Ceballo crossed his arms over his chest, smiled in an angry sort of way—with the corners of his mouth forming a hint of a grimace—then began pacing the room and shaking his head. “I don’t believe this! I don’t believe what I’m hearing. You guys are supposed to be lumberjacks…big, tough, smelly lumberjacks for crying out loud! And here you are afraid of the conjurings of some crackpot and a platoon of blue-haired, tree-hugging old ladies.” He uncrossed his arms and put his hands on the shoulders of two men sitting in front of him. “C’mon now…we’ve been through stuff like this before. Remember Port Simpson and Alice Arm? Things started off rough there too, but we stuck it out. These people are salad-eaters who are up here protesting, not because they love the environment, but because they feel guilty about destroying it. They’ll be here a few more days shoutin’ their slogans and wavin’ their flags, but they’ll get tired of it sooner or later. Then they’ll drive back to the city in their gas-guzzling SUVs, satisfied they did what they could. That’ll leave just the people who live around here. They might take a bit longer to wear down, but once they realize how much money’s at stake, how many jobs are waiting for them…they’ll come around.” The angry edge to his smile was gone now, and he managed a little laugh under his breath. “And if they still want to put up a fight, we can always buy their support with more cash and drinks.”

The room was silent for a moment. Finally somebody said, “What about after?”

“What do you mean?”

“What about after we’re finished with the forest here? What then?”

Ceballo looked at the man as if he couldn’t believe someone could ask such a stupid question. “What’s your name?”

“Brian,” he said. “Brian McAteer.”

“And how long have you been with us?”

“Ten months…almost a year.”

“Well, Brian. When we’re done here, we’ll move somewhere else and do it all over again.” A pause. “It’s what we do.”

“Oh.” McAteer said the word like he understood, but the look on his face suggested he didn’t.

“Now,” Ceballo continued. “We just need to stick it out a few more days, a week at the most. By then all these people will be gone. After that, if everything goes well, we can probably start harvesting by the end of the month, maybe the next.”

He paused a moment to look around the room. “So who’s with me? Who’s for showing these bumpkins that Conservco loggers don’t scare easily, that we can give as good as we get, and then some?”

A couple of hands went up.