And so he was seething with emotions—irritation, self-pity, anger—by the time he was settled in his usual chair by the fire upstairs, when his grandfather handed him a thick letter, much battered, its edges crisped with dried water.
“This arrived at the office today,” his grandfather said, expressionless, and David, wonderingly, turned it over and saw his name, addressed care of Bingham Brothers, with a Massachusetts postmark. “An express delivery,” his grandfather said. “Take it, read it, and return,” and David stood, wordlessly, and went to his own study, sitting for a moment with the envelope in his hands before at last slicing it open.
My dear David, January 20, 1894
There is nowhere for me to begin this letter but with my deepest and most sincere apologies for not having written earlier. I am wretched at the thought of any pain or upset I might have caused you, though perhaps I am only flattering myself—perhaps you have not thought of me as often as I have thought of you these past almost seven weeks.
I do not wish to make excuses for my poor manners, but I do want to explain why I have not communicated, because I do not wish that my silence should be mistaken for lack of devotion.
Shortly after I left you in early December, I was obligated to make a trip up North to visit our fur trappers. As I think I mentioned, my family has had a long-standing agreement with a family of trappers in northern Maine, and over the years, it has become an important aspect of our business. On this trip, I was accompanied by my eldest nephew, James, who had left college the previous spring to work in our business. My sister, understandably, was not enthusiastic about this idea, and nor was I—he would have been the first among us to graduate from college—but he is grown and we finally had no choice but to acquiesce. He is a wonderful young man, high-spirited and enthusiastic, but as he has no sea legs and is indeed given to sickness, my siblings and parents and I decided that he might be trained to eventually oversee our fur trade.
The North has been unusually cold this year, and as I had mentioned, our trappers live very close to the Canadian border. Our visit was largely a ceremonial one; I would introduce James to them, and they would take him out to demonstrate how they caught the animals and skinned and cured them, and then we would return to the Cape in time for Christmas. But that was not what happened.
Initially, everything proceeded as planned. James immediately formed a friendship with one of the members of the family, a very likable and intelligent youth named Percival, and it was Percival who spent several days introducing James to their trade while I stayed behind in the house to discuss how we might expand our offerings. You may well be wondering why we are concerning ourselves with fur when the industry has been in decline for the past sixty years; certainly our partners did. But it is precisely because the British have now all but abandoned the area that I think we have the opportunity to make our business there more robust, by selling not just beaver but, crucially, mink and stoat, which are much softer and finer and for which I believe there will be a small but meaningful group of dedicated customers. This family, the Delacroix, are also one of the very few European families left in the trade, which means they are much more reliable and much more suited to the realities and complexities of business.
The afternoon of the fifth day of our visit was reserved for leisure, to be followed by a dinner to celebrate our partnership. Earlier, while touring the Delacroix property, we had passed a pretty little pond, now frozen over, and James had been excited to skate on it. It was a frigid day, but clear and calm, and as the pond was just a few hundred meters from the main house, and he had comported himself well, I said he might.
He had not been gone an hour when, abruptly, the weather changed. In minutes, the skies had turned first white, then a deep pewter, and then nearly black. And then, at once, it was snowing, the flakes falling in clumps.
My first thought was of James, and it was the first thought as well of Olivier, the family’s patriarch, who came running to find me as I was running to find him. “We will send Percival with the dogs,” he said. “He can walk this route in the dark, he knows it so well.” To ensure his safety, he tied one end of a long length of rope to the bottom of the staircase banister and the other to his nephew’s belt, and told the boy, armed with an ax and a knife as a precaution, to return as quickly as he was able.
Off the boy set, unafraid and calm, while Olivier and I stood at the staircase, watching as the rope unspooled itself and, eventually, grew taut. By this time the snow was so thick that I, standing at the door, was unable to see anything but white. And then the wind began, gently at first, and then so fierce, so howling, that I was forced inside altogether.
Yet still the rope remained taut. Olivier gave it two sharp tugs, and a few seconds later, received two sharp tugs in response. By this time, the boy’s father, Marcel, Olivier’s younger brother, had joined us, silent and anxious, as well as their other brother, Julien, and their respective wives and their aged parents. Outside, the wind blew so loudly that even the sturdy cabin shook.
And then, suddenly, the rope went slack. It had been some twenty minutes since Percival had left, and when Olivier yanked on the cord once more, no one returned his signal. They are stoic people, the Delacroix: One cannot live in the part of the world they do, with the weather they have （not to mention the other dangers—the wolves and the bears and the cougars, and of course the Indians）， and not remain calm under dire circumstances. And yet they all treasured Percival, and a hum of nervousness immediately circulated through the entryway.
There was some swift, murmured discussion about what to do. Percival had two of the family’s best hunting dogs with him, which would offer him some protection—the dogs were trained to work as a unit, and one could be trusted to stay with him while the other returned to the house for help. This was assuming the dogs had not, for example, been urged by Percival to find and remain with James. By now the snow and wind were so intense that it seemed the entire house was listing to and fro, the windows rattling in their casements like chattering teeth.
We had all been timing how long he had been gone: Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. At our feet, like a dead snake, lay the length of rope.
Then, nearly forty minutes after Percival had left, there was a thudding at the door, one we at first mistook for the wind and then realized was the noise of a creature tossing itself against it. Marcel, with a cry, quickly threw off the heavy wooden bolt and he and Julien pulled it open to discover one of the dogs, his coat crusted so thickly with snow it appeared as if he’d been baked in salt, and, clutching at his back, James. We pulled him in—he was still wearing his skates, which had, we later realized, probably saved him, allowing him purchase as he made the walk uphill—and Julien’s and Olivier’s wives fell upon him with blankets and hustled him away to a bedroom; they had been heating water for the boys’ return, and we could hear them running back and forth with pails full, and the sound of water splashing into the metal tub. Olivier and I tried to interrogate him, but the poor boy was so chilled, so exhausted, so hysterical, that he was making very little sense. “Percival,” he kept saying, “Percival.” His eyes flicked back and forth in a way that made him seem crazed, and I was, I will admit, frightened. Something had happened, something that had terrified my nephew.