“I don’t think he’ll be back,” I said. “But I need work.”

“Any experience?” he asked.

“Landscaping, tree planting, firefighting, flagging, clearing debris. I’ve taken down my share of trees,” I said. “And I have a college degree.”

“Oh my,” Rudy said. “Slumming it with the hill folk.” He knelt and began to oil his saw, judiciously dripping it from an unmarked plastic bottle.

“I’m saving money to go back to Seattle,” I said.

“What did you go to college for?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Sounds like you got scammed,” he said. “Do you know your knots?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

“I’ll probably yell at you. It’s not that I’m proud of it, but that’s just how I am.”

“If you yell at me, I’ll walk off the job,” I said.

Rudy screwed the lid back on the bottle of chain oil and stood up. He wiped his hands on his shirt. He pulled wood chips from his beard. Coarse red hair crept from his cuffs and his collar, laced with sawdust. He reached in and scratched. “Might as well start today,” he said. “It doesn’t appear that you have anything better to do.” I stashed my bike. He handed me a hard hat.

While I watched, Rudy set his climb line on another yellow pine, and strapped on his spurs. Then he threw his body upward, making his way up the tree by launching himself up into the air, an eel, gaining inch by inch up the rope. He moved as a current, sending his Blake’s hitch up ahead of him, until he reached the lower branches, twenty feet up. Then he dug his spurs in, hugged the trunk like a bear cub, and went higher, using the small handsaw in his holster to cut twigs and small branches out of his way. Finally, he looked down at me. “Turn a quick-hitch on my climb line and send me up the Echo for limbing,” he called. So I sent him up the little saw. I tied on the bull rope, and he hoisted it up. “Come-along’s hooked onto a cherry tree,” he said, swinging in his harness and pointing into the woods. I took the highway of a fallen pine and found it.