Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

8 / Finch Finds His Roots

SOMEONE HAD BEEN STEALING TREES from the prettiest groves of black oaks in our forty-two thousand acres, at a place on the west rim of the North Fork called Big John Hill. Ranger Ron O'Leary had been checking the area for weeks, but so far he hadn't turned up a lead—just, each time, more stumps.

One April morning a neighbor along our boundary heard a chainsaw running and called the Sheriff's Department. Knowing that Big John Hill was part of Auburn State Recreation Area, the deputy who took the call asked his dispatcher to have a ranger handle it. I heard their conversation on my scanner and started rolling that way before our dispatcher called me. On the way I radioed O'Leary, up at Mineral Bar.

O'Leary and I rendezvoused near the village of Weimar along Interstate 80—a grocery store, a gun shop, a tiny post office, and some rough little dwellings—and from there I followed him east along the wooded toplands toward the canyon of the North Fork. Dropping into Specimen Gulch, the road turned to gravel. At our boundary it devolved into a few pairs of red-clay ruts wandering off in various directions into the pines. We stopped and got out to listen. The cool air was pungent with bear clover bruised by our tires. To the east toward the canyon rim, we heard the complaint of a chainsaw. We locked up Ron's Jimmy, and he folded himself in behind my shotgun rack. I put the Jeep in four-wheel drive, and we followed one set of ruts toward the sound of the saw. The ruts climbed steeply onto the groves of Big John Hill. On all sides of us the charcoal-gray trunks of black oaks split into symmetrical, wineglass-shaped bowers of branches supporting a ceiling of spring leaves sixty to seventy-five feet overhead. The leaves hadn't sunburned to the darker color they would be by midsummer, and the morning sun filtering through them bathed everything beneath in luminous pale green.

The track we followed forked often, and at each fork I stopped to listen for the saw, then steered toward it. Soon we saw stumps and tangled piles of limbs on either side. By now the trail was nothing more than two wheel marks of crushed vegetation slaloming through the trees. A stick popped under one of our tires. I stopped to listen out the open window for the reassurance that the saw was still running. It was.

Toward the hillcrest, our way was blocked. The tree poachers had felled an oak across the trail to keep prying eyes away from their larceny; no doubt they planned to cut their way out when they left. The dense forest on either side afforded no other way through. We didn't have a saw, but the Jeep was equipped with an electric winch. I got out, hit the gear release on the winch, grabbed the hook at the end of the cable, and, leaning into it, paid out the cable toward the fallen tree. By the time I'd made it fast, Ron had the winch control in his hand. He hit the switch, the cable went taut, and the whine of the electric motor dropped half an octave as it took up the load. Rustling and snapping branches, the tree began to inch toward us. A hinge of bent and splintered wood still connecting trunk to stump suddenly gave way with a loud snap. The saw, no more than two hundred yards away now, stopped abruptly. Ron took his thumb off the winch control and we stood stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. The rapping of a woodpecker echoed through the forest.

The saw started again. Ron hit the winch control and the broken stubs of branches on the fallen tree dragged dark grooves in the forest floor. The saw stopped again. Ron stopped the winch, and again we held our breath. The saw started, and again so did the slow progress of our tree. Eventually we had enough room to sneak the Jeep between the tree and its stump. We got in, closed the doors gently, and continued. O'Leary removed my camera from its case on the floor.

Around another bend in the trail, suddenly they were right in front of us: two men and two pickup trucks, both partially loaded with oak firewood. I stomped on the accelerator to close the remaining distance. To my right the camera flashed off the inside of the windshield as Ron caught them in the act.

The photograph would show one of them—a stocky man with a drooping mustache, his muscular arms below his T-shirt covered in bluish tattoos—just looking up to see us. The other—huge and lanky, with long, stringy blond hair, wearing a red flannel shirt and jeans—would be captured still intent on his saw. A whitish blur of wood chips was frozen in midair, cascading down his pant leg.

We bailed out and began walking toward them. The first man tapped the sawyer on his shoulder. The other looked up. The tattooed one nodded darkly in our direction. The big man—his driver's license would show he was six feet seven—hit the kill switch on the saw and uncoiled himself upward to gape at us.

"You're under arrest for cutting park trees!" I called out as I walked toward them. "Keep your hands where I can see them."

I moved in, patted them down, removed their knives—both men carried them—handcuffed each in turn, and sat them behind the prisoner cage in the Jeep's back seat. O'Leary stood back, watching carefully, which one ranger always does so the one preoccupied with searching and handcuffing doesn't get taken by surprise. The two men said nothing. When I closed the door on them it was just after eleven A.M. The day was growing warm, and the air was full of the rich scent of spring—oak leaves, deer brush flowering, bear clover, and moist soil. O'Leary was