a leap to a spot just behind a fallen tree, which held off the tumbling logs for a couple of seconds before snapping like a twig. By then Hoekstra had clambered up the bank and was looking back at the crushing weight of the harvest as it swept past him.
That night Karl and his uncle sat across from one another eating dinner.
“Dangerous business out there today,” said Karl.
“Without risk, there is no business,” said Uncle John, wiping his lips on a handkerchief. “You borrow money to buy rights to a territory, hire a skeleton crew in the summer to scout it. Then you wait for the freeze. If it comes late, you lose precious days. If the snow doesn’t fall, the rivers don’t rise in the spring to float the logs. These things are variable, but the interest on that borrowed money is as relentless as the current. Many have drowned.”
“It seems a shame to have to borrow,” said Karl, his father’s son.
“The need for capital is what has kept every lumberjack out here from going into business against me,” said Uncle John. “That and the memory of 1857 and 1873, when everything collapsed and the less you had the less you lost.”
“On the farm it’s different,” said Karl. “We have the land.”
Uncle John looked at him.
“Look around you. Land is everywhere,” he said. “No, I’m afraid that to make money, you have to play with fire. And the closer you get to it, the bigger the payoff.”
“The Dutchman didn’t seem to be looking for a payoff,” said Karl.
“Thank goodness for such men,” said Uncle John.
The next day his uncle left for the city. Karl was in charge of seeing the harvest downstream to the sawmill, then making proper financial settlement with the tribe.
But first came a task he dreaded. After all the work was done he gathered everyone together and told the men that this was to be his uncle’s logging company’s last harvest. There would be no more work. The men murmured, then drifted away. Only the Dutchman stayed, leaning against the side of one of the cabins, puffing his pipe.
“Where are you going to go?” Karl asked.
“Another river,” he said.
“You could do anything,” Karl said, “a man like you.”
“A man like me,” Hoekstra said. “A man like me does what a man like you tells him to do.”
“I’m no different than you,” said Karl.
“I hope for your sake you are wrong about that.”
After finishing with the last payroll and reconciling balances, Karl set off to give the tribe its royalty payment, which he had meticulously documented with copies of the mill receipts. The trip to where the chief lived was a simple matter of mounting a naked ridgeline and following it. Long before the snows the chief’s family would settle into the cabin where Karl and his uncle had worked and slept, the chief at Uncle John’s desk doing whatever chiefs did.
Karl’s breath came heavily in the thick air as he mounted a hill and got the village in sight. He was carrying a lot of money and wearing no sidearm, but he was not concerned. Nobody would come to this barren place to look for something worth stealing.
The village stood on the other side of the river. Karl descended and picked his way around the marshes until he reached the bank. He felt no urgency. He had nothing left to do in camp but pack up his things. The men had reveled late into the night and would be doing little today but paying for it.
He stepped into the water and pulled from his rucksack a light rod he had bought from the Dutchman. It came in two pieces, ingeniously held together with a ferrule of tooled tin, which had been joined to the shank with a varnished winding of thread. Karl withdrew from his pocket a reel of nickel steel his uncle had sent him from Chicago. He cinched it to the handle of the rod, then threaded the braided horse-hair line through the guides, doubled so that if his fingers slipped, it would not drop all the way back through. He had greased the line carefully the night before. To the end of it he had tied a length of gut and then another of silk so fine that he had to use a special knot Hoekstra had shown him.
Karl took out a small tin from his breast pocket and greased the gut and silk so they would float. Then he withdrew a wooden box. Into its lid he had carved his initials in the fanciest German script he could manage. He gently opened the box and took out a tiny tan fly that he had made of rabbit fur, feathers, and thread. His fingers, which had seemed so thick and unwieldy when he was learning the knots, now deftly whipped the filament around itself five times, then threaded the tip back through the loop until he had a connection he was confident could hold the wildest fish in the river. He pulled it tight, the hook biting into the edge of his thumb. Then he put a bit of grease on the fly itself, grooming it as carefully as he might ready himself for church.
When he was satisfied, he stripped out some line and waited, watching the water. There were tiny midges in the air, but nothing to interest a trout of any size. Karl saw no rings on the surface of the water that would have marked feeding fish like a bull’s eyes. He gazed up and down along the far bank until he spotted some fallen timber lying just inside the line of bubbles in the current and parallel to it. A few days ago he would have thought to free it up and send it downriver, but now it suggested to him another purpose.
Sliding his feet along the river bottom, feeling for obstacles, he carefully pushed upstream. With folding money in his pocket he could not afford to take an accidental swim. When he stopped and looked up, he met another pair of eyes.
An Indian brave about his age stood ten yards off the bank in a thicket of reeds. Karl nodded to him. Nothing passed the young man’s face.
Karl’s line trailed downstream until he lifted it from the water in one smooth pull and set it down straight, cutting an angle to the current. His first cast landed well short of the submerged timber, but he was pleased with the soft presentation of the fly and the even float of leader and line. He looked up at his observer to see if he, too, appreciated the technique but received no satisfaction. Then, checking behind him to see how much leeway he had for the backcast, he slipped two more pulls from the reel, lifted the whole length of line, sending it backward, then stopped the rod abruptly. He waited a count and sent it forward again. The fly uncoiled in front of him and landed a little upstream of where he wanted it, but a quick flip mended the line and gave him the drift he needed. Sure enough, from beneath the fallen log flashed an apparition. Karl lifted the rod to set the hook and felt the desperate tug of life.
It took a few minutes to bring the wildly darting, running beast under control. Then he patiently reeled it in until, holding his rod high over his head, he could reach down and seize it by the tail.
The fish was no more than sixteen inches, but, as the Dutchman used to say, it had shoulders. A fine offering it would make when he reached the village. Perhaps, he thought, the chief would ask him to share a meal.
When he looked up, the young Indian was gone. The fish arched its back. Then came a sickening splash as it broke free of his hold.
Shortly he heard movement upstream. The young Indian stood on a raised bank above a deep, murky pool. He glanced at Karl, then set eyes on the impossibly dark waters for a long moment before lifting his arm and hurling a spear. It pierced the river with hardly a splash. The butt end rose, splashing madly this way and that. The young man took several quick, sure steps downriver, pulling in the cord attached
