It had been an unseasonably wet winter. This, combined with the mild autumn and the good rain they’d had the previous summer, had resulted in a large build-up of dried grass and other plant matter. Hazard-reduction burning and the updating of firebreaks with the grader were two jobs that were on the cards for the near future. But after a particularly hot Wednesday in early spring, an out-of-season electrical storm took the crew at Redstone by surprise. Sitting at dinner, Sam looked out at the frequent flashes that were illuminating the range to the west, his face full of concern.
Sure enough, when Alice woke at dawn the next day, she was met with the acrid smell of smoke. She leapt out of bed and ran out onto the veranda in her pyjamas. Standing in the small yard at the front of his cottage, Jeremy saluted her. He’d been observing a billowing brown cloud in the west that was obscuring part of the range. He called out to her, ‘G’day, mate. Better get your gear on. I’ll fill up the slip-on fire unit and water trailer. Lucky the grader is already out at Red Gully.’
‘It needs more fuel though,’ Alice called.
‘Righto, I’m onto it. Meet you at the shed in ten.’
Alice hurried back inside, where her grandmother could be heard scolding her grandfather animatedly from the direction of the bedroom. She poked her head around the door frame and found her grandfather struggling to pull on his overalls while her grandmother stood beside him in her dressing-gown, hands on hips. Olive looked stormily at Alice. ‘Will you please tell this silly old man that his days of firefighting are over?’
‘Liv, if I drive the grader it’ll free up Alice and Jeremy to patrol the breaks,’ Sam said determinedly.
‘Did you listen to anything Dr Wong said about your heart? And what about that cough? I’m sure the smoke will do wonders for that.’ Olive was furious.
Alice cut in. ‘Ma, have you phoned Eden and Glenorchy?’
‘Yes, of course! They’ll be here as soon as they can. Alice, will you please back me up with your grandfather?’
‘Ma, if we can stop the fire before it gets to the flat country, it will all be over quite quickly.’
‘Well, if it gets away on you, send Sam home as soon as the neighbours arrive.’
‘Oh, that’ll look bonza, won’t it?’ said Sam sulkily.
Alice left them bickering and hurried back to her room to get dressed. Then she grabbed the two-way radios, filled some water bottles and threw them with some fruit and leftover quiche into a small esky, before jogging out to the shed where Jeremy was filling some drums with fuel. She loaded the rakes, chainsaw and the hand-held drip torches or fire bugs that they would need for backburning. Then she went to fuel up the motorbike.
Sam came out to join them, Olive tailing him in her floral dressing-gown, still berating him for his foolishness.
‘Mrs Day, you look a picture,’ Jeremy greeted her.
Olive frowned at him, distracted for a moment. He tipped his hat at her, leapt onto the motorbike and rode away. Sam had ducked out of sight into the passenger seat of the ute, but Olive’s ranting face was in the window seconds later. Alice jumped in to the driver’s seat and interrupted her grandmother mid-sentence.
‘Ma, when people arrive could you please tell them to go straight out to Upper Bullock then head west from there? That way is longer but the road’s much better and there are fewer gates.’
Her grandmother was glaring at her now, and didn’t answer. Alice started the ute and set off, certain that the irate woman would follow the instructions. Ma always rose to the occasion in emergencies.
By the time they reached the grader in Red Gully, the distant smoke cloud had become ominously thick and billowy, as though it had reached the open grass of the boundary paddocks. Alice fuelled up the grader with the drums, a process which seemed to take much longer than usual.
‘Bloody westerly,’ muttered her grandfather, referring to the wind that was just starting to pick up.
As she tipped in the final drum of fuel, they heard Jeremy approaching on the motorbike. He pulled up abruptly. ‘The fire’s in Cliff paddock and most of it’s staying up on top, but it’s burned down the southern face and come through the fence into Top Boundary paddock. It must have happened in the cool of last night, because by some flaming miracle it’s stopped at that overgrown road along the fence. But it’s burned all the way along the break into Bottom Boundary.’ He motioned with his hand in the direction of the fire. ‘I only went far enough to see that it’s jumped the break somewhere in there. That’s where we’ll need the grader, Sam. I’ll leave the gate open for ya, and me ’n’ Ali will try to find the front of it.’
Sam nodded and heaved himself up into the machine. Once they’d made sure the grader would start, Jeremy headed off in the lead on the bike with Alice close behind in the ute, towing the water trailer. As they came closer to Redstone’s boundary she could see the fire burning up against the sky on top of the cliff.
In Top Boundary, she drove along the fence road. The fire had burned through the fence from the national park, and one side of the track was black and still smouldering in places. Sections of fence had been roasted. The slope of the land had been in their favour, though, as the fire had been burning slowly downhill when it hit the track and stopped. Had the ground been flatter, or had there been any wind behind it, the fire would have easily jumped the overgrown break.
Judging by the billowing smoke cloud ahead of her, Alice could see that the fire had advanced well into Bottom Boundary paddock. With the westerly behind it, the front would be travelling quickly now. She hoped they could block it on the downhill slope before it reached the grassy creek flats at the eastern end of the paddock. Otherwise, the fire would almost surely get away. In the heat of the day, the wind-driven flames would do extensive damage to pasture, trees and fences. After the good rain in the first half of winter there had been no early monsoonal storms, so there was no moisture about to protect the soil and plants from being cooked. All the gullies were bone dry and a raging grass fire like this one would jump them with ease.
The motorbike and ute entered Bottom Boundary at the corner gate; leaving it open for Sam, they headed along a cattle pad that veered away from the fence. Alice stopped and unhitched the thousand-litre water trailer so that she could drive across country. She’d have to take her chances with the six hundred litres in the slip-on unit.
The fire had jumped the old break along the fence and raced across the paddock in a narrow tongue to the east. The thin corridor had burned outwards then, so that by the time Alice and Jeremy arrived, there was a vast blackened V-shape, bordered by hungry flames. Alice knew they had to get to the foremost point of the fire and try to halt its advance before working back along the sides.
Jeremy had gone ahead and Alice was following the wing of flame, trying to see through the baffling smoke. The two-way came to life. ‘Alice, I’ve found the front. We need the tank here, quick as you like.’
Before she had time to reply, Jeremy’s silhouette loomed up out of the smoke and they moved around in front. Jeremy parked the bike where it would be safe on an area that had already been burned, while Alice started the engine on the firefighter unit to power the pump. Jeremy came to join her and unravelled the hose, then started blasting the wall of flame with water while she drove along in first gear.
After about twenty minutes they had managed to slow the advance of the fire at the very front, but it was still spreading outwards on either side. All at once there was a sudden gust of wind and the flames swept easily past them and continued their onward march. It was clear that Jeremy and Alice weren’t going to be able to stop it on their own. Alice hopped out of the vehicle and jumped up in the back. Then over the crackle of the flames she heard the rumble of the grader and spotted it through the smoke carving its way across the paddock. She yelled to Jeremy and pointed. He nodded, retracted the hose and jogged towards his bike while Alice got back into the ute. They both bumped across the paddock towards the distant grader.
Sam had known from experience that the fire would be travelling fast, so he hadn’t followed Jeremy and Alice through the corner gate. Instead, heading east, he’d come in at the far end of the paddock and was grading the old road across the centre. He gritted his teeth and peered through the grimy windscreen, trying to ignore the nagging tightness in his chest. Eventually he reached around and opened the door on the machine. The smoke couldn’t be worse than the airlessness of the cab.
He saw Alice and Jeremy reach the newly graded line. Taking the fire bugs, they headed off on foot in opposite directions and set about lighting the grass on the western edge of the break so that a slow line of flame began creeping back, against the wind, towards the rapidly approaching fire front. Sam was gratified to observe how well they worked together.
It wasn’t long before the graded break had been widened with the back-burn. Just as Sam had hoped they would, Alice and Jeremy began to light another strip fifty metres further in towards the approaching fire. These flames, pushed by the wind, raced to meet their slower counterparts near the graded track. The two lines of flame collided and soon extinguished one another.
Sam slowed the grader to a crawl. He was panting slightly, his fist on his chest. By this time the main fire front had arrived. He smiled with satisfaction at the sight of Alice and Jeremy standing shoulder to shoulder in the ash, watching the approach of the galloping wall of flame from the national park. It reached the smoking black corridor they had made and abruptly halted its advance.
Alice radioed her grandmother to let the neighbours know they’d blocked the fire in Redstone, and to advise them to head home again to patrol their own boundaries. While her grandfather finished off on the grader, she and Jeremy took off their sooty hats and sat down for a brief rest and drink in the shade. They regarded one another without speaking, and Alice noticed that the black smears on Jeremy’s sweaty face made his eyes appear an even brighter, more intense blue than usual. They grinned at each other simultaneously. While they were eating some of the quiche, they discussed their next move.
Suddenly, Jeremy jumped to his feet. ‘Oi, what’s going on with the old bloke?’
Alice looked over to see the distant grader, now stationary, with its front protruding through a section of badly mangled fence. ‘Pa!’ she shouted.
They bounced over the grass in the ute and Alice jumped out before it had rolled to a stop. With relief she saw her grandfather’s face looking at her sheepishly through the open door. He lowered himself down from the cab, gently pushing her hands aside as she tried to steady him. Jeremy stood by quietly while the old man caught his breath.
‘Pa, you’re pale,’ said Alice. ‘What happened? Is it your heart? Oh, I should have listened to Ma!’
‘Settle down, Ali. I just gave myself a bit of a fright, that’s all.’ He examined the fence. ‘Made a bloody mess o’ that, didn’t I?’
But Alice wasn’t interested in the fence. She’d never seen her grandfather looking so weak and shaken. ‘I’ll radio Ma.’ She turned to go.
‘No you won’t.’ Her grandfather spoke sharply. ‘She’s already in enough of a flap as it is.’ Then, more gently, he added, ‘There’s no need to worry her like that.’
‘Well, then I’m taking you home right now.’
‘I’ll take myself home on the bike,’ Sam said. ‘Be a bloody waste of effort if this fire got away on us again now.’
In the end they convinced him to take the ute. Alice took over on the grader, as the breaks along the entire length of the boundary would need to be brushed up that day. Jeremy began the tedious task of patrolling on the bike the edges of areas that had already burned. This involved continually stopping to throw pieces of burning timber back into the blackened country and also raking any smouldering cow pats away from potential tinder and into the ash. Mounds of manure were notorious for smoking innocently for many hours after a fire had passed, only to glow red with life again when fanned by a wind gust. With the chainsaw, Jeremy cut down several burning trees that were threatening to fall across the break and reignite the blaze. However, the cool of the late afternoon was their ally, and the danger for today had largely passed.
At dusk Jeremy doubled Alice home on the motorbike, leaving the gear under a singed tree for the following day. Every muscle in Alice’s body was aching with fatigue, but the shock of seeing her grandfather so unwell had affected her far more than the physical exertion.
Until today, she’d believed that she was prepared for the time to come when her grandparents would no longer be able to run Redstone. She’d felt herself capable of taking on more responsibility as time went by, and had even pictured herself running the place. But today, seeing the greyness of her grandfather’s face, she’d suddenly realised she was far from ready. Even if she did possess the skills and knowledge, without their strength and support how could she carry on?
Puttering home in the twilight, Alice was suddenly overwhelmed by the full realisation of everything her grandparents meant to her. And the thought of losing them filled her with terror. She put her arms around Jeremy’s waist and pressed her cheek into his broad, steady back and felt comforted.
At this, Jeremy spoke. ‘You did a sterling job out there today, Alice. Never seen another girl with as much go in her as you, even if you are little and weedy.’
‘Thanks.’ She laughed, relieved to be distracted from her painful thoughts. ‘I’m sure you mean that as a compliment. You didn’t do so badly yourself.’
‘We make a bloody good team, don’t you reckon?’ Jeremy turned his head, waiting for a reply, but Alice only smiled. How she wished it were true for the long term. Jeremy went on, ‘Been to smaller fires than that bastard, with three times as many people, all running round like chooks with their heads cut off and rattling away on two-ways, and they’ve still got away on ’em. Old Sam knows a thing or two about fighting fires, I reckon.’
The veranda lights were shining out across the yard in welcome, and a mouth-watering smell greeted them as they walked towards the house.
‘Life’s bloody good, eh, Alice?’ Jeremy put his arm around her shoulders just to bother Olive, who had appeared a moment earlier at the veranda railing. The old lady frowned disapprovingly, and Alice, deciding that her grandmother had suffered enough anxiety for one day, ducked out of Jeremy’s grasp and bounded lightly up the steps to kiss her on the cheek.