But then this giant wrench in the works had come along…

He had his brother’s wife locked up in his cabin-a brother who thought he was dead.

Hell, Carlos might even believe his wife was now dead, if they didn’t do too much investigation around the wreckage-at least until spring, when the way down the ravine was less treacherous.

We’ve got until spring, he told himself, swinging the maul again, aiming far past the point of impact, as if the top half-foot of wood didn’t even exist. The result was a fine, resounding split, the wood flying apart, the wedge of the maul separating it cleanly. His father had taught him never to split wood with an ax. A maul did the job best, and a dull one at that. A sharp maul was no good to anyone-it just got stuck in the wood.

Silas swung again, thinking about his father, gone too many years now. The old man had taught them both all of the same things. He and Carlos had grown up side by side, their mother a distant, warm, sad memory from the time Silas was about six and Carlos fifteen. Maybe the old man had spent more time with his younger son, teaching him to set traps and track and hunt.

Carlos had been doing older-boy things by then, dating girls and asking for the keys to the truck all the time. Perhaps the experience of their childhoods had been more different than he realized, Silas thought.

But the old man had done the right thing, the smart thing, when he finally succumbed to the cancer eating away at his esophagus-too many years of chewing tobacco, something Silas would never do-putting provisions in his will that one son receive all the land, the other son all the money. It was supposed to get them to work together, Silas was sure, although perhaps his father had known that was an improbability. Silas had been outspoken about the rape of the natural world taking place in the logging camps and strip mines, and had made it pretty clear what he would do if he got his hands on the land.