Chapter 4: The Skidder

The skidder was a yellow machine the size of a bus, and it was dragging a cedar my father had planted down the hill.

I got there before the next one came down.

Soren drove me, and I was out of his truck before it stopped rolling.

Six men in hard hats were working the stand, and a crew boss in a white pickup was watching them with a clipboard.

I walked into the middle of the road and stood in front of the machine with my arms folded.

The skidder ground to a halt eight feet from my knees.

"Lady," the crew boss shouted, climbing down. "You can't be here."

"This is the Halvorsen stand."

"It's pack timber. Mr. Dahl's got the signed order."

"Then you can read it to me from over there, and then you can turn that thing around."

"I'll call the Council."

"Call whoever you like. I'm not moving."

I had stood in front of a wall of fire in July with a pulaski in my hands.

I wasn't about to be moved by a clipboard.

Behind me, far back in the trees, Soren had stopped at the edge of the road.

I felt him there between my shoulder blades.

I hadn't looked around.

"This one's mine," I had told him in the truck. "Don't you dare."

He hadn't said a word.

He'd just stopped where I said and stayed stopped, and his stillness was costing him.

I could feel that too.

The crew boss took out his phone.

Then I heard engines, a lot of them, coming up the creek road.

Dell's truck came first, with a plate of something under tinfoil on the dash and three carloads behind it.

Out they poured, in aprons and work boots and flannel.

There were forty people from the Stump, and they all had their phones out.

"Morning!" Dell yelled, waving a casserole dish like a flag. "We were in the neighborhood!"

"You were not," I said.

"One woman brought her camera. A man brought his cousin from the county paper."

"That's a lie."

"It's a rumor," said Dell. "It'll be true by lunch."

They fanned out across the road beside me, shoulder to shoulder.

An old man in a feed cap leaned on the skidder's bumper and began, very slowly, to eat a sandwich.

The crew boss looked at the phones, then at the forty faces, then at the lone figure at the tree line.

I watched him recognize Soren Brekke and take the measure of what the Alpha had decided not to do.

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