Free Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean Page A

carrying a saw,and Navon started with the other saw, which he soon traded off to Rumsey, who was carrying the heavy water can. Power saws, of course, were already invented, but those early ones were mechanical monsters; it took a whole crew just to crank one, so they were of no use to the Smokejumpers until well into the 1950s. The crew’s two saws would have been two-man handsaws, and in making a fire-line would have been used to cut trees lying across the line or standing too close to it. In mopping up, they would have been used to drop the burning snags.
    The not-always-clear references to tools by the two surviving crew members indicate that besides these two handsaws the crew had two or three shovels and eleven or twelve Pulaskis. Laird Robinson, who when I first met him was information officer at the Smokejumper base in Missoula, says that number sounds about right for a crew of sixteen at that time.
    Even the numbers show that the Smokejumpers’ tool of tools was the Pulaski. It was the forest firefighters’ one invention, primitive but effective, invented strictly for firefighting. It was even named after the Forest Service’s most famous fire-fighting ranger, Edward Pulaski, who in 1910, when many thought the world was ending in flames, put a gunnysack around his head and led forty-two half-paralyzed men through smoke to a deserted mining tunnel that he remembered. The cold air rushed out of the tunnel and was replaced by heat so intense it set fire to the mining timbers. Pulaski kept the fire in the tunnel under control by dipping water with his hat from a little stream that went by the mouth of the shaft, and he had enough control over his men to make them lie flat with their mouths on the ground. He was badly burned and finally passed out, and from time to time they all fell unconscious. But all recovered except five men and two horses.
    The Pulaski is a kind of hybrid creation, half ax and half hoe. I remember the first one I ever used, an early, handmade one, nothing more than a double-bitted ax with one bit left on and a little hoe welded to where the other ax-bit had been. Even after all these years the Pulaski is still the tool for diggingfire-lines. A little hoe goes deep enough because its job is to scrape the stuff that would burn off the surface of the ground. So the hoe makes the line; the ax-bit chops little trees or shrubs along the line that might let the fire jump across, and it has other uses, such as chopping roots. When the foreman ends his first lesson to his trainees on how to use a Pulaski, he says, “For the next couple of hours, all I want to see are your asses and your elbows.”
    Behind the crew with the fast Pulaskis come a couple of men with shovels, who clean out and widen the fire-line, and, of course, in the mopping-up operations, shovels are all-important in making shallow graves and burying whatever is still smoking.
    The crew strung out on the trail. Those with the unsheathed saws were behind because the long teeth and rakers of the saws make them hard to carry and dangerous to follow too closely; most of the double-tooled men were carrying Pulaskis and for the second tool either a shovel or a water canteen or a first-aid kit or a rattlesnake kit. The flank of the fire was in plain view only half a mile across the gulch. Although from the cargo area its most advanced front on top of the ridge was not visible, they had seen it from the sky and remembered that on top of the ridge it was burning slowly downhill into a saddle. They had no trouble guessing what they would be doing ten or fifteen minutes from now when they caught up to their foreman and the fire. He would line them out on both the Mann Gulch and Meriwether flanks to make fire-lines that would keep the fire from spreading farther down either canyon and so limit its advance to the top of the ridge where, forced into the saddle and light grass, it would be easy to handle. Dodge would space the men with Pulaskis about ten