Ash Road Read Online Free PDF

early because the heat was stifling, and the sun was already glaring, and the north-west wind that had blown all night was still searing the leaves off the trees as it had seared them the day before. Grandpa hated the north wind. He had hated it all his life. It was an evil wind, a wind that angered men and dismayed women and frightened small children. The long grass growing up to the house was as dry as straw, and dust was in the air, and the smell of smoke. It was the smell of smoke more than anything that had got Grandpa out of bed and out of doors in his pyjamas.
    He could see no smoke in the sky, but it was in his nostrils, teasing them, and in his mind, in a way, prompting his memory back down the years to that one desperate hour when he had faced an inferno on his own and fought it on his own and beaten it on his own. He had prayed hard at the time, prayed for a wind-change, for rain, for an army of men with beaters; but none of these had come, and he had done it on his own, and had stood blackened and burnt and bare-headed in the paddock, in the prime of his strength, shaking his fist at the heavens.
    An old bushman like Grandpa could smell eucalyptus smoke on the wind from a fire burning fifteen or twenty miles away; he could smell it and feel it and see it with his eyes shut, with tingling senses, with an awareness that was electric. He stood almost motionless, every part of him tuned to that faint signal of smoke.
    There
was
a fire; it was burning somewhere, and the world around him was set to ignite. It always happened on a day like this; when the north wind raged, the temperature soared, and the hills were so dry that they crackled. Fire at most seasons of the year was nothing but a flame that water could extinguish; in this season, on a day like this, a little flame could in an instant become a monster.
    Not in years had Grandpa seen real smoke—the savage, boiling, black-red smoke of the forest fire on the rampage. He had seen the smoke of scrub fires that had got a little out of hand for an hour or two; the smoke when farmers burnt off new ground, or when shire-workers burnt off the roadsides; and the smoke when fire brigades were cleaning up hazardous pockets of bush before the full heat of summer (the boys of the fire brigades enjoyed a good blaze now and then). But he hadn’t seen real smoke close to home since 1913. He had read of bad fires and seen far-off glows in the sky by night, particularly in 1939, but those days seemed to have gone; there were too many people now.
    Though the presence of fire always tightened him up, Grandpa had never been unduly afraid of it. He knew that fires, unlike earthquakes or avalanches or erupting volcanoes, could be stopped or turned. Men who knew what they were doing could even fight fire with fire. That was what Grandpa had done in 1913, and he had saved his farm though others not so far away had been wiped out. Even the township of Prescott had gone on that day, 13th January. It had been there in the morning, and in the afternoon it was a heap of charred rubbish and the Gibson family had been burnt to death.
    That dreadful day had started like this one, even to the day of the month—the same searing northerly, the same faint smell of smoke, the same sort of temperature that had climbed and climbed to over 112 degrees in the shade. And when the fire had come over the top of the range and thundered into the valley like a thousand locomotives steaming abreast, it had become still hotter and hotter—so hot that birds on the wing fell dead and grass started burning almost of its own accord and locked-up houses exploded and creeks boiled.
    But that had been a long time ago. It couldn’t happen now. Now there were hundreds of firefighters trained and equipped at immense expense with fast vehicles and water-tankers and high-pressure hoses. Those boys made fast work of the job; they knew what they were about. Now there were firebreaks through the eucalyptus