Lauraine Snelling - [Red River of the North 02]

by A New Day Rising

  A New Day Rising

  Copyright ©1996

  Lauraine Snelling

  Cover design by Jennifer Parker

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-7642-0192-9

  * * *

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

  Snelling, Lauraine

  A new day rising / Lauraine Snelling.

  p. cm. — (Red River of the north ; 2)

  ISBN 1-55661-577-9 (pbk.)

  I. Title. II. Series: Snelling, Lauraine. Red River of the north ; bk. 2.

  PS3569.N39N49 1996

  813’.54—dc20

  96-25355

  CIP

  * * *

  To the Round Robins and the Birds of Pray

  for all their support and encouragement.

  Minnesota north woods

  February 1884

  Timber-r-r-r-r!”

  Haakan Bjorklund shaded his eyes against the sun glinting off the snow-capped branches and watched as the ancient pine crashed to its death. Branches exploded from the trees around and beneath as the monolith fell, sending a shower of long green needles and resinous pitch that followed the plunging tree to a snowy grave. Silence followed, a tribute to the death. One last branch, snagged on a companion giant, tumbled to the snow beneath.

  “All right, let’s get those branches stripped,” the boss yelled.

  Two men with a crosscut saw nodded and sent Haakan and his partner, Swede, the go-ahead signal.

  “We got da ting ready for you. See you do so good.” The speaker smiled, his cracked lips showing a missing front tooth. He’d lost it in a discussion over a card played wrong the night before. His right eye, only half open, sported a purple swelling left by the contender’s fist.

  “Ja, like that would be hard. You fellows couldn’t get started sawing if we didn’t wedge ’em for you.” Haakan hefted the heavy ax he wore across his shoulder as if it grew there naturally. He stepped to the first branch, and with three perfectly placed cuts, he severed a limb equal to the trunk of a small tree. As he worked his way up the trunk, he could hear the process repeated on felled trees all around him. The virgin north woods were being leveled, tree by tree. Swede worked the other side of the huge trunk, and when they reached the end of usable wood, they severed the tip and rolled the log to finish cutting the branches half buried in the snow.

  Haakan felt his muscles loosen, and despite the near zero air, sweat trickled down under his arms and the middle of his back. As the rhythm of heft and slam continued, his mind wandered back to the cookshack and the widow woman who ran it. She served pancakes so light the men nearly had to hold them down with a fork lest they float away. But it wasn’t only her pancakes that drew Haakan’s attention. Trading pleasantries with her at mealtimes had become the high point of his day. And when he could bring crinkles to the edges of her warm brown eyes and a smile followed by a laugh that even sourpuss Johnson couldn’t resist, Haakan felt like he could defeat the entire crew single-handedly.

  “Hey, Bjorklund, you gonna daydream all morning?”

  Haakan snapped the last limb off by stepping on it and raised his ax to his shoulder. As they made their way to the next marked tree, he removed his whetstone from his pocket and honed the edges of his double-bitted friend. His father had always said dull axes caused more accidents than sharp ones, and this son had no intention of losing wages due to an injury.

  As soon as he had enough money saved, he planned to propose to Mrs. Mary Landsverk and suggest they take their earnings and head west to homestead some land of their own. After fifteen years routing about the country, he was ready to tap into that dream of free land and a strong, happy family. The fact she had two small sons only added to her value, far as he could see.

  When the steam whistle blew for dinner, he followed the rest of the crew over to the sledge and climbed aboard. While the others jawed and teased one another, he worked at the bits of his ax with his whetstone. It was about due for a real sharpening on the grindstone.

  “Hey, Bjorklund, there’s a letter for you.” Cappy, a logger until he lost an arm on the ripping saw and now a bookkeeper in the office, passed down the rows of benches handing out letters to those fortunate enough to have relatives who wrote. “You got a girl hid somewhere we don’t know about?”

  Haakan thanked him with a smile that reached the edges of eyes blue as the fjords of his homeland. The Bjorklunds were known for the blue of their eyes and jaws squared with determination. He recognized his mother’s handwriting. “Ja sure, this one, she’s known me all my life.” He stuck the letter in his pocket to be read in private. He hadn’t heard from home for a long while. When he looked at the postmark, he knew why. This one had been mailed three months earlier.

  He looked up to catch the smile of the young boy who refilled the platters of beef and bowls of potatoes for the hungry crew.

  “More coffee, Mr. Bjorklund?”

  “Ja, Charlie.” Haakan held up his cup. “Mange takk.” Over the top of the cup he caught Mrs. Landsverk looking his way. He raised the now full cup in a toast of gratitude and returned to his plate. He knew if he didn’t hurry, he wouldn’t get enough to fill his belly before they returned to the woods. As the men finished eating, the noise level rose accordingly.

  Curses split the air over at the next table, causing everyone else to stop talking and listen.

  “Not again.” Haakan dropped his knife and fork and turned to see who’d started the commotion. But he knew without looking. Swede and Jacob were at it again.

  Haakan got to his feet, cut his way between the stomping and cheering men the fight had drawn, and exited the building through the door nearest the kitchen. The shoveled path led to the outhouse. At least out here he wouldn’t be forced to break up another fight. Just because he stood half-a-head above most of the men and could reach farther than any of them, he’d been deemed the peacemaker. He wore a cut lip to prove it.

  Once he’d finished his business, he returned to the cookshack porch and drew his letter from his pocket.

  “My dear Haakan,” his mother wrote. “I hope and pray this letter finds its way to your hands and that you are well. Your far and I watch the mail for a message from you, but so long, now, we have been disappointed.” Haakan sighed. He hated writing letters. What could he say to them? How many trees were cut, who beat whom in cards, and that two men were caught by a tree that fell wrong? One died and the other wished he had. Life in the north woods took all a man had to give and then bled him again.

  “I pray that you have found a church where you can hear God’s Holy Word and draw near to the foot of the cross.” His mor had no idea how far and wide this land of America stretched and how many were the miles between towns. No minister came to this logging camp or to the mill downriver, and the farm where he worked one summer lay ten miles from the nearest town. No, a church he hadn’t seen for more than a year or two.

  After giving him the news of the family at home, she continued. “You remember your cousins twice removed, Roald and Carl? Both of
them died in the terrible blizzard and flu epidemic last winter in Dakota Territory. I would have told you sooner, but I just learned of the dreadful tragedy myself. I believe you could be of help to their families and perhaps could spend Christmas at their farm. You are the closest family to those two poor grieving widows who are so young to suffer like this, and I know they would be beholden.”

  Haakan swung his arms to warm himself. He shook his head. Mor talked like he could ski right over to the cousins’ houses and help them do the chores of an evening. He checked the date at the top of the precious paper. Sure enough, early November. Besides being so far away, he had steady work here. And if Mrs. Landsverk agreed with him, he’d soon have a family of his own. Perhaps they’d stop by the Bjorklunds on their way west.

  The blast of the steam whistle forced him to stuff the letter in his shirt pocket and return to the front of the cookshack, where he loaded on to the sledge along with the others. Ignoring their banter, he thought about what it would be like to have a family of his own—a fine wife, sturdy sons to help in the fields, and golden-haired daughters who laughed like their mother. Fifteen years he’d been in America, and while he’d seen a lot of the country and worked anywhere at whatever he found, he was no closer to the dream of owning land than when he left home.

  “Hey, Bjorklund, you going to Hansen’s tonight?” The sledge driver threw the words over his shoulder. Everyone stopped talking to hear the answer.

  “Nei, I got better things to do with my money than fill Hansen’s pockets.”

  “Ah, that ain’t it. He’s hoping to spend a bit of time with Miz Landsverk. Widow woman like her needs a man. Why else you tink she come to da logging camp?”

  “Ja, but you better get a push on. I heerd she done got a beau.”

  Haakan felt like someone slugged him in the back with a tree trunk. He forced himself to turn slowly and look at the last man who spoke. Raising one eyebrow, Haakan waited for an answer to the question he kept himself from asking. Ears, so named for the appendages that nearly waved in the breeze but for their frostbitten tips, nodded. “Dat’s vat I hear.”

  Haakan shrugged as if it meant nothing to him. He knew they’d never let up if he showed any reaction at all. Keeping secrets was well nigh impossible when twelve men bunked in a ten-by-twelve room.

  “Ah, he yoost repair tings for her ’cause he got nothing else to do.” Swede, his partner and best friend, managed to stick up for him as usual.

  Haakan had found the best way to get along was to keep his mouth shut and his fists ready. He used them rarely, only in emergencies, but everyone knew that when he started swinging, he meant business. He shut down many a brewing brawl on his reputation alone.

  At each stop, more men bailed off and headed for the marked trees to be downed and stripped that day. As those felling the trees moved on, teams of horses skidded the logs to the clearing where they would be loaded onto sledges and hauled to the bank of the river. After the ice left the river in the spring, they’d be floated down to the main sawmill. Keeping the logs from jamming up took another kind of skill and daring as the logrollers jumped from one floating log to another, using their peavey, a pronged spike, to break things up. While he had good balance, Haakan had chosen instead to work in the mill itself, feeding logs into the buzz saws. The noise alone fair to deafened a man, but at least he didn’t have to worry about a dunking in the frigid water.

  Haakan, Swede, and Huey swung off the sledge at the end of the track. The three were known as the best team in camp. They wedged the trees for the sawmen, then stripped the huge pines with greater speed and fewer accidents than anyone in this logging camp or the three surrounding it.

  Haakan paused and sniffed the air. “Snow coming.”

  Huey shook his grizzled head. “You be better’n anyone I ever met for knowing the weather like you do. Yoost smells cold to me.”

  “And piney.”

  The three slogged through the drifts to the next tree, marked with a notch about chest high. Within a few strokes they were back to their natural rhythm, and the blows of the axes fell precisely on beat. Haakan resolutely kept his mind on the task at hand. With the letter burning a hole in his chest and the nagging voice that said he’d lost the woman he loved, he maintained a speed with the rise and fall of his ax that would have felled a lesser man.

  “Enough, man. What you tryin’ to do? Kill us off?” Swede stepped back to watch the tree drop to the ground and mopped sweat off his forehead with a frost-encrusted sleeve.

  Haakan looked at the third member of the crew to see him nodding and puffing hard. Plumes of steam rose and frosted his bushy eyebrows.

  “Sorry.” Haakan leaned on his ax handle, only then realizing his lungs were pumping like bellows. He looked up to see the first snowflakes drifting in the stillness. A last branch broke through the ice-crusted snow with a pop, while in the distance another tree crashed to its death. The forest wore that peculiar silver-blue look of winter’s early dusk, when the sun has fallen beyond the trees but not yet fully set. Directly above, a gray cloud sent more snowflakes drifting downward.

  “We should be able to down another before the team arrives.”

  “If they can find us. We got so far ahead.”

  “Even that lazy driver we got should be able to follow the felled trees.” Haakan slapped Swede on the back. “Come on, I promise to let up on you.”

  That night in the warmth of the cookshack, Haakan tried to catch Mrs. Landsverk’s gaze. Was she deliberately not looking at him? The thought made the possibility of the gossip being right even more worrisome.

  As half the men shouted and shoved their way out to the strawfilled wagon for the hour-long ride to Hansen’s saloon, Haakan bided his time, counting on her to come by again with coffee refills for those few who still lined the benches. Instead, Charlie, her young helper, carried the pot around.

  “More coffee, Mr. Bjorklund?”

  Haakan held out his cup. “There isn’t, by chance, more of that dried apple pie in the back, is there?”

  The boy’s cheeky grin split his face. “For you, there just might be.” He took the pot with him and hurried to the kitchen, leaving the man sitting farther down the table unattended.

  With one finger, Haakan traced the red lines in the checkered oilcloth covering the table. Should he try to talk to her tonight or wait till morning? With it being Sunday tomorrow and half the camp hung over from their carousing the night before, breakfast was always served later and then dinner in the middle of the afternoon so the kitchen help had part of the day off.

  “Here you go, sir.” The boy leaned closer. “I din’t tell her who it was fer. Herself’s not in too good a mood.”

  Haakan thought of asking Charlie what was happening with Mrs. Landsverk, but a shout from the other logger stopped him. Besides, he’d never been one to ask a boy to do a man’s job.

  “Hey, boy, bring some of that coffee down here. You want I should have to fetch it myself?”

  “No, sir.” Charlie scooted off, but only after a wink at Haakan.

  Haakan took his time over his pie, removing the letter from his pocket and reading it again under the light from the overhead kerosene lamp. The words hadn’t changed. His mother surely did expect him to head for Dakota Territory immediately. And on skis no less, as if he’d had any time to make skis. He thought of the long hours he’d spent playing cards with the other loggers. Skis hadn’t seemed important. Where would he go anyway? Deeper into the woods?

  He scraped the last of the rich pie juice off the plate. He knew he should write his mother a letter. Since her letter had taken so long to arrive, she believed he was already there. Wherever there was. Surely she understood he had a life of his own to lead. As the eldest son, he’d always taken care of the younger ones, especially after his father died in a fishing boat accident when he was ten. Only after his mother remarried did he feel he could leave Norway for the new land. And now she expected him to run save the wives of two of his cousins,
cousins so far removed he’d only met them once and their wives never.

  A guilty conscience weighing him for not writing in so long, Haakan headed for the bunkhouse to get paper and pencil. Since the light was better in the cookshack, he returned and took his place again on the long plank bench. Besides, if he remained in the cook-shack, he might get a chance to talk with the woman he’d been dreaming of.

  “Dear Far and Mor and all my family, I am as well as can be expected and still logging in the north woods of Minnesota. I am sorry to tell you that I cannot leave here right now—your letter took three months to find me—as my boss depends on me in many ways. Perhaps I can travel west in the spring if they don’t hire me on at the mill.” He stopped and chewed the end of the pencil. What was there to tell them? He knew they didn’t want to hear of the fights and drinking, the accidents, and the frostbite. What they wanted to hear was that he was married and raising a family. A shame it was, because deep down he really did like the logging life. He signed the letter “With love from your son, Haakan,” and addressed the envelope, sticking the last stamp he owned up in the corner. The room had grown too quiet.

  He stared at the now darkened kitchen. Mrs. Landsverk hadn’t come to join him for a last cup of coffee like she usually did. He shook his head. There was trouble in the hen house for sure.

  In spite of his concern, when Haakan fell on the rough bunk, sleep hit him on the way down. He heard the carousers return sometime in the wee hours, but since no fight erupted, he slept on. When he awoke, it was with the determination to confront Mrs. Landsverk, tell her he loved her, and ask her to marry him. The sooner the better. He crossed his hands over his broad chest and stared at the rafters above. Is this really what he wanted?

  “Ja, it is!” He leaped to the floor with a thud, slapped Swede on the shoulder to wake him, and, still in his long red underwear, rattled the grate and added fresh wood to the nearly dead fire.