Too Much Happiness

from the farmer and he knows nothing about any other deal. He will say that furthermore he intends to go on cutting unless the farmer comes and personally tells him to get out. If that really happens, of course he will have to go. But it’s not likely it will happen because Suter is a hefty man with a bad hip, so he is not much taken to wandering around his property.
    “… no authority…,” Roy says, talking to himself like Percy Marshall, “I want to see it on paper.”
    He’s talking to the stranger he’s never even seen.
    The floor of any bush is usually rougher than the surface of the surrounding land. Roy has always thought that this was caused by trees falling, pulling up the earth with their roots, then just lying there, rotting. Where they had lain and rotted there would be a mound-where their roots had torn out the earth there would be hollows. But he read somewhere-fairly recently, and he wishes he could remember where it was-that the cause was what happened long ago, just after the Ice Age, when ice formed between layers of earth and pushed it up into odd humps, just as it does today in the arctic regions. Where the land has not been cleared and worked the humps remain.
    What happens to Roy now is the most ordinary and yet the most unbelievable thing. It is what might happen to any stupid daydreamer walking in the bush, to any holidayer gawking around at nature, to somebody who thought the bush was a kind of park to stroll in. Somebody who wore light shoes instead of boots and didn’t bother to keep an eye on the ground. It has never happened to Roy before in hundreds of times of walking in the bush, it has never once come near to happening.
    A light snow has been falling for some time, making the earth and dead leaves slippery. One of his feet skids and twists, and then the other foot plunges through a cover of snowy brush to the ground, which is farther down than he expected. That is, he steps carelessly-is thrown, almost-into the sort of spot where you should always step testingly, carefully, and not at all if you can see a nearby place that is better. Even so, what happens? He doesn’t go down hard, it’s not as if he has stumbled into a groundhog hole. He is thrown off balance, but he sways reluctantly, almost disbelievingly, then goes down with the skidding foot caught somehow under the other leg. He holds the saw out from himself as he falls, and flings the ax clear. But not clear enough-the ax handle hits him hard, against the knee of his twisted leg. The saw has pulled him over in its direction but at least he hasn’t fallen against it.
    He has felt himself go down almost in slow motion, thoughtfully and inevitably. He could have broken a rib, but he didn’t. And the ax handle could have flown up and hit him in the face, but it didn’t. He could have gashed his leg. He thinks of all these possibilities not with immediate relief, but as if he can’t be sure yet that they have not happened. Because the way this started-the way he skidded and stepped onto the brush and fell-was so stupid and awkward, so hard to believe, that any preposterous outcome could follow.
    He starts to pull himself up. Both knees hurt-one from being hit by the handle and one from coming down hard on the ground. He gets hold of the trunk of a young cherry tree-where he could have bashed his head-and pulls himself up gradually. Tentatively he puts weight on one foot and just touches the ground with the other-the one that skidded and twisted underneath him. In a minute he’ll try it. He bends to pick up the saw and nearly buckles again. A pain shoots up from the ground and doesn’t stop till it reaches his skull. He forgets the saw, straightens up, not sure where the pain started. That foot-did he put weight on it as he bent over? The pain has drawn back into that ankle. He straightens the leg as much as he can, considering it, then very cautiously tries the foot on the ground, tries his weight. He can’t believe the pain. He can’t believe that it would continue so, could continue to defeat him. The ankle must be more than twisted-it must be sprained. Could it be broken? In his boot it doesn’t look any different from his other, faithful, ankle.
    He knows that he will have to bear it. He will have to get used to it to get out of here. And he keeps trying, but he does not make any progress. He can’t set his weight on it. It must be broken. A broken ankle-even that is surely a minor injury, the sort of thing