The mountains caught fire in August. He had already seen the end of the world.
Chicago, 1903. On the coldest afternoon of the year, fireman Silas Dunne climbs the marble stairs of the Iroquois Theater and finds a wall of the dead. He carries out one small girl who is still breathing. His own daughter is not among the living.
For seven years afterward, Dunne drifts west with no destination but away. He works the wheat harvest in Nebraska. He tends the hoist above the copper mines of Butte, where a fire a mile underground sends him back into the smoke and leaves him with a dying man's unfinished message and a promise he cannot bring himself to keep. He cuts white pine on the Clearwater. He does not stay anywhere long enough to be known.
Idaho, 1910. Dunne arrives in the mining town of Wallace with thirty-one cents in his pocket and a brass fireman's badge he can't bring himself to throw away. He signs on to a Forest Service crew for twenty-five cents an hour, cutting fire line in the Bitterroot Mountains under a hard, quiet ranger named Ed Pulaski, a man who asks nothing about where his crew has been and expects everything of them on the mountain.
It is the driest summer anyone can remember. The sun rises red and gives no warmth. Ash falls on the town like snow. The crew Pulaski has gathered is the flotsam of the American West: an old Tennessee preacher who carries a Bible with the cover torn off, a former cowhand and railroad brakeman, Swedish farm boys, Italian and Slavic laborers who speak little English, and Francis Xavier Quilligan, a red-haired, fast-talking Irish boy out of Butte who attaches himself to Dunne whether Dunne wants him or not. Against every instinct he has built over seven years, Dunne finds himself responsible for the boy.