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as his, but he felt his responsibility as its leader at every moment, not so much a weight but something added to his blood to thicken it. It made it easier that Miles liked them, especially the kid. Another pyro-nerd in the making. Asking questions about the origins of pulaskis, the combination rake-hoes designedfor cutting fireline in different ground conditions. Volunteering for the nastiest tasks—staying the night to keep an eye on spot fires extinguished the day before, axing a snag into pieces to see if the smoke had hidden inside it, manning the radio when everyone else opted to make a dent in the beer stocks. He did all of this not to seek approval but because he wanted to see how it was done. The rest of the crew liked him for this, too. Not only because the kid relieved them from unpleasant work but because he so plainly loved doing it. It was hard even to make fun of someone like that.
    Miles also admired the way the kid could spend time with him without disturbing his thoughts. As a result, he spoke more freely with him than with anyone else on the attack team. Although Miles never brought up the topic of their friendship, he knew that this is what they had found together. Alex asked after him in every phone conversation they had. She always called him Tim.
    ‘There’s a pattern to every crewman’s career,’ Miles remembers telling the kid on one of their long drives between watchtowers. ‘The first year you learn, the second year you complain, and the third year you actually enjoy yourself. There’s almost never a fourth year.’
    ‘How long have you been doing it?’
    ‘Five years,’ Miles says, laughing. ‘But I’m still learning. With fires, there’s always something you think you know but don’t.’
    What Miles neglected to add is that withoutfires to work on, there’s not much to learn anything from. This year, June and most of July turn out to be curiously uneventful months, despite the above-average heat and string of eighteen days without rain. Aside from a handful of smouldering snags lit up by lightning, and a burning garbage can at a roadside picnic area fifteen miles to the south, the camp is fire free.
    The crew spend the time inventing increasingly complex practical jokes, eating too much, pretending to be soldiers. Miles has experienced stretches like this before, though not nearly as long, and is coming to the end of make-work tasks. The two pockmarked pickups had been waxed into glittering auto show pretties. The cache’s store of tools were sharp as butcher’s cleavers, the other supplies hung upon hooks or lined in straight aisles according to an ‘attack priority sequence’, just like the manual dreamed it might be. The bunkhouse was painted top to bottom four times, followed by a poll on each colour’s aesthetic merits. By the middle of July, it was neon pink. A unanimous vote (Miles abstaining) determined it would stay this way for the rest of the season.
    It isn’t until the first week of August that they receive notice from a spotter plane of a smoker at the bottom end of a gulch funnelling down into the Mazko River, two hundred miles north. Miles had known that something was there for the past twenty-four hours, as the spotter had to pass the site twice to determine whether it was an actualfire or merely a ‘ghost,’ the mist that can rise in locations near water. The delay in identifying the fire hasn’t allowed it much growth, though—the plane’s last report was of a tight congestion of small spot fires, each one no bigger than the smouldering sticks left behind at morning campsites.
    There is a tradition among attack teams of naming a fire they have fought on, large or small. Most of the time it arrives at the end, after mopup is completed and some detail of the location or episode that occurred over the course of the job lends itself. But when they disembark from the helicopters in the lee of the smoke-fogged valley, the kid tosses a name out right away. The