Pandapop's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Pandapop heard the first axe strike before sunrise, and she knew the guardian would hide. She lived in a bamboo grove most people could not find. A spirit had watched the grove longer than she had been alive, and last winter, when fever nearly killed her, the grove stayed warm through every freezing night. She believed that warmth saved her. Every morning since, she left fresh shoots at the base of the oldest stalk. Two weeks ago, on a dry, windless night, one stalk bent flat to the ground. She checked the soil, the roots, the air. Nothing explained it. The guardian had answered her, and she had been trying to coax it closer ever since. Now strangers were cutting into the far path, and every blow drove the answer further away. She followed the noise to the grove's edge. Two men had set up a camp just outside the green wall: a log shelter with a slanted roof, a ring of stones around a smoking fire, an axe leaned against a stack of split wood. A lantern still burned by the door though the sun was up. Past the camp, where they had already worked, the bamboo ended in a ragged gap. Fresh stumps stood in a half-circle. They had nailed a yellow board to one of the taller stumps. CAUTION, it read, in black letters as tall as her hand. The warning was for anyone who might wander in. It was not for the grove. Pandapop crouched behind a clump of stalks and tried to think. She could not speak to them. Strangers who saw a panda girl in a hidden grove would tell other strangers, and then there would be more men, not fewer. She needed them to leave on their own. She crept back through the grove to a place she knew, where a dead tree leaned over a dry creek. Its bark hung in strips. Its trunk was hollowed and split, and one heavy branch sagged almost to the dirt. She braced her shoulder against it and pushed until the roots gave. She dragged it, a step at a time, back toward the cut line. When the men went to the creek to fill their kettle, she hauled the dead tree across the fresh stumps and laid it over their warning board. A sick grove. A bad place. A reason to move on. She waited in the stalks until the men came back. The taller one stopped. He kicked the trunk. He called to the other, and they stood over it a long time, talking low. Then the shorter one walked to the shelter and came back with a saw. They cut the dead tree into three pieces and threw the pieces on their firewood pile. The taller one pulled the warning board free of the splinters and hammered it back into place at a fresh angle. Then he picked up his axe and walked deeper into the grove than he had gone before.