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though back then all the handled chopping tools looked the same), and compared with the specific and easy-to-confuse logistics required to start the chainsaw— brake on, choke on, pull, pull, fire, off choke, pull, pull, fire, off brake, throttle— the axe seemed too simple to require much instruction. (If you know how to swing an axe, you know that I am about to make a fool of myself.)
    I stepped up to the trunk. I can’t recall each motion, but I’ve since watched many people who don’t know how to swing an axe try to swing an axe, and I know what I looked like. Axe head up next to my ear, arms awkwardly cocked with hands spread wide on the handle. Then, the downward motion we picture when we hear the word chop, a vertical blow akin to the board-breaking karate move. The blade hit the trunk straight on, bounced off lamely, just missing my shin. I tried this a few times, putting more muscle into it, until the pure ineffectuality of the whole thing stopped me short. I looked to Reba. She was laughing, not unkindly, the guffaw I’d hear many times over the next months. “Any tips?” I asked her.
    â€œWatch.” She took the axe from me, squared her body to the tree, and, swinging the axe over her head, hands moving up, down the handle with each blow, she dispatched the tree in less than ten minutes. Karate-style, it would have taken me all day. Reba didn’t explain the mechanics—she wasn’t given to clear verbal instructions, instead gesturing, like this, and lighting into the task like a storm—but watching her, I could see that what she was doing made sense. Her swings had constant rhythm, the motion of the axe while not in contact with the tree as important as the chopping. The blade hit the wood at an angle, chiseling out pieces the way you’d whittle with a knife, and making clear the origin of the word “woodchips.” Reba swiveled the handle in her palms in midair so she used both bits of the head to chop on alternate sides, the width of the cut twice the diameter of the tree, leaving plenty of room for the angling cuts to meet in the middle and sever the trunk. My technique, I could see, was at best bludgeoning, more suited to driving a spike with a sledgehammer (the twelve-pound version of which would later make a different, equal fool of me). When Reba swung, it looked not exactly effortless, since her T-shirt was soaked with sweat and she stopped to catch her breath, but at least graceful. It seemed clear why you’d use that tool to do this job.
    I watched Reba chop and tried to picture her somewhere else—at an office job, in front of a fourth-grade classroom—and I couldn’t really do it. In clothes that filthy, with all those freckles and so much energy to burn, she belonged where she was, before that tree. She’d barely turned thirty. She’d just gotten married, and Rob, her husband, was a packer for the Forest Service. Tan and quick and light on her feet, she was at ease in the woods in a way I didn’t even know how to describe. Before I started my trails job, back in Missoula spreading out maps and counting new pairs of socks, I wondered what my co-workers would be like. I guessed, as I usually do when joining a gang late, that they were much different than me. And they were, stronger, confident, knowledgeable. But Reba didn’t fit my worries. She was a chatterbox, easy and open, and she told me stuff. The names of flowers, which truck couldn’t go in reverse, don’t ask the foreman questions until after morning briefing, how much she missed her husband when they were apart for a month. I was starting to know her. The axe was the bigger stranger.
    Reba finished the first cut and I began the next one, swinging as she had shown me, the head at an angle, my hands loose on the shaft. The axe still glanced off here and there and I had to rest often. I started the cut too narrow, and at the bottom of the V, the