Most likely, it stood there when the woods were fields—a marker between properties or just a spot for the cows to graze out of the sun—and it had remained after the farmers left and the fields gave way to forest once again. It seemed a shame, somehow, to cut it down, but it was dying, and besides, a tree that size was worth more than a cord of firewood. By the next winter I had it cut, stacked, and dried inside my shed, but it was buried near back, behind three other rows, and it wasn’t until January that I’d burned enough of the other wood to actually get at it. That’s when a strange thing started happening. At first, I thought I was imagining it. I’d go out to the shed in the morning, and the stack of wood would look lower, as though someone had come in the night to steal the logs. It seemed crazy: Who would drive a mile down my rutted driveway in the middle of the night just to make off with an armload of firewood? I told myself I was imagining it. But when you rely on wood to cook your food, to keep you warm, to stop the pipes from freezing, you know how high your pile is, almost down to the last log, and someone, I decided after three more days of this, was taking my wood.
