Tim was completely familiar with the outdoors, but he had never realized before how much technology was tied up in a backpacker’s gear. A down sleeping bag seems so little to carry, but it represents the work of hundreds of people. Take the nylon shell alone; from the geologist, to the oil rigger, to the trucker, to the workers who run the refineries and factories that turn oil into nylon, to the workers who cut and sew the cloth into the final bag, it represents a chain of effort stretching through dozens of links.

Tim had taken his gear for granted before, taking care of it because it was expensive and because his father demanded care, but not really thinking about what it meant. He would never take it for granted again.

As he limped downward, the slope of the ground increased. Within a hundred yards, he could see better. He could look across a tree studded valley to another broken slope beyond. He worked his way gingerly downhill, holding his injured ankle above the ground and leaning heavily on the crutch. He knew that he would eventually come to a stream if he kept to the lowest ground.

The rain came again in scattered droplets, but luck was with him and it did not rain hard. He had to reach a source of drinking water and construct a shelter before the rain started again in earnest.

Now he was among low, twisted trees. The ground was very uneven underfoot. A gully some twenty feet across cut across his path and he was forced to detour along it. Eventually that gully widened into a miniature valley. Tim found a slide and worked his way down to the valley floor thirty feet below. On the way down, he fell and slid, stopping himself by digging his crutch into the talus like an ice axe. He lay panting for a while, until the pain in his ankle eased enough to let him go on.

The stream that had cut the valley was dry now. Once Tim found a pool, scarcely a foot across and drank there, saving the water in his canteen. There were a few wild flowers still growing so late in the season. Tim could not remember their names, but he chewed on them as he walked, and tried not to think of how hungry he was. There were probably many edible plants around him, but there were also poisonous ones, and he didn’t know which was which.

The sky had gone dark, although it was far from evening, when he came to the pool. A ponderosa pine growing close to the stream bed had been undermined some previous season and had fallen across the stream. Gravel and sand had shored it up, forming a natural dam. The pool was eight feet wide and stretched for thirty feet upstream, becoming more narrow and shallow toward its upper end. At most, it was no more than eighteen inches deep.  Last night’s rain had filled it with muddy water and there were tracks of small animals at the water’s edge.

Tim stopped short and did not approach the pool so that he would not leave his scent there. Then he searched about for a place to make his shelter. Another ponderosa pine grew a few dozen feet upstream. Like the tree that had dammed the creekbed, this pine had roots denuded by erosion and a mound of driftwood had gathered at its base. There were several willow saplings, shade killed and still dry beneath the ponderosa.

Tim chose his campsite with care, near the driftwood pile but above the flood line. First he cleared a small area of debris and built a ring of rocks. He cut tinder and fuzz sticks from the dead saplings and soon had a fire going. more tomorrow

He stood again, propping himself with the juniper, and measured it against his body. Then he sat to cut his makeshift crutch to length. The narrow tip that he cut off would make a crosspiece later, but now he just jammed the base into his armpit and started out looking for firewood. It cut him painfully, but Tim couldn’t worry about that.

Everything was soaked from the rain. All of the down wood he dragged up had to be dried by the fire before it would burn. As he nursed the fire, he lashed a crosspiece onto his crutch with another strip cut from his shirt sleeve.

Rain soaked him through and turned the granite shiny in the firelight as the last light of day faded. Nearby, a nest of boulders caught the runoff and made a finger sized waterfall. Tim set his empty canteen under it, and had his first drink of water that day. It made him feel better.

Out there, a quarter of a mile away, were trees which would give him shelter. But he could not move his fire, and he could not be sure of starting another one with wet wood.

His second night on the slope was even more miserable than his first one.

* * *

Tim awakened when the wind began. The rain had stopped, but the wind was even more dangerous. It cut through him with a deadly chill. His campfire was nearly out, and so was the fire of life within his body. He knew that if he did not get warm soon, he would die.

He added new fuel to the fires and started a third one.  Within that triangle of fire, he stripped. Off came his left boot. His jeans would not go over his splinted right boot, so he split his jeans from waistband to cuff and pulled them off.

Off came his wool shirt and he sat nearly naked, shivering as he dried his shirt over the fire. When it caught fire, he squeezed the flames out with his fingers. The wind tore at his bare skin and carried away the heat from the fires, but he would not let himself take half measures. He held the shirt to the flames until it was dry, and when he put it on again the warmth was unbelievable.

Drying his jeans took even longer. By the time he had them on, and had laced up the split leg with strips cut from his handkerchief, the sky was beginning to turn light. He used his makeshift crutch to stand and turn around, but the clouds were so thick that he could not tell which section of the sky was lightest.

Tim knew that he had to get off the bald side of the mountain and into shelter before it rained again.

He could not put his fire out properly, but on this bare, wet rock it would do no harm. He scattered the wood with his crutch, and took stock. At his belt he had his knife, canteen, and the precious firestone in its canvas case. Since he had laced his pants leg with handkerchief strips, his pockets were empty.

Or were they? He suddenly realized that he had dried his jeans over the fire with the three remaining rifle cartridges in the pocket!

He swallowed hard and started down the slope. It was rough going with the crutch, but at least he could move. The crosspiece cut into his armpit, but he didn’t want to sacrifice any more clothing to pad it. When he got to cover, he would find something to use as a cushion. more tomorrow

Then he dragged himself back. Halfway there, a terrible weakness came over him. Whether it was from pain, poor sleep, or hunger, he could not say, but it frightened him.

In the back of his mind, Tim had been thinking about his mother, and how she would worry about his absence. Now he set those thoughts aside and began to seriously worry about himself.

The clouds rolled above him, gray and heavy with the promise of rain.

Pulling himself to a sitting position, he began to trim branches for a splint. He studied the situation, and decided to replace his boot, then splint over it. That might not be the best or most comfortable way, but at least it would let him walk.

Whatever else happened, he had to get off this bald knob and into shelter.

He cut the splints, but the cord he could have used to bind them had gone with his other survival supplies. He considered his clothing. He wore ten inch boots and socks, jeans, a wool shirt, and underwear. He had a belt, but he needed it to support his knife and firestone case. He had a handkerchief, but that would be too flimsy.

Nothing could be spared, yet something had to be spared. Finally, he decided to sacrifice his shirt sleeves from the elbow down. He cut strips from them until he had enough to bind the splints into place.

He fed the fire and took stock. It was nearing noon, yet a chill hung in the air.

Food? Impossible for now.

Fire? Secured, but not portable. He needed to cut and dry some kindling before he let this fire die out, or he might not be able to start another one later.

Shelter? He had to have shelter by nightfall, or before it rained. And there was no way to make a shelter until he got to lower ground. The edge of the forest was a quarter of a mile away, and that would be a long way to limp on one foot.

He stood to get a better look at the treeline, and to pick the easiest path. He balanced on his left foot, and slowly let some weight down on his right. The pain in his ankle was intense. He lost his balance and sprawled headlong.

* * *

When consciousness returned, the sun was nearly down, and his face was caked with blood from where his head had hit the granite bedrock of the bald.

He was freezing. Again!

He dragged himself to the fire. It was down to a few embers. He chose the driest wood at hand and cut new fuzz sticks – six inch twigs from which twenty or thirty chips are lifted, but allowed to remain attached. He placed these in the embers and blew the fire to life again.

A drop of rain struck his neck.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and crawled to the juniper stem. He would have to have a crutch, so he started working away at its base. It was six feet high and four inches through at the base. Working with only a knife was heartbreakingly slow, but Tim stuck to the task. As he worried away at the base of the tree, the rain began to fall more heavily.

Half an hour later, the juniper fell. Tim crawled back to the fire, dragging it behind him. He was soaked and shivering as he fed the fire and tried to warm himself. His supply of firewood was getting low, and he couldn’t crawl around on the rocks to get more. more next week

At some point he must have gotten free of the current and come ashore. Obviously – since he remembered none of it – he had only been half conscious. What could have happened then?

As the light increased, Tim realized that this was nowhere he had ever been before. There was no familiar landmark anywhere. He was in high, broken country surrounded by manzanita and scattered junipers. The low hanging clouds kept him from seeing any landmarks he might have recognized, and those clouds seemed to be getting thicker. Without his compass or a view of the sun, he didn’t even know east from west.

He let his campfire burn down. It was time to leave, but he had no idea which direction to go.

How long had he wandered in his dazed condition? More important, how far had he wandered, and in which direction? He might be within a mile of some familiar place, but if he set off in the wrong direction he would only make matters worse.

Tim looked up at the low hanging clouds and began to worry. If it should snow or rain he would be in serious trouble. His poncho – two ounces of flimsy plastic – would have been enough to protect him, but it was gone.

STOP. Stop, think, observe, plan. Tim had learned that phrase in outdoor school as a sixth grader, he had never really thought he would be in a position to use it.

He had certainly stopped and thought. He had observed that this bald knob was no place to find food, water, or shelter. His immediate plan was clear. He would move off downhill. Since he was on the California side of the Sierra Nevadas, any downhill movement would take him westward, which was the direction he wanted to go. If he did not find a familiar landmark, he would at least find a better place to build a survival shelter.

He rose to leave

His right ankle turned beneath him

He cried out as he fell. He took the force of the fall on his shoulder to spare his ankle, but the pain did not go away.

Chapter 3

The pain did not go away. It burned on like a hot knife deep into the joint and Tim knew he had not caused all this by a simple misstep. It had to be something he had done in his fall or his semi-conscious wanderings.

He carefully removed his boot and sock. The flesh was pink and swollen, but not sensitive to his touch. The injury, whatever it was, lay deep. Setting his foot down, he bumped it and the pain almost made him faint.

If he had not been in trouble before, he was certainly in trouble now!

His ankle did not seem to be broken, but how could he be sure? Strained, sprained, twisted, or broken – it made little difference, really.

He needed wood for a splint, and for his fire. Now that he could no longer just walk away, that fire had become a matter of life or death once again. Sliding on his back, with his left leg drawn up to hold his right ankle above the ground, he made his way to a nearby dead juniper. Taking his knife, he cut off the stiff lower limbs until he could reach no more, then balanced on his good foot and continued. Every time he made an unguarded move, the pain in his ankle shot through him.

He stripped the tree of branches, then threw them one by one back toward the fire. Then he dragged himself back. Halfway there, a terrible weakness came over him. more tomorrow

He arranged this tender on a flat rock and worried the bullet out of a cartridge with his teeth. He spread the powder over his kindling, buried the mouth of the casing in the pile, and held it down with a rock.  Taking his knife, he tapped the primer.

Nothing!

He tapped it harder, and still nothing happened. Shivering and desperate, Tim dropped his knife and struck the casing with a rock. There was a sharp crack and the kindling scattered, but nothing took fire.

A spasm of shivering moved through him and he whimpered in the cold. Flint and steel. It was the only thing left to him, but he had no flint. He grabbed a broken off piece of granite and beat it viciously with his knife. It made no sparks. He tossed it aside and tried another. His breath was coming in sobs now. No sparks. 

He fell to his knees and rummaged among the pebbles and broken rocks, searching for something that was not granite. For a moment, the moon broke through, and he grabbed a rock that was shinier than the rest. He struck it with his knife.

A spark appeared. Tim struck it again and again until a shower of sparks fell on the damp tender. The gunpowder ignited, fizzling and snapping. Tim dropped the rock and knife and fell on his belly.

Blowing gently, he nursed the flame. A shred of bark shriveled and flared, then another. He held a fuzz stick above the tiny flame until it was fully burning, being careful not to smother it. Now he had a handful of flame and be began to feed it larger pieces of wood.

When finger thick pieces of wood were burning, Tim began to relax. He stretched his hands over the flame. Returning circulation almost made him cry out.

Tim gathered more wood and started another fire six feet from the first, then built a woodpile between them. He settled down there, warming himself and feeding them both. It was over an hour before the shivering stopped.

* * *

In the predawn light, Tim examined the rock he had used to start the fire. It glinted with metallic, golden flakes.  Pyrites – fool’s gold. The miners who had dug California’s hills for real gold had despised it, but to Tim it was a treasure.

The canvas case that had carried his emergency gear was basically undamaged. Only the snap had torn out. Tim bored holes in it and tied it shut with strings cut from his shirt cuff to make a secure case for his firestone.

He did not know how long it had been since he started his fire. He had watched the moon cross about a third of the sky before sunrise, peeking from time to time through the overcast. It was a glorious sunrise, but Tim hardly noticed.

Tim could not remember what had happened to him. He could only reason it out. He must have fallen into the stream, and it must have carried him downstream. Had he hit his head against one of those fang shaped rocks?

He explored his head with his fingers. There was a gash above and behind his left ear which had formed its own poultice of matted blood, dirt, and hair. Tim decided to leave it alone, since he could not see to tend it. It explained why he did not remember how he got where he was. It also explained his throbbing headache. more tomorrow

The stream roared in its bed, and towhees darted about, showing him their red sides as the flitted by. Tim was watching them, when he saw his deer. The stream took a sharp bend here, so he saw the muley through a double screen of willows and across the open space above the stream. Its forequarters were matted with dried blood.

“Finally,” Tim thought. He brought up his rifle. Walking at a half crouch, he worked out to the lip of the stream. The wind was upstream and the deer was not looking his way, so he waited, hoping it would move. A tree trunk lay between Tim and a prefect shot. But the muley didn’t move, so Tim carefully shifted sideways.

A rock turned under his foot, the rifle went off into the air, and Tim fell through space into a pit of blackness.

Chapter 2

Tim was caught up and swept away. For an eternity, he fell through frigid space, beaten by unseen fists.

Then there was a time of drifting and slow surrender.

There was an endless slope where he chased his quarry. Then the quarry turned on him and he was running downhill in frenzied panic.

There was the cold. The numbing, all consuming cold.

Finally there was ultimate blackness.

* * *

It was the cold that woke him.

His consciousness did not return all at once. First he was aware of the crumbled granite beneath his cheek. Then he became aware that his clothes were wet and that the world was dark.

Tim rolled over onto his back, tearing his ice encrusted jeans loose from the rock. The moon was up and for a time Tim had no idea where he was.

Fire! He had to have a fire. His clothes were soaked, where they had not crusted with ice. He reached for his match case, but it was not there. The survival pack was torn open and empty.

He sat for a minute, holding his head and shivering.

He was beginning to remember his plunge into the stream. Somewhere along the line, he must have hit his head. His fingers explored his scalp and came away damp and sticky. He had probably smashed into one of the boulders that studded the stream.

He raised his head and looked around. He was nowhere near the stream. He was high on a slope in broken granite country; the boulders and stunted trees around him made fantastic shapes in the night.

And he was freezing!

The cold was intense. As he became more fully awake and aware, Tim’s discomfort changed to pain. His fingers ached deep in the joints and he shivered so that he could hardly move.

His rifle was gone. His watch was gone. He had an empty canteen and a hunting knife at his belt, but the canvas case that held his survival kit had torn open. The snake bite kit, salt tablets, coil of snare wire, coil of fish line, hooks, sinkers, compass and plastic poncho – all the things his dad had helped him put together, all were gone. He still had the clothes he was wearing, a handkerchief, and four cartridges for his missing rifle.

Those cartridges seemed his best hope of a fire. He knew how to start a fire with them if he had a rifle. But without one . . . ?

He gathered firewood as best he could in the near darkness, where the moon only showed occasionally through the clouds. Using his knife, he shredded bark from the driest wood and cut fuzz sticks. He arranged this tender on a flat rock and worried the bullet out of a cartridge with his teeth. more tomorrow

Tim started up the slope and the muley broke from cover.  With surprising speed, it went up the slope on three legs. Tim sighted quickly and squeezed the trigger – but nothing happened! He had forgotten to work the lever after his first shot. He jacked a shell angrily into the chamber and fired, but the deer kept right on going, and he knew he had missed.

Tim topped the skyline fifteen minutes later. Below him was a broad, shallow valley, now lost in shadow, and behind him the sun was setting. The deer was nowhere in sight.

* * *

Tim was in trouble, and he knew it. It was too late to find his way back to the campground before full dark, and he was growing cold, so he built a fire near a circle of junipers. He had slept out many times with his father, but never without a sleeping bag or jacket, and never without food. “Serves you right,” he told himself, bitterly. He fed the fire and squeezed close to it.

Tim could imagine his mother coming home from work, past midnight, and moving about the silent, empty house. She would see his note. If he was really lucky, she would assume that he had decided to spend the night at his grandfather’s house. It would be late, so she probably wouldn’t call. It would probably be morning before she knew he was missing.

If he just had his cell phone he could have told her what happened, although he cringed at how lame the story would sound.

It was a miserable night. Tim dozed in snatches on a bed of dry ferns and needles. Before is was fully light, Tim had already stamped out his fire and started off, but even exercise did little to warm him.

He had a decision to make. Within an hour, his mother would be calling his grandfather, and would find out that he wasn’t there. He didn’t want to worry her, but there was no way to avoid it now. The question was, should he go back immediately and face her, or should he spend a little more time to bring the muley in. He decided to spend one hour looking for the injured muley, then he would have to go back.

The ground was too rocky to take tracks, so he headed for the stream he could see at the base of the valley. It was rocky with only a few patches of dirt, and he found no tracks there, so he worked his way downstream, looking for anything to indicate that the deer had passed that way.

Just when he was about to give up and turn back, he found three-legged deer tracks.

Now Tim was really in a dilemma. He didn’t want his mother to worry, but he didn’t want to leave his wounded deer either. And he certainly didn’t want to have to tell his dad that he had left a wounded animal.

“Just a little longer,” he decided.

Tim followed the tracks down the valley. It was slow work; the tracks only appeared at scattered intervals where the ground was soft enough to hold them. Several times he lost them altogether, but always managed to pick them up again.

The sunny morning was turning into a very cloudy day. Up here snow would be dangerous, and even rain would be a first class misery. At least he had the survival pack his father had helped him put together. It held matches and a plastic poncho, and he never went into the woods without it.

The stream roared in its bed, and towhees darted about, showing him their red sides as the flitted by. Tim was watching them, when he saw his deer. more next week

He hid his bike in the manzanita a hundred yards from the campground and took his rifle with him. Then he slipped a few cartridges into the magazine, just in case.

He walked into the woods. It was late October and the Sierra Nevada mountains of California were beautiful. The aspens were gold against the deep green of the firs and the air was clear and cool. As the morning slipped by he occasionally heard the shots of other hunters, but he didn’t see any deer.

By mid-afternoon, Tim reached a high valley, cut through by a small, swift brook. There he lay back with the sound of water in his ears. The rifle was across his stomach as his eyes searched the edges of the trees.

Five deer came out of the woods on an eyebrow of trail fifty feet higher up the slope and a long hundred yards away. A four point buck led the way, followed by three does and a yearling. Tim sat up and brought up his rifle. He took up slack on the trigger and squeezed gently, just as his father had taught him.

In the moment that Tim fired, the lead muley caught sight of him and pulled up short, then stumbled. His forequarters failed him and his chest hit the trail as his back legs struggled for balance. Then he was up again and running up the trail.

The other deer were gone. Tim’s attention had been all on the leader and he had not even seen where they went after they disappeared into the forest.

Now he was in a panic. Until he had fired that shot, he had not really admitted to himself that he was out hunting alone. He had just been “taking a walk”. If he turned away and went back down to the campground now, his parents would never know the truth. But Tim would know, and in the hunter’s code his father had taught him, leaving a wounded animal was unthinkable.

Tim plunged into the stream where it ran shallow across a bar of harder rock, holding his rifle high. He scrambled up the talus slope, using rocks and juniper as handholds. When he reached the point where the deer had been, he found the manzanita covered with a fine spray of blood.

Tim turned up the narrow, winding trail in pursuit of the wounded deer. Near the stream there were vines and underbrush, but as the trail climbed, it became more open. The muley was nowhere in sight.

There were a number of tracks on the trail, but only one set going in the right direction. Tim studied them for a moment, looking for some distinctive feature, but he found none. The deer held a grueling pace for more than a quarter of a mile before his tracks showed that he had slowed and begun to limp.

The situation didn’t look promising. The deer had run into an area of broken granite and stunted firs. It was not a place for an inexperienced tracker.

The sun was low, filling the land with shadows and strange suggestions of shapes. It was beginning to get cold, and Tim’s jacket was back at the campground, tied to his bike.

Tim sat down on a rock to scan the slope ahead of him. Finally, almost lost in the tangle of roots at the base of an uprooted ponderosa pine, he thought he saw a set of antlers.

Tim started up the slope and the muley broke from cover. With surprising speed, it went up the slope on three legs. more tomorrow

Last year, Tim had been allowed for the first time to go with his father on his yearly deer hunt. Then his father had given him a rifle for Christmas, and this year they would have hunted together for the first time. There had never been any open agreement between them – that would have spoiled the whole thing – and his father would never have admitted that these were rewards for good behavior. Good behavior was simply expected. But if Tim hadn’t gotten control of his temper, the rifle and the hunt would not have been his.

Tim picked up an axe and took his anger out on the wood.

* * *

Tim was standing beside the pickup when his parents left the next morning. His dad tossed a worn leather satchel into the back and squeezed his shoulder. “Your mother is going to drop me off on her way to work,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be able to get a day between runs before deer season is over.”

“Now don’t you go driving crazy!” Tim’s mother said.

“You know me, Helen.”

“Yes, I do.” She turned and kissed Tim, and said, “There are leftovers in the refrigerator. You’ll have to make your own supper. I’m taking another double shift while Susan is having her baby. Maybe you ought to bike over to see your Granddad.”

“All right, Mom,” Tim said, but inside he was shouting, Not you too! He knew he shouldn’t be angry at either of them, but he was. After the pickup pulled out of sight, he wandered around the yard, feeling abandoned and feeling sorry for himself.

Eventually, he went to his bedroom and sat down on the bed with his new rifle across his knees. It had never been fired, except on the practice range. He took the shells from the box on his desk and loaded it, then unloaded it again. Finally he dropped a half dozen cartridges into his pocket and picked up his pack. As long as both parents were gone for the night, he figured he might as well spend the time with his grandfather. Maybe he could get in some target practice, or maybe he could get his grandfather to tell some of the family tales about the old Miwuk Indian days.

He left a note for his mother and strapped his rifle across the handlebars of his bike. He turned up the main highway into the mountains, standing on his pedals to make the initial grade. When he got to the turnoff to his grandfather’s place, he hesitated. Up the road, only seven miles further into the mountains, was the campground where he and his father had parked last year when they went hunting. At least he could go there. He had all day.

The road rose sharply for those seven miles, and Tim was thoroughly winded when he arrived at the campground. Half a dozen empty campers were parked there, but there was no one in the campground. Everyone was out hunting.

Tim stood astraddle of his bike for a long time, running his hands across the smooth steel and wood of his rifle. He was sorely tempted to have his hunt anyway, alone. Finally he decided to just walk in the woods for an hour before he went down to his grandfather’s place. He reached for his cell phone to tell his grandfather, then remembered that it was at home.  The one girl he liked least had begun to call him twice a day, so he had stopped carrying it. more tomorrow

Spirit Deer
by Syd Logsdon

Chapter 1

Tim was packing for their hunting trip when his father came to his room. When he hesitated in the doorway, Tim knew that something was up, and that it wasn’t something good. He shoved another pair of jeans into the pack and said, “What’s the matter, Dad?”

“I just got a call from Mike Conway,” Tim’s father replied.  “He’s come down with the flu.”

Tim stood still with his hands resting quietly on the half filled pack, waiting for the rest.

“I have to drive his rig for him.”

“How far?” Tim asked.

Tim’s father came up and put his hand on Tim’s shoulder. “All the way to Chicago. I’m sorry, Tim”

Tim wished he was twelve years old again, so he could throw a screaming fit. He had been working on his temper these last two years, trying to be fair to his family, trying to be responsible – trying to be more like his dad. If he acted childish now, if he even whined, his father would be terribly disappointed in him. He didn’t want that, so he gritted his teeth and asked, “How soon will you be back?”

“That’s the rest of the bad news. I can’t pick up his load until tomorrow morning. Figure two days each way, and at least a day to unload and load at the other end. Five days; I’ll barely be back in time to make my own next run.”

Tim couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t fair. He had waited all year for this hunting trip and now it was going to be snatched away from him. He said, “I wish we had left two hours ago.”

Tim’s father shook his shoulder in a friendly way. “Then Mike would have driven sick. I’m glad I was here for him. He has been a good friend to all of us.”

It was true. Tim knew that; but inside, the selfish twelve year old he had been was screaming, “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” Tim was tired of being fair. His fingers tightened on the pack. He wanted to grab it up and throw it – preferably through a window, or at his dad.

But Tim saw his father’s eyes on him. He knew the look of disappointment that would come into those eyes if he gave in to childishness, and he never wanted to see that look again. His dad said, “Tim, I’m proud of you for taking this like a man.”

Tim couldn’t reply, and he couldn’t stand those eyes on him any longer. He nodded with set lips and left the room. He headed for the woodpile.

Two years ago, the last time he had thrown a tantrum, his father had taken him out to that woodpile. He had given the axe to Tim and had told him to chop wood. After ten minutes, when some of his anger had been drained away by smashing the heavy logs into firewood, his father had said, “Everyone gets angry. Everyone wants to have things go just right, and things never do. Now you’ve got a choice to make. You can cry like a baby when you don’t get your way, or you can act like a man. The next time you find yourself losing control, I want you to get up from whatever you are doing and come out here. Work it out, then come back.”

Tim had spent a lot of time at the woodpile that year. Gradually he had gained control of himself, and as his father grew proud of him, he had grown proud of himself.

It had been nearly a year since he had gone to the woodpile to take out his frustrations, but this was no ordinary disappointment. more tomorrow