  After breakfast the next morning, Russ Steele and the boys said goodbye to Jonas Driscoll and started back in the direction of Red Lake. Once again they fanned out at 1500-foot intervals, as soon as they were out of sight of the logging camp. “It seems like such a waste of time,” Jerry complained. “We’re never going to find that bomb, just four guys in a big woods like this.” “Most likely we won’t,” Russ admitted. “Our team is only a small cog in the vast search machinery, but the ultimate success of the operation depends on how well each small team does its job. The military doesn’t expect us to march straight to where the bomb is and say, ‘Here it is, fellows!’ What they do expect is for us to be able to say with certainty where the bomb is not lying. Gradually, by a process of elimination, they’ll be able to pinpoint its exact location.” The trek south was just as unrewarding as the trek north. They covered twenty-five miles by dusk, when they made camp and cooked a simple supper of beans and bacon. The boys were so weary that they sacked in before it was completely dark. Russ Steele sat outside awhile smoking his pipe and watching the moon climb into the cloudless heavens. In the early afternoon of the following day, they arrived back at the ranger station. Dick Fellows signaled them with a flashing mirror from the tower when they were still a half mile away. By the time they arrived, he had a pitcher of iced tea frosting on the table. “No luck,” he said flatly, as soon as he saw their faces. Russ shook his head. “How about yourself? Still no rain in sight?” The ranger sighed. “Just got the forecast before you got here. Fair and hot for the rest of the week. I’ve been on twenty-four-hour duty for the past two days. Headquarters has declared a state of emergency.” “Why don’t you grab a couple of hours’ sleep?” Sandy suggested. “We’ll keep a careful watch for you.” “Thanks,” Dick said, “maybe I will. I’ve been sleeping with one eye open these nights, and one ear on the alarm clock. How long are you fellows going to stay around?” “Until tomorrow morning,” Russ told him. “We’ll cover the ground between here and Red Lake next trip.” It was 2:30 P.M. Dick Fellows had been asleep for about an hour. Quiz and Jerry had left to take a bath in a nearby stream. Russ Steele was relaxing in the big easy chair with his pipe and a book from the ranger’s library. Sandy was on watch. Standing at the north window, he swept the horizon from east to west with a pair of binoculars. Three-quarters of the way across, he stopped and trained them down on a tall trunk that stood out bleak and spare against the thick foliage of the other trees. With a frown, he dropped the glasses and blinked his eyes, squinting through the distant haze. “Uncle Russ,” he said steadily, “it’s probably an illusion, but I think I see smoke.” Russ Steele rose quickly, dumping the book off his lap onto the floor. “Where?” he asked tensely, coming to the window. Sandy passed the binoculars to him. “That big snag due north-northwest.” While his uncle was studying the location, Sandy went back to the table and picked up a pair of sunglasses specially treated to penetrate haze. “Well, what do you think?” he asked. “I’m not sure,” Russ said tightly. “It could be heat waves shimmering through the ground haze.” He turned to look at the sleeping figure of the ranger on the bunk. “In any case, I think it rates the attention of an expert. Better wake Dick.” Dick Fellows sat up promptly the instant Sandy’s hand touched his shoulder. “Trouble?” he asked grimly. He was at the window focusing the binoculars before Sandy had finished explaining. After a brief look, he put down the binoculars and studied the trouble spot through the haze glasses. Then he announced matter-of-factly: “Smoke, all right. Well, we’ve got ourselves a fire.” His voice sounded almost relieved. The waiting and the anxiety were over now, at least. The enemy was out in the open—something tangible you could see and fight. Immediately, the ranger made a compass reading. Then he took a fix on the smoking tree with an Osborne fire finder, an instrument roughly resembling a sextant. “The fire finder measures both horizontal and vertical angles,” he explained to Sandy. “If we know the height of the fire tower and the angle of the fire with respect to the top of the tower, it’s a relatively easy matter to locate the site on a good topographical map.” “What’s a topographical map?” Sandy asked. “A map that charts the surface features of the terrain,” Dick said. He went back to the table and made some rapid calculations on a pad, stopping occasionally to measure off distances and angles on the big map spread out before him. At last he stuck a red pin at an X that marked the intersection of two lines. “That’s where she is,” he said with finality. “Now I’ll radio the news in to headquarters. They’ll try and get a sighting from another tower and double-check my fix on the fire.” “What do we do in the meantime?” Russ Steele asked anxiously. Sandy could see that, underneath the heavy tan, his uncle was pale. He had a flitting mental image of the missing A-bomb lying in some desolate part of the forest with flames licking in all around it, and he felt the short hairs at the base of his skull bristle. “I’ll go straight to the fire and see what I can do until a crew shows up,” the ranger said. “You’ve got yourself a crew,” Russ volunteered. “What can we do to help?” Dick Fellows smiled gratefully. “That’s wonderful. I’ve got plenty of tools stored out in the shed. With any luck, maybe we can get it under control before it spreads too far.” At that moment, they heard Prince barking at the foot of the tower and footsteps vibrating on the metal steps. “That must be Quiz and Jerry,” Sandy said. He ran to the door, opened it and called down. “Stay where you are. We’ll be right down. We’re going to fight a fire.” Within fifteen minutes, the five of them were double-timing it through the woods, loaded down with long-handled shovels, burlap sacks, fire swatters and strange-looking implements that the boys had never seen before. One resembled a giant fly swatter; another, the Pulaski tool, was a combination ax and grub hoe. They had covered, perhaps, ten miles, when Prince, who had gone running far ahead, began to yelp excitedly. Before they even sighted the flames, they could hear the crackle and roar of a formidable blaze. Dick Fellows ran his tongue nervously over dry lips. “Not much smoke. She had a good start before we spotted her.” In spite of the ranger’s words, Sandy felt a wave of relief when they finally reached the fire. It didn’t look nearly as bad as he had expected it to be. At most, it ranged over a quarter of an acre, blazing lazily in the surface litter that covered the forest floor. “Gee, it’s just a little brush fire.” Jerry echoed his friend’s sentiments. “So far,” the ranger said grimly. “But all it will take is a little breeze—” He left the thought unfinished, as without warning a dead tree that stood in the center of the fire, blackened and smoldering, burst into flame like a torch. The rotten wood gave off great flaming sparks that were carried high into the air by the updraft. Sandy traced the journey of one glowing ember as it plummeted down like a shooting star into the woods about a half mile away. “That could mean more trouble,” the ranger said. “Before you know it, you have a half dozen spot fires burning in addition to the one you’re fighting. I’ll have a look over in that direction later on. The first thing we’re going to do is to build a fire line across the head of the fire; I’d say maybe fifteen feet in front of it.” Quiz nodded. “The head of the fire is determined by the direction in which it’s spreading the fastest. Right?” “Right. All fires have a roughly circular shape to begin with. But depending on air currents, slope of the terrain and available fuel, they soon take on direction. Usually they assume an elliptical shape, sort of like an egg, with the fat part of the egg representing the head. We always attack the head first—stop the advance. Then we can work down the flanks to the rear. “Our fire line will be about one hundred feet long. I’d say this particular fire calls for a trench about two feet wide through the duff and litter; we’ve got to get down to mineral soil. Everything inflammable must be cleared off this path. Bushes or low-hanging branches that the flames can reach have to be removed or avoided.” At this point, he stopped talking to lay out the fire line, tracing its path through the forest with a hoe. It was a zigzag route which detoured around bushes that were too large to be uprooted and low-hanging tree branches. “We avoid anything that would give the flames a chance to leap the fire line,” Dick explained. As soon as the boundaries were clearly defined, he distributed the tools and assigned specific jobs to everyone. Russell Steele showed as much respect for the young ranger as any enlisted man had ever accorded a general. Sandy and Jerry worked with the hoes, breaking the first ground. Their job consisted mainly in clearing a swath through the loose litter, shoving it in toward the advancing flames. Dick Fellows and Russ Steele came in back of them with Pulaski tools, hacking out stubborn roots and small shrubs and cutting deeper into the duff. Quiz brought up the rear with a shovel, scooping up loose matter that had tumbled back into the ditch and sluicing a light layer of soil across the ground in front of the line. They worked intently, without speaking, to conserve their wind; and the line grew rapidly. Still, the fire was within two feet of the barrier when Quiz sent the last shovel of dirt rattling into the waist-high flames. The heat was searing, and their lobster-red faces streamed with perspiration. Their clothing was soaked and streaked with dirt. Jerry and Quiz staggered back from the line and collapsed on the ground. The ranger waved Sandy and his uncle back too. “Better take a breather,” he warned them. “The worst is yet to come.” He took a long drink, then emptied the rest of his canteen over his head. After a five-minute break, Dick passed out the long-handled beaters to the three boys. He handed Russ Steele a burlap bag soaked in water. “We’ll do the best we can with these. The idea is to patrol the line and keep a sharp watch for embers that fly over it.” They stationed themselves at 25-foot intervals, with Russ and Dick each holding down an end of the line. The flames reached the edge of the break and leaned hungrily across it. Sandy brought the flat of his rubber beater down on a spark that kindled on his side of the line. “It gives me the creeps the way the fire seems to be reaching out for you,” he yelled to Jerry. “It’s almost as if it was alive.” Jerry was too busy swatting to answer him. Down at one end of the line, Dick tossed aside his smoking burlap sack and grabbed a shovel. With horror, Sandy saw a thin trail of fire race along the edge of the ditch, skirt the end and blaze up in a patch of grass around the ranger’s legs. Sandy dashed down to attack the breach with Dick, and together they extinguished the flames and the long fuse of burning grass that had kindled it. “Thanks,” Dick gasped, as Sandy raced back to beat at a fiery tongue that was licking at the brush in his sector. For at least a half hour they battled the tenacious foe, and then the flames began to subside, their frantic efforts to leap the line growing more and more feeble. At last Dick Fellows announced hesitantly, “Looks like we have her, men.” The boys let out a lusty cheer, and Jerry did a comical little waltz with his long beater. But their exultation was short-lived. For some time, no one had paid much attention to the dead tree in the center of the burned-out area, now a solid pillar of fire reaching into the sky. The ranger had been relieved to note that it stood a safe distance apart from the other trees, and he decided that its chief hazard lay in the sparks that kept rising intermittently from it. Then disaster struck. Crumbling from decay and the ravages of termites, and further weakened by the flames, the towering snag unexpectedly gave way at the base. As the fire fighters stared in hypnotic fascination, the tree toppled in slow motion toward a thick cluster of pines on the left flank of the fire. It went crashing down into their midst, sending a spray of sparks and flame over the thick, dry foliage. Instantly the crowns of the trees erupted simultaneously in a huge balloon of flame with a noise like an exploding bomb. A blast of red-hot air singed Sandy’s hair and eyelashes and sent him stumbling backward with his hands over his face. Rejuvenated, the front of the fire leaped the barrier and blazed up beyond control at a dozen separate points. “She’s crowned!” the ranger yelled in despair. “That snag did it. The surface fire had heated the foliage to the point of combustion and it was just like touching a match to a gas jet.” Sandy was aware of a strange rustling in the trees overhead. “What’s that?” he asked the ranger. “It can’t be wind.” “It’s wind all right,” Dick told him. “Once these fires get really going, they make their own wind.” “It’s simple,” Quiz explained. “You can even feel it standing near a big bonfire. The updraft of hot air creates a partial vacuum over the fire area, sucking in cool air from all around it.” “What do we do now?” Russ demanded. The ranger pointed to the crown fire, which was spreading from tree to tree fairly rapidly. “Only thing to do is get out of here. We don’t want to get caught if this thing really takes off. There’s a firebreak about one mile back, where we can wait for reinforcements.” He glanced up at the sky, and for the first time Sandy was aware that a helicopter and a small observation plane were circling the area. “They should be rallying a gang up there within a few hours,” Dick said. “What’s a firebreak, Dick?” Quiz asked. “A king-sized fire line similar to the one we made. It can be anywhere from ten feet to a hundred feet wide. Nowadays critical areas are interlaced with firebreaks, just in case. The one we’re heading for is a road really; the idea is to take advantage of natural defenses as much as possible when planning firebreaks—roads, rivers, clearings, railroad right of ways.” As they followed the ranger at a slow trot in the direction of the road, Prince leaped out from behind a bush and fell in beside Russ. “I was beginning to wonder what had happened to him,” Sandy said. “Animals are deathly afraid of fire,” Russ said. “I’m surprised he isn’t on his way back to Red Lake.” Jerry snorted. “Some hero! And I thought dogs were supposed to be fearless.” Russ looked at Jerry solemnly. “Only fools are fearless. I can tell you I’m plenty scared right now—for more reasons than one.” |
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