Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets,
and camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods
passing the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a
sawmill that stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean
sweet smell of the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of
the water tumbling over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen
working among the floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air,
and above the song of the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting
song, the song of love and of life singing in the hearts of husband and
wife.
In a little roughly-built lumberman’s hotel they ate breakfast in a room
overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing
the door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold
swiftly-flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages
wrapped in blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little
wharf beside the hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two
strange boys, saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his
breast.
On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
current. During the six weeks’ waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
essentials of the canoeist’s art and, now, as he shot the canoe under
the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the
prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the
shore.
At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill
and on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they
made their first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like
feathers in the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while
Sue, at the foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared
their first cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out
her rifle and gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness
making the lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the
young night, with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold
wind blowing into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under
the trees to where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the
stormy waters of a great sea before their eyes, and lay down together
for their first long tender embrace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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