On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman

prove himself, Bunch once worked himself to heat exhaustion and had to spend an hour sitting in the shade. He returned to work that same afternoon.
    His tenacity seemed to leave an impression on Marsh. Later in hisrookie year, Bunch was arrested for drinking and driving, an offense severe enough to merit his firing. The only reason he kept his job was because Marsh convinced the department chiefs to give him a second chance. Bunch was nineteen at the time, and Marsh forgave his recklessness.
    “It’s nice to see you’ve got a little life in you,” Marsh told Bunch.
    The fact that Eric had stood up for him made Bunch even prouder to work for Granite Mountain. Marsh, though, remained an enigma to him. Bunch never felt he had a good read on his superintendent, but then, few people who worked with him did. One former colleague called him an “onion with layers he doesn’t let most people see.” He was typically serious, but he had a sharp wit and could be funny. The hotshots called Marsh’s lingo “Eric-isms,” and they included quips like “It’s hotter than two rabbits screwing in a sock.”
    Marsh was a polymath and a bit of a snob. He took pride in understanding his pursuits well, and whether it was music, bikes, his tattoos, or his books and coffee (always locally roasted and shade-grown), Marsh enjoyed the finest things he could reasonably afford. His discerning taste gave Bunch the impression Marsh was cerebral but often lacking in the real-world experience to back up his ample theoretical knowledge. Whether it was mountain biking, riding horses, or firefighting, he knew all the right terms and the way to present himself. He also seemed to be searching for identity and affirmation.
    The more seasons Bunch worked for Granite Mountain, the more he felt that under Marsh’s command, the hotshots were always having to prove themselves. Some hotshot crews required their men to shave regularly, wear clean shirts, and keep their hair short. Granite Mountain was this way, and to Bunch, who was in the minority of the guys on the crew with no aspirations of becoming a structural firefighter, the crew’s straitlaced vibe seemed at odds with the realities of a job that required digging line in hundred-plus-degree temperatures, camping out for two weeks at a time, and doing so with scant access to running water. By the end of the 2012 season, Bunch, who’d been raised on a ranch and spent his childhood riding bulls, had grown tired of “dressing up like a schoolboy to work in the woods.”
    That winter, he applied to two federal hotshot crews, in hopes of finding a crew culture that aligned more closely with his love of the woods. Then Janae got pregnant again. She didn’t want him to go back to hotshotting at all. Raising two boys while he was away on fires was already testing his family, but planning for a third child changed everything.
    Money was tight, and the Bunches had few options. With a high school education and no job experience outside of the hotshots, Bunch knew that fighting fires was the best way he had to make money quickly. If the crew hit a good assignment, he could save $2,500 in two weeks. Working for Granite Mountain would keep him close to home when he wasn’t on fires. He and Janae decided that the best option was for him to return to the crew for another season. He’d leave just before Janae’s due date. Marsh agreed to let one of his best sawyers leave early, and they set Bunch’s last day for the first week of July.



CHAPTER 6
   THE DYNAMITE AND THE WICK   
    A merica’s fire season usually starts in the Southwest, where desert winds and warming temperatures have primed the brush and pine forests for flame by early May. Wildfires then follow summer’s heat counterclockwise, moving north and west up through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada before establishing themselves in the big timber in Idaho, Montana, and the Pacific states by August. Come October, the season has begun to slowly wind