Except with Deirdre in the lead, it was more like a run. Ben did his best to keep up, tripping over bramble, letting branches sweep across his face. They yelled for Deirdre to stop, slow down, but she wasn’t listening. She was unrestrained, uncontrollable. She was going to meet a new old friend and there was no holding her back.
Until at last they arrived.
“No,” Deirdre said, almost under her breath.
Ben was well behind her. He kept running, huffing and puffing, holding the stitch in his side, till he finally arrived at the point where Deirdre had frozen in her tracks.
“No,” he echoed, when he saw what she saw.
“Oh, God,” Maureen said, pulling up behind them. “Oh, please God, no.”
The tree was gone. That tree and all its companion trees-gone.
The clear-cutters had moved in, just that morning, from all appearances. But they had been busy As usual, they started work with the largest and therefore most profitable trees, then moved outward in concentric circles, taking all the rest. There were four tree cutters working the area, systematically using their huge mechanical arms to grip and slice one enormous trunk after another.
In the space of a few hours, more than two hundred trees had been leveled.
“No!” Deirdre screamed. She ran forward, weaving between the cutting machines and fallen branches. Like a pigeon homing in on an old companion, she led them directly to the spot.
The tree was now nothing but a stump, flattened, less than a foot off the ground.
“My God!” Deirdre cried. Her face was wet with tears. “He’s been here since before Columbus.” There was a catch in her throat, like something was being ripped out of her insides. “Before Columbus!”
Ben didn’t know what to say. There were no words to express what he was feeling, much less anything that would be of any comfort to Deirdre. Instead, he simply stared at the flattened remains of that once-great cedar, and the remains of all the other immense cedars surrounding it, on and on, around and around, as far as he could see-the remnants of hundreds of lives that had survived for hundreds upon hundreds of years, only to be destroyed in a single morning.