A squirrel surprised him, skipping from one of the decaying trunks hanging into the river and onto the bank and scurrying up a dogwood tree that was supple and had survived the fierce tornado in August, unlike the stiff and unforgiving trunks of the big hardwoods that had stood majestically but tumbled down in the big winds to lie dead and proud in the river. The squirrel screeched and its claws scraped on the bark as it climbed to the top and looked down at him, its bushy tail flicking in the sunlight and its eyes bulging. It wasn’t a flying squirrel so Percy let it be. He was getting too old to bark his lungs out at every varmint that crossed his path. Many a squirrel he had treed and waited out and crunched their fragile skulls and broken their pencil-thin necks between his teeth, but this one he let go. Squirrels were not meaty enough. Rabbits made for better eating.
He paused and let his eyes close for a minute and was tempted to trot back into the cut pines and curl there in the needles in the sunlight and nap when he heard yapping, a steady cry in the distance beyond the hill. He followed the yelps up a low rise to a narrow stretch of pines left standing near a clear-cut, the lonely stumps still oozing sap. He smelled the drift of cigarette smoke but ignored it and ran along the edge of the cleared forest to a new trail the pulpwooders had used to haul out the timber, a scratched-out path where longleaf pines had been dragged through clay and brown needles to the waiting trucks. The smell of young dogs rose in his nostrils and the sound of puppy cries got stronger. At the juncture of a dirt road plowed only a month ago, he followed his nose and ears to a side ditch. He stepped warily in their direction, eyes open for an angry mama dog to show up and protect her litter. But no dog appeared and he inched closer to the whines of the puppies. He looked down in a swirl of wiregrass and saw six skinny black and brown pups curled together, their eyes still closed and their attempts to walk on their feet shaky, their cries of thirst and hunger unanswered by their mama, who was nowhere near.
He put his nose into the squirming pile and they detected his warmth and yelped louder and suckled desperately at his nose, trampling on each other’s heads. He pulled back and watched them and then sniffed at the pile again, this time rousing them even more as they cried and whined with all of their young might. A damp warmth rose from their young bodies. Most of the pups were all black or mostly black with white streaks on their bellies and legs and paws, but one yellowish one that was solid in color and fatter than the other scrawny ones managed to crawl across Percy’s snout as he nuzzled them. It scratched his nose with a needle-like toenail. Percy shook his head and knocked the yellow dog to the ground beside the litter and barked loudly, the roar flattening the ears of the still-blind pups. He barked a few more times and then let out a low growl, a grumbling threat. They cowered and cried, holding their heads down between their front paws and their stumpy bodies squeezing together, helpless against his tirade. He stopped growling and turned and trotted off to explore in the direction of the cigarette smoke, fainter than it had been earlier. Maybe a man there had a hambone in his pocket. The whimpers of the pups faded as he ran away.
He crossed through the low valley, stopping to smell the fresh sap every now and then where the big trees had been felled and hauled off, leaving only two-foot high stumps and a mess of pine needles and cones and branches covering what had been the floor of the forest. The fresh pine oozings caused him to lose the odor of the cigarette smoke but he remembered where it came from and followed in the direction to the high edge of the valley.
He saw the man lying on his back beneath a small island of remaining trees. Percy took a wide arc and circled about fifty feet away, sniffing the man out. It was the same man who had been firing his gun at the squirrel this morning, the same man who had been to see the old lady and who had shuffled around on the porch with her and that tub, the same man who had smoked by the river and urinated into it and who spat regularly into the hydrangeas and who drove the big blue truck that was parked in the middle of the road across the river. Percy kept his distance from this man. His eyebrows worked in confusion over the man’s behavior and he looked back in the direction of the truck, an uncustomary place for someone to park. It also was odd for a man to nap flat on the ground beneath the trees. Usually men would sit half in a daze with a gun and watch for dove or quail or deer, perhaps sipping from a small bottle, but never stretching out to sleep. Percy couldn’t get his mind around the way people were acting, the changes in their routines. When he saw the man stir, moving his arm and beginning to raise his head, he hightailed it into the trees further up the hill and ran off and hid in the brush.
Elmer opened his eyes and raised his head and rubbed a stiff spot on the back of his neck. He detected movement and looked up the hill where small pines and briars and wayward shrubs grew thick. He reached for his revolver and aimed that direction, tensing his finger on the trigger, but he decided not to fire. He couldn’t see what was causing the faint rustling through the thicket, a scuffling sound that faded off into the stillness of what remained of the pine forest. He didn’t want to waste a bullet.
The forest here once had been the quietest place on earth in the daytime when the bugs and birds and squirrels were still, recumbent in their nests of straw and dirt, the longleaf pine trunks absorbing sound like a sponge takes up water, except the sound held in the trees forever. Now most of that pine was bound to be made into newspapers and paper plates and cardboard of all shapes, folding boxes and poster board, even the little tubes that toilet paper rolled around. How those trees went into those stinky factories and came out paper products he couldn’t understand. He and Sherry once had been down to Savannah near the ocean where the paper mills sat on the mouth of a tidal river. They smelled that rotten-egg stench until they couldn’t stand it anymore, rolling up the windows on a 98-degree day, his eyes burning, she holding her nose while he drove, cussing. All he knew about the tree business was that he wanted no part of it. Whatever he had learned was horrifying. A man falling into a wood chipper and coming out mangled like a sausage. A man drowning in a vat of sulfuric acid. Other men getting rich and building golf courses on the north side of Atlanta along that pretty road where they wouldn’t dare touch any of the majestic oak trees surrounding their homes that sat like palaces on the hills.
He stood up and tucked his pistol in the back of his britches and crossed straight through the valley of stumps, like low brown wooden gravestones in a cemetery blanketed with pine straw. He paused to watch small black beetles rushing around the globs of sap that were drying on the cut of the dead tree. He moved on through the chair-high remains of the longleaf pines until he came to an enormous stump, almost four feet across, a tree that had once been king of the forest with its green crown towering above the tree line. Perched atop the remaining stump sat a praying mantis, its long green front legs poised in sharp elbow bends and the bug’s angular head cocked in an air of wisdom as though it was saying grace over the perished pine.
Elmer studied the stump, a cut less than two weeks old. The stump had the angled shape of a pine felled by an axe and not the smooth hewn surface that most of the nearby trees had, zipped through by the engine-powered teeth of the blade. This tall tree had fought like a sumbitch, forcing perhaps a second larger chainsaw with a bigger motor than the first to be called in and the blade sharpened and pressed at an angle and the engine gunned until they shouted timber and it fell downhill in the direction of the Oogasula.
Elmer raised his heel and kicked at the top side of the stump and the praying mantis fluttered its green wings and buzzed away. Elmer watched its flight and then looked back at the top of the stump and the rings there, too many to count, at least one hundred, maybe twice that many. He fired a cigarette and tilted his head back and blew the smoke up, a cloud drifting in the air, stiller after the early morning breeze. The sun had crossed the eastern sky and hung at the top of its arc, not yet having begun its downslide toward the evening, bound for an early quitting time as the days became shorter. He took a few more puffs and then started out through the pine stump field toward the river.
Elmer crossed the boulders on the river and returned to his pickup. He stuck his pistol under the seat and cranked it and drove slowly up the one-lane dirt road, the ruts getting rockier as he climbed the slight hill away from the river into a wild thicket. He had driven half of a mile when he saw a Ford F-100 coming from the other direction, the truck a shiny