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support—a ratio roughly twenty times as efficient as the military’s.
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    I went to bed when the five hundred fire fighters did, at dark. The only noise was the continuous rumble of the generators. The planning session had brought bad news, in a way: The fire was cooperating almost too quickly. A thirty-acre spot fire had started in light fuels on the south front but had been contained by three crews. Seven type two crews—less experienced than hotshots and usually used for mopping up—had cut line all the way down to the river, farther than expected. The winds were dying down, and unless they picked up again, the fire would be contained within days.
    A fire camp is never completely still. All night long I was aware of the movement of men. They walked past, packed equipment, coughed, spat. Around four in the morning the sounds were so continuous that I woke up even before my watch alarm went off. It was still dark, and the camp undulated with human forms and occasional headlamps. Crews were packing their line gear, drifting toward the catering tent, clustering around the big stand-up kerosene heaters set up at intervals in the field. It was cold, maybe in the twenties. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and pulled on several sweaters and my boots—I had to wear leather on my feet in the helicopter, for some reason—and hustled toward the lights of the tent.
    The person assigned to me was Bill Casey, a type two safety officer from the Boise area. He was a strong, clear-eyed man in his late forties who directed the local Bureau of Land Management district and was also qualified to command a type two overhead team. (A type two team handles smaller fires, but operates the same way.) He had bagged thirty elk in the past thirty-two years of hunting them, he said. His father hunts with him and can still shoulder fifty pounds of elk meat, at age seventy-one. Casey is part Blackfeet; he has dead-straight gray hair and brown eyes and a handsome, open face.
    â€œWe’re a little overstaffed because the fire didn’t do what we expected,” he admitted as we sat in his truck at the helibase.
    â€œWhat did you expect the fire to do?” I asked.
    â€œWell.” He chose his words carefully. “The guys don’t want to see the forests burn, but on the other hand, they want to have a good, productive summer. They like to have two to three weeks on a fire and then move on to another one. In that sense, it’s disappointing to have the fire lay down so fast.”
    We were waiting for our flight into the fire line, and the heater was going full blast in the truck. In the clearing, men were checking the helicopters and writing up flight manifests. The first few days of a fire are usually disorganized to the point of chaos, Casey said. Then it gets better. Casey took advantage of the wait to tell me more about how fires are fought—not from the field but from the office.
    â€œBIFC is just a logistical center that responds to needs in the field,” he said. “Suppose Unit X has a fire. As long as it doesn’t escape the initial attack, BIFC is not involved. If it does escape, then a regional coordination center gets involved. If the regional center doesn’t have enough resources to fight the fire, then BIFC steps in. We’ve had a lot of fires already this summer, and this is the first one where BIFC has been involved.”
    Initial attack, he said, comes in many forms. Smoke jumpers are initial attack. Helirappelers are initial attack. Hotshots can be both initial attack and extended attack. Air attack—retardant drops from planes and helicopters—can also be initial or extended. The idea of initial attack is to hit the fire hard and early so that you avoid the expense of an extended campaign. If the attack crews can’t contain it, then an overhead team is assembled and put on the fire. A really big fire will suck in ’shot crews from all over the