Jumping Fire by Murry A. Taylor

Author:Murry A. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

Lynn Flock, an Alaska jumper, once had an interesting encounter. He and his crew had jumped a fire, worked it late into the night, and then returned to the jump spot. They were tired, had eaten quickly, and left food boxes scattered around. After putting up their hootches, they immediately crashed. Rich Halligan and Lynn had shared a cargo chute hootch. I don’t know how long they’d been sleeping, but suddenly Lynn woke up thinking he’d heard a noise. He was so groggy, though, he couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming. There came this steady push on the chute near his feet, and he thought it must be one of the jumpers. Suddenly, a set of huge claws punctured through the fabric. Next thing Lynn knew, a black paw had ripped a hole and filled it with a hairy black head.

“That got us fairly excited,” Lynn told me. “I bolted up in my sleeping bag, Rich bolted up in his. The bear looked at us. We looked at him. He grabbed the end of my sleeping bag and started pulling it out the hole. I wiggled out about the time the bear had it halfway out.”

After a very long moment, Lynn and Rich heard the bear messing around with another hootch. Lynn poked his head out. Ten feet away the bear was standing on its hind legs beside Brian Fitzsimmon’s hootch. Fitz had stretched a cargo strap between two black spruce and tied his tent and rain fly to it. This crazy bear held out its paws and belly flopped on Fitz’s hootch. If the cargo strap had broken, the bear’s great bulk would have crushed Fitz. But the strap held and suspended the bear high-centered, astraddle the whole mess.

Fitz woke up, annoyed. “All right you fuckers . . . knock it off. This is no time to go foolin’ around.”

Lynn yelled back, “Fitz, it’s a bear. Bear in camp!”

Fitz started screaming. “Get him off. Get him off meeeee!”

The scream stopped abruptly, and there followed a complete silence. Then the bear came padding back toward Lynn and Rich’s hootch. Halligan remembers thinking, “Whatever else may have been happening in the world at that moment, I knew only the following: A bear had torn up our hootch, gone next door and killed my neighbor, and was headed back our way with, I assumed, homicidal intent.”

As Lynn and Rich grabbed their clothes and tried to dress, Lynn’s head was bumping the side of their hootch. The bear came over and gave it a swat. They both screamed. Halligan tore out of the tent and immediately ran into a tree. The other jumpers had gotten up and started running around frantically. One went for the chain saw, some grabbed fusees.

The bear headed back for the mess he’d made of Fitz’s hootch, then turned to face a gang of strange hairless creatures waving fusees. Hot slag from the fusees started dripping on their feet, which made them hop around, stepping on more hot slag, cussing at the top of their lungs.

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