On the Burning Edge Read Online Free PDF

shoulders; many have burn scars on their necks from where the muffler, hot from running all day, touchedan exposed piece of skin. Sawyers wear Kevlar chaps, eyewear, and gloves to protect themselves in the event that they slip, but on every crew in the nation, somebody has a story of a chainsaw injury. Some are gruesome. Some are life-threatening. It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure what happens when some unfortunate hotshot touches a spinning chainsaw.
    Many crews won’t allow new hotshots, even those with fire experience, to be sawyers until they’ve proved themselves fit, capable, and safe. It wasn’t long after watching the fluid and confident way Scott ran chainsaw that Steed offered him one of the crew’s lead sawyer positions.
    Scott tugged his machine to life and set it to idle beside him while he pushed in earplugs and pulled his hands into leather work gloves he’d turned inside out to prevent blisters. Joe Thurston, a thirty-year-old Utah native and father of two, had been assigned to be Scott’s swamper, and he followed Scott in to work. There was elegance in the way the team moved.
    Unable to talk over the screaming engine, Joe occasionally touched Scott’s shoulder to alert his sawyer of an overlooked limb. Otherwise, the men, ever aware of the other’s presence, seemed to dance around each other. As he grabbed cut limbs, Joe always left a couple of feet between his hands and Scott’s saw. At a manzanita bush a little smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, Joe pulled the branches back to make it easier for Scott to see. The sawyer lopped the limbs off inches above the ground. When one dropped, Joe and Scott made eye contact, and Scott held the saw still for an almost imperceptible moment. In that pause, Joe reached toward the still-whirling chain, grabbed the branch, and tossed it off the fire line. It took seconds to clear the manzanita. Falling trees took longer.
    At a larger pine that sat in the middle of the fire line’s path, Scott first removed the limbs, running the saw up and down the eighteen-inch-diameter trunk in one fluid motion. Then he hugged the trunk and looked up, assessing the tree’s natural lean and determining which direction he wanted it to fall to make Joe’s job of removing it from theline easier. Once decided, Scott aimed the pine where he wanted it to go by cutting the trunk perpendicular to its lean. Eight inches above that, at a forty-five-degree angle, he made a second cut that intersected the first. With the toe of his boot, Scott kicked out of the pine a chunk of wood roughly the size and shape of a large watermelon wedge and, still on his knees, spun around to the opposite side of the tree.
    “Back-cutting!” Scott bellowed. Travis Carter, the squad boss in charge of the sawyers and swampers, cast a quick glance in Scott’s direction to ensure the other three saw teams were a safe distance away from the tree, and Scott checked to make sure Joe was safely behind him. Then, satisfied, he revved the saw and made a flat cut on the back side of the tree. Wood chips bounced off his wire mesh goggles and clung to beads of sweat and the stubble of his red beard. On trees that he was trying to fell against their natural lean, Scott would have Joe hammer a shoe-size plastic wedge into the back of the tree with the small yellow-handled sledgehammer the swamper sometimes carried in the back of his pack.
    But wedges weren’t necessary on this tree, and the deeper Scott cut, the more the pine leaned over a strap of wood—a hinge—he’d intentionally left in the pine’s interior. Then it cracked, and Scott stepped back as the tree broke off the stump and crashed to the forest floor. Every hotshot on the line could feel the ground shake. Scott didn’t pause. He strode over to the fallen tree and bucked it into smaller pieces that Joe was already tugging off the line.
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    Wildfires occur in every state in America. Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, Maine’s North Woods,