On the Burning Edge Read Online Free PDF Page A

work, she made Grant salads for lunch, which otherwise would have been gas station burritos and maple bars, and when he came home she would coddle him as he complained about the punishing workouts that Steed dished out every day. In the beginning, he’d come home to her threatening to quit. But Leah never doubted Grant’s toughness. She was less certain that he could handle the time away from her.
    “For the first time in his life he actually had a place he felt he belonged,” Leah said. They shared a comfortable rental with their dog, Derek, and a few roommates. His job bartending and washing dishes at a local Mexican restaurant was the only hitch in what Grant otherwise considered the smoothest period of his life.
    When Bob first suggested that Grant apply for Granite Mountain in the winter of 2012, the prospect wasn’t appealing. Leaving Leah for any amount of time, let alone many months, sounded awful to him. So did sleeping in the dirt. Ultimately, though, the lure of professional job experience and a chance to earn a year’s salary with just eight months of work trumped Grant’s love of creature comforts. Plus, Leah pushed him to take the job. Her encouragement made it easier to believe that hotshotting, no matter what challenges the job presented, couldn’t possibly be worse than manning a sink.
    “Get your ass up! Don’t you fucking quit!”
    Back on the side of the mountain, Scott Norris, a wiry twenty-eight-year-old redhead who’d transferred to Granite Mountain from a Forest Service hotshot crew that spring, pounced on Grant before he could catch his breath. It was usually the squad bosses’ job to discipline the rookies, but Scott, who’d wanted to make a career of firefighting, took it upon himself. A few of the guys marching behind Steed glanced back. Grant was still down on one knee, but now he was vomiting again.
    Kneeling on the ground, his vision blurred by fatigue, with Scott yelling at him and the other hotshots still racing up the hill, Grantmanaged to stumble to his feet. Becoming a hotshot might not have been his dream, but backing down from a challenge wasn’t in his nature. Grant gritted his teeth, hauled the box of water to his shoulder, and chased after the rest of the crew.
    —
    Marsh and Steed had designed Granite Mountain’s training day with a larger purpose in mind. The crew would build a line that, later in the fall or winter, would serve as a line meant to contain a prescribed burn. The eventual fire would accomplish two objectives. First, it would mimic the natural low-intensity blazes that were common to the Prescott area before fire suppression took hold as the dominant land management policy, in around 1910. And second, the burn would check any future wildfires by leaving something like a moat of blackened forest around Prescott.
    The prescribed-burn plot needed to be lined at some point that summer, and Steed intended for Granite Mountain to tackle the project with the same urgency they would if the flames were already marching down Whiskey Row. He ordered the saw teams—the sawyers and swampers—to clear a thirty-foot-wide swath of trees, brush, and limbs on the edge of the pink flagging. The scrape would follow behind, digging a ten-foot-wide path down to mineral soil in the middle of the swath. When complete, it would look as if a bulldozer had plowed through the forest and a trail crew had built a jeep road through the middle of the swath.
    Scott started working. During the five seasons he’d spent fighting fire with the nearby Payson Hotshots, a crew based a hundred miles to the east, he’d learned to run a chainsaw well. When he came to Granite Mountain, he expected that Steed would bump him back to the scrape with the rookies. Regardless of prior experience, on the Payson crew, new guys always swung hand tools.
    Running chainsaw is the most dangerous job on the line. Hundreds of men have knocked out their front teeth while traversing mountains with saws on their