6 – Local Wildlife

It wasn’t too hard to make money, for as small and unremarkable a place as Tiode was. After I tended my fields, the soil already healthy enough for rows of wheat to start to prod from the soil, I occupied my day with other actions.

Usually this meant taking something off the town bounty board, which often had need of something or other. Whether it was picking bundles of flowers for the dye shop, or hunting wolves for their pelts for the tanner, I usually ended each day with extra coin.

Was it glamorous? No. Did I enjoy it? Also, no. But this was what it meant to live a normal and quiet life and I simply had to endure. It was better than dealing with war and slaughter on a daily basis.

Recently I had started heading north west, where the River Io flowed. A sawmill had been erected upon it, and the whole place was usually alive with the sound of sawing and banging. They needed workers and were wiling to pay. Plus it gave me access to wood for home improvement.

“You wanna work for me, eh?” The owner was a one eyed old man who stood with a perpetual stoop, peering up at me with his wrinkled face set in a grimace.

“Yes, Shino.” That had been the exchange when we had first met, and that was the exchange every other time I came up to the sawmill. I wasn’t sure if the old timer had a short memory, or if he was just some kind of oddball.

He grunted, turned, and spat a red mouthful of some chewable herbs onto the soil. “Well, get to it then. I’ll give you three gin for every ten logs you split.” He jerked a bony thumb to a great stack of wooden logs, a square metallic chopping block laden with shallow cuts off to one side of it. An axe rested on the block.

“You got it, Shino.” I don’t know if the rate was bad, if he was conning me, but it did not much matter. I could do that work with ease and made plenty each day.

One by one I set blocks on the chopping block, cleaving them clean in half with a single stroke of the sharpened axe. The heavy clunking sound of chopping wood filled he river valley, almost louder than the sound of the massive logs being sawn by the mill’s waterwheel-powered blade.

The local workers, burly men who were decently tall for Tsukio standards, watched me warily in passing. My presence didn’t impede their work but I could see some of the distaste in their stares. Perhaps they thought a foreigner didn’t belong at their mill.

Or, perhaps, they disliked an outsider taking work from them.

But none of them said a thing.

When you see a man effortlessly split five dozen logs in quick succession, not even working up a single bead of sweat from the work, it douses any desire most men would have to pick a fight. I’d deny anyone who asked if I was a ‘cultivator’, but people could still tell easily enough that I was no normal man.

Shino didn’t care who or what I was, and that was what mattered.

He watched me as I worked, chewing his herbs the way a cow would chew cud. “Where’d you come from anyhow?” he asked.

“West,” I said. “What does it matter?”

“Ain’t never had westmen working around here. Don’t think I ever known a westman to live in Tsukio. Just traders on the coast, who come an’ go as they please. You’re an oddity.”

“Oh?” The jolt of another chop ran up my right shoulder. I had to be mindful of my own strength so as not to drive the blade too deep into the scuffed steel. “Nothing wrong with that.”

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Shino shrugged. “Reckon not. You’re a good worker, so it’s not as if I can complain. You keep doing what you’re doin’, I keep paying. But there’s a look of trouble about you, and I’d appreciate you keeping trouble away from my mill.”

“Calm yourself,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at him. “Trouble’s something I seek to avoid.”

The boar came rushing at me, squealing and frothing at the mouth. It was a big bastard, taller than my waist and able to charge with incredible speed. I dodged it off to the side, jumping off the dirt road with my bound stack of wooden planks threatening to tip my balance as I landed.

The black furred beast kept going, skidding too late and smashing his tusks into a nearby tree. He gouged a thick chunk from the wood, snorted indignantly, and rounded on me. I narrowed my eyes at it.

I’d encountered wolves on the road, but a boar was a new one out here. Didn’t even know they had boars in Tsukio. And this one was a monster, even compared to the tusked beasts back in the Paathia Mountains.