Snath

The girl found Nyra in the shed with the snath across her knees, the long curved shaft of the scythe bare of its blade, the two short grips set along its length where a hand would fall to the work. The girl asked how a pole with no edge at all could be the chief part of a tool meant to cut, when it was the blade that bit the grass and laid it down. Nyra turned the snath so the grey light ran along its bend. “The snath does not cut,” Nyra said. “It carries no edge, and it never will. It only sets where the edge will go, and how wide, and how level to the ground, and that is the most of the work.”

The girl took the snath and swung it through the empty air, and the far end wandered up and dipped low and would not hold a steady line. “A blade would cut wherever this wandered,” the girl said. “A keen edge on a shaft I cannot hold level would cut badly, and cut my own leg as soon as the grass. So the shape of the pole settles the cut before the edge has touched a single blade of it.”

“It does,” Nyra answered. “The bend of the snath holds the blade at its proper lie, flat to the ground and no deeper, so the edge takes the grass in a long level sweep and not in bites. A straight pole would drive the point into the soil at every stroke and leave you spent by noon. The curve is what keeps the edge true, and a true edge on a crooked snath is worth nothing at all.”

The girl wanted the snath set down in the book, the long bend of it and the span between the grips and the way it held an edge it did not own. Nyra let her write it, and watched the slow letters fill the row. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

“You can set down the length of the snath and the reach between the grips,” Nyra said, “but not the swing that finds the level on its own, nor the ache that tells you when the sweep has gone wrong. Those live in the shoulders, and the shoulders learn them only by mowing one field and then the next.” The girl looked from the page to the bare curved shaft across her knees, and she let it rest. The book keeps the length of the snath, and you keep the sweep of it.