The watchman stood on the porch for a few seconds and studied the slowly graying eastern sky and observed that it might rain later in the day. He wrinkled his nose and inhaled and smelled wood smoke and wondered why on a late July dawn one of the members residing in the cottages attached to the Club would want a fire in his fireplace. An evening fire was nice, regardless of the season, to take the chill off and cheer the company, but an early morning fire in July, the hottest July on record, was more trouble than it was worth, a waste of good wood. He looked down the line of bungalows facing the golf course to see which chimney was giving off smoke, but it was still not quite light enough for him to see clearly, so he took a stroll along the lane and studied each of the six cottages close up with his flashlight beam. All the chimneys were cold, and all the windows were dark; the members and their families and guests were still asleep.
Puzzled, he walked back to the flagpole and hooked the American flag to the line and hoisted it and followed with the TWR flag and stood back a ways and watched them flutter prettily in the steady south wind. It was a morning ritual, the watchman’s last act before signing out and walking to his house in Tunbridge three miles north of the clubhouse. It was a way for him to check the direction of the coming weather. Last night, under a full moon, when he took the flags down, the light wind had been out of the north, driving clouds down from Canada. Sometime during the night the clouds had erased the moon, and now this morning’s wind was coming from the south, promising change — lower temperatures, and rain, probably, which Tim Rooney hoped would not fall before he got home to eat his breakfast with his wife and children and sleep for an hour and return here by noon to commence his day job tending the greens at the golf course. He felt lucky to have two jobs, even though they were only seasonal. Most people he knew barely had one.
He smelled that smoke again and caught sight of two of the women from town who worked in the kitchen, Florence Pease and Katie Henson, walking up the long hill from the road to the clubhouse. He waited for them out behind the clubhouse at the service entrance to the kitchen, and when they arrived there he said good morning and asked them if they smelled smoke or was he imagining it? Both women assured him that he wasn’t imagining it, they had smelled it all the way from town. But it wasn’t coming from anywhere in town or from the clubhouse grounds, it seemed to be coming from someplace inside the Reserve, they said. He asked if anyone had rung the fire bell. Like most able-bodied men and older boys in Tunbridge, the watchman was a member of the volunteer fire department, and if the big cast-iron bell on top of the firehouse had been rung, he’d be obliged to get back to the firehouse in town as fast as he could, catch breakfast where and when he could, and forget about his morning nap.
But the women said no, no fire bell, not while they were in hearing range.
If the fire was inside the Reserve, the watchman told the women, and it evidently was, then someone would have to climb a mountain, Goliath or Sentinel, for a look-see. They agreed. But they had work to do, they had to prepare breakfast for over a hundred members and their families and guests staying in the cottages and clubhouse bedrooms and suites, so maybe he should be the one to scoot up Goliath or Sentinel, where a view of the whole forty thousand acres of the Reserve could be easily obtained.
Goliath, seven hundred feet higher than Sentinel, provided the better view — there was talk of the CCC building a fire tower on the summit next year — and Tim Rooney, who was strong and young and fit, managed to reach the top of the mountain in less than an hour. By then the sky was covered by a rippled white blanket of high clouds from Canada, and the Tamarack Valley and village of Tunbridge north of the mountain and the entire broad expanse of the Reserve south of it sprawled below in full daylight. The watchman peered from his perch on top of the bare gray peak and traced the Tamarack River back upstream from the village, over the meadows of the outlying farms and into the woods that surrounded the clubhouse grounds and golf course, and saw no smoke. He looked through the woods, past waterfalls and gorges along the narrow lane that led from the clubhouse to the First Lake, across the First Lake to the Carry, and over the Carry to the Second Lake, where the half-dozen much-prized, privately built lakeside camps were situated on lakeside land leased from the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve, and saw no smoke. Then, halfway down the eastern shore of the Second Lake, the watchman located the source of the smoke. One of the camps was burning, or it had already burned to the ground, he couldn’t tell from this distance; and the fire was no doubt going to spread to the nearby forest, or it had already spread into the forest and was burning its way up the wooded slopes behind the camp. It was too far for him to see with his naked eye, but there was the strong likelihood of a forest fire, if not the reality of one.
Descending as rapidly as he could, the watchman ran to the clubhouse and found the manager in the dining room eating breakfast alone at a corner table, anxious and puzzled by the faint burning smell that had greeted him when he’d left his cottage a half hour earlier. The manager received the watchman’s news from the mountaintop with sober equanimity, almost as if he’d expected it, although it was only the sort of thing he’d been expecting since his little talk the evening before with Hubert St. Germain. He folded his napkin and sighed audibly and told the man to drive to town in the Club’s one vehicle, a wood-sided International Harvester truck that had been fitted out with bench seats for up to ten members and their luggage. Raise the alarm, he instructed the watchman, if it hasn’t already been done, and call out the volunteer firemen. He himself would ring the clubhouse dinner bell and rouse as many of the members and guests as were willing to help fight the fire and he would outfit them with shovels and buckets and lead them into the Second Lake.
The manager had no doubt as to which camp up there was burning. Rushing from the dining room to ring the bell, he glanced at his watch — a quarter to eight — and nearly bumped into the guide Hubert St. Germain, coming in. The guide quietly told him what he already knew, that there was a fire at the Second Lake, and added that fire bells were ringing all over the county, calling out the volunteers. They needed permission from the manager to drive the fire trucks and other vehicles onto clubhouse grounds in order to get into the First Lake. They also needed permission to use the guide boats there for transporting the firefighters over the lake to the Carry and on. The manager nodded his approval and told Tim Rooney, the watchman, to ring the dinner bell out on the porch steadily until he had everyone who was willing and able to help fight the fire out of bed and gathered here on the porch. He said to give them as many shovels and buckets as he could find in the gardeners’ sheds and carry them in the truck up to the First Lake boathouse, where he would meet them and lead them the rest of the way in. There were guide boats in the boathouse for no more than fifty firefighters, the manager said, and the volunteers from town had first claim on them, so the members and guests would have to be prepared to hike the whole way in to the Second Lake by way of the East Shoreline Trail, which was seldom used and thus was much overgrown with brush and blowdown.
By now fire trucks from Tunbridge and the nearby villages of Sam Dent, Mascoma, and Petersburg were arriving full speed at the clubhouse, along with cars and pickup trucks filled with volunteer firemen in their fire helmets and knee-length waxed coats. One by one, the long line of vehicles drove quickly past the clubhouse and into the Reserve.
No one knew yet what the firefighters would find when they finally got up to the Second Lake. It would be nearly midmorning by then. They might find a single camp or outbuilding partially or wholly destroyed by a fire that could be easily contained and extinguished by a bucket brigade hauling water from the lake; or they might find the beginnings of a forest fire, which they could capture and control with trenches and limited burns until it burned itself out; or they might come out of the Carry and look across the lake and see half the eastern forest in flames, in which case they could only pray for rain.