What the Woodsman Heard

In the time before the great cities, the land lay covered in lush green forest still untamed by man’s ambitions. In those days there were songs that echoed through creation that will never be heard again. There were noble creatures who cannot be seen anywhere today, by any falcon’s eye high above, nor any watery beast of the abyss deep below. There were creatures who now live only in the tales of men, men who build their homes from their remains.

In that time there was a family of woodsmen. The most rambunctious of them, the youngest of four sons, was named Bardan. Bardan’s mother died bringing him into the world and so he was raised in the rowdy unkempt company of juvenile souls with the vicious strength of bulls. He spent his youth at the bottom of dogpiles and fighting for scraps at the dinner table; learning only hard-fought respect and knowing nothing of tenderness. His back grew strong, and his hands grew callous.

When still just a child, Bardan followed his third oldest brother, Essan, into the wood one day. Skillfully Essan felled a tall tree in just four quick strokes, as their father had shown him.

“I can do that!” the impetuous Bardan yelled.

Essan laughed, “You’re just a kid! You’d be lucky to get the blade an inch into a tree this size.”

“Let me try,” he huffed, “just give me the axe!”

A mischievous grin crept along the older boy’s unwashed face. “Sure,” he said, “If you can find it!” Suddenly he threw the axe, spinning end over end, into the brush.

Bardan issued a shrill scream like a wounded animal and stuck out his tongue towards his brother. Then he ran headlong into the forest after the axe. He barreled through the brush, snapping branches and wincing through briars as he went.

Frantically he scrambled like a mad boar, until he came upon a clearing. One singular hazy beam of orange sunlight penetrated the canopy illuminating a patch of thick moss. There in the sunbeam the axe was lodged blade down, and resting perched on the oaken handle was a small bird like a sparrow with emerald green feathers. Bardan had never seen anything so vibrant and dazzling as the brilliant green feathers. He hesitated as the bird chirped a gentle melody.

“Get out of here you stupid bird!” The child yelled, shooing the bird away from his family’s tool of trade.

In a flash and a peep the bird was gone, vanished through the leaves and into the sky. Bardan snatched the Axe in a huff and ran to return to his brother, backtracking the furrow he had carved through the brush.

When he made it back to the fallen tree his brother was rolling up his bindle.

“Oh you found it,” he said through grinning teeth. “The sun’s getting low brother, we should probably head back.” He slung the cloth sack over his shoulder.

“No…way…” the younger boy gasped through heavy breaths, one hand on his knee and the other propped up on the axe handle like a cane. “I-” he wheezed, “have to try… chopping a tree.” He leaned back against the trunk of a young pine. “Just let me catch my breath.”

“No time little brother. We have to get home before sunset, if you want to prove me wrong you better do it quickly.”

“Fine!” Bardan barked, hopping to his feet. “Here I go!” He turned and swung the axe at the tree he had just been leaning on. His footing was all wrong and the weight of the blade sent him off balance, missing the tree.

“That’s one,” Essan smirked.

“Ugh!” Bardan ground his feet into the dirt and took another swing, but his grip was too loose and the blade bounced off the trunk, shaving the tiniest of splinters. The rebound of the handle stung his hands.

“Pfft, that’s two! Why bother at this point?”

Bardan grit his teeth and wrung the axe handle between his hands, tightening his grip. He swung again. The blade was buried almost completely in the tree.

“Whoa,” Essan gasped in surprise.

Bardan braced one foot on the tree using his full strength to pry the axe out. The tree cracked and groaned as he yanked the blade free. “Just one more,” he whispered to himself, and swung the axe with all his might, sending an explosion of pine fragments. The axe almost broke through the other side but stopped just short. It didn’t matter though, the child’s lethal work was done, and what little was left of the tree’s support snapped under its immense weight. “Timber!” the boy shouted with glee, and the pine fell with a crash.

After that day the boy only continued to grow more brazen, just as he continued to grow taller and wider. Soon he infuriated Ishan, his second oldest brother, by mastering his favorite trick as well. Like Ishan, he could chop down an adult cedar in a single swing of his axe.

Years went by and eventually he outshined his oldest brother, Hergan. Hergan could chop down ten tall hardwoods in one hour, without a sip of water. Bardan had managed twenty.

His arms were dense as knotted roots, his skin was tougher than tanned hide, and his beard grew thick and dark like a briar patch. Now there was nothing his brother’s could do that he could not do better, and he lorded it over them. He called himself the greatest woodsman who ever lived, and he would grab his brothers by their ankles and twist them until they howled if they uttered a word in disagreement.

“Fine!” Hergan shouted one day in disgust. “I’ll admit it, you’re better than all of us, but you still can’t say you’re the greatest that ever lived. There is still one greater.”

“Who?” Bardan demanded. “You tell me, and I’ll double anything they’ve ever done!”

“You’ll wish you hadn’t said that brother,” Essan said with his sly grin.

“His deeds are inhuman little Bar,” said Ishan. “Even Death himself struggles to comprehend the desolation he wrought.”

“Who is this man?” asked Bardan.

“Someone you know well,” Hergan added. “And this exploit nearly killed him.”

“Tell me who!”

“Our father,” said the three elder brothers in unison.

“You don’t know this story,” said Ishan.

“I barely remember it myself,” said Essan.

“It began the day you were born,” Hergan said coldly. “The day our mother died… father left into the woods taking a roll of ten axes.”

“He was gone for five days.”

“He stayed out in a torrential storm.”

“He ate only what he killed.”

“And by the time he returned home-”

“He had cleared 40 acres.”

“They say,” said Hergan grimly, “when his last axe broke, he chopped down ten more trees with his bare hands, and only came home because in the end his hands were broken as well.”

Bardan sat for a moment, grinding his teeth. He snorted and scratched his sandpaper beard. He looked his eldest brother in the eye and said flatly, “fetch me ten axes.”

* * *

Bardan took a whole day to feast and rest in preparation for his challenge. He would start the next day at first light.

Before sunrise all four brothers hiked out to a less frequented area of the wood, Bardan carried a roll of the family’s ten best axes. Openly the three eldest mocked him, but inwardly they accepted that he may succeed. They were not so prideful that they wouldn’t come witness; after all, win or lose, he would leave a small fortune of cut timber in his wake.

Bardan wasted no time. When the first beams of sunlight touched his face he sprang into action, chopping away with a practiced ease and a steady rhythm. For hours and hours, the forest was loud with the constant tempo of thundering chops, like a pounding heartbeat. His scornful brothers followed behind, piling logs into stacks and chopping chords of firewood to sell.

He continued through the night without stopping.

When his second axe snapped, Bardan paused to stretch his arms wide in the cresting morning light. He rolled his shoulders, then climbed high up into a nearby tree where he found a bird’s nest. Quickly he made a breakfast of five bird’s eggs, eating them raw. Descending back to the earth, he hefted a fresh axe from his roll and went back to work, rudely waking his sleeping brothers with the sound of renewed ferocious chopping.

The rain began early in the morning as an impish sun-shower, intermittent drops flicking the green summer leaves, and cooling the temperature. However, the patches of blue sky were soon crowded out and covered over in layers of invading gray clouds, until all was one gray world of muted colors and gently hissing rainfall.

When the afternoon brought a torrential downpour and sounds of thunder, Hergan, Ishan, and Essan agreed that their riches of fallen timber would still be there when the rain cleared. They packed their supplies and abandoned their brother to his trial.

Undeterred by the rain, Bardan continued his savage labor. The rain continued just as fiercely as the stubborn woodsman, turning the paths into slurries of thick mud, slowing him down, but never stopping him.

A frigid breeze sent a shiver through his aching muscles. Looking back on his path he saw the thoroughness of his work had destroyed the tree cover for the better part of a mile leaving nothing to break the wind. Worse, without the canopy to deter the pounding rainfall, most of the brush was washed away in the runoff and shifting mudslides. The path he had cut had become a muddy wasteland.

Here at the end of the second day the rain relented, and so did he. At the first flat spot he could find, Bardan collapsed in the filthy mud.

During the night he dreamed of flying through the sky on brilliant feathered wings, but was halted by the shadowy figure of an old man.

“Is this your work?” asked the figure.

Looking below, Bardan saw the dark scar he had carved through the wood. Bardan’s wings beat fiercely to keep him aloft, but the shadowy man seemed somehow to stand on the empty air, his long grey beard gently twisting in the breeze.

“Is this your work?” the man asked again.

“It is, and I am not yet finished,” instinctively he reached for his axe, but grasped at only air.

“Look around, is this not enough? You have brought death to these woods.”

“Everything dies,” Bardan said. “I was greeted by death on my first day. I have done nothing that time would not do on its own eventually. Besides… The trees will grow back.”

“No, they will not.”

Before Bardan could react to the man’s strange response, he found himself suddenly falling, hurtling down to the earth below, his wings dissolving in a trail of scattered feathers. As he fell he could see only the face of the ancient-looking figure, silently falling with him to their certain peril below. Then everything was dark.

* * *

Bardan woke to find himself in a cage made of wooden bars. Groggily he felt around for his roll of axes, but found nothing. His head was spinning and he felt weak, but he could hear a constant chatter of low voices. He gripped one of the poles of his prison and pulled himself up, but it wasn't quite tall enough for him to stand to his full height.

“-such egregious disrespect for the earth cannot be overlooked,” he heard one voice say.

“Who are we to meddle in the affairs of humans? Are we not as bad as he to have apprehended the beast so?” another voice added.

“But we have not killed him!” There was passion in the voice, but even so it came out even and unhurried.

Bardan looked around and found that he was in an earthen ditch, cleared out in a crowded thicket of trees. A dense canopy of leaves and branches arched over the clearing like a vaulted roof blocking all but a few shafts of light stained green through the leaves. He was surrounded on all sides by grassy mounds, and when he stooped to look up out of the cage he could see at the peak of many of the mounds men sat cross-legged.

“Where am I?” he yelled.

“He wakes,” one voice said with contempt.

“This is your trial,” said another.

“Trial? What crime have I committed?” Asked Bardan

“Why is it always the burden of those who know what is right to instruct the ignorant?”

Bardan’s blood boiled with annoyance, but before he could snarl a response he saw one of the trees bordering the clearing begin to shift. The tall swaying branches retracted, it shrank as if time was rewinding, returning it to a young sapling. Rather than vanish into the dirt, the limbs folded and took the shape of a man. That man walked towards the circle and sat on an unoccupied mound. Bardan couldn’t believe his eyes, but then he saw three more trees join the circle as men.

“I-,” he stuttered. “The trees - I can’t believe it- you’re -you’re-”

“Your prey,” said one of the figures, “the victims of your recklessness.”

“Calm yourself brother. Remember, we gather not for our own defense, but for those who cannot speak our tongue.”

“And who soon will have no voice at all.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Extinction.”

“The fruits of your labor.”

“I don’t understand,” Bardan cried.

“Because you do not listen.”

“Bardan of the axe, you have killed!”

“Killed who?” he asked.

“There is no dispute. Hundreds have fallen at your hand.”

“We have not gathered to determine your guilt, only to deliver your sentence.”

“How should we punish the beast?”

“Please, I don’t understand, who are you?” He pleaded, “who have I killed?”

“His slaughter was without mercy,” the voices continued as if he had not spoken, “so his sentence should be without mercy,”

“Agreed,” murmured many voices.

“His actions are indefensible, we must be severe.”

“Please…” Bardan said weakly, sweating almost feverishly, he fell to his knees unable to stand.

“Bardan of the axe,” a voice boomed. “We find you guilty of the crime of ignorance, and as your punishment you have been sentenced to know.” Again the chorus of voices murmured in agreement. “Follow Old Simeon, and you will be cursed to learn.”

The wooden bars withered and unfolded freeing the woodsman. When he looked up all the mysterious figures were walking languidly into the woods disappearing one by one. Only one remained. He looked and saw the face of the same stranger from his dream. Looking closely now he could see the man’s long beard was a hanging grey moss, and his wrinkled skin had a texture more like a gnarled mahogany root.

“Follow me,” bade the wood spirit.

Dazed, and weak, Bardan followed.

In silence the pair walked for what seemed like miles until Old Simeon brought the woodsman out of the woods to a clearing on the edge of a cliff. And at last, he spoke.

“My kind are the last of the great listeners,” he said. “When I listen, I can hear the gentle breath of the earth itself. I hear things that have happened long ago… and what will. This forest was once filled with a rare creature unique in all the world. A bird with feathers like a sparkling gem.”

“I have seen it,” said Bardan.

“I’ve heard,” said Old Simeon. “Today, the last of their kind will leave this world. I hear this too. Fragile was their habitat, and now none of it is left.” He gestured to the cliff edge, looking out over a large section of the forest.

“Because of me?”

“Yes, you and your brothers.”

“I didn’t know! If I had known I-”

“But you could have known. You do not know because you do not listen. But today you will listen, and today you will know.” He stopped at the edge of the cliff.

Bardan approached the edge, then stood silently, and for the first time he listened to the forest that was his home. Faintly in the distance he heard the gentle melody of a chirping bird. His ears had heard hundreds of birdsongs, but for the first time his soul listened. The song drifted through the silence with a discernible melancholy, and then suddenly it ceased. A tear rolled down the proud woodsman’s cheek.

“Now there are none left. You were the last to hear that song, and when it fades from your memory it will be gone, just like its composer,” Said the wood spirit, “and in your deafness, had I not brought you here, you wouldn’t even know what you lost.”

No force could ever have broken the woodsman’s back, but the parting words of Old Simeon broke his heart. The ancient spirit turned and walked away, disappearing into the forest.

Bardan never again touched an axe, but all the same, the trees he cut down in those two days never did grow back. His brothers each built homes for themselves from the abundance of fallen timber, and soon a great city rose up in the clearing, loud with the hustle and bustle of ambitious men. But some say an old man still walks its outskirts, and if you listen he whistles the saddest song ever heard.