I was a little sad to take down the huge old beech, a wolf tree three times as large as anything else around. 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 that it was just an illusion to find that the stacks reduced day by day and for each day the stack used to be a little lower than the prior day. I wondered if someone used to steal the logs every night. I also thought that why would someone steal s...
When there is no one around !