To Fell a Tree
by Robert F. Young
The First Day
Just before the treeman’s lift began to rise, Strong swung it around so that his back would be toward the trunk. The less he saw of the tree during the initial phase of his ascent, the better. But the lift was little more than a triangular steel frame suspended vertically from a thread-thin winch cable, and before it had risen a hundred feet it swung back to its original position. Whether he liked it or not, the tree was going to be with him right from the start.
The trunk was about fifteen feet away. What it made Strong think of most was a cliff, a convex, living cliff, with bark-prominences eight to ten feet long and fissures three to four feet deep—an arboreal precipice rising into a green and majestic cloud of foliage.
He hadn’t intended to look up, but his eyes had followed the sweep of the trunk of their own volition. Abruptly he lowered them. To reassure himself, he looked down into the shrinking village square at the familiar figures of his three companions.
Suhre and Blueskies were standing on one of the ancient burial mounds, smoking morning cigarettes. Strong was too high to see the expressions on their faces, but he knew that Suhre’s stolid features were probably set in stubborn resentment and that Blueskies was probably wearing his “buffalo-look.” Wright was about a hundred feet out from the base of the tree, operating the winch. His face would be essentially the same as it always was, a little pinched from worry, perhaps, but still embodying that strange mixture of gentleness and determination, still unmistakably a leader’s face.
Strong raised his eyes to the houses surrounding the square. They were even more enchanting seen from above than from below. Omicron Ceti’s red-gold radiance lay colorfully on chameleon rooftops, danced brightly on gingerbread facades. The nearer houses were empty now, of course—the village, within a three hundred yard radius of the tree, had been vacated and roped off—but looking at them, Strong got the fanciful impression that pixies had moved in during the night and were taking over the household chores while the villagers were away.
The thought amused him while it lasted, but it did not last long. The convoy of huge timber-carriers that moved into the square and parked in a long waiting line sent it scurrying.
Once again he confronted the tree. He was higher now, and the trunk should have become smaller. It had not—at least not perceptibly. It still resembled a convex cliff, and he felt more like a mountain climber than he did a treeman. Looking up, he saw the first limb. All he could think of was a horizontal sequoia growing on the vertical slope of a dendritic Everest.
Wright’s crisp voice sounded over the tree-to-ground radio hookup, the receiver and minuscule batteries of which were attached to Strong’s left ear lobe: “Seen any dryads yet?”
Strong tongued on the tiny transmitter attached to his lower lip. “Not yet.”
“If you do, let me know.”
“Like hell! That long blade of grass I drew gave me exclusive treerights, remember? Whatever I find up here is mine!” Wright laughed. “Just trying to help out.”
“I don’t need any help, thanks. What’s my height?”
There was a pause. Strong watched the cigarette-size figure of Wright bend over the winch-control panel. Presently: “One hundred and sixty-seven feet. Another hundred and twenty more and you’ll be even with the first limb… How do you feel?”
“Not bad.”
“Good. Let me know if anything goes wrong. The least little thing.”
“Will do.” Strong tongued off.
It was growing darker. No, not darker, Greener. The little sunlight that filtered down through the countless strata of foliage in a pale, chlorophyllic glow deepened in hue in ratio to his ascent. Tree-fright touched him, but he dispelled it by applying an antidote he’d learned in treeschool. The antidote was simple: concentrate on something, anything at all. He took inventory of the equipment attached to the basebar of the lift: tree-pegs, tree-rations, blankets; tree-tent, heating unit, peg-hammer; cable-caster, cutter, first-aid pack; climbing belt, saddle-rope, limb line (only the ringed end of the limb line was attached to the bar—the line itself trailed down to a dwindling coil at the tree’s base), Timkin-unit, tree-tongs, canteen…
At length the lift drew him into the lower foliage. He had expected the leaves to be huge, but they were small and delicate, reminiscent of the leaves of the lovely sugar maple that once had flourished on Earth. Presently he came opposite the first limb, and a flock of scarlet hahaha birds derided his arrival with a chorus of eldritch laughter. They circled around him several times, their little half-moons of eyes regarding him with seeming cynicism, then they spiraled out of sight into the upper branches.
The limb was like a ridge that had torn itself free from a mountain range to hover high above the village. Its branches were trees in their own right, each capable, were it to fall, of demolishing at least one of the houses the colonists loved so dearly.
Why, Strong wondered for the dozenth time, had the original inhabitants of Omicron Ceti 18’s major continent built their villages around the bases of such arboreal monsters? The Advance Team had stated in its report that the natives, despite their ability to build beautiful houses, had really been very primitive. But even so, they should have realized the potential threat such massive trees could pose during an electrical storm; and most of all they should have realized that excessive shade encouraged dampness and that dampness was the forerunner of decay.
Clearly they had not. For, of all the villages they had built, the present one was the only one that had not rotted into noisome ruin, just as the present tree was the only one that had not contracted the hypothetical blight that had caused the others to wither away and die.
It was the Advance Team’s contention that the natives had built their villages close to the trees because the trees were religious symbols. But, while the fact that they had migrated en masse to the “death-caves” in the northern barrens when the trees began to die certainly strengthened the contention, Strong still found it difficult to accept. The architecture o the houses suggested a practical as well as an artistic race of people, and a practical race of people would hardly commit self-genocide just because their religious symbols turned out to be susceptible to disease. Moreover, Strong had removed trees on a good many newly-opened planets, and he had seen the Advance Team proved wrong on quite a number of occasions.
The foliage was below him now, as well as above and around him. He was in a world apart, a hazy, greenish-gold world stippled with tree-flowers (the month was the Omicron Ceti 18 equivalent of June and the tree was in blossom), inhabited only by himself and the hahaha birds, and the insects that constituted their diet. He could see an occasional jigsaw-patch of the square through the intervening leaves, but that was all. Wright was out of sight; so were Suhre and Blueskies.
About fifteen feet below the limb over which he had made his original cable-cast, he told Wright to halt the winch. Then he detached the cable-caster from the base-bar, fitted the butt to his shoulder and started the lift swinging back and forth. He selected the highest limb he could see, one about eighty feet up, and at the extremity of one of his swings on the winch side of the tree, he aimed and squeezed the trigger.
It was like a spider spitting a filament of web. The gossamer cable drifted up and over the chosen limb, and its weighted end plummeted down through leaf and flower to dangle inches from his outstretched fingers. He caught it on the next swingback and, still swinging, pressed it against the apex of the lift-triangle till its microscopic fibers rooted themselves in the steel; then he snipped the “new” cable free from the caster with his pocket-snips and returned the caster to the base-bar. Finally he increased the arc of his swing till he could grasp the original cable, which slanted down through the foliage to the winch. He held on to it long enough to squeeze together the two cables—the “old” and the “new”—till they automatically interspliced, and to sever the bypassed section.