ALL the land is lying listless and a warm September breeze Has brushed the green to silver on the rustling orchard trees, And the near-by hills are curtained with a doleful, yellow cloak, For the world is swathed and sweltering and blanketed in smoke. Up the Sacramento Valley from the 'Frisco country south, To Seattle and Vancouver there's a thirsty, baking drouth; From the Rockies to the Coast Range 'neath the heavy-hanging haze Leagues and leagues of trees are giving up their ghosts in smoke and blaze; There are endless acres smouldering, their trunks forever dead— Oh, is it any wonder that the sun's a red-hot red!
From the towns they're rushing fighters—rushing, rushing them by rail.
They're meeting them in motors and they'll tote 'em up the trail Where the pack-nags are a-packing with a tramp, tramp, tramp- Packing tools and grub and blankets up the canyon to the camp. And fire they'll foil with back-fire-pitting pitch 'gainst snarling pitch, They'll slash the brake and lacerate the earth with upturned ditch; Their skins will smart with singeing draughts that play along their tracks, They'll sting with wet from reeking sweat of shovel, pick and ax.
She's headed up for Clear Creek and she'll make it 'fore she stops, For she's a roaring crown-fire with her wind- swept, blazing tops. From flaming lance to flaming lance on through the parching day, Exhaling clouds of rolling black, she surges on her way. She sucks the flying embers like a burning hurricane, She flings them miles around her in a sputtering, sparking rain,
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Her Devil's dance leads ever up—
Exultingly she swings
Her wild red arms out toward the heights—
She sizzles and she sings.
She pants and thirsts for living green, she stays not for the snags,
She’s charged the steep embankments and she’s gained the higher crags;
Her Devil’s dance leads ever up—exultingly she swings
Her wild red arms out toward the heights—she sizzles and she sings;
With dragon-spit she hisses, a maniac in her wrath,
She laughs to scorn the human things that try to block her path.
On yonder crest they’ve made their stand—hark to the timber fall,
Again the winds have veered around—the bosses curse and call
Through driving blasts of pitch-pine heat and pitch-pine smoke and smell,
“She’s turned again—hang to your tools—and damn you—run like Hell!”
It takes a canny general whose eye’s a weathervane,
A mighty canny general with seamed and schemy brain,
To meet the gay manoeuvers and the unconventional ways
That a breeze kicks up at noonday in a crown-fire forest blaze.
But when the cooling later hours have lulled her hot desire, She straggles down the blackened trunks in fretful gusts of fire. The tinder-brush has caught the spark, the temples of the night, Their purple columns towering high, glow in the amber light. There's a maple dancing, dancing with her arabesques of gold, Till her flaming scarfs have shrivelled, fluttered down and touched the mould. From censers gleaming fitfully the dripping pitch-gum falls, And heavy incense fills those wild and weirdly lighted halls. Each hollow stump a cauldron is with molten pitch aglow— Its roots are twisted holes of pitch that pierce the earth below. Beyond the burning border of the bracken and the vine, A ruddy edge is eating through the carpet of the pine, But the fighters, they will meet it with their paths of upturned soil— It's many days those little paths have saved in sweat and toil.
A four-league stretch is burning now—the cavalcade of death Moves on with scarlet torch and blade and with a scarlet breath, And over all the smoking ridge, the clouds that hang like lead— Oh, is it any wonder that the moon's a red-hot red!
And when the golden ladders of tomorrow's sickly sun Slant through the mournful tree-tops and the holocaust is done, There won't be much to interest the breathing things around In the charred and ashen litter of the scarred and ghastly ground. There's quite a large community that undertook to change Its residential section to a more inviting range. There is a fox—a red, red fox, who took his bouncing luck And dusted down the pathway of a panic-stricken buck; There's a corps of gray-backed diggers and a bunch of cottontails Who didn't tarry very long to figure out their trails;
And the suckers and the peckers and the flickers and the wrens, And the buzzards and the finches and the cocks and pheasant-hens, And the jays and bees and skeeters and the gnats and dragon-flies Have saved their skins and feathers for they're fairly weather-wise. But woe betide the crawling things and heaven help the mark For every wriggly worm that rides the earth or bores the bark; And every caterpillar—and a caterpillar's hairs Can get as badly frizzled as a big, brown furry bear's; And woe betide the silly squirrels who for a refuge run Far up the blazing trees because it's what they've always done. And may the blessed Jesus save all souls of mortal men Who perish in that fiery maze, walled in their smothering pen, Like those they found near Jefferson upon the mountain side, Who strangled there near Jefferson—with fingers clenched they died.
Oh would you know the meaning of that lazy yellow haze, Why the sun's a scarlet pinwheel in the late September days, Why the thirsty earth's a-drowsing 'neath a lowering panoply From 'Frisco to Seattle—from the Rockies to the sea? For the skirmish that they're having up the Clear Creek canyon there Is but one of all the flare-ups that are burning everywhere. And you'll know them—oh, you'll know them when a decade's come and gone, And the lifeless bark has fallen from those trunks now pale and wan, And their ghostly, gray battalions in their long unbroken lines, Stalk the ridges, rising, falling—ghosts that once were firs and pines; You will know them—you will know them when a score of years has run, Faintly limned in mist, or gleaming—silver lances in the sun.
