Chopping Wood and Carrying Water

Arlah’s rhythmic breathing makes for an eerily offset chant of echoes as he labors across the uneven terrain of this rift canyon. The steep red walls rising up around him have become a familiar place these last few moons, but his imagination still wonders with images of the people that once called it home.

The walls of the canyon are pockmarked with niches which are sometimes connected by traces of old footpaths or roughly hewn stair steps; the kind that seem more carved by use than intention. These haphazard collections of overhung-dwellings and the routes between them are unnatural but not strikingly so. Had Arlah not heard stories of this place he might not have understood what he was seeing. Not only are these marks of life blended with the rock, but the shrubs and grasses have never given up their green-brown-flowering claim over this place. Their march over those remnants of people is persistent and fruitful.

Bending his knees into a deep squat and shrugging his shoulders Arlah frees himself of the lightest burden he will bear today. The lightest physical burden, at any rate. Empty tall clay pots, soft hempen rope slings, and the worn aspen yoke they hang from.

Arlah takes long minutes in the shade under a jutting overhang of the canyon wall. First stretching while standing and rejuvenating the ache in his legs, arms, shoulders, and neck, then dropping into the dark orange dust. He reclines in the late-morning shade and drifts in thought with the wind.

Part of becoming a man has been assuming responsibilities for his tribe on behalf of his family; and the hard labor of chopping wood and carrying water is appreciated for its tedious necessity… he also isn’t trusted with anything more important, yet. This isn’t even the village’s most important source of water, and the wood he cuts only fills a few cook fires.

The work Arlah does is not important, but it is appreciated.

The spring at rift bottom is always clean and rarely fosters competition, but the trek is long and requires confident feet with thick hide. From the story circle at the center of everything he knows Arlah had set out away from a gold and orange sunrise through their fields of wild grains, across the cracked lakebed, skirted loose-rock hills, and entered the deceptively welcoming slope of the gully-mouth. He’d let that gently increasing slope pull him further onward and, having resisted the urge to stop any sooner, he found himself at this final bend before the crisp cool water.

He’s learned that a rest in this breezy shade makes the next part of his journey a little less tiresome.

Fears and doubts creep their way into the edges of Arlah’s mind during these moments between toil.

How many more things have to go wrong before mother and I are left behind? Nobody will let me forget how thankful I should be that I wasn’t exiled with my father.

A fist of fear closes in his chest and a sharp breath somewhere between a scoff and a sob escapes Arlah’s throat.

I was three when they exiled him. My only memory is of him being prodded out of the firelight at the back of that season’s camp…

Helanti wisdom tells us that a rapist father begets a rapist son, as does a thief, coward, liar and murderer. All things Arlah’s father was accused of. Guilty of. Even his mother didn’t try to defend the weasel.

I will always bear the weight of his mistakes in this tribe. Just as the river will always flow from ice to sea. How long is always? Melo’s stories tell us that the river was laid there for us by ancestor-gods, but mother reminds me that the world’s truth is often different from people’s truths. I don’t know how to balance those… Are the gods real? If they are, do they care for us or… less? Do they just spectate? Do they have some hope about who may live or die, succeed or fail? Do they have a plan? I wish mama would tell me which way it is.

Arlah’s family line has, thus far, been one of disappointment. Not just mediocrity but detriment in the eyes of multiple generations of Helanti Elders. Even before this blood was his father’s it has been considered low and incapable. That weighs heavily in Arlah’s heart.

Exile is no light punishment. Arlah imagines surviving for a moon or more on his own, but beyond that the fear of loneliness seems too much to bear. He already struggles to remember his father… How quickly might he forget his mother and friends if they were separated?

Or they him?

A soft whistling of wind over rock and the prickle of blown sand wakes Arlah from his dark reverie. Rocking forward to sit up, stretching his arms high above his head, Arlah breathes deeply and bellows a harrumphed-sigh that refreshes his mind and echoes back to him off the many angles and curves of the tall red walls.

Fears and doubts would patiently await the next break in his focus, until then, there is water to carry for the evening’s meal.

Each pot reaches from the ground to Arlah’s middle-thigh and is secured in a noose around the thin part of its neck before the mouth flares open and comes to a spout. The rope lengths make loading and unloading easy, but travel difficult as the pots will swing. Changes in elevation require shrugging, shifting, and outright lifting of the yoke while the water-filled pots swing and creak making every misstep more exhausting for each slosh and splash.

It only now strikes him that these ropes were fashioned for the short flat walk from camp to river. He can probably save himself some pain if he can make them shorter. Thankfully the tall necked pots lose very little water unless he brakes them.

Which he has done. More than once. A screwed-up face and a tiny shake of his head rids him of those thoughts of failure.

With the yoke and four pots once-again suspended from his shoulders Arlah carefully wades into the spring until he is knee deep, then steps one foot far forward lowering the pot mouths to submerge. Shifting to account for the extra weight Arlah’s exhale sends spittle forward from his cracked lips and new beads of sweat down his leathery sun-darkened face. The hours between this moment and his next chance at idle rest would be grueling. So Arlah lets the weight pull his face down to the water.

Many thankful, even greedy, gulps later Arlah staggers splashing with heavy steps out of the spring and begins the journey back up the rift, down the stone hills, across the lakebed, and through the grassland where the rest of the Helant peoples share their temporary hide-and-cedar dwellings.

In his first hundred steps Arlah’s brown feet become caked with red dusty mud forming a protective coating layers deep, much like his spirit has become clad in focus warding away fears and keeping him present in the task of choosing each step.

Arlah’s trek has become a ritual of focus. Though walking is a skill that most Helanti master early in life; this is not walking, this is dancing to a rhythm set by water. Water suspended between sky and earth. The unnatural movements threaten to topple him and break his containers; yet he has learned to anticipate without expectation and follow rather than force this burden back to his home.

Two hand-widths of the Sun’s movement mark the time it takes to dance his way back. Its only taken two moons, six broken pots, and more than a little help from older boys; but Arlah has finally proven that he can be trusted as the sole provider of water for his mother’s cooking during this past half moon.

Lifting each foot high and huffing with the lunge that follows Arlah’s dusty-mud feet make the staggering ascent from dry stony lakebed into the warm, soft loam of the grasslands. The ground beneath his feet is not only a welcome sign of being near home, but presents less immediate danger to his feet and more importantly his water, than the harder sharper less forgiving terrains of the further lands.

Following this season’s footpaths between plots of ‘kept’ land Arlah’s yoked load brushes lightly against the chest-high grain on either side. Mother’s hide-and-cedar appears as he rounds the outer circle of homes in this season’s camp and Arlah spends a few moments rejoicing in a task accomplished before immediately beginning to steel himself against the second half of this day.

Mother’s thanks is warm and sincere, but fleeting as she turns back to her daily responsibilities. With her fresh spring water safely near her cook stones the night’s plate breads would begin wafting aromas of hunger and Helouk out from the village in all directions.

This is their value to the Helant, mother’s baking and that added sense of Helanti identity from her special technique in preparing the grain into this magically tasty flatbread. Others made thick porridge or flattened crispy cracking things, but mother made a softer more chewable flattened folding tearing thing. Over the last harvest this has become a staple for many Helanti families, and it is now common to see a line of bruised young children form at mother’s cookstones before the evening meal so that each could take home a small stack of flatbread for their family.

After taking some well earned swigs of drinking water in a cool breeze Arlah slings the most valuable thing he has ever touched across his back and takes up his light wooden sled in each hand to haul behind him. Empty for now.

Hanging head-down along his left hip, handle diagonally slung so that it sticks out over his right shoulder is the most sophisticated tool his people have short of the biting-lick of fire itself. This stone axe represents everything the Helanti people have learned since the “always” that Melo’s stories speak of. A long wooden haft made from one piece of solid ash. A heavy, sharpened, blackstone head is fitted into and bound through the carved hole in the end of that haft.

Arlah could rebind the head any time it came loose or began to shift so long as he kept some lengths of leather cord. Maes could craft another haft given a half season of time, good wood, and plenty of food.

No Helanti still living could craft another blackstone axe head. Not, at least, to this level of mastery. Not only because the original source of stone is used up, but because the best knappers have passed-on before any apprentices could reach a similar level of expertise. There are many apprentice knappers, for a hunter is only as good as his tools, but knapping is not a simple nor intuitive craft and today knapping is a means to the end of hunting more than a craft in itself.

This axe represents one of the two best ever crafted by the Helanti, and how it came to rest in the possession of Arlah and his mother is a subject of aggravation for some. She’d argued and angled and bartered to get such a tool loaned to her son at his coming of age ceremony. Lacking a father to build his confidence and teach him strength she told him that hard work and responsibility might be enough. It has gotten her this far and she knows what it is to grow up without a worthwhile father.

Arlah feels a combination of pride and fear at this responsibility. Fear that he will somehow ruin this tool and disappoint his mother, maybe even risk their place in the tribe. Pride that she has such faith in him, that she would put at stake so much of her own reputation and potential well-being for his opportunity at success. She does not share the Helanti ‘wisdom’ that his blood has already determined who he will become.

Dragging the empty sled takes more effort than a morning of lugging empty pots, but compared to the upcoming efforts Arlah’s feet and arms feel light and easy. Traveling away from the village this time Arlah sets his sights on the distant line of shadow along the horizon that is the forest. After some minutes of following paths between grain plots the cackling chatter of younger kids playing some game in the grasslands beyond floats into Arlah’s ears.

It takes some effort to hide his smile and excitement at the sounds of play. At last season’s camp he was playing with this same group of kids. Then it had been air filled aurochs bladders. Today it seems to be hide and spear, whoever the hunter is has to make an accurate throw with a blunted spear haft to win their turn. Everyone else screams, runs, hides, and dodges wildly hoping not to get another bruise. Rules for selection of next hunter have never been clear to anyone, but its never the freshly killed quarry so everyone learns quickly to evade well or be targeted round after round.

Arlah would love a turn at hunter now that he’s had some weeks with the axe. His arms and shoulders are more sturdy now, he could leave some good marks. There’s not enough sunlight though. He needs to get to the treeline. Keeping his face serious Arlah crosses the edge of the last grain plot and comes into view of the kids.

More than ten of them ranging between six and twelve years old are sweaty, grinning, hootin’, and bruised. One of the youngest in the group is having his turn as hunter and apparently can’t land a throw.

“You missed five in a row! Miss again so I can be hunter!” one shouts while confidently standing in the open.

An angry growl accompanies the hunter-boy’s two-handed sideways swing of the play-spear. He lets go at the front of his swing. This was not a spear throw at all, and the taunter was not prepared to duck or dodge a waist-high horizontally spinning stick.

The sound of that wooden haft hitting the taunter’s forearms is painful to Arlah who squints in empathy. Taunter drops to the ground cradling his elbows to his stomach and wailing. The hunter-boy who arguably did not miss a sixth time was already gone, whether from shame at the outburst or fear of retribution he was already kicking up dust crossing the footpath and disappearing into what Arlah imagines is his parent’s plot of grain.

The argument about who should be hunter next in this game that is suddenly two players smaller erupts and slowly fades as Arlah’s journey returns to a less distracted pace.

A hand width of the sun’s movement brings Arlah to the treeline where the Helant harvest wood for this camp. Others from the tribe had been here this morning, and likely done more difficult work with less effective tools so Arlah tries to appreciate that this would be worse without his mother’s love.

Leaving his sled at the first felled stump and unhooking the hempen rope from the notches carved into the axe haft lets Arlah unsling the axe and wrap the rope around his waist overtop of his loin-hide’s own wrapping. A few quick shrugs of his shoulders and squeezes of the haft help Arlah to prepare for what’s to follow.

Rhythmic breathing, whole-body huffs and puffs, hand-shocking impacts, and most exciting of all the long fall. Once today’s tree is down then the worst of the work begins. Wrestling, branching, chopping, splitting. Today Arlah has again found focus and the sun moves without his keeping track. Fears and worries fail to claw their way in, and instead Arlah’s mouth is dry while his body is wet with sweat. His sled fills with split logs and he leaves the remainder of the trunk undivided for tomorrow’s work.

The Helant wood gatherers respect eachother’s felling efforts and rarely disturb another’s works in progress. Arlah had learned from and trusted them, so with the axe re-slung and the sled challengingly full he leaves the other half of his felled tree behind and starts toward home one heavy yet measured step at a time.

Dripping sweat and trudging between the grain plots Arlah welcomes that unique smell of his mother’s bread which banishes all aches and fatigue from his well-used hips and knees and arms. Only a handful more minutes of effort before he could drop to the dust and listen to mother’s humming while waiting for her to declare their evening meal ready.

Arlah’s movements are habit, and before thinking much at all about the stacking of his split firewood and returning of the sled and axe the tasks were complete and he was lowering himself to the dusty blankets just outside their home. Mother hums and performs her own habitual routine as bruised, dirty little kids started lining up with their woven-reed baskets patiently awaiting their families requested batch of breads.

Drifting in and out of sleep Arlah’s hard work of the day pays off in a peaceful nap before their meal.