Grumpus's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Grumpus had one pile of logs and one river he could not cross. The river had split his family for generations. His cousins lived on the far bank, close enough to wave to, too far to touch. He wanted to build a bridge wide enough for all of them to walk across at once. But he could see the problem from where he stood. His logs barely reached to his knee in a heap. The river ran wide and dark, and he had no idea where it ran thin. He set a log in the water to test it. The current ripped it from his big hands and spun it away downstream. Grumpus watched it shrink to a dot. One log gone, and he had learned nothing except that guessing would ruin him. Pick the wrong spot, build where the water ran deep, and his small pile would vanish like that log. He needed to know the river. He scratched his huge ears and stared at the moving water, lost. So Grumpus walked the bank. He walked until his feet ached and the trees thinned. The river curved, then opened into something still and strange. Here the water lay flat inside a ring of fitted gray stones. Orange and black fish looped through it in slow circles. It was a moat, carved to border some castle he could not see past the hills. The fish swam where the water stayed shallow. They turned away sharp from the deeper middle. Grumpus knelt at the stone rim. He watched the fish for a long time. They told him what his eyes could not. Where water runs shallow, it runs clear and slow, and the fish drift lazy. Where it runs deep, it runs dark, and nothing lingers. His big nose hovered close to the surface. He smelled the difference too: the shallow edge warm, the deep center cold and sharp. He lumbered back to the river with the lesson. This time he did not guess. He crouched and sniffed along the bank, step by step, the way he had smelled the moat. He watched for small fish drifting slow near the surface. Far past his log pile, the water turned pale and warm against his nose. Little fish hung there, unbothered. The bottom showed through. He had found the narrows. Grumpus pressed a stake into the mud to mark it. His chest felt lighter than it had all day. He knew where to build now. He would not waste his logs. But he stood up and looked again at the small heap behind him, then at the wide gap the bridge must span. The narrows were still far across. His pile would not reach a quarter of the way. He had solved where. Now he faced a worse question: he did not have nearly enough to build with.