Then I heard an eerie buzzing noise coming from below the Woodsman. I walked closer, looked down, and at his feet saw tiny people, the size of insects, maybe half an inch tall. I carefully got on my knees for a closer look.

The little people scurried about and wrapped fragile threads around the Woodsman’s feet. To ones so small the threads must have seemed great ropes.

“We have him now,” I heard one gloat squeakily. “He can’t get away from us.”

“He can’t tell us what to do.”

“We’ll show him. We’ll force him onto the tree!”

I laughed and called down to them, “With one flick of a toe he would break your threads, and with a stomp of his feet you would all be smashed!”

As I ridiculed the pathetic arrogant men below, suddenly I stopped laughing when I saw them next to me. Standing eye to eye with them now, I saw a huge shadow and looked up. There, far above me was … the Woodsman!

Had I become small or had the Woodsman become big? Perhaps it was both. Maybe that explained how he could cut through the huge tree. I was so much smaller than I’d thought, and he was so much bigger than he looked—things were not as they appeared.

I heard the sound of someone pounding with a hammer, but it was a dull tearing sound, not the crisp, loud sound of nails driven into wood. Where was it coming from?

I heard jingling metal and looked around me and saw people pulling things from their pockets. I reached into my left pocket and pulled out … a handful of nails.

I saw now that each person had a hammer. I watched motionless as person after person positioned nails on the Woodsman’s giant feet.

“No!” I shouted. “What has he done to you?”

What horrified me most was that the people seemed so normal, even nice.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” a woman in a white nurse’s uniform asked me as she positioned a nail and hammered it five times until it was buried to its head in the Woodsman’s foot.

“Where’s your hammer?” asked a businessman in suit and tie. “Here’s an extra. Glad to share.”

I took the hammer. It hung limp in my right hand. After watching this for a few minutes, it seemed less horrible. Something moved in my chest, and before I knew it, I was thinking about how big the Woodsman was, how distant he was, and how little he cared about me, and how he hadn’t made my life go the way I wanted, and how he thought he was better than me and had dared to cast blame on me. I took the hammer and started pounding nails into his heel, first one and then another and another. I felt gleeful, almost giddy.

“Nick! How’s it going?”