Or so Adam assumed until they came around a bend and looked far downriver to the place where the East Fork flowed in. Just beyond there was the beginning of Eltown, whose towers of smoke caught the red light of the nearly set sun. And just before it, plainly in view, was the hill that stood above the junction of the rivers. Its denuded, stump-stubbled lower reaches were in shadow, but its crown was still lit, as if by a dying fire, and the great tree’s scarred trunk rose up above that, its winter-bare branches raised up into the sky as if grasping at the last traces of the day’s light.

“You have mocked me for the last time, old one,” said Feller.

It took Adam some few moments to understand that he was addressing the tree.

“If my boat is no more, why then so be it. We shall seek what is nearer to hand. Tonight our iron bars we will reforge into axe heads ready to be made keen by Edger, and tomorrow we will come for you.”

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

The plan of Feller was much slower in coming to pass than he had first imagined. His crew were too exhausted to do anything at all the next day, and the day after that they awoke thinking of the complications that would be entailed, not just in cutting down the big tree, but in reducing its carcass to pieces small enough to be got down to the river. Adam had little interest in the plan and correspondingly little knowledge of its particulars, but when he crossed the river a few days later, everyone in Eltown seemed to know about it and to have become somehow involved—or to be claiming, at any rate, that Feller had entrusted them with this or that aspect of the preparations. Axe heads were being forged just as Feller had promised, but as well there was rope to be twisted, splitting wedges to be made, and supplies to be laid in for the encampment that Feller imagined he would bring into being around the tree. The project was seen as requiring a month’s work. Feller’s ambitions soon grew to include the creation of a new town on the site, and this brought further delays.

It also entailed docking the log piles of Adam and the other members of the crew. Feller did this when no one was present to raise objections, and later explained it as a necessary investment that would be repaid manyfold when the big tree came down.