Letters Of A Sourdough

He looked at the bunk, then at the rain beginning to stipple the clearing. “We’ve already come in.”

She held the page near the window. The ink had faded, but the letters remained firm.

“Read it,” she said at last.

“Here?”

“Where else?”

He set the pack beside the stove. The woman sat upon the edge of the bunk, and together they bent over the old sheet while the rain thickened upon the roof.

August 30, 1905

The cabin stands yet, and I with it.

It is a small concern, being no more than a single room of spruce logs, with a roof that leaks at the north corner and a door that sticks in damp weather. There is a pot-belly stove, a table made from a split board, and one bunk where a man may lie down without complaint if he has known poorer beds, as I have. The forest presses close on every side, save where the timber breaks and the country opens toward the high ridges.

I set these lines down at the table with the last of the daylight upon the page. A raven has been calling from the roof, and there is the sound of water running somewhere beneath the moss. Such sounds are company enough when a man has grown accustomed to hearing his own thoughts.

I am Edgar Morrow, fifty years of age, and lately come to this place for the winter. Whether I shall remain here until the snow goes is a matter between Providence and my legs. The country is not given to promises. It offers wood, water, game, and a hard account for every one of them.

This cabin is refuge, though it is no paradise. A refuge need not be handsome. It must keep the rain from a man’s shoulders, give him a place to dry his socks, and allow him one quiet hour in which to remember that he is more than the labor of his hands.

I have worked beneath the earth in West Virginia, where the roof timbers groaned and the coal dust entered a man’s eyes, ears, and lungs. Down there, a fellow learned to listen before he moved. A whisper in the stone might be warning enough. I carried coal until my back was crooked and my temper was not worth carrying at all. Yet I do not despise those years. Hard work teaches a man the weight of bread, the value of a sound tool, and the mercy of a roof that holds.

Here the work is different, though the lesson remains. A fire must be fed. Water must be carried. The flesh must be guarded from cold, and the mind from foolishness. There is no foreman in these woods to call a halt, and no neighbor near enough to hear a man curse. If I neglect the axe, I shall shiver. If I neglect my ankle, I shall crawl. If I neglect my thoughts, they shall make a wilderness of me.

This morning I walked the clearing and found fresh tracks in the mud beside the creek. Moose, by the breadth of them. The animal had passed during the night, close enough that I could see where the grass was torn. I found no need to follow. A man who has come here to be alone ought not to quarrel with the creatures for keeping their distance.

There are signs of other life. A fox crossed the ridge at dawn. Two gray squirrels scolded me from a spruce. High above the open ground, a hawk turned in the light. I have seen no human mark since reaching this country, and I confess that the absence has settled upon me kindly.

The cabin was not built by me. I found it three days past after losing the old trail in a wet storm. The roof appeared between the trees at dusk, and I came upon the door with rain running down my neck. There was no lock. Inside, I found only a rusted kettle, a broken chair, and a length of stove pipe fallen from the wall.

I repaired what I could before dark. The stove drew poorly, and the first fire filled the room with smoke. I opened the door and sat upon the step until my eyes cleared. By then the rain had stopped, and the whole forest steamed beneath the last light.

A man might pass a lifetime and never see such a country.

That thought came to me before I had earned it. I had not yet cut wood, laid in provisions, or learned where the creek froze first. I had no right to praise the wilderness while standing empty-handed in its doorway. Still, the mountains were there, blue beyond the timber, and the silence between the trees was not empty. It had room in it.

I spent the better part of this day searching for dry timber. The standing spruce is plentiful, but the green wood fights the axe and gives little heat. Fallen trees lie beneath the moss, wet as a cellar floor. I found one dead trunk on the northern slope, but it was too heavy to move alone. Tomorrow I shall cut it into rounds and bring them down by hand.

The work has left my palms tender. I do not mention this as a complaint. Tender hands become useful hands if a man gives them time.

Toward evening, I heard a crack in the brush and saw the back of a moose moving through the alders. It was a cow, broad and dark, with no calf in sight. She stopped once and looked toward the cabin. I stood still. After a moment she went on, and the brush closed behind her.

It is a strange thing to be watched by an animal that has no interest in one’s name.

The rain has begun again. It taps the roof above me and runs down the wall in a thin line. I have placed a pan beneath the leak. The bunk is dry. The fire is low but steady. These are small mercies, though a man who has slept in a mine shed or beneath a freight wagon knows they are not small at all.

I write because the day otherwise leaves no mark. I write so that my thoughts may stand apart from me and be judged in the morning. Perhaps these pages shall remain in the table drawer. Perhaps the damp shall take them. Perhaps some wandering soul shall find this cabin when I am gone and read words from a man who was once as solitary as he feels.

If that happens, let him understand this much: I did not come here because I hated the world. I came because I wished to hear what remained of me when the world had grown quiet.

The woman lowered the page.

For a while neither spoke. Rain ticked against the roof, and somewhere outside a branch struck the wall with a hollow knock.

The man looked toward the table. “There are more.”

“Nearly the whole winter,” she said, lifting the tied pages. “August through November.”

“Seventy-five years.”

“Almost.”

He reached for the next sheet, but she closed her hand over it.

“What if he meant them for no one?”

The question remained between them. The cabin seemed smaller now, and the rain louder. The man glanced at the broken window blind, the stove, the narrow bunk.

“He left them here,” he said.

“That isn’t the same as leaving them to us.”

“No,” he answered. “It isn’t.”

A gust pushed smoke down through the stove pipe. The woman coughed and rose quickly, opening the door. Cold rain swept across the floorboards. The old pages lifted from the table, their corners fluttering like pale leaves.

The man seized the bundle before it could scatter.

“Put them back,” she said.

He held the leather tie in both hands. “If we leave them, the damp will ruin them.”

“And if we take them?”

He looked once more at the first page, at the careful name written beneath the date.

“Then they’ll be read.”

She did not answer.

At length she shut the door. The man wrapped the letters in a piece of oilcloth from his pack and placed them beneath his shirt, against the dry warmth of his body.

Outside, the rain erased their tracks in the clearing. Inside, the cabin kept its dark, its iron stove, and the quiet that Edgar had trusted to preserve him.

The letters were safe for the night.

But they were no longer private, and I fear that the noise of the outside world may alter what I meant when I set them down.

End of chapter one. 18 more chapters in the full book.