• • •
They bought horses in Detroit and rode into the hardwood forest. As they left Detroit behind Lennart said, “I have heard that a hundred years ago old Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac thought La Ville d’Étroit and its environs ‘so beautiful that it may justly be called the earthly paradise of North America.’ ”
They were in unpopulated country and James was disturbed by the green gloom. There were no landmarks, only trees, no open sky, only wind-rustled canopy. He felt as he sometimes had felt at sea, that glittering, hallucinatory sense of trackless immensity. But unlike wind-fated ocean travel the Sauk pathway was obvious, an ancient trail made by weighty mastodons and already very old when men from the steppes of Asia found it.
At a ravine they looked down on a sinuous course of dry stones.
“A sign that settlers are nearby,” said Breitsprecher, pointing at the desiccated watercourse. Another quarter mile took them past an eroded cutover slope. They could hear ax blows and smell smoke as they came to a stumpy clearing of twenty acres where three men were cutting trees in a windrow for a winter burn. An adjacent field already fired showed incinerated soil and cracked rocks.
The settler — James judged him somewhere between forty and sixty years old — came toward them swinging sinewy arms. His hair hung to his shoulders, pale expressionless eyes gazed at them.
“Where ye headed?”
“West. Going west,” answered Lennart. “I’m Lennart Vogel.”
The settler looked them up and down. The ropy sons came near and stared at the strangers, jaws relaxed.
“You, Moony, Kelmar. Git back t’ choppin, schnell,” the father said fast and hard. He turned his eyes on James, on his horse, looked at his boots, squinted up to see his face better. “Look like you might be some kind a govmint man?”
James said nothing. The father gave Armenius Breitsprecher one of his lingering looks, opened his mouth, closed it when Breitsprecher treated him to a similar examination. “We’ll be getting along,” said Armenius to Lennart and James with some emphasis. Without another word they clucked at their horses and moved out.
They had ridden half a mile in silence when Armenius suddenly motioned them into the woods and down an incline to a swamp. At the end of a beaver dam, willows, brush and saplings had all been clear-cut by the rodents, making open ground with good views over the pond and their back trail.
“Stay with the horses, keep quiet and no smoke,” he whispered. “That old man means trouble and I’m going up to see if he and the imbeciles are creeping along the trail. Hans Carl von Carlowitz, komm!” In a minute man and dog were out of sight. James and Lennart waited, the pond surface, the beaver house, the horses, their faces honey-glazed by the setting sun. The day began to close in and the mosquitoes thickened. “I got to have a cigar,” said James in a low voice. “Better not,” whispered Lennart. “Some settlers been known to kill travelers, take their money and goods, their horses. You see how the old man looked us over? How he marked us with his eye?”
“Suppose they got Armenius? Suppose he don’t come back,” whispered James.
“Cross that bridge when we get on it.”
James took out his vial of pennyroyal and slathered it on to repel mosquitoes, fell asleep leaning against a mossy but damp spruce log. Something, a noise, woke him. He was more wide awake than he had ever been in his life. Something — someone — was there, near them, not moving carefully but letting branches swish, footsteps squelch.
“Armenius?” said James very quietly. “Is that you?”
“Hunh!” said something that clumbered off into the swamp, and for the rest of the night they could hear dripping water as the moose pulled up weed. James dozed against Lennart’s comforting snore. In the cold fog of dawn they both woke violently alert when the yellow horse nickered quietly.
“Someone coming,” whispered Lennart. The horses had their ears cocked in the same direction, then placidly began to pull at some blueberry bushes. “Breitsprecher. They know his tread.” They waited. The swamp mist took on a tender color showing it would be a clear day. James fished in his saddlebag, found his Boston cheddar and cut it in half. As he was putting it to his lips a terrific splash startled him and he dropped it in the muck, cried, “Damnation!” A beaver, galvanized at the sight of Armenius Breitsprecher and his dog whipping along its dam, had signaled danger. Hans Carl von Carlowitz took a pose, pointing at the expanding rings of water. Beaver far down the pond slapped their tails. Breitsprecher stepped off the dam and walked up to the horses, patting each on the nose. He smiled broadly at Lennart and James and opened his coat to show a cotton sack. From the sack he drew a flitch of bacon, half a dozen eggs, striped apples and warm biscuits.
“Guter Mann,” he said. “Name was Anton Heinrich. He was on the trail, not following us with evil intent but to bring us to their Klotzhaus for the night. I did not have time to return for you before the woods went dunkel—so I went on with him. He was ein Deutscher, once a Bauer in Maine. We only talk Deutsch—you would not like it. No English. They give me a big supper and sleep in a hay bed in the barn. Here is breakfast that the wife, Kristina, gives to us. Maybe eight Kinder, sets a good table, ja, es gab reichlich zu essen und zu trinken. Gute Menschen.”
“Do not forget how to speak English,” said James.
“Ja, sorry. He bought that farm from the Witwe—widow Kristina — when the first owner died from a fever. Anton used to have a farm in Maine but die Erde, the soil, didn’t last. It couldn’t, the way they burn the ground dead and then try to grow crops in the ashes year after year. Four, five years it’s done. Erde that the forest took tausend years to make.” He bit into an apple and continued. “But you cannot be too careful. There are settlers — and there are settlers.”
Lennart said to himself, “There’s travelers — and there’s travelers,” for he saw blood on Armenius’s trouser leg. He wasn’t going to ask.
• • •
The trail took them through a clearing thick with bracken fern edged by red pine and hemlock and occasional white pine. By late afternoon they were again in forest, and in a mix of deciduous and conifer, frond and lichen, Breitsprecher pointed out white birch and aspen groves and more scattered white pine, taller than other trees. The next morning as they scrambled up a south-facing ridge Breitspecher scraped up a handful of the dry sandy soil and said, “Now we come where white pine rules.” Yet on the other side there were more hemlocks than white pine and the trail betrayed them with a knot of intersecting pathways. Which was the Sauk Trail, which the unknown way to thick growths of white pine?
“We have to try the different ways,” said Breitsprecher. “Let us start with this north branch.” As they hiked along, young hemlocks and hardwoods fighting for space slapped at them, and even smaller pathways cut in — game trails, said Lennart. James wondered if any might lead them to what they were seeking. By noon the next day they were confused by the multiplicity of unknown trails.
“I find it strange that we have not seen any Indians,” said Breitsprecher. “If we meet Indians we can ask them where to find the white pine. I think we must go back to the main trail and wait until a party of Indians comes by.”