A hot southerly wind blew through central Wyoming recently, disturbing the dogs and turning the cottonwood leaves silver side out. A small forest fire had been burning for days near Stockwell Creek in the Bighorn Mountains. It was nearly extinguished when the wind blew the fire over Little Goose Peak and onto the steep walls of an adjacent canyon. What had been a narrow plume a few hours earlier was now an inverted pyramid of smoke, its source steadily broadening, its edges keenly incised by the wind in an otherwise perfectly blue sky.

The smoke streamed northward, diffusing only slightly, over the town of Big Horn, which had grown distracted. A woman who had just come off the fire line walked up and down the stairs beside the Mercantile, Big Horn's general store, unable to remember what she had wanted there in the first place. The doors of the fire station stood open, and there was a puzzling air of expectant idleness about the place, which was resolved the next morning when exhausted fire crews gathered outside the station. The whole town seemed to be living under the fumarole of an active volcano.It proved impossible that afternoon to do much else but watch the smoke. Along the east-west face of the Bighorns, the wind sucked the lower edge of the smoke cloud downward, out over the hay meadows and pastures south of town. It looked, for a time, as though that portion of the sky were full of deep-dyed virgas, falsely promising a smoky rain. The central mass of the smoke pillar was tinted a livid yellow - very near the color of wheat fields at twilight - and when one stood in its shadow one seemed to be standing in the eerie light of a partial eclipse. Even in full sunlight, the atmosphere possessed a new chromatic intensity.

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By night from the precincts of Big Horn, one could see, at times, only a dull red glow, like the moon rising behind a thin layer of clouds. Then the wind would shift, and the flames, burning in six or seven spots across the north face of the canyon, would come unveiled for a minute or two. Trucks and cars were returning from the mountains along the road called Red Grade, and compared with the headlights - so piercing, so focused - the fire seemed to burn with a blunt incandescence. But soon smoke settled over the canyon again, the heat of the fire, its roar, and now even its light lost in the distance. What remained in the darkness was a hot wind and the smell of ashes.

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