The redwood fell without ceremony.
It was not the largest within the Huxley-shire Forest, but Errol never felt at ease when cutting down a tree that was too tall for his means. In his days as a Lumberjack, he had been given the nickname of Cottonwood: a tall tree, thoughtful in how it shaded the land, a softwood. He had tried to see the sense of his actions while he grew. Smaller saplings could be cut and suit a town’s needs, the roots could be dug up and seeds could be resown; there wouldn’t be a scar in the forest, things could be allowed to grow in peace. The sense of life given its chance to grow old felt true to him. To give, to live within the forest and to survive alongside it.
He looked at his axe and inspected its edge, it glinted reverently in the dim light and he saw a reflection of himself in the old metal. The edge was clean, still sharp enough to cut through stone if the effort was put behind it. He had owned this axe for longer than he could recollect, and its edge had yet to fail him. When something of use is treated with respect, it would respect you in turn.
Feeling a soreness well within his shoulder, Errol felt a quiet shame at the weakness of his age. Resting for a moment on the new stump, the tired barman listened to the forest. The wind moved between the creaking pines; the fallen tree settled upon the ground. He could have sat in this cathedral of silence for an eternity but the movement of someone approaching withdrew him from his thoughts.
Standing, he scanned the wood for his visitor, had he misheard?
Without haste nor pride, a thin timber wolf loped happily across a rise close by to where Errol rested. The wolf, either deaf or uncaring of the human’s presence, snapped playfully at a floating drift of a pine fir and yawned expressively in the late morning’s light. It was a shaggy wolf, young but not timid among the ancient trees. It looked as like a cub, a child living its first spring spent in the sunlight.
The two strangers looked at each other and saw a familiarity in each other’s eyes. Something that was yet to come, something that was once the present. There was an equalness to their standing in the forest, a moment of recognition that only themselves and the wind were privy to.
The wolf looked further down the rise and with one final glance toward Errol continued into quietness, the forest closing its hands in protection around of one of its own, the precious moment now at its end.
Errol closed his eyes and noticed that he had been crying. In the soft light he had remembered four smiles, and then his hands holding one much smaller. He tightened his grip upon the axe and continued his work.
—
Many years ago, the winter itself had felt frozen.
Any flame conjured would die upon the hearth as four looked down in whimpering hope at their last attempt of warmth.
‘The winter god looks for his lost love.’ one of them spoke in sudden solemnity.
He was older than the rest, often voiceless and thoughtful in his stare. The man had a weariness to the furrow of his face and some in town believed him followed by ill omen in shadow and in dark.
‘With forlorn wandering, the winter looks for sun but can find only moon. It finds an imposter, a dying lantern that shimmers behind something that was once so true.’ The man looked sightlessly towards his hands and wept as they shook, a thin bar of iron was held as if it were a feather, something too precious for him to cradle any longer.
Errol, much younger then, moved to the man and took what was gestured outward, an act of acceptance, himself the only soul able to listen.
Frost clung to the man’s beard as the wind howled mercilessly into the cabin, buffeting the smouldering hearth as with a titan’s anger. Past the flecks of frostbite, past the humanity that still burned inside this man, Errol saw what was the echo of a prayer, an echo of something more important than life.
With a whisper the old man spoke in honesty.
‘You’re standing on my foot.’
Errol looked down and saw that he had been handed a nail.
The cabin became a place of laughter, the Lumberjacks had rejected the storm and filled their dying days with the warmth of voice. They told tall tales of little accuracy; they made songs and invented names for all the things that should never be named. Within the plight of the storm the four had found brotherhood, and as the open sky became a creature of blue, the Lumberjacks called out in joy with a disharmonised chorus of cheers.
The old man, named Bark by his fellow storm-weathered brothers, seemed to uncoil within the sunlight. With clicking bones and energy unbound he sprang into the snowfall, caught as if by the dance of movement in the air, the feeling of being free.
The expedition was a bust, too much time had been lost to the storm and their wages were no longer worth whatever wood that they could return with. Rich men with solemn faces would shake their heads and apologise. “There are the investors to consider”, they would say, “if the trip was made again, I’m sure a deal can be made”.
Errol didn’t care for investors, he realised now that he didn’t even care for money. There was a joy to be found in the presence of others and he knew that life was all that there was to strive for. But still, to the very core of something within his grain, he hated the greed that people were capable of. Unthoughtful hands just reaching, taking, without compassion.
Redgum, who knew of the weather like sailors would know of salt in their hair, had warned the group of the storm’s return, in two days they would have to be off the mountain or the heavens would open again, in two days they would be trapped where they stood and whoever survived would be out of food before the week’s end.
‘But there will be wolves,’ Soap-birch warned in his ever-fretful ways. Wringing his hands, the quick footed Lumberjack looked toward the departing storm and breathed with a staccato. He could hear the wolves of this forest bay on the wind, he could feel their desperation in the air.
‘They’ll be hungry too. There would have been no movement in the forest these last weeks, the animals would know to lie still a while longer. We should wait, we have to wait.’
Redgum threw a ball of snow at Soap-birch and chastised his worry.
‘We are not animals, no matter how bad you smell. If there are wolves, then there are wolves. We will bare our teeth and they will run away. If they do not? Well, then we will wrestle them to the ground and use their anger as our sled dogs. They want to survive as we do now; I just plan to be paid at the end of it.’
Movement became a thing of urgency; the sled was strapped on to the lone horse that survived and whatever timber could be found was lashed to the rails behind. Bark, who understood a horse’s mind better than his own, leapt upon the Clydesdale’s back and whispered frightful dreams of snakes and other nightmares that may draw it into tireless running. Sound took over the mountainside. Yells of the Lumberjacks called out from left and right as they stumbled down the slope and directed the sled. There was no road, luck was the only saviour that they could hope for.
Painfully becoming snagged on a rise, Errol and Redgum strained mightily against the timber, it shifted and turned perilously to its side, the horse taking freight in this steepening decent and Bark did all that he could to try and calm it.
Seeing the horse in agitation, Soap-birch could now smell the approach of wolves in the air. Paws were aflutter upon freshly fallen snow; a howl called across the rise. He knew that the death had found them.
‘Cut the straps, the wood’s not worth it.’ He yelled, as he pulled a torch from the sled and stuck flint upon the oiled cloth. He ran as flame coiled hungrily around the cold winter; his mind focused in a mad panic.
They are weary of fire, he thought, they are weak of hunger, there’s time to run away, there’s time to run away. The flame, too weak in the frigid air, spluttered and faded into ether but remained unheeded by its creator.
Redgum turned as her friend ran towards the howl, Errol found new purchase and the timber came free of the rise, momentum exploded forth into helpless tumble as the incline grew steeper and steeper, control handed towards gravity and panic as they fell. There were figures behind them now, closer, and closer they neared until there was no longer a ground to run on at all. All that remained was light, sound, darkness, silence.
The sled had been buried and the timber unfastened somewhere along the fall. Three Lumberjacks awoke.
They could find no sign of their friend.
—
‘You’ll pay us in full,’ Errol roared with an anger that could unbend the curve of a crescent moon and dropped his axe upon a table that was unsuited for a paper weight let alone lumbering implements. The table made several distressed popping noises as its every joint was tested and the integrity of small man behind it was tested quite the same.
‘Um… it can’t be done; the investors will never allow it. You can’t threaten me,’ the banker squeaked like a mouse before a lion.
Errol leaned down on his axe gently and heard something structural break within the burdened woodwork.
‘I don’t intend to threaten you, but a man died for this timber. We survived a storm that held no compassion, we ran from wolves who held no compassion. If we should meet the same fate here, if we should meet the same fate in this place where compassion should exist, the storm, the wolves, they both shall be joined by a beast who holds no mercy for thoughtless men,’ leaning in so that he and the banker were only a hairsbreadth away, Errol then whispered something to the banker with a quiet clarity, unmistakeable and true, ‘And that beast is someone that I love.’
Redgum, who up until this point had been bristling with a barely controlled rage, caught herself as she was about to open a bin of lamp oil by the door and then see what could be done with a flint and some tasteful swearing. Had Errol just said that he loved her? She looked at Bark and saw the old man digging a knot a wax from his ear, oblivious to his surroundings and smiling an odd-toothed smile. He can’t have meant Bark, you don’t love a man like Bark; he’s tolerable. He’s the friend you would hide the good cutlery from before he visits. Not Bark, surely?
She breathed shortly and was further distracted from her dreams of arson as a neatly brushed brown rat scampered over her shoe and made towards the banker, a scrap of parchment flapping from its mouth as it ran.
Skittering to a halt, the rat caught its breath and then dashed up a chair leg, dropping the parchment into the pocket of the banker shortly before it was back running towards the shadows and whatever business it had in the walls. Closing her eyes–safe in the knowledge that rats don’t just give people paper– Redgum leant against a wall and retired from her surroundings. It was a dream, she decided, she had banged her head when the sled had crashed and now was seconds away from being devoured by the wolves. Good, a this was good thing, dreams were manageable.
The banker, who also wished that this were a dream, felt a weight in his coat pocket and grew fretful, the invisible hand of his charted accountant had just passed him another decree.
‘Not now,’ he whimpered while shakily withdrawing the parchment.
‘No, I was going to wait until the spring festival. You know, flowers, song, and all that.’ replied Errol, missing the point, and embarrassed about opening up to a banker.
But the little man wasn’t listening, he was reading a half-gnawed piece of paper and rolling his eyes back in that way people do before they…
He had been quick.
The banker had fainted forward, and the Lumberjack knew that accidently headbutting the edge of an axe wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. Flinging the tool backward across the room, the banker crashed downward upon his already broken desk and further crumpled into what was a wreckage of timber and splinters. The axe, thrown as with the full force of a Lumberjack in panic, scythed through the air in a terror of movement. Its edge became dizzy as it spun. It looked toward every item within the room and became lost within its place in the world. The axe had a simple purpose, cut when swung, being thrown wasn’t an eventuality that it was prepared for. Seconds passed as hours, Redgum laughed as the axe demolished a large portion of the wall right next to where she stood and then followed behind as it continued to destroy whatever was in the room beyond.
Errol reached down as two more walls were altered by the continuing axe behind him–Redgum had found it by the sounds. Retrieving the parchment from the detritus of banker and furniture, he glanced at the paper and hoped that there was no one around that would ask him to pay for damages. Reading slowly, his mouthed curled upward with a smile. It was a receipt, it was addressed to the four Lumberjacks, they had been paid.
—
In a room bathed by the departed light of two-thousand candles, the wise old god of death picked up a jar from his shelf and gazed at the flickering light within.
Theo Farley, or a man known as Soap-birch to his friends, awoke in the study and immediately recognised the god Dormir before him. Laughing, he remembered promising his mother that he would have washed before his time of judgment and was within himself enough to realise that it would be impolite to sniff at his armpit.
‘Mr. Farley, you’ve done quite a pleasant thing and then suffered quite an unpleasant one it seems. Justice may not exist within life, but I see that it shall in death.’
The weathered voice of the god reminded Theo of the sound of settling dew as night became dawn. He felt a warmth of kindness behind the clear lenses of Dormir’s glasses, he smiled as the candle’s wick was trimmed, light and darkness becoming what was a single entity.
—
The young wolf first saw the light of sky, and then the trees that would become the canopy of its home. It was a shaggy wolf and its mother fussed over its tangled coat. Nipping at the cub’s ear, the wolf mother growled lowly and hoped that her child may one day attempt to keep clean, she hoped that they would be careful in life, that they may be presentable whenever final judgment should call. But this cub was a wolf of the forest, it would live countless years and know safety within the trees. The mother could see that within the eyes of her child that a happiness had taken growth. It would see old friends in the spirts that many could not see, it would be kind.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 