Trail of the Axe

Timber veins bleed across a primordial forest where axe-heads glint like cold constellations. Dave Malkern—sinewed patriarch of an empire built on resin and bone—banishes his own blood, Jim, whose breath reeks of moonshine and dereliction. The dismissal is not mere termination but an eviction from myth: the brothers once felled colossal pines as if toppling titans. Now, Jim staggers into the tavern dusk, nursing humiliation that ferments into thermite vengeance. Under a sky bruised by winter auroras, he steals dynamite from a riverside depot, the explosive sticks pulsing like incarnadine cigars. He plants them beneath the cathedral-sized sawmill, that buzzing heart of the valley, while saw-blades sing psalms of progress. At dawn the blast rips through cedar and steel, a terrestrial comet hurling splinters into low-hanging mist. Lumbermen dive from catwalks; a river of burning sawdust cascades into the gorge. Dave, framed by conflagration, recognizes the handiwork of kinship gone feral and charges into the inferno, axe raised not for logs but for absolution. Their final clash occurs on a floating log-jam, timbers greased by rain and kerosene, two silhouettes wrestling against the roar of a dam about to burst. When the spillway gives, the forest itself seems to exhale, swallowing brotherhood, machinery, and the very notion of frontier justice in a cataclysmic gulp.