Free When We Were Wolves by Jon Billman

with his hemostat, pulled the hook free and pushed her back into the current.
    Though catching them now still held the same excitement as when he was a kid, Strain had never really liked eating catfish, especially since he knew what they ate, those old goats of the river, their fat full of DDT. Once he had suffered through a sermon by a Bible literalist on Old Testament foods—what was okay to eat, what wasn’t. Catfish, skin fish, weren’t okay, just like pork. Couldn’t eat oysters or shrimp. Ostrich. Crows. Was tuna in a can a skin fish? Bats, too. He remembered it wasn’t okay to eat bat, which had been just fine with him at the time. They went home after the sermon and his grandmother fixed a ham.
    Anyway, today was Thanksgiving.
    Now two
or so miles north of town he heard the old civil defense siren. He looked back toward Crook and saw a thick column of black smoke. A trailer house, perhaps. But there weren’t many structures in the entire town. He cut the leach from the tippet and reeled in. It had started to snow lightly. “Let’s go, Festus.” He shouldered his pack and walked south, slowly, thinking about irony and responsibility. Strain knew the fire came from the ranger station.
    A short in the ancient wiring. A cigarette on flannel. Or Horton might have kicked a section of newspaper into the heater. The paper would have caught another paper until the flames reached the bone-dry pine walls. One wall would catch, leading to the ceiling, then to the attic, where a hundred gallons or more of petroleum-based paints and outdated agricultural chemicals werestored. The Sioux Ranger District would be history in a matter of minutes.
    George, the tavern owner and Camp Crook Volunteer Fire Department chief, radioed for help to Buffalo. “Complete conflagration” was the term he used. “That’s it for the old school,” he said. “Too late for the bucket brigade. Horton’s inside.”
    A Powder River charter bus full of Type II firefighters from Pine Ridge Reservation idled in the street. It was one of the many crews ordered three days earlier to help put out the same Custer Complex that had gone out two years before.
    Strain thought about his duties, then about Horton inside, where the old man burned like a Molotov cocktail. For the first time in his career, he balked at fire. There was a realism of consequences and an urgency to this fire he’d never experienced before.
What would Horton Wynn do in my boots?
He looked down at his boots, the steel showing through at the toes where the leather had been eaten by the lye made from ash and water. He thought of the Apache and Gila trout he’d caught during the past fire seasons that had melted together into one long sortie in his memory. He thought about bats. Kurt Strain learns to fly: Go Fish. He reached for the pis aller, his fly rod, which leaned against the fender of the volunteer engine. Then he met the strike-team leader in the yard. “Have your men put a line around it before it gets into the grass. Mop up when it cools. Don’t forget to fill out your crew time reports. You’re on your own for chow. De-mob when you feel you’re finished here.” He called the dog, who was running frantic circles at the edge of the intense heat, and headed back toward the Little Missouri.
    “Sir,” said the strike-team leader, “where are you going? I mean, is there anything else?”
    The Indian stared at the burning house as Strain looked past him. The Lakota man knew he was witnessing the passing of morethan one ghost. In Washington, D.C., this incident wouldn’t amount to a cigarette burn on the circus-tent-sized corporate canvas. Strain stopped and turned, meeting the man’s eyes. “I’m gonna fish through.”

    At night, on fires, Strain had often thought about what burning to death would be like. Not as immediate as an unsuccessful cavalry firefight, not as peaceful as the latter stages of drowning. “Down here,” he mouthed to Mayday, who leveled the ship