The cops screamed into the parking lot. They had their shotguns poking out the windows before they even stopped. Five or six cruisers. Blue uniforms and neat ties and shiny brass. They’d taken their hats off. They had shiny sunglasses. You could tell that they were itching to shoot somebody, now that they’d locked and loaded. The black guy was leaning against the car, heaving. I knew I wouldn’t get to finish my beer. I heard them shuck their pumps. I raised my hands and my beer. I pointed to Miss Sheila.

“She did it,” I said.

The Crying

It was old timber, good, heavy timber, some of the best left in the land. There was enough of a canopy in the tops to keep the sunlight blocked and prevent the undergrowth from taking over, and I’ll tell you that’s something rare in this day and time. The floor was so clean you had shooting lanes anywhere you wanted to look, and it was easy to see any movement in all that open space of dead leaves. I was lucky to be able to hunt on it. I knew it might not last much longer. Not that you can blame people for wanting to sell land and make money, or for getting old and in bad health and unable to pay the taxes on it. You just hate to see it leave, because you know that particular forest will never be back. It takes a hundred years to grow a forest like the one we had. And Weyerhauser and U.S. Plywood and Georgia-Pacific don’t want hardwoods anyway. They want pine trees about twenty years old, for more lumber for more houses for more people to spend their lives paying for. They can grow five of those forests in a hundred years. But when the logging crews come into untouched area like that, with their long-bar saws and dozers and skidders and trucks, it’s an awful thing to see.

We had a five-year lease. All written down on paper and typed up in a lawyer’s office, all duly signed by all involved parties, the money paid. It was safe, at least for a while. We didn’t know what we’d do if Mr. Barlow upped the ante the next time around. We were all getting to the age where we had to start thinking about things besides deer hunting, things like college educations and car insurance for the teenaged boys, additions on our homes. Our sons were growing up, you see. That was the kicker. We hadn’t leased all that land just for ourselves. We’d leased it for our boys, too.