A girl called Trillium shouts, “We’re just trying to protect a good thing.”

“Why don’t you protect what belongs to you, and let us protect our jobs and our family and our own mountains and our way of life?”

“The trees don’t belong to anyone,” Doug-fir says. “The trees belong to the forest.”

The passenger door opens, and the older man gets out. He walks around the front of the cab. Once, in another life, long ago, Adam took a seminar in the psychology of crisis and confrontation. Now he remembers nothing. The man is tall but stooped, gray hair falling in his face. He’s like a big grizzly pitching forward on his hind legs. Something flashes at the man’s wrist. Adam thinks: Gun. Knife. Run.

The old guy reaches the front left bumper and lifts the metal weapon. But the threat is soft, philosophical, perplexed, and the weapon only a metal hand. “I lost my arm at the elbow, cutting those trees.”

The heartthrob calls from the cab, “And I’ve got white finger, from working. You heard of working, haven’t you? Doing things other people need to have done?”

The old guy rests his good hand on the hood and shakes his head. “What do you people want? We can’t stop using wood.”

Maidenhair appears, walking through the drawbridge toward the men. The upright grizzly takes a step back. She says, “We don’t know what people can and can’t do. So little has been tried!”

The look of her sets the goateed driver on every kind of high alert. “You can’t put wood above the lives of decent people.” He’s stunned; he wants her. That much is clear to Adam a hundred yards away.

“We don’t,” she says. “We don’t put trees above people. People and trees are in this together.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“If people knew what went into making trees, they would be so, so thankful for the sacrifice. And thankful people don’t need as much.” She talks to the men for a while. She says, “We need to stop being visitors here. We need to live where we live, to become indigenous again.”