I perched the ax on my shoulder and swaggered to the stream and back, enjoying the picture I imagined I made: a strapping young man with his favorite tool. I’d like to see a dangerous animal dare to cross me! I strutted some more, and the forest quieted, the only sounds now coming from the quiet munching of the oxen, the trickling stream, and my stomping boots.
The camp, with its proximity to both water and the trail that would become our road, was a good location for a house. Gid probably hadn’t settled on a precise spot to build the cabin, but most if not all of these trees would have to go. I gazed up at one pretty specimen: a youngish hickory, its bark shaggily lining the trunk. Then, stepping away from it, I experimentally swung the ax again. Chopping down a tree couldn’t be that hard.
Shielding my eyes, I stared at the tree’s canopy. How far up it went. I smiled, envisioning Gid returning and blinking in amazement at the clearing I’d managed in his absence. Granted, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to hitch the oxen to the trunks to drag them out of the way, but at least some trees could be felled. That would surely be a good start. I eyed the tree once more, shuffled my feet shoulder-length apart, and did a little experimental swinging without making impact, just to gauge my distance from the tree and get a sense of the potential in my stroke. Then I shuffled closer and, swinging with all my might, drove the blade, at an angle, straight into the trunk.
Where it got stuck.
With both hands, I pulled on the end of the handle. The blade didn’t even wiggle in its berth. I slid my hands all the way up to the base of the blade and pulled again. Nothing. Finally, I planted my boots on the trunk and yanked. The blade came free so suddenly, I fell to the ground, hard on my back, the ax still in my grasp and, mercifully, not embedded in any part of my body. Arms outstretched over my head, fingers clinging to the handle, I remained on the ground for a moment, alarmed and panting.
This position gave me a good view of the tree’s inner branches. With a sinking heart, I watched a robin flutter into the air from a top bough and a squirrel leap from one limb to another. Maybe this was the reason that February was usually the month for felling trees: Fewer animals had started their spring nesting. How many small creatures’ homes were Gid and I likely to destroy in the process of clearing for the cabin, road, and field?
Well, the damage was done. I couldn’t leave a tree spliced. Feeling like a bird killer, queasy with regret, and still trembling with nerves, I scrambled to my feet and ordered my hands to stop shaking. After taking a deep breath and situating myself by the hickory, I swung again and again, until I finished the notch. I stepped back to examine it. Cleaved a third of the way into the trunk, the cut didn’t look half bad.
I lowered the ax and rolled my shoulders, then went to the other side to start hacking from the opposite direction. This back notch went easier, and though the exertion made me ache, a deep satisfaction welled inside me. I, Freddy the Foundling Apprentice, formerly Harriet Submit Winter, could handle any hardship. Blizzard travel? Pff. Raging Genesee River? Not a problem. Capable of taming the wilderness? Just watch me.
I gazed, gloating, at my young hickory, took a final swipe at it with the ax, kept an eye on the canopy, saw when the tree began to waver and keel, and, as nonchalant as you please, strode out of its way, like any expert tree feller would. Simple pimple in the dimple.
This was why I couldn’t understand, in my final moment of awareness—immediately after something monstrously large crashed through and splintered boughs overhead and just before this terrible something made contact with my brow and knocked me senseless—how a tree going that way could possibly have managed to come this way to hammer me straight to the ground.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Daniel Long explained when I regained consciousness.
Sitting cross-legged beside my supine body, he said, “They call it a widow-maker: a dead bough the felled tree will strike loose, from itself or its neighbor, in the process of toppling to the ground. Bad luck, but you’re alive, and you did a decent job on the hickory. Sore?”
I stared, dumbfounded by his presence, and belatedly nodded. The movement made me wince. My aching head was pillowed on something woolly, soft, and familiar. It was his coat. I blinked up at his broad, straight frame and, despite the pain in my crown, experienced a sudden and excessive swell of pleasure, an avalanche sensation, though hot rather than cold. As I visually inhaled the dear, chiseled face with those dear, gray eyes, laughing eyes, even when his mouth stayed stern, I sighed heavily. Was it a surrendering sigh? Perhaps. But I didn’t feel defeated. My voice was husky when I asked, “How did you find me?”
“After Skunk’s Misery? I backtracked along the trail, then returned to the tavern to ask a couple of questions—learned something there I hadn’t bargained for.” He gazed at me intently, then abruptly shifted his attention to Fancy, who’d settled on his lap. He patted her absently, as if deliberating something. Finally he plucked a stick off the ground, tossed it, watched the dog leap after it, and continued matter-of-factly, “Once I knew for sure you’d been there, I decided the simplest recourse was to get Gideon’s new address. An agent at the Holland Land Company shared his parcel’s location. I headed north. The agent’s instructions put me in the vicinity of a neat farm—owned by friends of yours, I learned. They helped. Mr. Standen was happy to direct me to the trail for the last stretch, once Rachel Welds verified my identity and he could be certain I wasn’t about to force you to resume your apprenticeship. Your name is Freddy, and I’m an evil silversmith?”
“Sorry.” I bit my lip.
“At least it’s interesting.”
I tried to sit up, but as soon as I lifted my aching head off the coat, a wave of dizziness assailed me.
He slipped a hand under my neck and eased me back to the ground. “Not yet. You’ve got a regular goose egg growing out of that cropped hair.”
I dabbed at my tangled fringe. What must he think of me, a girl going around like a boy, making up names and stories? Blushing but without much means to hide my embarrassment, I averted my eyes and gazed instead at the canopy. Was this where I’d chopped down my tree? I couldn’t tell; the branches still so thickly knitted the sky. One downed tree hadn’t made a difference, not a bit of difference after all.
So Daniel Long had found me, and I knew precisely how. But why? Why did he find me? Why did he come looking for me? I blurted it: “Why did you come?”
“Two reasons.” He’d folded his hands and rested them on his crossed legs. Head bowed, eyes lowered, he looked like a man praying. “Not long after you and Gideon left, your mother received a letter. Sally Huber of Londonbury wrote to express her pleasure in meeting your mama’s fine-looking children”—he gave me a lopsided smile—“and of course to express her condolences over the unfortunate state of your appearance. Your mother was flabbergasted. A case of head lice so severe, nothing would do but to chop off all of that beautiful golden hair? And how had the bugs beset her darling girl—in the winter, no less? What troubling environments had Gideon dragged her precious daughter into? Seedy inns, unsavory taverns? As you can imagine, astonishment became consternation. She was in a tizzy. When your mother shared her concerns with me, I offered to come here and look into the situation.”
Oh.
It was as if the terrible widow-maker bough had hit me a second time. I was that flattened. If I hadn’t been already on the ground, I would have toppled for certain. When I recovered sufficiently, in a voice that (strive though I did to control it) was filled with too much choke and quaver to be called colorless, I said, “Well. That was generous of you. Remarkably generous. Daniel Long, the best neighbor ever, leaving his prosperous farm right when he ought to be storing up firewood and splitting fence rails and making his sugaring buckets and—”