But the map shows the rest of the property, too. The steep hollow we cross. The swath of sugar maples we tap for syrup. The river that coils through the valley, the swamp that is only a swamp certain times of year, but which, in a tiny patch in the southwest corner, has quicksand, and that, too, is noted, in small print. The patch of huge, lichen-covered rocks, where there is a cave that I eventually searched for and found, and also a stretch of rock on the ground that’s so flat it feels like a road but it’s not. Even the square of huckleberries that flushes red with fall is noted. You see, this was drawn by a man who loved his land, who wanted to know it the way a good father wants to know his child. In the dim light of the kerosene lamp, I lean in close and study the sketches and notes.
* * *
There is a thing I’ve always been good at, one of the few worthwhile abilities I never had to work for: a preternatural sense of direction. As a kid I used to wander the state forest behind Aunt Lincoln’s land, hours sometimes, just walking and tracking and following sign. Footprints, scat, the pressed grass of animal beds. I was a boy without commitments or rules, mostly, so on days when Lincoln was working long hours, or wherever it was she would disappear to, I went to the woods.
Never once did I get lost. Never once did the possibility cross my mind. I don’t know how else to put this, but I just always knew where I was, and I always knew how to get back, even if it involved going a way I’d never gone before. And because this wasn’t something I’d learned to do or learned to fear, I never gave it any thought.
Then one day Lincoln took me hunting. We trekked way up into state land, and Lincoln shot a deer. It was wounded bad but didn’t fall. Deer, sometimes they can take such a hit, and bleed and bleed and you wonder how on earth they can still be alive, but they are. They keep on moving, resilient creatures, with an irrepressible drive to live. Well, dark folded in quick and Lincoln slumped down against a tree and said, “Heck, Kenny. Did you bring yourself a snack? I think we might be lost.”
I was eleven then, and hungry all the time, but more often than not, there wasn’t much to scrounge from Lincoln’s cabinets, so I told her no, I didn’t have a snack. But the good news was, we weren’t lost. I knew exactly where we were, and in thirty minutes we were home, back at Lincoln’s kitchen table, eating Chef Boyardee from the can.
Lincoln sat across from me and shook her head. “How’d you do that, Kenny? How’d you get us home?” Her face was red, the way it would always get when she’d been outside for long, and her eyes were moist. The one always teared up and spilled over when it was cold.
I shrugged.
“You been out there before, to that spot where we were?”
“Nope.” I shoved a ravioli in my mouth.
“Never?”
“Never.”
She pointed her fork at me. “That’s from your mother.”
I stared at her. Lincoln never spoke about her—my mother, her sister.
“She could know how to get somewhere, even when she’d never been there before. We were in a city once, somewhere neither one of us had been. I’m telling you, I was all turned around, felt like I was spinning. But she knew her way around, like she lived there. Crazy thing, that a person could know a place they’ve never been.”
In the military, I learned, and so did my superiors, that my ability to know my way around unfamiliar territory was a useful skill indeed. And let me tell you: they did not let that skill go to waste. “What street was that where you saw the woman with the radio, Private?” I didn’t know the name—couldn’t say it—but I’d point on a map. “Can you get us to the spot where you and Williams found that cache of weapons? In the dark?” And I could get them there. A roundabout way, a different way than I’d gone before. I could find it. I always did.
* * *
Anyhow. I guess when I take out the map to double-check, I’m not really double-checking. I know where the property line is that separates this land from the national forest. I know that, sitting against the King of Trees, we were a quarter mile from that line because I paced it off, a long time ago. I know that girl headed back through the national forest by walking an old logging trail that winds a mile and a quarter through a swath of towering white pines and all the way back to a small parking lot. In fact, come to think of it, I believe it’s called Old Logging Trail: a flat, comfortable walk that, on some pamphlet, experts have designated as “easy.” I know, too, that she would’ve passed the NO TRESPASSING signs I posted years ago and that she must’ve paid them no mind.