I followed the runoff stream as I moved steadily closer to the truck, crouching low under cover of the willows along the bank. Nature might seem all peace and quiet, but she's deceptive that way, and I was thankful for how loud she really is. The noise of the stream covered the noise of my breath, my footsteps. I wanted to take pictures but didn't want to risk the glow of my phone. Henson was leaning against the truck bed, looking up at the stars. When he poured his coffee into the lid of his thermos, I was close enough to smell it. There were fuel cans in the back, shovels and rakes. It takes balls to burn public land, but plenty of ranchers have done it, claiming later that the fires on their own land just went a few acres wild. The one thing those birds need is abundant sagebrush, and getting rid of sagebrush is the whole point of a rancher burn in sage-steppe habitat. The fire makes room for cattle forage by erasing everything else.

“Hey girl,” Henson said, and my body panicked, blood on fire. I thought to run, but he wasn't talking to me. He had a little girl with him, probably kindergarten age, wispy pigtails curling around her ears. Her coveralls were patched and worn, all her movements muted by the quilted fabric. She grabbed Henson's hand, and I wondered if she had the same egg-delicate eyes as her father.

“Can you carry this shovel?” Henson asked her, half whispering.

“I can see your breath, Daddy,” the girl said. “It's steamy, like your coffee.”

Henson smiled, and I did too. The girl threw her arms around his neck. I felt my heart fluttering again, my pulses warming. The sky lightened with the approaching dawn.

“Next time I come we should bring the horses,” she said.

“Whatever you want, sweetheart.” The two of them crossed to the other side of the truck, walked some distance away from it. Henson was stepping off an area, measuring it. The child was laboring at cartwheels, trying hard to work her limbs against the confines of her coveralls.

When Henson turned his back to the truck, I pulled the fuel cans and started dumping them into the dirt behind the back tires. The diesel fumes made the ground shimmer and shake, go blurry, filled up my nose so much that I thought no clean air would ever get in again. I couldn't take the ranch back from Henson, but he couldn't burn anything down without diesel. I heard a shout that might have been my name and dropped the cans. I snapped a picture for evidence and got out of there as fast as I could, tracking my way along the runoff stream deep into the BLM land. When the fumes cleared my head, I came back to myself. I tried to turn a cartwheel, but my center of gravity was all wrong.