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but became lost in the trees. She screamed and clung to him, begging him to save her, but suddenly they reached a drop-off and could run no farther. Rob paused and looked up into the sun. And, directly from the center of it, a spear came searing down at him.
    Rob awoke panting. His body was bathed in sweat. He rose on trembling legs and pulled the curtains, to shut out the moonlight. But the moon was so bright he could still see it’s shape through the curtains. Returning to bed, he managed to close his eyes again, and this time fall into dreamless, exhausted slumber.
     
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    The same moon that lighted Robert Vern’s bedroom shone down on the Manatee Forest, gently illuminating the tops of the endless expanse of trees. The wind was warm, rustling the surfaces of the lakes, creating tapestries of glittering sequins from the reflection of the moon.
    From the time of the planet’s creation until now, this three-hundred-square-mile plot of earth had been allowed to remain as God meant it to be. The morning sun still filtered through the trees, given definition as clear as laser beams by the fog; the towering black spruce and red balsam still spiked a mountainous skyline. Dawn still came with the discordant orchestration of loons, dusk with the faintly drumrolling wing-beats of the ruffled grouse. And darkness was still punctuated with the sudden and unexpected cry.
    It was the place where the Manatee River flowed into the Espee, creating a watershed known to the Masaquoddy, Ashinabeg, and Wampanoag Indians by sixty different names. All of them describing the bountiful life that existed within.
    But in recent years, the Indian names had given way to others. The largest body of water, the lake with a small island in its center, once known as Lake Waba-goon was now called Mary’s Lake, named for the wife of Morris Pitney, an industrialist from Georgia who’d come in 1930 and founded the Pitnev Paper Mill on the shores of the swift-running Espee River. The pond
     
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    once called Talak’tah was now listed on Forest Service relief maps as Flat-iron Pond because it reminded Mary Pitney of the steam iron she pressed her husband’s pants with.
    The Pitneys were dead now, but their imprint on the landscape was permanent. The Pitney Paper Mill, now passed into other hands, had grown on the charts of stockbrokers and Wall Street economists into a corporate conglomerate, one of five absentee landlords who owned over half the land in Maine and looked upon its forests as a cash crop waiting to be harvested. The towering pines that were once called by the names of Indian ancestors, each one considered an individual personage, had now been counted and measured, classified by size and weight, and labeled with price tags.
    The major products of the Pitney Paper Mill were wrapping paper, disposable grocery bags, and toilet tissue. For the latter product, and the noxious fumes that hovered along a three-mile section of the Espee River, the Indians referred to the paper mill as D’hanat Y’oah ‘tha. The Farting Giant.
    Unlike the Indians of the American Western Plains, the American Forest Indians had been a passive people, conditioned perhaps by the gentleness of their environment to accept changes within their lives and to accommodate trespassers who came to live within their borders. Thus the small tribes of Masaquoddy, Ashinabeg, Yurok, and Wampanoag were content to give the paper mill its small share of the massive forest. As long as they gave wide berth to the lumberjacks with their trucks and chain saws, the two civilizations lived separate lives, occasionally crossing each other’s paths, gazing at one another with nothing more than curiosity. The lumberjacks felled trees and processed them into pulp; the Indians netted salmon and dried them in the sun. It seemed there was little connection between the two.
    When the once benign temperament of these Indians began undergoing an insidious psychological