Chapter One

Gary Hazen

The dark green Jeep Cherokee with the yellow-and-gold D.E.C. police seal on its door turns off the log road, bumping the rut, and powers up into the cut's landing. It's my younger son, I expect, nineteen-year-old, blond Kevin, who promised me he'd be here by noon, home from school for the weekend to help us get in the last of this wood. But it's that new lady environmental conservation officer, Josephine Roy, always busy scouting around our North Country, who's somehow managed to find us at work out here on this tiny twenty-four-acre private parcel inside of Hamilton County's blue-lined million-acre part of the park.

It's past lunch, after 1:00, and when I see who it is, who it isn't, the Stihl 034 in my hands grumbles, and I return to my work. Rocking the blade of the chain saw back, I give it the juice, slice forward, the honed sharpness singing into the wood. Chips spit past the goggles that mask my glasses. You can't be too careful.

Kevin's brother, my older son, dark, curly-headed Gary David, stands behind me steadying the trunk of the tree-sized limb, but hustles around to the front at the end of my cut to ease the log's falling, helping not to let it pinch the blade. Forced to work the jobs of two men, he catches the log as it falls, before it can drop, lopped off into the snow, and turns and tosses it on top of the mounding pile sinking the springs of our rusted old, red and white, half-ton F250 Ford. He then steps quickly back around me again to steady the limb for the next cut-right where I need him, when I need him, no waiting around. And there's no time to wait. We've got wood to get in-always I can hear Kevin say, bein