When in Drought

Tropical Forest, Queensland, Australia

The wind rustles through our needles, barely holding onto our fragile limbs. Some fall, down, down to the earth. Light and drying into yellow, a breeze lifts them from our limbs and together they dance. Layers of dehydrated leaves and needles blanket our floor, too thick, too dry, too much. Dust billows, like sediment rising in the ocean, up through the brush and settles in the cracks of our bark. We haven't been this parched in centuries. Vines, twisting their lengths along the full height of our trunks, loosen their grips and dust settles in their drying bark, filtering through the cracks. Void of leaves, too barren for the season, they creak and settle around us. It already feels like summer, even though spring is just beginning. Swallows flit between our branches, wingtips just a breath away. Their song carries on the breeze and echoes between our trunks. We would smile if we could. An echidna, stout nose prodding gently at half-decomposed detritus and termite mounds, shuffles between us, feet tripping slightly on our surface roots. It can't even find insects to eat. Our brittle needles snap and give away under its gentle weight. The sun warms our canopy, breaking through to our floor between our shy crowns, and speckles the too-dry shrub with shifting, dappled, winking flecks of gold. We drink in its rays while wishing instead for rain, waiting for today's solstice night to fall.

The weight of heavy feet presses on our floor. Metal stakes, by human hands, are pulled from the earth. Swaths of dirt, exposed and square, dot our floor between these stakes. Nothing grows beneath those man-made covers. Tight, woven ropes loosen from around our trunks and light floods back onto our floor. Pollen settles in the sunbeams, swirling in the turbulent air. A tree frog, feet so carefully placed, meanders back under a shadow, back into the cool away from the glittering sun. Someone flicks a cigarette from between their finger and thumb, turning away as it arcs towards the ground, still lit. We spark.

Warmth tickles at the clearing’s edge, an ember below a shadow. The brush has sparked and caught. Softly, the breeze encourages it, permits it, feeds it. Our needles, fallen, crackle as they ignite, spitting wayward scraps of flame with each exhale. Tendrils of smoke wind skyward like new vines reaching for sunlight. The fire burns cool and orange. This is our dance of summer. It's early this year, the first of the season. We welcome it. Innocuous, it satiates itself on the detritus shrouding our exposed roots, forked tongues wrapping around us and leaving ashen streaks. It licks across our trunks, its flames painting false shadows. The air flickers, fires’ tongues splintering at their highest reaches, sending effervescent sparks towards our canopy. We bask in its rejuvenating heat. King parrots, their green and red feathers ever festive, dot our lower branches as they squawk in hoarse tones and fan their already-broad tails behind them. Whispering, the fire spreads slowly, snaking between our trunks and consuming the dry grass and shrub carpeting our floor. Lines of ants, in perfect trains, file back to their hills and vanish below. As the feet of the fire tiptoe across our floor, fingers of wind hiss beneath our roots, spiraling upward as they expand and warm.

It's intoxicating. We breathe deep, as one, as flames sneak along our floor, refreshing the dry earth like rain. Gusts through our branches caress our needles, in their tiny bundles, and, murmuring, threaten to lift them from our limbs. Heat rises in the valleys of our trunks, filling each crevice with warmth and pushing against our bark. Flame follows, almost liquid as it traces paths along our lengths. Our children, the animals that live among us, delight. Birds dip and glide between our lowest limbs, the momentary brushes of wind from their wings tickling our bark. Cuckoos dart through the thick underbrush, heads low and parallel to the ground as their feet dance across our floor, their golden-brown plumage ruffled. The air is marked with intermittent trios of their deep-throated call even as that sound is swallowed by the smoke and fire around them.

Eucalyptus resin softens gladly in the mounting waves of heat. Seed pods begin to split, almost creaking as they open. That small sound breaks through the chorus of cracking fire and we celebrate. In long, thin strands, resin drops from the pods. Seeds follow. They drop, noiseless, into the lapping flames and disappear within. Some land softly on the ever-weaker shrub, pausing on an outstretched limb only to fall yet further. They make their way to our covered floor and settle between our needles, brown and yellow and singed now on either end, waiting. We blush with joy to see these seeds release. Finally there’ll be new growth. The ever-increasing drought has been taking that from us. Rising orange into yellow, the base of the flames licks hungrily across these fallen seeds, trying in vain to consume them.

A smaller sapling catches, the fire greedy for its upper branches. Its leaves ignite, fraying. They dwindle, skeletal, before landing, now only lines of fine grey powder, on our floor. The soot falls in broken streaks upon the brush, outlining their dry and barren branches. A goshawk, perched delicately upon our canopy, takes quick flight and glides through smoke the color of its feathers, black eyes focused above the growing flames. Our elation starts to fade as worry creeps in on its heels. We shiver as a breeze darts, dusty and sharp, between our trunks. It lifts the newly fallen soot and mixes with the rising smoke, ever darker. Tongues of fire, waltzing, engulf the smooth sapling’s trunk, leaving it dusted in black. Its highest branches, ever reaching towards our canopy, falter and lose form under the onslaught of flames, bowing earthward. The fire moves on; angry, it consumes.

Flames roar all around us. We suffocate in their smoke. Like a flood, fire fills every crevice of our floor and winds its way into every valley of our bark. Overwhelmed by the inferno, our bark starts to singe and burn, ever darker. It’s too strong, too big, too hot. This is a fire that devours. Sharp wind hisses through our trunks, teasing the flames upwards and whipping our leaves from our branches. They fall into the hell-sent blaze, composing a staccato snare-drum chorus as they catch and burn to dust. Our needles quake and tremble in the waves of heat rising up from below. It shouldn’t be like this. We knew it was too dry.

Our floor echoes, hundreds of feet pounding across it in desperate bids to survive. Birds flit, panicked, through the rising waves of heat, from the flames burning across our floor. Each wingstroke forces a momentary valley in the sea of flames, like ripples over the ocean. The feathers that before tickled our trunks now cut and sting our bark. Red-tailed black cockatoos, new to our home and ever in pairs, swoop through our trunks, their plumage in perfect harmony with the devouring fire they flee. The edges of their feathers start to singe, tendrils of twirling smoke rising with each beat of their frenzied wings. Feathertail gliders flit from one branch to another, from one trunk to the next, in a desperate, fatal game of connect-the-dots. Our trunks are too hot, scalding their soft feet. Some animals try to hide in burrows underground; we can feel them cower between our roots. We wish that we could cower too. Wombats open their burrows to wallabies and wood frogs and rabbits as they’re forced to come together to survive, to escape the hungry, insatiable flames. The spaces between our roots fill to bursting with our frightened children. Those that run, run fast. We’ve never seen them run so fast. Almost airborne, they fly across the ground, ignoring our surface roots and breaking the brush in their path. Small footprints dot the falling ashes on our floor in scattered, frantic paths only to be obscured a moment later. Some aren’t quite fast enough. They yelp and whimper as the fire burns their feet, their ankles, their legs. Until they can’t run anymore. Blisters flower on their toe pads, turning them shades of peeling red, and their hair and fur catches fire, singeing and burning. Like shedding fur, their skin flakes off, dancing behind them in the wind and flames. The smoke twists around us and the horrid smell fills the air, rising and expanding to fill every crevice between our trunks. It’s nauseating. We can’t protect them. We can’t even protect ourselves. And it’s killing us.

The flames constrict around our trunks, choking us, and force their way beneath our bark, snapping pitting pieces from us and heaving them, now made charcoal, to the ground. It hurts. We cry out with every unnatural creak and crack. What once was just summer sparks, spitting skyward, effervescent and brilliant and bright, now strips us of our home, strips our bark from our trunks and leaves us raw and flayed. Yellow and crimson flashes are born of blue and orange, far hotter than before. It has grown insatiable. Fixed in place, we stand, silently howling, among the flames, drowned in their punishing heat. With callous certainty, the fire ravages our trunks, ripping our lower branches from us and feeding its ever-hungry flames. We blacken, shadows dancing up our bark in a deadly display. Ants flee our trunks, forced into mass exodus as their colony ignites and their brothers crackle, like popcorn, and die.

Our needles shiver in a sharp breath of wind. A single arcing ember undoes us and our canopy ignites. Like river rapids, we catch in a violent rush of flames. We scream. Smoke billows skyward through our burning branches, darting through creases in the flames. With deafening and sudden cracks, our stronger, thicker, upper branches snap, burned away, and crash down to earth, sending shockwaves through our floor. Their cacophony echoes despite the wild, livid flames clamoring at our roots. Leaves rain down around us, emaciated and grey. The sound of fire, rushing, roaring, fills us.

Heavy footfalls reverberate through our floor and make our trunks all quiver. Water fountains down around us, painting our blackened bark, and sizzles, hissing and spitting, as it hits the infernal flames. The first breath of hope takes flight, deep within our despair. Footprints overlap endlessly among our burned and broken remnants, upwind of where the fire still burns strong. The pressure from the water strips the charcoal from our trunks before arcing skyward to come down on the fire from above. Flames, resisting, twist skyward between the man-made waterfalls in orange and yellow pillars. They claw and grab at our upper branches as our crown burns ever hotter, the fire popping and sparking as it sets our needles alight. Shreds of licking flame split from their edges and turn to steam as they hit the rushing water. The center of the blaze, its heart still burning almost white, rages against these human hands, consuming ever faster. At the edges of the fire, wild with fury, dozens of footprints pattern the now-sodden ground. Shadows on grey and black, the slight indentations push into our ashen remains, our decimated floor.

They yell, these humans, their voices barking and coarse as they choke. From one to another, they shout. Some fall to their knees, the impact rebounding through our floor and the cowering animals tremble in their holes. We feel their desperation coursing through our roots. Where the flames subside, smoke takes their place. Black, opaque and senseless, the smoke, suffocating, rises. The fire exhales it in sputtering breaths, blowing it, billowing and bellowing, skyward. We choke too. The humans cough, hacking, and are lifted to their feet. They retreat. Our fear again grows. The fire still burns strong, destroying us.

We snap and fall to earth, splintered at the base, blackened by smoke and flame. The crack echoes between our ravaged trunks, only skeletons now, and we can almost feel the sound waves as they pulse through the air between us. The trunk falls through the fire, carving a valley like parting the sea, and lands on our floor, burning and scorched. It almost bounces when it collides, our floor made soft by ash and soot. We weep, our tears the needles torn from our limbs and cast to the ground at our roots. We haven’t lost one of our own in more than a lifetime. Its fractured skeleton stands, stark, between our trunks, stalagmite splinters like jagged teeth, the mirror image of its broken body on our floor beside it, framed by our dead and burning children.

Chemical mist douses our canopy from above. Almost powder, it settles on our branches and filters through our still-shy crowns, blanketing our floor. Clouds of smoke in greyscale tones are birthed with each wave of water and chemical mist and billow skyward, snaking between our branches and winding their way between our trunks. The water, still arcing, mixes with the chemicals from above into frothing rivulets. The waves of heat begin to subside, no longer hot enough to singe and hurt and burn. The call of a lone cockatoo permeates the air, its lilting, crescendo song far brighter from the scene laid out around us.

Finally, the sky opens up and rain pours down, extinguishing the fire with each hissing drop. Lightning streaks down and thunder splits the clouds. Slowly, incrementally, inevitably, the fire dies. We have been made charcoal, our trunks rough and black and crumbling at the slightest touch. The brush and shrub is gone and just their bones remain. Ash piles between our roots and trunks, gathered there by the wind. Made black, too-slow mice and frogs and squirrels pattern the spaces between us, their bodies still and cooling in their fatal isolation. Rivers of runoff gush between us, furiously sent downhill with nothing in their way. Grey and muddied, they run. Wombats’ noses test the air as they slowly emerge from below. We look on reverently as a rabbit tries to wake his lifeless littermate, fur muddy and matted where it isn’t simply burned away. Tendrils of steam, now almost white, rise from the ash blanketing our floor, embers not yet cooled. Weakly, they glow, pulsing red and orange as the breeze goes past. Soon, they too die out. There’s nothing left for them to burn. This fire may be over, but we can’t recover. There are so few of us now.