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.

Grumpus knew where to build now. He still did not know how. He lugged a fresh log to the narrows and dropped it in the pale water. For one breath it floated. Then the current caught it, swung it sideways, and tore it away downstream. Grumpus clenched his fists. Even here, where the water ran shallow and warm, the river stole anything he set in it. His logs would never hold if the water pulled them loose before he could fit them together. He sat on the bank and glared at the water. The problem was not the depth. The problem was the pull. A log alone was light. The river shoved it like a leaf. He needed something to pin each log down until the next one locked beside it. But he had only logs, and logs floated. Grumpus walked, thinking, until the trees opened and a huge stone castle rose ahead. Towers climbed high above thick walls. A wide wooden bridge hung from chains at the gate, stretched across the deep ditch below. Grumpus stared at that bridge. It did not float away. It hung from above, held fast at both ends. He crept close and studied the chains. Each one gripped the bridge and the wall. The bridge could not drift because something anchored it. Grumpus touched his big nose and grinned. He did not need chains. He needed weight. He needed anchors. He lumbered back to the narrows. On the way he gathered stones, the biggest he could carry, until his arms shook. He piled them on the bank. Then he took a log and lashed stones to one end with twisted vines. He heaved it into the shallow water. The current grabbed the log and pulled. The log shifted, then stopped. The stones dragged in the mud and held. The river hissed around it, but the log stayed. Grumpus let out a long breath. He pressed the free end down and jammed it against his marker stake. He did it again. He weighted a second log and set it beside the first. The two leaned together, stone-heavy, and the current could not spin them loose. For the first time, wood stayed where Grumpus put it in the river. He stood over his two anchored logs, water rushing past his knees. The narrows no longer stole his work. He had beaten the current. But he looked across the wide gap to the far bank, where his cousins lived, and his grin faded. Two logs reached barely a step into the river. To anchor the whole span, he would need stones by the hundreds, and logs by the hundreds more. His small pile would run out long before the bridge did. He knew how to build now. He simply did not have enough to build with.