first lesson in business came the very next day, the basics of double-entry bookkeeping. He was not so sure at first about doing everything twice, but his uncle did not seem to be one to waste motion. For one thing, he did not repeat himself, unlike Karl’s father, who assumed his sons could never harvest anything clean on a single pass.
Soon Karl began to appreciate the ways of the account books. He learned to make the figures tell the future, not like a gypsy lady, but scientifically: Let this number drift upward—by paying the men too generously or buying too many provisions—and that number (net profits) began to drop. Your fortune, or the loss of it, was not in the Tarot cards or crystal ball; it was right there on the ledger paper.
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