Finn Oakley's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Finn Oakley cut down trees for money, but he wanted to raise them back up. He stood on his own land at dawn, boots sinking in cold mud. Stumps circled him for a hundred yards. He had cleared this ground himself, one saw cut at a time. Now he wanted to build a sanctuary here, a place where hurt animals could live safe beside him. But nothing safe could grow on bare dirt. There was no brush, no cover, no home for a rabbit or a fox. He had ruined the land before he ever thought to save it. A whimper turned his head. His pit bull pushed against his leg, black-and-white coat streaked with mud. The dog had followed Finn to work every day for six years. Now he stared at something small trembling near a stump. Finn knelt. A plump chipmunk lay in a puddle, one dark wing folded wrong beneath its body. Feathers. A chipmunk with feathers. Finn had watched enough strange things on late-night movies to stop questioning wonders. He questioned instead where it could live. He cupped the creature in his broad hands. It shivered against his beard. There was no shelter for a hundred yards in any direction. "I've got nothing to give you," Finn told it. The dog whined again. Then Finn remembered the tool leaning inside his shed. A trader had left it as payment last winter, calling it useless. The head glowed faintly green, wrapped in carved leaves. Finn had thought it decoration. Now he had one dying animal and a hundred yards of dead ground, and no other idea worth trying. He set the chipmunk in his coat and fetched the hoe. Its handle warmed his palms at once. He drove the blade into the mud beside the nearest stump. Where the metal turned the earth, the soil went dark and soft. A green shoot pushed up through his boot print. He struck again. Ferns unrolled. A sapling rose to his knee in the space of one breath. Finn worked the hoe across the clearing until his arms burned. Grass spread behind him like a spilled bucket. Bushes thickened around the stumps he had cut. By midmorning the bare ground wore a coat of green, and the dog crashed happily through new brush. Finn eased the winged chipmunk down into a fresh patch of ferns. It found its feet. It burrowed under a leaf and stayed. The land could hold life again. His sanctuary had its first ground and its first resident. He leaned on the glowing hoe and grinned. Then he saw the truth he had not planned for. Animals would come now. The new brush would draw them out of the hills. He had cover and food and one small patient. He had no fence, no pens, no clean water, and no shelter for winter. He had made a home, and now he had to fill it before something with teeth found it first.