“Trees don’t talk,” the boy scoffed. They stood in the deep woods, on a road of packed earth, between towering redwoods, behind a battered Ford Model T grain truck.
“How do you know?” the old man said. Sun and wind had carved a map of his face. He picked the boy up and set him on the flatbed of the truck, sided only with a wood grate, among neatly tied bundles of scavenged firewood. “Maybe you just don’t stick around long enough to hear what they have to say.” He pinched the boy’s knee affectionately and hobbled toward the driver’s seat.
The boy’s face lit up as his gaze swept from the base of the trees into the canopy. Columnar trunks soared two hundred feet into the sky, taller than dinosaurs. As the boy’s eyes hit the crest of the canopy, sunlight pierced the green with gold, bird cal
