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“I’ll apologize. I’m just giving you a hard time, Bug.”
The waitress comes back, puts our plates in front of us. We thank her, then examine our brunches.
“Want to trade?” Silas asks, looking over at mine.
“No.”
“Want to share?”
“No,” I tell him.
He reaches his fork toward my plate.
“Just a—”
I smack his hand, but he gets a piece of waffle anyway.
“You are such a pain in the ass,” I tell him.
“You gonna eat all that?” he asks.Chapter Forty-FiveLeviOn the ground in front of me, something moves in a brief flash of shiny black and then it’s gone, twisting under the cover of the leaves. I hold out one arm to block June.
“Are we there?” she asks, looking up and around, confused. “This isn’t it. Is this it?”
“No,” I say lightly, watching the snake reappear, mosey around a mostly rotted log, and vanish into the forest. “Just hang on a sec.”
“Okay?” June says, holding onto the straps of her backpack and glancing around a little nervously. “Is there something I should be worried about, or…?”
“Nope,” I say. I give my slithery friend one more moment to disappear fully, then put my arm down. “All clear.”
June steps forward, looks around suspiciously, and then we start hiking again.
“There’s not a mountain lion staring us down or something, is there?” she asks, glancing around at the trees.
“If I’d seen a mountain lion, I promise I wouldn’t be calmly walking on,” I tell her. “Those are some bad news kitties.”
“Bad News Kitties is the name of my all-girl punk band,” June says, still looking around, though she’s looking up into the trees, not at the ground. “Bear? Was it a bear?”
“No,” I tell her, glancing over, trying not to smile. “Could you please accept that I saved you from a horrible, gruesome fate and stop asking?”
“How gruesome?” she asks.
“I’m trying to keep you blissfully unaware,” I tell her.
“I just want to know how much to appreciate your selfless gesture,” she teases. “Are we talking mauling, or being eaten, or—”
She gasps.
Trying to keep information from June has always been and will always be pointless.
“It was a snake, wasn’t it?”
I don’t answer, just glance over at her again, but the jig is up.
“It was definitely a snake,” she says to my silence, our feet still crunching over the deep leaf cover on the forest floor. “Ugh. Thank you.”
Then she shudders.
“You’re welcome for my remarkable act of heroism,” I deadpan.
“They move wrong,” she says as we keep walking. It’s the same thing she always says about snakes. “It’s unnatural. They’re just a tube, they shouldn’t be able to get around—”
“And they’re too shiny, swallow prey whole, and have poison teeth?” I finish for her.
“They don’t all have poison teeth,” she says, mimicking my role in this conversation.
“It was just a black snake,” I tell her, as if that’ll help. “They don’t have poison teeth, and since you’re not a small forest rodent, you don’t interest them much.”
June just wrinkles her nose, and we keep going. I don’t mind snakes, but ever since the first time she told me she doesn’t like them, I’ve been unable to help but see her side of the argument.
They do move wrong. It’s a little unsettling.
We hike another quarter mile, around some rocks, over a small stream that’s nearly covered over with fallen leaves, and then we’re there.
I look up, not sure what I’m hoping for.
There’s a tree missing. The big oak is gone, and I clench my jaw because I know what I’m going to find: a tree almost as old as this country sawed to pieces, in chunks.
Jail is too good for them, I think.
“It’s gone, right?” June asks, and she sounds excited. “Didn’t there used to be another tree? A bigger one?”
“Yes,” I say, my tone clipped.
“Now we just hope the camera worked,” she says, and grabs my arm by the elbow.
The site’s exactly like I knew it would be: massive tree, freshly cut, in pieces. Looks like it was done by a chainsaw.
“Okay,” June says from twenty feet away. “It looks like it’s in good shape, though I think something might have chewed on this one corner? But I assume these things are built for being chewed on.”
I sling my pack to the ground, reach into the correct pocket, and pull out blue nitrile gloves and the evidence collection bags given to me by the state police.
It’s now been almost five days since Marjorie and Donald were caught with a chainsaw. The Forest Service is a slow-moving bureaucracy and trying to work with another agency like the state police instantly halves the speed.
I spoke with State Police detectives and a Forest Service investigator. They spoke with each other. They spoke with a lumber expert, who spoke with a tree trafficking expert, who spoke with a conservationist, all of whom tried to determine the value of the destroyed trees.
