The Great Fire
David Tillinghast
It had been one of those summers everyone wants to lay claim to; and this summer's attraction was that of being the driest in the recent history of western Canada, which may have been true, for it hadn't rained but once from June through September. My wife and I were living then in a cabin we were building on one of the smaller mountain ranges that crisscross themselves between the great Coastal Mountain Range and the great Rocky Mountain Range.
All summer we had been familiar with the tiny flash fires that sprang up on either side and behind us and across the wide lake from us. These fires, which principally were ignited through lightning, were docile and sometimes even extinguished themselves. They were puffs in an ashtray, and if we hadn't known better that we were in wilderness land, we would have imagined them just campfires. It was only when the premature winds of fall began to blow that we were to understand the potential deception of these innocent fires.
Now in early October, the fluctuation in the weather amazed us. One week we had three straight days of soft wet snows, and there was a pane of ice on our water bucket each morning when we woke. The very next afternoon a chinook wind melted the snow from the mountaintops within a few hours and sailed the temperature into the sixties.
