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country. There are a total of sixty nationwide. If that’s not enough, or if they’re needed elsewhere, then type two crews that are trained in fire but often do other work for the Forest Service and BLM are deployed. Farther down in the barrel are convict crews, laborers from the Snake River valley who collect at the center of town when sirens go off, and pickup crews. Pickup crews usually just consist of people with sturdy shoes and in good enough health to pass the training course. When there are pickup crews on a fire, it’s a really bad fire. There were no pickup crews on the Flicker Creek fire.
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    A fter about an hour the helicopter was ready. It was a Bell Jet Ranger, rented from a private contractor in Arizona for two thousand dollars an hour. The huge Croman logging ships cost three times that and can sling twenty thousand pounds of retardant in a bucket beneath them. We were read the safety procedures by a helitack crewman and then asked how much we each weighed, with gear. The answers were entered into the flight manifest to calculate how much the helicopter could carry once we were out of the ground effect. Once a helicopter rises about a certain height, the downwash from its rotors no longer has the ground to push against, so it can carry less. If you combine the altitude, the air temperature, and the relative humidity, you have a figure called density altitude that determines how much a helicopter can carry. The retardant buckets, called Bambi buckets or Sims buckets, depending on their manufacturer, could even be cinched down to change the size of the container to compensate for variations in density altitude from day to day.
    The crewman went over the instructions again: Keep your head down when you come and go from the helicopter. Never leave a helicopter uphill. Never go toward the rear of the helicopter. Never go anywhere that the pilot can’t see you. If you violate any of these rules, the attendant is authorized to use force to get you to comply.
    â€œI’ll tackle you,” he said.
    It was the first flight of the day for this helicopter, so the rotors weren’t turning when we boarded. Gloves on, helmets and goggles on, sleeves rolled down. The attendant made sure we had buckled our seat belts, and then he closed the doors and the rotors heaved into motion.
    â€œBy the way, why couldn’t I wear sneakers in the helicopter?” I shouted to Casey.
    â€œBecause if we crash, the nylon melts to your skin,” he yelled back.
    In front of me, the copilot had a flight helmet that said, “Crashing Sucks.” The technical term for crashing is hard landing. One pilot said that half the pilots he knew had done it. Some had been killed; most hadn’t. Many helicopters these days are designed to autorotate, meaning that they don’t whistle straight downward if the engine fails. They do an awkward imitation of a glide. Most of the Boise National Forest is rocky and steeply angled, though, so it was hard to imagine its turning out well one way or the other.
    The Bell Ranger lifted off, and within minutes we had put the camp behind us and I could see smoke coming off a distant ridge. It was not the furious orange blaze I had imagined; it was a 750-acre smudge fire that, if touched by wind or left unattended, could spring to life and go ripping off into the heavy timber north of here. Helicopters were shuttling back and forth from Barber Flats, where they dipped their buckets in a retardant tank. The retardant was rust-colored, and you could see it splotched on the hillsides. Below us, one of the big Cromans was easing down into a steep valley to fill its Bambi bucket in a stream. (Hotshots are fond of saying that fish get scooped up in the bucket and can be found flopping on the hillsides. No one had actually seen this happen, but the story became so widespread that the Fish and Wildlife Service hired a helicopter to see if its pilot could catch fish on purpose.