“You remember this, Delivery. You remember that your uncle’s the one who stood over me and wouldn’t let them move me till the ambulance got there. He comes around again and you remember that. He saved my legs, you hear?”

His voice comes out ferocious, echoing down the basement hallway.

“Well,” he says lightly, “your grandma’s probably wonderin where in the hell you are. Go on now and tell her ‘hi’ from me.”

Lincoln turns and walks back up the hallway. One-Two watches him and shakes his head. Ain’t no stoppin it now, he thinks. It’s out and rolling.

6

In 1958 there were no more furs left, and no one was buying the few stray beaver that remained tucked into boggy ponds away from trappers on snowmobiles or the poorer ones breaking temporary roads under the rawhide web of their snowshoes. The fisher and marten were long gone and since muskrat and weasel only gave twenty-five cents each, they were ignored and left to rut in the broken slashings and rice beds.

Simon and his father took the minimal logging roads along the river and cut pulp off their family allotment ignored by the white land-grabbers because the surrounding lowlands were impassable in the summer months. They left the cabin at dawn. Betty was just waking to feed Irma, newborn in the cradle of winter. Caroline and Lester barely woke for anything, not until Betty shooed them outside to collect kindling. Simon and Jacob left the waking house with the saw rolled tight and tied together with string and their lunch in a tin pail that banged against Simon’s leg no matter how he held it as he tried to stay on the hard pack left by his father’s snowshoes.

They cut off the logging trail and headed toward the river. The land descended and under the snow the short brush gave way to frozen clumps of grass that tilted their snowshoes off level and so, slipping and cursing, they made their way over the winter-stilled swamps.

Jacob’s shoulders swayed under the greasy plaid of his wool jack coat. His bare hands seemed impervious to the cold. They were squares of muscle that could clear a bar of drunks and pull off a frozen deer hide without a knife to separate the neck skin, that could lift two full rice sacks, one hundred pounds each, and set them on the scale gently.

They weren’t across the swamp when Simon’s legs began to burn and his calves knotted as he tried to keep his snowshoes from landing on top of each other. They were almost across when the nose of one of his snowshoes caught a branch and he pitched headfirst off the trail into the three-foot-deep snow.