By the time they reached the north end of the ridge, the bulldozers had already started to clear a fire line to the hill about a third of a mile away.
Dick Fellows and Ed Macauley came forward listlessly to greet them; the ranger and the gang boss were too exhausted even to show their gratitude that relief had finally arrived.
The ranger pointed to the walkie-talkie sitting on the ground. “Landers radioed the new battle plan to us. We’ve got it under way.”
“Fine,” Lukas said. “We’ll take over from here. Your men must be ready to drop in their tracks.”
Macauley sighed. “They’re working strictly on nerve.”
Lukas accompanied the ranger up to the top of the ridge, while the other two Canadians mobilized their crews to go into action. From this vantage point, it was possible to trace the course of the fire since its beginning. With the heavy screen of foliage destroyed, the boundaries of the burned-out area were clearly defined. There was a long narrow strip parallel to the ridge, swelling out into a sector of more than 300 acres to the southwest. Only a feeble surface fire was burning around the fringes of this area now; the stiff gale was turning the flames back on ground that had already been burned over.
Sandy’s first impression was that this latest peril had been exaggerated. Compared to the awe-inspiring spectacle of the previous night, the fire as it appeared now, in broad daylight, didn’t seem very threatening. After it had jumped the line at the end of the ridge, it had taken an unusual shape and direction. It had been slowed down in the center by the thinning timber and brush on the approaches to the hill beyond the ridge. As a result, the fire front had flattened out and then assumed a crescent shape as the flames went racing through the heavier growth that flanked the hill on both sides. Sandy estimated that the area it was burning over was less than fifty acres. When he pointed this out to Dick Fellows, the ranger shook his head.
“The way she’s crowning, we’d have trouble confining her on ten acres.” He turned to Lukas. “You’re not going to have time to be too particular with those lines. She’s moving in too fast.”
Lukas agreed. “We’ll have to get our backfires started as soon as possible, and just pray that the tank trucks can put out enough water to keep them from jumping back at us. That infernal wind! Why doesn’t it let up!”
Quiz called their attention to a great dark mass building up low on the western horizon. “Aren’t those nimbus clouds?” he asked.