Ned was the youngest in the crew. He was also the foreman. He’d got the job because he didn’t drink much, and the other loggers drank like they were being paid to. At the end of each day they returned to their bush camp, where the foresters mirrored the violence they’d wreaked on the White Knights—the name they’d given to the pale, towering mannas—in the way they treated their own bodies. They poured lakes of beer down their throats, as well as rivers of brownish, burning rum. Spread out in the shadows of the White Knights, they sang and fought and screamed until they vomited, cried for their wives and crashed into their swags.

When they’d put him in charge, Ned’s superiors had given him a simple mission: stay sober enough to make sure chaos didn’t overwhelm the camp. During the working day he was nominally in charge of operations, but the loggers were experienced men, leathered by decades of warring with the trees. They rarely felt the need to speak to each other, not even when they felled the largest of the Knights, lopped off the limbs and hauled the pale-glowing trunks onto their flatbed truck. None of this required Ned’s oversight, although the loggers usually remembered to squint at the dropping sun and wait for his nod before knocking off for the day.

Ned drove the truck back to camp as the men began drinking in the back. Through the night he’d smile and recline and sip at a single bottle of lager as the men twisted themselves into goblins of the forest, drunk as much on the sweet-sticky sap that leaked from their vanquished foes as the liquor they gulped. Ned woke them at dawn, rolled them into the truck, drove back to the latest patch of mutilated forest and poured them onto their cold axes, their sap-bloody saws.

One night, after a particularly arduous day battling the Knights, the talk at camp turned lewd. There was talk of whores, of cunts, of buggery. It was intimated that splinters suffered in fucking a waxed tree hollow were ultimately preferable to the long-term wounds inflicted by a marriage. Ned did not consider himself prudish, but he did not feel comfortable listening to this talk, especially while sober. After throwing a log on the fire he walked back to his seat, then kept walking into the night, unnoticed by the hollering loggers.

He moved slowly through the trees. With each careful step he could hear less of the raucous conversation. Voices faded to barks and yips. Starlight filtered down, revealing lumpen shapes, wet foliage. Soon he reached a swollen creek, and its heavy trickling washed away the remaining racket of the camp.