Their meager lunch wrapped in flour sacking sailed out of the bucket and disappeared in the drifts, leaving only craters on the surface. Jacob stopped and looked over his shoulder as Simon flailed in the snow.

“Miikaan gimiijiminaan,” he said.

He continued and Simon looked after him as he made that human road on top of the snow that the next day or the day after would be pocked with the tracks of deer trying to use it but failing. Only fox, light under the flame of their fur, could coast on it, leaving the faint impression of their feet like rose petals.

Simon removed his snowshoes and stuck them tail-first in the snow. He wiped at the powder above their buried lunch parcels with his bare hands until he found them, like frozen jewels, and set each on the packed trail. Once he had found them all, he placed them back in the pail and rolled onto the snow pack, careful not to bring his full weight to bear on any one point. He set the shoes side by side on the crust and stepped onto them and with a numb finger stretched the rubber tubing around his ankles. Brushing the snow from his clothes, he lifted the bucket and moved forward, sweating under the rough wool of his coat.

His father’s trail snaked past the bouquets of dead diamond willow and elm, a level plane stamped on the surface of the snow crosshatched like beaver tails. Ahead he saw the churned-up snow where Jacob had stamped the crowns of hazel brush flat as he left the swamp and made to higher ground.

Simon heard his father cough, and as he rounded the skirt of the hill saw his father springing loose the coiled metal blade and testing the teeth with his wide callused thumb. Once he was satisfied that it was sharp enough, he took an oil-soaked rag from his pocket and oiled the blade so it wouldn’t catch and bite as the resin in the trees heated up. Simon trudged to his father’s side, sighed, and set the bucket carefully on a stump upwind of the section they would be cutting. Without stopping Jacob glanced down at him, a play of a smile on his kissing-thick lips.

“Good job,” he said.

Once the saw was ready, Jacob and Simon tramped a circuit around the first twenty trees they would cut, unstrapped their snowshoes and stuck them like crosses in the snow. Jacob gauged the wind again, circled until he stopped in the right place and, with Simon hanging on the other end of the saw, shunted it back and forth loosely. The chalky outer layers crumbled away to reveal the green inner bark. Jacob stopped and checked to see if the cut was at the correct angle, nodded to himself and they began to saw in earnest.