by Allen Steele
They were big men, hard as the mountain upon which they worked, their faces and clothes filthy, their boots caked with mud and wood chips. A few women as well, but they were nearly as muscular as the men; in a couple of instances, Susan had to look twice to make sure they were female. They stamped their boots on a mat just outside the door, then took off their jackets and hung them from hooks on the support posts as they made their way to the table, taking places to which they’d long since become accustomed. As they filled their mugs with ale, Tillie quietly showed Susan how to ladle the thick vegetable stew into serving bowls and pass them down the table along with platters of corn bread. Only a few loggers seemed to notice that there was a new face among them; most were too tired to care.
Uncle Lars was among the last to arrive. He came in with a young man little more than a teenager; like most of the woodcutters, his hair was shoulder-length, tied back and kept out of his eyes by a bandana. A good-looking kid, despite the layer of grime on his face. Lars gave her a wave, then pointed to a couple of seats left open at the end of the table. Susan nodded and let Tillie finish serving dinner.
“Making yourself useful. Glad to see it.” Lars wasn’t nearly as dirty or exhausted as the men who worked for him, she couldn’t help but notice. “Thanks for helping out. Tillie needs a hand when Joe isn’t around.”
“Least I could do.” It appeared that her uncle had sobered up a bit; perhaps he’d taken a nap, too. “Thanks for offering a bed, but she said I could stay with her if I—”
“Think nothing of it.” Lars’s face went red, and the teenager glanced first at her, then at him. “Might as well get some of that stew while there’s still some left.” As she took a seat across the table from the young man, Lars motioned for Tillie to pass them the serving bowl. “Wanted you two to meet,” he went on. “This here’s my boy, Hawk. He’s been working up here this season, learning the family trade. Hawk, this is your cousin Susan. She’s come here to—”
“See if she can help us get the treecrawlers under control.” Hawk took the bowl as it came to him, politely offered it to Susan. “Know all about it, Pop. You told me last week, remember?”
“I did?” Lars’s brow furrowed as he searched his memory. “Umm, well, I guess I…”
“You were drinking at the time.” Hawk ladled some stew onto his plate, then handed it to Susan before helping himself to the corn bread. “Long trip from Liberty?”
“Umm…yes, it was.” Susan took some stew and corn bread, then passed the bowl and platter to her uncle. “Took a wagon to Leeport, then bought passage on a keelboat to Clarksburg. Stayed with your mother and sister in town last night, then caught a ride up here. Got in late this afternoon.” Catching the look in his eyes, she realized that she’d mentioned places he’d never been. “I’m sorry we’ve never met until now.”
Indeed, until yesterday she’d never laid eyes on either one of her cousins. It was only last night that she’d met Hawk’s sister, Rain, for the first time, a sweet little girl who’d proudly shown off her watercolor sketches of the Clarksburg harbor. Aunt Marie had said little about Hawk, though, except that he’d recently dropped out of school to move up into the mountains with his father. The only pictures she had of him were from childhood, and they bore scant resemblance to the young man who sat across the table from her. It was as if her aunt had written off her older child as a loss to her estranged husband, and now doted upon the one who’d stayed with her.
“We don’t get into town much,” Lars said, as if this explained everything. “We come up here soon as the snow melts and stay until it gets too cold to work. Beginning of each season, we move camp to another part of the range, wherever we find a good stand of timber we can—”
“Pop tells me you know a lot about ’crawlers.” Hawk passed the serving bowl to his father. “Did he ask you here, or did Mom?”
Lars scowled. “I told you…”
“Your mother did,” Susan said. “She got in touch with the Colonial University, told them that the company was having trouble with chirreep…treecrawlers, I mean…and asked if they had any experts who could come out here to study the problem.” She shrugged. “As it turned out, they did…me.”
“Like I was saying,” Lars continued, “I knew your cousin was studying this sort of thing, so I told your mom, ‘Y’know, you oughta get ’em to send out Cousin Susie, ’cause she’s—’”
“Sure you did.” Hawk barely glanced his way. “Hey, lucky break for us. A scientist in the family, ready to drop everything and come all the way out here to—”
“Watch that tongue, boy. Gonna get you in trouble.” Lars didn’t look up as he shoveled stew into his mouth, yet for the first time Hawk didn’t respond to his father. “Yeah, we’ve had a helluva time with those chirreep.” He mispronounced it as shire-reep, not sure-reep as Susan had said. “First it was them stealing stuff, and that wasn’t so bad so long as we locked everything away, but lately they’ve taken to sabotage.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“Trying to knock down the flume, for starters. Pulling down one of two support beams so that the trough collapses when we send down a log. Done that three times already. And once they pried a hole in the spill dam, so…”
From the other side of the room, a sudden crash as a plate shattered on the floor. Someone bellowed an obscenity, and Susan looked up in time to see one burly logger hurl himself across the table at another man. The next instant, the mess tent was filled with the sounds of a fistfight; men and women stood up, either to get out of the way or see what was going on.
“Oh, hell.” Lars leapt to his feet, rushed toward the brawl. “Awright, damn it, break it up, break it up!”
“Don’t worry ’bout it.” Hawk scarcely seemed to notice the fight. “Happens all the time. Just their way of saying how much they love each other.”
Susan regarded him quietly as he daubed a piece of corn bread in his stew. No more than five or six Coyote years; too young to be so cynical. “Pardon me for saying so,” she said, keeping her voice low, “but I have a feeling you don’t get along with your father very well.”
“Oh, no. We’re best friends. So long as he isn’t drunk, that is.” Hawk didn’t look up at her as he swirled a spoon through the stew on his plate. “So tell me…did he try to get you to sleep with him, or did you ask Tillie to put you up just because you wanted to learn how to make this crap?”
Susan didn’t know whether to laugh or slap the kid across the face. “Neither,” she said at last, doing her best to muster a reply. “I figured I’d sleep with you, and let your father teach Tillie how to cook.”
His eyes slowly rose. He stared at her for a long moment, as if trying to determine whether she was joking or not. A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Are you sure we’re related?”
“Oops, I forgot. I’m your cousin, aren’t I?” She shrugged. “Sorry, offer rescinded.”
“No problem.” He chuckled, then the smile faded. “Not that it wouldn’t have stopped Pop. He’s already made moves on most of the women in camp, even the wives of guys who work for him.” He blushed and looked away. “Why draw the line at his own niece?”
“Sorry.” She didn’t know why she said this, yet he nodded all the same. “If you don’t like him so much—”
“Why am I here?” Hawk gazed across the room. His father had stopped the fight, and now he was seated at the opposite side of the tent, talking with the loggers who’d been at each other’s throats only a few minutes ago. They were passing around a jug of ale, and there was no sign that he was returning anytime soon. “I dunno…kinda figure my options are limited. Stay with Mom and paint pretty pictures like Rain, or come up here and learn the family business.” He glanced at Susan. “What do you think? Do I look like an artist to you?”
No, she thought, you look like a kid who doesn’t know what he wants from life. And more the pity, because he was obviously a more intelligent person than one who should be spending his time spli
tting logs. She gazed at the woodcutters seated around them. They were the sons of starship engineers, the daughters of pioneers, yet through the years of learning how to survive on this world they’d forgotten their legacy, until now all they had were splinters in their hands and dirt under their nails, and only the most vague memory of the cosmos. And in this way, one generation became less than those that had come before it.
She tried the stew, discovered that it was awful. An idea occurred to her. “How long have you been up here? Since last Machidiel?”
“Pretty much.” A suspicious look. “If you’re going to tell me I should go back to school…”
“No, no.” Although that was her first thought, Hawk obviously wasn’t interested in having another adult giving him well-meaning advice; he’d clearly rejected completing his formal education as much as he’d rejected his mother’s efforts to make him more like his sister. “Look, you know the mountains, right? Well, I don’t, and I’m going to need a guide.”
“So why don’t you ask someone else?” Not a snide comment, but an honest question.
“Like who? Your father?” She raised an eyebrow. “If I’m going to do my job right, I’ve got to get as far away from camp as possible. That’s where I’m going to find the chirreep. But I don’t want your dad to get me out there alone…you said that yourself.”
“No.” Hawk shook his head. “No, that’s not such a good idea.”
Susan gestured to the men sitting around them. “Maybe some of these guys know the woods,” she went on, “but I don’t know them. Unless you want to introduce me to—”
“I know what you’re saying.” Hawk seemed to think about it a moment. “Look, I might be able to get away for a couple of days, but what am I going to tell him?”
“What’s wrong with the truth? I’ve hired you to be my guide…my research assistant, if you want to put a fancy name to it.” She paused. “There’s money in it. The university gave me a small grant for expenses. Call it…say, thirty dollars a day.”
“Thirty?” He shut his eyes in disgust. “Try again, cuz.”
“All right, forty.”
“Sixty.”
“Fifty. High as I go.”
He sighed. “All right, fifty…but you carry your own pack.”
“Did I say I wouldn’t?” Fifty dollars a day was steep—she knew the loggers earned that much for a week’s work—but she needed him, and he knew it. The kid was sharp, all right. “Don’t worry, I know how to hike backcountry.”
“Didn’t say that you didn’t. So when do we start?”
Susan didn’t reply. As they were speaking, she’d gazed down the table. Uncle Lars was drinking with his guys; the plates had been shoved aside, and they were working their way through another jug. Yet, in that moment, he happened to look straight at her, and there was a certain glint in his eyes that caused a shiver to run down her back.
“Soon as possible,” she murmured. “First thing tomorrow.”
She awoke to the sound of Tillie humming to herself as she stirred flour and eggs into batter for the breakfast biscuits. It was still dark outside, yet coffee was already brewing in an urn on top of the oven. Susan’s first impulse was to roll over and go back to sleep, but Tillie would have none of it; she prodded her awake and made her get dressed, and once Susan returned from the privy, Tillie put her to work setting the table. Susan had barely finished when the loggers started coming in; they drank coffee until Tillie brought out the biscuits and gravy, then reappeared a few minutes later with a platter of sliced ham. No one spoke much; it was too early in the morning for conversation.
Hawk showed up while she was helping Tillie prepare sack lunches for the crew. He gave her a quiet nod, but otherwise said nothing to her; at his insistence, they hadn’t told anyone where they were going. The sole exception was Uncle Lars, and only because he had to know that Susan had hired his son to be her guide. All the same, Susan noticed that Hawk said little to his father when he finally showed up. Not that he was in a talkative mood anyway; with his eyes swollen and his shoulders slumped, he was obviously nursing a hangover.
After she helped Tillie clean up, she found Hawk waiting for her outside. He’d brought a small pack, into which he’d stuffed a canteen, a map, a compass, and a flashlight. Susan had her own pack, in which she carried, along with a canteen and lunch for them both, a camera, a satphone, and a pair of binoculars.
Dawn had painted the sky with wispy slashes of crimson and gold as they began hiking up the trail to the logging site. The crew had already left camp, and Susan and Hawk followed the timber wagons into the forest; from far ahead, they could hear voices coming through the trees, breaking the cool silence of the morning. Scarlet pikes cawed at them from the lower branches of the trees, as if threatening to impale them on clingberry thorns as they did with the leafbugs upon which they preyed. Susan caught a brief glimpse of a pair of shy brown eyes peering at her from a hole beneath a faux birch, then a root rat scurried back into its lair. The woods were alive, its inhabitants spying on the intruders.
“Not a bad place to spend a year,” she said, and Hawk gave her a skeptical look. “Here, I mean. I’m rather envious.”
“Thought you grew up in the mountains.”
“I did, but Great Dakota has a different ecosystem from Midland. There’s species here you don’t find on the Gillis Range.” She smiled. “You know, we’ve been on this world almost forty years, Earth-time, and yet we’ve explored less than a quarter of it.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Aren’t you curious? About what we haven’t seen yet?”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “If you weren’t busy trying to make a living.”
She was trying to figure how to respond to that when there was a sharp crack from somewhere up ahead, followed by a loud crash that echoed down the mountainside. “Hey, they just brought down a big one,” Hawk said, quickening his pace. “C’mon, you want to see this.”
Susan followed him up the trail until, all of a sudden, they emerged from the woods; there were no more trees around them, and a vast clearing stretched away as far as the eye could see. A short distance away, several loggers stood around a giant blackwood they’d just felled. Its lower branches had already been trimmed away, and now the trunk itself lay upon the ground, like a titan brought low by a gang of dwarves.
“They’ve been working on that one all week,” Hawk said. “These old ones, they’re pretty hard to bring down. Guess someone got up here early to make the final cut.”
Susan didn’t answer. She was awestruck by what she saw. Where there had once been old-growth forest were now mile upon mile of barren slope. Scraggly undergrowth surrounded vast acres of raw stumps, with granite boulders now laid bare beneath the sun. She’d seen logging operations before—quite a bit of Midland’s rain forests had been harvested, particularly on the western side of Mt. Shaw—but the sheer scale of the clear-cutting being done here in the Black Mountains boggled the mind. Blackwood, mountain rough bark, faux birch, swoops-nest briar: all leveled indiscriminately, with nothing larger than the smallest sapling left standing.
“Good God,” she whispered. “What are you people doing?”
Hawk looked at her. “What do you mean, what are we doing? We’re cutting down trees.”
“I don’t…you don’t…”
“We started on the other side of the mountain,” he went on, oblivious to her shock as he pointed to the northeast. “About eight seasons ago, back in a valley the other side of Thunder Ridge, then began making our way over here. Trick is finding a good stand where you can put in a road. Last spring, we moved the camp over to this side, to get us closer to the creek. Took us a while to put in the flume, but since we did, we’ve been moving out twice as much timber as we did last year.”
They began making their way through the clearing, stepping over dead branches, passing stumps sawed low to the ground. Here and there, men and women used crosscut saws to cut trunks into logs, which were then anchored toget
her end-to-end by thick chains fastened to iron hooks hammered deep into the wood. Shags dragged the logs to nearby wagons, where they were loaded aboard and carried to the flume. The larger branches were pulled aside to be trimmed to size, the smaller ones thrown upon massive piles where they would be burned.
“We’re using hand equipment, for the most part,” Hawk explained, “but look over there.” He pointed to where a couple of men were carefully mounting a yellow-painted instrument upon a tripod. “That’s Big Lucy, our particle-beam laser. Used to be a Union Guard weapon until Pop managed to swing a deal for it. Takes a lot of juice, so we only use it for—”
“And you’re not replanting.” Susan stared back at the ground they’d just crossed. Already there were signs of soil erosion, deep furrows in the mud where rain was washing away what remained of the ground cover. “You just cut everything down, then move on.”
“Umm…yeah, sure. There’s plenty of trees left.”
Susan looked at him, saw nothing in his face save for ignorance. “I’ve seen enough here,” she said quietly. “Let’s go.”
Leaving the site behind, Hawk led her across the clearing to a trail that went farther up the mountain. It had been made by an exploration team, he said; if they continued to follow it, they’d eventually reach some cliffs at the base of the summit. After that, they would have to bushwhack it; nonetheless, they might be able to make it to the top of Mt. Shapiro by noon, and still be back in camp by sundown.
“That sounds good,” Susan said. “The chirreep might use this same trail, and it could lead us to their habitat.”
Hawk seemed puzzled. “We always figured they live in the trees.”