The Woodsman

“I told you the hunting was good here, Aulf.”

The man who said it was dressed in green and brown. The other, in plain brown, dangled a stick with three birds hanging from it.

“Aye, the hunting’s good all right. Just got to watch out for the bears.”

“And ghosts.”

“Ain’t no ghost here.”

“You not heard the stories?”

“That ain’t here. That’s further north.”

“Aye, I guess. Still find this solemn as shit.”

“Solemn? Who the fuck uses a word like that, Conrad?”

“I do.”

“Idiot.”

“I ain’t no idiot.”

“Yeah, you are.” Aulf scoffed. “Solemn,” he copied.

“Well, what word should I use?”

“Scary?”

“It ain’t scary.”

“No, but it’s solemn, right?”

“Fuck off, Aulf.”

“Fuck— Oh. See that beauty.”

Both men stopped and watched a small deer crossing the pathway. They looked at each other, and Conrad lowered the stick of birds and took the bow off his shoulder.

“You going to hit it this time?”

“Shut up, Aulf.”

He drew a bead and loosed, and the shaft took the deer in the hind leg. It bolted.

The birds went quiet.

His hand went to the axe. Birds going quiet meant something was happening close by, so he walked out into the day to find out what.

A short way along, a deer came past him at a bolt with an arrow jutting from its hind quarters. Then the voices came after it.

“Conrad, slow down.”

“It’s this way, I’m sure of it.”

Over that deafening silence, two men crashing through the wood at a run was all there was to hear, and it came closer and closer.

He sat down on a log to wait for them, the axe across his lap.

“I said—” Conrad stopped, puffing. “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” answered Aulf.

“Not you. Him.”

Aulf came to a stop as well and followed Conrad’s head towards the man sitting on the log.

“Fuck him, get the deer,” said Aulf.

“Deer’s long gone, and this one might be worth more.”

The man sat quietly.

“Who are you, then? Deserter? Worth a few jats if we bring you back, alive or dead.”

The man said nothing.

“Can’t he speak?” asked Aulf.

“Oh, he can speak. Look at his armour.”

Aulf looked harder and whistled. “A Crown’s man, eh?”

“Aye. A Crown’s man,” said Conrad. “I asked you a question. Who are you?”

The man sighed. “Why did you shoot the deer? You already have enough with the pheasants.”

“None of your business what we do, deserter,” said Aulf, bravely.

“I won’t ask again. Who are you?” said Conrad.

The man thought for a moment. “I am a woodsman. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The two hunters sneered.

“You’re a soldier and no mistake. No woodsman dresses like you.”

“I suppose they dress more like you, then.”

“Aye, they do,” said Aulf.

“Shut up,” said Conrad. His hand went to his bow, and he felt for an arrow. “Dead or alive, then?”

“You seem bent on me being a deserter.”

Conrad nodded. “I know the type. I was one.”

“You would have lasted a short while with me. You talk too much.”

The woodsman threw the axe and it took Conrad in the chest. He went back and landed hard, and lay fumbling at the haft of it.

Aulf pulled his dagger. “Why’d you do that?”

The woodsman did not move. “Because he was a prick.”

“Yes, well, maybe, but—”

“You going to stick me with that, or run?”

“I don’t know,” said Aulf, backing up.

“Looks like you’re going to run.”

Aulf dropped the dagger and turned, and the woodsman moved faster than his bulk suggested. He had the bow up and an arrow nocked before the man had gone ten paces, and Aulf went down with the shaft through the back of his neck and the point out through his mouth.

“Guess you might be right about the clothing, gents.”

He walked over to Conrad, who was still breathing, though barely. There was a little blood about his lips, and his eyes said a thousand words.

“Always greedy, aren’t we. Wanting more than we need. Thing is, I need your clothes and I don’t need you.”

He pushed an arrow into the man’s throat and watched him fade.

He set about the bodies, and he talked while he worked, the way a man does when the work is not to his liking.

“I fought with men like you. I fought against men like you.” Conrad’s coat came off one arm at a time, and he had to roll him to get the second. “Fuck it. I was one of you.”

The boots were a poor fit and he took them anyway.

“No more. Enough is enough. You’re vile, and I want no more of it.”

He went through Aulf next, and Aulf gave up less.

“I have had enough.”

He left them out for the animals and came away with clothing, daggers, a few arrows and a better bow than the one he had. He looked about for the birds he had seen them carrying, scooped them up, and headed back to his home.

“The worms and foxes will take you.”

The fire crackled as the juices of the first bird turned to steam and sizzled. His little shelter was cramped with all the gear he had taken hidden away inside it. Being seen once was enough, and he had not so much as thought about his clothing until the two men.

He closed his eyes, and there was the arrow jutting from Aulf’s mouth, and then the deer with the shaft in its leg. His mouth tightened.

I will find you tomorrow and help you move on. It’s a shitty way to go otherwise.

Night came and morning followed, and the woodsman found that sleeping in clothes rather than bits of armour was a good deal more comfortable. He woke late because of it.

The birds were singing loudly.

“Good morning, my little ones.”

He turned and looked at the shelter, and shook his head.

Time to really leave and get to the river. I have said it more than once. Now I must do it.

“What’s the plan, old man?”

His heart went to the deer. It would not have gone far with a wound like that. His head said the river, and that the chances of finding it were slim.

“The river. If I find the deer, so be it.”

The ground felt solid under his boot as he walked. The boots did not quite fit him, but his feet would adapt in time, or with luck another pair would stray too close to him.

The trail to the main river was easy to find. Bears, deer and all manner of game used it, and he found himself playing a game of guess the animal from the prints. Some were easy. The bear, of course, was simple, large and deep. The two toes of the deer simple enough. The cats were harder. There would be cats out here, large ones and small, and they must walk with grace, for they left him little to see. Then the larger birds. He won the game with a pheasant, picking up its trail and finding the bird itself not far off.

Next time I will try to tell when you were last here.

The river was making a din, and from that he guessed a sizeable waterfall ahead. His eyes told him the real size of it when he stood on the bank at the top and looked over, and he shuddered at what it must feel like to fall that far.

He closed his eyes and listened. He was truly alone here, and the forest told him so in ways he found he understood. Birds talking, trees squeaking, water running. Those were the sounds that filled him with happiness. The lack of them was the sign to go and look, and that danger was not far off.

Peering over the edge again, he saw a rectangle shape that did not sit right.

“What are you?” he asked the air.

He looked over the way down.

“Well, I am after somewhere with more space. Maybe down there works.”

He took hold of a tuft of heavy grass, lowered himself over the edge and started down. It was scrub, shingle and grass, with a few trees dotted about holding on by barely a limb. He scrabbled and slipped, fell and climbed, and there was nothing graceful or skilled about any of it.

At the bottom he rubbed his scratched arms. There was a little blood left on his hands from it, and it did not worry him.

The thing he had been looking at stood in front of him. A shack, mainly roof and one side, the rest long gone. He took a step inside and the floor gave way and dropped him into the body of it.

He picked himself up and looked about. An old bed that would carry no weight. A chair with three legs. A torch on the wall. Scraps of cloth. A skull.

“What’s this?”

The shack had more spiders’ webs holding it together than wood. But it had one thing. A chimney, built of stone.

He pulled himself out of the hole and went to it, slow and careful, and put a hand out. Solid.

This works.

Home.

He stood a while, taking in the room. The chimney was well built, and while the floor was rotten, the main supports looked to have years left in them.

He went to the head and found the rest of the body strewn about the place. Animals, once the owner had stopped being able to object.

“Well, my friend, I thank you for the effort you put into this place, and I hope my moving in won’t affect you.”

He picked up the skull and carried it outside into the open. The birdsong hit him at once, as if the forest were playing music for him and him alone. He turned and looked at the cabin, and smiled, and brought the skull up in front of his face.

“What to call you? Frank? Klem? Ah, who needs names anyway.”

He set the skull down on a fallen tree.

“I will bury you. As much of you as I can find, and if I miss a part, please forgive me.” He took a step. “Like, seriously forgive me. No haunting, please.”

He went back inside and started pulling out anything rotten or past serving. The work was tiring, and the little food he had taken soon vanished. He sat down on a log near the skull and chewed the last of the tough meat, and when he looked at the last piece in his hand he grimaced.

“Got to be able to do better than that.”

He picked himself up and walked the outside of the cabin, looking for holes and marking them in his head for patching. That was when he saw the low fence at the rear, and the odd-looking plants inside it. Wild and overgrown, but not like the usual growth of this forest.

He knelt in front of one and sniffed. It smelt of earth, so he pulled, and it came out with a snap. Underneath was a white carrot, long and thick, but a carrot nonetheless.

He worked his way round the beds, pulling as he went, and was rewarded with turnips and radish. He found mint and parsley, all well past their best and rotting in places, but all of it there.

He turned and looked at the skull.

“Thank you.”

The day’s foraging and clearing in the garden was productive. He found a few usable carrots and turnips, and some other bits besides, but what mattered more to him was the clearing itself. If he could get it growing again, he could stay as long as he wanted.

The chair held his weight well enough on its three legs, so long as he did not lean back.

Time to go through this properly tomorrow. And I need to fetch my things.

His body had started complaining of hunger earlier, and the cold hard crunch of the carrot in his mouth brought a gurgling up out of his gut. He chewed absently, the sound of it loud in the room.

Somewhere outside a fox screeched, and it sounded like a wounded child. He remembered the first night he had heard it, wandering about looking for whoever was hurt, until he saw the fox run off and put two and two together.

The night was clear and the moon bright. Small things scurried around him, and for a reason he could not name he was protective of them. When he was young he had chased a vole round the room his family shared, swinging a reed brush at it and hoping to land one.

“I won’t do that, little ones.”

He reached for his pocket out of instinct, and his pipe was long gone. It was the first thing he had missed.

The old straw mattress was calling him. Walking to it, he decided he did not much care what state it was in. It was time to sleep.

His clothing creaked as he rolled to get up, and there was a small white line of frost on him. His nose was numb. The night had been colder than any he could remember in a long while. He let out a breath, and the stream of it reminded him of smoke off a fire.

His stomach growled and he ignored it, took a few steps outside, found a tree and took a piss.

He looked back the way he had come. Time to make the walk and fetch what he needed from the old place.

“Keep an eye on it, skull,” he said, without turning, and started off.

His body was getting used to constant movement on little fuel, and it only moaned at him for a short while. He was weak still, and stronger than he had been. He had a garden, a way to catch fish, and he could hunt and forage. Most of all he had quiet.

The walk was uneventful. He went the right way on memory alone and found the old camp without trouble. On the way he passed the small graves, said his hellos, and told them about the place he had found.

A branch had come down on the shelter since he left it, and it was hard not to think someone was looking out for him.

He gathered what he wanted, the bow and the knives, the pauldron, and bound it all up in a torn cloak he had taken off a body, and set it to one side. The rest, the swords and the armour, he wrapped as best he could and hid inside the ruins of the shelter, then brought the whole thing down on top of them. If he ever needed money, he knew where it was.

Then it was time to head back home.

He let the thought sit there a while.

Home.

The bundle was heavier going back than it had been going out, and the slope was a thing he had not thought about until he was standing at the top of it with his arms full.

He looked down at the shack, small and crooked below him, and then at the scrub and shingle in between.

He cut the cloak into strips and twisted them until he had something that would hold, tied it off round the bundle and lowered it over the edge a little at a time, and when it jammed he climbed down to it and worked it loose and started again. It took him two trips and most of the afternoon, and by the end of it his arms were shaking and there was blood on both palms from the grass.

Everything he owned sat in the middle of the rotten floor, and it did not look like much.

That night he laid the fire in the hearth, in the mouth of the stone chimney, and lit it, and sat back on his heels to wait for the room to fill.

The smoke went up and away and left him sitting in the warm with his eyes open and no reason to go outside. He watched it go for a long while.

“You built that well, friend.”

He buried him in the morning, at the end of the garden where the fence turned.

The digging was the hardest work he had done since the arrows, and the ground had stones in it that wanted a man with two good arms. He got down far enough that nothing would be coming back up, and then he went round the shack and the trees behind it and gathered what he could find.

A good deal of it was gone. He laid out what there was on a piece of sacking, the way he had made his men lay theirs out for inspection, and found that counting ribs was a poor way to spend a morning.

“Thank you, friend. I have done my best and I hope it is enough. If you want to be a ghost somewhere, find a better place than here, please.”

He carried him down the garden a load at a time, and talked while he worked.

“Who were you, I wonder? One of us? One of them?”

He fetched the skull last, and set it in with the rest.

“Did you do something wrong, or did you just want the quiet? I can’t say I blame you. The noise can get a bit much. I think in truth it has for me.”

He pushed the soil in with his boot and his hands and trod it down, and stood there afterwards with his arms hanging.

“But all this time alone? Were you on your own out here?”

The water carried on over the fall and the birds carried on in the trees, and he had not expected anything else.

He got to the floor after that. The bruise on his toe kept reminding him it was time to stop catching it.

The boards came up easy where they were soft and took work where they were not. Under the third one along, by the wall, was a small axe. The head was orange with rust and the haft had gone soft at the end, but the steel underneath had plenty left in it.

“Still life in us both, eh?” he said, and put it to one side.

He worked across to the corner, to where the bed had stood, and found the cage under the frame of it with the door shut.

The bird had been dead a long time. There was not much left but feathers and a scatter of bones no bigger than pins, all of it in the corner where it had gone to wait for somebody.

He sat down on the floor with it in his lap and did not do anything for a while.

“So you weren’t on your own.”

He opened the door of the cage with one finger, which was about twenty years too late, and tipped the little bones out into his palm, and carried them down the garden in both hands.

He did not have the strength left to open the ground again, so he scraped a hollow at the head of the grave with the small axe and put them in it and covered them over.

“Together again.”

The cage he kept. He knocked the worst of the rust off it, hung it on a nail in the one wall the shack still had, and left the door of it standing open.

The roof and the one wall, and what was left of the others, were not doing much to keep the winter out. So the day’s task was cutting logs with an axe, and that meant hard work, and hard work needed fuel, and fuel was the part missing from the equation.

Time to set the fish trap up.

On the way to the river he heard the bear. She sounded different this time. He knew her call by now, the way it came off the trees, the way the birds went quiet and started up again the instant it stopped.

“Time for your sleep soon, girl.”

A pang of loneliness went through him. Not the sort he used to get when he missed girls. The sort his heart could not put a name to.

The roar of the bear, the call of the fox, the birds. That was company that did not jabber when it was not needed, or ask more of him than he wanted to give at the time. The river had its own music too, if a man was quiet enough for it.

He set the line, the hooks fashioned from thorns.

“Yes, father, I did retouch the point. And added the barb.”

He looked at the small hook.

“You would have been proud, I think.” Then, “Of this, at least.”

A bloated feeling came on him, and last night’s food wanted out. He moved off downstream, took his clothes off and got into the water. It was cold and it cleaned him well. He watched his turd float away down the current and chuckled.

“Never shit like that before.”

Above him a crow squawked from a branch.

“Go away. I don’t want watching while I do that.”

It called again, and he heard rustling.

“The fucking line.”

He came out of the water and splashed to the edge and ran, and three strides in he howled, with a thorn driven up into his foot. The running had done it. By the time he could stop he had put enough weight through it to bury the thing.

The line was still pulling. He got to it just in time to watch it give way and go off downstream, fish and all.

“Fuck you,” he shouted. “Fuck you all.”

He looked down at his nakedness, and at the red hole in his foot that was bleeding, and then downstream to where his clothes were.

“Fuck it.”

He got into the river and let the current take him down.

He sat on the bank afterwards and worked the thorn out by squeezing the flesh around it. The occasional fuck you and twat came out of him, and then fewer, and he gave in to the pain and, after a while, it came away. His foot pulsed. The damage was a good deal more now than the small hole the thorn had made going in.

He reached for some moss and found a frog sitting there, and grabbed it.

So there it was. Fix the hooks, make new line and eat well, with luck. Or eat the frog, leave the fishing, get on with the build and be warmer.

The axe bit the tree several times before it came down. The sixth so far.

His head was pounding and his vision was not where it should be. Day two of the build, and the last wall was going up. Plug the holes after that and he would have a tight cabin, or a tighter one at least.

The trouble was food again. Topping himself up with water had stopped working, and the frog and the worms from the night before were long since processed and floating off downstream.

He held a hand out and watched it shake.

He sat down on a downed log and listened for the bear. She had not spoken in days. The ground was hard and carried a frost every morning, and the river had hurt when he sat in it. Things were changing.

He eyed the last of the veg and gave in, and devoured the carrot and the two radishes. They did little but make his belly feel like a cathedral.

The mice and the rats that scurried about the place seemed to find enough to live on.

He got up and the dizziness came again, so he took hold of the log. It was thick, about two hands across, and heavy with it, but he dragged it to the cabin and set it in the last hole.

He flopped down, done in.

“Maybe I am being stupid.”

The cabin held its heat that night.

He woke with something on his chest.

It was sitting up on its back legs with its nose going, close enough that he could count the whiskers, and for a moment the two of them looked at one another in the dark and neither moved.

Then he came up off the mattress with a noise he would not have owned in front of his men.

The rat went one way and he went the other. He got a hand to it by the hearth and had nothing but tail, and it came out of his fingers like wet rope. It went under the bed frame. He swung the axe haft and took the leg off the chair, which left it with two. It went along the wall and he went after it and put his foot through the part of the floor he had not got to yet, and by the time he had his leg back out of the hole the cage was swinging on its nail and the rat was gone through a gap he could have sworn he had plugged.

He sat on the floor in the dark with his chest going.

“Tomorrow night, friend. Tomorrow night I will be ready.”

It did not come the next night.

He sat up with the axe haft across his knees and a scrape of carrot peel by the wall, and he waited, and nothing came, and he woke cold and stiff with his chin on his chest and the fire out.

“Well,” he said. “That’s that.”

By the night after he was not right.

Things had edges round them that they should not have, and standing up took two goes, and he had started talking to his father again without noticing he had begun.

He set the helmet up against the wall, propped on a thorn, with the last of the peel under it, and sat down to watch it, and he had got as far as thinking that a grown man was lying on a floor waiting on a rat when it came in along the wall.

It poked its head out of the hole in the skirting.

He came alive, the adrenaline kicking in.

“Just get in the fucking helmet, you fucking shit. I want to eat you.”

It came along the skirting, saw him, and turned the wrong way, straight into his boot. He closed his hand on it and that was the end of it.

He sat for a while with it in his fist.

“Good work,” he said. “Patience, that was.”

He skinned it and gutted it this time, and he took his time over the cooking, and it tasted of nothing much and it did not matter. He licked the fat off his fingers and lay back and let his gut get on with it.

In the morning he could hold his hand out without the shake.

He took the bow and went up along the treeline where the ground was soft, and the first thing he saw was a badger.

He had shot men for a living. Men shout and run in straight lines and mostly oblige you by being large. A badger does none of that, and his first arrow went into the earth a hand’s width short, and the thing was away before he had the second nocked.

He looked up at the crow circling. “No need to laugh. If it was a man it would be dead.”

He found the next one at dusk, down near the sett, and this time he waited until it was broadside and sure of itself and took it behind the shoulder.

It was an old boar. Half its face was scarred where something had opened it years back, and there were wounds on top of wounds along its flank.

“You didn’t give ground, did you.”

“You and me and the bear,” he said.

The meat was tough and tasted of the earth it had spent its life in, gamey enough to make his eyes water, and none of that was the point. The point was the fat, and there was a good deal of it.

He rendered it down in the pauldron and ate until he was slow with it, and the next morning he woke warm and clear-headed, which he had not been in a while.

He spent that day making hooks and line out of sinew, more than he needed of both, and he hung the spares inside the cabin where the rain could not find them.

“Never again,” he told the cage on the wall. “Not over one hook.”

The birds stopped while he was setting the line.

He came up off his knees with the bow in his hand and the arrow on it before he had thought about doing either, and stood still in the shallows with the water going round his boots.

Whoever it was had made no effort at all. There was whistling, badly done, and a stick knocking against trunks as it came, and then a voice from well back in the trees.

“I’m old, I’m slow, and I’m not worth the arrow.”

“That’s for me to decide.”

“It is. I’d decide quick, mind. I can’t stand about all day, my knees have opinions.”

The man who came out of the treeline had a pack, a long stick, a grey beard and no weapon in his hands at all. He stopped a good way off and waited to be looked at.

The woodsman lowered the bow and did not put the arrow away.

“You’ll be the one up at the old place,” the man said. “With the fence.”

“You know it.”

“I knew the man who built it. Long while back now.” He looked up past the fall, towards the roof of the cabin showing through the trees. “He was no good at it either.”

“At what?”

“Any of it.” The old man sat down on a rock without being asked. “You’re thin.”

“I’m managing.”

“Course you are.” He opened his pack. “Who do I have, then?”

The woodsman thought about it.

“I am a woodsman. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The old man looked at him for a moment, and then laughed until he had to put a hand on the rock.

“Woodsboy,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. Woodsboy.” He wiped his eye with the back of his wrist. “Oh, don’t pull that face at me, lad. I’ve had it pulled by better.”

The heat came up the back of the woodsman’s neck. His jaw set, and he knew how he looked, and the old fool was still laughing, and he had killed two men by this river for less.

“I have twenty summers more than you’d like,” he said.

“I dare say.” The old man held his arms out wide and turned them to take in the trees, the water, the fall, the lot of it. “And next to this? We’re all boys. I’m a boy. You’re a boy. That bear up there’s a girl.” He let his arms drop. “Sit down before you fall down.”

The woodsman sat down.

The old man pulled out some jerky and they both ate it. After a while the pack came open properly.

“You’ve got a good knife on you,” the old man said.

“I have.”

“I’ve a want of a good knife.”

“What have you got?”

What he had was more jerky than one man needed, a small pipe gone brown with use, and a twist of leaf in oiled cloth that he opened and held out without a word.

The woodsman put his nose to it.

“Cherry,” he said.

“You smoke?”

“I did. Years.”

“Then it’s a knife for the pipe, the leaf and the dinner, and I’ll know I’ve been robbed, and we’ll both be happy.”

They did it there on the rock. The old man tested the edge on his thumb, nodded once and put it away like a man who had got what he came for, and the woodsman filled the pipe with hands that were not quite steady.

“You’ll run out before the thaw,” the old man said. “Grow your own. Soft leaves, about so high, pale flower on it, likes the warm banks where the trees break and nothing stands over it. Take the lower leaves first and hang them in the dark till they go the colour of that.” He nodded at the twist. “It’ll be rough. Rough is better than none.”

“Does it grow out here?”

“Everything grows out here if you stop treading on it.” He got up in stages. “There’s a thing the dead fellow never learned either. He’d have been all right, that one, if he’d come down and asked.”

“Asked who?”

“Anybody.” The old man got his stick under him. “Mind your foot. You’re walking on the outside of it.”

He went back the way he had come, whistling, badly.

The woodsman sat on the rock with the pipe going and watched the light go off the top of the fall, and the birds came back one at a time.

It was the first time he had laughed with a man since Benni.

The edge ice looked the same as it had the day before.

He had walked out on it twice that week to free the line where it had frozen in, and twice it had held him, and the third time it went without a sound. One moment he was standing on it and the next the river had him to the chest, and the cold came in like a blade.

His breath went first. He was gasping, and the panic came up with it. He splashed about, though his feet were on the river bed and all he had to do was walk in to the shore, and instead he tried to haul himself out. The first handful of ice broke. So did the second. His strength was going faster than his breath. The current took his legs and he went under, and he stood up again still chest deep, and that was when it came to him that he was standing.

He broke a path through the ice with his elbows until the bed rose enough to put him out of the water.

He came out of it like a living waterfall, the river running off him, and he could not feel anything at all. His hands had stopped shaking. His legs were lead. His heart was going harder than it had on the first day of any battle, and the two hundred paces up to the cabin looked like a mile.

His clothes went stiff before he reached the door. He slipped twice on the scree and cut his arms and his face, and the second time took longer to get up from. The ground felt warmer than the air, and it was a hard choice.

“No. Get up, you idiot.”

He got to his door and pushed it open. His hand had gone from no shake at all to shaking beyond stopping, and the colour of it was deathly white.

His eyes went to the hearth. He had banked it before he went down, and been gone far longer than he meant, and the fire was out.

His teeth chattered. His mind said fuck and his mouth never managed it.

He went down on his knees at the hearth and got the flint and the steel out and could not hold them. His hands would not close the way hands close. He got the stone between his palms and struck, and the steel went out of his fingers into the dark, and he felt about for it and found it and dropped it again, and the shaking had moved up into his arms and his jaw.

“Come on.”

He struck four more times and got two sparks. Neither took. The dripping tinder told him all he needed to know, and the pouch having been in the river with him had been a bad idea.

He sat back against the cold stone of the chimney a dead man had built, and he was so tired.

Somewhere outside, badly, somebody was whistling.

The old man came to the door and pushed it open. The whistling stopped. He crossed the room and lit the fire with his own kit, a tin out of his shirt, and soon it was going well.

“You some kind of child, Woodsboy?”

He pulled the man’s clothes off him, scolding him for a fool the whole while, and out of the pack came a blanket, thin and warm, and he wrapped him in it.

The shaking got worse before it got better. The cabin held its heat well, and it was not long before the woodsman had warmed back to a reasonable level.

“There he is. My friend the Woodsboy.”

“I went through the ice,” he said, between chattering teeth.

“You think I am blind as well as old?”

“But it held me twice.”

“Aye. It does that.”

When he could hold a cup on his own, the lesson started, and the old man gave it the way a man gives something he has given before.

“Now. Your fire goes out. That’s fine. Fires go out. What’s not fine is you on your knees in the dark with wet hands trying to make one from nothing.”

He pointed at the hearth.

“Before you go anywhere, you lay the next one. Every time. Tinder, kindling, sticks, all of it set and ready so all it wants is a spark. You come home wet and stupid, you put your hand on it and it goes. You do that if you’re going out for a day or going out for a piss.”

“And if the kit’s in the river?”

“Then you were carrying all of it, which is the other half.” He tapped his own chest, where the tin had come from. “One on you. One in the house, up high and dry where no damp gets at it. One somewhere out there you can find in the dark. Three. Three is a man who gets old.”

He turned the blackened cloth over in his fingers.

“Cloth, burnt in a tin with the lid shut till it’s black and no more. Takes a spark like it’s been waiting for it. Keep it dry and it’ll keep for years.” He put it away. “Birch bark, fat wood, old man’s beard. You’ve got the makings all round you here, and you’ve been keeping it in a pouch on your belt.”

“I have.”

“Aye.”

The old man let that sit, then went into the pack again and put things on the table. Jerked meat, a good deal of it. A cloth bag of flour that he thumped down like an argument he had won.

“Flour?”

“Water, a pinch of salt, a flat stone by the fire. You’ll not want for bread again in your life if you can be bothered.” He looked at him. “You’d not thought about bread.”

“I had not thought about bread.”

“No. You’d thought about not dying, which is a start, but it’s a poor thing to think about all winter.”

The fire got low and neither of them moved to see to it for a while.

“You said you knew the man who built this place,” the woodsman said.

“I did.”

“You said he was no good at it.”

“I said a lot of things to a man pointing an arrow at me.” The old man rubbed at his knee with the flat of his thumb. “He was a carpenter. Best I ever saw. Look at the chimney. Look at your roof plate up there, holding a hundred winters’ worth of weather on half a wall.” He nodded at it. “Edric. My brother.”

The woodsman said nothing.

“There was trouble in the village, years back. Crown men drunk, my brother in the middle of it, one of them dead at the end of it. Pushed, went down wrong, hit the kerb. Nobody meant it, and nobody was going to stand up in front of a magistrate and say so.” He shrugged. “So he came out here. I brought him what I could, twice a year, three times if the weather let me.”

“And then you didn’t.”

“And then I didn’t.” He looked into the fire. “The last two years were bad ones. By the time I got up here there was nothing to come for. I never went in. I’m not proud of that.”

He turned his cup round on his knee.

“I come up every year to put him in the ground. Every year since. And every year I get as far as the fence and I go home again, and I could not tell you why, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t told myself this was the one.”

“That’s why you came back tonight.”

“That’s why I came up, aye. Spade on my back and everything.” He let out a breath. “I gave him what I knew, you see. All of it. He took none of it well. A man that good with his hands doesn’t want telling. And I let it go, because he was older and I was tired of being told to mind my own. I should have pushed him. I knew the winter he was in.”

“You brought him what you could.”

“Twice a year is not the same as pushing.” He looked at the door. “And then there’s you. Starved to a stick, lighting fires out of a wet pouch. I could not sit at home and let another man go the same road without opening my mouth.” He rubbed his knee. “Perhaps it sits well with him. Perhaps he’s up there laughing at the pair of us.”

“Three winters,” the woodsman said. “Maybe more. The place was far gone.”

“Aye.”

The woodsman put his cup down.

“He’s at the end of the garden,” he said. “Where the fence turns. I got what I could find of him and I put it in the ground proper, and I said what I could think of.”

The old man did not say anything for a long time.

“There was a bird,” the woodsman said. “In a cage, under the bed. It had been shut in.”

“He always had a bird. Daft about them.”

“It’s in with him. At his head.”

The old man got up and went outside, and he was gone a good while, and the woodsman did not follow him.

When he came back in, his eyes were wet and nothing was said about it, and he sat down and put another log on and said, “You’ll want to eat some of that meat before you sleep. You’re no good to anybody empty.”

Before he slept, the old man went into the pack one last time and put a roll of cloth on the table. Inside it were twists of paper, each one tied off, and he turned them over with a finger as if he were counting men.

“Seeds.”

“You’ve given me enough.”

“I’ve given you a winter. These are for after it.” He tapped them one at a time. “Onion. Beans. Greens, which go in first and come up before anything else and taste of very little, and you’ll be glad of them anyway. And that one is your leaf.”

The woodsman put a hand on it and did not pick it up.

“Now hear me, because this is the part men get wrong. They go in at a set time and not before. The leaf and the beans wait until the frosts have finished, and not a day sooner, or you’ll have a tray of dead sticks and a grudge. The greens you can chance earlier if the ground lets you.”

“How will I know when?”

“When the ground stops biting your hand.” He shrugged. “Later than you’ll want. Everything is. Put them in then and they’ll give you what you’re after by the back end of the year. Not much, the first year. Enough to make you careful with it.”

He tied the roll up again and pushed it across the table.

“And when you’ve more than you need, skins and the like, there’s a hamlet. Three days if your legs are good. Four if they’re what mine are. Follow the river down until it widens out, then the track on the left bank, and keep on till you smell the smoke.” He looked at him. “They’ll trade with you and they’ll not ask you a single question. That’s the whole of their charm. Don’t give them a name and they’ll not give you one of theirs.”

He went at first light, with the pack a good deal lighter and the stick knocking on the trunks.

At the top of the slope he stopped and leaned on it.

“Luck to you, Woodsboy. You’ll need some.”

“I’ve had a little.”

“You have.” He looked out at the trees, and the fall, and the white on all of it. “And listen while you’re here. Properly, I mean. Not the way men listen, which is waiting their turn. Sit still long enough and this place will talk to you, and it will tell you things no man ever could, and you will find you understand it.” He got the stick under him again. “Forty years I have been coming out here. It is the only thing I would swear to.”

“Woodsboy,” he called back from up the slope, without turning round.

“Old man.”

“Lay your fire!”

“I owe you!” he shouted after him. “What do I call you?”

No answer came.

The woodsman stood in the door of a cabin a carpenter had built, with a tin of black cloth and dry tinder in his shirt and a bag of flour on the table, and he watched him out of sight.

Then he went in, and he laid the next fire before he did anything else at all.

The snow came in the night, and in the morning the forest was singing something else.

He stood in the door with the blanket round his shoulders and listened to it. Snow falling has a sound. Not much of one, but it is there, a sort of settling, like a man easing himself into a chair in another room. Under it the timber of the cabin creaked as the sun got on the roof, and creaked again at dusk when the cold came back and took it the other way. The water still went over the fall, but further off than it had been, and deeper somehow, as though the cold had put it down a register.

Nothing else. No birds to speak of. No bear.

“Well,” he said. “That’s new.”

He counted the woodpile the way he used to count arrows.

Not by eye. Properly, in armfuls, and then in days, with the days laid against what he could see of the sky. The answer came out as enough, probably, if nothing went wrong, which was the same answer he had got on every campaign he had ever served, and it had been a lie about half the time.

So he went out in the thin light and cut more, and he cut it standing in snow to his shins with his breath going up in front of him, and he stacked the new wood on the side of the cabin where the sun found it.

“Too late to be clever,” he told the stack. “But not too late to be busy.”

The badger skin had been curing on a frame since the autumn, and it made him two gloves.

They were ugly. The stitching was sinew and the fingers were wrong, and the left one was too tight across the palm so that his hand sat in it like a man in a borrowed coat. The fur was on the inside, which took him three goes to arrive at. The first way, leather in, looked better and did little. Unpicking it was a pain, but the warmth they gave was worth it.

He put them on and held his hands up in front of the fire and turned them over, and then he laughed out loud at them, alone, in a dead man’s house, in the snow.

“You’d not have had these,” he said to the cage. “Not with your fancy carpentry.”

The fish got harder.

He kept a hole open below the fall where the water ran too fast to close over, and he fished it from the bank on his knees, and he did not set one foot on the ice again that winter. Not once. Not even where it was a hand thick and groaning at him that it would hold.

Some days he had two. Most days he had none. He ate what he caught on the day he caught it and took from the stores on the days he did not, and the stores came down, and he learned to look at a thing on the shelf and see how many days it was rather than what it was.

The flour went further than he had expected and the jerky went nowhere near as far. He got the flatbread wrong twice, burnt black on the stone and raw in the middle both times, and then one morning he got it right and sat in the door eating it hot with the snow coming down, and that was as good as anything he had ever eaten in a hall with a hundred men in it.

The leaf lasted until it did not.

He cut it with dried mint at the end to make it go further, which was a crime against the old man’s kindness, and then he smoked that until it was gone too, and after that he cleaned the pipe and put it in his shirt and carried it about empty. He took it out sometimes and held it in his teeth, and the cherry went out of it little by little, until the smell was long gone and only the memory provided it.

He knew where the warm bank was. The one where the trees broke and nothing stood over it. He had walked past it in the autumn and marked it without meaning to.

“Soft leaves,” he said. “Pale flower. Lower leaves first.”

He would try it in the spring. He would try a lot of things in the spring.

The planning was the best of it, in truth, and he did it in the evenings with his feet near the fire.

Turn the beds over as soon as the ground let him. Carrot, turnip, radish, whatever was still alive down there, and the mint, which would take over if he let it. Fence to mend. Smoke the fish next autumn instead of eating it the day he caught it like a man with no sense at all. Dry the meat. Build a store with a stone floor so the damp stayed out. More wood. Twice this much wood.

And the leaf, up on the bank.

He said the list out loud most nights, and added to it.

“Next winter will be better,” he said. “This winter is a lesson I am paying for in full.”

The dreams came when the nights got long.

Kaland went down with the arrow in his eye, over and over, in the middle of a sentence he never got to finish. The archer at the treeline turned round and was eighteen summers old and had nothing in his hands. A man he had cut through at some ford, whose name he had never learned, sat up afterwards and asked him what the orders had been.

And the clearing. Always the clearing. The firelight on armour, and the sound of a man being taken apart slowly by men who were bored, and himself hanging there, and Benni in the bushes saying he had only wanted the noise to stop.

And the two by the river. Conrad on his back with the axe in him, working his mouth. Aulf turning to run with the arrow already on its way.

He woke out of that one wet through, in a cabin cold enough to see his breath in, and lay there with his heart going and waited to feel what he thought he ought to feel.

“They shot a deer in the leg and left it to run,” he said. “They had three birds on a stick and they wanted more.”

The fire took the log and the timber creaked above him.

“This place kept me alive. I’ll not have men like that walking about in it.”

It came out steadier than it had any right to, and he lay back down.

He woke from those with his heart going and the cabin cold and black, and he would lie there and listen to the timber creak and the snow settle, and then get up and feed the fire that was always laid, always, and sit with his back against the warm stone.

“They can have it,” he said once, into the dark.

He meant the whole of it. The Crown, the ranks, the coin, the women who liked the coin, the beds in halls, the shouting and the orders and the long flat waiting with men who would be meat by the end of the week.

“I would rather die out here in the cold than go back to that.”

He sat with it a while, and then said the rest of it, because there was nobody to hear it and no reason not to.

“That isn’t living, anyway. You don’t live it. You just move through it till it stops.”

By the end of the worst of it he was thin again, and his gums bled when he ate, and he had a cough he did not like the sound of.

He also had a dry cabin, a fire that had not gone out since the night he nearly died, a hole in the ice that was his and nobody else’s, two ugly gloves and a list as long as his arm.

One morning near the turn, the snow stopped, and the cold came hard behind it and made everything ring. He stood out in the garden where the fence turned, by the grave with a carpenter and his bird in it, with the empty pipe in his teeth for the shape of it.

Somewhere far off, back up the valley, a bird he had not heard in months tried a few notes and gave up.

“Not yet,” he said. “Soon, though.”

He was turning for the door when the sound came up the valley.

Not a roar, not properly. A lazy, half-done thing, the noise a big animal makes when it is pleased with itself and wants the trees to know about it. After it came the long tearing of claws down bark, slow and unhurried, somewhere above the fall.

He stood in the cold with the pipe in his teeth and listened until it stopped.

“So you made it, then.”

He went in and shut the door, and the timber creaked, and the fire took the fresh log without being asked.