Black Stag

A large gentleman Daniel Barker sat atop his round-cut log and dipped his fingers in a can of baked beans—unbaked—and as such they were merely called beans. Being a man with many winters beneath his belt, his black beard was specked with white hairs, and his brow was thick and as if furrowed permanently and seemed to collect snow and ice. His eyes were like small, black buttons, blank and reflective, and onlookers whispered to one another that were they truly able to stare knives, his beans would fall to the leaf-covered ground, so focused was his gaze upon the can. He made smacking noises and slobbered so viciously that those around him moved away, afraid to catch drifting bean morsels, and when he had finished he snapped his black eyes up from his can to the small crowd, and one smaller man sunk away into a shadow, afraid that he might share the fate of Daniel’s repast.

He was a lumberjack; everyone in the party of twelve was, and it was nearly 2 o’clock AM, the time at which they began to drag the trees across the frozen ground to the clearing.

“Watch ‘im,” said Robert Watkins. “Not to be trusted, that fella’.” Robert was the foreman’s brother. He was short and narrow, but had good bones and knew his way around the job as well as any other. They say he once walked seventeen miles in the dark of night to fetch the men some peroxide and carried a dog through an ice storm with a sprained ankle. But he didn’t trust Daniel, and he did all he could to convince his brother that the man had to leave.

His brother was much larger, as were most of the men, and had a habit of spitting before he said just about anything. When confronted, he peered at Robert through his thick wood-colored brows, and said, “he works hard and he doesn’t cause no trouble.” And that was that.

The sky that night was bright and clear, and stars shone in patches of light through the thick pine growth. The conditions were exceptional, and as each hand clutched a rope and pulled between the winter giants one of its fallen brethren, the trees seemed to sigh and mourn and tilt inwards upon themselves as if to weep. The lumberjacks pulled harder in these times where they felt most confined, and unable to reach their arms out and feel the cool air breathe openly about them. There was something, they all agreed, very liberating about the felling of a tree, and the way it opens up the sky for them to see and stretch and yell out into.

They pulled the tree along the path and dug up the earth from its place, upsetting roots and stones and what might have been the burrow for a skunk, and when they had heaved and pulled their arms and legs numb they all stopped and slumped against the toppled tower, breathing hard and cursing gravity.

“Should’ve chopped it in half.” A young man looking twentyish leaned against the tree with his arms over it and expressed his concerns between loud, hard breaths. His hair was sand colored and the whiskers on his chin were barely visible against the moon’s light.

None from the group responded immediately. Robert grunted and Mr. Barker merely stared at him. Most of the men had been in the business for their whole lives, and some’s lives had been longer than others’. “Would’ve taken two hours to cut again and two trips to pull,” someone said, and the logic seemed sound enough that it was not mentioned again.

The men strained once more against the cold ground, pulling and heaving with a strength common only to such gentlemen of the woods, and with teeth bared, throats emitting fearsome growls and fingers clutched so tightly that the ropes burned their hands and made them bleed, they dragged the timber through the woods and nearly across the open field.

At several times during the haul Robert and the young sandy-haired man quietly spoke to one-another about their distrust for the likes of Daniel Barker. Oftentimes when they stopped to rest, they would ask the other if he had seen Daniel cast dark looks upon his partner, Brian, for everyone was grouped with a person of relative pulling ability, and they stood directly across the way from each other. Robert and the sandy-haired man were paired thusly.

Robert said, “I reckon Mr. Barker’s meaning to do some harm to Brian,” and the stories would circulate between the men until even Brian himself seemed surprised to hear it, and stole nervous glances at his partner, who seemed more concerned with stuffing his cheeks with tobacco than any rumors about himself. Brian was young and a giant of a man, with thick sideburns connecting below his nose in a respectable moustache, and leaving the chin unshaven. He would have little to fear from any of the men if size were the only factor, and he acted as if the stories did not affect him. Something about Daniel Barker though, he decided, was frightening- perhaps the deep set of his narrow eyes or the thick brow- and for this reason he was cautious.

Come 4 o’clock AM, their work had come to an end. They had pulled the giant pine across an acre of frozen grass and snow, and most of the men limped away from their toils, eager to be separated from the ropes and the tree itself. Robert leaned against it and Brian and Daniel had moved away to smoke their pipes and eat.

The lumberjacks heard a booming snap. To city ears, the sound was gunfire, or close-by thunder, but these were men who lived and breathed the trees that they cut, and every one knew what that sound had meant, and reacted as such. They leapt up from their resting places and cleared the area, shouting and using the language that could only be learned in a group of woodsmen, and the years or decades or more of learned instincts sent the men clamoring for safety.

Everyone but the sandy-haired man, who was not as experienced, and did not understand that the cracking of the giant pine on its side meant that its branches were crumbling underneath the tons of weight, and that it was liable to roll or topple in his direction. The ancient tree did just that, as if exacting one final desperate attempt to strike back. It wobbled for a moment as if unsure of its target, and then tumbled over much quicker than even the veterans could have anticipated. The young man tried desperately to crawl to safety, but the field was frozen and uneven, and he could not move fast enough.

He cried to his partner, who did not hear him over the sounds of the colossus, groaning in protest as its limbs snapped and crushed. It seemed to fall purposefully, and under it disappeared the man with sandy hair. The lumberjacks stood back for a moment, waiting for the commotion to cease, holding their breath and all quite unsure if what they had just seen actually transpired.

They did not move at first. They did not speak. It was as if they stood atop thawing ice and to move—to even think about moving—would cause them to fall in and be pulled away by the current.

Robert was the first to run to the boy. Several others followed, and they picked their way through the branches until they found him pinned to the ground with a branch the size of a man’s wrist jammed into his lower stomach.

He made a few noises, and was alive, but he seemed to the men altogether oblivious of their presence.

Robert said that at least he didn’t seem to be in pain.

The man with sand-colored hair wasn’t with them, then. He could still see, or so he thought, but the corners of his eyes were dim and the harder he squinted to focus, the less he could make out. It seemed to him that they had never left the forest at all—that somehow, he thought, he was underneath the bristling canopy and watching the tops of trees sway in the wind. He heard muffled voices from somewhere, and they became the sounds that the trees made as their branches scratched at one another.

The lumberjacks stood about nervously, unsure how to proceed. “If we move the tree,” Robert had said, “it will likely kill him. But if we do not–”

They eventually decided that Robert and some of the smaller men would move towards the center of the tree and cut the branches from the inside carefully, while the rest would support it and prevent it from moving.

As the young man lay pinned to the frozen ground, he began to wonder what it was that his eyes were continually being drawn towards. A distant, blurry form that moved between the trees slowly and steadily. It came closer, and its presence inspired the sandy-haired man before he could even discern its identity. He felt cold, and for reasons beyond his comprehension, time seemed as if to stand still with the exception of the form that came still nearer. Then it was before him, and the man beheld a black deer with horns that twisted unnaturally and appeared gnarled with age.

It spoke to him in a cool tone that sounded like metal sliding against metal. It told him to follow, and the sandy-haired man did.

He walked deeper and deeper into the woods, and as he did, the light began to fade away.

Robert and some of the men against the tree had cut through the branch at last, but it was large and heavy, and they struggled to support its weight without injuring the boy. At one point the tree had heaved again, and crumpled even lower to the ground, and they surmised that had the branch not been removed by that point, then the boy would have been impaled.

The foreman directed his brother to retrieve the shears from Brian, who carried a hand-sized pair on his belt. Brian emptied his pipe as if the taste no longer appealed to him and gave Robert the sheers. Beads of sweat trickled down the man’s brow as he clamped the blades around the arm-sized thorn still protruding from the boy’s midsection, and began to cut.

The young man trudged quietly after the regal stag, and the sounds and smells of the places he had been started to fade away and become a neutral gray fog of the senses. For an instant, though, he thought perhaps he had heard a whistling sound.

And then an arrow struck the black deer in the ribs, and then another. It fell to the ground, a metallic cry escaping its bloody mouth, and died. The sandy-haired man felt as if his stomach had been pierced, and he experienced what he thought was the deer’s pain very succinctly.

From the shadows of the already-dark forest, Daniel Barker crept up to the deer and began his grim work with a skinning knife and a saw. His small, blinking eyes were focused intensely, and his hands were steady, but he said nothing.

The lumberjacks formed a ring around the boy, and when his eyes opened, their hearts felt joy, and some even shed tears. Daniel was away from the group, hunched over the fireplace with a can of beans.

“We thought you were dead for sure,” said Robert. He was smiling. The foreman was too. Even Brian seemed to twitch his great moustache.

The sandy-haired man said nothing, but instead stared through the crowd at the large gentleman Daniel Barker.