• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 312 0

northeast through the treetops at a hellish speed. Tonight we’ll be clearing a new firebreak seven miles farther up. During the night we’re going to let over four thousand acres burn away. Half of it may, in fact, have gone already. We’re dealing with the biggest fire in Finnish history—not counting Tuntsa, perhaps. Now, your task is this: You’ll be let down at the point marked with a cross in the line of the fire’s advance. You’re to form a chain at hundred-yard intervals from each other and head northeast for at least six miles or so, shouting and making a hell of a clamor to get the game to flee from the path of the fire. There are two houses as well. They’ll have to be evacuated. Get the people down to the lakeshore, at this point here. And any other people, get them out of the fire area, too. Also, according to our reports, there’s livestock at large in these backwoods, on the run from Nilsiä—horses, and about fifty cows. They’ve got to be driven down to the lake, also to this point on the map.”

They helicoptered over the fire area. The glowing heat down below seemed to be reaching right up to the chopper. The air was cloaked in a thick pall of smoke, the earth scarcely visible. The helicopter was buffeted about in the heat turbulence, and it seemed as if the long blades of the main rotor might crack and drop the chopper into the roaring furnace below.

The helicopter passed beyond the fire area and began descending like a large dragonfly. Its rotors churned; blue smoke jetted from the tail into the sweltering air. The lower the warplane got, the more the treetops swished. Finally, the pinecones on the ground flew helter-skelter in the hot downdraft; the helicopter touched down, and the roar of the rotors subsided.

The men leaped from the aircraft and scurried out of range of the blades, bent double by the downdraft. The door banged shut, the rotors roared, and the chopper disappeared into the smoky air. The men were left rubbing their watering eyes in the forest.

Vatanen occupied a central place in the chain. The men dispersed into the forest, their shouts echoing out from the smoky trees. Life does shake you up a bit, Vatanen was thinking: only a month ago he’d been fed up, sitting in a corner tavern with a mug of warm beer in his hand; and now here he was, in a hot wilderness, surrounded by smoke, carting around a knapsack of wet fish, and feeling the sweat running from his groin.

“A thousand times better here than in Helsinki,” he grinned, his eyes brimming with water.

The terrain descended into a damp depression. A large brown hare was zigzagging about, not knowing which way to go. Vatanen chased it away from the direction of the fire, and the creature vanished. In a dense clump of birches beyond the depression, a cow was bellowing frantically. It was so panicked by all it had gone through, its bowels were loose: its flanks were spattered with dung right up to the ridge of its back, and its tail was a smelly black whip. The cow stared at Vatanen with moist, fear-distended eyes, squeezing a stupid mooing from its swollen, panting throat. He grabbed it by the horns, screwed its head around with all his might, pointing it northeast, and kicked its backside. The poor creature finally got the point and disappeared the way it was supposed to go, with filth pouring from its rear and its bell clanking like a monastery fire alarm. Vatanen wiped his watering eyes.

The forest was swarming with various animals: there were squirrels and hares; land fowl clacked into flight and splayed to earth again; he chased capercaillies like farmyard fowl to get them to understand which way to go. He came to a brook, a little river of clear water about four yards wide. Smoke hovered over the lush banks and the water: it had a fairy-tale beauty.

Vatanen took off his sweaty clothes and slipped naked into the cool water, rinsing his bloodshot eyes and his mouth with fresh water. After his trudge through the smoke, a quiet dip in a brook was paradise. He swam slowly upstream, following the brook’s interesting meandering. The water flowed