Nicky pedaled past the carved wooden head of a man adorned with a blond handlebar moustache and a horned Viking helmet. welcome to the norseman mill the sign beneath it read. She swerved to avoid ruts left by the truck, then skidded the bike to a stop at the main building.
Maybe Josie would announce herself and insist to the person behind the desk that she needed to see the owner. But she wasn’t her twin. She wheeled her bike along the side of the building, pausing at a door. Inside she could hear the chug and grind of machinery. Cigarette butts dotted the concrete. She leaned her bike against the metal siding and pulled open the door.
The smell of fresh-cut Christmas trees and the scream of saws greeted her. Blocks of wood that looked like large sticks of butter rattled their way through a chain of tracks and gears. She covered her ears and started scooting along the wall, trying to avoid getting too close to the machinery. Her boots left prints in the film of sawdust along the concrete.
“Hey, kid! What are you doing?” A heavyset man with a bandanna tied around his throat shot a lever and came toward her. He had a scraggly beard and a lump beneath his bottom lip. He spit into a Styrofoam cup as he approached, then flipped down a plastic shield to cover his face. “C’mon, kid. You shouldn’t be on the floor. Don’t you got a mask? Where’s your hard hat and safety glasses?”
“I want to see Lars,” Nicky shouted over the din. “Lars Ruger.”
“Lars? Hold up,” he said, squinting at her. “Aren’t you that kid who spoke the other night at the town hall? Cliff’s niece?”
“I’m Nicky Hall, not Josie. I’m her twin sister,” she said, holding out one of her curls. “See? No green hair.”
“I recognize you. You and your sister have no right telling us our business.”
“Is my uncle here?” she asked.
“Yeah, he’ll know what to do with you. Follow me. Just don’t touch nothing.”
He led her along a path that snaked through the equipment. She ducked beneath moving chains, watching as pieces of wood slid along the track above her.
On the other side, the floor opened up, and Nicky could see up to the sheet-metal roof of the building, which was supported by long wooden logs with the bark still attached. Uncle Cliff appeared at the top of a set of metal stairs. “Nicky!” he yelled over the noise. He met her on the stairs, and motioned for her to follow. He held the door to his office open, then shut it behind them. Instantly, the screech went away.
“Hey, love,” he said, giving her a quick hug. He smelled like diesel and wood sap. “Is your father here?”
“No. I biked.”
“You biked? That’s a long trip. What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
“I want to talk to Mr. Ruger,” she said. “About Sky River Valley.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Lars? Oh, I’m pretty sure he’s downtown now, trying to get people to vote. Is there something I can help you with?”
Nicky’s heart sank. She shifted in her chair and scanned the office, searching for something that might distract her, because she felt like crying. Her eyes landed on a carved swirl of wood, painted red and black. Not unlike the halibut carved into the yellow cedar in the lobby of town hall.
“Is that a whale?” she asked.
“It’s a killer whale,” Uncle Cliff said. “Orca in English. Kéet in Tlingit. Just like my Tlingit name.”
“Did you grow up speaking Tlingit?” Nicky asked.
He reclined in his chair, watching her. “My mother and her brother taught me,” he finally said. “She lived in what they called Indian Village in town. They had a government curfew when they were young. They both spoke Tlingit at home. Later they passed it on down.” He reached for a metal ball on his desk and rolled it smoothly in one hand.
“Clete said that his grandmother was sent off to a boarding school in town,” Nicky said. “He told me they punished her whenever she didn’t speak English.”
“That’s correct,” Uncle Cliff said. “They gave her what they called an education there. Strangely enough, my mother went on to become a teacher herself.” He set the metal ball back into its wooden holder. “Listen, Nicky. I’d show you around a bit, but we’re in the midst of cutting a shipment of wood before the logs from Sky River Valley start arriving. I wish I had known you were coming so I could have cleared my schedule.”
Nicky’s heart thrummed in her ears. “Did town vote to cut the trees?”
He watched her. “Not yet.”
She nodded, turning again to the killer whale carved into the yellow cedar. “What do you think your grandmother and her brother would have thought about Sky River Valley?” she said. “I mean, logging it. If they were alive today.”
Uncle Cliff’s smile vanished. “I think both of them would have been in favor of anything that would allow me to raise a family here on this island. That’s what I think.”
Sweat formed along her brow. Her pulse raced. She wasn’t like Josie. She didn’t like picking fights, and making adults angry. “When I came here today, Uncle Cliff, I just wanted to tell Lars that this is wrong. I mean, the whole thing is wrong. I know it’s the wrong thing.”
He shifted in his chair, glancing out the window onto the mill floor. “And how do you know this, Nicky?”
“I know this sounds crazy, Uncle Cliff. But I can hear the trees. That night when we came out to your island, it happened. Except then it was different. I touched a spruce, and it was like stepping behind a waterfall. I touched its bark and—”
“Did Clete take you up into Sky River Valley on Sunday?” he asked. He held her eyes, staring across the desk at her, not moving.
“Yes,” she answered.
He watched her coldly. “This ball here on my desk, you know where it’s from?”
She shook her head.
“The Russians,” he said. “From that man whose statue is outside of town hall. He shelled our island in October of 1804. My ancestors fought back, but the Russians were too strong. They kept firing on Shiskinoow, our fort of saplings, with their fourteen cannons until we had to abandon it. We marched to an island north of here. Then, after some time, we returned to Jackson Cove and built up Indian Village. Did you know that Russian Hill above town had its cannons pointed at Indian Village until 2003, when someone finally decided to point them at the ocean?”
Again, Nicky shook her head.
“I’ll tell you one thing my grandmother would never have believed: that Tlingits would be in offices like this, running these machines. That we would be the ones making the decisions about our land. We fought hard for this island, and we never gave up. When it was time for us to be patient, we were patient. When it was time to fight, we fought. We fought hard. No one tells us what to do.”
The power of his voice scared her. He rose and lifted a hard hat from his desk.
“C’mon. Whatever anyone says about you and your sister, or even my own son, you guys have put in your time to understand what’s happening in the forest. It’s time you understand what’s happening in this mill—especially if you’re biking all the way out the road, and your daddy’s going to work here.”
He turned a knob on the back of a hat and handed it to her, along with a set of safety glasses. “Wear these.” He opened the door to the scream of machinery, then closed it again. “And these,” he said, handing her a plastic package of orange earplugs. “Let’s go.”
Uncle Cliff led her through the maze of saws and equipment, and out another side door. They reached the far end of the building, where the logs had been deposited. He cupped his hands over his mouth and called something to a worker, then turned back to her.
“Okay. We’re about to process these logs. They just came off the barge from Prince of Wales Island, where we’ve been getting wood for the past couple years, because there’s nothing we’ve been able to cut on Shee. They’re going to be rolled into a chute, then chains will feed them into a ring. This here’s what we call the primary breakdown, where the trees get made into what we call cants. First order of business is stripping the bark.”
Nicky watched as the logs were fed into a circle, which reminded her of a big pencil sharpener. A blur of knives peeled bark from the log.
“From there the headsaw cuts the stick to length. That’s the big spinning saw, what we call the Wheel of Fortune, if you kids even watch that show anymore. Slices it like warm butter.”
The saw lurched forward. A knot of nausea formed in her stomach as it cut into the thick log. The split pieces wobbled on the track as the metal receded.
“Bingo,” Uncle Cliff said. “Once the log’s debarked and cut to length, it goes inside. From there, anything can happen, depending on what we type into the computer. We’re lucky to have a big mill, and a big floor, so we can change gears easily.”
Nicky stood in place, watching a second spruce tree enter the debarker, the whir of blades tearing the skin from the tree. Once more the log advanced, the saw ticking forward, the chains making the sound of a roller coaster chugging uphill. The knot in her stomach loosened as the round blade dove in, the log jerking as it was split to length.
Her uncle ran his fingers over his mouth.
“Do you know that trees can feel pain?” she asked.
“I did not know that,” he answered without a smirk.
“It’s true,” she insisted. “I mean, they don’t have nerves like humans. But when a tree is cut it sends a bunch of electrical signals. The cut reacts in the same way wounded human tissue reacts.”
“You’re telling me these trees are feeling everything that’s happening to them?” he asked.
“They’re already dead. But when you cut them down, yes.”
“Hmm. I guess that would make me an accomplice. Or maybe the perpetrator. A murderer of trees. Then what we’re doing here at the mill is butchering.”
“Yes,” Nicky said, thinking about it.
“C’mon,” he said, easing through a door at the end of the building. “Let’s go back inside and see the green chain.”
“If town votes yes today, when will the trees from Sky River Valley be cut?” Nicky asked.
“We’re setting up operations now. If the vote goes our way, and it looks like it will, then we’ll start bringing out equipment tomorrow. Set up a tent. Start punching through with a road. Probably get our first logs Wednesday. You know, knock on wood,” he said, grinning. “We actually don’t want to be cutting before it gets cold, because sap in the trees makes the logs rot quicker.”
Nicky’s mind raced. Tomorrow, starting at the trailhead where she and Clete first entered the valley, they’d start building a road. Punching through.
Clamps gasped as they secured the logs at either end, holding down the trees as a vertical saw rolled forward, lopping off the sides. What had been recognizable as a log before was reduced to a golden bar. The bar was dumped into a chute leading to a pair of twin blades that sliced it into smaller pieces.
“You remember when your dad and I built his guitar shop out back in Danville?” Cliff asked. “That’s about what we were using, pieces like that. Then the wood travels to the sanding house, where its edges get smoothed out, and it’s ready for packing.”
They walked alongside a track lined with slabs of wood moving toward a smaller house. Nicky reached out to touch one. She could still feel the heat in its fibers, and the roughness left by the teeth of the blades.
“That’s about that,” Uncle Cliff said. “The wood gets put on a pallet and barged down south. People make fences out of it, door jambs, flooring. Homes, and guitar shops, like your dad and I built. Make you any prouder to have your daddy working at the mill?”
Nicky didn’t know what to say. It felt like the trip she had taken in elementary school to the pig farm in Elysburg, where she had watched pigs get ushered into a room they wouldn’t come out of. She was witnessing what the adults would call a sad but necessary part of life: death.
“Nicky, I know this feels like the end of the world,” he said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “But it’s not. I promise you. It’s not. There are good people working out here, including your father. I know you and your sister are angry because of the valley. But life goes on. We need to live with our decisions and wake up another day to confront the world.”
“You sound like my mom,” Nicky said as they reached the stairs leading back up to his office.
“That’s a great compliment to me,” Uncle Cliff said. “Your mother was special, about as great as they come.”
Nicky nodded her agreement, and she reached up to hug Uncle Cliff.
“Thanks for the tour,” she said.
“Thanks for biking out here,” he said. “Hey Nicky,” he said as she started toward the stairs.
“What?”
“Don’t give up.”
She smiled, momentarily confused. Was she telling him to continue to fight?
Before she could say anything, he waved, and shut the door behind him.