When We Were Wolves by Jon Billman Read Free Book Online Page A

endangered Gila trout and Apache trout, a threatened species. These fish he released unharmed, opting to eat the more prevalent rainbows and cutthroats.
    An old regulation, still on the Forest Service books, allowed for one bottle of beer with lunch. This didn’t include fire duty, though it wasn’t unusual for beer to get packed into Strain’s spike camp with the water, saw gas, fusees, and bar oil; this was the West, the Forest Service, and drinking beer was not drinking.

    Strain’s insubordination started after a campaign on a series of high-desert fires in western Colorado. A unit of hotshots was sent to a mountain to control a fire in heavy piñon juniper and bur oak—nothing salable. Their safety had been sacrificed for a public-relations stunt. Residents of a small subdivision five miles away were watching operations with binoculars from their patios. The prudent thing would have been to let the fire burn up the ridge, then over and down to a Cat line on the other side. It was all desert and didn’t need to be saved. The order went through to stop the fire’s run before it torched out at the ridge. Strain’s crew had been choppered in to help retrieve the fourteen bodies, most of them college kids.
    At thirty-six, Strain now realized that the Forest Service was less an overevolved branch of the Boy Scouts than a branch of the military. Catch 22. Once you started questioning logic, nothing on aproject fire made sense, and it became very difficult to work six-teen-hour days and nights, taking inane orders, accomplishing little other than comforting a public raised on Smokey Bear. He began fishing. Carrying a concealed fly rod was not legal grounds for dismissal; his supervisors never caught him blatantly fishing on a shift. They knew he did, but couldn’t prove it, so they busted him down to a seasonal firefighter from his full-time position as a timber sale manager. They were sure this would cause him to quit. Instead each fire season got a little longer and he readily made enough money to do nothing other than hunt, ski, and fish all winter long. His true life’s work. Let some Fucking New Guy or lifer charge hell with a bucket of water.
    An unprecedented buildup of forest fuels, a severe drought, and consistently dry storm systems that contained much ground-to-cloud lightning had resulted in five million acres burning left of the ninety-eighth meridian by mid-July. Strain was convinced of global warming and he planned to adjust by spending more time fishing. The geographical frontiers gone, he believed the next frontier would be weather: hurricanes, blizzards, monsoons, infernos. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina
does
cause a tornado in Texas; we wouldn’t win the war against the elements. When things got bad enough, he would drive to Baja, live off the gutted peso, and take up marlin on the fly.
    According to the Forest Service, the world would end in fire. The flammable buildup came on the skids of years of successful fire suppression. Now the fires—most ignited by lightning—burned hotter and faster than ever before. A thick haze hung in the sky over two time zones, and the eastern vacationers stayed on their side of the river and attended ball games and theme parks, played golf, and motored through Civil War battlefields with the windows up. The western smoke reached even the easterners, intensifying their sunsets, turning them a deep salmon, the color of steak closest to the bone.
    In August Strain worked as a crew rep, a liaison between three twenty-man Bureau of Indian Affairs handline crews and the fires’ Incident Command teams. Crew reps were minor administrators, glorified baby-sitters, politicians. They made sure the Montagnards carried their fire shelters, washed their feet, and didn’t suck a bottle. Strain slowly led the Indian crew, following lightning fires up western Colorado and back into Wyoming, where they’d started. The Indians, who were often aloof and laid-back to