Free Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

must have been allowing for about a quarter of a mile of wind drift. It also told them something else—that the outside world had disappeared. The only world had become Mann Gulch and a fire, and the two were soon to become one and the same and never to be separated, at least in story.
    They finished collecting and piling up their cargo. Dodge estimated that the crew and cargo were dropped by 4:10 P.M. but that it was nearly 5:00 before all the cargo had been retrieved.
    Dodge made the double L signal on the landing area with orange sleeves, signaling to the plane, all present and accounted for. The plane circled twice to be sure and then headed for the outside world. It headed straight down Mann Gulch and across the glare of the Missouri. It seemed to be leaving frighteningly fast, and it was. It had started out a freight train, loaded with cargo. Now it was light and fast and was gone. Its departure left the world much smaller.
    There was nothing in the universe now but the terminal glare of the Missouri, an amphitheater of stone erected by geology, and a sixty-acre fire with a future. Whatever the future, it was all to take place here, and soon. Of the Smoke-jumpers’ three elements, sky had already changed to earth. In about an hour the earth and even the sky would all be fire.
    They could see the fire from their cargo area, at least they could see its flank on the Mann Gulch slope, and even at five o’clock they were not greatly impressed. Rumsey didn’t think any of them regarded it as dangerous, although he did think it would be hard to mop up because it was burning on steep and rocky ground.
    Then they heard a shout from the fire, but it was impossible to distinguish the words. The crew had been led to believe before they left Missoula that there would be a ground crew on the fire (hence, their having no maps), so Dodge told the squad leader, Bill Hellman, to take charge of the men and see that they ate something and filled their canteens while he himself took off for the fire to find out who was on it.
    They spent only about ten minutes at the cargo area before they started tooling up. Sallee and Navon carried the saws; the rest were double-tooled. They thought they were going to work. Actually they were leaving an early station of the cross, where minutes anywhere along the way would have saved them.

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    S INCE THEIR TOOLS HAD BETTER FIT our hands if we are going to a fire, we should try them on here and see how they would have been used if the fire had been reached while it was at its present size of about sixty acres. At that size it is doubtful that the crew would have tried to hit it on its nose—it is dangerous business to attack a good-sized fire straight on.
    Instead, they would have started flanking it close to its front and tried to steer it into some open ground, some stretch of shale or light grass where the fire would burn itself out or burn so feebly that it would be safe to take on directly. It’s a ground fire of this size that, as suggested earlier, is brought under control by digging a fire-line around it, a shallow trench two to three feet wide scraped deep enough to expose mineral soil. All dead leaves, needles, even roots are removed so that nothing can burn across it. If any dead trees lie across it, they also must be removed and likewise any standing trees with low branches that the fire might use to jump the line. To put a fire “under control” is to establish and then hold such a line around it, especially around the part of it that is most likely to advance. What follows is called “mopping up,” working back from the fire-line into the interior of the fire, digging shallow graves and dropping still-burning trees into them, and of course burying everything on the ground that smokes.
    The tools that perform these two operations are, with one exception, those that have done most of the hard work of the world—axes, saws, and shovels.
    Sallee says he was single-tooled and was