Last Cut at the Chainsaw Championship

• Chapter 1 The Whispering Pines Invitational
• Chapter 2 First Notch
• Chapter 3 Sawdust and Sap
• Chapter 4 Two-Stroke Tension
• Chapter 5 The Master's Block
• Chapter 6 Cold Steel, Red Cedar
• Chapter 7 Kickback
• Chapter 8 Carved in Blood
• Chapter 9 The Judges' Table
• Chapter 10 Blunted Blades
• Chapter 11 Rain on the Ridge
• Chapter 12 The Second Cut
• Chapter 13 Fuel and Flesh
• Chapter 14 Silent Engine
• Chapter 15 Timberline Secrets
• Chapter 16 A Chipped Tooth
• Chapter 17 The Sculpture Garden
• Chapter 18 Midnight Maintenance
• Chapter 19 Deep Grain
• Chapter 20 The Choke Lever
• Chapter 21 Splintered Alibis
• Chapter 22 The Speed Carve
• Chapter 23 Bark and Bone
• Chapter 24 The Finalist's Trap
• Chapter 25 Red Canopy
• Chapter 26 The Last Cut

The mountain highway narrowed until the yellow center line surrendered entirely to cracked asphalt and creeping moss. To an outsider, the Black Ridge looked like an unbroken ocean of Sitka spruce and western red cedar, dark green needles knitting together under a sky that had been threatening drizzle since breakfast. To Silas Vance, it looked like an oversized lumberyard that smelled of pine needles, wet stone, and unfinished business.

Silas eased his battered Ford F-250 around a hairpin turn, the truck’s transmission groaning in protest. In the flatbed behind him, bolted down beneath heavy waxed canvas, rode twelve thousand dollars’ worth of German engineering: two Stihl MS 661s for roughing out the meat of a trunk, four carving saws with narrow quarter-pitch dime tips for fine feathering, a shelf of flat-ground files, three spare bars, and two five-gallon cans of mixed fifty-to-one two-stroke fuel. It was everything he owned that mattered, along with a folding cot and a duffel bag that smelled exclusively of chain oil and woodsmoke.

A weathered cedar archway loomed over the gravel turnoff, carved into the likeness of two rearing grizzly bears whose snarls had softened over decades of winter rot. Below them, a banner of heavy vinyl flapped between the uprights: The 44th Annual Whispering Pines Invitational Chainsaw Carving Championship. Beneath the bold letters ran the local chamber of commerce slogan: Where the Timber Speaks.

"Timber doesn't speak," Silas muttered to the empty cab, clicking his blinker down. "It just falls where you drop it."

The tires crunched onto packed shale, and the smell hit him immediately through the open vent. It was the peculiar, intoxicating perfume of the craft: green wood sap bursting open under sharp teeth, scorched bar oil, exhaust from modified two-stroke engines running on high-octane avgas, and the fried dough of early-bird concession stands. It was a carnival with teeth, where fifty men and women spent four days turning eighty-foot logs into eagles, frontiersmen, and abstract forms using tools originally designed to take human limbs off in less than a second.

The fairgrounds occupied a bowl of cleared valley surrounded by sheer granite bluffs. A perimeter of chain-link fence kept the public from wandering into the spray of woodchips, and inside that fence, twenty-four concrete pads were laid out in a wide horseshoe. In the center of each pad stood an eight-foot monolith of old-growth western red cedar, each log three feet thick, freshly peeled of bark, wet and pale like stripped bone. The logs were numbered in bright orange lumber-crayon.

Silas parked near the staging sheds, killed the Ford's engine, and sat for a moment enjoying the silence before the valley turned into an open-air combustion chamber. He pulled a worn leather notebook from the dashboard, thumbing to the pencil sketch he’d spent three months refining: an osprey striking the surface of a mountain lake, talons extended, water bursting upward in jagged, frozen sheets. It was technically demanding, structurally precarious, and required boring out the belly of the log without cracking the heartwood. It was the kind of piece that won championships or ended up in the scrap pile as eighty cubic feet of very expensive firewood.

A sharp rap on his driver’s side glass made him jump.

Standing outside was Maren Cruz, chewing on a dried apricot and squinting down through amber safety glasses. She wore heavy Kevlar-lined chaps over faded Carhartts, her dark hair tucked tightly under an orange bandana. Over her shoulder hung a custom Husqvarna 550 XP, its exhaust port drilled out and polished to a mirror shine.

Silas rolled down the manual window. "You're late, Vance," she said around the fruit. "Draw for logs was twenty minutes ago. You drew number seventeen. Down on the south bend, right in the wind tunnel."

"Number seventeen is good," Silas said, stepping down onto the running board and stretching until his spine popped. "Wood’s from the lower drainage. Denser rings. Holds an edge better than the ridge-growth they put in the center slots."

"Always looking for an angle," Maren said, though she cracked a half-smile. She was thirty-two, five years younger than Silas, and had taken second place in the World Championships at Mullet Lake the previous summer. Her cuts were surgically clean, faster than most men half a foot taller than her, and she had an uncanny knack for reading grain rot before her bar even touched the bark. "You see the competition this year? Harlan didn't come. His shoulder finally gave out. But they brought in the Swede."

Silas reached into the truck bed, unhooking the first bungee cord from his tarpaulin. "Andersson?"

"Andersson," she confirmed, leaning against the truck's rear fender. "Brought an eight-man pit crew with him. They’ve got custom bars flown in from Osaka, ground to half-millimeter tolerances. He spent an hour walking the log line this morning tapping them with a brass hammer, listening to the pitch."

"Logs aren't tuning forks," Silas said dryly, lifting down his primary roughing saw. He set it on the tailgate with a metallic clatter. "They’re weeds that got out of hand. You cut the ugly parts away until what's left looks like something folks will pay ten grand for."

"Tell him that. He’s down on pad four wearing matching team jumpsuits. Makes us look like a bunch of woodcutters who took a wrong turn on the way to the pulp mill."

"We are woodcutters who took a wrong turn," Silas pointed out.

Across the field, the sound of a starter cord snapping broke the morning air. A saw fired with a sharp, screaming bark—a two-stroke engine tuned so tight it sounded more like an angry hornet than forestry equipment. The throttle blipped twice—wa-baaaap, wa-baaaap—a sharp blue puff of exhaust curling into the grey overcast, and then settled into an impatient, idling lope.

Silas looked over the bed of his truck toward pad number one.

Standing beside the first log was Arthur "Bull" Varner, sixty-eight years old, with forearms like cured hams and a gray beard stained yellowish-brown around the mouth from chewing tobacco. Varner was the elder statesman of the Whispering Pines, having won the Invitational back in the late seventies when competitors used heavy, vibrating Homelites that numbed a man’s fingers so thoroughly he couldn't hold a coffee cup for two days after the whistle. Varner didn't wear earplugs, which was why he shouted even when he was trying to whisper, and he viewed modern thin-kerf carving bars with the kind of open disgust usually reserved for timber poachers.

Varner killed the engine and set the saw down on a stump, wiping a greasy thumb down his canvas apron. Catching Silas’s eye, the old man gave a curt, downward nod—the universal logger's greeting that conveyed recognition without offering anything as careless as warmth.

"He's running that ancient Stihl 070," Maren noted quietly. "One hundred and six cubic centimeters of pure spinal compression. I don't know how his wrists haven't turned to gravel."

"Spite," Silas said. "Keeps the joints lubricated."

The crowd was already beginning to trickle past the ticket kiosks near the southern gates. In an hour, there would be two thousand spectators lining the bleachers and pressing against the ropes: retirees in folding camp chairs, tourists from Seattle in clean Gore-Tex jackets smelling of espresso, and old loggers who stood with their arms crossed over their chests, watching the bars with critical, narrowed eyes, waiting for someone to take a kickback to the shoulder or bind a chain in a hidden knot.

Near the center of the grounds stood the judges' platform, a raised timber deck shaded by a green canvas canopy.

Three figures sat behind the long table. In the center was Judge Thomas Cleary, a retired forester whose thick horn-rimmed glasses made him look perpetually startled. To his right sat Evelyn Ward, the regional arts council director who famously judged pieces not by their anatomical precision but by their "negative space," an evaluation metric that drove the traditional carvers into quiet rages. And on the left, looking bored and immaculate in an oiled-tin filson jacket, was Frank Rucker.

Rucker was the man who had bought up the Whispering Pines property three years ago. He was a timber broker from Spokane who saw the Invitational not as a traditional gathering of blue-collar artisans, but as a high-end marketing spectacle that could drive real estate values on the adjacent lakefront properties he was developing. Rucker had doubled the prize purse to fifty thousand dollars for first place, which had attracted foreign champions like Andersson, but he had also introduced corporate sponsorships, VIP tents, and a rules committee that issued penalties for spilled bar oil and unapproved safety equipment.

Silas watched Rucker lift a brass megaphone from the table. The tinny, amplified voice cut through the damp air, echoing off the rock faces of the valley.

"Attention, carvers. Ten minutes to initial safety inspections and log clearance. All stock must be stripped of loose bark and debris before the starter horn. Check your perimeter ropes. First cut begins promptly at nine o'clock."

"Here we go," Maren said, stepping back from the truck. "Good luck, Vance. Try not to carve your own boots this time."

"That was five years ago, Maren. And the leather was already torn."

"Keep telling yourself that." She turned and jogged toward pad eight, her saw swinging casually from her right hand like an extension of her forearm.

Silas gathered his tools, loading the four primary saws into a two-wheeled contractor's cart along with his fuel jug, tool roll, and fire extinguisher. He wheelbarrowed the kit down the gravel lane toward pad seventeen.

The cedar on seventeen was a massive, clean specimen, seven feet ten inches tall and forty inches across at the butt. The bark had already been removed with a drawknife by the prep crew, leaving the wet, silky surface of the sapwood exposed to the air. The wood had a fine, reddish-amber grain that twined upward with very little spiral twist—a prime piece of stock. Silas laid his palm flat against the cool wood. He could feel the residual dampness of the river valley in it. The heartwood at the center would be deep crimson, smelling like sweet tea and copper.

He unrolled his tool wrap on the work bench at the rear of the pad. Sockets, screwdrivers, a brass depth gauge, five spare Carlton chains soaking in a bath of mineral oil, and a small roll of electrical tape.

Two pads down, at pad fifteen, a man named Brody Miller was already kneeling beside his fuel can. Miller was a local boy from Forks, barely twenty-five, with wild red hair and an aggressive, frantic carving style that favored high speed and showmanship over clean layout. He was running a hot-rodded saw that sounded like a snowmobile, and he had three GoPros mounted to aluminum poles around his concrete pad.

"Hey, Silas," Miller called over, his voice cracked from yelling over engines. "You see the timber on Andersson's pad? They gave him a dry-stock cedar from the high basin. Bastard’s already got an advantage on shrinkage. His wood won't check half as bad as ours when the sun comes out."

"Sun's not coming out, Brody," Silas said, looking up at the solid gray deck of clouds pressing down on the ridge. "And if it does, keep a wet burlap sack over your end-grain. You worry about your own wood."

"Easy for you to say. You got an osprey in your head. I'm doing a six-foot logger wrestling a mountain lion. If this trunk checks down the middle, my logger’s gonna look like he got cut in half by an artillery shell."

"Then carve him faster," Silas said.

Brody gave a nervous, high-pitched laugh that died quickly as he turned back to his saw, yanking the spark plug boot off to inspect the gap with frantic fingers. The boy had ten thousand dollars of credit-card debt riding on this weekend's prize money, Silas knew. Everyone in the circuit knew everyone else's business. You couldn't sleep in the back of trucks thirty weekends a year in fairgrounds from Montana to Oregon without learning who was behind on their alimony, who was drinking too much kerosene-cut whiskey, and whose hands were beginning to tremble with vibration white-finger.

Silas knelt and checked the chain tension on his Stihl 661. He lifted the bar slightly, running a gloved thumb along the bottom edge of the guide. The drive links sat snug in the groove, snapping back with a dull clink against the steel when pulled. Perfect. Not too tight to bind the clutch, not loose enough to throw a link at twelve thousand RPM.

A shadow fell over his bench.

Silas didn't look up immediately. He finished tightening the two bar nuts with his scrench, giving the second one an extra eighth of a turn, before rising to his feet.

Frank Rucker stood at the edge of pad seventeen, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his expensive waxed jacket. Beside him was an older man Silas didn't recognize—short, squat, with a thick neck and a face that looked like it had been carved out of salt pork with a dull hatchet.

"Silas," Rucker said, showing teeth that were too white and straight for a man who claimed to have worked in the woods. "Looking ready. Pad seventeen treating you alright?"

"Wood's sound, Frank," Silas replied evenly, setting the wrench down on the canvas. "Rings are tight. No visible rot in the heart."

"Good, good. I want everything top-tier this year. We have a film crew coming in from Portland tomorrow afternoon for the local arts feature. High-definition cameras don't hide rough block-outs, Silas. Clean lines. That’s what the viewers want."

The stocky man beside Rucker didn't look at Silas; he was staring intently at the cedar log, his small, watery eyes tracing the line of a faint knot about five feet up from the base.

"Silas, this is Jacob Gidley," Rucker added, gesturing casually. "Gidley Timber out of Aberdeen. He supplied the logs for the southern tier this year."

Gidley didn't offer a hand. He just grunted, his gaze shifting slowly from the log to the rack of saws in Silas's cart. "You run Stihls," Gidley said. His voice was gravelly, like stones tumbling down a metal chute.

"Mostly," Silas said. "Some Huskies for the small stuff."

"Old iron," Gidley said, almost to himself. "Hard to control when the chain grabs a pitch pocket. You got to watch the kickback on these river trunks. They got stones washed up into the bark sometimes from the floods three years back. Dull a tooth right down to the rivet."

"I keep my eyes open," Silas said.

Gidley nodded once, an odd, mechanical movement, and turned away without another word, walking heavily toward the judges' pavilion.

Rucker lingered for a second, flashing another cold, professional smile. "Fifty grand, Silas. Life-changing money for an independent. Just keep the sawdust off the VIP bleachers when the wind shifts, will you?"

Silas didn't answer. He watched Rucker follow Gidley down the lane. There was something off about the timber broker's walk—a stiff, hurried gait that suggested he was managing a problem he hadn't put on the schedule.

The five-minute warning siren wailed—a low, mechanical howl that rose from the central pavilion and rolled across the field, silencing the hum of the spectators.

Around the horseshoe, twenty-four carvers reached for their hearing protection. Face shields came down, amber goggles clicked into place, and the heavy leather of work gloves creaked. The carnival atmosphere vanished, replaced instantly by the cold, metallic focus that preceded the block-out. The first four hours of an invitational were brutal, back-breaking labor: hogging off hundreds of pounds of wet wood with big-bore saws before the delicate shaping could even be contemplated. It was dangerous work; arms tired quickly, fatigue made fingers sloppy, and a ninety-cubic-centimeter saw running wide open didn't care whether it was cutting red cedar or human femurs.

Silas pulled his heavy muffs over his ears, deadening the world into a quiet, underwater hum. He pulled his safety glasses down over his eyes, checked the footing on his concrete pad, and grabbed the front handlebar of the big 661 with his left hand.

Across the lawn, Andersson on pad four was already crouched, his hands poised over the pull cord of his Japanese-tuned machine. Further down, Maren gave Silas a brief thumbs-up with a gloved hand. Varner was standing over his 070 like an executioner waiting for the trapdoor to drop.

A single red flare hissed upward from the judges' stand, arcing into the grey timberline above the valley.

The starter horn blew.

Instantly, the silence shattered. Twenty-four big-bore engines roared into life simultaneously, an explosive wall of sound that hit Silas in the chest like a physical blow. The air turned instantly blue with two-stroke smoke, sweet and sharp, drifting low across the damp grass.

Silas set the choke, planted his right boot through the rear handle, and pulled the cord once. The saw coughed. He flipped the choke off to half-throttle and pulled again.

The Stihl screamed to life, vibrating violently against his boot sole. He snatched the saw up by the handles, his left thumb hooking under the bar, his right index finger feathering the trigger. The engine settled into a ferocious, rhythmic scream that vibrated right through his chest and teeth.

He approached the seven-foot cedar log, eyes fixed on the pencil marks he’d notched into the rough bark at the top. The first cut was a forty-five-degree wedge from the crown—removing seventy pounds of head-weight to begin framing the wings of the osprey.

Silas lined the thirty-six-inch bar against the pale grain, leaned his weight into his front knee, and pulled the throttle wide open.

The spinning teeth bit into the cedar. A torrential rooster-tail of crimson shavings exploded from the exhaust port, showering over his boots and covering the pad in a thick, fragrant carpet of fresh pulp. Silas leaned into the cut, feeling the saw pull itself into the heart of the timber, the steel bar sinking out of sight into the ancient grain.

The Whispering Pines had begun, and the mountain was already screaming.

A chainsaw under load is an entirely different beast than one idling on the ground. When the chain bites wood at twelve thousand revolutions per minute, the machine wants to do two things: climb straight up out of the cut and break your thumbs, or drag you face-first into the spinning teeth. Silas Vance countered both tendencies with forty pounds of downward shoulder pressure, his boots locked onto the damp concrete.

The wood fought back. The Sitka spruce and hemlock of the coast were soft and stringy, but this high-valley red cedar had teeth of its own. It yielded under the cutter teeth with a wet, tearing hiss, throwing a continuous plume of coarse, damp ribbons against Silas’s leather apron. The vibration traveled up the bones of his forearms and settled into his collarbones, rattling his teeth in their gums. It was a familiar ache, almost comforting in its brutality.

Within twenty minutes, Silas had dropped the first three wedge cuts. Two massive blocks of heartwood thudded against the concrete, shaking the pad. Each block weighed at least sixty pounds, dark maroon in the center where the tannins were concentrated, fading out to a butter-colored sapwood near the periphery. He paused, killing the throttle to let the 661 drop to an idle. The sudden drop in pitch allowed the ambient cacophony of the valley back into his ears, muffled through the foam inserts and plastic muffs.

To his left, Brody Miller was attacking pad fifteen like a terrier shaking a rat. Brody had already notched out the rough shoulders of his logger, his cuts wild and over-deep, throwing showers of jagged splinters instead of clean shavings. Brody didn't clear his chips; they piled up around his work boots until he was standing calf-deep in cedar waste, his saw’s air intake sucking in stray sawdust. Silas shook his head slightly. A clogged intake meant an overheated cylinder, and an overheated cylinder meant a seized piston before noon. But Brody wasn't listening to engines; he was listening to the adrenaline singing in his own ears.

Across the lane, Andersson was working with the cold precision of an automated milling machine. The Swede stood tall, upright, barely bending his spine, letting the long, specialized Japanese bar sink through the cedar on its own weight. His pit crew stood outside his perimeter rope like track mechanics, one holding a stopwatch, another holding an air hose attached to a portable tank, ready to blow the dust from the fins of his machine the instant he stepped back.

Silas took a swig of tepid water from a plastic gallon jug, wiped his brow with the back of a greasy glove, and bent to inspect his lines.

The initial relief was taking shape. The heavy, blocky outline of the osprey’s folded wings was beginning to emerge from the upper third of the cylinder. The bird’s head would come out of the crown, angled downward toward the base where the cedar would flare out into the churning surface of the lake. The trick was the negative space beneath the belly. He had to bore straight through the center of the trunk—a plunge cut with the nose of the bar—without hitting an internal crack that could run the length of the log and split the whole thing into kind of kindling that wasn't worth twenty dollars at a roadside stand.

He laid a lumber crayon against the wood, checking his measurements against the notebook resting on his tool cart. Three inches to the left of center. The grain looked straight, but there was an odd discolored streak—a bluish, bruised tint in the sapwood—running diagonally down the north face of the log.

Silas touched the streak with his bare thumb. It felt oddly greasy, not like natural pitch, which was sticky and sweet. This had a faint chemical smell under the heavy perfume of the wood. Mineral strike, maybe. Sometimes trees growing near old logging roads sucked up dumped motor oil or hydraulic fluid through their root systems decades before they were ever felled. It made the wood brittle, like dry toast.

He picked up the Stihl, thumbed the kill switch to on, and gave the cord a firm, practiced heave. The saw roared instantly.

He moved around to the log’s rear quadrant, lining up for the horizontal back-cut that would free the rear bulk of the trunk and establish the sweep of the tail feathers. As he squeezed the trigger, bringing the chain up to screaming speed, a flash of movement beyond his perimeter tape caught his eye.

Jacob Gidley was standing by the equipment shed, watching pad seventeen.

The timber supplier hadn't moved back to the hospitality tent or joined the VIP spectators sipping cider on the bleachers. He stood beside a rack of industrial gas cylinders, thick arms crossed over his chest, his small eyes fixed directly on the spot where Silas was about to lay his bar. When Gidley saw Silas looking back at him, he didn't nod or turn away. He simply spat into the gravel and stepped backward into the shadow of the open shed doors, vanishing into the dim interior.

Silas narrowed his eyes behind his safety glasses. Log suppliers didn't usually hang around the carving pads once the chips started flying. Their job was done when the crane set the timber onto the concrete anchors. Once the logs were numbered and drawn, a supplier had no more skin in the game unless a block proved to have center-rot, which meant a five-hundred-dollar refund from the organizers.

The saw was idling down in his hands, burbling irregularly. Silas squeezed the throttle again, putting Gidley out of his head. Thinking about anything other than the tip of the bar was how men lost fingers.

He brought the nose of the bar against the wood at a thirty-degree angle, preparing to plunge. In a plunge cut, using the upper quadrant of the bar’s tip was suicide; that was the kickback zone, where the teeth grabbed the wood instead of cutting it, violently throwing the running saw back toward the operator’s face. You started with the bottom edge of the nose, carved a pocket, and then swung the saw level once the steel was buried.

The chain dug in. The saw bucked once, twice, then settled as Silas leaned the full weight of his hip against the rear handle.

Wood smoke, thin and white, drifted from the kerf. Silas backed the bar out an inch to let the oiler catch up. The bar was running hot. He reached down and cranked the auxiliary oiler screw on the Stihl's belly, giving the chain a double shot of vegetable-based lubricant, then shoved it back into the channel.

The bar sank six inches. Ten inches. Twelve.

Then the engine screamed, the RPMs skyrocketing as if the chain had suddenly hit open air, followed immediately by a sickening, metallic screech that tore through the engine noise like a knife through canvas.

The saw jerked sideways, ripping the front handlebar from Silas’s left hand.

Silas reacted on pure reflex honed over twenty years of brush-clearing: he threw his hands forward, locking his left wrist against the chain-brake paddle. The inertia brake slapped forward with a deafening clack, locking the chain around the guide bar in a fraction of a millisecond, even as the engine wailed against the stalled clutch before dying in a puff of acrid, gray smoke.

Silas stumbled back, his right boot catching on a mound of chips. He caught his balance against the metal edge of his tool bench, chest heaving, his heart hammering against his ribs like an air chisel.

Down the line, the other saws continued their unending roar, oblivious to the near-miss on pad seventeen. Brody was still hacking away; Maren was buried in a plunge cut on pad eight, throwing a rooster tail of sawdust twenty feet into the air.

Silas let the saw hang from his right hand, his left forearm tingling where the handlebar had whipped against the bone.

"Damn it," he whispered, spitting wood dust from his lips.

He approached the cedar trunk cautiously. A thin wisp of pungent, blue smoke was curling out of the horizontal plunge cut. It didn't smell like burning cedar; it smelled like toasted steel and molten zinc.

Silas unlatched the chain brake, took a flashlight from his tool cart, and clicked the beam into the three-inch-wide kerf.

Deep inside the cut, about nine inches into the heartwood, the wood wasn't red or amber. It was gray. Embedded across the grain, completely invisible from the outside of the bark-stripped log, was a piece of metal.

It wasn't a surveyor’s nail or an old piece of barbed wire grown over by seventy years of annual rings. Those left distinct blue-black tannin stains around the iron that any experienced woodsman could spot from ten feet away.

This was a three-quarter-inch threaded steel rod, freshly drilled and tapped horizontally into the center of the trunk, then sealed over with a plug of green cedar sapwood shaved down and glued flush with the exterior before the log had been peeled.

Silas felt a cold drop of sweat trickle down the back of his neck, cold despite the heat radiating from his engine.

A threaded rod at that depth wasn't an accident of history. If he had hit that rod at full throttle with a standard carving chain, the cutter teeth would have sheared off instantly. The chain could have snapped, whipping backward out of the casing like an iron whip, straight toward his chest. If the chain held, the kickback would have driven the powerhead straight up into his throat.

The only reason he hadn't taken the saw to the collarbone was because he’d been running a semi-chisel skip-chain with hardened rakers, and he had been feathering the plunge instead of shoving it home with his chest.

Silas set the dead saw down on the bench. He grabbed his scrench and backed off the bar nuts, sliding the side cover off.

The chain was ruined. Four consecutive cutter teeth on the top strand had been sheared clean down to the rivets, the steel edges curled back and blackened like burnt fingernails. The nose sprocket of his four-hundred-dollar Cannon carving bar was seized solid, a tiny shard of bright silver steel wedged tight between the roller bearings.

He looked over toward the staging sheds.

Jacob Gidley was no longer standing in the shadows. The space between the gas cylinders was empty.

Silas took off his safety glasses and rubbed his eyes. The Whispering Pines Invitational was cutthroat—there were plenty of old grudges on the circuit, men who had accused each other of doctoring timber, stealing layout designs, or sabotaging fuel jugs with sugar or water. Two years ago at the Idaho State Fair, someone had dumped fine lapping compound into an Oregon carver’s crankcase, turning his bearings to mush within ten minutes of the start.

But this wasn't sabotage meant to foul an engine or ruin a design.

A steel rod placed nine inches into a heartwood plunge was meant to kill a man, or at least take off half his face.

Silas walked around the back of his log, looking closely at the blue-tinted streak he had noticed earlier. Now that he knew what to look for, the deception was crude but effective. Someone had used an industrial auger to bore an inch-wide hole from the back of the trunk, slid the hardened steel rod inside, and then pounded in a cedar dowel made from green wood, shaving the face down with a rasp so the wet sap concealed the seam. The rain and the morning damp had swollen the plug, making it virtually seamless with the surrounding wood until the chain hit it.

"Silas!"

The voice came through the din. Silas turned to see Harlan Davies limping down the gravel lane between the pads. Harlan was seventy, his right shoulder permanently dropped two inches lower than his left from forty years of felling timber with heavy gear. His carving days were over, ended by a torn rotator cuff that surgery couldn't fix, but he was serving as the competition’s chief pit marshal this year, wearing a neon yellow safety vest over his flannel shirt.

Harlan stopped at the edge of pad seventeen, looking down at the pile of fresh shavings, then at the disassembled saw on Silas's bench.

"You're down early, Vance," Harlan shouted over the surrounding racket, his voice like gravel in a cement mixer. "You got a fuel clog already? Anders is already halfway through his rough-out. He’s dropping the flank pieces like he’s got an electric bread knife."

Silas didn't answer right away. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his pocketknife, and stepped to the back of the cedar. He drove the short blade into the center of the blue-tinted knot, twisted it, and popped out the remaining half-inch of the cedar dowel.

The flat, bright end of the threaded steel rod gleamed in the grey daylight.

Harlan blinked. He took two steps closer, bent his stiff back, and squinted at the exposed hole. His yellow-tinted safety glasses slid down his nose.

"What in the hell is that?" Harlan muttered, the noise of the neighboring saws suddenly fading into the background of his attention.

"Found it nine inches in," Silas said, keeping his voice level. "Took the teeth right off the Carlton chain. Locked the sprocket."

Harlan reached out with a scarred, calloused finger and touched the metal. "That ain't old fence wire. That’s machine stock. Grade eight, by the look of the hex head." He looked up at Silas, his old eyes widening under bushy grey brows. "That wasn't in this tree when it came down. The feller buncher would have felt that through the hydraulics."

"It was put in recently," Silas said. "The plug was green wood. The glue hasn't even fully cured yet. Smell it."

Harlan leaned down, sniffing the hole. "Polyurethane construction adhesive. Waterproof. Takes twenty-four hours to set." He stood up slowly, his face darkening with a sudden, deep anger that made the veins in his temple pulse against the weathered skin. "Someone spiked your block, Silas."

Spiking timber was an old eco-terrorist tactic from the eighties—driving spikes into trees in federal forests to prevent loggers from cutting them down. But this wasn't an old-growth protest. This was an eight-foot piece of show timber on a concrete pad in a closed competition.

"Who had access to the yard last night?" Silas asked.

"Nobody," Harlan said immediately. Then he stopped, his jaw working as he reconsidered. "Nobody from the public. The outer gates were chained at nine. We got two private guards from the security outfit in Shelton patrolling the perimeter fence. But the carvers... hell, half the carvers were back in the equipment barn until midnight swapping chains and drinking beer."

"And the supplier?"

"Gidley?" Harlan frowned, looking back toward the main pavilion. "Gidley brought the second load of logs in around seven yesterday evening on his lowboy. He said two of the butts on the first load were rotten, so he swapped them out. Pad seventeen was one of the replacements."

"Did he drop it alone?"

"He had a crane operator from the yard. Young kid named Toby." Harlan rubbed his chin, the gray stubble rasping under his hand. "Silas, if you'd hit that with a speed chain, running twelve thousand revs..."

"I know what would have happened, Harlan. The chain would've come back over the top handle."

Harlan turned toward the judges' stand. "We're shutting it down. I’m blowing the horn. We got to inspect every damned log on the line."

"No," Silas said, reaching out to catch the older man by the nylon sleeve of his safety vest.

Harlan stopped, glaring. "What do you mean, no? You think I'm gonna let twenty-three other guys swing big-bore saws into logs that might be packed with scrap iron? Brody Miller over there is running that hot-saw at fifteen thousand RPM. If he hits a bolt like that, it'll throw shrapnel into the bleachers!"

"Look at Brody's cut," Silas said calmly, pointing with the wrench.

Harlan looked. Brody was already four feet down into his cedar, his cuts wide, deep, and sloppy. He had carved away nearly half the volume of the log, throwing out huge chunks of clean, pale heartwood. There was no metal in Brody's log.

"Look at Maren," Silas continued. "She's hollowed out the belly of her eagle. She’s already six inches past where this rod was set. And Andersson's using a bar long enough to slice bread for a banquet. If their logs were spiked, they'd have hit them an hour ago."

Harlan stared at the shiny steel plug in the heart of log seventeen. "Then it’s just yours."

"It's just mine," Silas agreed. "Whoever did this didn't want to stop the Whispering Pines. They wanted to stop me."

"Why the hell would someone want to put you in the hospital, Vance? You don't owe money, do you?"

"No more than anyone else on this circuit."

"Then what is it? The fifty grand?"

"Maybe," Silas said. "Andersson's the favorite, but I took first at Sedro-Woolley last spring, and my sketch was on the bulletin board in the registration office all week. People knew I was doing a deep hollow-out. They knew I’d have to plunge the core."

Harlan spit onto the sawdust. "That's crazy. Nobody kills a man over a ribbon and fifty thousand dollars."

"People kill each other over a twenty-dollar watch in the parking lot behind the tavern, Harlan," Silas said softly. "Fifty thousand dollars buys a new truck, three years of timber leases, and keeps a shop open. For some of these guys, it’s the difference between carving for a living or going back to bucking scrap on a choker crew."

Harlan looked back at the metal rod, his lips pressed thin. "I still got to report it to Cleary. And Rucker. It’s on my watch."

"Tell them," Silas said. "Tell them log seventeen has an inclusion and I need a replacement. See what Rucker says."

"There are no replacements, Silas," Harlan said, his voice dropping. "That was the last of the thirty-six-inch stock. Gidley only brought twenty-four logs. If you can't carve this one, you're out of the main event. You'd have to drop down to the ninety-minute speed-carve on Sunday with the four-foot firewood logs."

Silas looked down at his ruined saw, then up at the massive pillar of cedar.

The osprey was still in there. The head and the upper arc of the right wing were already roughed out, clean and sharp against the morning sky. If he backed off now, whoever had spent forty minutes with an auger and a tube of construction adhesive had won without even having to smell sawdust.

"I don't need a replacement," Silas said.

"Silas, you can't carve through three-quarters of an inch of tempered steel," Harlan said, exasperated. "You'll throw every chain you own."

"Then I don't go through the center," Silas said. He picked up his pencil from the bench. He walked to the front of the log and struck a bold, dark line four inches to the left of his original layout, altering the angle of the osprey’s dive. Instead of striking straight down into the water, the bird would now be banking hard to the left, wings tucked, rolling away from an invisible predator. It was a more difficult composition, more dynamic, and it shifted the entire stress load of the sculpture onto a narrow two-inch bridge of sapwood near the rear.

It was risky. One bad cut and the bird’s wing would shear off under its own weight before the judges even saw it. But it avoided the steel rod by less than an inch.

Harlan watched the pencil move, his expression torn between professional admiration and sheer disbelief. "You're out of your mind, Vance. If you slip an eighth of an inch, that bar will find that bolt."

"Then I won't slip," Silas said. He reached into his cart, pulled out his backup saw—a slightly smaller Stihl MS 462 with a twenty-eight-inch bar—and checked the fuel level through the translucent tank. "Go talk to Rucker, Harlan. Ask him where Gidley went. Ask him why Gidley was standing by the shed watching my pad when the horn blew."

Harlan hesitated, then nodded once, his face set in hard lines. "I’ll talk to him. But Vance... keep that chain-brake adjusted tight. You hear me? If that bar bucks again, I don't want to be the one telling the coroner in Port Angeles that you were too stubborn to drop out."

"I hear you," Silas said.

Harlan turned and marched toward the main pavilion, his limp pronounced as he navigated the sea of woodchips drifting across the central aisle.

Silas set the 462 on the concrete. He pulled his leather gloves back on, his knuckles still sore from the recoil of the first saw.

Across the way, Brody Miller had finally noticed the silence from pad seventeen. The young carver stopped his machine, letting it drop to an idle, and pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. "Hey, Vance!" he yelled across the grass. "What happened? You throw a chain already? You look like you seen a ghost!"

"Just a hard knot, Brody," Silas called back.

"Told you that south timber was garbage!" Brody laughed, a shrill, nervous sound that was instantly drowned out as he snapped his goggles down and revved his hot-saw back into the meat of his wooden logger.

Silas didn't laugh. He looked back toward the timber shed.

The door to the back office of the staging barn was half-open. Inside the dark rectangle of the doorway, someone was watching. Silas couldn't see the face—the gloom of the unlit barn swallowed everything above the belt—but he could see the dull yellow reflection of a safety vest and the distinct, broad outline of a heavy man leaning against the doorframe.

The horn for the end of the first hour sounded—a short, brassy blast from the judges' platform.

Twenty-three carvers kept working without breaking rhythm. Silas set the choke on his backup saw, caught the starter handle with three fingers, and pulled.

The engine roared to life with a crisp, high-pitched crackle. Silas stepped up to the cedar, eyed the blue streak where the steel rod slept in the dark heart of the wood, and laid the spinning bar back against the timber, two inches to the left of death.