Nothing mattered to William now but seeing where Louise was laid to rest in the woods. He had had enough of New York City. Besides the humiliating meetings with Mr. Sutphen that had become more frequent lately, he also had to contend with the smug looks he received from those he had considered his friends at the social clubs since the announcement of the Adirondack Railroad Co. bankruptcy. He gladly packed his things, made excuses to Sutphen and others in the company that he had some business to attend to in the Adirondacks and left the city behind.
It took him ten days from the day he left New York City to reach the Lawrence compound on Eighth Lake. He took the train to North Creek, borrowed a family horse and sleigh and took it to Pine Knot. He planned to stick around until spring, as long as he could before his father summoned him back to the City. He hoped their impending departure to Florida would keep his parents preoccupied and not fretting about his whereabouts.
He had lied to his parents, telling them he had word from Frederick someone had broken into the kitchen at Pine Knot and was stealing household items. Whether they believed a native would actually need crystal glassware or plan to hawk it, he didn’t care. He needed to go to the woods.
After arriving at Pine Knot, he traveled by sleigh over the ice to Eighth Lake and the Lawrence household. When he entered the cabin he had built for Louise and her sister he was confronted with the reality she was no longer alive.
Sarah, who looked so like her, was sitting in a rocking chair, nursing her baby Nathaniel. Her toddler, a girl, was tottering around at her feet playing with corn husk dolls Mémé had made.
William looked around for the old woman, she wasn’t there. Neither was Ike or his father Isaac.
“Where is everyone?” he asked.
Sarah looked up from the baby’s face to William and asked him to sit down.
“Ike is trapping with my father and the rest are napping. Can I get you some tea?” she asked him as she lifted the sleeping babe off her breast.
William shook his head.
“Louise? How did it happen?”
Sarah looked away, her eyes welled with tears. She remembered that day vividly. Mémé was worried when she didn’t come back with the water and sent Ike to find her. He followed a bloody trail leading into the woods away from the creek. He discovered her body, ripped apart by the wild cat, and her shawl soaked in blood.
William looked around the cabin and when he saw the bed from the open doorway into the room he had shared briefly with Louise he was grief stricken to realize he would never again feel her warm body next to his. He watched Sarah prepare their tea.
“Anything you need, Sarah, anything, you must tell me and I will provide it for you and your family.”
Sarah nodded. She already knew that. After he had drunk his tea she led him out to a clearing in the woods where they had buried Louise. Just a mound in the woods William thought, nothing but a dirt mound with a small wooden cross to mark the grave. Ironic, his love was buried under a small pile of dirt in the Adirondack forest while his own father, bankrupt as he was, had just commissioned a Durant mausoleum in a Brooklyn cemetery. He had to look away. The mound was a cruel reminder to him of what he had lost with Louise.
William ignored the nagging voice in the back of his head telling him he should return to New York City. He was paralyzed by grief. And the hum of activity in the Lawrence household, the way Sarah and Emaline managed the children, the daily chores, reminded him of Louise and he wanted to let the feeling linger. He stayed in the second bedroom of the cabin while Sarah went about her tasks, which were endless with a baby, toddler and an extended family to feed. Emaline was often in the cabin as well, assisting with the children and chores.
During the night he would hear Sarah cooing softly in the next room when her son Nate woke up hungry. Once he knew the babe was not stressed he let her soft voice lull him back to sleep.
One morning after rising from bed to the sound of the children, William put on some clothes to go outside and use the outhouse. It was a clear crisp morning. On his way back from the outhouse to the cabin he stopped to admire his surroundings. The sun was climbing over the tops of the evergreens, casting a warm glow on the hoar frost that was clinging to the needles of the trees like petite crystal pendeloques dangling from a chandelier.
A doe came bounding out of the row of spruce, stopped and looked straight at him. He reached behind for the rifle he had strapped to his back. He brought it to his front, took aim and pulled the trigger. He could hear the echo of the shot ricochet against the mountainsides.
For a brief moment the doe’s startled eyes bore into his before her legs buckled, and she crumbled to the ground. A dark pool of blood was forming in the snow as William walked up to her. Her eyes were still wide open. He knelt beside the animal and a flood of remorse struck him. Like this doe that had just lost its life, he had lost something he would never get back.
While William stayed on at the Lawrence household Ike and Isaac took the opportunity to teach him about trapping. William especially loved this time. He learned a lot from both men about the habits of the woodland creatures they trapped.
They strapped on snowshoes and enter the deep woods. Ike would spend the morning checking his traps, or setting them up. Either way it was a long day of hiking. William found it invigorating. The city life was a distant memory for him. One day they went out to set up marten traps. The marten, a member of the weasel family had a yellowish brown coat that was in demand. Ike brought along some dried fish. He showed William how to look for the marten tracks in the snow, small footprints, and the back paw a little larger than the front. “Otherwise they’re not easily found,” Ike said. “They hunt at night. Look.” He pointed to tracks in the snow that appeared like canines, a slight claw print above each toe.
When they came across an area with tracks, Ike looked for rotting trees with caverns or caves and proceeded to set up a small teepee of branches. In the center of that he laid down the bait, and then placed the steel-jawed trap over it. He covered the tee-pee with boughs of pine.
“He’ll go after the fish and when he enters the trap it will clamp down on his head,” Ike said.
Ike’s trapping business was doing quite well. One night over dinner he had explained to William how he had brought a sled full of mink, marten, and otter with him to the Prospect House and he received $750 for the pelts from a local trader. William knew Ike could make even more if he delivered them to a New York furrier himself. And he could easily convert one of the smaller cabins at Pine Knot into a trapper’s cabin for Ike to store his pelts and equipment.
“I’ll collect your next batch of pelts and get you a better price for them.” They made a deal. Ike could set up operations at Pine Knot and William would get them to market in New York City, removing any middlemen. “By spring I should have twice the number of skins,” Ike said.
William might have stayed on longer but one night Jeff arrived home unexpectedly from the lumber camp. That night, William could hear the bedposts softly banging against the wall in the bedroom Jeff and Sarah shared with the baby. He had lingered long enough. It was time to move on.
With assurances of visiting as long as the weather permitted, he left the Lawrence family waving from the door of the cabin with little Nathaniel strapped to a papoose on Sarah’s back.
His mind was on trapping when he wondered how Alvah was faring. On his way back to Pine Knot he decided to stop at Alvah’s cabin to see. He pulled up to the little cabin set back off a logging trail in the woods and was alarmed to find there was no smoke coming out of the chimney. Even if Alvah had gone off to hunt he would have kept coals burning. William got out of the sleigh and walked with trepidation to the front door.
“Alvah?” he called as he knocked.
There was no answer from inside. William walked around to look through the windows. He could see someone lying on the small bed. It had to be Alvah. He knocked as hard as he could on the glass without breaking it. An old man turned over in bed. It looked like Alvah, but it was hard to be sure through the thick glass.
“Alvah! It’s William Durant. Open the door.”
Alvah slowly crawled out of his bed and tottered to the door. He threw it open and staggered backwards at the force of the cold air.
“Whatdoya want from me?” he hollered. He looked ghastly. He was wrapped in a bearskin, yet visibly shivering. William entered the cabin. The air inside was so cold, he could see his breath. Coals were glowing in the hearth but there was no wood left to burn.
“I planned to get out today to chop some,” Alvah said to him when he saw him looking at the empty hearth. “I aint lazy ya know, just durned tired is all. I can’t hardly move.” Alvah started coughing and sank back down on his bed. William walked about the cabin looking for wood to light the stove and make some tea. He found however that the cupboards were bare.
“How long have you been sick?” William asked the wheezing wreck of a man sitting down on the bed. This was not the stalwart Alvah he knew so well.
Alvah flopped back down in his bed and refused to answer, grumbling something about being left alone and for William to mind his own business.
It took all of the cajoling William could muster to heave Alvah out of his bed, out of the cabin, and into the sleigh to travel to Pine Knot. Jerome greeted them and helped Alvah down.
“He’s burning up with a fever. You take care of the horse and I’ll get him to my cabin,” William instructed.
William gently guided Alvah into his cabin where there was a fire burning and a bed made. “You’re staying here until you feel better Alvah. You could have died out there in that cabin of yours. There are disadvantages to being a hermit you know,” William chided as he went to the fireplace to boil water for tea. Luckily, Mémé had given him a few tinctures, including a dark broth made with balsam pitch.
“Good for coughs,” she said.
For two weeks Alvah stayed on at Pine Knot, falling in and out of fitful sleeping bouts while William and Jerome stayed in Dr. Durant’s cabin. Everyday William would come to make sure he drank some tea or broth. And everyday Alvah complained that he was being kidnapped.
But he never asked to return to his cabin until one day William came in from hunting rabbit and saw Alvah, fully dressed, looking more flush than he had in two weeks. “I want to go home now.”
It was the last chance to go before the ice broke up on the lake. William insisted they take Alvah back, not allowing him to walk in snowshoes.
“I just spent two weeks holed up in your durned cabin escaping death’s door, why’d I want to take a risk of fallin’ through the ice on that fancy cutter?” Alvah said when William told him of the plans.
William was losing patience with the man. “I’m going that way to collect a load of furs from Ike. I just took this route last week. I have it all mapped out in my head where the ice was thinning. Trust me. Let’s move on before it gets too late to reach the Lawrence place.”
They got a late start due to Alvah’s grumbling. The past few days the lake had been popping and pinging as it expanded and contracted between warm days and cold nights.
“Mr. Durant. Jerome stopped the horse when they reached a juncture where he could see a small fissure in the ice ahead. “Maybe we should go through the woods?”
“Not yet, it will take us all day to reach Alvah’s cabin. Look over there,” William pointed toward the shoreline, “there’s a small spring outlet — watch for the current under the ice. That’s where it will be weak.
“Steer the horse to where the ice is black,” Alvah hollered from his seat in the back of the sled.
Jerome drove the cutter in a meandering route, avoiding mottled- looking ice. Although it was only a seven mile trip it was slow going, and before long dusk started to set in, making it harder to see clearly. “Is that black ice ahead of him or the shadow of a tree?” he said.
William was fatigued by the effort of concentrating and a small nagging ache started to work its way from the back of his head toward his temples. His eyes started to throb.
He was in a daze when he heard it, a sickening, creaking sound, and then a CRACK!
The back end of the cutter’s rails caved through the ice. The horse heaved in a panic at the sound. The men jumped from their seats.
“Bloody hell! We have to undo the harness or he’ll drown with the sleigh!” William shouted, frantically trying to cut the harness loose from the desperate animal.
Jerome must have been blinded by the glare. He had no idea where the shore was, and was staggering away from all the noise.
Alvah took hold of William’s coat sleeve and started to pull him from the edge of the cracking ice. William fought him off, screaming, “Let me go, I have to save the horse!” He tried in vain to undo the harness from the horse, struggled to free himself and they fell down hard.
“Damn it, William!” Alvah cursed, picked himself up, took hold of William’s sleeve once more, and scuttled along the ice, dragging William along with him. He managed to get him to a safe distance from the gaping hole before they both slipped and landed on the ice next to Jerome.
William watched, helpless and horrified, as the hole doubled in size.
The water, black as night, churned, engulfing the rails, then the carriage. The horse, still tethered, kept kicking at the lip of the ice, attempting to get out of the hole and back on top of it. He put all of his strength into counteracting the weight of the sled, but his efforts were fruitless. The sled sank deeper, dragging the horse with it until both were consumed by the watery grave.
The last thing William saw was the look of terror in the pupils of the horse’s eyes.
Alvah stood up and spat on the ice. “That’s a damned waste of a good animal,” he said.
William turned over on his side and vomited.