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"You just caught me on one of those days," Dave Jewett said Monday.

He was a few hours from having to drive from his home in upstate New York to Lehi, Utah, for his first STIHL Timbersports competition in nearly two years, and his hot saw had just conked out. He was still nursing a middle finger that he'd dropped a log on a couple of weeks ago and split badly enough to see bone.

He was also trying to figure out what went wrong over the weekend. May marked his first forays into lumberjack sports competition in the nine months since he swapped out two bad kidneys for a healthy one from his father. The axeman known to the sport as Super Dave had been training intensely as soon as he could convince his doctors to let him. His strength was terrific. His technique: improving.

But his endurance has not returned. And his attitude—his confidence—it's not there yet. Not after a bad showing at a competition in Bath, N.Y., on May 17 (notwithstanding the stitches on his finger that kept chaffing open). And not after last weekend, when he won $115 in a West Virginia competition where he routinely wins a couple of thousand dollars.

"It's definitely a new frontier for me to go out and just get totally waxed and keep a positive attitude," Jewett said. "We'll see how Utah goes, try to correct things."

Jewett doesn't want his disease to mean retirement. Two years ago, he finished fifth in the world at the STIHL World Championships, the top American competitor. Can he return to that level? Is there a chance he could somehow, through force of will, improve on it?

One thing Jewett knows, after turning 39 last week, is that no matter how lucky he is to have this second chance, his days as an elite competitor are running out. He's fighting the fear that through no fault of his, they may already have.

A slow slide

There's no telling how long it took Dave Jewett's kidneys to go out on him. Was it a year? Three? The headaches stretched back that far, anyway, nasty things, migraines bad enough to wake him up in the mornings to go throw up. The best American lumberjack athlete would march to log, axe in hand, with his skull splitting like the cedar. Was that his body warning him, from far away, that something was wrong?

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Was it as recently as two summers ago? He felt terrible during competitions, but wrote off his sundry ailments—fatigue, nausea, nosebleeds, cramping, headaches—as allergies, or some aspect of the migraines. It was one thing when he would be that wiped out after tournaments, but by late 2006, merely loading truckloads of Christmas trees did him in. The indoor soccer team he played with to keep in shape began running rings around him. When the team captain yelled at him for not working hard enough, as he was absolutely killing himself, he should have known something was amiss.

At an event in Wisconsin last February, he nearly fainted in the springboard event. Days later, he went to do a tree job…and woke up in the hospital. His kidneys were operating at about 10 percent. He still wasn't concerned, until he learned how poisonous his blood had become.

"I always knew Dave Jewett the lumberjack," says his friend Tina Bartucca, (who adds, "he's kind of like a brother to me"). She continues: "I always knew he was strong physically. But watching him go through it, the first night — he got there at 4 in the afternoon and didn't get a bed until 2 a.m. — I saw how strong emotionally he was."

Says Jewett: "I suppose I'd be dead right now if I hadn't done anything about it. You figure 60 years ago I'd be dead at 37 years old."

He decided early on that he would eschew steroids or other treatments in favor of a transplant. But there was still dialysis, or as Jewett described it, "torture for six months." Determined to live something like a normal life, he set up the dialysis equipment at home, along with the boxes of solution, and administered part of it himself, rather than going to the clinic; when he'd travel to timber events to work as a commentator, he'd ship the solution to meet him at hotels.

"I would try and give Dave pep talks, but he was too much of a realist for that," says his friend since childhood, Jason Berry (who adds, "I think of him as a brother"). "He's not the kind of person you can give a good pep talk to."

His friend Shannon Hookway, with whom Jewett builds handmade furniture, recalls Jewett in those months: not sleeping but not complaining, working when he could and watching Austin Powers movies or "Jackass" to buoy his mood. And training as much as his body would allow.

"Outside of his other talents, [lumberjack sports are] his definition," she says. "There was a possibility that he might not be able to go back to it at all, and that was scary as hell for him."

Jewett was determined not to let that happen, and in pushing himself too far too fast, he courted disaster. After competing in a couple of early season events last year, he was headed to the STIHL qualifier, in Iowa. Along the way, he saw that the chest catheter that allowed dextrose fluid to drain out of him had become blocked.

"Once I saw my body all bloated, and that my body was leaking, that snapped me back to reality pretty quick," he recalls. "There's more than just chopping wood." He left his friends who were carpooling to the event, rented a car and drove straight back home to the hospital.

People around his hometown of Pittsford, N.Y., saw how dire it was, and were prepared to offer themselves as donors. "I would get phone calls on a daily basis asking, 'Where could I get tested?'" Hookway says. "I think a lot of that was really humbling for him."

Genetics and clean living made his father a compatible match, and since last August, one of Bill Jewett's kidneys has been doing the work that Dave Jewett's two couldn't.

Bill Jewett fairly shrugs off the surgery. At age 65, he handed his son a kidney, laid in the hospital for two days and four weeks later was feeling no discomfort at all.

"It was a pretty easy process for me, once we got through all the screening," he says. "I highly recommend it. It's amazing that you've got a spare part like that."

When one man stepped up, a town came together to pitch in. Jewett's friends arranged it on the sly: "I initially had declined any offers to hold a fundraiser," he says, "but everyone in my town quietly ignored me." When the day finally came, they convinced him that he could stand to be there. He relented, but insisted on helping with the heavy lifting of setup, to help him stomach the fact that people were rallying for him.

"There wasn't a second of the five hours we weren't raffling, auctioning or giving stuff away," Hookway says.

One of his soccer teammates made hats that read, "Support your local lumberjack." A pub called Thirsty's hosted the party, donating food and drink; others brought coffee and desserts. When everything settled, Jewett's friends had raised $23,000 for his expenses—much needed, because of insurance snafus, his sponsor dropping him and loss of work.

"It was overwhelming, and beautiful to me, to see how it turned out," Hookway says.

Jewett, so independent by nature, had to come to grips with the generosity. Then he had to go back to work.

Whole again

Doctors never could figure out what almost killed Super Dave. A virus, maybe, but by the time renal failure forced him into the hospital, his kidneys were swathed in scar tissue, and did not reveal their secrets. He was fit as an ox. Didn't smoke. Had no reason to think he was anything but invincible. Hookway summarizes the general sentiment around Pittsford thusly: "If Dave can get sick, my God, look at me. I'm hanging out at Thirsty's every night."

Or, as his father says, "Maybe for other people, there's this message of do the best you can. But sometimes Mother Nature will get you anyway. Bad things happen."

Maybe that's part of why Jewett can't accept defeat. In his mind, he didn't deserve to go down like this, and doesn't want his legacy to be that he was a great woodsman, one of the best, until some fluke in his system cut short his career—even if that may yet turn out to be the case. After his last tournament, Jewett told Bartucca, "I'm not up there." She saw it as him coming to grips with reality. It's easy to convince yourself you're fast when you train alone.

"It's important for this thing only to have affected one year of his life," Berry says. "But he's very, very anxious to get back to this elite status of one of the top guys. It's inspiring, but it's also hard to watch, because I don't know that he'll ever be at that level again."

"I would strongly suggest this (competition) is Dave's way of beating it back. Of saying, 'You didn't take this from me.'"

This week Jewett will find out how he stacks up against the best in the world, the guys against whom he set 20 world records in his day.

The mind is there, wants to do everything, wants to compete, wants to split wood. But the body's not following through. Not yet, at least, not fully.

What if it never does?

"I think that all the time," Jewett said Monday. "I probably won't ever be back to where I was. I don't know." Then he added: "It's still only been nine months since a major organ transplant."

He's not offering excuses. He just has to remind himself sometimes.