only in cold, moving waters and the other wild things of the world.
4
WHEN 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.”
. . .
WINTER 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.”
“What will happen?”
“The forest will regenerate,” said his uncle. He pointed to a chipmunk rooting around in a pile of brush. “In the meantime, if there is food for him here, he will stay and prosper. If not, he will either move on or die. It is the same for us.”
As they approached the water, the noise increased. Men barked orders. Chains clanked. Wood rasped against wood. Out of the reeds stepped a dark figure soaked to the skin. In the still air his clothing actually steamed.
“Goddamn greenhorn!” he said. “Ran a goddamn log right over mine.”
The river was engorged with melted snow. Two lumberjacks knocked away the stays at a rollway, and the logs thundered down the bank and hit the water like an explosion. The men stood and watched silently, as if it were a natural disaster.
When the logs in the river stopped moving forward, the