A Country of Ash

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.

Idaho, 1910. Seven years later, Dunne is a drifter with thirty-one cents in his pocket and a brass badge he can't bring himself to throw away. In the mining town of Wallace 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.

It is the driest summer anyone can remember. The sun rises red and gives no warmth. Ash falls on the town like snow. On the mountain, Dunne takes a red-haired Irish boy from Butte under his wing, and he stands between the crew and a lynch rope when they turn on the immigrant they blame for the fires. Someone is setting them. Dunne begins to suspect who, and he doesn't want to know.

Then, on August 20th, hurricane winds drive three thousand fires together into a single wall of flame. In two days it will burn three million acres and destroy a third of Wallace. Cut off on both sides, forty-five men follow Pulaski into an abandoned mine tunnel, hang wet blankets across the entrance, and wait for the fire to arrive.

What happens in the Nicholson tunnel that night is history. What it costs Silas Dunne, and what he carries out, is the story.

Based on the true events of the Big Burn and the heroism of ranger Ed Pulaski, A Country of Ash is a novel of fire and faith, guilt and mercy, and the terrible arithmetic of survival. It asks what a man owes the dead, and what he still owes the living.

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