On the Burning Edge Read Online Free

double-wide trailers and finally to McMansions perched in the foothills. Just a few miles from downtown, the buildings vanished altogether. The roads, once paved and suburban, became dirt or gravel, and ponderosa pines filled the view. On the oldest trees, the bark wasblackened from past fires. The hotshots, drowsy and still unaccustomed to the day’s early hours, watched the pines flicker by. Most of the men, nervous about the coming test, mentally rehearsed the skills they’d learned over the previous weeks and focused on their assigned roles. In the stillness, Grant saw an opportunity to ease the tension.
    “Hey, Chris!” he called to the cab from the dim light in the back. “What are we going to do today?”
    “You gonna learn, boy!” Chris, the lead firefighter, yelled back to his squad from the buggy’s cab. He’d said the same thing before every workout since day one. At first, Chris’s yelling terrified the rookies; now the joke was theirs, too. Anytime Chris forgot to deliver his daily message, Grant reminded the lead firefighter.
    From basic crew structure to the nation’s coordinated response to wildfires, nearly everything in wildland firefighting is organized hierarchically. There’s generally one person or organization in charge, with layers of command cascading down from the apex. It was no different on Granite Mountain.
    After Marsh was injured, Steed claimed the crew’s top position. Tom Cooley, the temporary captain, was just beneath him. The rest of the hotshots were divided into two modules, called Alpha and Bravo. Each squad of either nine or ten hotshots was assigned a buggy and contained a mix of veterans and rookies. Command of the smaller units fell to their respective squad bosses: Clayton Whitted on Alpha and Bob Caldwell on Bravo. (Travis Carter, the third squad boss, ran both Alpha’s and Bravo’s chainsaw teams.) Below Clayton and Bob were two lead firefighters—Chris on Alpha, Travis on Bravo—who could step into the squad boss role; a pair of hotshots known as sawyers, who ran chainsaw; and another pair who removed the vegetation the sawyers cut: the swampers. Rounding out the squads were the ten or eleven firefighters whose job was to use hand tools to dig fire line. These firefighters are called the scrape. At any point, a hotshot might be instructed to run saw, dig line, or swamp, and one of the nine qualified veterans might serve as a lookout posted to warn the crew of any unexpected change in fire behavior, but otherwise the men defaulted to their assigned roles.
    Among seasonal hotshots, the scrape is considered the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s where nearly all rookies start their fire careers. Over the course of the season, the scrape try to prove themselves capable of becoming swampers, while the swampers are trying to move up to the sawyer job, which is the most sought-after position among seasonals. Grant was in Alpha’s scrape, and since he was a rookie, the seat the veterans assigned to him was in the rear left, the bumpiest of the eight seats in the back.
    He was the first out of Alpha’s buggy when the caravan stopped at a dirt parking lot walled in by 150-foot pines. The morning was still cool, with traces of night’s humidity still in the air. The hotshots, wearing yellow fire-resistant shirts, green pants, and black hard hats, gathered around Steed. He and Marsh, who had come to supervise the drill, wore the same uniform as the men, but their helmets were red.
    Marsh stood quietly to the side and took notes on the drill while Steed spread out a map on the hood of his truck and pointed out the fake fire’s location. It sat in a saddle of the Bradshaws between the Senator Highway, a now-decrepit stagecoach road from the 1860s, and Highway 89, which runs south through the town of Yarnell and toward Phoenix. The flag fire, marked before the drill started with strips of plastic pink flagging, was a few acres and spreading quickly. Steed identified for the men