Jack Cordwood swung his axe into the fifth tree of the morning, and the blade told him he would freeze before spring. He counted the felled trunks in the mud. Four. He needed forty for the cabin walls alone. His hands were already raw, and the frost came early on the peninsula. He wanted one thing from this rainforest: a home so deep in the trees that no neighbor could knock, complain, or borrow anything ever again. But no man built that alone with a single axe before the snow. He worked until his shoulders quit. Then he sat on a stump and laughed, because laughing was cheaper than crying. "Great plan, Jack," he said to the empty forest. "Chop the whole coast down by hand. Real smart." The math was simple and cruel. One tree took him an hour. Trimming and hauling took longer. At this pace the walls would rise about the time he died of old age. He needed to fell timber faster or spend the winter under a tarp, listening to the rain mock him. So he changed the plan. He left the trunks and walked out to the logging road he'd found weeks back. Someone up here ran a real operation. He'd seen the fresh stumps, wide and clean, cut by something with teeth. He followed truck ruts until he reached a small clearing. A young man stood there, sleeves rolled, lifting a fallen log off a stuck trailer with his bare arms. He set it down without a grunt. Beside him leaned a two-man crosscut saw, taller than Jack, its teeth oiled and sharp. Jack didn't do people. That was the entire point of the rainforest. But he pointed at the saw. "That thing cut faster than an axe?" The young man wiped his hands. "Ten times faster. But it takes two men to pull it." He studied Jack's blistered palms and the sawdust in his beard. "You're the one building alone past the ridge. That won't work. Not before the snow." "I noticed," Jack said. "Tom Creek." He offered his hand. "I'll pull the other end. You supply the coffee." Jack stared at the hand like it might bite. He'd come here to escape exactly this. But the frost was in the ground, and his four trees were still four trees. A saw with two men beat an axe with one, every time. He shook. They worked till dark. With Tom on the far handle, the crosscut bit through trunks in minutes. By nightfall twelve trees lay stacked and trimmed. Three days of axe work, done in one. Jack looked at the pile and knew the walls would rise before the snow now. He also knew he'd just let a stranger into his solitary life. The cabin would get built. It would simply never be his cabin alone again.