Torched by April Henry Page B

manage to live.”
    He took a deep breath. “For thirty years, those states have not included Oregon. Now we have it on very credible information that Oregon may again be one of those states. A lynx has been sighted on land belonging to PacCoast Lumber outside Bend.”
    “That’s great news!” Seed said. When everyone turned to her, she hesitated and said in a smaller voice, “Isn’t it?”
    “It’s a logging company, for God’s sake,” Meadow said. “Not a nature preserve.”
    Seed sucked in her bottom lip and looked down at the floor.
    “For those of you who don’t know,” Cedar said, “PacCoast is a small logging company that has been doing business in the Northwest for seventy years. For a logging company, they have a pretty good reputation. But they were recently bought out by a Texas-based company, Stonix, who thought their assets could be maximized through ‘accelerated logging.’ According to what we’re hearing, that’s Texan for ‘clear-cutting.’”
    I made a face. A clear-cut was just like it sounded, when loggers mowed down a section of forest. No shelter for birds or animals, nothing to keep the soil from running off in the next hard rain.
    “Stonix is run by a man named Gary Phelps,” Cedar continued, “who’s known for skirting the law. He’s even supposed to have ties to the Mafia. The way he works, the forest will be long gone before anyone starts looking too closely at the rules and regulations. But the lynx needs that old growth for denning and hunting.”
    “How do we know the lynx are there?” Coyote asked.
    “One of the loggers who works for PacCoast saw it,” Cedar said. “He used to live up in Canada where they do have lynx. He told some of the guys while they were out drinking at the end of the week, and word’s been getting around, even though Stonix has been trying hard to keep it quiet.”
    Meadow leaned forward. “We could go to the media. That will force the EPA or the Forest Service to do something.”
    “It won’t force them to do anything,” Cedar said. “We can tell the Forest Service, we can tell the EPA, we can tell the media—but we don’t have any proof. And without it, they’ll say we’re lying just to stop the development.”
    “Then we set traps,” Coyote said.
    “Traps?” Hawk echoed sarcastically. “What, we prove there are lynx there by handing them a dead one?”
    Sitting so close to Coyote, I could see the muscles in his jaw clench. “That’s not what I mean. You can make a special trap that catches some of the animal’s fur. Once you have the DNA test done, nobody can deny the results.”
    “That would take weeks,” Cedar said. “And we don’t have weeks. The logging will force the lynx out—maybe even make it starve—long before that. So we’re going up in the trees now.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    As soon as I got off the bus, I called the number Richter had given me. A woman answered, simply repeating the phone number I had just dialed.
    “This is Ellie. I need to set up a meeting with Richter. I’ve recorded some evidence.”
    “Hold, please.” When the woman returned after a couple of minutes, she said, “You will be contacted at this number at eight tonight.”
    That evening, time crawled by. I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. Some of my teachers had asked me if there was anything I wanted to talk about. I just played dumb, shook my head and said I had been really busy. That I promised to concentrate from then on.
    Finally, I gave up and went into the living room to watch an old rerun of Star Trek with my parents.
    “Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a magician,” Matt said, settling down in his recliner. I saw him slip a Snickers bar out of his shirt pocket.
    Laurel caught him. “I thought your doctor told you to stay away from that junk! You know what candy does to your triglycerides!” She had finally persuaded Matt to see his cardiologist, and he had come home with a long list of foods he wasn’t supposed