The first several feet were bad. I will never improve that part of the story, because it matters that it looked, for a while, as though the skeptics were right. What the cut revealed behind the saw was muddy, uneven wood, with dark pockets and a black seam that followed the wound deeper than anyone wanted. The timber did not look like a treasure. It looked like a very expensive lesson.
Dale stared at the ground. The furniture maker from Mendocino shifted his stance and put both hands on his hips, preparing, I think, the gentle sentence he'd offer when the machine stopped. Preston's expression softened into something he seemed to think was sympathy, though the satisfaction at its edges had a hard time hiding. I looked at Maren. She had not moved, and I couldn't tell whether that meant confidence or the effort of holding herself still while a very real fear ran through her.
The cut advanced beyond the worst of the scar. A warm band appeared, faint at first, then deepened into a clearer red. The dark pockets diminished, the exposed fibers tightened, and the grain began to lean gently instead of running straight. Then the pattern opened. It rolled away from the old injury in broad continuous arcs, long waves of figured redwood that caught the pale sunlight and shifted when a person moved along the face.
I had worked wood and watched wood worked for nineteen years. I had seen beautiful curl and unusual growth and occasional pieces that caused experienced men to stop in the middle of a sentence. This wasn't a tight decorative patch that would yield a few small objects. It was a continuous sweep stretching across feet of material, broader and longer than any of us had expected, visibly connected to the wound the tree had endured decades earlier. The figure seemed to move like water across stone, not because the wood was moving, but because the changing angle of light woke up different fibers as your eyes traveled.
Wyatt eased off the machine when the exposed portion made it safe to stop. The silence afterward felt bigger than the yard. Eleven adults stood looking at the newly revealed surface, and Annie stared from the fence rail as if her mother had made something appear by speaking to it. I didn't know what to say. Preston, for once, didn't know either.
Wyatt removed his gloves, approached the exposed wood after the operation had been safely secured, and ran his fingertips across the clean face. He said he had worked perhaps nine hundred salvage logs and had seen figure approaching this scale only a couple of times. Even then, he cautioned, surface appearance did not reveal how far the pattern continued or how much sound material surrounded it. The core could still be unusable. There could be hidden cracks, and moisture might become a problem long after the first cut looked beautiful.