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Borden Watson braked his bike and jumped off. He wheeled it across the narrow logging road and into the dark forest. Leaning it against a tree, he took his rifle from its carrier and put a bullet in the chamber.

A cool green silence wrapped around him. He breathed deeply, then stepped onto the needle-carpeted ground and walked a soundless distance. Ankle deep in ferns and wildflowers, he stopped in a grove of trees. The trees were so enormous that one alone, standing in the middle of a logging road, could block trucks in two directions.

Borden was in the old-growth forest of the Pacific Coast in northern California, a land blessed with abundant rain and sun, a temperate climate, and deep soils.

He did not see this wild wealth. He was in the old-growth forest for one purpose: to 'shoot owls--spotted owls.

He hated them.

His eyes cruised up the trunk of an enormous Douglas fir. They peered past the large low branches, up past a floral burst of limbs where a pine siskin cheeped, and on up to a cluster of needles two hundred feet above the forest floor. just below the needle spray was a large nest of sticks. He grinned.

"You," he said aloud. "You owl, in that nest. You're dead, the minute you stick your head up."

It was almost twilight, and the owl, Borden reasoned, should be awake and ready to go out hunting. He thought about his father and cried out, "My dad doesn't have a job because of you. He can't cut any more big trees because of you."

Shouting seemed to help the pain Borden had felt since his father had lost his job with the lumber company. His father had told him that a judge had stopped allsale of the trees on public lands in the Northwest until the United States Forest Service could come up with a plan to save the spotted owl. It lived in the old-growth forests, and the forests were being cut down for lumber. The gentle owl was on the brink of extinction.

The government, it seemed to Borden, liked owls better than people.

Borden thought about this and grew angrier. "He's the best tree cutter from here north through Canada to Alaska," he shouted to the bird in the nest hole.

"He can put a giant tree right down on the earth without hitting a single tree around it. He can do that." He lifted his rifle. He had more to say.

"He's the best of the cutters, and the cutters are the most important people in the whole lumber business. And their work is very, very dangerous. Limbs and trees can fall and kill or injure them. They have to be smart people." He paused, then went on.

"My pop is famous. He won the National Tree Cutters' Award--" He smiled pridefully, then remembered. "But because of you, he can't work."

Borden caught his breath and thought about what he had just said. He did not understand why a little owl could stop honest, hardworking men like his father from cutting down trees, but it had happened. Now his father was out of work, and it was painful for the whole Watson family.

His mother had been forced to take a job in the school cafeteria. Borden had mowed lawns to help, but that was in the summer. Through the winter and into late spring he, too, was out of work.

Sally, his older sister, with her pale-blue eyes and bush of red stringy curls, was also upset. She had stopped playing soccer with her friends, and every day except Tuesdays came home right after school. She would go to her room and close the door. She wouldn't talk about spotted owls when Borden and his father ranted against them.

Borden suspected she was embarrassed that Pop didn't have a job. She didn't need to be. She could be angry, maybe, but not embarrassed. Many fathers were out of work in the lumber town of Fresta. Stores had closed, and businesses and lumber companies had failed. Almost everyone was suffering, but that did not seem to matter to Sally. She went on soothing her hurt behind her closed door. Borden did not criticize her. He understood why she felt as she did. Their father was Leon Watson, big, noisy, protective. They thought nothing could happen to him. But it had, and that was very upsetting. A hero had been felled by a measly little bird.

All spring, Borden thought up plans to get his father's job back. None were any good. He just didn't understand why an owl could stop a man like his pop from cutting down trees.

When Judge Kramer came down the street on his way to the post office one school morning, Borden caught up to him and put the question to him.

"There's a law," said the impeccably dressed judge, adjusting his tie. "It's called the Endangered Species Act. It states that no one can destroy threatened and endangered creatures or the habitats they live in. If they do, they will be fined, put in jail, or both." He looked at Borden.

"Our northern spotted owl is a threatened species. He can only live in old-growth forests and nest in big tall trees. When we cut them down, he dies."

Borden thought about that. Judge Kramer continued. "The problem is this: The agencies that take care of our public lands--the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management--violated the nation's environmental laws. They permitted lumber companies to cut recklessly and too fast. The owls are being wiped off the face of the earth. Mountainsides are eroding. A judge in Seattle ordered all timber sales, and therefore cutting, to stop until there is a workable plan to save the owl."