Boryna Joins the Manor’s Timber-Hauling Partnership is a turning point in the forest dispute because Boryna accepts work that serves the manor while privately insisting that employment and ownership are separate matters. The Voyt persuades him to enter a timber-carting arrangement with the miller and the blacksmith, offering a quick winter income. Boryna says yes, but does not regard the agreement as a surrender of his claim to the forest: he expects to profit from hauling while continuing to resist what he sees as the manor’s encroachment.

Background and the Offer

The Voyt approaches Boryna at a moment of unresolved conflict. Boryna has received court summonses connected with the manor’s cow dispute, and the Voyt urges him not to break with the manor or proceed alongside Kłąb and the others. Boryna has been hesitating, in part because he remains angry that the squire did not include him in an earlier meeting at the blacksmith’s. The private conversation therefore takes place amid both a legal grievance and a wounded sense of being excluded from decisions affecting the village.

The Voyt first asks Boryna to come around to the other side of the house, then explains that he, the miller, and the blacksmith have reached an agreement with the manor. The three are to transport wood to the sawmill and planks to town. Their proposal to Boryna is not to join the negotiations over the forest, but to join the hauling partnership itself. That distinction gives the offer its force: it holds out a share of the work without requiring Boryna to resolve his dispute with the squire.

The Promise of Winter Earnings

The Voyt presents the arrangement as a practical opportunity. Boryna has strong draught horses and farmhands who are idle; transport is paid by the stere, and the Voyt estimates that Boryna could earn a hundred roubles before fieldwork begins. The work can start as soon as the following day. Timber is already being felled in the nearer clearings, the roads are passable, and sleighs can still make plenty of trips before conditions change. The prospect is immediate rather than abstract: Boryna could put his horses and available labor to use during a season when they would otherwise bring in little.

The offer also appeals to a household economy in which animals and workers must be maintained whether or not the fields are being worked. Boryna pauses over the pending cow case, but the Voyt reassures him that the partnership will turn out well. After considering the proposal at length, Boryna agrees to cart timber and enter the arrangement. They plan to speak further at the miller’s after court the next day. The Voyt leaves pleased, believing that the offer has brought Boryna onto his side.

Boryna’s Private Calculation

The narrator makes clear that Boryna’s acceptance does not mean what the Voyt thinks it means. Boryna understands that the miller’s land is not on the village register and that the wood is of little concern to him; the Voyt and the blacksmith occupy church lands. Boryna, by contrast, regards the forest as a matter of his own registered rights. Elsewhere he counts four morgen as his and one morgen as Jagusia’s, and appeals to the Lord Jesus not to let the villagers be wronged. His claim is therefore not simply a complaint about lost wages or a dispute over the partnership’s terms.

He reasons that carting is one matter and the forest itself another. He can nod along with the others, earn money for the farm, and leave open the possibility of a later agreement—or conflict—with the squire. The Voyt reads consent as political alignment; Boryna treats it as a limited business decision. His private satisfaction at having supposedly fooled the others underscores the distance between the agreement as they understand it: the Voyt thinks he has bought Boryna’s support, while Boryna thinks he has accepted useful work without giving anything away.

Forest Rights and Later Confrontation

The distinction Boryna draws here recurs in the wider conflict. He insists that the pasturage belongs to the villagers and is clearly recorded, and protests that they are repeatedly driven off land they claim as theirs. When the manor’s felling becomes an immediate threat, he argues that the villagers have suffered injustice, that legal complaints have achieved nothing, and that the cutting of their wood is the last straw. In the clearing, he rushes forward at the head of a crowd and calls on the woodcutters to leave the forest, asserting that it belongs to the villagers.

The later confrontations do not erase the earlier partnership, but sharpen its significance. Boryna can accept a share in hauling timber and still oppose the manor’s right to fell trees that he regards as belonging to the village. The same material resource thus supports competing claims: for the partners it offers paid work and transport earnings; for Boryna and the villagers it is also land and customary possession. The episode captures his ability to act pragmatically without abandoning the grievance that makes the forest conflict so charged.