Marking

**I. Inventory, September** Orange paint, one dot: harvest this year. Two dots: harvest in five. No dot: the forest doesn't know yet what we've decided about it. I walk the stand with a can in each pocket, right hand for now, left hand for later, and try not to notice which hand moves faster.

**II. Ips typographus** The bark beetle doesn't hate the tree. It reads the resin pressure like a door, finds the spruce that can no longer flood its own wounds fast enough to drown him, and writes, under the bark, a map that looks like handwriting if you don't know what handwriting is for. I photograph the galleries for the report. They are, I will not pretend otherwise, beautiful. The report doesn't have a field for that.

**III. Load calculation** Snow load, wind load, root plate radius — the formula that tells me which trees will still be standing after a storm that hasn't happened yet. It is not a metaphor. I have watched it be right too many times to let it become one.

**IV. The stand at Björnberget** Forty-one years old, planted the year my father stopped climbing his own ladders. Two dots, this September. Harvest in five. I did not plant it. I will not fell it. I will hand both jobs to someone not yet employed by the state, and this, more than the beetle, more than the storm that hasn't come, is the actual shape of forestry: not loss, exactly. Custody, passed on before you're finished with it.

**V. What I tell the trainee** Don't name them. Mark them accurately, walk on. A forest is not a room you furnish. It is a number you keep honest for longer than you will be here to check it. She writes this down like it's wisdom. It's just the job. I have never once, in nineteen years, stopped noticing the difference, and I have never once said so out loud until now.

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