Fire Breathing
BY PATRICIA ROBERTSON
This story was published in the author's collection, "Hour of the Crab," published by Goose Lane Editions, 2021.
There they were. Ahead of him. Four immense black figures, curling downward at the tops, reaching out spindly crackling fingers toward him. He automatically tugged at his hose pack, but it was hopeless. —Get out! someone yelled, racing past him, Get out, now!—it couldn’t be Ray, could it?—not Ray, of all people…. The nearest black figure was toppling in slow motion, if he didn’t move now he’d be trapped—
He woke shouting, as always, strangling in blankets. After he’d wiped the sweat off his face he stood in the cool band of moonlight, blinds raised, staring out at an ordinary edge-of-city suburb. Out there, in the hills and mountains, the black figures walked, ever closer. It was safe, for now. Safe for as long as he and his kind did what they were trained to do—hold back the wall of flame from the world.
Over black coffee and scrambled eggs he checked his phone. No call-outs yet, just a kind of ominous silence. End of season anyway, or what used to be the end of season, though it wasn’t, not anymore. November and still over a hundred active fires in the Coastal region alone. Already there’d been snow at lower levels, melted now, but that didn’t mean he was done for the year. He paced, drinking a second cup. Stella bumped her nose into the back of his knee, triggering a bolt of pain. Walking her was usually Parveen’s job, but she was on the other side of the planet for a wedding, some cousin or other in Chandigarh, he couldn’t keep track.
You remember, Parveen would say insistently, Kiran, the pretty one in the pink-and-gold salwar kameez, my auntie Nanda’s youngest, and he’d laugh and ask how she expected him to remember out of the fifty or sixty cousins he’d met on their honeymoon.
It was beginning to drizzle. Typical November weather for Burnaby, if you could call anything typical nowadays. He hunched into his anorak, the much-too-expensive one Parveen had bought him last Christmas, and opened the door for Stella to go arrowing out. She’d been his own present to Parveen two Christmases ago, a wriggling lump of yellow fur from a farm in Abbotsford. Black lab and golden retriever, the ad said. No, not Christmas—Diwali, when Parveen filled the house with candles and sweets and spent three days preparing a feast for their closest friends. Yes, Diwali, of course, the festival of light. That was why they’d named the puppy Stella.
—A puppy for Diwali? Parveen’s brother had said in mock horror. —You are worshipping dogs now?
—Now, Dhanu. Parveen frowned at him. —Don’t tease. I wanted one, you know. Ty bought me the perfect gift.
To her husband she had to explain that in parts of India people offered garlands and food to dogs and marked tikas on their foreheads during the festival. —Remember, sweetie, what I told you about dogs in Hinduism? They guard the doors of heaven and hell.
No, he hadn’t. All those dizzying gods and goddesses with their multiple incarnations and avatars, their pulsating colours—how could anyone recall them all?
—My mother always said, if your pet dog sneezes while you are going out, it’s a good omen, Parveen’s sister-in-law added. —Remember, Dhanu, that pug of hers, how she dressed it up like a baby?
Then there was an awkward silence, because Parveen’s own mother kept asking why there was no baby yet, after eight years, when Dhanu and his wife had three, all boys.
They had agreed, he and Parveen, there would never be a baby. How could you bring a baby into a world on fire?
Stella was ahead on the path to the park, growling at something. This early he hadn’t bothered with the leash. —Stella! he shouted, and broke into a run. She was barking now, at what he thought was a pile of branches until it shape-shifted into a lean-to draped with a wet tarp. Under it a man, thin, aged-looking, watching Stella warily through the rain. Ty bent and grabbed her collar.
—She’s harmless, just trying to be protective, he said as she twisted against his hold, giddy with bravery.
—’s’okay, the man said, except you could see it wasn’t. He shook in his jean jacket, the pucker of scar on a forearm. One eye was puffy and half-shut. —You got cigarettes?
Ty didn’t, so he fumbled for coins instead. The man held out a dirty palm, poked at the coins with a nicotined finger. —That all you got? He had the air of one perpetually disappointed in the human race, but he closed his fist around them. —I got something for you, eh? For luck.
He pushed a crumpled paper bag at Ty. Only when he’d walked away with Stella did he look inside. A tree cutout, one of those pine-scented things you hung in your car. He dropped it in the nearest garbage can and stooped to pick up a stick for the dog.
—Who’s Ray? Parveen said when he described the dream.
—I don’t know. I never knew a Ray in the crews. Not that I remember.
—Are you doing your calm breathing? He could tell she was trying hard to keep her voice level. —The way Mandy showed you?
Yes. There were days he thought it helped and days he didn’t. It was one of the tools in the toolbox Mandy talked about, though a toolbox you couldn’t see or touch struck him as ridiculous.
—Then call it a strategy. A technique. Parveen tightened her hands round the mug of coffee; she’d just got up. —The kids call it belly breathing.
It wasn’t fair to burden her when caring for kids in pain was what she did for a living. She was a nurse in pediatric oncology, on twelve-hour shifts during weeks that always seemed to coincide with his own time off. They went to temple together occasionally; Parveen joked it was because otherwise he’d never see her. The days dedicated to Sri Ganesha, the elephant-headed god—lord of good fortune, remover of obstacles—were her favourites. There’d been a puja to the god as part of their wedding ceremony.
Ganesha had once had an ordinary human head, apparently, but his own father had replaced it with an elephant’s instead out of jealousy. Parveen said the whole incident was some sort of misunderstanding. Just like all gods everywhere, forever cursing and behaving badly. He was never sure how seriously Parveen took all this, but he was happy to be with her as the tray of ghee lamps was brought round, as everyone held their hands out and brushed the light toward their eyes.
—It’s taking the essence of the fire into your heart and mind, Parveen told him, which unnerved him. Did he need such essence, when he witnessed it every time he went to work?
He hoped Parveen’s belief in the god who removed obstacles protected him, too.
The call-out came on Monday. Parveen wouldn’t be back for another two weeks. He drove Stella to his niece’s, where her eighteen-month-old and the dog could tangle together on the floor, and checked the coordinates on the status website as he headed to the airport. Estimated size: 5 000 hectares. Suspected Cause: Person. Stage of Control: Active. Approximate Location: Binder Creek. It had broken out on the weekend—likely a campfire—and blown up fast. An interface fire, where cabins, houses, communication lines could all be threatened. He’d fought another fire back in the summer in the same valley, only ten kilometres from this one. An evacuation order was in place, though so far it affected only two pumice mines and a hydroelectric project.
Ed, Ed Stefanovich, would be taking him up. Steady Eddie. He knew all the pilots; he’d been flying in these mountains for longer than he wanted to remember. —You got one of the Vulcan crews this time, eh? Ed said as they walked across the tarmac. —Skookum bunch of kids. Dave took em up last week.
They’d told Ty that when they called him out; all the Wildfire Service crews were on other jobs. Since his back injury the year before, when he’d been off for four long months, he’d become an itinerant crew boss, flown in on relief or wherever they needed to cobble a crew together. Vulcan had a great rep; he’d heard only good things.
—For pity’s sake, Parveen said after he’d sprained his back. —Last year your shoulder, this year your lumbar. You’ve been doing this half your life, sweetie. You’re getting too old.
But thirty-seven wasn’t old. Some of the men he worked with were in their forties, even fifties, now they were calling out the retired veterans as well. The contract crews like Vulcan’s were younger, mostly college kids, though fighting fires year-round meant there was more of a mix. Every year was worse than the year before. He’d still been in college, back in 2017, when the province had the worst season in its history: 1,064 fires scorching over a million hectares of forest. That twenty-year-old record had long receded, along with his plans to teach anthropology. Firefighting paid better and meant steady work.
The plane was falling through the drifting smoke, the river twisting up to meet them. As silver-grey as the cutthroat trout he’d fished for here on a field trip during his student days, when he’d worked on a pit house dig near a river tributary. They’d found a seasonal camp dating back 5,500 years. What would they think, those long-ago people, of the airborne machine that dropped humans from the sky into flame?
On a strip of pebbled beach, the helicopter was waiting for him. He and Ed high-fived and then he was dodging under the rotor blades and lifting himself into the passenger seat even as the machine rose from the ground. Last in, last out, he thought to himself—that was his role these days. The chopper pilot was new, some kid—younger man, he corrected himself—who grinned at him above his boom mike. They swung so low over the trees he saw a moose and her tiny calf in wetland below them. Smoke drifting across his vision erased them.
The kid—man—put the chopper down like a pro in the helispot on the hillside. Crouching, Ty scrambled out, pumping his fist when he was free of the rotors. And who was coming toward him but Graham, except it couldn’t be Graham, Graham wasn’t fighting fires anymore….
—Hey Ty, I’m Reid, they said you were coming up. Dad says to say hi.
—Dad says you’re among the best because he trained you himself. That laugh again, and the teasing, what they called fire-bagging.
A clump of burning debris landed at their feet. —Fire whirls already? Ty said, and glanced automatically uphill.
—Yeah, things picked up this morning, we’re getting crossover conditions, weird this time of year, huh?
Not just weird but impossible. Who’d ever heard of it in BC in November?
He’d met a First Nations firekeeper on that student field trip, an elder who sat silent while her son talked. Their family had been firekeepers for thousands of years, the son told the dig team. —Lines of our people walked the land beating drums. We warned the birds and the four-leggeds.
That was their hereditary role, to renew and purify the land through fire. —My mother taught us that every fire is like a snowflake. No two are alike.
Every fire is like a snowflake. Yes. Each fire was a live thing with a mind of its own. Fire was a divine attribute, after all, a gift of the gods, or else it was stolen from them and the thief punished. It wasn’t something you messed around with. But they’d thought themselves able to control it, white people had. They’d suppressed it for hundreds of years, and now it rose up against them, blisteringly intense, full of fury.
The Vulcan team was working in four sub-crews that day. He didn’t meet them all until their shifts ended. Five women, the rest guys, though he soon lost track of their names.
—Got slimed today pretty bad, one of them—Mike?—said when the first crew came into spike camp that evening. His chest heaved in spasm, choking his words.
—Here, have some Vitamin I, Veronica said, sliding the ibuprofen bottle across the counter as the others laughed. They were at ease; they’d had a good day, a good pull, despite the fire retardant. Some people were more reactive than others, though nothing like the borate salts they’d used when he was the age of these kids. Gave you runs so bad you were pissing liquid shit for days.
—Black coffee does it for me, Reid said. —Honest. Opens up the airway.
—How’d you learn that already, snookie? said Jai. —Second year on crew and he thinks he knows it all, eh?
Ty left them to the banter to find his cot and fall into comatose sleep, though not before trying, and failing, to get a signal so he could phone Parveen. Not that she’d be surprised if he didn’t. You couldn’t count on it out here. Besides, she was in that other dimension half a world away, helping choose the music, the jewellery, the lehenga choli the bride would wear. There—he’d remembered something about Parveen’s universe after all.
On the second day he found himself in a sub-crew with Reid at the perimeter, digging a firebreak. The weather had changed, bringing rain squalls and sleet. They could focus on tactical work, get ahead a bit, though his hands had numbed with cold. Every time he turned and looked at Reid he saw Graham, that same sunburst of freckles over his nose. If it wasn’t for the flickering pain in his lower back he’d have felt years younger.
—Don’t do this forever, he told Reid as he straightened against a muscle spasm. —Don’t trash your body like I did.
—Oh, I’m a goner, Reid said. —Anyway, you and Dad did.
—Yeah, and now your dad’s wearing a truss and his rotator cuff’s shot.
The muscle seized again but he was already over the limit for ibuprofen. —How’s he doing these days? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Graham, now in a desk job at headquarters in Parksville.
—Bored, Reid said, and laughed, and whacked at the ground with his pulaski. —Tells me how he envies me.
Well, the old always did, didn’t they? Envy the young? If Ty had married early, like Graham, maybe he’d have chosen parenthood after all, have a son like Reid. Another would-be lifer, in love with gut-wrenching challenge. In love with fire, really, and the outdoors, and the trees themselves.
They weren’t always menacing and spindly-fingered, the trees in his dreams. In the last year or two things had changed. He had no idea why. That first time, he was in a northern forest with his hand on the white bark of a paper birch. Three eyelike knots stared back at him. The tree was trying to tell him something, and he stood there listening. The voice was brisk, eager, impatient. He was on the edge of understanding, but he couldn’t quite make it out. He woke into sheets damp with sweat, but from exertion, not fear. He lay still, puzzling, for a long time.
Spruce came some months later, slow of speech and rather condescending. A black spruce, from those same northern forests where so much had burned in the last decade. This tree was young, not much more than a sapling, and the new growth of fireweed frothed around it. Every sound was intense: a downy woodpecker rapping on a nearby trunk, a ground squirrel chittering alarm. The spruce took its time, leaning toward him as if blown by high wind. Ty wondered if it was because he hadn’t been able to keep up with the birch. The woodpecker’s rapping was a message too, but he was too slow, too stupid. He looked down at his trenching tool and threw it away, and then he woke.
On the fourth day the clouds blew off and the ground began drying under a sudden blast of sun. A breakout on the hillside above them was radioed in from a bird dog. A smouldering hotspot, maybe. Ty dispatched a sub-crew that included Reid and went back to trenching.
Fifteen minutes later a call came in: Veronica, her breath ragged. They needed more personnel, fast. —We’re back into a Rank 3, she said.
That meant open flame, the tops of trees torching. Jesus. He headed up himself with his sub-crew and another. Harder to breathe now, the smoke thickening as they climbed, their voices hollowed. The trees around them seemed to buckle in the waves of heat. A couple of his crew ran past, yanking on their hose packs. Already the flames were soaring up a hundred metres or more, the wind egging them on. Had he miscalculated? Half the hillside was jackstrawed pine, beetle-killed, which meant much greater fire intensity with the right conditions. And even wet weather didn’t dampen ground fuel these days.
He was lightheaded and his back twinged but he plunged on. A young doe leapt past him, ears flat with fear. He yanked out his radio phone and called in the bambi bucket and hoped—christ—it wasn’t too late.
He’d met the god of fire at their wedding ceremony. He and Parveen made the traditional seven circles around the altar with its consecrated flames so that Agni could witness their vows. The god had two heads and seven tongues and rode on a ram, holding an axe and a torch. When he died in the myths he was dismembered, his flesh and fat turned into resin, his bones into pine trees. He could be resurrected only by new fire, just as the lodgepole pines that blazed around Ty on the hillsides needed fire to regenerate. Only in the intense heat of a wildfire would their cones open and drop their seeds.
They tamped it down, but only just. For the rest of the day he pulled his crew from one spot to another, helped build a firebreak for half a dozen cabins, liaised with the helitack crew that brought in equipment. The chopper brought in more fire crew as well, and flew out a rookie overcome with smoke inhalation. It was almost midnight when Ty got back to the spike camp. Only Veronica was there. Stiff, stunned, he heaped cold pasta on a plate in the kitchen.
—You want a Coke or something? she said as he lowered himself to a chair. She passed him a can. —You don’t know when to quit, do you?
—You ever been a crew boss? he said, mouth half-full.
—As a matter of fact, yeah. On the big Yukon fires back in ’33. She ran a hand across a face lined with dirt and exhaustion. —Fires are changing. Everything about them’s changing. And the way to fight them.
—We should have called in the stitch drop sooner, is that it?
—I remember when we were up near Dawson. The rotor wash threw embers into the green, I’d never seen it catch so fast. We jumped out and started digging fireline. There were full minutes when I thought, this may be it, we may not make it.
She was talking about this fire, earlier that day, he was sure. Every fire is like a snowflake. She was wrong, and also right, and she wasn’t shy about it. He’d pushed too hard to come back to work, probably. It was like a drug: the adrenaline, the thrill of victory.
—I’m going to try and catch some sleep, he said, and tipped the rest of the pasta in the garbage.
He’d read about firefighters who deliberately started fires. Not that the Wildfire Service ever said as much. It got classified under Cause: Person. He understood it, in a strange way. Firefighters and fire were locked together in an embrace, a chokehold, and who were you if you didn’t have fires to fight? Better than sitting at home waiting for a call-out, pacing. Funny how easy it would be to start one, how difficult to control. They started deliberate fires all the time to create a line of fire as a firebreak. The modern-day version of the fire god wore a Nomex suit, held a driptorch in one hand and a pulaski in the other. You fought and pulled back, created and destroyed.
It was still only 20 percent contained when he was pulled off after a nineteen-day stint of thirty-six-hour shifts and sent home. He needed a break, even he knew that, and Parveen was back, and he wanted to see her. She picked him up at the airport, Stella bouncing with delirium in the back seat. He left a smudge on Parveen’s cheek from the grime still under his fingernails. As always she was the one talking on the way home; he stared out the window at the green lawns, the drizzle spotting the windshield.
—I’ve got a surprise for you, she told him as they pulled into the driveway. Stella, barking, leapt out and chased a robin across the grass.
—My favourite dinner?
That would be murg makkai with Parveen’s special filled naan, and basmati rice, and mango ice cream for dessert.
—I’m pregnant.
He couldn’t have heard right. The flames still roared in his ears. But Parveen’s tremulous smile, shy and startled and overcome—
—Really, Ty. I went to the doctor yesterday. Mami said she thought I was and the doctor confirmed it.
As in a dream he put his arms around her and she collapsed in tears against his shoulder, then pulled back and brushed them away, half-laughing. —So silly of me, I don’t know what is the matter. She was falling back into the Punjabi syntax he’d found so charming when they were dating. —And you’ve only just arrived and look, I just dump this news on you. Let’s go in, darling, you’re exhausted.
—When—when’s he—?
—Late July, the doctor says. Around the twenty-fifth or so, but of course it’s not exact. And it could be a girl, you know. They can’t do an ultrasound before the twelfth week.
He watched Parveen moving around the kitchen, talking about a nursery, about telling his parents, and felt a sudden bloom of protectiveness, a fierce need to shelter her. This wasn’t supposed to happen, but it had. He supposed they’d been careless. Overconfident. Like him with the fire a few days ago.
—This is—you’re okay with this? she said suddenly, the rice cooker paused in midair. —I didn’t ask about—you know, at the doctor’s. I couldn’t. Not when Mami knew.
She was looking down at the pot in her hands, not at him. It had all been decided without him, for him. In the last couple of months there’d been four deaths on her pediatric unit, four children under ten. Something in her had wanted balance, restoration. And maybe the spruce sapling…? But that was crazy. He was just tired. Overwhelmed.
His first night home it was, apparently, the turn of a lodgepole pine to come to him. Unusually tall, singed by an old lightning strike, with missing branches on its lower half and near the top a burst of the witches’ broom caused by rust fungus. It was old, this tree, old and slow and full of wisdom—appropriate for a species that had been around for millions of years. He touched the cone buds at the tips of the branches and felt a shock of electricity, and then a knowing. Nothing he could put into words, but a freeing, a lightness, an opening up in his chest. First Nations people had used pine needle tea against colds and sore throats, he remembered from somewhere. The conelet—in the way of dreams he had swallowed it—expanded and opened in the heat of his own body, and for the first time in years he woke without a headache.
He was called back on a relief crew a week later, working again with Reid and a Vulcan team. The fire was contained on its eastern flank but not the west, where spot fires had started. Temperatures in the area had gone up to thirty-two degrees Celsius. In early January. He didn’t startle, as he once would have, when an olive-sided flycatcher flew overhead as he was washing up in camp the first evening. So many birds that used to migrate in winters no longer did. In the kitchen he ate mechanically, thinking of Parveen, of the baby—the size of a sweet pea, so the doctor said.
—How’s Sweet Pea? he said when he called.
—Not very sweet. Still making me sick in the mornings.
But some women got worse morning sickness than Parveen did, so he’d been told. One of the older crew members said his wife had spent much of the first eight weeks of each pregnancy in bed His mother-in-law claimed it was a good omen; the baby was full of vigour. Parveen herself said the baby would be a Leo, one of the fire signs. —So it must be all your fault! she’d said, pinching his chin.
Half the crew were fighting colds. Reid was living, so he said, on oil of oregano. —My girlfriend’s into all these health things, he said, and swallowed a slug of the oil, grimacing. —She says it’s a natural antibiotic. Good for my gut, too.
—In my day it was beer. Ty shoulder-punched him, gently.
—Weren’t you telling me just the other day not to trash myself? Reid punched back, grinning. —This way we’re gonna live forever, you know that? Meanwhile his dad was still raring to go, if they let him. —I swear he’s got a bag packed ready and waiting. Mom’s choked, she doesn’t want two of us fighting fires.
It wasn’t fighting anymore so much as living with. Ty had understood that much, at least, from the pine. Fire was an ally, not an enemy. It could never be fully contained. You danced with it up the mountain and down again. More and more fires were allowed to burn now; there simply weren’t the resources to fight them. This one, the Binder Creek fire, was threatening several small communities, and the air quality health index was off the scale.
On the fifth day he was working downslope, building yet another firebreak to prevent the fire jumping the creek. It had consumed over a hundred thousand hectares now, engulfing an abandoned gold and copper mine known to be leaking toxins. They had to wear face masks, though Ty hated them; they made it difficult to breathe. Ahead of him, upslope, Gord was working with the chainsaw, falling insect-deadened pine, with Reid and Jai following behind with their pulaskis, digging down to mineral soil. Using hand signals to communicate because radio didn’t always work in this terrain. An extended horizontal thumb meant go back, two fingers in a horizontal V meant keep your eyes on the green.
Ty had his head down, hacking with his own tool, when he heard shouts above the roar of the fire. One of the crew had five fingers flashing open and shut: an accident. Farther up the hill other crew were hosing down a burning tree that lay horizontal. Ty started up toward it at an awkward run. Now he could see a streak of yellow jacket underneath it, and Gord with his chainsaw bucking the top of the tree. His heart cratered into his stomach. Dear god, let it not be Reid. Already he saw himself on the phone, having to tell his old friend Graham….
But it was Reid, the blackened trunk diagonal across his chest and shoulder, eyes glassy with pain. Breathing, thank god, still breathing as Ty and the others worked to free him. Deanna, the line medic, brought up a traverse rescue stretcher and stabilized his upper body before they moved him.
—Fast as a lightning bolt, that top snapping out.
They stood watching, Ty and Gord, as the stretcher was carried downhill to the evacuation site. Gord pressed his fingers in his eye sockets, face white under the dirt layer.
—I shoulda seen him. He was in the danger zone under the lean.
Ty rested a hand on Gord’s shoulder, half-turned to look back up the slope at the fallen tree. He’d just been through a safety review with the crew about burning snags. Lots of times you never saw them coming. Every tree was different. How rotten, how much of it was burning, how long it had burned. You never knew.
He worked the rest of the day with a sharp pain in his chest that wasn’t from the smoke. That evening his radio crackled in its holster. Reid had broken an arm and his collarbone and punctured a lung, but he was stable, in intensive care in Vancouver. His parents and younger sister had flown over from the Island. Reid had asked a buddy at Vulcan to be sure and call Ty.
He felt the tears come then. Had to sit, or rather give way, onto a nearby stump, pull his mask off and squeeze the liquid out of his eyes. Getting soft, old man. Get a grip for christ sake. He pulled his mask back down shakily and stood, leaning on his trenching tool until he got his breath back.
Reid was back at work within three months, or so Ty heard. Telling people he’d nearly bought it and that the best thing was to get back in the saddle. Had he learned anything at all? Only that he’d survived through blind, dumb luck. You couldn’t plan for it, couldn’t alter what you did, except develop that sixth sense Ty himself now had. It had saved him from death more than once. That and being humble in the face of a devouring beast that showed no mercy. The beast itself would teach him, in the end. Nothing else.
The fire was contained by then only because of heavy wet snow. With the crews pulled off he was in waiting mode again, sitting at home, teaching Stella the stay position, to come when called. Sweet Pea had turned visible, an egglike bulge in Parveen’s stomach, pressing insistently against the waistband of her nursing outfit. They hadn’t wanted to know the gender after the ultrasound.
—Mami says I shouldn’t wear white anymore, Parveen told him. She stood in the kitchen stirring turmeric and chiles into sizzling onion. He brushed by Sweet Pea—the face? a leg?—as he took knives and forks to the table.
—It’s the colour of mourning in India, you know, only widows wear white. Silly, isn’t it. Anyway I said I’d go shopping with her. Blue or pink, what do you think?
She was teasing, her eyes sparking. Waving the chef’s knife around as she began dancing bhangra fashion. Stella, always wanting to be part of everything, made little rushes at Parveen’s bare feet. Parveen pulled Ty back into the kitchen to dance with her until the shrilling smoke alarm told them the onions were burning.
He was home for five weeks, the longest break he’d had for reasons other than injury in years. They cleaned out what had been, variously, an office, a den, a sewing room. Repainted, installed a crib, a comfortable armchair, a changing table. There was no need to shop for baby clothes; his mother-in-law was round every week with new items. He read articles online about bringing a new baby home to a house with a dog. There could be jealousy issues. Introduce your dog to smells like baby lotion and powder. Bring an item from the hospital that contains your baby’s scent before the homecoming.
They talked about names. Stewart Amar, after his grandfather and Parveen’s; Brighid, after the Celtic goddess of fire and poetry (Ty’s mother’s suggestion) and Simran, after Parveen’s mother. Simran meant remembrance or meditation. Parveen was carrying a girl, so her mother insisted; she’d consulted an astrologer. Really, the child should be named based on her jyotiṣa chart, which could not be cast until the exact date and time of birth.
A few days later, out with Stella in the park, Ty threw a stick that arced into a bush next to a pine tree. As Stella wrestled with retrieval, he stared at the pine with the shock of familiarity. The same lightning singe as the one in his dream, the same missing branches, the burst of fungus. The conelet in his chest expanded again, making it difficult to breathe. The scent of pine was overwhelming. He had to lock his knees to stop them trembling. His mind groped for logic. He must, surely, have seen the pine before the dream. But the trail he was on was new to him, recently cut and cedar-chipped.
Perhaps five weeks off wasn’t long enough after all. The arrival of the child, this world-changing event…. And all those injuries over the years, what they’d done to his body. And his mind.
He whistled Stella back, turned away.
But when the call-out came Ty went, of course. That was what you did. This time in the southeast of the province, mercifully not near assets. Late March and bone-dry, what with the drought of the last two years. The fire was in a valley, working its way upslope. They’d dropped in smokejumpers earlier; he was in a mop-up crew. He wondered, briefly, why they hadn’t called him sooner. He hadn’t jumped in years, but surely he could have been on a ground team or at base camp. Though really he didn’t want that. He wanted to be at the fire face, studying what he now thought of not as an enemy but a teacher. Some ancient and relentless teacher who gave no quarter. Just as in martial arts, you had to use the fire’s own strength against it.
He was summoned back to base late one afternoon. No reason given, just a terse radio call. —Fill you in when you get here, his supervisor said. Some new task, some new set of operational commands. Sometimes they made sense, but more often he chafed, knowing he’d mainly rely on his gut to keep him and his crew safe. He didn’t cut corners, he wasn’t a risk taker that way, but you had to let your body, with its knowledge that was now second nature, lead.
His wife’s brother had phoned; he was to call right away. His heart did a backflip into the gut he’d been exalting. It took nearly three hours to get a signal. He sat praying—to what he didn’t know—for only the second time in his life.
—I am so sorry, Ty, Dhanu said, close to tears, when Ty finally got hold of him. —It is Parveen, she is—how do I say this?—
—What? She’s—what? He was almost incoherent with terror.
—The baby, it is the baby. Dhanu choked on a sob. —She lost the baby.
There was no night flight crew available to fly him home. And it wasn’t a matter of life and death—not his own, at least. Parveen was okay, Dhanu said—sedated, in a private room, with her mother or one of her nursing friends with her. The hospital had offered grief counselling. Ty heard and didn’t hear. She was safe, Parveen, as long as she was safe…. But out of the roil in his mind, in his body, toward morning Sweet Pea floated clear. She had her mother’s small flared nose and his own mother’s bowlike mouth. Her eyes were closed, her fist against her cheek. In the smoky air of the tent he might have reached out and touched her.
We travel with you, the pine said. We have entered you.
But Parveen— he said, swallowing a sob. —If I’d been home more—I was away so much….
You were called away. You obeyed the call. What has happened is not in your power to alter.
He must have slept after all, because when he opened his eyes it was the grey-dark of imminent day. The dawn chorus was starting—a couple of varied thrushes, a ruby-crowned kinglet. He rolled over and stood, his hand going automatically to the deep spasms in his lower back. In the pain he felt a kind of ridiculous comradeship with Parveen. More birds now, joining up, dropping in and out, swelling into throbbing intolerable life. Shut up, shut up, he thought, and wept, softly. He found he was cradling his arms for the child, and he held her until the sun rose, through the morning singing, until he couldn’t any longer.
LITERATURE OF RESTORATION AND "FIRE BREATHING"
I chose this story, Fire Breathing, because a story about a wildland fire fighter in British Columbia turned out to be a story about his growing relationship with the trees he fights to save, and their stabilizing wisdom in the midst of family tragedy. If the Literature of Restoration means anything, it means de-centering the human and allowing other voices to speak—mineral, vegetable, animal. To quote from Deena’s description of LoR: some qualities that seem essential are alliance and intimacy with or belief in a spiritual universe and a profound, respectful and complex relationship with the natural world in all its aspects. This, it seems to me, is exactly what the trees are trying to teach the protagonist, Ty, who is aware that he’s struggling to comprehend these new and strange teachings. Beyond the ending of the story, when intimate loss has made Ty more vulnerable and open, he is also opening to the wisdom imparted by the trees, a learning that will surely grow in him in the years to come.
PATRICIA ROBERTSON
/ Author
BIO
Born in the UK and raised in northern British Columbia, Patricia Robertson has lived in Spain, London, Yukon, and elsewhere. Her third fiction collection, Hour of the Crab, was named co-winner of the 2022 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. The worlds of its stories range from an eleventh-century monastery in France to a near-future British Columbia where apocalyptic wildfires seem to be never-ending. In keeping with the Literature of Restoration, their protagonists try, in different ways, to connect with the Other, whether that is the natural world or unseen realms. The collection has been described as “electrifying,” “unsettling,” and “uncanny”—fiction with one foot firmly in this world and the other somewhere else.