Page 108 of The Wild Beneath

He turned to see the head line cook, Tracey Ramos. She was in her late thirties when Evan last saw her nearly seven years ago; new lines had appeared around her smiling eyes. An earring stud of a carved mountain range still stretched her right earlobe. An intricate barn owl tattoo climbed up the left side of her neck.

“Trace. It’s good to see you,” he said, embracing her.

“The prodigal son returns!” It was Michael Enslow behind him, one of Hale’s oldest loggers. When Evan was young, Michael’s hair was blond and shaggy, but now it was white and grey. His posture had stooped. “I’m so sorry about your dad, bud. We’ve missed you up here.” He squeezed Evan’s shoulder with his large hand.

“Payroll’s been delayed,” Ed said, as he pulled Evan away toward the office trailer and held the door open. “Everyone’s grinding my gears.”

“You didn’t call me.”

“How was I supposed to do that? No number until Gibbons dredged you up.”

“You could have called the lower mainland coast guard. You knew I was there.”

“Well... We’re here now. Buckle up, Evan.”

“I only found out about this three days ago, Ed.”

“We’ll get it squared today,” Leonard Gibbons said from inside the office.

Gibbons had flown up for the occasion. His black suit was nearly identical to the one he wore on the day they first met. He pushed a tall stack of papers across the table. They hadsign herenotes sticking out the side.

Evan was almost ready to tell them: He was out.

“Let me take you through the fine print.” Gibbons held out an uncapped pen.

On the wall behind him hung a picture of Isaac and his timber crew at a summer barbecue. At least a dozen families. White curlicues of smoke drifted up from the grill behind them. Tracey in her stained cooking apron, and Michael with his arm slung around Isaac. At the bottom of the photo was Evan, a wide grin on his face. He couldn’t have been more than five years old. His mother was kneeling beside him, holding his hand. Everyone looked toward the camera except Celeste, whose eyes were turned upward. Evan wishes he could know what she saw.

Evan did not take the pen.

He stood up and excused himself. He left the trailer, climbed down the stairs onto the hard, wet ground. He hiked straight into the spruce, the hemlocks, the cedars.

Voices in the distance. The grind of chainsaws and the smell of diesel. He watched a tree go down on the mountainside with a familiar knot in his stomach. Trunks thicker than fuel barrels, leaving enormous root systems like underground graveyards.

He hiked past a yarder and its pendulous cables. He walked until his thighs burned, then paced in the mud.

Even in late winter, it was as green as he remembered. Emerald moss hanging, dew beading on pine needles. Heavy pine cones.

As a child, Evan did believe he could talk to trees. Celeste knew this; he whispered their voices to her, what they told him, like ancient lore. She never looked away. She hung on every word.

Evan put his hand on the trunk of a western red cedar that felt as big as God and pressed his ear against the trunk. He stayed there for a long moment, the bark pressed into his skin, as if he was waiting for instructions.

And the forest held its own song: the geese honking overhead, the rush of a nearby river, sap trickling, the sway of feathery branches. The three-syllable vibrato of an olive-breasted flycatcher above:I-see-you, I-see-you, I-see-you.

When Celeste died, Evan asked Isaac to spare certain trees, the big ones, the ones he could wrap his arms around and feel the pulsing of a deeper place. Evan thought she would have wanted that. Isaac laughed. “Those sailboat hippies are wearing off on you,” he’d said. He felt the murky shame of it, even now.

But he still loved these trees.

The sky was clearing, the sun pale yellow. The low background din of machines, the occasionalpop-popof engines. The smell of fresh sawdust.

He stepped away from the tree.

He’d come this far, and everyone here was depending on him. Maybe even the forest. Wasn’t it best to change something from the inside? Celeste always said so.

In high school he’d chosen selective, sustainable logging for his senior year science project. He’d pored over the strategies at Wildwood, the renowned ecoforest on Vancouver Island, where careful stewardship had saved an old-growth forest. They were foresters with more trees than they started with. The details were blurry now, but could he find a way?

And maybe give Annie what she needs at the same time?

He hiked back down, through the songs of dying trees, the brigade of chainsaws, the growl of the skidder, the shouts between lumberjacks. These were men that his payroll would be supporting.