By the time they reached the firebreak, men and trucks were streaming down the dirt road from both directions; rangers and volunteers from the logging camps and small towns in the area.
“Do we sit back here like soldiers in trenches and wait for the fire to come to us?” Sandy wanted to know.
Dick Fellows shook his head. “It’s not likely. That’s too much timber to give up without a fight. Most likely the fire boss will try and contain the fire within some area much closer to the front. We’ll construct another fire line—a lot bigger than the one we made, of course—and backfire from that, probably.”
“Backfire?” Jerry looked puzzled.
“Yes, light more fires all along that line.” He had to smile at the boy’s incredulous stare. “Fires that we know we can control. It’s the only way to stop a running crown fire. A running fire picks up a lot of momentum—you saw how those flames jumped our line. The idea is to light the backfires right on the edge of your fire line so that they’ll burn in the opposite direction, toward the main fire. Actually, the air currents created by a big blaze tend to draw in the smaller backfires. Under ideal conditions, the two fires meet head-on and die because all the fuel has been exhausted.”
“That’s a fascinating image,” Russ said. “Like two greedy monsters destroying each other.”
“Now I know where they got that old saying about fighting fire with fire,” Sandy said.
“That’s right,” the ranger acknowledged. “It’s an old trick that goes back earlier than the Christian era. Tricky business, though, and you have to have a gang that knows what it’s doing every second. If anything goes wrong, the backfire may get out of control and leap the fire line itself.”
He looked up as a tall gray-haired man in riding breeches and high boots got out of a truck on the far side of the road and hailed him.
“Dick Fellows! How does it look?” the tall man came across and joined them.