The maple frog was without question the ugliest boat twenty-year-old Walter Paine had ever seen. It may even have been (as its captain and co-owner Percy DuGreen often claimed—more strenuously the more he drank) the ugliest boat currently afloat on any of the five Great Lakes. No small claim: in 1871 there were plenty of wrecks heaving around those waters, and Walter often felt they'd spent their day jockeying among a flotilla of leaky longboats, wounded schooners, leprous tugs, and rancid fishing launches, each a unique and horrible spectacle of maritime decrepitude. Were some boats faster than the Frog? Indeed, most. Sounder? Of course. But if it was an ugly contest someone wanted, Walter (who three weeks earlier had never sailed a body of water whose far shore wasn't visible) would have backed the Frog against all comers, confident he'd not only profit but garner the awe of any wager-man who watched him step aboard. Captain Percy took a dyspeptic pride in the Frog's condition. "Twelve yards of abomination flottante!" was his tenor cry whenever passing crews jeered at them—a near-hourly event. Though Irish, Percy DuGreen liked to affect a French-Canadian accent in the belief that Canuckdom bestowed upon a man a certain nautical gravity. "So hideux!" he'd shout, bowing and sweeping his hat for hecklers, like a lead actor acknowledging the brilliance of his supporting cast. "Yet only God can seenk her!"

About this latter claim, Walter had doubts; it seemed to him that anyone with a small-bore musket could have put the Frog under. But the former claim was observable fact. If beauty conferred buoyancy, the Frog should never have been afloat. Her steam pipes were as caked with rust as the tin roof of a Civil War corncrib. Her engine—Percy called it the world's only coal-fired anchor—was a concatenation of clanking, hissing ironwork that served mainly to belch sausages of black smoke into the air (smoke which quite often moved across the lake more quickly than the Frog). Her portside wheel was alarmingly egg-shaped and outward-dishing, and lacked entirely or in part three of its sixteen paddle boards. Under full steam her hull shed a dander of mildewed paint like a ragweed releasing pollen. And true to her name, wherever the paint had entirely disembarked, maple planking shone whitely forth. Yet on the evening of October 8, 1871, the Maple Frog, drifting a mile off the Wisconsin coast in the middle of Stinking Bay, was to Walter's mind the most magnificent craft in nautical history—because Walter was on board, and because, in every direction, the world was on fire.

There were three of them aboard the frog: Walter dashed fore and aft across the main deck, mashing cinders with his boots. Percy DuGreen stood in the Frog's dilapidated little wheelhouse, drunk (though this was to be expected, since the sun had set). Jess Folquist, co-owner and first mate, was belowdecks tending to the boiler. Together they comprised the full crew of the Frog: Percy piloted, Jess tended the steam plant, and Walter bent his back loading and unloading when in dock.

Walter could have named many other people who would have liked to be aboard with them, most from the Bassoon Saloon, where a few hours earlier he and Percy and Jess had been drinking and talking to a dancing girl—until the bell of the Presbyterian church on the north side of the town of Menominee, Michigan, began to peal, double-struck. The din inside the Bassoon Saloon masked the sound until a man burst through the door, shouting, "Fire bell!"

The piano music halted midphrase (the Bassoon Saloon had no bassoon—merely irony). A heavy-breathing silence settled across the room as the occupants collectively realized that for some time, below conscious registration, they'd been hearing the sonorous dong! of the bell, struck by its own clapper, followed by the quavery vlang! of a sledge or crowbar striking the brass. Chair legs screeched across the dry floor planking. Eighty pairs of calked boots hit the wood floor. The pianist slammed the cover on the keys of the upright piano so violently that every string inside resonated as though strummed by a claw.

Some men began to laugh at the sound of the piano, squawking like a mechanical chicken. A few even began singing again. But the sound of the fire bell kept pealing down the street, and the songs and laughter quickly faded. Even from the middle of the barroom, Walter could see red light flickering against the dirty front windows.

"Get out, fools!" someone shouted. "Get out the damn door!"

There were, by Walter's estimation, close to a hundred fifty men in the saloon, but only one door. The patrons threw themselves toward it in a scrambling, shouting, surging mass. The first few drunkards out stumbled and pitched onto the street just beyond the threshold, jamming things up. For long minutes Walter, Jess, and Percy, trapped in the middle of the crowd, could only contemplate the flammability of the wooden walls of the Bassoon Saloon and of the six inches of sawdust used throughout town as street pavement—and the fact that none could remember when rain had last fallen—while the light of the wildfire, terrifyingly intensified, painted across the window glass. Those even further behind shouted and heaved at their backs. Then the crowd began to move forward again. The man directly behind Walter lurched and fell, clutching at Walter's belt as he went down. Reflexively, Walter kicked backward; he felt his bootheel strike some bony part of the poor fellow. Instantly remorseful, Walter turned to offer him a hand up, but a sweaty-faced lumberjack planted his calked boot between the fallen man's shoulder blades and pressed him to the floor. Walter found himself facing backward but carried forward, rowing and twisting to keep from going under, without space for his feet to move or his lungs to breathe. At the doorway he was turned sideways and his breastbone ground against the unpainted pinewood jamb until his skin began to tear and his cartilage crack. Within the walls of his chest he felt his heart struggle. Then he was thrown free, sprawling onto the sawdust street. He scrambled to his feet, was knocked down, then came up again, hands on knees, gasping. The three of them had risen from the same table at the same time but the hydraulics of the crowd had separated them. As he looked behind, Jess stumbled out of the saloon, among the last.

The fire bell kept ringing its two-note fugue. Men ran from house to house, pounding on closed doors and shouting. Someone began blowing a Gabriel horn. The revelers of the Bassoon Saloon, who until minutes earlier had been swilling beer, arguing over poker hands, and singing choruses of "O, Fanny Annie," stood staring at the horizon south and west of town. No one lived for long in the northwoods without witnessing a fire, and such fires were routinely fought and staved off until they smoldered themselves into quiescence in the damp of the forests. But the forests had ceased being damp weeks ago. And this was a cataclysm—a vast red heliosphere that struggled upward against a darkness intent on driving it into the earth; a magmatic shield of red that gathered and pulsed starward, its glow broad and world-encompassing.

Percy, twenty yards ahead, shouted, "Jess! Walt! Head for the Frog!" then went reeling down the street, drunk but determined, twice nearly losing his balance before he turned at Hattie Street and disappeared.

Walter looked back at the Bassoon Saloon. The door had been torn off its hinges and he could see the man he'd kicked lying motionless on the floor. He started back. Jess caught him by the shoulders. "You can't help him," he said. "I already checked. Now come on." And then they were running, wordlessly, side by side.

Everywhere people were rushing through the streets. On the Menominee side of the river, men were hitching horses to a steam-powered fire engine. Homesteaders were digging fire holes and pitching silver and valuables in, or loading their children into wagons and sending them toward the river. A little girl raced across the street carrying a snowy pullet in her arms, its red-combed head tipping and jerking. A man stepped out of a house holding a rifle, and raising it to his shoulder, fired one shot after another into a line of hogsheads balanced on the ridge beam of his house. Water began pouring out of the bullet holes in long silver spouts.

They caught up with Percy on the Marinette side of the bridge and together they covered the final half mile to the dock where the Frog was moored. Jess scrambled down the engine hatch and went to work on the steam plant, throwing open the feed and pitching in shovels-full of oil-soaked starter coal. Percy took up position in the rickety little pilot-house, looking intently back the way they'd come. Without a definite task to perform, Walter dashed pointlessly between them.

"Push off!" Percy shouted.

"Ten minutes to pressure," Jess shouted back. "Maybe fifteen." "Now! " Percy cried. "It has to be now, or we'll swamp for sure."

To Walter, whose eye was drawn by the blaze rising behind the twin towns of Marinette and Menominee, Percy's concern seemed nonsensical. The fire was clearly advancing; to the west, above the treetops, gigantic streamers of orange flame leapt and consumed themselves. It was easy to imagine their craft set ablaze, but how could the conflagration swamp the Frog? Then he realized that Percy wasn't looking at the fire; he was looking at the Hattie Street bridge—the same bridge the three of them had crossed moments before.

In those years, the bridge was unlit. Gaslight was far beyond the sophistication of a northwoods frontier town that ran on firewood, and electric light in any form was a decade in the future. Even so, it was easy to see the throng of panicked residents fleeing across the bridge, for they carried their own light—whale oil lanterns, candles in hurricane glasses, torches that billowed and smoked. Bearing fire as they fled fire. Their movement suggested hysteria, folly, ruin. A man's voice echoed across the river: "This way! This way to the dock!"

Walter, Jess, and Percy had spent the last several days loading the Maple Frog in preparation for their next run up the shore of Lake Michigan, and under the combined weight of a full coal bin, thirty beer kegs, sixty molasses barrels, and countless sacks of flour, the little sidewheeler wallowed, even at the pier. This was just how Percy liked seeing his craft: terrifyingly overloaded. It meant fewer runs and more time sitting in saloons.

Besides, as Percy liked to point out, they always stuck close to the shore, and once they'd put into port at the first few shoreline villages, the Frog became downright perky again, its bow hardly ever threatening to plunge beneath the waves. But setting out was perilous. The weight of even a few additional passengers would leave the lake chop lapping at the rails—and running headlong toward the dock were forty people, maybe more, who wouldn't stop coming aboard until the Frog foundered and sank.

Percy ran to the bow, unlashed the mooring lines, put one of the long poles against a pier post, and began to push. Walter grabbed an- other pole, sunk it into the shore mud, and likewise labored.

"Jess, get that boiler cooking now!" Percy cried. "Or we're all going to die with Wisconsin river piss in our lungs!"

Jess clambered up from belowdecks and looked at the approaching crowd. The nearest were already running down the long main plankwork of the pier, leaping aboard any vessel still docked. But it was obvious that the Maple Frog would be among the first to depart, and the main mass of people waved and flagged, shouting, "Wait! Hold up! Stop!"

Even in the dark, Walter saw Jess blanch. "Damn," he said. "Damn, damn, damn." He leapt down the engine hatch, barely touching the ladder. The iron burner grate clanked open and great orange flashes illuminated the deck as Jess hurled more coal into the burner.

Percy hauled his pole aboard and dropped it on the deck. To Walter, he said, "Don't stop pushing until you can't see this town." He ran between the port and starboard paddle wheels hauling them around with all his strength. Between Walter's poling and Percy's efforts at the paddle wheels, the overburdened little boat began slowly drifting away from the dock.

"Now is the time, Jess!" Percy shouted. "Now is an excellent time!" "I can't make water boil faster than it boils!"

"Then help turn these paddles," Percy cried. "For God's sake!"

Jess clambered out of the engine hatch and strained at the starboard wheel, while Percy, at port, screamed, "Turn, you lazy swine! Turn! Turn!" The first of the group had reached their mooring on the pier by then, but between Walter's effort with the barge pole and Percy and Jess at the paddle wheels, the Frog had advanced forty yards toward the center of the river.

"Wait!" someone cried. "Take us!"

"We're too heavy!" Percy cried. "Go on to the Union!"

Four men jumped off the dock and began swimming toward the Frog. One of the pierbound figures produced a pistol, knelt, and steadying his elbow on a piling took aim at the boat and fired. A bullet whanged a spark off the smokestack just behind Jess's head. Walter and Percy ducked, but Jess, dumbfounded, stood looking at the dented stack. It wasn't until the second shot splintered the gunwale eight inches from his hand that he finally bounded across the deck and disappeared down the engine hatch, yelling, "Either it'll go or we'll all be blown to kingdom come!" A moment later, a heavy thunk resounded from the engine compartment and the paddle wheels jerked and slowly began slapping the water. The swimmers shouted and cursed, then thrashed back toward the dock. The crowd was already rushing on toward the Union.

Walter stood on the deck, transfixed, watching the town dwindle while the glow of the fire behind it swelled. Overhead three tiny white stars sped across the as yet moonless sky; a fourth, rushing after, pulled a long bright line through the night. The Frog passed into a dense smoke bank that rasped in his throat. Gusts of wind carrying hot ash rushed across the water, first from the north, then from the west. No matter how ugly, no matter how clumsily its paddles flailed at the water, Walter felt only the purest gratitude to be aboard the Frog. No place was worth the fight—hopeless, in his estimation—that the townspeople of Marinette and Menominee were about to undertake.