The south stream ran fast and ice-cold over black rocks, filling the small clearing with a steady roar.
Stacked along the grassy bank lay thirty massive pine logs.
Each trunk was two feet thick, freshly cut from the high slopes, smelling heavily of sticky resin and wet bark.
The wood was dense, heavy, and wet with sap.
Vidhar stood before the first log, his bare feet dug into the damp loam.
The blunt four-kilogram practice Parashu (battle-axe) hung from his hands.
His palms burned where raw blisters had rubbed against the deerskin wrap, and the muscles of his neck and upper back felt like stiff leather.
He set the first log upright on a flat river boulder.
He widened his feet, raised the axe high above his head with both hands, and brought the blunt iron down with everything he had in his shoulders.
THUD.
The blunt crescent head didn’t bite.
It bounced off the wet pine with a dull thump, sending a numbing vibration straight back up the wooden haft into Vidhar’s wrists.
The log didn’t split; it merely wobbled and rolled off the boulder into the mud.
Vidhar’s forearms seized with an electric cramp.
From a drooping birch branch over the water, Kakbhushundi fluttered his wings, preening a damp primary feather.
“Splendid chopping,” the crow’s dry voice echoed in Vidhar’s head.
“The log feels thoroughly insulted, I am sure.
At this rate, the sun will die before you finish three trees.
You are hitting the pine as if it were an iron shield, boy.
Wood has a grain.
It has a heart.
It does not yield to a battering ram.”
Vidhar spat a speck of bark from his lip.
He hauled the heavy log back onto the flat stone.
“Then tell me the trick, bird,” Vidhar muttered under his breath.
“Listen to your Teacher, fool.
What did he say in the gorge?
The cut does not live in your arms.
When you chop from the shoulders, you are fighting the iron and fighting the wood.
Let the weight fall.
The iron knows where the earth is; your job is only to guide the line.”
Vidhar lowered the axe, resting the blunt head against the dirt.
He closed his eyes and pulled a deep, icy breath of stream air into his lungs.
The current of Prana-Vayu (the vital breath of nature) expanded behind his ribs, cooling the burning fire in his forearms.
He remembered Bhagavan Parashurama’s stance in the gorge.
When the Teacher swung his axe, there was no strain in his neck.
There was no desperate clenching of the jaw.
His massive frame moved like a waterwheel—rooted at the axle, heavy at the rim, letting gravity and leverage do the killing work.
Vidhar opened his eyes.
Through Kala-Drishti (seer’s sight), he looked closely at the top of the pine log.
The circular cut of the wood was not solid.
Running from the center to the bark were dozens of hairline cracks where the drying air had already begun to separate the fibers.
There was a natural fault line running straight across the middle.
Vidhar set his feet.
He stepped his left foot forward three inches, softening his knees.
He gripped the haft not with a death-grip, but lightly—pinching the base with his pinky and ring fingers, leaving his wrists loose and flexible.
He raised the four-kilogram axe.
He didn’t pull it up with his biceps; he pushed with his legs, letting his hips lift the iron above his right shoulder.
At the peak of the lift, he didn’t throw his arms down.
He dropped his weight.
His hips snapped forward.
His torso dropped an inch toward the earth, pulling his hands down in a clean, vertical track.
At the very last foot of travel, right before impact, his wrists cracked forward, whipping the four kilograms of blunt iron into the center crack.
CRACK!
The sound was not a dull thud.
It was a sharp, explosive snap.
The blunt iron wedge drove deep into the fault line.
The wet pine fibers tore open down the center with a tearing hiss, splitting the two-foot trunk in half from top to bottom.
The two halves tumbled left and right onto the gravel, clean and flat as if sliced with a saw.
Vidhar exhaled a long plume of steam.
His wrists didn’t hurt.
The shock hadn’t traveled back into his bones; the energy had transferred entirely into the wood.
“Hmph,” Kakbhushundi croaked softly from the birch branch, cocking his head.
“A lucky cut.
Let us see you do it twenty-nine more times before the water boils for evening prayer.”
Vidhar didn’t waste words.
He grabbed one half of the split trunk, set it upright, aligned his hip, and let the axe fall.
CRACK.
Quartered.
He set the other half up.
Step, drop, snap.
CRACK.
Four clean quarters.
He rolled the second log into place.
His movements found a steady, rhythmic cadence.
He stopped thinking about the four-kilogram weight of the iron head.
He stopped feeling the rough deerskin on his blistered palms.
The axe became merely an extension of his spine, rising with his inhalation, dropping with his exhalation, striking the natural lines of the wood like lightning finding an iron rod.
Ten logs.
Twenty logs.
Sweat soaked through the pale saffron dhoti at his waist, running in clean tracks down his chest and ribs, but his breath remained long and unhurried.
Whenever fatigue tried to settle into his lower back, the anchor of Antar-Dharma (the inner anchor of purpose) locked his core, keeping his cuts true and square.
By the time the sun touched the top of the western ridge, the thirty logs were gone.
In their place stood a neat, towering cord of firewood, stacked four quarters deep, every face smooth and split clean down the grain.
Vidhar stood in the center of the clearing, resting the blunt head of the practice axe against the grass.
His hands were stained with black pine sap and red loam, but his grip was firm.
The weapon no longer felt clumsy or top-heavy.
It felt balanced, dangerous, and familiar.
A quiet crunch of gravel sounded behind him.
Bhagavan Parashurama stepped out from the pine shadows, his towering frame silent as a ghost.
His sharp, dark eyes swept over the stack of firewood, checking the edges of the split timber.
He walked to the pile, picked up a heavy quarter of pine, and turned it in his broad palm.
The cut was straight from bark to heartwood.
The Teacher set the piece back onto the stack.
He turned to Vidhar, his gaze resting on the boy’s shoulders and the loose, natural way he held the axe haft.
“You stopped fighting the iron,” the Teacher said, his deep voice carrying over the sound of the stream.
“The wood told me where to strike, Gurudev,” Vidhar replied, lowering his head.
Bhagavan Parashurama stepped closer.
He reached out and took the practice axe from Vidhar’s hands, checking the blunt iron head.
The metal was covered in wet sap, but the haft was unbroken, and the head sat tight on the wedge.
“In battle, flesh and bone have grain, just like pine,” the Teacher said quietly.
“Armor has seams.
A shield wall has joints.
The clumsy soldier hacks at the front plate with fury, breaking his weapon and exhausting his lungs.
The warrior sees the line where the form already wants to break, and he places the iron there.”
He drove the practice axe haft-deep into the soft river mud, leaving it standing upright.
“Wash the sap from your arms in the stream,” Bhagavan Parashurama commanded.
“Eat your grain, and rest your hands with mustard oil tonight.
Tomorrow, we leave the practice tools behind.”
Vidhar looked up, his eyes sharpening.
“The practice tools, Gurudev?”
“The wood is split.
The bow has cast the heavy arrow.
Your hands are no longer the hands of a clerk.”
Bhagavan Parashurama turned back toward the ashram trail, his voice rolling through the dusk.
“Tomorrow at dawn, we unseal the weapons cache beneath the Vajra Shila (the lightning-stone peak).
You will hold the live iron, and you will learn how to pair the axe with the bow in a running fight.”
From his perch on the birch tree, Kakbhushundi spread his broad black wings, launching into the cold evening sky with a deep, solemn croak.
Vidhar bowed to the Teacher’s retreating back, turned to the roaring stream, and plunged his burning hands into the freezing water.