Abbeville (4 page)

He lived with Uncle John in the back of the main cabin. At night Karl would watch his uncle poring over the dense market tables in the
Chicago Tribune,
a packet of which was delivered once a week. He did not know what his uncle was looking for, but somebody could have detonated a stick of dynamite outside and Uncle John would not have lost his place.

Meantime, Karl began to admire the men he at first had feared. He came to love the forests and streams in which they worked, learned to find his way by moss and the lay of shadows. He developed a genuine feel for the contours of sand hill and swamp. He soon knew the names of birds and the melodies of their songs. He could track deer and turkey. More than once, during slack times in the office, Uncle John let him go off with scouts to investigate virgin lands they intended to work during the winter.

It was on one of these journeys that he came across the river that drew him for the rest of his days. Ahead of them a big buck turned and stared at them for a moment before cracking off into the deep brush. As they reached the lowlands, their boots began to sink into the wet loam, the suck of their footsteps punctuating the hush of invisible waters and the rustle of the wind.

Suddenly off to Karl's right something reared up. He turned. It was a bear, and it had a cub.

Karl froze. The others, who had not seen it, continued to move up behind him.

He had never known such an animal. On the farm there were weasels
and coyotes, but they wanted to stay away from you. The bear stood its ground.

The cub kept rooting around, curious about everything. At some point it began to edge in Karl's direction and would not retreat. Karl did not dare move because mama had one clear purpose, and it was as old as life. When her child came closer to Karl and mama showed her fangs, Karl's foot found a stiff twig and snapped it to back off the cub. We're in this together, little cub, Karl thought. A tremor went through the mother.

Then from behind him came a shot. The shot was clean. The mama bear's legs buckled and she fell.

Her cub went to her and began poking her with its snout. The next bullet came so close that Karl could hear it ticking through the branches near his ear. The cub collapsed.

A sharp cry pierced the forest. It did not come from the animal.

The ox man and the Norwegian with the rifle ran to him.

“You hurt?” shouted the ox man, who went by the name of Peter Hoekstra.

“Big one,” said the Norwegian, grinning. He moved up to the carcasses and touched the mama's nose with his toe to make sure she was gone.

Karl had been around butchering all his life, so he knew what to do. When he finished flaying the beasts for their skins, he waded into the river to consecrate it with the blood from his hands and to cool in himself the heat that blood had raised.

Though the mortal teachings of the forest were not over for the day, at least the next lesson brought with it a measure of grace: Hoekstra had decided the time had come to show Karl how to cast a fly.

The Dutchman began the process by opening a case and drawing from it the thin reed of a long, delicate rod. He assembled it and attached a small reel. With big, blunt fingers he tied together some
lengths of light gut until it tapered down so fine that Karl could not imagine it being able to hold anything wild. Then suddenly Hoekstra reached up and snatched something from the air. As he slowly opened his hand, Karl saw a grasshopper, disoriented, taking a few tentative steps.

Carefully, Hoekstra stuck the body though with a needle-sharp hook that he had clenched to the end of his line with a series of brisk, perfect movements. The hopper was still alive, beating madly against the awful weight it suddenly bore. The Dutchman stood, released it from his hand, and in one smooth motion snapped the line back behind him. The moment it had completely unfurled, he shot it forward again, laying it out across the water as straight as a saw blade.

This first cast went about halfway across the river so that the fly landed at the upstream edge of a piece of flat water. The Dutchman stepped farther out into the current until he was up to his knees. Karl followed, and cold water filled his boots as the hopper drifted downstream, twitching.

The Dutchman lifted the line off the water in one sweeping pull. Karl followed the fly backward through its long, beautiful loop, then forward again until it fell just an inch short of a half-submerged log along the opposite bank.

“Ah,” said Hoekstra.

Karl thought it was because he had almost hooked the log, but then a large silver shape darted from beneath it. The water swirled and the hopper was gone.

The Dutchman lifted the rod tip. There was an instant of pure suspended time before the fish came alive to its peril. It knew how to protect itself from blue heron and eagle. It knew to stay clear of otters. It only came out in the open to feed when it felt secure. But it had surely never felt the sting of sharpened iron.

Hoekstra held the tip of the rod high and let the line hiss out
through the guides. At some point, as the fish raced toward a tangle of fallen limbs downstream, he put his palm to the reel and slowed it down. The rod bent under the force of the fish in the current, which grew stronger against Karl's legs as he followed the Dutchman down-river.

“Here,” said Hoekstra, handing him the rod. “Now you kill something.”

Pure wildness pulled at Karl as he felt the fish's desperate struggle against what was written for it on the waters.

“What do I do now?” he said.

The Dutchman signaled Karl with a circular motion as the line grew slack. Karl understood that he should begin to reel in.

The fish had turned under the pressure and now was moving by fits and starts back upstream toward them. Karl reeled in as fast as he could to keep the line taut so the hook stayed deep in the fish's jaw. Finally the rod tip bent again and shook. For a moment the fish appeared on the water's surface.

“Lordy,” Karl said.

“Good fish,” said the Dutchman.

It had to be more than two feet long, as big as a catfish on Otter Creek but ten times as strong.

A smile came to Karl's lips, then vanished.

It was as if a gale had suddenly gone dead or every bird in the woods had hushed at once. All the tension had gone out of the line.

“You tried to use your strength,” said Hoekstra. “The fish used it against you.”

“I'm sorry,” said Karl.

“You will learn,” said the Dutchman. “That is the difference between you and the fish. For you and me, most mistakes don't kill us.”

The Dutchman rerigged the line, using an artificial fly this time, tied with what looked like deer hair and feathers. He showed Karl
how to use the weight of the line and the spring of the bamboo to throw this tiny, weightless thing. Soon Karl was getting it out far enough that the fly drifted naturally in the current. Then, bang, another fish took. This time Karl was more patient and landed it. It was not such a fine fish as the first, but this one was all his. He struck its head on a rock, then laid it out on the grass of the bank.

“We'll fill our bellies with grayling tonight,” Hoekstra said.

Karl nodded, but his stomach was the least of it. He felt as though he had touched something fundamental, something that could be found only in cold, moving waters and the other wild things of the world.

W
HEN THE FIRST FROST CAME, THE CAMP
began to fill up with men. By then the scouting parties had investigated tens of thousands of acres along either bank of the river, reaching the end of the Indian claim in all directions. A master map in Uncle John's cabin marked all the best stands of forest, but the locations of the prime fishing holes were marked only in the hidden memories of the men who had found them.

Once the ground stiffened, the lumberjacks began bringing down the tall trees with two-man crosscut saws, then stripping their branches with axes. It was incredible how quickly they could harvest what had taken centuries to produce.

Ordinarily, Uncle John had said, they would pile the logs on top of a frozen river, ready to float down to the sawmills along the lake when spring came. But here the river never completely froze, so the logs had to be arranged along the water's edge waiting to be rolled in when the season changed and the snow melt-off swelled the current. The river did not freeze because underground springs warmed it. If you stood
on a high bank in certain places and looked straight down into the clear water, you could see the sand billowing upward, like smoke from a fire at the center of the earth.

Uncle John had been absent most of the fall. For him logging was a sideline; his real business was in Chicago. Karl kept in touch with him by packet, which went out by rail or across the lake by boat. Then one frigid day in December Uncle John reappeared. The first thing he did was look at Karl's books.

“Don't you want to go to the river and see what we've produced?” Karl asked.

“Right now the actual logs are deadweight,” said his uncle. “They only become important when they have been reduced thus.” He tapped the columns with his forefinger.

“Reduced to money,” said Karl.

“Or any other counter that seems appropriate: tons, board feet, shiploads,” said Uncle John. “I do this work out of affection now. Or better, perhaps, out of habit, which is what becomes of affection over time. You are young, so you do not yet see how one thing so easily transforms into another.”

“Cone to tree,” said Karl. “Tree to house.”

They were seated next to one another at the desk, the ledger between them. As his uncle spoke, he looked out the door, where water dripped from the roof and the sun was cold on the gray mixture of snow and sand that covered the ground.

“Most of my business is even purer of the physical,” he said. “I suppose I do come to the woods to renew my connection with what you can touch. Maybe we should go down to the river now, the two of us, and distract ourselves with reality for a bit.”

The Indian claim stretched twenty miles east to west and ten north to south, a perfectly drawn bureaucratic rectangle laid upon the vast
sand hills covered with white pine and lowland marshes rich with game. From the crest of a hill you could sometimes discern the curve of the land, but most of the time the sheer profusion of trees obscured it. Uncle John said it was one of the few such parcels of timberland still left that was located on a river good enough to carry the harvest to market.

“There's one of the braves,” said Karl.

Across the river, in a thick stand of trees, he could just make out the form of a young man. Often one or two of them would appear out of the forests, look on from the shadows for a time, then disappear.

Karl and his uncle walked along a path that took them past stacks of logs secured with great stakes driven through the frost. In the spring when the ground softened, the logs would be loosed with a few decisive strokes of the sledgehammer.

“We have done a lot in your absence,” said Karl.

“This is only the beginning,” said Uncle John. “We will have to fell a hundred times this just to cover the costs.”

“The river will choke,” said Karl.

“Yes,” Uncle John said.

He stayed less than a week. Under Hoekstra's tutelage Karl had become good enough with the oxcart to be trusted to drive his uncle back to the train crossing. A fog was coming up from the ground. The snow weighed upon the boughs, and occasionally one shuddered and dropped a pillow to the ground.

The train had only one car and no other passengers. Uncle John mounted the steps, and Karl handed up his canvas bag and leather briefcase.

“Will you be back?” Karl asked.

“When we are ready to commit our fortunes to the river,” Uncle John said. “Then you shall really see something.”

. . .

W
INTER DEEPENED, AND THOUSANDS
upon thousands of acres of pine came down as the crews relentlessly pushed from the river outward. Log piles grew into great pyramids along the water's edge. Hoekstra's beard of ice made him look like the Sphinx.

Even though Karl did his bookwork at a desk warm inside the cabin, he gathered his data outside. He became used to the bitter chill but often wished his duties required more exertion.

Logging was much more dangerous than farming. Trees fell erratically and broke bones. One tall pine took an eccentric bounce off the branches of another on the way down and crushed a man's skull. Still, the perils of winter—with its frostbite, icy footing, falling oxen, brittle skin, and thunderous collapse of trees—turned out to be nothing compared with what happened when the snow began to melt and the river rose.

It was uncanny that Uncle John managed to reappear just before the thaw. Karl had known farmers who could feel the weather coming, but not from a distance of hundreds of miles. Two days after Uncle John arrived, the temperature rose to almost 50 and the icicles began to fall from cabin eaves like spears.

For as far as the eye could see they had taken the forest down to stumps and underbrush. You did not find many animals except the occasional rodent or milk snake. The river seemed to have become nothing more than a machine for transport. Karl wondered how any fish could possibly have survived.

In his cabin Uncle John put down the ledger and stretched out his hands on either side of it.

“If you would like,” he said, “I will try to persuade your father that a business education should not end in the North Woods.”

“He won't want to hear that,” Karl said.

“Shall we have a look at the preparations?” Uncle John said.

The land seemed more barren than a cornfield after harvest. The only places that remained untouched were the bottomland swamps, which were nothing but rot.

“Will we replant?” Karl asked.

“A good farmer's question,” said his uncle. “But there is no reason to cultivate trees here. Since the coming of the railroads, the rivers are now made of steel; any kind of tree floats on them. This means the price of white pine is dropping, and it will never rise again.”