For a Handful of Feathers Read online

  Kiwi let her rip on the upwind border of the property. Molting gobs of napalm, the size of dog turds, fell out of the canisters to earth; the gobs metamorphosed into tiny orange blemishes on the forest floor, glowing, seconds later, inside billows of smoke that rose and pursued us.

  “Holy shit!” I howled into the speaker. The pilot raised his thumb again, and I wondered: What if this guy’s a fruitcake with a death wish? My hero banked hard and dove into a cloud of black smoke.

  It is a fact that, for fear of projectile vomiting, I never once joined my wife or children on a Ferris wheel, but there I was flying up and down in a tin can with steel blades spinning every which direction, sitting on enough firepower to torch the state capitol. The first blast of heat met us head-on and the helicopter bucked thirty feet into the air. “Oh my God,” I moaned, feeling my stomach turn over like a summer pond. Thick smoke filled the cockpit. This is it, I thought. Kiwi thinks he’s back in Vietnam!

  Twenty minutes later we landed next to the soon-to-be-refilled fifty-gallon drum. By then I was so sick I staggered out of the cockpit, waved to my cousin, his wife, and their children, who were anxiously waiting for some quality time in the sky, drove home, and went to bed.

  The neighbors called the police, the fire department, two congressmen, and a senator, but they didn’t know Cousin Colin, who was not going to be denied the intriguing sight of his land burning from a bird’s point of view. He stonewalled the lot of them, shrugged, and said, “A storm in a teacup.” I was proud of him and I was proud of the pilot who dropped six loads of napalm without ever crossing a firebreak. He was an ace, a painter of fire.

  IV

  The practice of burning the pinewoods of the South long predates the arrival of the white man, and by the time the explorers Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 and de Soto a decade later brutalized their way up Florida and southern Georgia, they reported large parklike meadows with widely separated trees, tremendous herds of deer, and rafters of turkey. Those forests had been burned by the natives as far back as 1000 B.C., by Indians of the woodland tradition, and probably by the archaic Indians (8000 B.C.) before them. Fire had been used as a means of opening the woods for travel, of herding and concentrating deer by creating grazing land, of exposing food in the form of acorns and chestnuts to turkeys, and of readying fields for the annual sowing of corn and squash, beans, gourds, and melons.

  Francis Willoughby wrote in 1676, “They are like the Spanish Quail, very good and pleasant meat, provided you kill them two or three days before they be rosted and served up. Physicians allow sick persons to eat of their flesh: Neither is there any Fowl among the Indians, next to tame Poultry, whose flesh is to be preferred before it, either for wholsomness or taste.… They are kept in Coops, and fed with Indian Wheat and are common in many parts of this Country.” A turgid tongue-twister bearing a certain historical weight.

  When a Southern hardwood canopy closes, the world below turns dank, the food source changes, and the trees struggle and stretch for the sun’s favors, the survivors displaying their resolve with misshapen limbs. In the fall and early winter deer and quail shop in this underworld for acorns. Turkeys, by nature more opportunistic, add crawfish and lizards to the list. In general, bobwhites prefer habitat photosynthetically fertilized by the sun, with trees far enough apart to cast individual shadows on a floor where the ground cover grows like a quilt: dense in some places and thin in others. Bobwhites like to feel dirt between their toes and are not equipped to scratch under matted cover for food. They relish pine seed, berries from dogwood trees, crab apples, and the odd acorn. By the end of winter, when the hard seeds, green growth, and mast have been gleaned, fire magically opens a new, snug reserve of food that for months had been sifting through pine needles and dying grasses to the forest floor; roasted treasures immediately accessible to all grain-eating birds, squirrels, and deer. Heat blisters the hard-shelled seeds of legumes such as partridge peas, beggarweed, and lespedeza, which until then were hibernating underground. Scarified back to life, these seeds resume their genetic aspiration to grow and multiply, and, in the case of legumes, develop into prime sources of food, cover, and bugging grounds for quail and turkey alike.

  In 1931, when both governmental agencies and privately employed foresters totally excluded the use of fire in the woods, a nucleus of biologists, funded by a group of industrialists and wealthy southern Georgia and northern Florida landowners headed by Herbert L. Stoddard, published The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation and Increase, a book that anyone even vaguely interested in bobwhite quail should own because it is still, and always will be, the Gideon Bible of quail management.

  Stoddard’s five-year study included the use of fire both as a means of improving the habitat—hence increasing the quail population—and as a method of improving the commercial production of timber. It is said that foresters were so set against fire that the first time Stoddard publicly praised its benefits he was booed off the stage by his peers. Nevertheless, Stoddard’s research and application of fire in the Southern woods eventually convinced the timber industry that burning every fourth or fifth year, a decade or so after the pine saplings were planted, reduced the hazard of wildfires, notorious for terminating thirty-year investments in minutes.

  The application of a hot summer sun on a pine-forest floor provokes a growth reaction unique to the Southeast. No other forest in the country is blessed with such a rich, diversified, and permanent undergrowth, perfectly located and adapted to overwinter migratory birds. The downside to this lush evolution is that, left unchecked for five years, the under-story grows into grasses, vines, and pine straw tangles, walls of dead vegetation so dense and constricting that they are unfit for all but a handful of species. The slow progression from fields to pine trees to an eventual climax hardwood forest promotes a steady ground-floor progression from grass and weed to an impenetrable deciduous jungle.

  From a wildlife-management point of view, fire cleans and retards the growth of ground litter and hardwood saplings. From a forestry point of view, controlled burns control a dry, overgrown source of fuel yearning for a match.

  Those who do not want nature modified in any way, particularly not for the benefit of specific species, feel that the biological development of the planet is a continuous mutation of life, encouraged by natural occurrences as tedious as the advance and retreat of glaciers and as rapid as the eruption of a volcano. Species that do not adapt to one ecosystem adapt to another or disappear. They are right, but the questions arise: What do you want and what are you willing to give up? No management program can serve all needs, much less all species. Without fire the pine forests of the Southeast would revert to hardwoods. So, if we are to return to nature, how far back do we go? This specific ecosystem was historically groomed through the propagation of wildfires, first from lightning and later by the Indians. In this day and age, wildfires present unacceptable dangers to human and animal life and, more pragmatically, unacceptable losses to the timber industry. Since we have physically altered the geography of nature by moving hundreds of millions of our own species into a system finely tuned to celestial tides and the whims of physics but impotent in the face of man’s insults and relentless desecration, it would seem appropriate that we manage what we have altered and clean up what we have soiled. We cannot buy plywood without cutting trees any more than we can delight in nature without giving something back.

  In this case, the opposition surrounding controlled burning stems first and foremost from man’s primeval terror of fire and secondly from the fact that smoke is a pollutant—regardless that it is a natural phenomenon and, compared quantitatively to what rises from our cities daily, a nonissue. A more practical reason for opposing controlled burning comes not from the radical right or left but from the ornithological community, where there is mounting concern that extensive pine management will affect the lives of millions of new tropical songbirds that migrate up from the rain forests of Central America looking for the junglelike habitat we work
so diligently to clear.

  All these issues warrant a great deal of thought by both interested and uninterested parties. Population volatility and the shift from rural to city life disallow absolute solutions to the interaction between humans and nature. Those whose livelihoods depend on timber are going to side with those who own the timber. Those who love nature for its own sake are unswayed by scientific rhetoric. That leaves the majority of mankind, which doesn’t give a damn one way or the other, a handful of professionals who care, and a minority of amateurs like me.

  Climax grasses, such as broom sedge, spread quickly and choke fallow fields in a few years, surrendering them to cotton rats, which relish the density. The rats in residence are overseen by battalions of predators that would just as soon eat a quail as a rodent. Fire opens that overgrowth just as it opens the floor of the forest, allowing bobwhites to travel the edges and use what second-year broom sedge escaped the fire as nesting cover. A percentage of what is burned is harrowed in the late spring, giving the sun a clean place to rest and renew the vegetative process. In June, year-old corn stalks, sorghum, and innumerable islands of unburned grass still totter in the breeze, a force to be reckoned with and a fine place for a quail to lay an egg. It seems that old grass, like old people, takes a long time to die.

  V

  I stop hunting around the middle of February, when instead of finding coveys my dogs point singles and pairs. No matter what anyone says, our quail-hunting season is too long (three and a half months) for the good of the species. The joys of hunting I experienced in September erode over the months, and by February I am loath to pull the trigger on anything that breathes. Each season has its priorities, and by the end of winter mine turn to growing things. The irony, of course, is that if I want to grow strong trees and provide a plentitude of food and safe habitat for my boarders, I have to promote an interaction between organisms—both vegetal and animal—and their environment (specifically, the science of ecology). In the Southeast, that means setting fire to the land.

  Firing a section of woods, particularly if you own or are responsible for them, awakens something old and fearful in man, like a great windstorm or a close accident. I have been mixing fuel for a decade now, at a ratio of three parts diesel to one part gasoline, into four-gallon firepots, and have set thousands of acres on fire. But every spring, particularly the first morning, I do so with the innate feeling that I am disobeying a fundamental rule, a rule repeated over and over to me by my mother as far back as I can remember: “Do not play with fire!” And therein lies part of the fascination. Scientific benefits aside, there is something visceral and unknown about cracking a match that gathers a man’s testicles like only a glance at death or the promise of sex ever does.

  Fire licks the disease off the trunks of pine trees and, if properly applied, kills enough lower branches for the trees to grow tall and without rickets. The heat clears the woods of ticks, chiggers, and other parasites, as well as bark-boring beetles, which home in on a scent emanated by weak or wounded pines and destroy the tree in a matter of days. Resin, acting like a salve, flows out of crippled pine trees, and if the bugs don’t find it the fire usually does, branding the hot resin into black catfaces in the thick, multilayered bark. The catface brands spread every year, burying deeper and deeper into the soft wood, slowly breaking its resilience, until one day the tree falls and rots and mushrooms grow, and the process of life starts over again.

  Bill plows firebreaks around the perimeters of those sections of woods left unburned the year before (I burn 50 percent of the farm every year, in increments of five to twenty acres). A master tractor operator, Bill is at his best tap-dancing on the pedals of the clutch and brakes. I set the fires while he pushes over logs and stumps, crowds the flames, and spins the harrow blades over potential problems. During it all he furiously works over a huge plug of chew. This bit of legal speed, coupled with coffee chasers, keeps him wired until he gets home to his double-wide, where he spoons a quart of vanilla ice cream into his mouth to ease his weakened stomach—a personal approach to checks and balances.

  On a clear and cool March morning a couple of years ago, with the wind out of the north at eight miles an hour, we fired the bottoms on the eastern boundaries of the farm. I’d hoped to burn about a hundred acres that day, but the wind never stood still long enough for a plan to work. We began by firing a block of planted pines with two years’ worth of cones and needles on the ground. Just about the time our carefully set backfire eased forward, the wind turned, swirling the pine tops and fueling the fire into an unwanted rage, the heat shriveling the undergrowth ahead of the flames. The smoke turned black, and the flames swirled into orange-colored funnel clouds. We were lucky that the fire stopped when it reached the break; it stopped just as suddenly as it had started, leaving in its path mature pine trees with trunks scorched twenty feet high, dead hardwood trees whose thinner bark had collapsed under the heat, and, where the fire had moved the fastest, perfectly shaped, white-tipped blades of black grass.

  The smell of pine heart burning is distinct and addictive, a stickiness that coats the air for weeks. Along with diesel fuel, burning pine heart releases an odor one shouldn’t forget from one year to the next; but for reasons I don’t quite understand, I always do. The first time I crack a match, my brain shrieks and revolts. A week later I don’t want the smell of pinesap to ever go away.

  That afternoon we backfired a block of young pine trees. The fire skulked away from the wind like an ebbing tide, a tiny red wave five inches high scorching the earth, weaving in and out of the crooks and crannies of years of debris, leaving behind a uniform blanket of soot. Backfires are as fascinating to me as their counterparts, the rolling headfires that suck the air out of gopher holes and hurl flames beyond the smoke and fear all the way up to where the sky is blue. The first fire cleans; the latter kills. Both have a place in woodland management, but unless the burn is to destroy dense stands of saplings, or is called for by reasons of time versus acreage, I prefer the former because of its contemplative, quiet progress.

  Afternoon clouds pushed long shadows over the blackened earth. The fire had barely singed the meager litter of leaves under the oak trees and had halted at the strips of annual rye and winter wheat I’d sowed back in November; there, green ribbons of grass waved in the breeze, undaunted by my devices. Meanwhile, because spring was on the way, the live oak leaves that had survived winter had turned yellow and brown from the heat.

  When the fires were out, the stumps on the side of the shadowed slopes smoldered into a gray world of bats and owls. Just before dark I saw a woodcock rise out of a burned creek bottom, outlined against a silver sky; the bird looked fake, a freeze-frame picture of nature projected onto a canvas, traced by an impersonator. Diesel fuel lingered on my skin, oily, determined, and unaffected by soap. Soot clung to my boots and smoke had parched my eyes. At the house I built myself a big drink. My daughter called it a killer drink. She was right.

  I had been reminded again how quickly a fickle wind can turn a creeping backfire into a maelstrom, and how heat races up hills and creeps down hollows, but mainly I learned about the lay of my land, its vulnerability to errors, and most of all about its finiteness.

  The strange irregularities and texture of the earth are apparent when a rain follows a burn. The earth is hard, strewn with mortified limbs and treetops, logs, smoking stumps that refuse to rot, shriveled leaves in a motif of black on black. Rain sinks the potash and minerals into the ground and drags the surplus to the creek bottoms. It washes color back into the face of darkness and exposes the red clay domes of thousands upon thousands of anthills, on the slopes, in the wood, the hollows, everywhere. Nature is at her most naked after a burn, and like a molting bird, she’s both vulnerable and risible, if one feels like laughing.

  Two weeks later—sometimes sooner, depending on rain, nighttime temperatures, and dew—the land greens up. Miniature fingers of chlorophyll stipple the earth, and these first revelations of color, pinned o
n shadowy backgrounds, deepen the landscape.

  Six weeks beyond that, the minerals that have sifted into the earth, the scarification of dormant seeds, the rains, and the hot sun have joined forces to introduce a vegetable explosion. When the woods still smell of resin, the ephemeral rainbow of wildflowers hurries to live and die before the canopy fills with leaves and casts shadows on their parade. It is said that the appearance of flowers coincided with the mystifying emergence of man on earth. Lupines and coral beans, violets, azaleas, redbuds, and wild green onions are everywhere. Insects multiply in the lush evolution of legumes and contribute protein and minerals to the health of nesting hens and their eggs and later to the growth of turkey poults and bobwhite fledglings during the summer months. White-tailed does and their fawns consume the beans of the same legumes in the fall.

  I alter the circle of life and death on my land every year. I believe it is for the better. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I am right. Rachel Carson wrote, “The control of nature is a phrase born in arrogance,” and while I am perfectly aware that what I do is a form of arrogance, I would suggest that given the decimation of habitat in all parts of the world, she might forgive me for playing God on an eight-hundred-acre farm.