Free Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean Page B

to fifteen feet apart, depending upon the ground cover, and they wouldn’t raise their heads until they had caught up to the man in front of them. Then they would tap him on the leg with a Pulaski and say “Bump.” If the two men right behind had also finished their stretch, they wouldsay “Bump Three.” To a Smokejumper, “Bump” is a musical word if he is the one who sings it out.
    When Smokejumpers work next to a regular crew of Forest Service firefighters, they take pleasure in leaving them bruised with “bumps.”
    As the crew started for the south side of the gulch, they had it figured out before they even had an order. They would work all night establishing a line around the fire. From then on, it would depend. The Smokejumpers couldn’t be touched when it came to getting a line around a fire, but they usually didn’t win medals in mopping it up. They were all in the business for money—the forestry school students, the fancy M.A., M.D., and Ph.D. students, and especially the jump-happy boys who hoped to make enough money in the summer to shack up all winter in Honolulu. So there was no use putting a little fire out of its misery too soon when you would be paid overtime.
    T HE CREW STARTED UP THE SIDE of the gulch toward the fire. It was about five o’clock. The next day a wristwatch of one of the boys was found near his body. Its hands were permanently melted at about four minutes to six. This must come close to marking the time when it was also over for most of the others. So there were about fifty-six minutes ahead of them, time to do only a little thinking, and undoubtedly only a little is all they did.
    It is not hard to imagine what was in their heads. They knew they were the best and they were probably thinking at least indirectly about being the best, sizing up the fire ahead as a kind of pushover. They thought of what they were in as a game and they were the champs and the fire didn’t look like much competition. They already had developed one of the best ways of facing danger in the woods, the habit of imagining you are being watched. You picture the mountainsides assides of an amphitheater crowded with admirers, among whom always is your father, who fought fires in his time, and your girl, but even more clearly you can see yourself as champion crawling through the ropes. You would give this small-time amateur fire the one-two, and go home and drink beer. It was more than one hundred degrees on that open hillside, and all of them were certainly thinking of beer. If anything troubled them, it was the thought of some guy they had tangled with in a Missoula bar who they were hoping would show up again tomorrow night. And each boy from a small town such as Darby, Montana, or Sandpoint, Idaho, was undoubtedly thinking of his small-town girl, who was just finishing high school a year behind him. She had big legs and rather small breasts that did not get in the way. She was strong like him, and a great walker like him, and she could pack forty pounds all day. He thought of her as walking with him now and shyly showing her love by offering to pack one of his double-tools. He was thinking he was returning her love by shyly refusing to let her.
    The answer, then, to what was in their heads when they started for the fire has to be “Not much.”
    L IKE THE FRONTIER CAVALRY , the Smokejumpers didn’t kill themselves off at the start of a march. They loosened up for about a quarter of a mile downgulch and then began to climb toward the fire, but they hadn’t climbed more than a hundred yards before they heard Dodge call to them from above to stay where they were. Shortly he showed up with Jim Harrison, the recreation and fire prevention guard stationed at the campground at the mouth of Meriwether Canyon. Harrison had spotted the fire late in the morning while on patrol duty, returned to Meriwether Station, and tried unsuccessfully to radio both Missoula and Canyon Ferry Ranger Stationoutside Helena at