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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 stoodon 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.
    â€œDon’t you want to go to the river and see what we’ve produced?” Karl asked.
    â€œRight 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.
    â€œReduced to money,” said Karl.
    â€œOr 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.”
    â€œCone 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.
    â€œMost 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 of us, and distract ourselves with reality for a bit.”
    The Indian claim stretched twenty miles east to west and ten north to south, a perfectly drawn bureaucratic rectangle laid upon the vastsand 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.
    â€œThere’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.
    â€œWe have done a lot in your absence,” said Karl.
    â€œThis is only the beginning,” said Uncle John. “We will have to fell a hundred times this just to cover the costs.”
    â€œThe river will choke,” said Karl.
    â€œYes,” Uncle John said.
    He stayed less than a week. Under Hoekstra’s tutelage Karl had become good enough with the oxcart to be trusted