Family Affair, by Charles O. Anderson

FAMILY AFFAIR
by Charles O. Anderson

Forward

The fire raged out of control, leaping across arroyos and streams, up the surrounding mountainsides and down into the valleys beyond. The bright red flames hungrily devoured everything in their path without mercy. Trees, brush, animals, all were greedily consumed without hesitation. A small rabbit dashed madly into a patch of brush and imagined safety, only to be viciously cremated as the brush burst into flames from the intense heat surrounding it. A young white-tailed doe, caught in the limbs of a fallen tree died quickly and horribly in the hot, searing flames. The wild conflagration's killing heat cruelly devoured everything in its path, bringing death and destruction to all it touched.

Firefighters had been working for the past four days to bring it under control, but because of the hot, dry winds blowing through the mountain passes and down their slopes to the valleys below they had had very little success. The headlong rush of the gale force winds through the tight confines of the passes produced a process called 'compression heating'. This caused the dry winds to become ever hotter and drier as the molecules of air were pushed tightly together, squeezing out the last drop of life-saving moisture. The exhausted, overworked firefighters had virtually no chance for containment of this hot, greedy killer of everything in its path. Forest service fire fighting aircraft from both Canada and the United States were brought in to fight the conflagration. They had some success in the beginning, but then the canyon winds picked up to a dangerous speed, grounding the planes and whipping the flames into a frenzy of destruction. Hot sparks lifted high into the air and drifted southwestward on the hot, dry winds. Then they were deposited, still glowing, in treetops past the western and southern perimeters of the main blaze, causing new fires to break out everywhere they landed.

At no time in the collective memory of the local inhabitants had the weather been so hot and so dry for so long. Some said it was because of the depletion of the ozone layer, others said it was because of all the clear-cutting up and down the west coast of the continent, taking away the life giving oxygen breathed out by the massive and beautiful firs, pines and alders that had been surviving and multiplying there since before the beginning of mankind. Whatever the reason, very little rain had fallen to impede progress of this conflagration, and it had taken only minutes for the devastating flames to grow from a small, unattended campfire to a raging inferno.

Sometime during the middle of the night the fire changed to a more southerly direction, sweeping across the Canadian border and by dawn reaching deep into the Northern Washington portion of the Pasayten wilderness area, an area that stretches for many miles across southwestern Canada and the Northwestern portion of the United States. Flames leaped from hillside to hillside, encompassing the tall forest trees in their deadly embrace. The tinder dry underbrush growing at the foot of these stately giants pulled the fire ever faster in its headlong race, spontaneously erupting as the surrounding heat reached flash point. Belching huge, towering plumes of dark, oily smoke that could be seen for miles in all directions.

Animals, small and large, ran madly in all directions, paying no attention to one another in their hysterical rush to escape the deadly flames. A large male brown bear climbed to the very top of a tall pine tree trying to escape the same terrible death so swiftly tendered by the crackling, glowing tongues of red hot fire. He growled in pain as the fur on his back began to smoke. He screamed in terror as his fur burst into flames. Frantic now, he pawed and snapped at the fire eating into his back. Then, in desperation he launched himself wildly into the air, trying to reach a neighboring tree that was not yet burning.

He missed!

His screams could be heard over the sound of the onrushing fire as he fell, terrified, to the ground below. His anguished cries were abruptly ended by a gut wrenching crunch as his body crashed heavily onto the forest floor.

But before his cries could fade mercifully into the night they were replaced by another, more frightening sound; a cry of pain that at first was almost buried in the hissing roar of the flames. This new sound quickly rose to a blood curdling scream, a scream so terrifying and chilling that, for a brief moment, the animals paused in their desperate flight to escape the deadly conflagration surrounding them, frantically searching for an enemy more fearful and terrible than the one they were presently threatened with. Even the flames seemed to pause momentarily in their headlong rush, as if listening, waiting for some unknown horror to reveal itself.

The cry sounded almost human. Yet it carried with it a feeling so terribly alien that it would turn the blood in a human's veins to ice water and engender a cold, helpless fear that only comes with the realization that death is close at hand.