Ralph's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Ralph swung his axe at the base of the great tree, and the blade bounced off the bark like it had hit stone. He wanted a homestead here, past the colony's last fence, where no man had cleared a single acre. But the timber in these woods grew thick and hard, and his tools came from softer country. He checked the edge. Chips bit the steel. A crack ran down the handle. These were his father's tools, worn gray with twenty years of use, and they could not touch this forest. He swung again. The crack widened. On the fourth blow, the handle snapped, and the axe head spun into the brush. Ralph stood with half a stick in his fist. Without wood, he had no cabin, no walls, no roof before the cold came. He sat on a stump and stared at the broken tool. His plan had failed before the first log fell. A bell jingled on the trail behind him. Lewis the mailman came through the ferns, leather bag swinging at his hip, blue cap pushed back off his forehead. He delivered to the far cabins no other carrier would reach. His boots were caked with mud from the long walk out. "You're a long way past anybody's address," Lewis said. He looked at the splintered handle, then at the trees. "Those tools belong to a flatland farm, friend. Not here." Ralph held up the broken half. "They were all I had." Lewis set his bag down and dug through it. He pulled out a folded paper and smoothed it against his knee. "This came for the hall two towns back. A smith there forges wedges and saw teeth hard enough to split ironwood. I was meant to carry the order in." He paused. "But the man who ordered it died last winter. Nobody claimed the tools." Ralph took the paper. The writing listed a crosscut saw, iron wedges, and a felling maul. Enough to drop every tree around him. "They sit in a crate at the Timber Craft Hall," Lewis said. "Paid for already. You walk in, show that paper, they're yours." He picked up his bag. "Two days each way. Longer if the rain comes." Ralph looked at the folded order, then at the forest he could not cut. He had come here to build something that would last. A snapped handle would not stop him. A four-day walk would not either. "I'll go," he said. Lewis nodded and started back up the trail. Near the ferns, something gray shifted in the brush. A young Lemmon bear, soft-furred and round, lifted its head to watch the two men. It did not run. It stayed between Ralph and the trail to the hall, chewing a leaf, blocking the only path out. Ralph gathered the broken axe head from the brush. He had his answer and his road. Now he only had to get past the thing standing in it.