The Woods-Rider

The pine woods of southern Alabama in the 1920s are no gentle landscape. Joe Marshall knows this firsthand - he's a woods-rider, tasked with overseeing the dangerous work of gathering turpentine from thousands of trees, a job that demands endurance, sharp instincts, and a tolerance for solitude. When a violent storm tears through the forest, Joe watches his livelihood literally crash down around him, and suddenly the question becomes not profit but survival. But nature isn't the only force Joe must navigate. His Canadian cousins arrive with restless energy and grand ideas about bees - specifically, the legendary legacy of Old Dick's bees, said to harbor some forgotten treasure in the southern wilderness. As Joe reconciles family obligations with the harsh economics of his camp, he finds himself caught between the demands of industry and the lure of something wilder. Pollock writes with the granular authenticity of someone who knew these woods intimately - the sap that coats everything, the brutal math of logging, the particular silence of a forest at dawn. This is adventure fiction rooted in place, where the real treasure might be the land itself.