It was going to be another hot day. The sky hung low over the woods, but the wind was coming from town and blew in warm gusts over the field and pond. The maple was swaying, its red leaves spinning through the air toward the forest. I imagined the situation there changing with the wind—orders being yelled, reporters and activists being moved on by the fire brigade, having to regroup. I thought of the girl with the short hair. I imagined tents and banners being packed up in a hurry, the protesters toiling through the forest, keeping an eye on one another.
Everyone here was familiar with the diagrams. A cross to mark the position of the fire brigade, a blue arrowhead to represent the fire driven by the wind, and along the sides of this arrow—the red zones. No one who was in these zones when the wind changed could escape the fire on foot. It was here that the two men had been caught by the flames—the men whose deaths had brought the fires to the attention of the international media. I don’t know why there was no talk of zones or wind direction before—maybe the fires hadn’t been as intense, maybe people were just lucky. Before those men died, the fire was seen as a local problem—a new phenomenon, to be sure, but part of the natural succession of the forest. A result of the hot summer, the drought. Over when fall came. We didn’t even have words for what was happening. It was only afterward that people started talking about the dead man zone, a term that would change our perception of what was going on in the forest.
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