It burned north for two or three days along the edge of the mountain. Then the wind shifted and pushed it east. BLM was out there with their crews, and it seemed to us like everybody was just standing around watching it go. Maybe it was more than they could handle. Maybe there weren't enough resources. Either way, it kept burning. It reached the interstate highway along the eastern edge of the ranch, then the wind shifted again and started driving it south — straight toward about twelve hundred head of cattle on their late summer pastures.

We made a plan and gathered help. Before we started, I took my motorbike down the cow trails at first light to see what we were up against. I drove up within a couple hundred feet of it. It wasn’t raging ahead, just a slow burn. Barely daylight, it was a line of orange flames a foot to two feet tall, strung out east to west through some pretty thick sagebrush for a mile and a half, maybe two miles. It was something. I wish I'd taken pictures.

We went back, unloaded our horses, and started gathering cows. By ten o'clock that morning you could see it coming hard. That same line of flames was six to eight feet tall and moving our direction. The cattle didn't seem to care. They were just scattered out doing what cows do. We gathered most of them — probably nine-fifty, maybe a thousand head — and pushed them down into a little hollow against the interstate fence. Good place to hold a big bunch. Maybe a hundred and fifty head were still scattered up in front of the fire, and we figured they were lost.

We held that big bunch in the hollow for a couple of hours. The fire moved right up over the ridge above us, less than a few hundred yards out, then went straight south and never came down to where we were. When it passed, we drove back up the two-track roads toward the mountain just to see the damage. Nothing but black for miles in every direction. And those cattle we'd left behind — most of them were just standing out there, not a hair singed. The fire must have moved so fast it blew right through without touching them. Strange deal.

It kept burning for another ten days or two weeks, working its way down the edge of Black Pine. At one point the flames got into some thick junipers — twelve, fourteen feet tall — and that wall of fire was easily a hundred feet high. I stood there and thought: that's power right there. Before it was over, the fire burned ninety-six thousand acres. More than eighty thousand of it was ours.

They finally got it contained. We scrambled to figure out what to do with a ranch full of cattle and almost no grass left. We sold a lot of cows that fall. The ranch didn't go under — that happens sometimes — but nothing was the same after.

I'd been groomed from the time I was eight or nine years old to take over the ranch where I grew up. That was the plan — my family's plan, and eventually mine. I fashioned my whole life around it. Went to college and studied agricultural business with one purpose: to run our place. When that didn't work out, I adapted. Managed other people's cattle. Worked my way up through a couple of outfits until I landed as cattle manager of Blackpine. I was in my early forties. As far as I was concerned, I'd made it.

That life rewards you in specific ways, and usually money isn't one of them. You get paid in things most people never see — a view from the saddle no one else has had, the particular weight of extreme cold at five in the morning, the satisfaction of seeing a big bunch of cattle strung out for miles ahead of you moving to fresh pasture through country you know by heart. You learn to be content with those things, because they're what you get. And they were enough.

I worked hard to get there. Long hours — I used to call them reverse banker's hours, five to nine instead of nine to five. And a lot of them. But here's what I learned: the work it takes to reach the top doesn't keep you there. Just because you paid your dues to get there doesn't mean that the dues you paid are gonna keep you there. Some things are out of your control and out of your hands. The fire showed me that much.

Through a series of events in the three years after the fire, I was no longer in ranching. I've thought a lot about what that means — what you do when you've reached what you considered the top, and then the rug gets pulled out. There's a point some people hit where the life they built stops being the life they're going to live.

It wasn't exactly taken from me. But I didn't exactly choose it either.