Dark Justice
Page 45
Finally, when they were considerably deeper in than Ben had been before, Deirdre stopped the Jeep. “This is as far as we can go on wheels,” she explained. “From here on out, we walk.”
Except with Deirdre in the lead, it was more like a run. Ben did his best to keep up, tripping over bramble, letting branches sweep across his face. They yelled for Deirdre to stop, slow down, but she wasn’t listening. She was unrestrained, uncontrollable. She was going to meet a new old friend and there was no holding her back.
Until at last they arrived.
“No,” Deirdre said, almost under her breath.
Ben was well behind her. He kept running, huffing and puffing, holding the stitch in his side, till he finally arrived at the point where Deirdre had frozen in her tracks.
“No,” he echoed, when he saw what she saw.
“Oh, God,” Maureen said, pulling up behind them. “Oh, please God, no.”
The tree was gone. That tree and all its companion trees—gone.
The clear-cutters had moved in, just that morning, from all appearances. But they had been busy As usual, they started work with the largest and therefore most profitable trees, then moved outward in concentric circles, taking all the rest. There were four tree cutters working the area, systematically using their huge mechanical arms to grip and slice one enormous trunk after another.
In the space of a few hours, more than two hundred trees had been leveled.
“No!” Deirdre screamed. She ran forward, weaving between the cutting machines and fallen branches. Like a pigeon homing in on an old companion, she led them directly to the spot.
The tree was now nothing but a stump, flattened, less than a foot off the ground.
“My God!” Deirdre cried. Her face was wet with tears. “He’s been here since before Columbus.” There was a catch in her throat, like something was being ripped out of her insides. “Before Columbus!”
Ben didn’t know what to say. There were no words to express what he was feeling, much less anything that would be of any comfort to Deirdre. Instead, he simply stared at the flattened remains of that once-great cedar, and the remains of all the other immense cedars surrounding it, on and on, around and around, as far as he could see—the remnants of hundreds of lives that had survived for hundreds upon hundreds of years, only to be destroyed in a single morning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS my appreciation to the dozens of forest rangers, loggers, scientists, and environmentalists who were willing to talk to me or my wife as I researched and wrote this book. I’d particularly like to thank Brita Cantrell, state director of The Nature Conservancy, for her assistance regarding the environmental issues discussed, as well as insightful suggestions stemming from her lifetime experience with the outdoors; and Daman Cantrell, of the Tulsa Public Defender’s office, for his assistance with various issues of criminal law.
As always, I must thank my friend and editor Joe Blades, surely one of the finest editors and human beings in all of publishing, for his support and guidance. I also want to thank Arlene Joplin, of the Oklahoma City U.S. Attorney’s office, for reading the manuscript before publication and giving me her always invaluable comments. And I must thank my wife, not only for her usual work as collaborator and editor, but also for her considerable research efforts that made this book possible.
The environmental facts, statistics, and information presented in this book are true, all taken from unbiased sources. All the actions depicted in the conflict between loggers and environmentalists are based on true events occurring during the last fifteen years. I’m sure there are and will continue to be a variety of opinions about how we should deal with our exponentially growing ecological crisis, but about these facts there is no question:
Before Europeans arrived, almost fifty percent of this country was covered by virgin forests. As recently as 1850, more than forty percent still was. Today, less than one percent is. And the trees are still being cut—even in our national forests.
—William Bernhardt
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1999 by William Bernhardt
cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4532-7718-8
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