The Dog

Bryce was nine when the grass fire caught him in March.

It was a Tuesday. The fourteenth. Burning season in the Flint Hills of Kansas, when every rancher in three counties sets fire to his pasture to burn off the old grass and the cedar trees, so the new bluestem comes up green and sweet for the cattle. You can see the smoke from fifty miles away. At night the hills glow orange like somebody spilled coals across them.

Everybody out here grows up with it. Nobody’s afraid of it. That’s the trouble.

The Hensley place, south of us, was burning that afternoon. A controlled burn. Or it was supposed to be.

The wind shifted around three-thirty. It came out of the southwest at thirty miles an hour, gusting forty, and that fire jumped the firebreak on the north side of Hensley’s pasture like it was nothing. It came across the county road and into the strip of tall grass between the road and our house.

I was at work. I’m the head cook at Elk Bend Elementary. I was scrubbing the steam table when the fire whistle went off on top of the town water tower.

Josh was at work too. At the feedlot east of town.

Bryce was home. With his sixteen-year-old cousin, Kaylee, babysitting. And our dog.

Kaylee told me the rest later. Sitting on a bench in the hallway of the burn unit at three in the morning, crying so hard she could barely breathe.

She saw the smoke coming over the hill. She grabbed Bryce by the arm and ran him out to her car. She did everything right. She got him buckled in the back seat. She was starting the engine.

And Bryce looked out the window and saw Biscuit.