To Fell a Tree

The Fourth Day

Sunlight seeping through the tent-wall awoke him. He kicked free of his blankets and crawled out into the morning. He saw no scarlet winging of hahaha birds; he heard no morning birdsong. The tree was silent in the sunlight. Empty. Dead.

No, not quite dead. A cluster of leaves and flowers grew green and white and lovely by the entrance of the tent. He could not beat to look at them.

He stood up on the stub and breathed deeply of the morning air. It was a gentle morning. Mist was rising from the Great Wheat Sea and a scattering of cirrus clouds hung in the bright blue sky like new-washed laundry. He walked to the end of the stub and looked down. Wright was oiling the winch. Suhre was cutting up the last fifty-footer. Blueskies was nowhere in sight.

“Why didn’t you wake me, Mr. Wright?”

Wright looked up, located his face. “Thought you could stand a few extra winks, Mr. Strong.”

“You thought correctly… Where’s the Amerind?”

“The buffalo caught up to him again. He’s drowning them at the hotel bar.”

A two-wheeled gyro-car pulled into the square and a plump man carrying a basket got out. The mayor, Strong thought. Breakfast. He waved, and the mayor waved back.

The contents of the basket proved to be ham and eggs and coffee. Strong ate hurriedly, then collapsed his tent, folded it, and sent it down on the lift along with his blankets and campfire. He got ready for the first cut. It would be considerably less than one hundred feet because the stub was centered on the three hundred foot mark. It came off perfectly, and he “burned” down in his saddle for the second. This one would have to go at least one hundred and twenty feet in order to leave the maximum of two hundred for the base-cut. He estimated the distance carefully.

After notching the section on the side Wright wanted the fall, he worked his way around toward the opposite side of the trunk, playing out his saddle-rope as he went. The bark-prominences and the fissures made the operation relatively simple, and he even paused now and then to look down into the square. The square was closer now than it had been for days, and it and the houses and the streets looked strange from his new perspective, as did the hordes of colonists watching from beyond the vacated area.

Wright informed him when he was directly opposite the center of the notch, and he drove a tree-peg. It took but a moment to transfer his saddle from the overhead stub-crotch to the peg-slot. He leaned back in the seat, braced his feet against one of the bark-prominences, and began the cut.

He began it gingerly. He was working with thousands of tons and the least miscalculation could bring those thousands of tons down upon him. The trouble was, he had to cut above the tree-peg, and to do so he had to hold the cutter at arm’s length above his head, at the same time keeping the line of the beam at right angles to the trunk.

It was a tricky operation and demanded good eyesight and excellent judgment. Ordinarily Strong possessed both, but today he was tired. He didn’t have any idea quite how tired till he heard Wright shout.

It was the bark-prominences that had thrown him off. He realized that instantly. Instead of using the whole of the visible trunk in estimating his beam-angle, he had used only a limited area and the prominences in that area weren’t true. However, the realization did him no good: the one hundred and twenty foot section was already toppling towards him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

It was like clinging to the face of a cliff and seeing the entire top section start falling outward in a slow but inevitable arc that would eventually enclose him between earthen jaws. The jaws were wood in this case, but the analogy was basically accurate: the fate of a gnat squeezed between two handfuls of earth differs but little from the fate of a gnat squeezed between two sticks.

He felt nothing; terror had not yet had time to take root. He watched wonderingly while the falling section blotted out the sun and turned the fissures between the bark-prominences into dark caves. He listened wonderingly to a voice that he was sure was emanating from his own brain, but which could not be emanating from his own brain because it was too sweet and poignant to have his mind as a source-place.

Into the fissure. Hurry!

He could not see her; he wasn’t even sure it was her voice. But his body responded, squeezing itself into the nearest fissure, squirming back as far as it could go. Another second and the effort would have been wasted, for the moment his shoulder touched the backwall of the fissure, the upended butt of the section came thundering down tearing his tree-peg out by the steel roots; roaring, crashing, splintering, finally passing from sight.

The fissure filled with sunlight. Except for himself, it was empty.

Presently he heard the heavy thud as the section struck the ground. Another, more prolonged, thud followed, and he knew that it had landed head-on and then fallen lengthwise into the square. He waited almost hopefully for the sounds of splintering wood and breaking glass and the other sundry sounds houses make when a heavy object drops upon them, but he heard nothing.

The fissure had no floor. He was holding himself in position by pressing his knees against one wall while pressing his back against the other. Now he inched his way to the mouth and peered down into the square.

The section had landed on an angle, plowing a huge furrow in the earth, gouging out ancient burial artifacts and bits of human bones. Afterwards it had toppled back away from the nearer houses. Wright and Suhre were running up and down its length, looking for his mangled body. He heard himself laughing. He knew it was himself; not because he recognized his voice, but because there was no one else in the fissure. He laughed till his chest hurt and he could barely breathe, till there was no more hysteria left in him. Then, when his breath came back, he tongued on his transmitter and said: “Are you looking for me, Mr. Wright?”

Wright went rigid. He turned, looked up. Suhre followed suit. For a moment no one said a word. At last Wright raised his arm and wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “All I got to say, Mr. Strong,” he said, “is that you got a good dryad watching over you.” And then: “Come down, man. Come down. I want to shake your hand!”

It got through to Strong finally that he could go down; that his work, except for the base-cut, was finished.

He pulled up his dangling tree-peg, re-drove it, and “burned” down the saddle-rope in fifty foot spurts. He cut the last spurt short, slipped out of the seat, and leaped the final few feet to the ground.

The sun was at meridian. He had been in the tree three and one half days.

Wright came up and shook his hand. So did Suhre. At length he became aware that he was shaking hands with a third party. The mayor had returned, bringing special plates for everybody this time plus a set of collapsible tables and chairs.

“We’ll never forget you, my boy,” he was saying, his dew-lapped jaws jiggling. “We’ll never forget you! I called a special meeting of the board last night on your behalf, and we voted unanimously to erect a statue of you in the square after the stump had been burned out. We’re going to inscribe the words, ‘The Man Who Saved Our Beloved Village’ at its base. Quite a heroic inscription, don’t you think? But it’s no more than you deserve. However, today—tonight, I want to express my gratitude in a more tangible way. I want you—and your friends, too, of course—to be my guests at the hotel. Every thing will be on the house.”

Suhre said: “I’ve been waiting to hear those words!” Wright said: “We’ll be there.” Strong didn’t say anything. Finally the mayor released his hand, and the four of them sat down to dinner. Steaks brought all the way from the southern hemisphere, mushrooms imported from Omicron Ceti 14, tossed salad, green peas, fresh bread, apricot pie, coffee.

Strong forced the food down. He had no appetite. What he really wanted was a drink. Many drinks. But it was too soon. He still had one more cut to go. Then he could drink. Then he could help Blueskies drown the buffalo. On the house. “The Man Who Saved Our Beloved Village.” Fill her up, bartender. Fill her up again. I did not wear my scarlet cloak, bartender. For blood and wine are red, bartender. And blood and wine were on my hands when they found me with the dead, the poor dead woman whom I loved and murdered in her bed…

The mayor had an excellent appetite. His beloved village was safe now. Now he could sit by his fire and count his credits in peace. He wouldn’t have to worry any more about the tree. Strong felt like the little Dutch boy who had thrust his hand in the hole in the dike and saved the burghers’ houses from the sea.

He was glad when the meal was over, glad when Wright leaned back in his chair. “What do you say, Mr. Strong?” “I say let’s get it over with, Mr. Wright.”

They got up. The mayor took his table and chairs, climbed in his gyro-car and joined the other colonists beyond the danger area. The village sparkled in the sunlight. The streets looked as though they had just been scrubbed, and the houses with their elaborate decor, looked like gingerbread fresh from the oven. Strong stopped feeling like the little Dutch boy and started to feel like Jack the Giant-Killer. It was time to chop down the bean-stalk.

He took up his position at the base of the trunk and began the notch. Wright and Suhre stood just behind him. He cut the notch carefully so that the trunk could not fail to fall in the direction Wright had designated. He cut it deep and true, and when he finished, he knew the trunk would obey him. He walked around to its opposite side, Wright and Suhre following. No one spoke. It felt strange to be walking on solid ground. He kept expecting to feel the tug of the saddle-seat against his buttocks, the drag of the limb-line on his belt. The tips of his boots were red, he noticed. Red from the “blood”-drenched grass.

He took up his final position and raised his cutter. He squeezed the trigger. The coward does it with a kiss, he thought, the treeman with a sword. A slit appeared in the fissured trunk. Its edges began to redden. The most modern of swords, manufactured in New America, Venus, and guaranteed never to become dull—

Never to show mercy.

“Blood” ran down the bark, discoloring the grass. The invisible blade of the cutter swung back and forth and back and forth. The two hundred foot stub that once had been a tall proud tree shuddered. Slowly it began its passage to the ground.

There was the prolonged swishing sound of the descent; the thick and thunderous sound of the descent’s end; the quick brief trembling of the earth…

The surface of the massive stump grew bright red in the sunlight. Strong let the cutter fall to the ground. He circled the stump, stumbling now and then, till he came to the building-high length of the fallen stub. It had dropped just as he had wanted it to, its uppermost section landing neatly between two of the rows of houses. But he did not care about the houses any more. He had never cared about them really. He continued walking, gazing steadfastly at the ground. He found her presently, near the edge of the square. He had known he would find her if he looked hard enough. She was sunlight and meadow flower, a transient pattern of grass. He could not see all of her—only her waist and breasts and arms and lovely dying face. The rest of her was crushed beneath the stub: her hips, her legs, her small, leaf-sandaled feet—“Forgive me,” he said, and saw her smile and nod her head, and saw her die; and the grass come back, and the meadow flower, and the sun.