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made the same way. First, a line scout goes ahead of the crew and flags the route with red tape, taking advantage of anything—streams, rock outcrops, ridgelines—that won’t burn. The sawyers follow after the line scout, cutting everything from knee-high sagebrush to 150-foot trees. Each sawyer is assigned a swamper, who pulls the brush out of the way and throws it well outside the line. After the swampers come the rest of the crew, who use rakes, shovels, Pulaskis, and even their hands to scrape the duff clear and remove every shrub or root that crosses the fire line. Untouched forest or range enters at the beginning of this line, and a fuelless strip emerges out the other end. It is supposed to stop fire, and despite its appearance—narrow and insignificant in the midst of such huge geography—it generally does.
    Fire line is built and measured in sixty-six-foot sections called chains, a unit of measurement that dates back to the early days of surveying. There are 80 chains to a mile, and hotshot crews should be able to cut 20 chains—a quarter of a mile—of fire line an hour. If it’s an emergency, the crew should be able to continue at that pace all day, all night by headlamp, and even all the next day. The unofficial record is sixty-seven hours, set by a California crew boss who had also gone thirty days without a shower. Technically both are in violation of agency policy.
    For the time being the fire line served as a very good trail on the steep hillside, and I followed in Casey’s dust down toward the crews below us. Fifteen hundred feet farther down was the river. Casey’s job, as safety officer, was to walk around all day watching people work and talking to them about potential problems. Do they have a safety zone to retreat to if the fire blows up? Are people being posted as lookouts on each crew? Is everybody wearing a shirt? Most fires are slow-moving, and fighting them is closer to hoeing a garden than being in combat, but when fires blow up, they move with awesome fury, and if people aren’t prepared, they die.
    â€œSeventy-two people were overrun at the Butte fire in ’85,” said Fred Fuller, part of the overhead team of one sort or another (“We’ve got layers upon layers of us out here,” he admitted). He was a lanky, soft-spoken man who was accompanying Casey and me on our rounds for a while. “They were in their fire shelters for an hour and a half. They lived, though—even the Cat operators who didn’t have fire shelters. They had to crawl under their machines. But they lived.”
    Cat operators suffer some of the highest fatality rates on fires because they are reluctant to leave their machines until it’s too late; on the Butte fire they had to be dragged off their machines by other fire fighters. Burnovers are considered catastrophes even if no one gets killed, and the people who survive are given counseling within twenty-four hours. By all accounts they are terrifying experiences; that close, a fire storm is as loud as a jet plane taking off, and many of the people trapped in their shelters don’t even have radio communication. All they can do is wait and try not to let the convection winds tear the shelters off their backs.
    Bob Root, a young severity crew foreman working downslope from us, put it bluntly: “If someone has to get into a fire shelter, then someone else fucked up. I mean, really.” Root has fought fire for seven years, since he was eighteen. He was a student at the Colorado State School of Forestry and also a member of the local sheriff’s search and rescue team. His severity crew, hired in advance because of severe fire conditions, was fire-ready around the clock and could be on their way within an hour. Root had straight straw-blond hair and a sunburn and dark Bollé glacier glasses. Realizing that I was as good an excuse for eating lunch as any, he sat down and pulled a brown paper