“I did this,” Ed said. “Cut it eight years back.” He gestured upward. “It goes way up, between these two hills.”

“How many acres are there?”

“To Haudenosaunee? Two hundred fifty thousand.”

Russ whistled.

“Ayeah. It’s been my primary harvesting area for a good ten years now. Used to cut in forest that was close enough to make it easy to get to, up past Tenant’s Mountain, but Global Wood Products bought it up a decade ago. We’d leased the yearly rights from Haudenosaunee, from way back when it was my daddy and old Mr. van der Hoeven. When I was younger, I didn’t understand why my dad didn’t do more in these woods, since he paid for the license. But as one piece of land and then another shut down to timbering, I was grateful he’d held this place close to his pocket.”

“Isn’t the company that’s buying the land for the conservancy GWP, Inc.? Is that Global Wood Products?”

“It’s their American subsidiary. All these big foreign companies got themselves an American subsidiary these days.”

“So why aren’t they harvesting the timber themselves?”

“Oh, they may some time in the future. Right now, it’s more valuable as a tax write-off to them. It works like this, see. If you’re the owner, you pay six, seven dollars an acre on these woodlands in property tax. That’s sumpin’ like two hundred thousand dollars a year for Haudenosaunee. And the owner pays that whether he’s taking timber from the holding, or building vacation homes, or just sitting on it watchin’ the leaves fall. The Adirondack Conservancy Corporation loves getting their hands on great big tracts of land like this one. But they’re hard-put to buy ’em, unless the owners can afford to give ’em a break on the price. So the ACC teams up with a business like Global Wood Products. The business buys the land and gives the conservancy the development rights to it. GWP takes a big yearly tax writeoff, and the conservancy gets to save the woods from guys like me, as they’d say.”