The planer growled and bogged down on a knot. I cranked a wheel to raise the cutterhead and tossed the plank aside. Some of the boards were so peppered with knots that they would serve only as firewood. In others, a well-placed knot or a twist in the grain brought the wood alive. The next piece was a beauty, a chunk of mountain hemlock so perfectly free of defects that it ran through the planer like butter and came out the color of fresh cream. There are two species of hemlock in Southeast Alaska: western, which is larger and more common, and mountain, which is exceedingly slow growing. I remembered the tree the board had come from. A rise of bedrock on the ridge where the house was to be built had dictated that I cut it down before laying out the foundation. It was small, only ten inches in diameter, and as soon as it fell, I regretted it. The stump was a blur of growth rings packed so tightly together that it