Forty Years a Forester by Elers Koch & Char Miller

Author:Elers Koch & Char Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy), HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books

6

The Moose Creek Story

Old Bob Monroe threw a couple of chunks on the campfire, which had been allowed to burn down to a bed of coals, as all good cooking fires do. The sparks flew high in the gathering dusk, and in a minute or two the flames burned up brightly, illuminating a circle in the camp on the edge of a mountain meadow.

The camp was snugged down for the night. Tom Grant, the Nez Perce Indian packer, had stacked his packsaddles one on top of the other, covering the pile with a manta, and tied it down securely with a cargo rope so there would be no wet rigging in the morning. Supper had been cooked and eaten, and the dishes washed and stacked upside down with the frying pan on top and a tarp thrown over them to keep off the night dew. Each man had spread his bed in what he hoped was a soft spot under a spruce tree. From outside the circle of the fire across the meadow came the soft crop of the horses and pack mules filling up on the sweet grass after a long day on the trail. Occasionally came the jangle of the bell on the white bell mare.

The boys had just cleaned up on a stubborn five-hundred-acre fire in the Old Man Creek Canyon. The fire was all out, burning snags felled, and mop up of the edges completed. The fire fighters had gone out yesterday, and the little party of rangers and guards remained to pack out the balance of the camp in the morning.

The men gathered around the now brilliantly blazing fire, ready for an hour’s relaxation before bedtime. Old Bob squatted on one heel by the fire in a position he could maintain without apparent discomfort all evening. He pulled a lighted brand from the fire and applied it to his filled pipe.

“Better look out, Bob,” said one of the men jocularly, “You will burn up the rest of that red beard of yours that you saved from the fire last Monday. When I saw you come out of that last run of the fire behind the crew, pushing that fellow Whitey ahead of you, I couldn’t tell which was sparks and which was that beard of yours shining.”

“Would have been all right,” grunted Bob, “if Whitey hadn’t gotten stampeded. I admit it was pretty tight for a little while when that run of fire started up the hill, but I had the men all lined up to make their get-away when that Whitey started crying and praying and saying we was all going to die. I had to be real rough with him; batted him over the ears and booted him ahead of me, and we came up through the smoke a fogging.”

Bob Monroe was the district ranger and had fought fire for nearly forty years through all the Clearwater country from the Salmon to the Lochsa, and everybody knew he was the man to do the right thing in a tight spot.

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