What We Are Not Doing

by John Boyd, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Ruben Archuleta gave the morning briefing the way he always gave it: standing in the road, with the crew in a half circle in front of him and the two buggies idling behind them with their headlights on. At ten to six on the Mogollon Rim in June there was not quite enough light to read a map by, and he did not use a map anyway. He used his hands.

"Fire's here." Left hand, flat, palm down. "The 9350's here." Right hand, edge on, like a blade. "Wildcat's here." He turned the right hand over behind the blade and let the fingers drop: the head of the draw, and the way it fell off the Rim.

"Task. We fire the 9350 from the Bearpaw junction south to the gate, two miles, and burn it in toward the main fire. Purpose. Keep it out of Wildcat. Once it's in Wildcat we don't put anybody in there, and it rolls to the bottom and comes up wherever it likes, and wherever it likes is the back fence of Turkey Flat. End state. By dark there's black on the west side of the road you could park a buggy in, and nothing on the east."

He let his hands drop.

"Southwest ten, gusting twenty. Front comes through around five, and then it's west-northwest and more of it. Humidity's single digits by one o'clock. Lookout is Morales on the knob at the junction. Escape route is the road. Safety zone is Bearpaw meadow until we've made one of our own."

He looked along the half circle for the newest face, the way he did every morning, and it was Jessup's. Jessup had been on the crew nineteen days. He was from Show Low, he had played linebacker for a junior college in Kansas until his knee went, and he still stood like a linebacker, a little forward, as if somebody might run at him.

"Jessup. What are we not doing?"

"We're not going into Wildcat."

"Why not?"

"Because if it's in Wildcat it's already gone."

"Good." Archuleta looked at his watch. "Lunch comes up at noon."

It was the only part of the briefing he ever got wrong.

---

Carla Benally had heard him ask that question, by her own rough count, something over three hundred times. Six seasons on Chevelon, two of them running the second squad. She had answered it herself once, her first June, on a fire in the Gila, and she had answered it badly, and he had made her stand there until she answered it well. The task changed every day. The purpose changed every few days. The thing you were not going to do usually had a place name in it.

The first thing she did every morning, before the briefing, after the briefing, and every time she stood up from anything, was look at the smoke. At six-thirty the main fire was lying down. Its smoke sat in the drainages to the west, flat and blue, the way smoke sits before the sun gets to it. By ten it was standing up and leaning northeast in a long brown column with a white cap where it had built its own cloud. She looked at the lean of it, at the cap, at the colour lower down, and when she had looked she went back to work.

They test-fired at eleven. Haskins ran the firing. He was the captain and had been on the crew longer than anybody except Archuleta, a big, slow, quiet man from Snowflake who carried a drip torch the way some men carry a briefcase. He laid a short strip of fire along the west edge of the road, and they all stood and watched it. It backed away from the road into the pine needles, slowly, a low line of orange about a foot high with a little smoke, and it kept backing, and nothing came across. Haskins looked at Carla and she nodded. Then they went.

Two torches, Haskins and a second-year named Delgado, walking the west shoulder of the road and dribbling fire into the needle cast from the wand of the drip torch, three parts diesel to one of gas, a smell like a truck stop on fire. Behind them and across the road, Carla's squad, eight people strung out along the east shoulder with hand tools and a saw, facing west. They were the holders. Their whole job was to watch the side of the road nobody was burning and to put out anything that landed there.

There is not much to holding until there is. You stand. You watch the wrong side of the road, not the fire, because the fire is everybody's to look at and the wrong side is only yours. The heat comes across the gravel in sheets, and you turn your face out of it and keep looking. Ash comes down. It sits on your shoulders and the brim of your hard hat and does nothing. Embers come down too, and most of those do nothing either, because most of them are dead before they land. The ones that are not dead land in the needles and sit there glowing for a second while they decide. Then a thread of smoke goes up, white and thin, and you go and put your boot on it.

By one o'clock they had caught two spots across the road, each about the size of a kitchen table, with Pulaskis and dirt. By one-thirty the humidity was nine percent. Carla had drunk two of her four quarts. Lunch had not come up.

---

At twenty past two the wind went round.

It was early. She saw it before she felt it. The column over the main fire, which had leaned northeast all morning, stood up straight for about a minute, as if it had been let go. Then it started to lean east. The smoke from Haskins's strip, which had been sliding along the road ahead of him, turned and came straight across the gravel into her squad's faces, and the ash came with it, then the embers, hard and fast and alive.

"Heads up," she said, and they were already moving.

Three spots on the east shoulder in two minutes. Her people jumped on them. She keyed her radio to tell Archuleta that the front had come early, and somebody stepped on her, the air attack plane talking to a helicopter over the junction. She keyed again and got the Division supervisor talking to a structure group in Turkey Flat. The channel was full. It was going to stay full. Everybody on the fire had just felt the same wind.

She let go of the key and looked at the smoke.

The main column was leaning east now, the way it would lean the rest of the afternoon. Under it the smoke was brown and heavy. Off to the southeast, four hundred yards from where she stood, beyond the pines on the east side of the road, there was a second smoke. It was thin. It was white. It was coming up from a place where there was nothing burning, and there was nothing between that place and the road but four hundred yards of pine and Gambel oak.

She went down the road at a jog to the cattle guard where the trees opened up, and she saw it properly. It was on the bench. The head of Wildcat began as a flat bench of ground below the road, half a mile across, open pine with oak under it, and then the bench ended and the draw dropped off the edge of the Rim in a long steep chute of rock and brush. The new fire was in the oak on the bench, maybe a quarter acre already, maybe less, two hundred feet back from the place where the ground fell away. The wind was laying its smoke over toward the drop.

A quarter of an acre. A long ember, or a pine cone off a torching tree, half a mile over everybody's heads. In ten minutes it would be an acre and at the edge. In twenty it would be over the edge and in Wildcat, and then it would be what Archuleta had said it would be that morning, with his hand turned over and his fingers dropping.

She looked back up the road. Her squad was holding the east shoulder, and if her squad left, the east shoulder was held by nobody. Haskins and Delgado were two hundred yards north, still putting fire on the ground, and every foot of fire they laid now was fire that could come across the road in this wind with no one watching it.

She ran up to Haskins. He saw her coming, then saw where she had come from, and looked over her shoulder at the white smoke above the trees.

"How big?"

"Quarter acre. On the bench. Two hundred feet off the edge."

He turned to Delgado and drew a hand across his throat, and Delgado shut off his torch. Haskins shut off his own. He looked at the road, at the strip of fire they had already laid, at the black and the not-yet-black, and he did not argue with her about any of it.

"Go," he said. "I've got the road."

He did not have the road. He had two men with empty hands and two miles of it. They both knew that.

---

Lyle Kemper's dozer was parked at the gate, a Cat D6 on a contract out of Holbrook, with Lyle sitting on the track eating a sandwich, which meant lunch had come up somewhere. Carla came down the road waving both arms, and he dropped the sandwich and climbed into the cab before she reached him. She pointed at the smoke, then at the bench, and drew a line in the air between the fire and the edge, and he nodded and started the engine. He had pushed line on the Rim for twenty years. He did not need it explained.

Her squad came down the road at a run, tools on their shoulders. She stopped Jessup at the cattle guard.

"See that rock?"

It was an outcrop at the lip of the bench, east of the fire, a grey hump of sandstone about the size of a house, standing out over the drop.

"Get up on top. You watch the draw below us and the main fire behind us. Anything moves in the bottom, anything comes over the road, anything you don't like, you call it. You don't wait for a gap. You step on whoever's talking."

"Okay."

"Escape route's back up to the road and north to the black. Say it."

"Back up to the road. North to the black."

He went. She watched him go up the rock on his hands and knees, the radio bouncing on his chest, and then she keyed her own radio and waited, thumb on the button, until there was half a second of silence on the channel, and went into it.

"Archuleta, Benally. Spot on the bench at the head of Wildcat, quarter acre. I've got my squad and the dozer on it. Jessup's lookout on the rock at the lip. Escape is the 9350 north to the black. Haskins is holding the road."

There was a pause long enough to be somebody deciding.

"Copy," Archuleta said.

That was all he said.

---

The fire had two edges that mattered and two that did not. The north edge was backing toward the road into the wind it had come on, into its own ash, slow, and it could back as long as it liked. The east edge was burning toward the rock, where there was nothing to burn. The south edge was the one moving, pushed by the wind toward the place where the bench gave out and the draw began. So she put all eight of them on the south edge and left the rest of it alone.

Lyle came down off the road with the blade down and cut a line along the bench, between the fire and the drop, peeling the needles and oak and the top four inches of dirt off the ground and rolling them away from the fire in a long brown berm. Behind him the two sawyers took out the oak he could not reach and dropped one dead pine that was leaning the wrong way. Behind them the rest of her squad went at it with Pulaskis and McLeods, scraping the dozer line down to mineral soil and throwing dirt on anything at its edge that was burning. Nobody talked. There was the dozer and the saws and the scrape of the tools and the fire itself, which made a sound in the oak like a lot of people tearing paper.

The bench was flat enough for the dozer for about two hundred yards. Then it broke up into rock, and Lyle got down out of the cab and looked at it and shook his head, and from there it was hand line, a strip two feet wide, cut by people bent double. They tied it into the base of Jessup's rock at ten past three.

At three-fifteen, a burning piece of oak rolled out of the fire, across the line and over the edge.

She watched it go. It bounced twice on the rock and stopped in a patch of brush thirty feet down the slope, below the lip, inside Wildcat. A thread of white smoke went up.

"Below the line," Jessup said on the radio, from the top of the rock. "Thirty feet. It's small."

She looked up at him on the rock, and at the slope. Thirty feet of loose rock and oak. Nothing burning below the new spot, nothing anywhere below it at all, all the way to the bottom of the draw. The fire she had left behind her was on the bench and held at its south edge. Above her, if she needed it, was the line, and above that the road, and above that the black.

She went down with a Pulaski. She went down sideways, kicking steps into the slope, and when she got there it was the size of a bath mat, flames six inches high in dry grass under the oak. She chopped it apart and turned it under and threw dirt on it, and threw more dirt on it, and felt it with the back of her glove until there was nothing in it warmer than the afternoon. Then she climbed back up.

When she came over the lip, Ruben Archuleta was standing on the dozer line with his hands on his hips.

---

He did not ask her why she had left the road. He walked the line from one end to the other, slowly, looking at the edge of it and at the fire inside it, which was lying down now. He looked at the dead pine the sawyers had dropped and at the place where the dozer line became hand line. He went to the lip and looked over at the bath mat of turned dirt thirty feet down. He looked up at Jessup on the rock, and Jessup, not knowing what else to do, lifted a hand.

Then he came back.

"What did you see?"

She told him. The column standing up and laying over. The white smoke, thin, from a place where nothing should have been burning. The bench. The dozer at the gate. She did not tell him why, because he had not asked her why. He listened to all of it with his eyes on the smoke over the main fire, as if he were checking what she said against it.

"Okay," he said.

His radio was talking. He turned it up, and it was the Division supervisor asking who had fire on the east side of the 9350 north of the gate.

Carla looked up the road. There was smoke on the east side, north of the cattle guard, where her squad had been standing at twenty past two: a slop-over Haskins and Delgado had not been able to catch with four hands. It had gone into the pines on the wrong side of the road while she was on the bench, and it had burned east until it ran into an old prescribed burn from three years before, where there was nothing left to carry it, and stopped. Forty acres, give or take, of black that was not supposed to be there.

Archuleta keyed his radio.

"Division, Chevelon. That's ours. About forty acres east of the road, tied into the old Rx unit. That one's on me." He let go of the key, and then pressed it again. "Wildcat's clean."

---

The wind blew hard out of the west-northwest until after six. By dark it had dropped, the humidity had come up to twenty-two percent, and there was black on the west side of the 9350 you could park a buggy in, and forty acres of it on the east side as well. They worked the edges of the slop-over until two in the morning and slept in the dirt by the buggies with their boots on.

At ten to six Archuleta stood in the road with the crew in a half circle in front of him and the buggies idling behind them with their headlights on. It was thirty-eight degrees. Everybody's breath smoked.

"Fire's here." Left hand, flat. "The 9350's here." Right hand, a blade. "The slop-over's here." He made a fist and set it behind the blade, up high, north. "Wildcat's here." He turned his right hand over and let the fingers drop.

"Task. We hold the slop-over and mop it up a hundred feet in from every edge. Purpose. It's on the wrong side of the road, and it's upwind of the bench. End state. By dark nobody could find a warm spot in it with a bare hand."

He looked along the half circle for the newest face, and it was still Jessup.

"Jessup. What are we not doing?"

Jessup stood a little forward, the way he stood. He looked at the hand that was still turned over, the fingers hanging down. He took long enough that two or three of the others looked at him.

"We're not going down Wildcat," he said. "Not from anywhere we can't see the bottom of."

Archuleta looked at him for a while. Then he looked at Carla, across the half circle, only for a moment.

"Good," he said, and closed his hand.

He told them that lunch would come up at noon. Then he turned and walked up the road toward the slop-over, and they picked up their tools and went after him in a line.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Nōnīs Octōbribus (7 October 2026), ā Iōanne Boydiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Boyd, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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