Antek threatens resistance to the manor’s logging

Antek’s threat to resist the manor’s logging makes the sale of timber from Wolf’s Hollow woodland a test of who may claim the forest and who must bear the cost of its loss. What begins as talk of stopping the axes quickly joins two grievances: Lipce’s farmers believe the woodland is theirs to defend, while poor villagers had counted on the felling to provide badly needed winter work. The conflict is therefore not only about trees or legal title; it is also about whether the village can act together when its members face unequal risks and competing interests.

The threat takes shape

As the priest pauses by the poplars and looks into the crowded inn, he learns that villagers are meant to meet and discuss the wood the squire has sold to Jewish buyers for logging. The exchange that follows sets out the stakes in blunt terms. The squire has not sold all the woodland, the villagers insist, and he must not touch a single spruce until he has settled with them. The priest asks what this means; Antek answers that the village will not accept the felling. His father wants to sue, but Kłąb and others oppose relying on a court. If necessary, Antek says, the whole village will go out with whatever tools it can carry: axes, pitchforks, and other implements.

The threat escalates from a refusal into the prospect of violence. The priest fears that the dispute will end in a fight or another misfortune. Antek responds that justice will come when men from the manor feel an axe. The priest rebukes him for speaking in anger, but Antek does not listen. He swerves away and disappears into the shadows. The moment leaves his words unresolved: the priest has heard a danger, not secured a retreat from it.

A village divided over means and interests

At another gathering, the logging dispute interrupts a discussion of the proposed school. Szymon warns that the trees have already been marked and that the loggers are waiting for frost and sleighs. Boryna answers that marking does not mean the cutting can proceed. The villagers argue over what to do: some propose a complaint to the commissioner, some urge taking the matter to court, and others say the commissioner is aligned with the squire and that the villagers should go together to drive the loggers away. Their shared opposition does not settle the question of tactics.

The miller’s response exposes a conflict of interest within the village. He urges Boryna to drink rather than continue the threats, because he has already reached an understanding with the Jewish buyers and expects to saw the timber at his mill. The farmers continue discussing the wood away from his hearing. They agree to gather at Boryna’s home and plan, but the conversation is broken off when Ambrozy arrives. The logging question has become too painful to drop, yet the men’s private consultation also shows that opposition to the sale is not unanimous in its practical interests.

Work, winter, and the cost of exclusion

The threat of resistance sits alongside the immediate hardship facing Lipce’s laborers. At least twenty hired hands are desperate for work. Winter is severe; snow and frost have already ruined some villagers’ potatoes, cash is scarce, and some households can manage a hot meal only once a day before going to bed hungry. People had expected that logging in Wolf’s Hollow would employ them. Instead, the squire has vowed not to hire a single worker from Lipce, apparently in anger over a complaint lodged against him at the commissioner’s.

This exclusion complicates the meaning of the protest. Stopping the cutting might defend what the farmers regard as the village’s forest, but it also threatens a source of wages on which poorer households had relied. Antek’s answer is that he personally signed the complaint and will stand by it: no fir should be cut until the squire reaches an agreement and recognizes what the villagers claim as theirs. The exchange does not resolve the poor villagers’ need for employment. It makes visible a conflict between defending a collective claim and securing work for people who have little margin to endure a long dispute.

A later appeal to Hanka gives the hardship a household scale. Filipka’s eldest daughter is gravely ill from hunger; the cottage is bitterly cold, its windows stuffed with straw, and the family has sold its quilt. There are no potatoes left, and the household must beg groats from the miller because no one will lend until harvest. Filipka’s husband is imprisoned with the other men. Florka, also without savings or help, has given birth while sick; her fields stand fallow because her husband is in prison, and she has no milk for the child. The account broadens the logging conflict beyond the public language of rights: village decisions unfold amid hunger, absent workers, and families with almost no protection from a bad season.

From angry words to collective action

The later mobilization over the forest takes place on a larger scale than Antek’s first outburst. A growing crowd fills the square outside the inn, waiting for the elders who have gone to fetch Boryna, regarded as the village’s leading farmer. The blacksmith tries to deter the people with the prospect of imprisonment, and the miller echoes him, but the crowd does not heed either man; villagers know that both have interests tied to the manor. The resistance is no longer only a set of competing proposals inside the inn. It has become a visible gathering prepared to act together.

The assembled villagers hear the logging placed among a wider series of grievances: the manor is felling the forest, has refused them employment, and has repeatedly harried them. Earlier complaints and court proceedings, they are told, have brought no redress. The proposed response is to go to the forest as a village and stop the cutting. The crowd answers with a common cry, then scatters briefly to prepare. In the ensuing rush, people change clothes, harness horses, bring out sleighs, and arm themselves with poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. Peasants, hired hands, women, and some older children join the procession. Boryna waits with Płoszka, Kłąb, and other leaders; he crosses himself before the group sets out.

Significance

Antek’s threat crystallizes the anger that runs through the forest dispute, but the episodes do not present a simple, unified village from the beginning. The priest fears violence; farmers disagree over courts and direct resistance; the miller stands to profit from the timber; hired laborers need the wages that logging might bring even as local workers are excluded. The later crowd turns scattered complaint into collective action, yet its unity is forged under pressure from both the manor’s decisions and the villagers’ precarious livelihoods. In that tension, the forest becomes more than a resource: it is the point at which claims of customary belonging, the need for work, and the limits of formal redress collide.