They caught up with the boys near the back of their land.
"How's it going, fellahs?" said Brendan.
Cameron was planting along the treeline. He just glanced over to Brendan and nodded, and kept planting.
Alistair stopped and drank from a water bottle he pulled out of his back bag. "It's not a bad day. It ain't cake, but it ain't bad," he said.
Brendan smiled. "Sweet!" he said. "I'm always happy when people have good land." He tossed his shovel a few metres behind the group. It made a couple of lazy circles in the air and thunked into the ground blade-first.
"I didn't say it was good land." Alistair put the bottle back in his back bag and slipped a tree in between the roots of a stump.
"If it ain't bad, it's good," said Brendan. He stomped on his shovel to stick it firmly in the ground. He put the loop of his checking cord around it. He stretched the cord out and walked in a slow circle around the shovel, dropping a little piece of pink flagging every time he spotted a planted tree.
The other three kept planting.
Brendan checked each tree carefully. He talked to himself and to the trees as he checked them. "How are ya doing, little fellah? You're a nice looking little sprucey. How's your friend here? Oh, she's not looking perfect. Bit of a leaner. I think one of those bad boys stomped a bit too hard on you. They're bad boys, aren't they?"
When he was done, he sat down on a stump and wrote up the plot in a notebook he pulled from his inside vest pocket. By the time he was done, the three planters had turned around at the back of the land and were almost abreast of him again. Brendan stood up on the stump.
"Not bad," he said. "Good spacing. Eight trees. One leaner. Cameron, I think you might be kicking a bit too close sometimes. I'll check some more on the way back. In general, it looks pretty good, though."
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