But the flames twitched and flared as the day got hotter and breezier, so he was dispatched to keep watch over the fire's flank. McDonough, whose name everyone on the crew clips to Donut, cut line in the morning. To do that safely, those crews, like McDonough's Granite Mountain hotshots, need to know where the fire is and where it might reasonably be expected to go, and that often requires posting a lookout somewhere with a better view. Roads and rivers can be useful, but most of the firebreak has to be created with brute force: by bulldozers in favorable terrain and by men with chain saws and hand tools everywhere else.
A wildfire isn't extinguished so much as choked into submission by encircling it with a perimeter cleared of fuel. McDonough is the lookout, and it's his job to keep his eyes on both the fire and his crew. From a half mile away, Brendan McDonough has a clear view of the eastern flank, a bright slash of orange beneath a tumble of gray smoke, and he can see his crew high on the slope to the south, cutting a clean line through unburned juniper and scrub oaks on the last day of June. The fire crawls north along the ridge, as it has for almost two days, burning a long black scar through the chaparral.
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