Taylor stood up suddenly, placing Button on the bench beside her. “Come again?”

Cooper explained that one spotted owl meant there might be others. He said that the wildlife center would likely conduct a survey to see if this owl belonged to a larger community whose forest habitat they should protect from developers, loggers, farmers, and certainly hunters.

Taylor and Royella began to bicker with Cooper over whether or not one dead owl meant there would be others. No one but Collin and I seemed to notice or care that Button was lying motionless on the bench, his pink tongue stuck out between little white teeth, his breathing shallow.

*

Later, while Aunt Taylor and Royella drove Button to the vet, Ranger Cooper drove Collin and me down a series of nausea-inducing logging roads to meet up with Dad.  I spotted his pickup by a grove of cedars. He was out working, busily marking the smaller trees, which would be cut for fire safety, with red spray paint. When he noticed us, he put down the paint canister.  He rested against the trunk of a marked tree and wiped his forehead with a sap-covered bandana.

The three of us tramped down from the road to meet him, feeling the whip of the low brush that we pushed aside as we descended. We greeted him with lunch leftovers and Collin told him about the spotted owl, dragged in but apparently not killed by Button, and about Button’s sudden sickness.

“Seems like the owl was poisoned or something,” Cooper offered.

“Geez,” Dad said.

The rangers talked on as Collin and I wandered off into the grove. Sunlight filtered through the shade of the cedars, and my sandals quickly filled with painful brush and razory dry stickers. Collin groused about how, thanks to Dad, the grove would be significantly thinned, turned hot and dusty. We paused by a thick-trunked cedar that bent towards the adjacent stream, and whose bark was marked with Dad’s red paint.

“Isn’t this tree a bit large for the chain saw?” Collin wondered aloud.