Andrew Pyper - The Wildfire Season

Miles has a dog with bad dreams. When he’s home during the day he can hear Stump’s sleep-muffled barks from the end of the bed the two of them share, the three-alarm woo-woo-woomph! associated with visitor warnings. Then something turns for the worse, and the terror that the dog faces brings out unfamiliar barks of distress, each distinct from the rest, as though he refuses to believe this could actually be happening to him, a good boy whose only fault is lifting himself to table edges to clean the plates once the diners have left the room.

Their arrival saves him from one such nightmare—in-progress. Without even the faintest pause, the dog pads across the brown shag of the living room and begins licking Rachel’s face.

‘This is Stump?" Rachel asks, the dog lapping at her laughter.

‘That’s him.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why Stump ?’

Miles has to think about this. It wasn’t because any part of the dog was missing. Instead, his name came from the way that, when Miles first spotted him from the side of the road, an abandoned pup sitting on his haunches in a clearcut of forest a few miles outside Teslin, he was nearly the same size and stood with the same square, unmovable silhouette as the levelled stumps of lodgepole pine and tamarack.

‘Stump!’ Miles had called to him when he pulled over in his truck, and the dog had understood that this was his new name and came trotting over to have his side thumped.

‘You’re a Stump,’ his master said again, simply, as though Miles had finally discovered another living thing that was as much a Stump as he was.

‘Because that’s his name,’ is all Miles tells Rachel now.

Miles thinks of Stump as the Mr Potato Head of dogs, his disproportionate features assembled with apparent malice, or perhaps humour. His nose as long as a ratter’s (though he fears holes of any kind, and requires some coaxing to warm Miles under the bedsheets on hungover mornings). Oversized ears that stand rigid atop his head in a kind of victory salute. Eyes as dark and bulbous as chocolate chips. For all of these handicaps, Stump made friends easily, a talent due in no small part to his indiscriminate distribution of kisses, the pink waterslide of his tongue reaching out for the faces of all who know his name, scratch his silver goatee or simply bend within range. He is so generous with these compensations that some call him ‘handsome dog,’ although it is clear that handsomeness is about five crossbreedings removed from his present appearance. Still, he’s not without his prejudices. He has never liked Wade Fuerst, for example. This for obvious reasons, even to a mongrel simpleton like Stump.

‘Comfy,’ Alex says, running her fingers over the varnished log end tables and peering up at the oil painting of a wolf howling at a too-yellow moon over the wood stove.

‘I don’t need much,’ Miles says.

He leaves the door open behind him, but the air inside the cabin remains laden with a combination of uncirculated scents: the gamy moose steaks that Miles has been thawing and eating for his dinner four nights out of seven ever since Margot started dropping them off, the mildew of the hall bathroom that no amount of ammonia scrubbings could entirely get rid of. Now, with Rachel and Alex in the room with him, Miles smells the cabin as a visitor would, and he’s embarrassed by what it says about his life. The bachelor’s neglect. The sockfarty aura that likely follows wherever he goes.

Alex circles the room, stopping to pull back the curtains and looking out at the picnic table with beer bottles sprouting up around its legs like mushrooms, and beyond it, the wall of forest that borders the backyard and marks the end of Ross River itself. She puts her cheek against the glass and looks both ways, but the cabin is far enough from the rest of town that no neighbours are visible. Even here, Alex thinks, Miles has chosen to live on the outside of things.

‘Momma! He’s following me!’ Rachel shrieks, walking backwards down the hall with Stump wagging after her.

‘He sure is,’ Alex says, pulling away from the window to study the dining-room table next to it. A plate smeared with egg yolk, three half-filled coffee mugs, and at the opposite end, a chess board with a game laid out over its squares.

‘Who are you playing?’ she asks, picking up the white queen by her crown.

‘My mother.’

‘She lives here?’

‘No. She doesn’t know that I’m here either.’

‘You don’t visit?’

Alex places the queen down on the board again. There’s a darkness under her eyes now that Miles remembers, clouds gathering over the crest of her cheekbones.

‘I went down there once a couple years ago. It wasn’t very—’ He stops, shrugs. ‘I just think it’s better if I stay up here.’

Miles tries at a laugh but nothing comes out, so that there is only his opened throat for Alex to look down.

‘How do you play?’ she says.

‘She sends me a postcard with her move on it, and then I send my move back to her. It’s slow, but you can really think out the options. I’ve given her a post office box number in Whitehorse and they forward them up to me. There’s less to worry about if nobody…’

‘If nobody knows where you are.’

Miles nods.

‘The postcards are almost as fun as the game,’ he says, sensing that it’s better to speak than not. ‘It’s not easy finding something new in Ross River, once you’ve gone through the dog sled team and northern lights photos, and then the cards you can get anywhere on the planet, the bikini babes and the joke Yukon at Nights. I’ve been forced to make some of my own.’

‘Your own postcards?’

‘Cut and paste. A photo of George Bush’s head on top of Stump’s body. The Welcome Inn with a Royal York letterhead underneath it. Arts and crafts.’

‘You make your own postcards ?’

Miles can see that Alex is about to cry, and while he doesn’t feel any particular sadness at the moment, he is more intensely humiliated than he can recall. Once more the smell of last night’s moose steak reaches him and he is sure he cannot meet Alex’s eyes again so long as the two of them remain in this room.

‘The winters are long,’ he says.

Rachel is in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers that Miles knows contain little aside from rolling mouse turds. As she moves, Stump follows her, tapping his nails over the linoleum.

‘Honey? It’s time to go,’ Alex calls to her.

‘Why?’

‘Just come here.’

Rachel trots into the living room and clasps her arms around Alex’s legs, the dog plopping down in front, so that the three of them form an instant portrait.

Halfway through the current breath he is inhaling, Miles feels a wave of fatigue so great he thinks he might fall before he gets a chance to breathe again.

‘You’re going to need a place to stay,’ he manages.

‘One with a shower would be nice.’

‘The Welcome Inn’s the only place for fifty miles. Talk to Bonnie.’

‘And tell her Miles sent us?’

‘If you want. But it won’t bring the rates down any.’

For Miles, the room is now a sickening carousel, rotating slowly, unstoppably, the different shades of brown carpet, furniture and panelling smearing together. He throws a hand out and finds the dining-room chair that his chess opponent would sit in if she were present.

‘You have to go now,’ he says.

The idea of having to bend and slap the cheeks of a passed-out Miles on the floor of his dingy cabin makes Alex turn her back to him. She takes Rachel by the hand and strides out the cabin’s open front door.

Even now, the solstice sun has not wholly surrendered to the night, so that the trees are cloaked figures against the sky. Alex has the strange sensation of being at once here and not here. Ross River. A name like a hundred others she has passed on signs hammered into the soil at town boundaries. It’s impossible to believe that this place— these ragged power lines, this gravel street—is any different. She doesn’t know what she expected of it, if she expected anything. All this time and she had never considered the place she would find Miles standing in, only Miles himself. What’s more unsettling is that now she’s standing in it with him.