A story written in wood

Back when they cut out cedar in basins of rivers north and south they'd float them down in log jams to the new ports built quickly from the timbers nudging down stream toward them. Once piered and poled those ports served new boats and big boats and saw Newfies and Scousers and Taffys and crooks. While upstream the men knew about it but stayed there to rip from the forests the great boughs they saw.

One of them they called King Billy and though no one had seen him for twenty years he was thought to be alive and living in the forests where the light of his fire would sometimes flick and his shadow flitted in front of the bullock teams. Archie Compton and Dennis Eves saw him one time they say, while they were digging out a wagon stalled with logs in a river bank turned to mud. The bullock were low snorting and had given up hope of jagging it loose. Arch had loosed the slack of the chains to give them a start and inspire them forward. They always put the dumb ones in the middle and they just followed and grunted in the directions the more wily leaders deemed fit. Those lead animals deflated would send the whole team into depression and the trick was to inspire them.

Like everything in life, belief is the key.

With the slack eaten up and the lead animals at pace and full of confidence that cart unbogged and Arch and Den looked up and seen old Billy the black who'd been in those forests since his birth and the birth of his father and pre that even.

But almost in the motion of seeing him was the sight of his disappearing too. Just the one moment of being and not being and all the while the wagon climbed the hill and the logs eventually left to float downstream and some of them logs onto a ship are probably there in Plymouth or New York even though I doubt it.

There's another story but it's written in wood.