The fire crawls north along the ridge, as it has for almost two days, burning a long black scar through the chaparral. 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.

McDonough is the lookout, and it's his job to keep his eyes on both the fire and his crew. A wildfire isn't extinguished so much as choked into submission by encircling it with a perimeter cleared of fuel. 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. 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.

McDonough, whose name everyone on the crew clips to Donut, cut line in the morning. 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. By late morning every man working the hills around the little town of Yarnell, Arizona, could see thunderheads rising to the north, too. If the wind shifts, if the flames break in another direction or run back to the south, Donut's responsible for providing the heads-up.

At 2:30, the fire is still chewing north. Behind it, the Granite Mountain men are working deliberately, sawing and trenching a line along the scarred edge, doubling back to reinforce it, then leapfrogging ahead. Their superintendent, Eric Marsh, is a cautious firefighter, as are most hotshots who want to continue being hotshots. He'll turn down any assignment he thinks is too risky for his men. He's always a professional, though, always figures out a safer way to accomplish the same goal. He never says, “No, we're not gonna do this, go fuck yourself,” Donut knows. He always says, “We won't do that. But we will do this for you.” Most important: Marsh's men, all nineteen of them, always make it home.

The slopes and canyons near Yarnell hadn't burned since 1966, so they were thick with chaparral, in places ten feet high and impassably dense and all of it desiccated by year of drought.

Donut loves Eric Marsh. He loves every man on his crew, even the rookies he's just getting to know, but especially his super. Marsh hired Donut more than two years ago now, when probably only the burger joints in Prescott would have. He'd always wanted to be a firefighter, and he'd taken all the basic courses, had the proper certifications. But he was also a pothead with a petty record, had just done a short time in jail a few months earlier, and smoked even more weed when he got out. Then his daughter was born, in March 2011. I put the fear of God in myself to be successful, he remembers. I wouldn't be shit to my daughter if I didn't do this.

So Donut went to Station 7 in Prescott, where the hotshots were headquartered. He knew a couple of guys from an EMT class he'd taken at a community college in Yavapai, and he'd overheard them mention Granite Mountain was hiring. But those guys knew him, too, the stoned kid. No jobs, they told him.

“Actually,” Marsh interrupted, “we do have an opening. Can you do an interview?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you do it right now?”

McDonough was wearing work boots, dirty work pants, a dirty white tank top. “Yes,” he said.

Marsh asked when he'd last told a lie. He always asked that question; if a person can't be honest about his dishonesty, he's probably not worth hiring. McDonough told him he'd lied to his mom not long ago about what time he'd come home. He told Marsh about his record. He told him he'd smoked dope recently. He told him he had no wildfire experience. Marsh hired him anyway. *He seen something in me that no one else saw.*He gave me a shot no one else would've—to be a better person, to be a better dad.