Bonner Incident (4 page)

“Is that really the regional forester?” Ben asked.

Giving a long sigh, “Yes Ben,” Joshua answered. “Don’t ask anything else because I don’t know.”

Moving over, he helped strap down the trailers, then went to help set chokers. When the mill’s trucks showed up, Joshua loaded them up. As he was climbing out, he saw the three dorks measuring the heights of stumps. “I’m really getting tired of shit,” he mumbled.

At four o’clock, his trucks returned and Joshua almost grabbed his radio, but stopped himself and waited. It wasn’t long until William’s voice came over the radio. “Last trucks are back. All vehicles back to the landing for daily maintenance so we can go home.”

As the skidder and crawler pulled down the valley toward the landing, Joshua looked over at the dorks walking along one of the creeks. When he saw Ronald writing in a notebook, he turned to look at the two lowboy trailers he used to haul the equipment parked off to the side. Fighting the urge to tell the crew to hook up the trailers and load up, Joshua went to his truck.

The only reason he wasn’t leaving was because all forestry sales were laid out in contracts and those contracts had fines to be paid if you didn’t do the job the way it was laid out. If he didn’t have this job done before the snow melted, he was looking at a twenty-thousand-dollar fine. Dealing only with Charlie, Joshua wasn’t worried. Charlie would just tell him to finish the best he could. Unlike the dorks that had come onto the site, Charlie had grown up around here.

Climbing into his truck, Joshua pulled the contract out of the center console. The contract was over two inches thick, spelling out the job, and as his dad had told him long ago, ‘Son, always have the contracts with you on the site. Like every organization, the Forestry Service has assholes’. Here lately, that’s all Joshua was running into, case in point; the three he was looking at.

Flipping through the contract, Joshua found the penalty section. Doing quick math in his head, it would cost him half a million to walk off this job without sabotaging his own equipment. That was the only loophole he could find. Toying with the idea, Joshua gave up and dropped the contract on the seat.

Climbing back out, he saw the dorks looking at the equipment. Looking over, he saw William pulling out dipsticks, checking fluid levels with Ben standing beside him. “They raised my business tax to forty percent two years ago, you can only bleed a man so much,” Joshua mumbled heading toward the landing to help with maintenance.

As he walked over, he noticed the dorks making a beeline straight to him. Not wanting the others to hear, Joshua stopped and took several deep breaths. “Joshua, we have found twenty-six violations on this sale site and I’m sure if I keep looking, I’ll find more,” Ronald said with a wide grin.

“Be my guest,” Joshua said. “Do you want to release me from my bid? I can load up and head out right now.”

“No,” Ronald snapped, shaking the notebook at him. “You took the bid and you will fulfill it!”

“Are you ordering me to shut down as you inspect the site?”

“No, but I’m suggesting it,” Ronald said lowering the notebook.

Knowing if he was ordered to shut down for inspection, the contract’s time would be thrown out and he couldn’t be fined for not completing on time. “If you’re not ordering me to shut down, we’ll continue,” Joshua said glancing over at the crew, and now all of them were staring back.

“Fine, but we must address the violations,” Ronald said opening his notebook. “You cut down unmarked trees-,” Ronald stopped as Joshua cut him off.

“What are you talking about?”

Turning around Ronald pointed at a big stump. “That was an old growth-,” he stopped and looked at one of the captains.

“Northern white pine,” the captain offered.

“Yes, northern white pine. It wasn’t marked yet you cut it down along with-,” he looked at the captain again.

“Douglas fir.”

“Yes, along with a Douglas fir,” Ronald said turning back to Joshua.

Seeing the stump and the two next to it, Joshua shook his head. “Ronald, those two trees had trees tangled in the limbs. You know what those are called by loggers? Widowmakers. If you cut the smaller tree down that’s tied up in the branches, it doesn’t fall. When you cut down the big one with a smaller one leaning on it, you can’t control where either of them falls. That’s how my dad was killed. It’s clearly laid out in the contract; widow makers are safety violations and must be cut down.”

Ronald scoffed. “You can cut a tree with a chainsaw and make the end jump several yards out.”

Joshua stepped back in complete shock that someone would say something so stupid. “I’ll get my chainsaw for you and you can show me just how in the hell you can make a tree jump several yards off the stump.”

“This is your sale site. I’m not going to show you anything,” Ronald snapped.

“What I thought, you’ve never touched a chainsaw,” Joshua said. “If you want, I can get my contract, I was just looking at it. For safety reasons, unmarked trees can be cut down without penalty, and I know my cutters took pictures before cutting those trees down just because they were unmarked and old growth.”

“We’ll come back to that,” Ronald said opening his notebook. “We found several stumps above the required thirty-centimeter height.”

“Like hell,” Joshua snapped. “Not taking as much of the base as we can costs us money.”

Ronald pointed behind him. “There is one right there,” he grinned. “That one, if I remember correctly, was ninety centimeters.”

Spinning around, it didn’t take long to spot the stump. “That tree grew out of a vertical rock wall, that’s the only place we could’ve cut it, hell your marking even marked it at the cut line,” Joshua shouted, turning back around.

“Don’t yell at me,” Ronald snapped.

“Listen, boy,” Joshua said lowering his voice to a growl. “I’m not one of your employees or your kid and you don’t even come close to impressing me so don’t snap at me, Ronald.”

One of the captains stepped up. “You will address him with respect. We are with the enforcement division and will arrest you.”

“I got a lawyer. Go right ahead,” Joshua said calmly. “So, do you want me to shut down while you investigate?”

“No, I’m advising it,” Ronald said opening his notebook back up.

Fighting the urge to beat Ronald to death with his notebook, Joshua took a deep breath. “Then like I said, we’ll be here until the job is done.”

“We found three ‘green’ zone infractions,” Ronald said looking up.

Giving a long sigh, “I don’t care,” Joshua moaned. “Shut me down or leave us alone. I will be filing a complaint because you are endangering my employees.”

“That’s fine, I’ll file it away,” Ronald grinned closing his notebook. “You had an underage employee on the site, so I will be forced to notify the Department of Labor and the EPA about your ‘green’ zone violations.”

Spinning around and walking away. “Fine, just tell them to wear a hardhat and logging boots before they come,” Joshua said fighting to stay calm.

When he stopped at the crew, they were all looking from him back to the three walking to the SUVs. “Boss,” Ben said, watching the three climb in their vehicles. “Charlie still lives down the road from me, I’m stopping by and kicking his ass.”

Shaking his head, Joshua reached out and grabbed William by the shoulder. “Forget it, guys, we’ve been fucked with before,” he said and grinned at his son. “We need to take our foreman for the day to supper. I’m buying.”

Everyone cheered and grabbed their gear, heading to the trucks. “Dad, is it going to be okay?” William asked after he climbed in the truck.

“Hope so son, but they can only bleed a man so much before he has nothing left. Then he’s like a mean bear; don’t poke him or you’re liable to get hurt bad.”

Chapter Two

Beep, beep, beep
, sounded and Joshua reached over tapping the alarm clock. Sitting up in bed, he rubbed his eyes and brushed down his beard. He looked over at his wife, Sonya, sound asleep. Sonya was his second wife. His first wife, Mary, William’s mother, died of an aneurysm when William was five.

Leaning over, he kissed Sonya on the cheek as she reached up patting his head, “Your beard tickles,” she mumbled and immediately fell back asleep.

Getting out of bed, Joshua looked at the clock as he dressed. “I wonder what it’s like, going for a long time without having to wake up in the early morning hours?” he asked himself. Putting his boots on, he grabbed his Springfield 1911 off the bedside table and slid the clip-on holster over his belt. He had a concealed permit and carried the pistol most of the time. About the only time he didn’t, was when he was working. A pistol on your hip grabbed all kinds of shit, and working on very steep slopes, that could be deadly.

But even on some jobs, he’d carried it on him. Like when the Eco-furry-animal-lover terrorists were protesting, taking pop shots at them or sabotaging their equipment or work-site. Or when he worked in Alaska or Canada, bears could be a problem, be damned what the environmentalists say. In Alaska one year, he cut down a tree and turned around to spot a grizzly twenty yards away creeping closer. He’d pulled his pistol and shot the ground in front of it. He really didn’t want to shoot something with teeth that weighed just shy of a ton with a tiny .45 caliber bullet.

A .45 was massive to stop a man but could be compared to a spitball for stopping a grizzly. One of the machine operators that night, who was working with a company on that site had asked why Joshua was scared, he had a massive 3120 Husqvarna 118 cc chainsaw with a 42-inch blade.

Joshua had turned to the guy, “Son, a man several years ago, thought the same thing as a grizzly charged him. He raised his chainsaw gunning the engine and swung as the bear closed. His buddies came up an hour later, finding the bear eating the man. They shot it with a rifle and found a chainsaw clogged up with hair that choked it out. The blade never even made it to the bear’s skin.”

Grabbing his spare magazines, Joshua clipped them on his left side. Walking out of the bedroom, he glanced back at Sonya to see her snuggled up in the blankets. He smiled at her, thankful she’d come into his life. Even though she was William’s stepmom, she doted on William, and William loved her to death. Walking down the hall, he passed William’s room and eased in to see William sprawled over the bed with the covers kicked off. He patted William’s chest and picked the covers off the floor, covering him back up.

Walking in the kitchen, he smelled the coffee from the automatic coffee maker. “Sometimes technology is alright,” he said grabbing his mug. As he fixed his coffee, Joshua looked at the pictures hanging out in the hall. One was of him, Sonya and William up at the cabin.

The cabin was built by his great uncle and was about six miles from Nordman, Idaho. It sat on twenty acres, not even two miles from the Washington State border, and Joshua tried to get there every chance he could, which was several times a month at least.

William would always go with him if he didn’t have school and Sonya went too, but didn’t really like the rustic setting. The cabin had power from solar panels and running water, but that was pretty much it. Well, not really after last year. Somehow, William had rigged a cellphone up to a booster, and now the cabin had internet.

Joshua used to hate computers, but his boy had changed that for the most part. Walking across the kitchen, Joshua smiled as he opened up his laptop to look at the alternate news sites. Scanning the headlines as he sipped his coffee, Joshua shook his head. “Wish I had enough money to buy a politician,” he chuckled, reading how foreign parties paid millions to politicians.

Seeing his beloved country sliding further downhill, Joshua closed his laptop and grabbed his Kindle. Joshua loved to read, and now that he could buy books electronically and they didn’t take up space in the house, he’d gone wild. He literally had thousands of eBooks and hundreds of regular books.

Grabbing his coat and tucking it under his arm, Joshua grabbed his keys and lunch box walking out. Every night, Sonya made his lunch and fixed the coffee pot for him, and Joshua believed she needed a spot in heaven for that alone. Seeing a person standing next to his truck, Joshua grabbed the butt of his pistol. “Whoa Boss, it’s me,” Ben said holding up his hands.

Feeling his heart vibrating in his chest, Joshua fought to keep his legs from giving out. “I should shoot your ass just for scaring the shit out of me like that,” Joshua said walking over to the truck. The house sat on ten acres just outside of the small community of Lamb Creek off of Priest Lake. There was a small pasture and on the other side of the pasture was a large metal shop that Joshua ran the logging company out of.

“Sorry Boss,” Ben said lowering his hands.

“What the hell are you doing here? Your schedule only changes when I’m sick and that’s been what, six times in seventeen years?”

“I’m riding in with you. We need to talk,” Ben said stepping around to the passenger side. “I told Gene to drive my truck in.”

Hitting his key fob to make the truck start and doors unlock, Joshua nodded. The other company trucks that his crew used were at the shop. The crew drove to the shop, then took the company trucks to the site. “What the hell is so important that you got up before me?” Joshua asked tossing his coat in the backseat as he climbed in.