Wolf’s Hollow woodland is both a material resource and a test of who has the authority to define land rights. The manor’s sale of its timber turns long-standing peasant claims into open conflict: the villagers insist that the forest is theirs, and Boryna helps lead their attempt to stop the woodcutters from taking it.

Forest and customary claims

The forest is presented as an old, dense growth of pines, with aged oaks and birches among them. Its scale and age give it a presence beyond that of an ordinary parcel of land, but its importance is also practical: the surrounding community depends on access to resources and pasture, while the manor asserts its own authority over the land.

Boryna reads the forest in terms of holdings and inheritance. As he travels through it, he reckons that four morgen belong to him and one to Jagusia, and measures the trees with an owner’s eye. His claim sits alongside the villagers’ broader insistence that their rights are recorded and recognized. A related dispute over pasturage sharpens the stakes: people are repeatedly driven from ground they consider theirs, and the chasing has exhausted a cow until it developed an inflammation. The loss is put at three hundred zlotys, and taking the matter to court or the commissioner is proposed, though the grievance reflects the villagers’ wider frustration with the enforcement of their claims.

Sale and village mobilization

News that the squire has sold the wood at Wolf’s Hollow transforms resentment into a collective threat. Boryna reacts by hurling a bottle to the ground, while other villagers argue that the law should apply to the squire too. He answers that the sale will not be allowed to proceed, and the gathering remains late into the night, deliberating and making threats against the manor.

The protest becomes a public appeal to the whole community. Addressing farmers and hired hands as people who have all suffered injustice, Boryna connects the felling to a longer record of employment denied, people driven from their livelihoods, confiscations, and unsuccessful complaints and lawsuits. The forest is the immediate cause, but his speech frames the confrontation as the culmination of repeated wrongs. The villagers respond with calls to drive the workers away and stop the felling, making clear that the dispute is no longer only a private claim to particular strips of land.

Confrontation at the forest

When the crowd reaches the woodcutters, it arrives in a rush from the village: women, men, and youths come by sleigh, cart, on horseback, and on foot. Some carry sticks, pitchforks, flails, or scythes; others have only branches, and the women attack with their hands and voices. Together they order the workers out, insisting that the forest is theirs.

Boryna moves to the front and calls directly to the woodcutters, identifying people from Modlica and Rzepki among them. The scene makes the competing claims visible in the bodies gathered there: the villagers seek to enforce a communal right by physically blocking the work, while the woodcutters have come to carry out the sale. Wolf’s Hollow thus becomes the setting where a dispute over ownership and use turns into direct confrontation.

A model for later resistance

The forest’s significance extends beyond the immediate attempt to stop the logging. When the villagers later discuss the prospect of Germans buying land at Podlesie, one proposal is to act together as they had over the wood: approach the buyers collectively and, if they proceed, prevent them from sowing or building. The reference makes the forest conflict a precedent for organized resistance, even as the proposed tactics shift from confronting woodcutters to obstructing settlement.

Wolf’s Hollow therefore joins personal holdings, customary use, and collective action in one contested landscape. Boryna’s reckoning of individual morgen does not erase the villagers’ wider claim; instead, the conflict shows how ownership, livelihood, and communal rights become entangled when the manor controls the sale and the villagers believe their objections will otherwise go unheard.