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Corbett’s house. He had to laugh. Grubby, stoned, swaying like a loose road sign while cars blew by him, tossing his long hair. A new Pontiac with two young women in the front seat slowed down long enough to get a good look at him, then took off. What scared them? Doper? Axe murderer? Deportee? For the first time he’d felt ugly, conscious that he could be seen entirely different from how he saw himself. Across the road some kind of small trees ran up a hillside clearing like rows of young corn. Pulp saplings, he’d thought, spruce. Bands of Mi’kmaq Indians had torn up acres of them, Starr said, so a big pulpwood company couldn’t spray from the air to kill off hardwood, it’s useless for pulp. Spraying poisoned their springs, the Indians said. Brooks, game, the forest is not your farm, nota plantation, it has life you can see and life you can’t see. But the spray had come anyway, misting over the new woods from helicopters, carried beyond its targets by shifts of wind not officially predicted but which any local would have warned them about. All right, he’d seen Indians along the highway and had never met one, but here was something for the Mi’kmaqs. He charged up the hill, yanking out the young trees, flinging them about like carcasses until he noticed the soft needles in his hand: damn, these were pines, hundreds of them, meant for bubble lights and tin angels. He found a plastic garbage bag in the road ditch and began to work the roots out gently instead of ripping them up, setting each seedling into the bag. He did not intend them for anyone’s Christmas: he would plant them in the higher woods, a cover for his own crop of weed, an excuse to his uncle for going up there, if Starr should ever ask. Did his uncle even care what Innis did up there? The moonlight had made everything hard and still, the shadows of the tiny pines diminishing up the hill behind him. Another truck had finally given him a lift and the driver, tired in the dashboard light, kidded Innis about the sack that filled the cab with a smell of balsam and damp dirt. They got to talking about the Indians and the property owners who were fighting the herbicides, and the driver said, Listen to treehuggers and we’ll all be out of work. We’re out of it anyway, Innis said, trying to sound like a local, fellas like me. And what kind of fella are you? the man said. There’s always work for them that wants it. Innis just smiled. He had a plan now, something of his own. He’d leaned his head back on the seat and watched the dark stream of trees rushing by, the road parting like a dark sea these woods he would slowly get to know.
    Snow twirled powdery off the toolshed roof The distance between houses widened in the winter months, the year-round residents fewer now, some houses empty until summer. He hugged himself. Beside the back field ran the dark gulley, its trees bare and black as iron. He was still afraid of the woods at night, of going deep into them, he couldn’t shake that: when they turned dark, something powerful came into them, and he had never known it in a city. It was not menace, the way he felt in parts of Boston just driving through, places where he wouldn’t even walk because what might happen there was easily imaginable—mugging, beating, being chased down, hassled. But in the woods he felt things he didn’t understand: nothing to fear in the usual way, but something messed with his sense of what was real. Right now he wanted spring, a warm wind, color. The brook down there was hard as stone. Last fall seemed years away, that play of light and shadow where the hardwood canopies closed over him and he was glad to be lost. If you’ve lived a winter here, you know something about this place, Starr said, anybody can live a summer. Well, Innis knew the woods in winter, the mysterious tracks, the dry creak of wood in the wind—all had been welcome to his loneliness then, sheltering, the black trees at dusk like a drape across a