“Walked.” Jack gave his reasons for thinking so while they were going toward the but door. “He probably thought he was going up the Yellowsand till he got up to the lakes.”
There was a monster military-type screen rigged inside, fifteen feet square; in it a view of the fire, from around five thousand feet, rotated slowly as the vehicle on which the pickup was mounted circled over it. He’d seen a lot of forest fires, helped fight most of them. This one was a real baddie, and if it hadn’t been for the big river and the lakes that clustered along it like variously shaped leaves on a vine, it would have been worse. It was all on the north side, and from the way the smoke was blowing, the water-barriers had stopped it.
“Wind must have done a lot of shifting,” he commented.
“Yes.” That was the camp meteorologist. “It was steady from the southwest last night; we think the fire started sometime after midnight. A little before daybreak, it started moving around, blowing more toward the north, and then it backed around to the southwest where it had come from. That was general wind, of course. In broken country like that, there are always a lot of erratic ground winds. After the fire started, there were convection currents from the heat.”
“Never can trust the wind in a fire,” he said.
“Hey, Jack! Is that you?” a voice called. “You just get in?”
He turned in the direction of the speaker whence it came, saw Victor Grego in bush-clothes in one of the communication screens, with a background that looked like an air-yacht cabin.
“Yes. I’m going out and have a look as soon as I find out where. I have a couple more cars on the way, George Lunt and some ZNPF, and three lorries full of troopers and construction men following. I didn’t bring any equipment. All we have is light stuff, and it’d take four or five hours to get it here on its own contragravity.”
Grego nodded. “We have plenty of that. I’ll be getting in around 1430; I probably won’t see you till you get back in. I hope the kid did start it, and I hope he didn’t get caught in it afterward.”
So did Jack. Be a hell of a note, getting out of Yellowsand River alive and then getting burned in this fire. No, Little Fuzzy was too smart to get caught.
He looked at other screens, views transmitted in from vehicles over the fire-lines — bulldozers flopping off contragravity in the woods and snorting forward, sending trees toppling in front of them; manipulators picking them up as they fell and carrying them away; draglines and scoops dumping earth and rock to windward. People must have been awfully helpless with a big fire before they had contragravity. They’d only gotten onto this around noon, and they’d have it all out by sunset; he’d read about old-time forest-fires that had burned for days.
“These people all been warned to keep an eye out for a Fuzzy running around?” he asked McGinnis.
“Yes, that’s gone out to everybody. I hope he’s alive and out of danger. We’ll have a Nifflheim of a time finding him after the fire’s out, though.”
“You may have a Nifflheim of a time putting out the next fire he starts. He may have started this one for a smoke signal.” He turned to Durrante. “How much do you know about that country up there?”
“Well, I’ve been out with survey crews all over it.” That meant, at a couple of thousand feet. “I know what’s in there.”
“Okay. Gerd and I are going out now. Suppose you come along. Where do you think this started?”
“I’ll show you.” Durrante led them to a table map, now marked in different shadings of red. “As nearly as I can figure, in about here, along the north shore of this lake. The first burn was along the shore and up this run; that was while the wind was still blowing northeast. It was burning all over here, and here, when the Zebralope sighted it, but that was after the wind shifted. We didn’t get a car to the scene till around 1030, and by that time this area was burned out, nothing but snags burning, and there was a hell of a crown-fire going over this way. This part here is an old burn, fire started by lightning maybe fifteen years ago. There was nobody on this continent north of the Big Bend then. The fire hasn’t gotten in there at all. This hill is all in bluegums; that’s where the latest crown-fire’s going.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
They went out to the car. Gerd took the controls; the forester got in beside him. Jack took the back seat, where he could look out on both sides.
“Hand my rifle back to me,” he said. “I’ll want it if I get out to look around on foot.”
The forester lifted it out of the clips on the dashboard; it was the 12.7-mm double. “Good Lord, you lug a lot of gun around,” he said, passing it back.
“I may have a lot of animal to stop. You run into a damnthing at ten yards, seven thousand foot-pounds isn’t too much.”
“N-no,” Durrante agreed. “I never used anything heavier than a 7-mm, myself.” He never bothered with a rifle at a fire; animals, he said, never attacked when running away from a fire.
Now, there was the kind of guy they make angels out of. That was all he knew about damnthings; a scared damnthing would attack anything that moved, just because it was scared. Some human people were like that too.
They came in over the lakes a trifle above the point where the fire was supposed to have started and let down on the black and ash-powdered shore. A lot of snags, some large, were still burning. They were damn good things to stay away from. He saw one sway and fall in a cloud of pink spark, powdered dust, and smoke. He climbed out of the car, broke the double express, and slipped in two of the thumb-thick, span-long cartridges, snapping it shut and checking the safety. Wouldn’t be anything alive here, but he hadn’t lived to be past seventy by taking things for granted. Durrante, who got out with him, had only a pistol. If he stayed on Beta, maybe he wouldn’t get to be that old.
It was Durrante who spotted the little triangle of unburned grass between the mouth of the run and the lake. At the apex a tree had been burned off at the base and the branches lopped off with something that had made not quite rectilinear cuts — a little flint hatchet, maybe. The fire had started on both sides of it, eight feet from the butt. He let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. Up to this, he had only hoped Little Fuzzy had gotten out of the river alive and started the fire; now he knew it.
“He wasn’t trying to make a signal-fire,” he said. “He was building himself a raft.” He looked at the log. “How the devil did he expect to get that into the water, though? It’d take half a dozen Fuzzies to roll that.”
Under a couple of blackened and still burning snags he found what was left of Little Fuzzy’s camp, burned branches mixed with the powdery ash of grass and fern-fronds; a pile of ash that showed traces of having been coils of rope made from hair-roots. He found bones which frightened him until he saw that they were all goofer and zarabunny bones. Little Fuzzy hadn’t gone hungry. Durrante found a lot of flint, broken and chipped, a flint spearhead and an axehead, and, among some tree-branch ashes, another axehead with fine beryl-steel wire around it and the charred remains of an axe-helve.
“Little Fuzzy was here, all right. He always carried a spool of wire around with him.” He slung his rifle and got out his pipe and tobacco. Gerd had brought the car to within a yard of the ground and had his head out the open window beside him. He handed the remains of the axe up to him. “What do you think, Gerd?”
“If you were a Fuzzy and you woke up in the middle of the night with the woods on fire, what would you do?” Gerd asked.
“Little Fuzzy knows a few of the simpler principles of thermodynamics. I think he’d get out in the water as far as he could and sit tight till the fire was past, and then try to get to windward of it. Let’s go up along the lake shore first.”