Sweating men and fear-crazed horses race the flames to save the grain
For a month the sun had dealt with us pitilessly. The wind, robbed of its moisture by the mountains far to the west, swept burning and parching over the rolling grain fields of South Saskatchewan, drawing the last trace of dew from the stooks of cut wheat, from the stiff stubble and the powdery, dusty summer fallow. From the train one could see the threshing outfits working at top speed while the dry weather lasted. The separators, half hidden by the loaded wagon on either side, lay in the hollows of the fields like sanguinary dragons, each with its long neck upthrust, spewing straw in a fine cloud onto the strawpile.
At the wayside station I watched the train leave, trailing behind it a swirling dust cloud. Close beside the railroad track, like giant tombstones stood the grain elevators, darkly red, springing from a tangle of dry grass and weeds to the brilliant sky. That night I slept with the threshing crew. There was a spare team and harness in the barn. I would take out a bundle-rack with the rest of the crew in the morning.
Sun and dust
The farm was large. We threshed for two weeks, moving the outfit from place to place, working south. Each day the sun blazed from a brazen sky. In the morning the dry wind sucked up the dew from the stooks, so that the machine for the rest of the day threw out suffocating clouds of dust. It was not so bad if one used a handkerchief as a mask. The horses stood nervously by the roaring separator, while the dust sifted down on them in a white coat. Very often they would start forward as one of them interpreted a squeak of the machine as a whistle from the driver. The man, balanced on the uneven load above the whirling knives of the cutter, would curse and grab the reins, while the menacing knives, swallowing the last bundle, would race all the faster.
We filled two granaries in the field, and then moved west to the last set-up near the house. There was no granary here, so we let the grain run out onto the ground, and built up an edging of planks around the pile as it grew higher. When a grain tank came back from the elevator empty, the driver would draw it up close to the separator, unhitch his horse and leave us to swing the spout over the pile to the tank. Things were going well for the farmers. Nearly all the grain was threshed, much of it drawn, and still the weather was dry. A wheat stalk powdered between the fingers. At this place the growth had been lush, leaving a long stubble. Then one day it came.
Fire!
I had finished pitching off my load into the separator, had scraped up the loose wheat with a shovel, stuck my fork between the bars of the rack and gently untied the reins ready to move off. The horses laid back their ears expectantly, but I stood for a moment looking at the man coming towards us from the far side of the field. That in itself was not unusual, but it was remarkable that he should be running in this heat and waving his arms. There was no load waiting behind me.I chewed a straw and looked again. He was still running and waving his arms.
Suddenly the meaning of it drove my heart into my mouth. It was fire! Above the great strawpile was a wisp of smoke. I jumped from the rack, ran to one side. It was fire right enough. The far side of the strawpile was twenty-five feet of leaping flame. It was already in the stubble, twisting, flickering, flying before the wind. The wind had depressed the smoke and hidden it from us behind the straw.
My first thought was for the horses. I swung onto the rack, turned them from the already silent separator, and with the reins slapped them into an agitated trot. The flames were over the top now. As we went, I saw out of the corner of my eye the full grain tank. Sixty bushels of grain, a box and a wagon, waiting to be burnt. At a safe distance, we stopped. I pulled the pin from the doubletree, and drove the unwilling horses back for the grain tank. The whole straw pile was now blazing furiously. The flames were lowdown on the windward side and reaching for the wheat, the grain tank and the separator. The horses were pretty good, but badly scared.
As I turned them on to the wagon tongue, the farmer’s son appeared from nowhere and grabbed their heads. As a man who had a lot to lose, he was pretty excited. He was white and sweating, but habit steadied his hand at the bridles, and helped to slip the ring of the neck-yoke on the wagon tongue. He yelled at me all the time that the harness was rotten. I knew it was rotten. I was the latest comer on the crew, with rotten harness and twenty-year old horses. If they cracked up now it was his loss. The heat was blistering the plunging horses. I dodged their feet, hauling back on the doubletree, and got the pin in somehow. The smoke was bad. As the pin went in, I yelled to the horses, dived clear and went for their heads. They needed no urging. They went hard and fast away from those flames and took with them a load that, next day, took four horses to move it on the soft ground.
A Running Fight with Fire
With the grain tank clear of the fire, I unhitched and tied the horses, grabbed a shovel, and ran towards others of the crew, fantastic figures in the dust and smoke, racing the flames, beating at the blazing stubble with pitchforks, shovels, anything. One drove his horses through the flames, cut a fireguard of a few furrows before the fire ate up the filled granaries and the best of the year’s work. But the wind was master of the situation, played with the flames and with us, blasted a smoking path two hundred feet wide, straight between the two granaries to the summer fallow a quarter mile away, where the fire died on the edge of the dry soil.
Exhausted, sweating, parched, we drifted back to the outfit and surveyed the damage. The farmer’s son, in the heat and excitement, had fainted and had to be dragged out of the fire, the threshing machine was scorched, and damaged as the tractor-man in a panic dragged it clear with the driving belt, some grain was burnt, half a day lost. But it might have been worse, we thought, even as we spent the night stamping out smouldering roots, and hoping that the wind would not change. As for the horses, they had been magnificent.
S Frank Bruce
294 Windsor Rd West, North Vancouver, BC
Phone: North 1654-Y