Incidencias

The first incident of the day was logged at ten past seven, and it was Manolo, and it was a hat.

The hat belonged to a German gentleman who had come up from the coast in a hired car to ride a camel before breakfast, which is a thing people did then, and paid for, and put on the internet afterward. Manolo took the hat off the German gentleman's head with the unhurried competence of a professional, held it in his mouth for a moment so that everyone could see that he had it, and then ate a third of it.

Remedios Cebolla wrote it in the book because the book was there and because writing it down was the job.

"He has never done that before," said Chano, who owned the place, and who said this at least twice a week, and who had never once been right about it.

"Chano."

"He has never done that particular thing before."

That was truer. Remedios did not look up from the book. She was forty-nine years old, small and round and built close to the ground, and she had been the vet at Camellos del Norte for eleven years, which meant she had eleven years of the book in her handwriting, and had long ago given up arguing with the column headings. There were five of them. NOMBRE. KILÓMETROS. PESO. FECHA. INCIDENCIAS. There was no column for why, and there was no column for and then what happened, and there was certainly no column for the fact that Manolo, who was eight years old and enormous and had a temperament like a door that opens the wrong way, had spent the previous winter standing over a sick calf every night for nine nights, in the rain, without being asked.

You put the hat in the book. You did not put the calf in the book. That was what a book was for.

She gave the German gentleman a form and forty euros of Chano's money and a genuine apology, and she checked Manolo's mouth for splinters of hat, saying, as she always did, "Con permiso, don Manolo. Abra usted." With your permission, don Manolo. Open, if you would.

He opened. He always opened for her. He was foul to everybody else on the property and had bitten four of them, and he opened his mouth for Remedios like a man showing you his passport.

The mountain behind the ranch was the color of a paper bag. It had not rained properly since April.

Angustias Cebolla saw the smoke at 11:42 and knew three things about it before she had finished standing up.

She knew where it was, which was the barranco below the forestry track at Erjos, which was the wrong place. She knew what it was standing in, which was ten years of pinocha nobody had cleared, the deep red mattress of dead needles a Canary pine drops and drops and never stops dropping. And she knew what the wind was doing, because the wind had been doing it against the left side of her face for two hours.

She called it in. She gave the coordinates twice, the second time slower, and she gave the wind, and then she said the sentence that she had said in training exercises for nineteen years and had never once said into a live radio, which was that it was going to run uphill and it was going to be in the crown within the hour.

Then she took the flat carpenter's pencil from behind her ear and wrote down the time.

She wrote down the time because the report would want the time. The report would want everything: the time, the bearing, the wind, the fuel, who she told and when she told them, whether the track was passable and whether the gate at the top was locked and who held the key. There would be a form with boxes on it in an office in La Laguna, and in eleven weeks a person she would never meet would read what she wrote in this pencil at 11:42 on a Tuesday in August and decide whether the Cabildo had done enough.

That was the machine. It was a slow, dull, quarrelsome, deeply unglamorous machine, and it employed her, and it had a helicopter.

"She writes down the time," Angustias said, to nobody, to the pencil, in the flat register of a man calling a horse race on the radio. "She writes down the wind. The wind does not care. She writes it down anyway. The crowd is silent."

There was no crowd. There was a stand of pines the color of paper bags, and a smell coming up the barranco like a struck match the size of a valley.

She started walking toward it, because that was also the job.

Milagros Cebolla was two hundred meters inside a hill and did not smell anything at all for another forty minutes.

The cave was up above the old water gallery on the El Tanque side, in the pines, and it was not on any map that a person could buy. It was on one map, in one drawer, in the Museo, and Milagros had the fourth key that had ever been cut for the grille across its mouth. She had been coming up here since May with a headlamp, a folding rule, a camera, and a waistcoat of many small pockets, which she wore because fieldwork is the business of needing a specific small object at a moment when both your hands are full.

There were eleven people in the cave. They had been there for something between six and nine hundred years.

You do not touch them. That is the first thing and the last thing. You do not touch them, you do not move them, you do not straighten anything, and you certainly do not take anything out of the hill, and the reason is not superstition and is not sentiment, it is that the arrangement is the information ⁓ who lies where, and beside whom, and with what at their feet, and how the reed matting was folded before it collapsed. Move one thing and you have not stolen an object. You have deleted a sentence.

So what Milagros did, for four months, was measure and photograph and write. Two hundred and ninety photographs. Sixteen pages of section drawings. A page of notes on the goatskin binding of the smallest one, who was very small indeed, and beside whom somebody had set a gánigo, a plain fired bowl, with a chip out of the rim that had been there before it was set down, because whoever set it down had thought a chipped bowl was still a good bowl and worth giving to a child.

That was the sort of thing she wrote down. There is no column for it in any of the forms either.

She came out at 12:26 to change a battery, and the light outside was wrong.

The three of them had a group chat. It was called ALLIUM, because Angustias had named it in 2019 during an argument and nobody had ever bothered to change it, and its entire history was photographs of vegetables, disputed onion weights, and the word no sent by Remedios approximately once a fortnight.

Remedios read that standing in the yard with the phone in one hand and her other hand flat on the neck of a camel, which is a thing she did without noticing she was doing it, the way other people hold a bannister.

Nobody replied to that. Nobody ever replied to those. They were always right and they were never useful, and the family position, arrived at over four decades, was that you did not encourage her.

Then Remedios put the phone in her apron pocket and went to find Chano, and the ordinary Tuesday ended there, at 12:51, and everything after it was the other kind of day.

There were fourteen camels at Camellos del Norte and the trailer held four.

Remedios did the arithmetic out loud while Chano did it silently and arrived at the same number, which was three and a half trips, which was two hours if the road stayed open and nothing went wrong, and something always goes wrong, and today the thing that went wrong was standing in the third pen looking at them.

Manolo would not load.

He would not load in the way that a mountain will not load. There was no drama in it. He walked to the bottom of the ramp with perfect courtesy, and stopped, and became eight hundred kilos of geology. Chano pulled. Two of the handlers pushed. Somebody fetched a bucket of dates and somebody else fetched a broom and was told to put the broom back immediately, by Remedios, in a voice that ended the discussion.

"Con permiso, don Manolo," she said, and put her hand flat on his neck. "Suba usted."

He looked at the trailer. He looked at her. He made a low sound that came out of somewhere near his feet, and did not move.

They tried for forty minutes. In the end they took the other three up and drove them down without him, which meant the trailer had gone with three instead of four, which meant four trips instead of three and a half, and Remedios stood in the emptying yard with a bruise coming up on her forearm where he had caught her ⁓ not a real bite, a warning, the kind he gave when he had run out of ways to say a thing ⁓ and she was, for about ninety seconds, as angry as she had been in a decade.

Then her phone went.

The trailer was on the lower road. The trailer had been on the lower road for eleven minutes.

It got through. It got through with about four minutes to spare, and the driver came back up white and talking too fast, and did not go down again, because by then there was nothing to go down for. The road took a crown fire across it at ten past two and after that the lower road was not a road, it was a place where a road had been.

So they walked.

You can walk a camel down the old cattle track above the water gallery. You cannot take a truck down it, and nobody had driven anything down it since about 1970, and it was steep and stony and overgrown with fayal, and it came out below the fire. Eleven camels went down it in a line with four handlers and a vet and no ceremony whatsoever, and it took an hour and ten minutes, and the only real trouble was a gate that had rusted shut in 1998 and had to be taken off its hinges with a rock.

Manolo went first. He went first because he was the biggest, and because the track was narrow and he simply took it, and because when Remedios put her hand on his neck at the top and said, "Ahora sí, don Manolo. Vamos," ⁓ now, yes, don Manolo. We go ⁓ he went, without one second of argument, like a door that had been waiting all its life to be pushed the correct way.

She thought about that a great deal afterward. She never got anywhere with it. You cannot ask a camel what he knew and when he knew it, and she was a scientist, and the honest answer was that he was a bad-tempered animal who did not like ramps and had been unhelpful at a bad moment. That was the answer that would stand up.

She never quite believed it.

By four o'clock Angustias was on the line above Montaña Negra with eleven other people, two of them BRIF crew flown in from Gran Canaria and the rest local, cutting a break across the neck of the ridge with hand tools because the ground was too broken for the dozer.

She had one boot.

The other boot was in the barranco. It had come off in a hole under a burnt cistus and she had gone twelve meters before she noticed, and by then going back for it was not a serious proposal, so she wrapped the foot in a fleece sleeve and a roll of flagging tape and got on with it, and if you had asked her about it she would have said that it was extremely stupid and that she was aware.

"She loses a boot," she said, under the roar, to nobody. "She continues. The commentary declines to discuss it."

The recreation area was two hundred meters below them and slightly east. Concrete tables under the pines. A stone barbecue that somebody's grandfather built. A pipe that had run water since before the road did, and a flat place where children had been camped every August since the sixties, and where four of them, one summer, had eaten raw onions until they cried and then run down the slope breathing the smell at each other and screaming.

Angustias worked the neck of the ridge for six hours and did not look down there once.

At about seven the wind turned and lay down, the way it does on this island when the day gives up, and the head of the fire dropped from the crown into the ground fuel and began to behave like something that could be argued with. The BRIF lead came along the line with water and said the word cortafuegos in a tone that meant it might actually hold, and everybody sat down where they stood.

One of the young ones, twenty-two, from Tacoronte, was looking down at the black. He had been on the tools for nine hours and he had the face people have the first time.

"It's all gone," he said.

"No," said Angustias.

He looked at her.

"Canary pine," she said. She was too tired to make it kind, so it came out as information, which is what it was. "It goes up like that and it comes back. Not from seed. From the trunk. Green needles straight out of the black bark, six weeks, eight weeks. You'll drive up here at Christmas and it'll look like the trees are wearing sleeves." She drank some of the water. "It is the only pine on earth that does it. Nobody knows why we got it."

The young man from Tacoronte looked at four thousand hectares of burning mountain.

"That's a stupid tree," he said.

"It is a magnificent tree," said Angustias, "and it will outlive every single person on this ridge," and she got the laugh, which was what she had been going for, and she wrote down the time.

They gave Milagros twenty minutes.

The man who gave them to her was about thirty and apologetic and had walked up from the track with a radio, and he was very clear that twenty minutes was generous and that he was being generous because she had asked him a sensible question first, which was about the wind, and not the question everybody else asked him, which was whether he was sure.

So she went back in with her headlamp, and stood in the chamber, and discovered that there was nothing whatsoever for her to do.

That is the part nobody warns you about. She had been in that hill since May. She had two hundred and ninety photographs and sixteen pages of drawings and a full set of measurements and a plan of the floor accurate to two centimeters, and it was all backed up in three places, one of them a server in a building in La Laguna and one of them a hard drive in a drawer at the finca. The work was done. The work had been done for weeks. Everything that could be carried out of that hill had already been carried out of it, months ago, in a camera, by her, and it weighed nothing at all.

She had twenty minutes and no task.

She thought about the gánigo. She thought about it properly, which is to say she went and crouched down beside the smallest one, the child, with the chipped bowl at the feet, and she put out her hand, and she held it there in the air about ten centimeters above a thing that had been set down by somebody's mother between six and nine hundred years ago and had not been moved since.

You do not touch them.

She took her hand back and put it on her knee and stayed where she was for a while, in the dark, with eleven people who had been given to this hill on purpose, by people who had climbed up here carrying them, and who had chosen a dry chamber with a good draft and a mouth that faced away from the weather, and who had got it right, because here they all still were.

"Va a haber fuego," she said, eventually. There is going to be a fire. She said it out loud, in a cave, to nobody, like an idiot, because it seemed to her extremely rude to leave without mentioning it.

Then she went out, and pulled the grille shut, and locked it.

She stood with her hand on the padlock for a second afterward, because she was a scientist, and she was aware that she had just locked a steel grille against a forest fire, and that the fire would not be stopped by the grille, and that this was in every measurable sense a stupid thing to have done.

It was the only door there was. You close the door.

She walked down to the track in twelve minutes, which was eight inside her allowance, and she did not lose a shoe, which she considered a personal disappointment.

The fire went around the hill. Not for any reason ⁓ the ground fuel thinned out on that face, and the wind lay down at seven, and it went east instead, the way water goes around a stone. She got back up there eleven days later with the man from the Museo and everything inside was exactly as it had been, eleven people and a chipped bowl in a dry chamber with a good draft, smelling faintly of smoke, which they had not done in nine hundred years and would now do forever.

She sat down on the slope outside for about a quarter of an hour before she opened the grille. The pines above the cave were black sticks and the ground between them was gray and the whole mountain rang like the inside of a bell.

She did not tell anybody that she sat down. It went in no report.

They got to the finca at some point after eleven that night, at different times, from different directions, and the state of them was extraordinary.

Angustias came last and came in one boot, with her foot wrapped in fleece and flagging tape, and stood in the doorway blinking at the light like something that had been dug up. There was a rim of ash in every crease of her face, so that she appeared to have been drawn in charcoal by somebody working quickly. She had not eaten since half past six in the morning.

"Someone will lose a shoe," said Milagros, to the room, with enormous satisfaction.

"I will hit you with it," said Angustias. "I have one. I can spare it."

Remedios put a pot on. Nobody talked about the day, because nobody had the words yet and because two of the three of them would have to write it all down formally within the week anyway, and there is no faster way to ruin a thing than to have to file it. So instead they sat at the kitchen table and Angustias put her ruined foot up on a chair and Remedios looked at the bruise on her own forearm and Milagros went out to the store and came back with an onion.

She put it on the table. A big white one, from the second terrace.

Nobody said anything about that either. Angustias took out her pocket knife and quartered it, and the three of them ate a raw onion at a kitchen table at midnight, standing and sitting in various states of ruin, and the smell of it filled the room and got into their clothes on top of the smoke, and after a while Remedios started laughing and could not stop for some time.

Then she got up, and said she had to go back down to the ranch, and both of her sisters said, at once and in the same tone, that she absolutely did not.

She went down anyway. There was a book to fill in.

The office at Camellos del Norte was a portakabin with a fan that did not work and a calendar from a feed supplier, and Remedios sat in it at twenty past one in the morning with the ledger open in front of her and her hands still smelling of onion and animal.

She filled in the day. Fourteen camels by name. Kilómetros: the walk, estimated, generously. Peso: unchanged, obviously, nobody had weighed a camel that afternoon. Fecha: the date.

Then the last column, which was the wide one.

She sat over it for a long time. She thought about the ramp, and the forty minutes, and the lower road at ten past two, and the fact that a truck with three camels in it had come up that hill with a driver who was still shaking at six o'clock. She thought about a bad-tempered animal who had not liked a ramp, on a day when not liking that ramp had been the correct position, and about whether an animal can be correct, and about what she was actually able to write in a book that a man she had never met might read in an office in eleven weeks.

She wrote:

Forty minutes lost. That was the true and accurate and professionally defensible way to record it, and it was what the column was for, and she read it back twice and could not make it say the other thing.

There was nowhere in the book to put the other thing.

So she closed the book, and turned off the lamp that was the last light burning on that whole dark hillside, and went home to bed, and Manolo stood out in the yard in the smell of the burnt mountain and chewed sideways at nothing in particular, in the manner of an animal who has had, on balance, a satisfactory day.

Some words from that night, for the curious:

• Incidencias: incidents. The last and widest column in a working ledger, into which goes everything that happened that the other columns have no room for ⁓ and, by long tradition, nothing about why any of it happened. It is the only part of most days that anybody bothers to keep.
• Pinocha: the deep red mattress of dead needles under a Canary pine. It falls forever, it does not rot in a hurry, and after ten dry years with nobody clearing it, it is simply a floor made of matches.
• Cortafuegos: a firebreak ⁓ a strip cut down to bare ground so the fire arrives at nothing and has to stop and think about it. Cut by hand, on a slope, in August, by people with rakes.
• BRIF: the Brigadas de Refuerzo en Incendios Forestales, the national reinforcement crews, who arrive by helicopter from whichever island is not currently burning.
• The Canary pine: Pinus canariensis, and the single most stubborn tree in the Atlantic. Almost alone among pines, it resprouts from the trunk after fire ⁓ green needles pushing straight out of black bark within a couple of months, so that a burnt mountain in December looks like the trees have been issued sleeves. It is why the Corona Forestal is still there after several thousand years of an island that catches fire.
• Gánigo: a plain hand-built Guanche bowl, fired without a wheel. The one in this story has a chip out of the rim that it already had when it was set down, because a chipped bowl is still a good bowl and worth giving to a child.
• Con permiso, don Manolo. Abra usted: with your permission, don Manolo. Open, if you would. Remedios is famously courteous to animals and merely warm to people, and has never been persuaded that this is the wrong way round.
• Camellos del Norte: the camel place on the road between Ruigómez and El Tanque. Fourteen animals, one trailer that held four, and a book with five columns in it.