Brock green's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Brock Green stood at the tree line with a folding saw in one hand and six weeks until the first hard freeze. The clearing behind him was flat, sheltered, and useless without walls. He had chosen this ground because Nova pointed at it last spring and said she wanted a porch here, a kitchen there, and a room for a child by the second winter. He had torn up a contract to make that promise real. Now the promise weighed forty tons of standing spruce, and he owned a saw meant for firewood. He walked the property once more and counted what he had. Two axes, both light. A hand saw. A coil of rope. No draft animal, no mill, no forge. He had drawn the house on the back of a supply receipt, a big place with wide windows and a steep roof, the kind he had seen once in a lumber town down south and never stopped picturing. To raise it he needed felling axes, a two-man crosscut, wedges, chain, and a team. He had cash for maybe half. The nearest outfitter was two days out by sled, and every day he spent traveling was a day the ground hardened past digging. Nova came out of the tent in her white fur coat and green sweater, boots crunching the frost, and asked him what he was going to do. He told her the truth. He said he could not build this house alone, and he could not buy his way out of it either. He went to the settlement that afternoon and knocked on Collin Blackish's door. Collin listened, poured coffee, and led him to a shed behind the cabin. Inside hung his late father's tools: a crosscut saw oiled and wrapped, two felling axes, a broadaxe, splitting wedges, and a set of timber dogs. Collin said Brock could borrow all of it through the winter if he helped cut Collin's own woodpile first. Brock agreed before the coffee cooled. He loaded the sled that evening and hauled the tools back to the clearing under a sky already dropping snow. Nova met him at the tent and ran her hand along the crosscut's teeth. The tools were his now, on loan. The clock was not. Six weeks had become five, and the first spruce still stood.