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 lumber-jacks stripped down to their undershirts and walked out onto the treacherous jams, their only protection an uncanny sense of balance and a safety rope, which seemed just as likely to get snagged and pull them under as to provide for their rescue. Armed with long, pike-like peavies, they attempted by applying leverage to unlock the front logs and set them parallel with the current, which rushed under them in a torrent.
Hoekstra picked his way surely from log to angled log. He was an enormous man, and his very bulk caused movement in the jam. Fortunately for the Dutchman, it was not enough to break the mess apart because if that happened without his being ready, he would be crushed to death.
He moved quickly toward the center until he found the keystone logs. They were fast against a half-sunken stump that backed up against a boulder that held it firm. After surveying the situation, he slipped back to the rear end of one of the leading logs and jumped. The height of his leap took Karl’s breath. The Dutchman landed on both feet, his outstretched arms angling to hold his balance. The shuddering log bucked but did not break free.
Dozens of other lumberjacks watched from the banks. Hoekstra walked forward again and surveyed the geometry. Then suddenly he undid the safety rope from his waist and plunged into the icy water. In unison the crowd drew a breath. For a moment Karl could see his head just above the water. Then it disappeared. Seconds passed. A minute. Two lumberjacks took a step out onto the jam, then backed off. Something was happening. At first it was just a nervousness among the logs. Then came an awful groan that could have been a man’s death agony amplified a thousand times. Hoekstra’s head popped out the water. Foam flew from his hair, and with both arms he hugged the lead log as it slowly gave way.
The safety rope lay useless across the top of the jam, which was all in motion now. Someone retrieved the rope and tried to throw a loop to him. But it was too late. The log he was holding careered downstream a few feet ahead of the others. He struggled with it like a man wrestling a beast.
At the next bend the river narrowed, deepened, and went flat. Karl knew the spot well because several times while fishing he had been sucked down into the cavernous hole. It was a place a man could die. But the deeper, slacker water was just what the Dutchman wanted because
