Barkskins (58 page)

“It is time for action, it is our turn to be first. If we can convince Cyrus, we can outvote Edward and Freegrace. It has come to that. They are timid. Since Lydia died Edward exchanges ideas only with his housekeeper and the cats.” This was patently untrue, for Edward was a passionate Trinitarian and Freegrace a seduced Unitarian dabbling in the new Higher Criticism and the two brothers had fiery discussions that flamed into shouting matches.

James considered that Lennart and he were not many years behind those brothers; they were all old, he thought, though he didn't feel it. And Lennart was spry enough. No doubt Edward and Freegrace felt able to run a business. The Duke blood promised longevity.

“James, they hold the company back. What do you say, are you willing to undertake a journey to Michigan Territory with me? Or even farther if we choose. I am intrigued by occasional remarks by mariners who have worked the otter fur trade on the west coast—sightings of heavy forests. I would like to see for myself, for what do sailors know of trees?”

“That is very distant. Almost Japan.”

“We are speaking of the future, James, the future! We must not let these chances pass us by.”

“What about Breitsprecher? Would he come with us?” James wondered why childless Lennart was so emphatic about the future.

“I think Breitsprecher is essential. It is he who can best judge the board feet of standing timber.”

“Lennart, I will go with you. And Breitsprecher. When do you think of leaving?”

“I have several important things to attend at once. First, I must see Cyrus. Then an immediate Board meeting. I must enlist Breitsprecher and persuade Edward and Freegrace that this exploration is vital. With luck I think we might leave in two weeks' time.” He stopped talking, paced around the fragrant damask La Ville de Bruxelles, turned and flicked his finger at a Maiden's Blush. “The first part of this journey by coach and rail I know well. The most tiresome is the canal boat to Oswego. Bring a large book to read on the canal boat. It is the greatest boredom known. Rail to Buffalo and the last leg to Detroit by steamboat. Progress has eased the traveler's lot. When I think of poor Sedley in the grip of knee-deep mud . . .”

James was interested not in his father's travail in that hundred miles of infested swampland but in what he should pack for the journey. Cigars, he thought, were of first importance. The Indians were in love with Cuban tobacco—as was he—and they rarely got it, so he planned to carefully wrap hundreds of cigars and fill two saddlebags. “But is there any transport beyond Detroit? I would be surprised.” They strolled toward the end of the property marked by aged oaks filled with quarreling squirrels.

“No, though steamboats, roads and trails extend travel every week. From Detroit it will all be terra incognita. Bring sturdy clothes for rough weeks of living off the land. And guns and ammunition. Only one thing I am sure of—we must go beyond Ohio.”

Near the oaks James picked up a fallen stick and pointed it like a gun; the squirrels fled. The friends shook hands. Both had a sense of urgency, a feeling that the North American forests were going up in clearance fires and fireplaces, that armies of immigrant settlers were seizing everything. Lennart Vogel, thought James, had looked into the treeless future and decided to act. It would be dangerous, but he recalled Lewis and Clark, who, three decades earlier, had safely made their way to the far Pacific and back.

•  •  •

When they met the next day Lennart Vogel had spruced up and looked pleased. “I had good fortune of a sort since Cyrus now lives in Boston. We talked and he will side with us against Edward and Freegrace if it reaches that point. Also, there is a Post Office map for Michigan Territory and I have procured a somewhat worn copy. It shows post roads and stage roads, but the intelligence is twenty years past. More useful I think is word of a well-traveled Indian path suitable for horse travel from Detroit to that mudhole Chicago. The westward Sauk Trail has many branches and I think that if we can discover one northbound we will find the reputed forests by horse and shank's mare. Indian guides and paddlers are easy to come by everywhere along those great lakes where the fur trade flourished so long ago. The natives will do anything for a bottle of spirits.”

“Would that Freegrace and Edward were so easily managed.”

“Give Edward a present of catnip for his beasts and he will smile on us.” It was true. Since his wife, Lydia, died of a profound asthma aggravated by the inescapable brown manure dust in the streets, Edward doted on Casimir and Vaughn, her two pampered striped felines.

•  •  •

And so, on an early September morning of drizzling rain Lennart Vogel, James Duke and Armenius Breitsprecher (accompanied by his
kurzhaar
hunting dog, Hans Carl von Carlowitz) got into their hired coach and headed northwest. Lennart set a hamper of roast chickens and beer on the floor. Hans Carl von Carlowitz ran beside the coach. “He may become footsore,” said Lennart. The dog heard this and ran faster.

•  •  •

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.”

They camped and waited, and after two days a hunting party of six Chippewa stopped and asked in English for “bacco” when they saw James smoking his morning cigar. “Give bacco,” said the youngest Chippewa, a boy of about ten. The others repeated the magic phrase, and Breitsprecher, speaking to them in some all-purpose linguistic mix, said James would give them tobacco if they showed the correct trail to many big white pines. He pointed to a handy example fifty feet off the trail, a large tree with exposed roots spread out like monstrous fingers. They all spoke at once and pointed in the same direction—back toward Detroit. An older man in the party broke a twig and drew a map in the soft soil. “Him d'Étroit,” he said. He drew five trails coming out of Detroit. “Sauk,” he said, pointing at a southwest way. “San Joe,” he said, pointing to the trail they were on. Breitsprecher's choice of the right-hand trail at the intersection had taken them off the Sauk, which was wrong in any case. “Saginaw,” he said, pointing at a line that ran northwest. “Shiawassee,” he said prodding another. “Mackinac.” The Shiawassee and the Saginaw connected to the Mackinac and two other important trails. They should have taken the Shiawassee or the Saginaw trail from Detroit, not the Sauk.

“Do we have to go back to Detroit?” said Lennart. Armenius put the question and the Chippewa talked excitedly.