It turned out the point of the axe was to cut more saplings for pointy sticks. It made sense, once I thought about it. Green wood, or whatever this stuff was, wouldn’t be easy to cut without something hard and sharp. It was beginning to look like the loss of their flint source had been a major blow for the Deltans, perhaps one they hadn’t thought about at the time, or they would have protected that site more aggressively.