Weeks after Daniela had drawn the map, Cadie added directions to the beech tree where they hid the gun in case she ever needed to find it. Cadie had laminated the map and The Poachers’ Code at the library.
“Very nice,” Raúl said, admiring Cadie’s painted cloud from the doorway. “Feel better?”
“About what?”
“I absolve you of your guilt.”
“If only it were that easy, huh?” Cadie watched his smile fade. “What you did mattered. You stood up against a corrupt government.”
“It doesn’t seem to have made a difference, does it?” Dark circles hung under his eyes.
“It matters to me. It matters to your family.”
He smiled weakly.
“Look at Sal. She’s exactly like you. She started a protest today to protect a kid from being bullied. Your granddaughter.”
“Ahhh.” Raúl nodded. “My granddaughter who got suspended from school today.”
“You’re proud of what she did, and you know it.” Cadie threw her arms around Raúl’s barrel chest.
“Very, very proud,” he whispered in her ear.
A car drove by and honked repeatedly. “Go back where you came from,” an occupant shouted.
Raúl flinched in Cadie’s embrace, but he didn’t let go.
29
PRESENT DAY
I absolve you of your guilt. Raúl’s words played over in Cadie’s mind as she drove to meet the fire crew and tag trees. Blue and silver paint speckled her hands and forearms from painting Raúl’s cloud. Her swollen knuckles ached from the fight and from gripping the scrub brush.
She parked her car at the trailhead in a lot surrounded by singed trees. The fire on the slope of Mount Griffin, which she had witnessed from the top of Mount Steady days earlier, had melted the macadam, which now lay bubbled and warped. She followed the trail into the charred husk of a forest. Deep tire tracks from timber crews had already broken through the sooty crust. A sweet, smoky aroma kicked up around her.
Beauty she had not anticipated saturated the light and air. The fire had rendered the woods a negative X-ray of itself, stripped down to its most elemental and raw form, like a cast of dancers frozen in position. The absence of color quieted her mind like a drug as she walked through the stark, silent landscape.
Air moved without the buffer of branches and leaves overhead. No one could hide in this scorched graveyard. It wasn’t a forest anymore. It wasn’t a fire, a refuge, or a home. In this half-place, Cadie’s burdens felt lighter, as if the gravity drawing them against her heart had been diminished.
Chalky debris swirling in the air caught rays of sunlight. Cadie blew into the cloud of particles and watched the ash dance. Vertical lines of the snag forest drew her eyes upward to the shocking blue of the sky. The sky she had left behind in Maple Crest had not seemed as blue.
Cadie walked toward a petite woman bent over examining a tree trunk. When she heard Cadie’s footsteps she stood up. Cadie recognized the shock of purple hair from outside the ethics committee meeting.
“You’re Piper?”
“Cadence Kessler!” The woman dropped her bag and a compact chain saw to run toward Cadie. “I’m so happy to finally meet you, like for real meet you.” The smell of patchouli nearly gagged Cadie as Piper pulled her into a hug.
“Everyone is talking about you. Have you seen the CadenceUnderFire hashtag?”
“Did you start that?”
“I won’t confirm or deny that. I’m the one who e-mailed you about the Bicknell’s thrush. Do you remember?”
“I read the material you sent. It was well researched.”
Piper beamed. She picked up her chain saw. “The university’s going to take a lot of heat, because of what you did, you know.” She swung the chain saw back and forth as she talked. “The government can sue the school and it would set in motion a series of other challenges. You could end up in the Supreme Court.”
“I don’t think so.” Cadie swallowed down the stomach acid creeping up her throat. “It’s not that big a deal. I just collected a few dead beetles.”
“You could be the reason they open federal lands back up.” Piper paused.
“Or I could go to jail and never work again.” Cadie did not want to be a test case for environmental law. She wanted to prove her thesis about the beetles, publish a paper, and prevent a few fires.
“It’s about so much more than your bark beetle research,” Piper said, seeming to read Cadie’s mind. “It’s about my thrush and tons of other research being cut off. Because of what you did, I took a chance and turned my research in, including the dates and locations of the samples I took. I figured I’d get kicked out of my program, but my department’s backing me. My research director cited your project. This is uncharted territory, but if the science community sticks together, we can ride this out until we can reverse the ban.”
“You can’t count on that happening.” Cadie tried not to show the pride blooming in her chest.
“It’ll happen. We’re screwed if it doesn’t, and I refuse to give up hope.”
“Well, we’re legally on public land now. Maybe we should take advantage and get some work done,” Cadie said, and walked away from Piper. The towering pines looked like etchings against the blue sky, their spines straight and proud.
Cadie froze at the rapid-fire trill of a single Bicknell’s thrush. A different sound than the night call, but in the same key. Unlike its somber night song, the thrush’s morning call always ended on an up note, a question. Cadie’s heart flipped as a rush of memory washed over her. Lying in the hammock with her father as he taught her bird calls. The giddy thrill of hearing the night call as the birds prepared to migrate south.
It took half a second to realize the call was not a Bicknell’s, but Piper’s impressive imitation.
Cadie replied with her own less-convincing call.
“Cadence Kessler, you have many talents.” Piper bounced up next to Cadie and tilted her head to look up at the treetops. “They could come back here, you know. They often show up after fires and help rebuild. They’re industrious critters. There’s still a population of them around here. But they’re coming back from the Caribbean in smaller and smaller numbers every spring because of all the hurricanes and deforestation there. And our temps are getting higher, driving them north into Canada.”
The hollow space in Cadie’s chest pressed against her lungs, a loneliness left behind by the tiny bird and everything else that had vanished from Cadie’s life. She bit her lower lip to quiet the unexpected quiver.
“I miss them too,” Piper whispered, her melodic voice taking on a gentle rasp as she readjusted the chain saw slung over her shoulder.
Cadie cleared her throat and walked ahead of Piper. Her footsteps crunched in the silence, but Piper did not follow.
“Timber!” Piper shouted from twenty feet behind Cadie. “Timber, timber.”
Cadie instinctively threw her arms up to protect her head and spun around, scanning the woods for the falling tree. But the woods stood motionless. Silent.
“What the hell?” Cadie yelled at Piper, who now had her back to Cadie.
“Timber!” A floppy Bernese mountain dog bound through the forest and tackled Piper. The hulking animal looked like it had been rolling in soot. “Where’ve you been, girl?”
“That’s a terrible name for a dog.” Cadie made a mental note to tell Daniela about the dog in the forest named Timber. “You scared the shit out of me. If you lived on the beach you wouldn’t name your dog Shark, would you?”
“I probably would do exactly that.” Piper buried her head in the dog’s thick neck fur.
“I’m going to go tag some trees. Good luck with your research,” Cadie said, trying to calm her pulse, still racing from the “timber” scare. “Nice meeting you. And, thanks, by the way, for showing up at the hearing. I think it helped.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.” Piper followed Cadie with Timber at her heels. “I
think we should let the fires burn.”
Piper let her pronouncement hang in the air, waiting for Cadie to rebut her, but Cadie did not respond.
“It’s not like I don’t care about the houses or businesses that might burn. But we can’t hold back the inevitable. Forests will burn, levies will break, seawalls will fail, and it’s going to be catastrophic. Everyone’s going to ask, ‘Why didn’t anyone warn us?’ I’ll throw my hands up and say, ‘I did, but no one got out of the way.’”
“And all the people in the path of the fires?” Cadie said, annoyed at the way Piper ended each sentence on a high note, as if asking a question. “We have a responsibility to try to save their homes.”
“I mean, I don’t want anyone to lose a house or a life. But if your home is in the inevitable path of a wildfire, get the hell out of the house,” Piper said.
“So just let everything burn?”
“Basically, there are two mindsets: First, thin the trees and buy some time. Build the levies and storm walls. And the farmers, they’re like, ‘I grow wheat and corn and that’s what I grow, dammit.’ When climate conditions make that challenging, they suck more water from the aquifers, dump more fertilizers, pour on the chemicals so they can keep growing that same crop.
“But there’s a second mindset,” Piper continued. “Accept that the climate is already shifting. It’s not some looming monster that will bring eighty-foot waves crashing into New York City. It’s already arriving in inches of sea level rise, in fractions of a degree of temperature increases. I mean look what’s happening in the Caribbean and Central America.”
Piper scrambled to keep pace with Cadie as they stepped over fallen branches and slid down rocky inclines. She wished Piper would stop talking so loudly. It felt disrespectful to the wounded forest.
“Do I want to reverse climate change? Sure,” Piper continued. Cadie clenched her jaw. “But guess what, it isn’t an option. I don’t give a shit if your grandfather and his grandfather grew some spectacular variety of corn on this same piece of land. If that corn won’t grow anymore because of altered climate conditions, maybe it’s time to grow something else. If the fire’s coming, get the hell out of the way. Don’t just stand there wringing your hands and crying, ‘It’s not fair.’”
“There’s a middle ground, for now.” Cadie had the feeling Piper had given this speech many times before.
“There’s no middle ground.”
“Edgerton’s on the other side of that ridge.” Cadie pointed to a mountain ahead. “Driving here I could see patches of dead pines spotting the mountainsides. At least eight thousand people live there. You can’t just say, ‘Oh well, we’re going to let your town burn. Move along now.’”
Piper snapped a burnt branch with her hands and examined the interior of the wood, blackened all the way through.
“What if it was your hometown?” Cadie asked.
“It will be one day. And I’ll be devastated.”
Cadie wanted to admire the purity of Piper’s motives, but her naiveté was dangerous.
“I’m here to teach the crews how to tag infested trees today,” Cadie said, brushing her hands off. “This is something productive I can actually do. Maybe we can reduce the fire threat for Edgerton, at least for now.”
“Good luck with that.” Piper’s resolve did not seem shaken, but she looked genuinely sad. “I’ve read that researchers in Nova Scotia are seeing Bicknell’s moving in after fires and helping rebuild the habitat. Maybe they haven’t given up on us completely.”
Cadie kept walking.
“And they love beetles, you know. If the fires don’t lure the Bicknell’s home, maybe the beetle buffet will.” Piper turned to Cadie as if waiting for a response.
Cadie didn’t want to talk. She wanted to get her work done and go back to Maple Crest, a thought that struck her as ironic after spending most of her life avoiding her hometown. But she wanted to talk to Garrett about how the police were responding to the graffiti at the hardware store. Her pulse quickened as she thought of the linger of cinnamon on Garrett’s lips.
“I know you don’t exactly agree with me, but maybe we can share data. I mean ultimately, we want the same things, right?” Piper said.
“I’ll think about it.” Cadie had been studying the mountain pine beetle for years. She had tracked it across the country and warned everyone it was coming to New England. Finally, people were listening to her, paying attention to her. She wasn’t ready to hand over her research to a grad student.
“I’ve been reading this study from Colorado,” Piper continued. “They’ve been monitoring forests that burned as a result of the mountain pine beetles there. It’s a small study, but it’s pretty cool.”
“Does it offer ideas on how to prevent the fires?”
“The answer isn’t always to stop the fires.” Piper sounded exasperated. “The study compares these forests to other forests that were not affected by pine beetles, but also burned.”
“And?”
Piper’s eyes widened with enthusiasm. “So, the forests affected by pine beetles grew back stronger and more resilient than forests that burned, but were not affected by beetles.” Piper paused for a reaction from Cadie, then continued when Cadie didn’t respond. “Don’t you see? What if the pine beetles know what’s coming? I mean, not consciously, or anything. But they just know. They’re clearing the way for a forest that will adapt to the new climate. Maybe the thrushes are helping by returning after the fires? It’s like, Nature can’t repair itself, but it’s making plans for the future. Maybe we’re getting in the way of those plans.”
Piper stopped walking and yanked on the cord of her chain saw.
Cadie jumped as it roared to life.
Piper sliced into a blackened pine trunk, carving out a thick wedge to expose the wood underneath. She proceeded to cut a wedge out of another tree nearby.
“Look at the difference. This one is still alive.” She held out the wedge for Cadie to take. Cadie smelled the wood and scraped her fingernail across the pulpy surface. The bark and the first layer of cambium were dry and brittle. But underneath, the yellow wood remained damp and healthy. Piper handed her a second piece. The tree had been dead or dying before the fire hit. The interior was almost as dry as the outer ring. The parched pulp flaked under her nail.
“Don’t you see? The first tree is alive. Not all of the strong ones will survive the fire, but the ones that do are the heartiest, the ones that put up a fight and said ‘fuck you’ to the drought. And to the beetles. This is the tree that will repopulate the forest now that the beetles are dead and the fire has passed. And it won’t have any competition from weaker trees, because the fire and the beetles wiped them out. Survival of the fittest.”
Cadie almost pointed out that Piper had damaged a resilient tree by carving a wedge out of the trunk, but decided against it.
“It’s like the beetles are coming in and preparing the forests to burn. The species that survive the fires are the climate warriors. This forest right here—” Piper held her arms over her head and spun in a circle. “This will be the forest of the future. The Earth is spinning one thousand miles an hour. Things are going to shift, things are going to burn. Nature will select trees better able to adapt.”
“So the bark beetles will save us?” Cadie couldn’t help smiling at Piper’s optimism, even though her theories did not convince Cadie.
“Well, maybe they aren’t the heroes of the story, but they aren’t the villain either.”
“Send me the research and I’ll look at it.”
“Awesome,” Piper said. “You’ll find the crew over the ridge. They’re expecting you.”
“Thanks.” Cadie extended her hand, but Piper pulled her into a hug instead.
“Cadence under fire. We’ve got your back.”
“Right.” Cadie grimaced at Piper, but smiled as soon as she turned her back.
The forestry department would never intentionally allow wide swaths of forest in this area t
o burn. Voters would blame politicians. Politicians would do whatever it took to get reelected, and no one would look at the big picture.
Yet Piper’s pure belief in science stirred a softness in Cadie’s chest, allowing her to breathe more deeply and taste a clarity in the air that she had missed earlier. She attempted another bird call, but no answer came.
Ashen twigs and scorched ground cover crumbled under her boots as Cadie trudged on. When she stopped moving, silence surrounded her. An aimless breeze rose up every few minutes, strong enough to sway the crisp branches, but not enough to make them chatter.
When Cadie was in a crowded mall, at a conference, or even on campus, she craved silence and stillness. She longed for space to hear her breath and feel her heartbeat without the competition of the rest of the world. Silence lived at the top of mountains and deep in the woods, where the nuances of worms under soil, insects in the air, trees exhaling, and animals wooing gave dimension to the quiet.
But the utter silence of the burnt-out woods burrowed into her head, creating an echo chamber where all her thoughts bounced against each other without compassion.
Layers upon layers of blackened tree trunks extended to the limits of her vision. Surveying fire damage from maps or from samples in a lab gave Cadie the tools to evaluate the damage. But standing in the middle of the wasteland, feeling the crush of burnt branches under her feet, Cadie felt their loss in her bones.
The deeper Cadie walked into the X-ray of a forest, the more adrift she felt.
The rumble of a truck engine and the hum of chain saws encroached on the silence. Over the ridge, a barren rocky terrain had created a natural firebreak. Crews below the ridge line had already cut down dozens of live pines, many showing signs of the telltale rust. Behind her, the charred landscape. In front of her, the intentional devastation of a living forest.
She made her way down the slope and approached the crew chief.
“I’m Cadie Kessler, I’m supposed to meet someone here to look at the trees you’re tagging.”
Waiting for the Night Song Page 24