"It was true. The wildlife was gone . . . I did not find any- one in the Black Dragon Country who remembered seeing a wild animal since the fire. There was not a sound to be heard and not a movement in the forest."37 This is how journalist Harrison E. Salisbury described the Black Dragon forest in China after a horrific 1987 fire had burned for over a month, consuming more land than any other fire in the last three hundred years.

Wildfires turn living and dead organisms into ashes, blacken the land, and fill the air with smoke. But all these changes are temporary. Months after a fire, vegetation has grown back in most burned wildland, and the animals have returned.

Fires create varied and broken patterns of burned and un- burned land called "mosaics." Mosaics appear because when a wildfire passes through land, not all...