Feeling the Burn

The burn would be done in late April and a good way away, out on the pasturage. Filimonovo’s menfolk were convinced that a burn gives the earth a rest while the soil gets rid of its bugs, caterpillars, and grubs, and the ash fertilizes the grassland into the bargain. And sure enough, soon after a burn, the charred and blackened land would suddenly start pushing up young shoots, eager and green, as if trying to cover the ugliness with clumps of tender grass.

The community farm’s cows, so skinny after the long winter, were herded out to pasture, where, smudging their pink noses with cindery ash, they ripped the juicy grass stalks right out of the earth. And by early summer, there was no trace of the burn, except for the trunks of birch trees bordering the pasturage that were seared on one side in its memory.

The old folks weren’t keen on those burns at all. They said they were dangerous, and there was always someone who remembered a burn back in the day that had taken out somebody’s house or even a whole village. Grandpa Nikiforov was one who heartily disapproved. He knew that fire destroys not just the dead trees and last year’s grass but also every little thing that lives – mice, shrews, frogs, birds, and all.

Burns had been known to make it to nearby groves of trees, setting fire to the young growth long before its time and then sending tongues of flame to lick at the mature forestland where there was lots of brush and dead wood. Finally, the blaze would threaten the clear-cut where the slash piles lay where they’d fallen. At that point, the villagers would run to the farm management office and call the fire department, but what could two fire trucks do when a whole forest was ablaze? So they’d light a back-burn and send it toward the fire that was traveling through the forest. By the time the two met, the back-burn would already be gasping for air, sending a fire devil whirling up into the sky and leaving the big blaze with no choice but to lie down and go out. For a long time afterward, they’d be finding the roasted corpses of bears, moose, and other forest creatures in the lifeless expanse.

In springtime, Grandpa Nikiforov would come out into his yard if his sensitive nose, its sense of smell somehow unscathed after years of dealing with home-grown tobacco, scented, somewhere close by, the biting, bitter smoke unique to the spring burn. Taking his faithful husky and his low-slung backpack, he would head off to a nearby village, Lokhi or Gorovakha, whose pasturelands lay only a couple of miles from Filimonovo. Although, even with the best will in the world, he would never have been able to put out a wildfire on his own, he did rescue everything he could in the short time he had – a hare born in the cold of late March, or a baby squirrel, or a tiny bird with a scorched wing. One time he saved a wild sow who was all ready to farrow, and he spent the whole summer taking care of her little ones until their backs went from stripy to reddish brown. Grandpa Nikiforov led them out into the forest, but when he turned to go, they trailed along behind him, and so, broken-hearted, he sold them dirt cheap to gypsies who traded on the market.

Old Nikiforov, who had served out the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War in a tank, thought that people were crazy to burn the land that fed him and delighted his eyes. He spoke at meeting after meeting of the farm management board, telling them that the whole thing was not only stupid but criminal, at which point the menfolk yelled at him that there were always fires, deliberately set or not, and that after a fire, everything grew back a whole lot better and faster than before. The farm’s agricultural advisor even trotted out a bunch of facts and figures, but Nikiforov waved it all away and left, not waiting for the announcement about the individual grazing units. He didn’t care; he hadn’t kept a cow since his old lady had passed on, and his goat went her own way, stuffing herself with greenery anywhere and everywhere.

Nikiforov wasn’t popular in the village. The men thought he was too book-learned and too nit-picky, and the women gossiped among themselves that he’d nagged his wife into her grave and whispered that he was a ruble millionaire who had made his fortune up north, where he’d gone to make a quick killing. On one thing, though, they did concur, namely that there was no point wasting any sympathy on the forest, or the fowl of the air, or the beasts of the field, because they all existed only so people could inhabit the earth with full bellies and could do with the earth as they saw fit – why else had they been given dominion? The youngsters, meanwhile, puffed on their cigarettes and told tall tales about who had been last to set the dry grass afire, when they’d done it and where, and nodded their agreement that burning was a good thing. Beautiful even – mad beautiful.

Spring came unusually early that year. By late March, the hillocks had all dried out and the snow still lay only in the hollows and among the forest’s wind-felled trees. The forest rivulets babbled and swelled, overflowing with snowmelt. Capped with white and peaty-red froth, the water beat against dams of fallen branches, and the clouds of foam floated downstream, swirling in the quiet eddies.

The farm’s chairman called everyone together to discuss compressing the sowing schedule, because the land was drying fast, the moisture was going away, and it was time to sow the spring crops, but the equipment, as usual, wasn’t ready, so the potato planting would have to be moved to early May, but seed potatoes needed to be bought because almost all the stocks had been fed to the livestock over the winter. The audience fussed and fidgeted, the dairywomen hollering that the farm’s mechanical loader could never seem to get fixed, the leaders of the field brigades hollering that there was no one to do the work, the tractor drivers hollering that there weren’t any spare parts... The uproar was so bad that the chairman gave up, sat back down at the table, leaned his cheek on his hand, and started scratching something in his notebook.

When the crowd had quieted all on its own, the chairman made another quick run though the knottier problems, put some people in charge, grabbed up his briefcase, and shouted that he was off to the district center to shake loose the necessary for the sowing season. He stood a little while longer, scratched the back of his head under his cap, and the last thing he yelled at them was, “Listen up, guys, our forestry service is giving us the Mitrokhino land they logged a while back, and it’ll be for grazing our cattle on, but only if we do the clean-up, and then I promise to get the Timothy grass to seed it, and there you go. But do the job properly – no messing around, you hear?” And off he went.

Mishka, the chairman’s grandson, had the worst reputation with everyone in Filimonovo. A scamp and a sneak thief he was, and if any shenanigans happened anywhere, you’d think of Mishka, and you wouldn’t be wrong. By fourteen he was already smoking and drinking and getting on his parents’ last nerve, which usually ended with his dad walloping him with whatever was handy.

Mishka especially hated Nikiforov, for having nearly put a bullet in him once when he saw Mishka harassing Pally the yard dog and fired a round into the air. Ever since then, Nikiforov had slept with one eye open, and he’d put a hefty padlock on his hut. He complained to the chairman, but the chairman stuck up for his grandkid, blaming it all on Nikiforov’s prickly personality.

It was Mishka who talked his friends Slavka and Zhenka into setting fire to the logged land. While the menfolk were pondering how to do it all by the book, planning to bring a tractor in to dig trenches for firebreaks, Mishka went and torched the dead trees. For kicks, no less. It wasn’t even a proper burn at first. All it did was smolder, charring the grass and sending up an occasional billow of scarlet as it headed toward the swamp, but when it got hold of a pile of dry spruce branches, the flames flared and shot up into the sky with a powerful, unnerving roar.

The familiar odor in the air sent Grandpa Nikiforov into an immediate, instinctive panic. He whistled for his husky and hustled off to Mitrokhino. The day was ending but without the damp evening mist that usually settled onto the swamp. Not this time: this time, the forest was on fire. Seeing the first tongues of flame, Slavka and Zhenka had bolted for the village, howling with fear as they ran, but Mishka had tripped over a stump and tumbled into a pit left after some tree roots had been grubbed up. The blaze was bearing down fast, but the breathless Mishka hadn’t yet figured that death was mere moments away, so there he sat, bawling his fool head off for help.

A pair of hands hauled him out of the pit and dragged him away, and he flopped helplessly around until he felt stinky swamp water being splashed on his face. Grandpa Nikiforov was looming over him, a fearsome sight in the fire glow, and his hair had gone from gray to black. And the old man heard nothing, not the fire truck sirens wailing, or the helicopter blades chattering, or the people yelling, or the dogs barking.

Grandpa Nikiforov spent a month or so in the district hospital, but he toughed it out and survived. Except that ever after he shaved his head bald, telling everyone that the hair does for sure grow back fast after it’s been singed away – just like the grass, except not green. And then there were the scars from being burned, but so what? He’d been nicely broiled in his tank before, so this wasn’t his first time, now, was it?