a novel by Pearl Luke
EXCERPT
SOME FIRES SMOULDER all winter in a subterranean world of roots, moss, and leaves, their flames held underground by layers of sodden, sometimes frozen, debris. Even as they burrow into the earth, each fiery offshoot sustains itself in muskeg, subsists on peat moss too light to hold water, on air pockets split like cells.
Some fires advance through coal veins, only centimetres at a time, warming the surface of the earth from the inside out. Others light spontaneously, or start when lightning stabs deep into the ground to ignite layers of dead leaves with one quick strike. Yet others begin when lightning hits the heart of a tree determined to burn from core to roots like an oversized wick. On occasion, the cause is an earlier surface fire too hastily extinguished by fatigued workers who turned soil in shallow scoops, who smothered embers but failed to expose flames pursuing roots to their farthest ends. Those are the flames that strain backward, forward, and upward again, moving any direction at all, incinerating at will until layers of wet duff turn damp, then dry, then ignite through to the surface.
Some fires advance through coal veins, only centimetres at a time, warming the surface of the earth from the inside out. Others light spontaneously, or start when lightning stabs deep into the ground to ignite layers of dead leaves with one quick strike. Yet others begin when lightning hits the heart of a tree determined to burn from core to roots like an oversized wick. On occasion, the cause is an earlier surface fire too hastily extinguished by fatigued workers who turned soil in shallow scoops, who smothered embers but failed to expose flames pursuing roots to their farthest ends. Those are the flames that strain backward, forward, and upward again, moving any direction at all, incinerating at will until layers of wet duff turn damp, then dry, then ignite through to the surface.
Only eventually will a tentative wisp of smoke curl upward, the freed tendril forming a smallish puff. Then one or two more will appear on the horizon, testing until, as each hungry flame candles even higher in the trees, smoke curls and writhes, twists skyward into columns of dense rolling white, violent grey, rising. If it goes unnoticed, the fire takes hold, and columns settle into uneasy layers, drift with the wind from Alberta to Manitoba, from the Territories to Quebec, until soon the length of the country is spanned by a hazy stratum coloured with whatever has been stripped from the earth – white if the fire catches in grass or pine; light grey if it burns in the snag of a dead tree or in white spruce; dark grey if the fuel is black spruce or muskeg. The thickest, blackest smoke reflects civilization – a flare, a stack, rubber from old tires, or waste in the nearest dump.