It towered far above, beautiful and frightening, a ligneous Herakles of formidable might, a dark giant leaning against the starry sky. Its heavy branches seemed made of vegetal muscle, ready to strike and sweep away what remained of the house. It was an old tree, a century old at least, and it had grown in a couple of hours, first as a powerful shoot drilling a hole in the concrete ground of the basement, then as a stapling whose boiling sap had burnt through the floor of the dining room, and finally as a mature, handsome ash, who had burst through the attic in a fireworks display of tiles, splinters and rusted nails. The impaled house had caved in, in the midst of the graceful arcs of cold and hot water that were still flowing from the torn pipes. Its inhabitants, bruised and haggard, sat despondently on the naked ground, eyes downcast. They acknowledged us with the mumbles and grunts of those who just lost a war.

And here we were, in our shiny pickup, the siren at full blast to scare off Mama Nature. Our red uniforms were a display of nasty-looking paraphernalia but our true and only weapons were the heavy-duty big chainsaws. We kept them well fed and well lubricated. We took them apart and reassembled them once a week, tracking down every fleck of rust or wood shaving. We gave them girls? names. We loved them.

Every trimming crew in the area had lost men because of an overlooked stump or root. You were hacking at a fallen branch, trying to get it out of the way, and the noise of the chainsaw covered the slithering sound of a growing root aiming at your back, neck or head. The trees had learnt a lot in the art of maiming us. They had something against us. Did they resent being turned into construction timber, firewood, or toilet paper? To win this war, we needed explanations, but while many hypotheses had been proposed, none had been proved. Failing that, our response, until now, had been only defensive. We hacked them into pieces. Giant bonfires lit the country every night, sending