How about striking out on cross-country travel?" Dad asks after we're all up and packed. He and Meg are scrutinizing a trail-less section of topo map, looking for a shortcut that might regain us the day we lost to rain.

Meg answers, "One of my older maps shows a footpath. It's some distance away, but we could shoot for that."

The bushwhacking is rough going, with some hard climbing in places. We skitter down grab-onto-whatever-you-can descents knowing we're just going to have to go uphill again, and we lose an hour working our way around a large area of avalanche-downed pines. And when we do finally spot an ax-cut blaze high on a tree, we still have to look hard to find the trail it once marked.

All in all, it's one long, hard day of hiking that doesn't even allow a chance to talk. The payoff, though, is that by ten o'clock the next morning, we're above the gulch where Meg thinks the Bottners had their homestead. The upper end of it tapers out of sight into the high country, and where the gulch widens at the lower end, its floor appears to be an impenetrable mat of densely packed trees and dark undergrowth.

"What a place to try to live," Meg murmurs, as we begin our descent. Gesturing toward a rock outcropping on the somewhat barren hillside opposite, she adds, "That must be the rock ledge that the Randalls climbed up to."

We stow our gear at a camping spot a couple of hundred feet from the bank above Rattlesnake Creek, and Meg checks her vest pockets for her topo map and compass, pencils and notebook, tape measure, and camera. I'm wondering if she's going to do her exploration alone—feeling disappointed, because that's what it looks like—when she asks, "Tess, want to go along? I'd love some help."

"Sure," I answer "I'll do whatever you want."

"I can help, too," Amy says, but Dad's ready with a different plan for her.

"I've got some plaster of paris for casting animal tracks," he says. "I thought you and I might set out along Rattlesnake Creek and see what we can find. Though I ought to warn you, we may need to wade right in."

Conflict races across Amy's face, and I hide a smile. I know exactly how she's feeling It is so frustrating to want to do two things and have to pick one. The bag of casting material that Dad pulls from his pack wins her over.

MEG AND I head into thick growth along a runoff stream that funnels water into the gulch from the mountains. I ask what I should be looking for.

"Anything unnatural," she answers.

"Like apple trees or poplars?" I ask, remembering what she told me our first day out.

"Exactly. But also look for any kind of nonnatural debris—metal scraps, fencing, a can pile. Sawed lumber or shaped logs, of course. Leather—sometimes that survives a long time. And especially keep an eye out for odd ridges or depressions."

Meg rattles the list off so easily that I expect it will be just a matter of moments before we spot one thing or another.

We don't, and we're not successful when we climb to the rock outcropping hoping, as the Randalls did, that from up there we might notice some irregularity in the landscape.

Traversing our way down, we do come across a rusted can riddled with holes in a rough pattern, but there's no way of knowing if it was ever connected to any homestead in the gulch.

And Meg vetoes checking out a brush-filled, caved-in section of hillside that could be the remains of an old mine. "Too dangerous," she says. "It'd be nice to know, given Katharina's story about injuring her hands, but it will have to wait until a team can investigate in a way that won't risk a cave-in."

Back down in the gulch, Meg and I knock off for a midafternoon snack. Sounding disheartened, she says, "I really thought we'd come across something by now. I was so sure all the evidence pointed to this being where the Bottners lived."

"MEG?" I CALL. "Does rhubarb grow wild?"

"No!" Meg shouts, hurrying to me. "It does not!"

Leaning down, Meg peers at the plant's big leaves and scraggly stalks as though they're the most gorgeous things she's ever seen. She says, "In the old days this plant would have provided jellies and pies, protected against scurvy..." She pauses, looking around. Assuming the Bottners did live here, then we're probably standing in their kitchen garden, which certainly would have been placed handy to the house."

She points but the area she thinks most likely to have contained the homestead buildings. "Let's work it in a grid, you taking one side and me the other We'll walk up in one direction, return a couple of feet over and so on."

"What about trees?"

"Go around them, but do your best to keep to the grid. And if you see anything... anything..."

I find the first confirmation that we really have found the homestead when my shirtsleeve snags on a twist of barbed wire protruding from a tree trunk. "Over here!" I yell. "Meg! I think I've found part of a fence!"

And thirty minutes later still looking for more fence remnants, I trip and fall into a shallow depression hidden by rotting vegetation.

Meg gives me a hand up. Then, being careful not to move anything but leaves, we uncover the extent of the hollow. It's a square, roughly four feet on a side.

"What do you think it was?" I ask.

"It's too small to have been a root cellar" Meg answers, "so my best guess is that you've found the Bottners' outhouse!"

"You're kidding!"

"Hey! That's an important find!"

After that, the discoveries come quickly. We find mossy lines that Meg says are probably the cabin itself and that we'll come back to. She points to a spot where vegetation is particularly thick and guesses that's where the barnyard was. "I bet that if we dug under the sod, we'd find a rich layer of humus," she says. "Think cows, horses, chickens, mud, cow pies..."

And not far from that, a bed-sized rise covered with pine duff turns out to be a can pile. Junk pile, actually, where somebody threw stuff they didn't want. I ask Meg if she wants to go through it.

"Not now. Maybe when I come back with a follow-up team, but we'll probably just finish documenting the site and then leave things the way we find them."

"Why?"

"Because you destroy when you dig Some future technology might let us learn something from all this that we couldn't now, and meanwhile, the site will be here to offer other people the thrill of discovery."

"And you just hope they won't cart things away," I say.

"You just hope," Meg agrees.

We trace the rest of the cabin's outline and then take a last break, sitting close to where Meg figures a porch might have been.

"I'm glad we'll be able to tell Katharina that we saw where she lived," I say. "Maybe, if you've got extra film, we could take some photos for her? Maybe of the way the mountains look from here? That must still be the same."

"That's a good idea," Meg says.

"I kind of feel like I know the Bottners," I say.

She nods. "A good day in the field often leaves me feeling as though I've met somebody. The thing is, no matter how much you study and investigate, when it comes to individual lives there are always things you just won't ever know."

I understand what she means. We know some of the facts of the Bottners' lives, and we've met Katharina, and I've even held Frederik Bottner's fiddle. But we don't know what he thought about or talked about. All we even know of his music is that Katharina liked it and that it was good enough he could play for a country dance. Living out here, he probably never got a chance to study music seriously. I wonder if he ever wanted to.

I nudge a rock with my boot, uncovering a black bit of shaped wood that's different from the debris around it. Picking it up for a closer look, I notice how hard it is, and the way it's smooth and a bit concave on both sides...

"What do you have there?" Meg asks.

"I'm not sure," I say, showing it to her "But I wonder ... It almost looks like part of a violin peg."

Then I remember the violin Katharina showed us. How it had one peg different from the others.

"Meg," I say, "do you think...?"