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.
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
