On the Burning Edge Read Online Free Page B

man’s pack weighed forty-five pounds or more. Then there were the things they carried in their hands.
    As the hotshots scurried around the buggy, one of the senior firefighters plunked down a five-gallon plastic-lined cardboard box of water at Grant’s feet. The cubie, as it was called, weighed another forty-five pounds. Steed and the squad bosses knew the hotshots wouldn’t need the additional water that day. Grant was given the cubie to prove that he could handle the extra weight.
    Grant threaded his tool through the cubie’s plastic handle, hauled the box to his shoulder like a bindle, and took his place in the single-file line that had formed behind Steed. The sawyers hiked closest to Steed, with the swampers following behind and the scrape toward the back. A squad boss took up the rear and scolded any hotshot who slowed down, to keep the long line of men from pulling apart and squeezing back together.
    Steed hiked faster than most people jog. His strides were long and steady, his weight slightly forward and centered over his knees. For twenty minutes, the crew hammered uphill along a two-track dirt road. Soon, sweat soaked through the men’s yellow shirts and the hotshots heard nothing more than the sound of their own breathing.
    Not long into the hike, Steed’s oppressively fast pace broke the rookie John Percin, Jr. He’d wrenched his knee during training and pulled up lame during the hike. One of the squad bosses bawled at himto catch up to the others, but Percin balked. The hike proved too painful. He dropped out, and a lead firefighter led him back down the hill to the trucks. Percin’s knee would take more than a month to heal, and he wouldn’t work with the hotshots again until the last week of June.
    The rest of the crew didn’t pause. They kept racing to their objective: the series of pink plastic strips of flagging tied to tree branches to mark the fire’s perimeter. Grant, with the extra weight of the cubie, was struggling to keep up, and finally he, too, peeled off from the single-file line and dropped to his knee, gasping for air. With his face inches above the sun-baked pine needles, their sweet vanilla smell drowned out by the sheer volume of air sucking into his nostrils, Grant returned to the question he’d been asking himself for weeks now:
What was I thinking volunteering to chase a fitness-obsessed ex-Marine up the side of a mountain?
    Grant’s goal was to help people as a medic—not save forests that he wasn’t particularly fond of anyway. He’d camped only three times, ever, and found the experience to be little more than an exercise in discomfort.
    Grant grew up a latchkey kid in Orange County, California. His home life was rocky and he started taking pills in high school. Unhappy with his life’s direction, he moved to Prescott as a sophomore in high school to live with his aunt and uncle, Linda and David Caldwell, and his older cousins, Bob and Taylor. Still, even in a more stable home, it took Grant a couple of years to straighten out. He had to repeat his junior year of high school. Eventually, he stopped abusing pills and even went on to use his own experience to teach Drug Abuse Resistance Education. After graduating, he started taking EMT classes at Prescott’s Yavapai College and fell in love with Leah Fine, a pretty blonde he’d met through a friend and who had a shared interest in running.
    Leah fell for Grant’s sincerity. His unabashed love for her was like nothing she’d ever experienced, and his honesty about emotion was raw and endearing. They moved in together and talked often of eloping in the fall of 2015. Leah was far more outdoorsy. She liked sleeping under the stars and craved exercise. When Grant first signed up to bea hotshot, they joked that she was far and away the better candidate for the job. Instead, Leah worked as an assistant at a property management firm and put her aspirations of going to college to be a photojournalist on hold. Before going to