By Van Allen Bear
The wood beyond the eastern peaks shimmers yellow in the autumn months. Lakes stretch long from the top of the valley to the south, and there are tall pines that sway in the warm breeze as their needles slowly drip one by one onto the soft forest floor beneath. The lakes have a healthy stock of trout with rainbow shimmering scales as they breech and munch on the lazy flies skittering on the surface. The skies are watched by eagles, always vigilant and steady as they soar from the valleys to their perches. Faint songs are sung from high boughs of the pines when the wind blows through. The wood harbors countless deer, elk, wolves, rabbits, squirrels, owls, and mice.
There is an interesting story about something that had happened to these woods, and had something to do with a woodchopper, however he wasn’t always called that.
You see, the wood harbors a family, and the head of that family is a man whom one could consider a woodchopper. Though he tries, he doesn’t quite pay enough attention to truly be called a woodsman, nor a chopper. He does fell trees but the man works along at a less-than-reasonable pace. The woods are rife with trees ready for chopping, but his pace surely is slow.
In the height of the spring, the woodchopper goes out from his home quite some distance to find the standing deadwood trees and clear out thickets of the wild brush. One year, on a particularly warm spring, the woodchopper headed out far from the house to a thicket that had suffered a landslide two seasons ago. The land had slid from a ways up the mountain and came to a halt in a rather flat area, off the beaten path. The trees were dead and ready for harvest, but they lay strewn about in new terrain, all bent and bundled together. This was going to be quick work, and the woodchopper made his way down to the fresh ground with only an axe and a bent claw tool. The woodchopper went to work, putting his hat on a protruding low branch, and dug his claw tool in a stump nearby his first tree.
“This is going to be an easy batch,” he thought, “all that I need to do is make a few cuts on these that are already dead and this should be the easiest bundle I’ll ever make.”
Careless, he wants the most firewood with the least amount of effort, so he finds a bigger tree than he has ever chopped before laying there in the pile of warped trunks and branches. Heedless, he goes atop the pile and began hammering away at the trunk. The woodchopper gets part of the way through and his axe loses the edge as it goes dull on the massive trunk of the dead tree. Realizing that he has forgotten his sharpening stones, he has to continue making due with an ever-dulling blade. “bang, bang, bang, bang, skrrraak!” he reeled back and the head of his axe was tumbling around inside the big pile of bundled lumber.
“You’ve got to be kidding me! I brought my worst axe and didn’t even notice!” he shouted to the sky.
Under further inspection of the handle, the woodchopper said, “no wonder it just broke, this is the most brittle axe I’ve got in the shed, I could have sworn that I brought the right one this morning, I must’ve not paid attention…” he said to himself, “what am I suppose to do now? Ah, guess I’ll go home and come back tomorrow…”
On his way off the pile of logs, he looked around to find his claw tool to see if he could drag a smaller log up the hill and have himself at least something to go home with. Around and around he looked and couldn’t find the claw tool, nowhere was it to be found. He reached for his hat on the bough and realized the ribbon had ripped on the inside brim, as it was rubbing against the sharp bark of the pine tree bough that it was resting on. He let out a low grumble and growl, having lost both his axe and claw tool and damaged his hat that day.
As he was climbing up the bank of the new earth towards the beaten path, he slipped with his right foot and slid gently back to the base of the slope. Tired and demoralized, he sat down on a bare log at the bottom. “My,” he thought as he put his head in his hands, “I had traveled so far and gotten so tired, I wish I had brought along a flask of water and a bundle of bread… I think I’ll just rest here a moment and try again to make it up this hill.” He then took a stick and cleaned the mud from under his boots.
Faintly, the woodchopper heard an unseen elk crying in the fields down the slope, and he panned the landscape but couldn’t place where the sound was coming from. Not up, not down, not left not right, and then it stopped. Nearing another clearing, he looked up to the peaks that were jutting above the treeline, then suddenly all at once the woodchopper got caught up in all the sounds and sights of nature. He saw the eastern peaks shimmering green in the springtime, the lakes stretching long from the top of the valley to the south, tall pines swaying in the warm breeze as their needles slowly drip one after another onto the soft forest floor beneath. The woodchopper could get a fair glimpse of the lakes he knew were full of rainbow trout and lazy flies skittering on the surface. He looked out towards the black wings gliding along in the skies as the eagles soared from the valleys to their perches. Faint songs were sung from high boughs of the pines when the wind blew through, and he knew, this world around him was that of no other.
Using the handle of his broken axe as a cane, the woodchopper made his way back up the bank towards the beaten path, and back to his home where he was greeted with a hot bowl of soup and his children reading a fairy-tale in the corner by the fireplace.
“My dear,” he started to his wife, “I’ve broken my axe, this brittle thing. I’ve ripped the inside of my hat, and I’ve gone ahead and lost the claw tool I brought with me. What I hadn’t brought with me was a lunch nor a flask of water… I tell you I’ve been heedlessly rummaging around about these woods too long. Thankyou for dinner, and in the morning I’ll be off with firewood in my return.”
The next morning he remembered his faults of the previous day. With a satchel full of mealtime pastries, broadaxe sharpened with a spare stone, flask slung on his back with water, and son by his side the woodchopper made his way into the warped bundle of trees down the bank.
“Son, take heed of the things you will see. I was here yesterday and made quite a fool of myself. Today you and I will harvest and clear a few piles of wood, and we will do it right, for we are within a living wood, full of elk and deer and eagles and fish and wolves and rabbits and trees and people like us. The woods have what we need, and in return we need to take care of and find a balance between what we take and what we give back.”
He said as he pointed his axe from the top of the slide zone to the base, “We will clear this slide area by the close of the summer, and in the next year it will be another thicket for the rabbits and the wolves and the bugs and the deer while we are warm and cozy all winter long.”
The woodchopper gained his title that day, as he and his son took a good helping of wood away from the warped pile and neatly stacked it under the awning of their humble home. They did this all summer, and as the eastern peaks shimmered yellow in the autumn months the slide zone was left clear for another springtime field for all the rabbits to play and the deer to bounce and the eagles to guard. That unseen elk which cried out to the woodchopper now lays to rest by bushels of berries on a carpet of grasses.
The same for all as time went on.
