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. A wildfire isn't extinguished so much as choked into submission by encircling it with a perimeter cleared of fuel.
McDonough is the lookout, and it's his job to keep his eyes on both the fire and his crew. 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.
The fire crawls north along the ridge, as it has for almost two days, burning a long black scar through the chaparral.
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