She watched as Kael, plastic shovel in hand, ran toward a shallow indentation, a place on the beach that looked as though it had been dug by another child — a place that looked safe for a child to play.

But when Kael took a step into it, his leg sank. The movements he made to free himself didn't seem right. Branford read in her child what she had failed to see in the sand: There was fire beneath.

"He was burning," she said.

The boy had stepped into the glowing remnants of a campfire, probably started the night before, on April 8.

Although beach fires are illegal outside of designated cooking areas and carry a fine of up to $500, they are not that uncommon, said Peter Young, director of the Department of Land and Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction over beaches from the vegetation line to the ocean.

The heat from the fire, trapped beneath the sand overnight, was intense.

Branford, with husband Josh Aylsworth close on her heels, reached Kael and grabbed him from the pit before the boy had gathered breath for his first scream.

"We were fast," Branford said. "But we weren't fast enough. He was really, really burned."

Branford handed the boy to his father and went for help, calling 911 on her cell phone, then making an unsuccessful attempt to flag down an ambulance that was en route to another call.

Josh Aylsworth looked down at his son's left leg. It was still burning. He carried the boy to the water and dipped him in — a move that medical officials would later say helped contain the injury.

Kael's legs were burned — the left leg with third-degree burns below the knee — and his left wrist and hand were burned. The plastic shovel he carried in his hand had melted.

The firefighters and paramedics wrapped Kael's wounds in cool, damp cloths and sped him by ambulance to Maui Memorial Medical Center. The doctors there arranged to send Kael by air ambulance to Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children on O'ahu.

"We'll be here at least another week," said Branford, who, along with her husband, is camped out in Kael's hospital room.

She said the doctors at the hospital are taking good care of her son.

But they have to take him into an operating room and put him to sleep in order to change the dressings on his wounds and to rub down his leg — and despite those efforts and a tube that drains the wound on the left leg, Kael's burns became infected and his temperature shot up to 104 degrees.

"And they have had to treat him for that, along with the pain," she said. "It is a nightmare. He's just a little boy and he's on morphine. They think he might need skin grafts because the skin won't grow back.

"He's hurting so bad."

Alysworth said his son will need physical therapy as he heals, to keep the scar tissue from immobilizing him.

Kael's parents take turn holding and comforting him. No one in the family has gotten much sleep. "When he doesn't sleep, we don't sleep," Alysworth said.

Branford and Aylsworth said they want people to know what happened to Kael so that whoever started the fire — and anyone who might be tempted to start one — will think about Kael and be aware of the consequences.

"We want people to understand what happens when they do that," Aylsworth said.

"The ocean was only a few feet away," Branford said. "If they were going to build an illegal fire, why couldn't they at least put it out?"