Roy Fowler is a professional sign painter in a small town in Ontario, Canada, although he is more passionate about his hobby of woodcutting than he is about painting signs. His wife Lila would prefer for him to focus on his work. Lila comes from a big family of talkative people, but when they come over to visit on Sundays, Roy escapes to his shed, where he works with wood. In the fall, Roy goes out into the bush to cut down trees several times a week because demand is so high for firewood. One day, shortly after the first snowfall, he passes by a dump and sees Percy Marshall, an old man from around town, who tells Roy that the nearby bush is under contract by someone — he's not quite sure who — from another town, who plans to sell the wood to an inn that goes through a lot of wood every day. Roy is a little surprised because he himself had talked to the farmer the other week and made a spoken agreement about cutting there. From Percy's details, Roy reasons that the person would need heavy machinery and a large team that would completely clear the area. Heading home, he decides that he will pretend he is unaware of the contract and collect wood until the farmer tells him to leave, getting as much as he can before the bulldozers arrive. The next day, as he is finishing his work on signs for the day, his niece — who Roy and Lila had raised — stops by to ask to borrow his truck the next day. Roy says she can, then he sets out for the bush. As he's hastily walking into the woods, he twists his ankle and falls to the ground, barely avoiding an injury from the sharp tools he is carrying. Unable to put weight on his foot, he is forced to abandon his saw and axe and crawl back through the snow to his truck. As he does so, he realizes that the contract that Percy had told him about was really about the spoken agreement Roy himself had made with the farmer, and that the details had been embellished beyond recognition.