Wynn was beyond questioning. In the wavering light from the burning behind them he saw on the left bank a country out of the Inferno, a shadowed world of stubs and spikes of blackened trunks still running with blue flame, or flaring, a ground charred to mineral dirt and scintillant with embers, and the bank itself was wholly strange: the exposed roots that ran over all these cut banks had burned and where they had embedded were now channels of blackened dirt like the remains of some horrible ant farm. He ruddered hard on the left and reset the angle and took them into a narrow gravel bar. Jack hopped out. He hauled the bow up on the rocks, which were strangely powdered with ash like snow and still hot.
“No rain,” he called. “Not tonight. The river won’t rise—we’re safe leaving it.”
“Leaving it?” Behind them two explosions. They did not turn to look, but the little beach was illuminated.
“Not safe,” called Jack. “Not here.” He did turn now to witness the new slaughter across the water: a straight stretch of river, how the fire was consuming the wall of trees in pockets that ran together, how different pieces surged and died. It reminded him of the aurora borealis he had seen the other night, the great forest beneath the stars seeming compelled to answer.
Wynn climbed out, glanced at Maia, she was awake, good, her eyes were wide and in them he could see a reflection of flames. He stepped up to Jack. On this side were only low hisses, a ticking and chirping, a simmering crackle like a million crickets, hellfire crickets, singing of apocalypse and char.
“What do you mean?” Wynn said. “Where do you think we should go?”
Jack pointed inland.
“There? Are you crazy?”
Jack took Wynn’s shoulders and turned him around. The sections of fire all along the far bank were running together with increasing speed, and they could see the concatenate crownings as treetops burst into flame, see it quickening, the flames jetting higher.
“She will do again what she did on this side of the river,” Jack said. “The fucker’s getting hotter over there, she’s just getting started. Once she makes her own weather she can do all sorts of crazy shit. Like back fully around. She can try to flash back. How wide is the river? A hundred thirty yards? It’s not enough.”
“Fuck.” Wynn blew out the word. “Really? You really think so?”
Jack didn’t answer. He let the spectacle across the water speak for itself. Finally he said, “Wildland firefighters call it running into the black. Back into the black. We won’t run, not with her, but we need to go in there. It’ll be uncomfortable but not so much as getting baked.”
He let it sink in. Wynn nodded, but almost as if he believed he was in a bad dream now and it didn’t matter what they did.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Walking into the outskirts of hell is like: filling your rubber knee-high Wellingtons with an inch of water—just seemed like the right thing to do. He and Jack still had them, as Wynn had thought to shove them into the dry bag for the night paddle. In case. In case what happened happened. Had they been wearing them in the flip they would have lost them. So as they walked into the embered wasteland of a burned forest they sloshed with every step. Maybe because the moon was not up, and the light there was cast from exploding trees across the river—the sense again of pulse like blood or breath, like something alive. The scorched landscape throbbed with light. Otherwise black and red: black ground, black stumps, red embers, black distances between the flaring stumps. It was hot. They walked through charred spindles and spears—the simple skeletons of the old-growth trees. They wound around the hollowed broken rounds of trunks, some twenty feet tall, that speared the night and whispered with small flames that ran up and down the edges. They passed a stump sheared ragged at the top and still, incredibly, barked, if charred, and streaked with resin. They passed one patch of spruce, maybe ten trees, singed but standing. How? Like retracing the tracks of fate. And if it was hellish at first, within a few minutes it felt holy. They held Maia upright between them to help her walk and they stepped slowly and nobody spoke. They avoided still-burning roots and feared those that burned beneath a layer of dirt. They sweated, and the ground was mostly very hot but it did not melt their boots more than a little. They coughed. Their sinuses burned but the smoke was mostly gone. They were aghast and awed. Nobody said a word but now and then one gasped.
They walked maybe a quarter mile and Jack whispered, “This is probably far enough. We’ll just wait.” His voice was a croak. He felt tired beyond reckoning. They scraped a patch of ash and scorched soil away with their boots and stood mute as the embered edges of the spiked trees breathed around them. It was not real. Jack looked around and thought that the Inferno was not credible: not because the details of Hell were beyond the pale—they were—but because of the unshakable equanimity of Virgil.
* * *
They waited there for hours. They leaned together and held her and slept like horses, standing. The ground was still too hot to sit on. She was weak and she buckled between them and they held her up. A crescent moon clawed out of the smoke to the east, a dim moon, heavy with blood. When she collapsed again they decided to move. It was too much—they’d take their chances on the beach.
They walked slowly back. They were dreamwalking now. She was mumbling, inarticulate. Jack couldn’t look at Wynn; whenever they passed a stump still burning, the large sear on his face glistened with pus and blood. He kept his eyes on the retreating flames eastward, a dread stare, his arm gone numb from holding her up. Wynn held her belt and thought of nothing. He saw shadows passing, shaped like caribou, coyote, moose, fleet and weightless as smoke, he even saw a bear, and he knew they were ghosts. Or maybe his eyes were closed; he kept snapping them open.
They stumbled down the bank to the stony bar. The hulk of the canoe lay there unharmed and Jack startled with a jolt of adrenaline, the thought: What if the fire had flashed back and burned the boat? What would they have done then? No logs even to make a raft. He hadn’t thought it through. They would have stood stunned on the narrow beach like castaways and watched a red sun rise on their own deaths.
Fuck. No way to truly reckon the odds, ever. They had been lucky. Was all this lucky?
They slept on the rocks, oblivious of the cold. At least the heat of the burn had dried their clothes and warmed their chilled bones. At the first touch of grainy light they slid the canoe to the water without a word and helped her in and she lay down against the bag and passed out. They shoved off and picked up the paddles. They could see their breath. In the gray dawn the river smoked with tendrils of mist. No wind, the water glass-smooth. No sound but the current frilling the stones of the bank. No bird chatter, no crickets. The river and the burns on either side were very still, the only movement there the tatters of flame worrying the biggest fallen logs. Jack said, “Big, we need fuel. Food. There won’t be any berries for miles is my bet.”
“Do you want to fish?” Thank God they’d broken down the rods and packed them in the bag.
“We’d better.”
“Okay. I’ll aim for the first creek.” Wynn picked up his paddle and put it down again. The boat was still gliding from their first strokes—the silent slip and freedom from land like flight that they both so loved. “That was really close,” he said.
“Yep.”
“I feel relieved,” Wynn said.
“Me, too. I do.”
Wynn opened his mouth to speak, had nothing to say. Jack was half turned on the bow seat, watching him. “I know,” Jack said. Wynn’s face was torn open by the burn and smeared with black and runneled pale where the tears ran. “I know. We did good,” Jack said. “We did.” Jack felt his own tears spring and he turned in the seat and began to paddle.
* * *
It was exhaustion, Jack thought. The tears. Hunger, exposure, exhaustion. How long could they keep this up?
* * *