There were blood smears on her father’s SUV. The Explorer was blocking the driveway, an anodized rack mounted over its back door. It looked like any other bike carrier, except that this rack was stained with red and crusting blotches that spattered a trail up the drive toward the detached garage. Looked like he got his buck this year. Becky stepped carefully as she crossed to the front steps. Her mother would have her hide if she tracked blood onto the floor. She checked the bottom of her boots and scraped them hard on the brushy doormat before opening the door.

“Hey,” she called. “Anybody home? Mom?”

The small downstairs was deserted. She walked through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. She could hear an electric whine. “Dad?” she shouted.

“Around here,” came an answering yell.

Becky clattered down the back steps and followed the sound around the edge of the garage. The coppery smell of blood nearly overwhelmed her. Her father had the deer hanging upside down from a metal bar chained to a rough wooden frame. Its gut was slit stem to stern, and its hind legs, which were spread wide and clamped to the bar, glistened in the cold sunlight. They had been skinned and cut off below the joint.

“Eugh! Dad, what are you doing?”

Her father paused from sawing straight into the buck’s crotch. “I’m skinning out my deer.” He was wearing baggy coveralls that looked like the aftermath of a terrible fight-all bruise-yellow, greasy grime, and blood. “Then, after he’s hung for a few days, I’m gonna butcher him.”

Becky winced. “Can’t you get someone to do that for you?”

Her father turned, the hacksaw in his hand. He had that look on his face, the one that said, Goes off to a fancy college and she loses all common sense. “Sure I could. But I’m not about to spend good money paying someone to do what any fool with a knife and a saw can do.” He replaced the hacksaw on a strip of cardboard that was laid out like a serial killer’s surgical set, with two wicked knives and a pair of long-handled pruning shears.

“I expected to see you on your last legs, the way Bonnie was talking this morning. Shows what she knows.”

Ed worked his hands well into the hide near the deer’s hindquarters and began to peel the skin off the body. “Bonnie’s just worried about your mother and me.”

“And I’m not.”

“Didn’t say that, did I?”

“You don’t say a lot of things. You’ve barely spoken to me since I started working on the Haudenosaunee project.”

“That what you call it? A project?” The hide stuck. Ed tugged it, then reached for one of the knives. “So what are you doing here? I mean, besides giving me grief. Weren’t you supposed to be over to Haudenosaunee puttin’ chains across the roads so’s no one could get in tomorrow?”

“Nobody’s chaining up the roads, Dad. I was visiting the great camp with a contractor. I’m trying to get things in order, so that after GWP buys the land and signs it over to us tonight, the ACC will be ready to implement its vision as soon as possible.”

The words were barely out of her mouth before she wished them back. Sure enough, her father’s eyebrows rose, in an exaggeratedly impressed expression.

“Implement your vision. ’S that what you people at the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation call shutting down the timber harvest and throwing folks out of work?”

Becky felt her face flushing hot. “No, that’s what we call returning the land to its natural state.”

“This land’s been occupied three hundred years. More, if you count the Iroquois. What’s this natural state you think you can get it back to?”

She knew she wasn’t going to win this, but she wanted her dad, for once, to get at least part of what she was trying to do. “We’ll be taking down all the buildings. Volunteers will remove the alien plants and replace them with native species. The forest will have a chance to resume its natural life cycle, unmanaged by harvesting or planting.”

“Firetrap, that’s what you’ll get with no harvesting. Just like you get diseased herds if you don’t hunt the deer.” He sawed in and out with his knife. The hide sagged away from the raw flesh beneath it. “Your group really tearing down the Haudenosaunee buildings? I was up there this morning, you know. Didn’t look as if anyone was getting ready to move. What does Eugene van der Hoeven think about you putting the wrecking ball to his home?”

For a moment, Becky considered telling her father the whole story of this morning’s disastrous visit to Haudenosaunee. If she did, though, God alone knew how her dad would react. He might be mad at her for her role in closing off the land to logging, but that didn’t mean he’d take kindly to a nutcase threatening her with a gun. Her dad had always been overly protective of his girls.

“He’s not happy about it,” she said, truthfully enough. “But it’s not as if the ACC is tossing him out into the snow. Millie has arranged for him to move in with her, when she returns to Montana. He’ll be set for life with what he’ll make from GWP.”

Her dad circled the deer, his knife lolling in his hand. “It ain’t always about the money, Becks. I don’t know as Eugene van der Hoeven has left Haudenosaunee since he came back from the hospital, after the fire. That was, what, seventeen, eighteen years ago?” He grabbed the flopping white-and-brown tail, pulled it away from the body, and began hacking it off. “So you’re all done with your work for today, and the only thing left to do is go swanning off to the ball tonight, huh?”

“It’s a signing ceremony, Dad, not a ball. And no, I’m not done with my work today. That’s why I’m here.” She folded her arms across her chest and took a slow breath. She wanted to sound relaxed and authoritative, not like a girl asking to borrow the family car. “As you may know, after GWP transfers the rights to Haudenosaunee to the ACC, we’ll have the landowner’s responsibility for all preexisting conditions on the property.”

Ed’s knife cut more delicately now, as he teased the tail off. “You mean if one of them contractors of yours trips over a sticking-up board, he can sue you?” He tossed the tail onto the frost-scarred grass.

“Basically, yeah. But we’re thinking here of a particular liability. Your machinery.”

Her father straightened. “Whaddya mean, my machinery?”

“Didn’t you leave Castle Logging’s machinery near your cutting site when you shut down last spring?”

“Course I did. You know that. Why the hell should I pay a couple thousand to garage the skidders and pickers in some truck depot when I can keep ’em for free on the van der Ho-evens’ land? They’re on one of the access roads. They’re not in anybody’s way-any hikers come through, they can waltz right past ’em.”

“That’s just it, Dad. Anybody can reach them. And as of tomorrow, if your equipment is stolen or vandalized, you could conceivably hold the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation liable as landholder.”

He flung the knife into the earth. It stuck deep in the ground, quivering with a violence to match his voice.

“I could ‘conceivably hold’ you liable? What the hell kind of man do you think I am? I’ve stored my machines on Haudenosaunee land for more’n a decade without a single problem or a complaint from the van der Hoevens! I suppose you want me to move ’em all off the sacred property before sundown.”

“You may never have had a problem, and I hope you never do! But that won’t let us off the hook with our insurer if we don’t take care of the details. I’m not asking you to move the skidders. I just want an inventory of what’s on the land and some proof of your insurance.”

“To save your butts if somebody decides to blow up one of my trucks.”

“Cut me a break, Dad. This is for your protection as well as for the ACC’s. What if something did happen to one of the pickers or skidders or trucks before you could sell them? Would you really want to be stuck in court, your insurance company fighting ours?”