Doug trot up the incline. At the roar of a chain saw, she tugs his arm. One snarling machine sets off another. Soon a chorus of gas-powered rippers screams through the woods. The loggers swing their machines lazily, laconically. Reapers with scythes.
Douglas stops. “Are they fucking nuts?”
“It’s theater. No one’s going to chain-saw an unarmed human being.” But as Mimi speaks the words, the driver of a loader with two women handcuffed to it kicks his rig into gear and drags them alongside. The protesters scream in disbelief.
The loggers turn their attention from the hostage Cat. They set to work on a stand of grand fir, threatening to drop the trees into the midst of the handcuffed slackers. Doug mutters and tears free. Before Mimi can react, he’s running toward the unraveling action, rucksack in tow. He wades into the fray like a setter into the surf, dashing among the protesters, gripping one man then another by the shoulder. He points at the hand-fellers descending on the firs. “Get as many people as we can up into those trees.”
Someone shouts, “Where the hell are the police? They’re always here to break things up when we’re winning.”
“Okay,” Douglas barks. “Those trees are going to be history in ten minutes. Move!”
Before Mimi can reach him, he springs off, heading for a fir with a skirt of branches low enough to hop up into. Once he’s off the ground, the limbs are practically a ladder eighty feet straight up. Two dozen flagging protesters revive and take off after him. The loggers see what’s happening on their flanks. They pursue, as fast as their nail-soled caulks allow.
The first few protesters reach the stand and scramble up into the foliage. Mimi spots a fir with branches even she can reach. She’s twenty feet from the trunk when something vicious clips her legs. She falls headlong into a patch of devil’s club. Her shoulder hits a lichen-covered stone and bounces. Something heavy camps on the back of her calves. Douglas, from thirty feet up his tree, shrieks at her assailant. “I’ll kill you, so help me God. I’ll tear your head from your cretin neck.”
The man sitting on the back of Mimi’s knees drawls, “You’re gonna have to come down for that, aren’t you?”
Mimi spits mud from her mouth. Her assailant grinds his shins into the back of her thighs. She yells, despite herself. Doug scrambles down a branch. “No!” she shouts. “Stay!”
A few tackled demonstrators lie on the ground. But some reach the trees and swing up into the branches. There, they keep their pursuers at bay. Shoes win out over reaching fingers.
Mimi moans, “Get off me.”
The logger who pins her wavers. His side is outnumbered, and he’s tied down, restraining an Asian woman too small to climb anything bigger than a shrub. “Promise to stay down.”
The civility stuns her. “If your company kept your promises, this wouldn’t be happening.”
“Promise.”
Nothing but flimsy oaths, binding every living thing. She promises. The logger springs up and rejoins his stymied side. The loggers huddle up, trying to salvage the situation. They can’t cut the firs without killing someone.
Mimi spies Douglas in his tree. She has seen that tree before. It takes her too long to recognize: the tree in the background behind the third arhat, in her father’s scroll. The loggers start up their saws again. They wave them in simplifying swipes through the air, cutting scrub, stacking it in fall zones in front of the firs. One of the fellers makes an undercut in a big tree. Mimi watches, too stupefied to cry out. They mean to bring it down through the branches of a squatter’s tree. The great fir cracks, and Mimi screams. She shuts her eyes to a tremendous crash. She opens them on downed timber tearing through the grove. The squatter clings to his mast, moaning in terror.
Douglas rains abuse down on the cutters. “Have you lost your damn minds? You could kill him.”
The crew boss shouts, “You’re trespassing.” The fellers prepare a new fall zone. Someone produces bolt cutters and starts clipping through the handcuffs of the Cat-chained protesters like he’s pruning a dogwood. Scuffles break out across the clearing; the luxury of nonviolence is over. In the fir grove, a feller tips his saw into the butter of the next doomed fir, aiming to drop it three feet from another squatter’s tree. The target squatter’s screams are lost over the saws, lost to the loggers, with their padded earmuffs. But they see