North of Boston
THEY aint much happened sence the last riting. Winter come awful late this year and give me a good chance to look up some lost timber lot lines.
One day I driv the jeep two miles back into the woods. Me and an old timer spent half an hour before we found the first trace; an old spot on a big birch. Took a compass course and found the next spot right where it was supposed to be.
We traced the line through scattered hardwood, thick young softwood, and a froze-over swamp, crisscrossed with blowdowns, renewing the line as we went. Slow fussy work.
Sun dipped so we headed back. Come into poplar growth. They was beaver cuttings and the tiny logging roads and little canals them fellers dig to get their wood home. We walked a beaver dam, found a water mill site, see old fields, picked up a logging road and bumped into the jeep.
Ice was forming fast around the rocks in the river. Hills was cold purple. They was a brass moon in a bright blue sky. So still you could hear the blood in your ears. We broke out a thermos of hot
kauphy and lit cigarettes. "How come that mill in here?" I ast my friend.
"Years back an awful nice young feller lived in the village. His girl throwed him over. So he moved way in here, cleared the land, built that stone dam, put up a one-man mill and stayed."
"He buried round abouts?"
The old gentleman stubbed out his cigarette, "Yep and the grave is lost, and I guess I'm the only man left that knows the story. But—" he paused to feel real slow for his words, "he done just what he wanted to do most of his life, and he did leave parts of an old dam and a good place for the beavers to do their logging and for the deer to feed in the moonlight—that's more than most of us do."
Now the hills was dark and the moon cast shadows. I fired up the jeep and we went. I would of give considerable if some of you fellers could of ben along. You might of liked it.
