chased will always head for high ground. I don’t suppose someone like you has
ever wondered about that.”
“Never chased enough rabbits to notice that’s what they do.”
“Well it is. I could never make sense of it. One would think there’d be more
places for them to hide down low. Fallen trees, thick underbrush, and such. But
when you chase a rabbit, it always heads up. You can’t figure out why, unless you watch them long enough. A rabbit can outrun anything going up, but on a downhill slope I or even you could catch one. Reason is, its hind legs are much
longer than the front ones. That’s what gives it so much force when pushing itself up. But going downhill it gets all tangled up in itself. I’ve seen them flip
right over. You see, no one would know things like that, if men like me, with a
feel for the world and the intellect to understand it, didn’t sit out in the woods watching. People try to study animals in zoos, but you can’t learn anything with
them locked in a cage. It won’t be long before those professors over in Ann Arbor set up a faculty of the Life Sciences. They’re extremely interested in my
work.”
It occurred to her that she hadn’t been showing nearly enough enthusiasm.
She began stumbling through her first attempt at gratifying a male ego.
“Well, of course they’re interested. Those articles you write are so important.”
The words felt thick and sticky coming out of her mouth. No wonder she’d had
no gentleman callers. She had no idea how to talk to a man. First she insulted him by not showing enough interest in his work, and now she had probably
angered him by spewing empty flattery, as if he were a five-year-old showing her one of his drawings.
He surprised her by brightening, stopping to face her again, and saying, “I can
give you some of them to read.”
“That would be grand,” she said and changed the subject. “Before, when you
were talking about your land, you said that they’d be ready to start slaughtering
the trees. That sounds like a funny word to use.”
He turned back to the trail. “That’s what the loggers call it when they first come in, to cut off the valuable wood. I didn’t make up the word, but I do think
of it as a slaughter. They move in, strip the land bare, and move on. We need another president like old Andy Jackson, to put a stop to things like that.”
“My brother says we should be grateful to the lumber companies for giving
jobs to so many people.”
“They may provide men with employment, but it’s temporary, at slave wages,
and under dangerous conditions. Then they take all the money with them and
move on to the next mountain.”
“But you can’t farm with trees all over your land. I would love for someone to
come in and slaughter the trees on my land and then pay me for their trouble.
And people need the wood. We couldn’t build anything if we didn’t have the
lumber companies providing us with wood.”
“And making outrageous fortunes doing it. Look, I’m not saying they
shouldn’t make money, but I don’t think they are entitled to all of it. The trees
are there. The lumber companies did nothing to produce them. They make no
capital investment to justify the size of their profits. Some of that money should
stay with the people of the state. Those companies use the roads and bridges and
water lines the states build, and now all the states are skint, can’t even repair the
roads they have. Why shouldn’t the big loggers put money back in that pot?”
