[Carriage Hill]

Tic-Tac-Toe!

[TXnMA]

" Fires burn in square miles and they're trying to put out fires in kilometers X square miles."

Can't tell whether you are trying to joke about Metric vs English units, but you don't sound like someone who has "eaten a lot of smoke"...

Wildfires (once they've destroyed their point of origin) burn linearly. The resulting damage is expressed as area, but the active flame front is irregularly linear.

My preferred mode of extinguishing a wildfire (properly garbed) is to get behind it (in the burned-over area and to attack the active fire front line from the rear.