While I watched, the skidder drove into a sugar maple and began to push against the trunk with the bulldozer bucket until smoke belched from its exhaust. (With a skidder you don’t need a saw or an axe to take down a tree. You simply rip it from the ground with the stick and grapple, or you use brute force to knock it down.) The maple snapped. The subsequent crash was loud enough that I could hear it above my hot air blower. The moment the tree fell, the young guy with the saw went to work severing its silvery branches. The loggers would then haul the de-limbed trunk to their improvised woodpile for later removal.

The signs along the road suggested this was still Jewett’s property, but he hadn’t mentioned logging it. Even if this was his operation, he didn’t strike me as the sort of landowner who would approve denuding the family estate. The savagery of the clear-cutting went beyond the limits allowed by Maine law. There was slash strewn everywhere, even near the road where discarded branches were not permitted.

Logging didn’t bother me; raping the land did.

One of the men—the driver of the faded yellow skidder—must have noticed my Jeep. He cut the engine and signaled to the others. I saw the man on the ATV lift his own pair of binos from around his neck and train them on my Jeep.

Then he shouted something up at the driver who dutifully moved onto the next maple.

The kid with the chainsaw, meanwhile, continued de-limbing the fallen tree. That idiot would be deaf before his thirtieth birthday. Maybe before his twenty-fifth.

While I watched, the man on the ATV had swung his machine around. He gunned the engine, zigzagging through stumps, toward the road. The four-wheeler looked like a recent model, but even the new shocks couldn’t cushion the ride across the deeply rutted ground.

I didn’t wait for him to arrive but stepped from the vehicle and unzipped my parka. I wanted the badge and gun on my belt to be plainly visible. I circled around to the passenger side, folded my arms across my chest, and waited.

The man on the ATV was dressed in winter-weight coveralls that made most people look tubby. Not this guy, though; he had to be a beanpole under that padding. He wore dark sunglasses and a black balaclava that he had pulled up around his head so only the oval of his face was visible.

He must have caught sight of my badge and gun because he braked hard before he reached the stone wall. The machine slid across the icy, torn-up earth. The rider didn’t dismount but sat with his hands on the vibrating handlebars.

“What do you want?” he shouted above the idling engine.

I made a motion with my hand, signaling for him to turn the key. He didn’t catch my drift.