Bones On Black Spruce Mountain Read Free Page A

feelings of what is right and wrong, stored in him from last fall's hike, feelings he hadn't known were there until now. It was the instinctive knowledge that he had been here before.
    They came to a fork in the road. Seth picked the direction that felt best and they pushed on. Seth knew his chances of finding the way were good if he could keep himself from doubting his feelings. If he could trust that odd urge to go this way instead of that, he'd get them there, but it was hard to do. Ever since he'd started school, he'd been taught to think, not feel, taught to mistrust his instincts. It was hard now to go forward riding entirely on a kind of knowledge he'd been told to disregard—hard but not impossible, and before long the angular lines of Isaiah Morey's sugarhouse loomed in front of them.
    The boys dropped their packs at the gaping open side of the ruined building and stepped in. Everything was the same as it had been the year before, the same litter of beams and gnarled tin, the same broken table and chair, the same ladder made from poles leaning against the wall. There was one change, however. The porcupine Seth had found stiffened and bloated with death, was now deflated and shrinking to a small clot of rotting hide and bone.
    Seth stepped around the porcupine and gingerly opened the door that led into the sugarhouse shed. During the winter the shed roof had caved in from the weight of snow, and now the shed was filled with a rubble of rafters and metal roofing. Where Seth had found an old and dirty but useful place to stay, he now found a chaotic tangle of decay. The shed would be useless as a camp. The boys would have to make other plans.
    The collapsed roof had allowed light and rain to come in, and weeds were growing in the shed. The old coat Seth had found last fall hanging from a nail on the wall had fallen to the floor, where it lay limp and wet. There were raspberries sprouting from the soggy mattress on the cot. The place wasn't a shed anymore; it had become a confused pile of sticks and tin. Last fall Seth had felt the presence of the men and women who worked here years before; now he felt nothing. All the ghosts were gone. The place was too far gone even for them. There was nothing left, only the last remains, only that final sinking back into the earth. The shed was slowly returning to the ground. The boys stepped out into the sun.
    "Now what?" Seth asked. "We can't stay in there. I wouldn't want to if we could."
    "Well, for starters," Daniel replied, "how about some lunch? I'm starved."
    "Good idea. There's a nice big beech tree right up over the bank. I had lunch there last fall. Let's go up there."
    The boys settled under the beech and ate sandwiches and apples.
    "We better not hang around here too long," Daniel said. "We don't have a camp; we don't have any fish. We've got a lot of work to do before dark and it must be noon already. Let's slide down into the ravine and work our way upstream until we find a good campsite. If that doesn't take too long, we can probably get set up before dark."
    The boys headed down a long sidehill covered with young spruce and fir not more than three feet high. The whole hill had been logged over a few years before and the young trees were growing profusely in the bright emptiness left by the loggers. Once into Lost Boy Brook ravine, however, huge ancient trees covered up the sky again.
    They stopped here and there on their upward climb to debate the merits of this spot or that as a campsite. They needed easy access to water. The brook would supply that. They also needed a level place on which to build their lean-to. Here in the lower reaches of the ravine the banks were far too steep. They continued up the ravine. Finally, far up into the mountains they found a spot where a small brook joined the main stream. Near the angle made by the junction of the two streams, there was a large, flat place clear of underbrush in a stand of tall hemlock and spruce. This was obviously