Timber

“Cheer up Sandy. You know as well as I. That activism stuff is hopeless.”

Sandy Fields stood beside his foreman on a hillcrest that overlooked a seemingly endless stretch of timber. It was to be the largest clearcut in Canadian history, and Sandy was trying to imagine what it was going to look like when the job was done. “20 million tonnes of carbon storage is what they said. What do you think that is, carbon storage?” Sandy’s foreman gave a shrug. “Beats me. Only millions of anything that I know about are the ones that ForesTech is gonna make once this lumber is cut.”

Sandy was paid well for a man so young, but as he looked over the forest into the distance he wasn’t thinking about the money. He was thinking about the she-grizzly he had seen the first day he showed up to inspect the site.

He’d been surveying the forest and came across what he guessed was an old trapping outpost, huddled against a dense line of trees and looking out to the river that marked the end of the property. Curious, he entered the log cabin to find matted pelts, rusted traps, a broken down bunk and the remains of a stove. He was trying to decypher a name carved into the bunk when he heard a soft cry. Sandy sprung up and went to the front door, where he faced a bear, standing fifty feet away from the cabin entrance. Again he heard the cry, this time identifying the sound as having come from behind the outpost. He took a step, hoping to move downstream and across the river to escape the bear but stopped when he saw a movement in the brush behind him. There he noticed a cub pawing uselessly at the ground with its fores, its hind leg entangled. The predicament was such that the mother was too large to get close enough to her cub to free it. Sandy had turned once again to the mature bear and found it waiting, almost expectantly. Keeping the cub between him and its mother he went around the cabin and freed the little one’s leg. Stiff from fear and excitement he had watched their reunion and departure, catching the mother’s last backward glance before they disappeared from view.

The sun was setting, and a few birds could be heard saying goodnights to one another. “What’s going to happen to all the animals?” asked Sandy. His foreman’s reply was a sudden gesture to a black squirrel which had scampered from the treeline into the open plateau where they stood. Sandy watched as his foreman made a jump as if to go after it, then laughed as it fled. “They’re gonna have to find somewhere else. Lucky for them this entire country is littered in forest. I ain’t stoppin this project for no squirrels.” Sandy nodded but remained silent.

A truck could be heard below and further in the distance a helicopter passed over what would soon be a barren plot of land. “The natives and the activists, they’re a funny sort” the foreman went on. “They come in here chaining themselves to trees and claiming rights to land they don’t own, then once all the timber’s cut they come begging for the re-planting jobs. God-damned nature lovers can’t decide if they’re with us or against us”. he gave a short laugh.

As Sandy stood watching the wilderness grow dark he reflected more on summers past. Hadn’t the weather been temperate? He recalled a newscaster saying something about record high temperatures. As if in response to his thoughts his foreman said “That climate change stuff is crap. We’ve got science students fresh out of school with no real job experience telling us we’re heating up the planet by cutting down trees? It’s a crock, Sandy, even the boss says they disproved that nonsense ages ago.” Sandy nodded again, saying “Yeah, I heard that”, wondering if he had not heard the opposite.

The city smog now blew through his hometown and the dense air had a stale quality that made him choke when he tried to breathe deeply. The river, too, was sparse with salmon stocks and Sandy had been finding it increasingly difficult to catch a sizeable spring though he was a seasoned fisherman. He wouldn’t have minded so much were it not for his 9 year old daughter; He wanted her to grow up healthy. Sandy thought of her now as he looked out on the forest, drawing a long breath that tasted of hemlock and fir. He took good care of his girl and yet she always seemed to be getting sick. The doctors said it was natural; she’s just building up her immunity, they explained.

His foreman’s voice brought him back. “You got any trouble breathing here?” Sandy shook his head. “Me neither. That’s cause there’s trees just the same as these ones for miles around. The way some people talk it’s like they think we’re gonna cut it all down by tomorrow. If only that were the case!” The foreman spat off the cliff where they stood and turned to go. Sandy waited, watching the last of the light fade from between the trees until the land below became an impenetrable black mass. He let out a sigh and followed his foreman back to camp.