Snowmobile tracks crisscrossed the field and converged behind the barn. I hadn’t caught a glimpse of Jewett’s sled, but I decided it must be a dependable, touring model with a scabbard on the side for an AR-15. He struck me as someone who patrolled his land regularly, looking eagerly for signs of intruders he could scare off at gunpoint.

I felt the automatic transmission downshift as the grade grew steep and the road entered a tunnel of trees. NO TRESPASSING signs were posted at state-mandated intervals: clearly visible, with less than a hundred feet between them. Bruce Jewett wasn’t allowing interlopers the slightest excuse to “accidentally” wander onto his land.

He struck me as a type I often encountered in rural Maine: a person who held strong yet contradictory views of the law. These men zealously guarded their own property rights yet thought nothing of taking multiple deer a season, in violation of state rules. They built buildings without permits and wantonly cut trees in protected wetlands.

I’d come to the conclusion that these hypocrites never suffered cognitive dissonance because they genuinely believed the law existed to protect their own selfish interests. Except when it became an unconstitutional encroachment on their God-given liberties.

But Jewett struck me as intelligent enough to recognize when he was actively violating statutes. He must have known his shooting range, for instance, wasn’t up to code.

Was he a murderer, though?

One of the perils of detective work is that, if you investigate enough crimes, every death begins to look suspicious. I had to check my own biases. Sometimes old professors fall out of boats without being pushed.

I was still seeing NO TRESSPASSING signs stapled to roadside trees when I rounded a turn and the pastoral forest transformed, all at once, into a wasteland. Someone had come into these postcard woods with chainsaws and a skidder and taken every tree thicker than a baseball bat. The bulldozer had even knocked a hole in a century-old stone wall to gain entry onto the property.

In the distance, beyond the handful of crooked trees still standing, I saw the dirty machines at work.

I braked, grabbed my 10 x 42 Leica binoculars from the dash, and scoped the brutalized hillside.

I counted three men: one driving the skidder, a second wielding a chainsaw, and a third supervising the job from atop an all-terrain vehicle. None of the loggers wore helmets, ear protection, goggles, chaps, or other safety gear.

Real geniuses, these three.