I had just finished a Boston Cream donut when Jimmy said, “There’s a deer sitting down on the road.”

I looked up. One hundred and fifty metres ahead a deer was seated in the middle of the left lane of the highway. He was causing a minor obstruction, but this was a country road and the traffic wasn’t heavy.

“He probably got hit by a car,” said Jimmy.

When we got closer I could see that he was right. The deer had his legs folded underneath his body, but he was making no effort to rise. You could tell he was young because the horn on the right side of his head wasn’t large. The other horn was missing, snapped off near the skull, leaving an ivory stub with a purple centre that was seeping blood. His head was erect and he stared straight ahead, not turning to watch the moving cars. Foam dripped from his mouth and chin.

We got to Lamb Doyle’s and chipped the brash from the trims I had done yesterday. When we left, I rode with Pat in the dump truck. As we approached the turn-off to the road the deer was on I saw cars backing up and reversing onto the main highway.

I said, “There’s a deer lying down on the road. I think it was hit by a car.”

“That’s all right,” said Pat. “I’ve got some chains. We can drag it off.”

A firetruck with its lights flashing but the siren off overtook us and turned down the road. Pat cursed. “It’s fucking terrible, isn’t it,” he said. “Fire Brigade coming out for a deer on the road. People could be burning in their houses.”

I smiled. Pat likes animals. He owns pigeons and Jack Russell terriers. But he has no luck with them. Cats are constantly sneaking into his pigeon coup and killing the birds, and in the last year he has had two dogs killed on the road by cars. His remaining dog he ran over in the dump truck himself. He is a one-man animal holocaust.

The next job was a sycamore removal at a John of God’s care unit in Shankill. It was a big, old tree with a large cavity at the bottom of the trunk where the stem meets the root plate. I got a little excited when I saw the size of the tree. It had been a while since I took down one that large – the central stem was so thick three men my size could not have touched hands reaching around it. I free climbed up through the canopy and tied a bull rope to the top of the tree then rappelled to the ground for a late lunch.

As we ate, cars started to arrive to pick up people from the day-care unit. It was a centre for the elderly. Some of them walked out and drove away themselves, but others were pushed out in wheelchairs looking like the living dead, emaciated heads bobbing on wire-sprung necks. A grey-haired daughter loaded her geriatric father into a gleaming BMW.

Just the simple transition from the wheelchair to the vehicle seemed to take so much effort for the old man. The daughter assisted with patience, but while she packed the wheelchair away he had to stand without her help. His body shook with the effort. His eyes were wide and staring so hard and yet completely vacant. There really is no good way to die. Even the slow dimming of the intellect into a medically induced half-life contains its daily allowance of humiliation and dread.

After lunch Pat arrived back with the dump truck and we sized up the stick for felling. When you fell a tree you make three separate cuts with a chainsaw. The first two involve cutting the directional notch – that orange-segment shaped space at the front of a tree that indicates the direction you hope it’s going to fall in. The final cut is the back cut. The traffic was stopped on the road behind me, onlookers gathered in disparate knots and as I felt the saw coming close to the holding wood I watched the half inch crack at the back of the tree where my saw first cut its way in. When the wood started to breathe and the crack widened I pulled the saw free. There was the shriek and rip of wood fibers stretching and splitting, then the spar lurched forward and eight tons of timber crashed to the ground.

I get a high out of felling big timber. I know I probably shouldn’t, but there you go. It pays the bills. But sometimes I wonder. I’ve cut a lot of trees in my time. Thousands of them. It’s demanding work, and I rarely stopped to consider what it was I was doing. Maybe one day people will live in a world where hardwood tables are viewed with the same distaste as we would exhibit on seeing an ashtray formed from a mummified Gorilla’s hand – but by then it will probably be too late. Public parks will have become arboreal museums.

A tree is a miniature world in itself. A mature oak will develop a symbiotic relationship with over two thousand different life forms, from the red squirrel to the gall wasp to the elusive truffle. I’ve cut down stands of mature oak to make way for unused car parks. When you clear-cut a lot from woodland you take an acre of land and everything growing above soil level gets shredded through a chipper or piled in a dump truck. Thousands upon thousands of critters are wiped out so a small family of humans can live there.

Sometimes I have this waking dream. I have died and I am flying through a dark tunnel. I look around and every creature I ever caused the death of is in there with me – passels of pigeons and hosts of sparrows, tidings of magpies and kettles of hawks, swarms of bees and armies of frogs. It is dark in the tunnel but within each being throbs an effervescent glow, like that of a deep-sea jellyfish, a mote of life that beams and flickers. We glide in silence through the still, airless dark, our snouts aimed at the burning light at the end of the tunnel.