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other hotshots in the scrape followed behind. A few feet separated each man, and, unlike out ahead where the saw teams were working, it was relatively quiet in the scrape. Donut and the veterans in the scrape talked about baseball, beer, girls, and food as they swung their tools.
    Swinging hand tools at a rabbit’s pace doesn’t generate the same risks as running chainsaw or swamping, but it comes with its own special brand of hazards. There’s the obvious—the business end of the tool. In the few hours they’d been cutting line, Donut had already taken a few thousand tool strokes, each time flinging an adze full of dirt into a berm of cut brush, limbs, and pine needles forming on the green side of the line. Already his pants were covered in dirt, and dust filled the creases on his face. At one point, the Pulaski’s head skipped off a rock and clanked into Donut’s shinbone. He let out a stream of curse words and felt a wave of nausea. The hotshots around him winced, but they’d all felt the same thing.
    Donut’s momentary pain didn’t slow the otherwise steady pace ofthe work for long. What did is when Donut attacked a forearm-thick root that crossed from the black (or future black) to the green. If the root burned, the prescribed fire could spread across the line and escape. When Donut paused to chop through it, the other hotshots stacked up behind him and progress slowed. But Donut stubbornly refused to admit defeat to a root. He switched to the Pulaski’s ax end, wound up into an overhead swing, and buried the sharpened bit into the root. Still, it didn’t break free, and from the back of the line came the call “Take a bump!” It meant Donut needed to leave the root for the next guy and keep advancing the line.
    The call had come from Bob Caldwell, the squad boss working at the back of the scrape. After five seasons fighting fires, Bob had proven himself a strong leader and over the winter of 2013 had earned one of the three coveted squad-boss positions on Granite Mountain. At just twenty-three, Bob was the youngest, least experienced, and baldest of them. In all likelihood, he was also the smartest. He loved Hemingway, Coors beer, and hotshotting; on a trellis in his backyard, he’d hung a wooden sign that read, I ’ D RATHER DIE IN MY BOOTS THAN LIVE IN A SUIT .
    In addition to keeping the scrape’s pace steady, Bob’s job during the training day was quality control. With a tiny hand rake called a monkey paw, he swept from the line whatever the others left. He checked the dirt berm for flammable material. He ordered sawyers to fell dead trees that could burn through and fall across the line and had hotshots with Pulaskis chop back pockets of light brush that could kindle a fire. He paid attention to the line’s width and the depth of trenches dug below steep slopes to keep burning pinecones from skipping across the line and igniting the unburned forest below the men. There was a certain art to deciding where trenches were needed. Sometimes three feet deep, with berms of the same height, trenches took extra time and effort to build and slowed line production. Build too many and the crew would be too slow to catch the fire; build too few and you’d jeopardize the work already put in.
    “Pulaski and two rhinos back!” Bob yelled forward more than oncethat day when he wanted the men to deepen a trench or widen a piece of line.
    It was now, before the fire season really began, that the rookies and new guys needed to learn the crew’s standards. The line is the mark that hotshot crews use to judge one another, and Marsh, Steed, and now Bob all insisted on perfection.
    The crew had settled into a pace after a few hours of cutting line. Up front, the chainsaws whined steadily and the men swinging hand tools worked amid the syncopated rhythm of metal slamming into dirt. All day, Steed had been moving between the head of the flag fire, to scout, and the back, to rejoin the crew. When he returned, he’d