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Mar 15, 2024 16:21
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 22:43 |
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Just Keep Cutting 1361 words Roan clipped his harness into the rigging and pulled himself off the ground. He climbed, skirting around the low branches that hadn’t been trimmed yet, digging the toes of his boots into the rough red bark, hauling himself higher and higher. He paused at two stops, standing on a branch to switch to the next rope, before moving into the canopy. Soon, all he heard was breeze through creaking limbs, the strain of thousand-year-old wood groaning under its own weight, and below him the green heads of the forest rolling away. There was nothing else like this in the world. Roan and his crew had traveled for weeks to reach the Old Man, the tallest tree they’d found so far. To the north, an unbroken ocean of green, while to the south the pitted scars of his crew showed the forest floor like wounds. It was gorgeous; they could work all their lives and barely make a dent. Roan had never wanted to be a flier, much less a forester, but he’d taken the job when Pops got sick and he’d bounced out of the Law Academy when he couldn’t argue a case to save his life. He’d stayed when he’d fallen in love with the quiet that came after getting as high as he possibly could. It’d been climbing, cutting, and hard tent living for him ever since. Now he reached the spot he’d left off the day before and got to work sawing. Normally out here in the wilds, they’d just chop the base and let it rip, but the Old Man was too drat big; they had to give him a nice little trim first to make sure he didn’t take down half the forest when he fell. It wasn’t easy, shearing off the head of a tree ten feet in diameter at its very top. Down below, the thing was easily fifty feet across, and there were six guys already working on the base. But here, this was Roan’s life, his world, and as his saw sent wood chips and dust into the air he felt like there was a reason he’d been given this climbing gift, a reason he didn’t feel the chest-heaving fear everyone else got. He was born to trim giants, that’s what Roan figured, and once he had a good wedge made, the big piece pointed to fall north, he sent down a signal flag to make sure the crew got clear. He counted off to four hundred, then shoved. The tree creaked, cracked, and dropped. It fell with a breath-sucking plummet into space, hanging over nothing but silence for a few seconds until it hit the canopy. The ungodly crash it made through the forest below was incredible, and adrenaline pumped into Roan’s body. He’d done that—him, nobody else, had made this massive beast fall. He’d ripped a hole in the world. As he reset his ropes and got ready to start on the next section, feeling more than a little satisfied, something caught his eye. It was a shimmer, like sunlight glinting off metal. He figured it was a spike he’d forgotten to take out, but when he looked up over the edge of the tree’s capped skull, that wasn’t it at all. There was no spike, no metal, only a strange darkness inside the tree’s cavity, a negative space that made no sense—a tree this big couldn’t be hollow and still support itself. But there it was, only darkness where he expected to find rings and flesh. Then another one of those glints again, this time followed by something small and fast moving away from the light. Roan stared, his mouth open. This had never happened before. Little creatures began skittering, beetles the size of his big toe with a black-and-green carapace shining in the sudden sunlight, and they were freaking out. Their bodies churned over each other, some retreating deeper into the tree, but others crawled toward strange, carved structures jutting out of the walls of the tree’s innards. Roan had to stare for a while before the stuff made sense, but there were structures carved around the edges. They were like little houses, smooth and carefully made, with windows at even intervals and a larger opening in the middle. Some beetles were inside, hiding from him, a little beetle family with beetle parents and smaller beetle kids. There were furnishings inside that house, a table, something like a bed. His mouth opened and worked, and he whispered a greeting but of course they didn’t understand, they were beetles. But there were more structures, different but similar, with windows and doors and more carved objects inside, and the impossible beetle city retreated down into the enormous tree’s cavity, deep into the structure of the huge thing. Hundreds of them, thousands even, he couldn’t begin to count, and for all the trees he’d lopped down in this forest, this was the first time he’d ever seen anything remotely like this. The beetles had made a home. No, they’d made a city. He was caught between the sheer impossibility of a beetle society carved into the trunk of an enormous tree, and the certainty that if this tree fell all of those beetles would die, and that would be a terrible loss for the world. He was a law school dropout, a crap son, a tree flier, and not much else, but Roan was smart enough to know this was important and had to be preserved. The climb down was a blur. He hit the ground and spotted the crew nearby, and they’d made way too much progress already. Roan unclipped himself, braced against the noise of the full crew cutting as hard as they could, and ran to find Lonnish. The heavyset foreman was in the cutting line with everyone else and waved at Roan before coming over. He had dark hair and a chest like an oak. “You’re down early,” he shouted over the noise. “That’s good. We were going to send up a flag.” “I saw something,” Roan called back and suddenly felt crazy under Lonnish’s hard stare. That man had been in the wilds even longer than Roan, a hardened cutter that had seen plenty in his time, but if anyone would believe him, it had to be Lonnish. Only the foreman could put a stop to the cut midway through. “Yeah, I bet you did, all the way up there. The piece you dropped hit the ground like a mountain.” Lonnish laughed and slapped Roan’s arm before turning back to his task, but Roan held onto Lonnish’s shoulder. “No, it was inside the Old Man.” He described the beetles, the houses, all of the intricate and beautiful buildings. “I’m serious Lon, it’s in there, like a little world.” Lonnish pried Roan’s fingers away, and Roan wanted to keep holding on, but the foreman was already shaking his head. “We got orders to bring the Old Man down. I don’t know what you saw up there, but it doesn’t matter.” Roan felt cold all over. “Just let me go back up. I’ll warn them. I’ll try to…” But what could he do? They were beetles. He didn’t speak bug and it’s not like they’d listen to him anyway. He thought of the dollhouses his grandfather carved, of the wooden soldiers he played with as a boy, of all the small things he’d gathered in his life and kept safe because they were important to him. And now there was a city inside this tree teeming with beetle life, and there was nothing he could do to protect it. The saws did their work. Roan watched for a while, but his crewmates gave him ugly looks for standing around, and soon he joined in. They had orders, and this wasn’t his choice, and there was a whole forest left to climb, more new worlds to explore. Roan couldn’t do anything to change this outcome; he was only a guy that climbed trees. The Old Man would sound incredible when it fell, taking all those beetles with it.
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Mar 18, 2024 02:07
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