Eleven Huskies, page 13
“Pippin’s got himself,” Laura said. “But understood. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
Kevin laughed. Peter could see that, despite the gravity of the situation, he enjoyed the adrenaline surge of a crisis.
“OK, campers, let’s go!” Kevin shouted.
Only a dozen steps up the path the lake disappeared behind them in a blue-grey fug of smoke. Visibility worsened the further they moved into the forest. The trees loomed up around them like in a fairy tale. Or nightmare. Only the ones immediately around them were clearly visible. Anything further away was only shadows and silhouettes.
Kevin, who was in the lead, carrying the front of the canoe, stopped. “I can’t see the path. I can’t friggin’ see anything. We could end up blundering right into the fire.”
Peter strained to listen for crackles, but it was eerily silent all around them, like a cosmic pause before a massive exhalation.
“Let me and Pippin go ahead,” Laura said. “He might be able to find the way.”
“Won’t the smoke screw up his nose?” Kevin asked.
Peter answered, “It’ll have an impact, but it’s really just another layer of scent.” He paused to cough. “When he concentrates, he can mentally edit this out and follow the underlying scents, which are still there. Like you following a dotted line across a busy painted canvas. We’ll tell him to ‘seek home,’ and he’ll find the path we took yesterday. For him it’s the first link in the long chain leading back to our house in New Selfoss.”
“That is amazing,” Stuart said from behind them. And then he began to cough as well.
Laura and Pippin moved to the front of their little parade. “OK, Pippin, seek home!” she said.
Chapter Eighteen
The portage was one and a half kilometres long. It had taken about 40 minutes to cross before, but Peter hoped they would be faster this time since their loads were lighter and they hadn’t been in a particular hurry yesterday. Now it felt like every minute mattered. Deep in the smoke-bound forest they had no idea how the fire was behaving, but it was best to assume that it was moving quickly toward them. Fortunately, Pippin was moving ahead with confidence. Nose down and tail up. Faster than he sometimes was on scent hunts. Peter was grateful Kevin had taken charge. One canoe and essential gear only made sense, although he still felt a pang of sadness about his tent, and even more so about his sleeping bag, which had been with him on so many special trips. Despite his highly rational nature, he could sometimes become sentimental about some of his favourite possessions. He was embarrassed to admit this, so he hadn’t said anything about the sleeping bag.
Peter was shocked out of his musings by a bang.
It sounded like a small explosion, followed by a rapid series of sparking and crackling noises. Like fireworks. It was ahead and above and slightly to the left. He looked up, but the canoe blocked his view.
“That tree!” Laura shouted. “Look out, the crown just exploded! Oh no! There’s more! Stop, guys!”
“LetsputthecanoedownPete,” Kevin said, breathless, the words rushing out of his mouth and mashing together.
Once his field of vision was clear with the canoe out of the way, Peter was dismayed.
Not ten metres ahead of where Laura and Pippin had stopped, several trees were engulfed in flames. This must have happened in seconds. There had been no indication of fire in the immediate area and now suddenly there was this hellish conflagration. A wave of heat hit them, causing all four of them to step back. Pippin stayed put, sniffing the ground intensively in an arc around him.
“It’s blocking the trail,” Laura said, panting, and wiping soot from her face.
“You OK?” Peter asked.
“Yeah, yeah. Just shaken up.”
“We cannot go this way,” Stuart said. “Is it the only path?”
“There’s nothing else on the map,” Laura said.
“Back to Parsons? Maybe wait it out on the water?” Peter suggested.
“Not a terrible idea,” Kevin said, rubbing his beard, looking a little forlorn now that he had lost his momentum. “But not a great idea either. If we use the canoe as a heat shield, plus those wet shirts, we could probably sprint through that.”
“Probably?” Peter asked, incredulous at the suggestion.
Just then a flaming tree crashed down ahead of them, and several more caught fire. The heat was becoming intolerable. All of them were coughing in the thickening smoke. All of them except Pippin, as the air was clearer closer to the ground.
“OK, maybe not,” Kevin said.
Then Pippin let out a short sharp bark and began trotting off to the right, perpendicular to the path.
“What’s he doing?” Kevin asked as he swivelled to watch the dog.
“I guess he’s found an alternative route,” Peter said.
“Really? There?” Kevin stared where Pippin was disappearing into a dense thicket of smoke-shrouded trees. There wasn’t even a deer track, but there was no undergrowth either, so at least it was passable.
“I trust him,” Peter said and positioned himself to pick up his end of the canoe.
“Me too,” Laura said.
“We have no time. We have no choice,” Stuart said and then doubled over with a short but intense coughing fit. When he recovered, he looked at Kevin and said, “Pick up the canoe.”
Without a word, Kevin did as he was told, and they set off to follow Pippin.
* * *
They moved as quickly as they could but maneuvering the canoe under branches was difficult. And the ground was uneven. Peter and Kevin stumbled frequently, Kevin cursing under his breath, Peter hoping fervently that Pippin knew what he was doing. The dog would disappear into the smoke up ahead, and then stop and wait for Laura, who was in front, to catch up. Peter was able to faintly make Pippin out when this happened. From his silhouette he pictured him with a big doggie smile, his ears erect, and his eyes wide and shining. Whether the dog had a sense of fear in this situation was unclear to Peter. If he did, then adventure and duty were likely overriding it. After ensuring that he had been seen, Pippin would trot off again into the grey, nose down, tail up.
“Aargh!” Kevin shouted as the bow of the canoe snagged on an especially unyielding branch. “Back up, Pete! We’re totally snared here! This is friggin’ nuts. We’ll have to carry it low by the gunwales.”
With much grunting and swearing, and some ineffectual efforts by Stuart and Laura to help, they disentangled the canoe and lowered it to the ground. In the brief moment of silence that ensued, Peter could hear the fire crackling and roaring behind them and to the left. He turned to look, but there were no flames visible, only the dense grey pall. He looked up and could see the tops of the trees swaying in the wind, which, if anything, seemed to have become even stronger. It would push the fire right on top of them soon. It was difficult to get any sense of orientation, but he noted that they had been steadily climbing. The ground had changed from forest bottom soil to more and more granite. The trees were thinning.
“He’s taking us to the high point,” Peter said.
“That stone rise we saw south of the portage from the Dragonfly side?” Kevin asked.
“Yes, I think so. We should be a bit safer up there, and then we can scramble down to the shore.”
Kevin just grunted in response. Carrying a canoe by the gunwales at knee level was much harder work than carrying it over your head, and it kept banging against their legs.
Peter had been right. Within a few minutes he and Kevin joined Stuart, Laura, and Pippin at a small rocky summit marked by an inukshuk.
They set the canoe down. Peter leaned forward, put his hand on his knees, and panted to catch his breath. “There’s . . . a . . . reason . . . portages . . . always . . . follow . . . the . . . lowest . . . route . . . possible.”
“As does fire,” Laura said. “Look.” She swept her arm all around her.
They were just above the tops of the tallest trees and had a 360-degree view of the area. The air up there was still smoky but at least they could make out the pale blue of the sky above the smoke when they looked straight up. They were on island in an ocean of dense smoke. None of the lakes around them were visible, only a few treetops here and there. Flames were the only other thing in sight as they shot through the smoke to the northeast, no more than five hundred metres away, entirely covering the area where Peter guessed the portage was. The wind was steady and hot, like a hairdryer turned to max.
“Which way to Dragonfly?” Kevin asked, looking from side to side, with his hand flat above his brow like a visor in the manner of a ship’s captain scanning the horizon, as if that might somehow cause the smoke to become transparent.
“That way,” Peter pointed to where Pippin was staring. It was a steep drop-off into a ravine choked with juniper and dogwood. He pulled out his compass, happy that he had remembered to bring an old-school navigational tool with him, as he didn’t trust the smartphone compass in these conditions. “Yeah, it makes sense.”
“And how do you propose we get the canoe down there?” Kevin asked.
“It can’t be that far,” Peter said, peering down into the haze. “We’ll lower it by the painter.”
“Painter?” Kevin’s look could be interpreted as either annoyance or confusion.
“Fancy word for rope tied to the bow,” Laura answered. “Don’t waste time, dear,” she said, not unkindly, to Peter and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “And we should tie the extra rope to the painter. We don’t know how far down the bottom is.”
“And us? Down by ‘painter’ too?” Kevin asked.
“We can proceed this way,” Stuart called from a short distance to their right where he was testing his footing on a series of washing-machine-sized boulders that lay jumbled past the edge of the little summit they were on. “Then we can make our way back to the canoe and continue down the hill.”
The four of them looked dubiously at the dense smoke-choked bush below them, and then Kevin shrugged and said, “I don’t think we have a choice. That seems to be a theme today. Painter away then.”
Peter scrambled down the boulders Stuart had found. With his gangly arms and legs, and his somewhat distracted approach to any physical endeavour, he was normally awkward and prone to clumsiness, but somehow adrenaline or fear had turned him into a kind of Spider-Man flawlessly executing the moves needed to get down without twisting an ankle. He was surprised at himself but didn’t have time to think much about it. Pippin was right behind him. Stuart was already at the bottom while Laura stayed at the top with Kevin. They slowly pushed the canoe over the lip of rock, stern first. It made horrendous squealing, scraping, and banging noises as it descended, like something one might hear from the far side of a junkyard fence.
Peter heard Kevin mutter, “There goes the damage deposit.” This was immediately followed by a strange sound, like a muffled roar, and then a much louder “Oh shit!”
The rope went slack. The canoe tumbled the remaining few metres, barely missing the two men and dog at the bottom of the cliff. It crashed into a large, jagged rock with a sickening crunching sound before it stopped moving.
Peter just had time to shout an annoyed “Hey!” before he noticed Laura and Kevin swarming down the boulders, rapidly pulling off their own Spider-Man moves, although Kevin missed the last step and landed with a loud “oof.” He limped toward Peter.
“The fire! It suddenly came up the other side!” Kevin’s beard was flecked with what looked like small chunks of charcoal. His eyes were wild.
“From over where we climbed up?” Peter asked.
Laura said, “Yes. There was a huge gust of wind all of a sudden. You wouldn’t have noticed down here. It blew embers at us like a hurricane of fire.” She looked like she was on the verge of tears, but at the same time, her face had a hard seriousness Peter rarely saw.
“Firestorm,” Stuart said, eyes wide, looking all around.
“Exactly.”
“The canoe’s toast,” Peter said.
Kevin shook his head as if trying to loosen something. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We just need to get to the water now. We’ll figure things out from there.”
Pippin was already exploring the dense dogwood that covered the slope. He quickly settled on what looked like a faint animal track. They followed, trying to watch their footing at the same time as trying to move as quickly as possible. Peter went first, trying to hold branches aside so they wouldn’t snap back and strike Laura, who was right behind him. He could hear Kevin grunting and swearing. Kevin was at the back and in danger of falling even further behind. The air had quickly become much hotter. The wind was whipping the treetops around wildly above them.
Hurricane indeed, Peter thought. Hurricane of fire. He had recently read something about large wildfires creating their own weather. The tremendous heat could generate winds, even tornadoes, and entire weather systems, including ones with massive special clouds called pyrocumulonimbus that could spawn lightning and thus even more fire. This thought was both exciting and horrifying — one part of his brain saying, Cool! and the other, Oh no! It wasn’t the first time Science Nerd Peter and Survivor Peter had found themselves in conflict. Survivor Peter was winning today, though. He didn’t bother to stop to listen for thunder.
The track widened and the going became a little easier. Peter could hear Kevin begin to catch up. He reasoned that the trail was probably made by moose — he remembered Lawrence called dogwood “moose candy.” The dogwood was much too dense to see where they were going, but it was downhill and that was all that mattered right now. As they descended the smoke became thicker again and all of them were coughing.
“Put something over your face, like a bandana, or pull your shirt up,” Laura said. She was right, Peter’s lungs felt heavy, and his chest tightened with every breath. His tongue felt like he had been licking an ashtray.
And then, suddenly, they were on flat ground and out of the dense shrubbery. The lake couldn’t be far away now. They were amongst tall jack pines and birch trees. The smoke was thick. The air was still. Peter reasoned that they were in the wind shadow of the hill. It was silent other than the hard breathing and coughing of the group.
Pippin stopped and began to circle slowly, nose down, nostrils flaring. Then he suddenly looked up and stood stock-still, as if staring at something unseen.
“What’s he doing?” Kevin said, panting.
Before Peter could answer there was a sudden blast of scorching wind from the left, bending the trees like blades of grass.
That instant, a wall of bright orange pulsing flame appeared, as if conjured out of the smoke by a malevolent being bent on mass destruction. A pitiless god of the apocalypse. It was the height of a six-storey building and wider than they could see.
It was rushing toward them with breathtaking speed.
* * *
Later they would argue about who had shouted “Run!” and who had been fastest, but it was hard to tell as they had fanned out. And about what route they took, other than just away. And about how long they ran, was it seconds or minutes, though it felt like hours. And about who first noticed that Peter wasn’t with them anymore. And about who turned back to find him.
But the fire was too intense. There was no way to find him.
All of them later noticed that they had singed eyebrows, so perhaps they all had gone back.
Pippin wasn’t with them anymore either.
All was flames and smoke and embers and wind and noise and confusion and desperation.
Chapter Nineteen
Peter had tripped and fallen. And then the fire was all around him, surging past on both sides. He was face down in something wet and squishy. He had blundered into a patch of shallow bog, and then hit his head on a branch. That’s why he had stumbled so badly. Being tall was a curse sometimes.
He remained face down and felt his hair. It was not on fire. He felt his backpack and pants. Also not on fire.
The bog was a tiny oasis in a scorching desert of fire. It was so hot, so unbearably hot. Peter had the bizarre thought that this is what a pizza must feel like as it lays in one of those wood-fired ovens.
Where are the others? Where’s Pippin? Oh my god! Am I the only survivor?
In spite of himself, he listened for screaming, but all he could hear was the end-of-the-world sound of the fire roaring all around him.
Should he stay and hope that he would remain safe, and the fire would burn itself out around him? Or was that more dangerous? Maybe it would consume all the oxygen here and he would suffocate? Or it would become so hot that it would evaporate the bog and then burn him alive like a medieval martyr?
He didn’t know.
His logical faculties were failing him. Generating a clear thought felt like lifting a two-hundred-pound weight with his pinky finger.
And then, although he was not conscious of making a decision, he pulled the wet T-shirt out of his backpack, draped it over his head, and began to crawl out of the mire on all fours.
Low was best.
Wet was best.
For good measure he rolled around in the muck to coat himself all over in mud.
But which way? He was entirely disoriented. It was completely flat here, and the sky was an invisible abstraction. There were no clues where the lake might be.
He began to crawl in the direction where the fire looked slightly less extreme, where there were possible gaps between the flames. Possible gaps.
Then he heard something that did not sound like burning or crackling or blowing.
