left it.”

“You sure you can walk more than twenty feet?”

“I’m about to find out.”

“I see. Let me escort you. I promise I won’t slow you down.” Sue flashed a smile and winked.

“Just take my pack” Armen proposed from his pine trunk.

“I need to check on my pack anyway.”
“Fine. But take my pack anyway. If you don’t need it, you can leave it anywhere. You’ll move faster this way.”

“Alright.”

Sam turned to the cowboy. “Sir, do you think you could spare some provisions?”

“Naturally,” the cowboy answered. “You and I are in luck. Miss Coswell here just hauled some in.”

Sam stuffed Armen’s pack with food, heaved it up onto his back, and thanked Walker. He turned to the trail.

Nobody was about to tell Sam to stay put, though he wasn’t in any condition for travel. Sue, Armen, and Walker didn’t know what had transpired, nor did they know what Sam had in mind, but they knew enough to guess that there would be trouble with the law. Sam was too conspicuous there in camp.

“Hang on, he-man,” Sue called to Sam from her hitching post. “I’ll get you up the trail as far as you like. You can go on foot as soon as you leave the trail.” She untied her mount, led him to Sam, and commanded, “hop on.”

“What are you going to do?” Sam challenged.

“I’m going to lead this gelding. You’ll never lose sight of me, you lucky boy.” She slapped herself on the ass and commanded, “Mount up.”

Sue returned on horseback at dusk. She and Armen rode out the next day, after a crash course in horseback riding.

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It was her—whoever she was. Her body was painted black and gray—perhaps with ash. A gray stripe ran down each arm. Her head was clean-shaven and condor orange with an avian—or igneous—symbol, charcoal-black with wings or flames extended. She wore straps around her torso, arms and legs to hold her quiver, knife, and what seemed to be darts. She was perched on a low creek-side ledge, her feet on the hanging roots of a pine that had been undermined by a slide. A lightning bolt broke through the orange waves of firelight, and she was momentarily transformed, the gray streaks on her skin flashing back at the thunderbolt.

Once he focused his eyes on her, he was trapped. He was caught in the depths of her dark eyes—eyes that were little larger than points at his range. He blinked, only for his eye to be caught by the head of the arrow that was trained on him. He blinked again against the firelight, and he noticed that something was missing. He wasn’t quite able to see the bowstring. Surely the bow was too distant for its string to be visible. Surely the string was there—hiding somewhere in the shadows of the fire and the smoke, and yet his eyes told him otherwise, and something in his head agreed with them.

Sam stood frozen, gazing down through the drifting waves of smoke at the scene from above. He shook himself and sprang down toward the creek, and saw her standing before the flames. She held her bow taut, pointing an arrow down at something or someone Sam could not make out. He paused again, unable to shake his eyes off of her and proceed. She seemed utterly transformed—or possessed—or replaced. He snapped out of the momentary trance and continued crashing down the slope.

The ranger coughed and gaped awfully at her through a break in the high, streamside grass. “You don’t really wa—” he began as he reached across his chest and over his shoulder for his rifle. But she knew where his hand would be moving, and let the bird fly. It struck him in the left hand. The blow startled him, and he stumbled and fell back. From the ground, he was able to reach for his rifle, but his hands shook as he pulled it into position. He fired a shot before he realized that he hadn’t thought to aim.

There was nothing to aim at. She had disappeared into the gathering smoke, and just then, a fire devil came spinning out of the conflagration. It whirled through the vale, swaying left and right like a top as it approached the ranger. He watched it calmly as though it were his destiny. Whirling to the edge of a patch of dry and burning meadow, the devil leaned out toward him and leaped up into the smoke, its tail whipping up behind as it vanished. As his eyes followed the devil’s flight into the smoke above, the ranger caught a flash in the corner of his eye.

It was her again. She took several steps forward and looked down upon him, and he gazed up at her terrible beauty, her black legs, blood-orange head and neck, black torso, a gray feather pattern unfolding from her navel up to her breasts. She was beautiful.

Sam watched helplessly from some rocks above. A cloud of smoke blew up the slope and obscured his view. Then he felt a blast of heat. He could hear the dragon’s roar. He felt its hot breath blowing up the mountainside, but he couldn’t quite see it, draped as it was in black smoke. The black veil closed in around him. He coughed, and dropped to his knees. A terrible white glow began to spread through his vision and into his mind.

The dragon struck the vale. Exulting over having feasted on a forest somewhere below, her appetite had been whetted for more. In her lust and relish, she had transformed herself from fire to firestorm.

The air, warped by the heat, gave her a shimmering, incorporeal appearance, exaggerated by the dehydration and heat stroke that had rendered him susceptible to hallucination. She turned her head slightly left and right while she inhaled the breeze, and she closed her eyes and smiled in tender ecstasy. He coughed, and the cough shook his body. He winced as he felt the arrow twist in his hand. It was snagged in there like a fishhook. She exhaled, and the air became still. He forgot his mission. He wanted her. He forgot the forests. He closed his eyes, and she opened hers.

She inhaled deeply just as a gust arose. She continued to inhale as if driving the wind herself. The conflagration was led by the gust into the vale, inhaling all of the free oxygen, and the vale erupted in flame. The fire consumed everything—even itself—there in a single explosive blast.

As the roar of the firestorm ebbed, a sizzling sound could be heard rising over the vale. Water was striking the burning remains everywhere. It was falling from the clouds, forgotten behind a veil of smoke. In a moment it was a downpour.

Sam lay motionless on a ledge above the vale. The rain pounded his back and the side of his head. His clothes were pocked with burn holes and blackened by smoke. His face and hands were blistered with burns.

He thought he heard someone call his name. He raised his head and opened his eyes. He saw a white figure approaching. It looked like Armen, but it was pale, and its hair was long and white. The whiteness began to spread again, and he closed his eyes and gave into the lightness of sleep.

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The heat of the sun broke through the trees. It was going be another hot day; even hotter than the day before. The hunting party moved quickly up the Hockett Trail, along the Little Kern River. They crossed a brook flowing off the Great Western Divide and stopped to fill their canteens. They were being watched. Sam Dorah had been following them. As they proceeded up the trail, Sam watched them from the ridge above. After a while, he stopped trailing them and turned to follow the old over-the-hump trail. Not long after they arrived at the Rifle Creek corral, Sam took up his post for the night. He watched from patch of cedars and manzanita atop a low rise south of the creek. He watched them set up camp, and then he watched them build their fire.

John Searles and the young hunter gazed into the restless flames of their campfire while the other hunter stood watch outside the perimeter of the firelight. The younger man broke the silence for a moment, asking, “fires ever start on their own up here?”

Sierra Juniper, by Leland Curtis (1897-1989)

“All the time,” the ranger answered.

“But there’s no lack of old trees,” mused the hunter. “Shoot, with all these fires I’d be surprised to find a tree older than me.”

“Yeah, well, some trees don’t burn so easy.”

“The old ones.”

“Yeah.”

“The redwoods.”

“Sure,” the ranger answered. “Giants—juniper—foxtail.”

“Them too, eh?”

“Older’n Jesus.”

“Huh,” the young man acknowledged, paused as if to think, and observed, “that’s a long time—a lot of fires.” He gazed into the flames and continued, “You think one firebug makes much of a difference?”

“Maybe; maybe not, but it’s against the law either way.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Sure,” the hunter agreed, and returned his attention to the fire.

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It happened one morning that while Ranger Searles and his hunter companions Bill and Cliff were in camp eating breakfast, a backpacking party passed through.

“Just setting out for the day?” Searles asked casually.

“Yep. Just broke camp a mile or so up,” one of the backpackers replied.

“Have a good day,” the ranger bade them off.

The ranger’s party finished their breakfast and broke camp. Just as they were about to set out, Cliff spotted smoke up the ridge, so the party started up the trail quickly. After about twenty minutes, they found the source of the smoke. It was a campfire, burning hot in a fire ring in the middle of a campsite, but there was no other evidence that the site was occupied. The fire didn’t resemble an old fire that had flared up on its own; it was full of fresh wood. It looked as though someone had just fed it, but there appeared to be no one around.

Searles told the hunters to check the area for tracks, and he turned back down the trail in pursuit of the backpacking party that they’d encountered that morning. He managed to catch up with them. They swore that they’d put the fire out, and they claimed they’d left the fire ring almost entirely free of unburned wood. Searles ID’d them and headed back to see whether the hunters had found anything. They hadn’t.

Again and again this happened. They found several more ghost fires, though they never heard of such fires being encountered by anyone else.

And then there were the night sightings. Searles never saw anything, but one of the hunters would occasionally look out over the campfire to see something move on the edge of the firelight dome. Sometimes, in the flash of a campfire flame, the form of a face might appear among the trees, or something might appear to move. The hunter would grab a knife or a rifle and, still blind from the fire, stumble around the camp perimeter only to bring minor harm to himself. Both hunters felt like clowns. Each believed he’d seen something, but neither was really quite sure.

Searles insisted that they take every sighting seriously. “I don’t care if you’re mad,” he told them. “Never assume that anything is all in your head; not while you’re working for me anyway.”

One night, the younger of the two hunters thought he saw a flash in the woods, just beyond the shadows that dance against the trees, rocks, and shrubs on the firelight perimeter. Rather than rushing out into the dark woods, he turned back to the swaying camp flames and asked Searles, “Ranger: you believe in ghosts?” Searles mumbled something like “the head is a haunted house,” cast his cigarette into the fire, and finished with “Cliff, you got business out there?” The young hunter gave a nod, stood up, and wandered out into the shadows.

A moment after Cliff returned to the fire, Searles emerged from the trees, sat down by the fire and said, “We need to set some traps.”

So they did. They set traps around their camp perimeter wherever they went. They left their campfire smoldering when they broke camp, and then doubled back. They did it for a week, and then another week, but they got nothing, or not much, anyway. Trip lines had been touched on two occasions, and one of their campfires was reignited, but they never caught anyone.

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When morning broke into the shack, neither girl stirred. They lay still as manikins, spooned under the rough hunter’s blanket. Cindy’s naked left arm was flung over Sue, her face laced with Sue’s black hair.

A while later, the racket of jays squawking awakened them. Sue got her clothes on quickly. “Oops! Slept in,” she explained. “I’ll try to get back later today. Make yourself at home.”

Sue returned that night. Cindy stayed in the shack a couple days and then vanished while Sue was out.

The news of Cindy’s escape from the youth home was already out. Sam left his work at the dairy to find her, and Ranger Searles was soon on the hunt. The ranger hadn’t forgotten that Sam had led him to Cindy before. There would be no missing person flyers this time, only the wanted posters distributed by Searles.

Armen, incommunicado in Lone Pine, working at a service station on the north end of town, was unaware of Cindy’s disappearance.

A cool spring breeze blew through the pines. Cindy climbed along a white cliff face, in the shade of the crowns of a grove of ponderosa pines. The cliff was not high by the standards of the Range. The pines only twenty feet behind her grew out of the slope only forty feet below. Cindy stretched her left arm blindly around the rock and found a good handhold. She swung her left foot out and kicked some loose dirt out of a notch in the weathered rock. A clump of needles and dirt spilled out, making enough room for her right foot, which she then swung over. Her right hand groped around for a new hold, and froze.

Cindy grunted as she strained to hold herself steady while she opened her right hand and waved it slowly around. She thought she may have felt a draft, but now she couldn’t feel a thing.

She brought her hand back against the cliff and found a hold, and then she pulled her left leg up to a notch near her thigh. She pushed up from that foothold while her right hand looked for another hold. It found one, so she brought her right foot up, and pushing up from her new foothold, she found what she was hunting for: an opening. The draft moved subtly through her hair. It was not enough to move her curls, but it was enough to be felt in her scalp. Her hands had found a small platform at the opening of a marble cave.

Cindy reached across the platform and grabbed an edge. She got a foot up into a shallow notch, and she grunted and heaved herself up onto the platform. The opening was narrow, but she was able to squeeze through. She couldn’t tell right off how much there was to this cave, but she didn’t need much. She pulled herself in deeper and reached up. There was enough headroom to sit. She turned around: she could barely see light from the entrance. She pressed farther on, searching for daylight, hoping to find a more convenient entrance.

Later, Cindy emerged from the same opening she’d entered by, and she began to investigate the cliff face for a batter access route.

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