The idea of sharing files with the people you would be arguing against the next day was weird. To Donny. Obviously not to them. They smiled, welcomed him, and proceeded to show him their whole case, document by document.

When they were done, he understood why they were so confident.

They had only fragments of the core elements, but it was enough to know they were right. The work they had done on the ecological damage was extensive. Not quite down to the tree, but close enough. A narrative of the long life of the forests, constructed from a mix of scientific reports, photographs, field notes of anthropologists and explorers, lore of the first peoples of the regions that had been razed, and so on. Stories of the lives of the trees.

Donny had seen trees that old before. He had been to Oaxaca once, with Joyce, and they visited a village at the heart of which was a tree so big and old that you could not take a picture of it. No lens could capture it. It was like a cross between a redwood and a cypress, taller than a giant of your juvenile imagination, but also drooping, enveloping, a canopy under which you could live. Climb right up in there and return to your simian roots. It was older than Columbus for sure, maybe older than Christ. The more recent arrivals had built their cathedral on one side of it and the town hall on the other, as if to appropriate its magic. At least they knew better than to cut it down for lumber to burn or build.

Donny remembered being told by his mom that the ranch house they lived in before Dad left was made from old-growth redwoods. It sounded cool at the time. Now that lumber was probably sitting in some South Dallas landfill, after the house was torn down to make room for a builder home.

Joyce’s team had records in there that you could use to count basically every tree that had been cut. Not its age, but its circumference. The sum of which was a number beyond Donny’s capacity to really visualize, but behind the numbers on paper was an atrocity you could feel in your bones as you sifted the data. An atrocity of a scale far beyond the human injuries to one another that Donny pursued in his own cases.

It wasn’t that trees could not scream, said Lupe. It was that we don’t have the senses to hear them. Because they are senses that don’t involve that kind of hearing.

And when you looked at the pictures laid out on the table and considered the entire forest as an interconnected thing, it was hard to argue.