They both saw at once that it was going in the wrong direction because of the twist, or maybe a lick of wind wound its way through the bare branches above their heads. They gauged its fall and stepped away from it to watch as it gathered speed. The outer branches caught in those of the trees surrounding its upwind side and it spun away from them. With a scrunching slide the forked upper branches caught in the rough-barked limbs of a jack pine and the tree groaned and popped and hung there twenty feet above the ground. The sounds died down again and Jacob and Simon stood motionless, steaming into the chill, as a slight wind began and the uncut trees swayed and scraped one another, singing out where they grew too close together.

Jacob leaned the saw against one of the trees and set the ax next to it with the head up so it wouldn’t rust in the snow and pulled off his gloves to reach into the hip pocket of his wool pants for his tobacco pouch and starchy five-cent rolling papers. Simon shuffled over to him and sat on the stump. Jacob didn’t look at his hands while he rolled the cigarette between the cups of his palms, straightening and flattening it with his thumbs, strong and shallow like small boats. He didn’t look at the result of his work when he tucked the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and rummaged again in the welted wool for a match.

Instead, he kept looking at the deadly embrace of the trees, the angles and lines of force, and tried to conjure the proper attack which would send the poplar groundward and keep the two of them out of danger.

He puffed and Simon sat patiently picking out kernels of snow from the folds of his pants, secured by the cold like burrs in a dog’s coat. Jacob held his gloves in one hand, the cigarette smoking yellowly in the other, while he paced around the tangled trees. Simon stayed seated.

The wind knackled the upper branches together, and Simon and Jacob heard the dickering of red squirrels who imagined the falling branches into formless predators. They blustered and chattered from short perches at a danger they could not see. Jacob continued pacing and reached out with his gloved hand to touch the gnarled trunk of the jack pine, as if he could feel through the cold-brittle bark, into the waved grain, as if in there, there was an answer to which way it would fall when he tried to free it.