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CHAPTER 1

Sight

By the age of eight, Charlie was crazy about horses. Maybe it was even earlier, but during that summer it came to a crisis, as things often did with Charlie and his enthusiasms. The problem began with Bat, the old one-eyed mule who was owned by Leonard Waits but seemed to spend most of her time at Silver Hill. Bat and Charlie were close, if such a thing could be said about a pale blond boy and a brown mare mule. But the fact was that they spent a lot of time with each other. The mule often jumped out of whatever pasture she happened to be in to end up where Charlie was. She even met the school bus — or at least she was usually there when the bus arrived. Many folks refused to accept the idea that a twenty-five-year-old mule would actually wait at the bus stop for a seven-year-old boy, and the fact that it often happened was written off as coincidence. Charlie talked to her just the way he would a human, and while he was on his own two feet she did almost anything he wanted. Most of the time she even followed him around loose, without a lead line, more or less like a dog.

But the relationship did not extend to riding.

The first problem was that she had a high, straight backbone that was so uncomfortable that even with a pillow Charlie could hardly bear to sit on her. The next problem was that when he was on her back, he had virtually no control over her. The way the friendship seemed to work was that when Charlie was on the ground and she could see him out of her one eye, their special relationship held. But when he was on her back and she couldn't see him — because of the blinkers on the old work bridle — he became just another human being. Most of the time she wouldn't even move. Mule nature took over. This theory was offered up by Jimmy Price who was considered an expert on horses because he had a mare named Princess who would lie down and roll over on command. Lacking any better authority, his theory was accepted. And so Bat fell from grace as transportation and, more important, as the embodiment of the romance of riding.

The summer Charlie was to turn eight, the woods on the far side of the farm next to the railroad were to be logged. No one was sure why. Professor James surely didn't need the money. There had to be something, some reason, but nobody knew what it was, not even Matthew.

A white man named George Maupin, who lived ten miles west at the foot of Burdens Mountain, had the contract in the beginning. George was only five foot six, but he was absolutely square and the physical power implied in his shape was true. He always wore a businessman's hat, summer and winter. He had sweated right through it for so many years that the band was two shades darker than the rest of the hat. George was an old-fashioned logger. That meant that he had two strong workhorses, a beat-up six-ton truck with a log rack, a huge two-man chain saw with a four-foot cutting bar, his own strength, and the need for one other strong man.

Before the war came, George had been doing fine. Landowners hired him to go into old woods, take out the biggest trees for saw logs, leave the rest, and not make a mess. In those days George had four horses and could move really large logs. It was a time before we got used to the woods being torn up by skidders and bulldozers.

George's branch of the Maupin family was native to the area around the village. There were three brothers, but the home farm next to the village was not big enough for one family, let alone three, so George, just before the war, had bought a little place in Burdens Hollow at the foot of the mountain. It was not really a farm, just a rocky fifteen-acre pasture with a log house and barn, with the beginning of Burdens River running through the pasture. It was a mountain farm — there were black snails in the stream, the kind found only in mountain creeks and rivers.

When George got home from the war, he wanted to pick up where he'd left off. But now there was competition from the machines. And time was becoming money. Even so, there were still some people like the professor who cared about the woods — not many, but enough to keep George busy, at least for a while.

Because Silver Hill was so far from George's home, his two workhorses would be fed ear corn in the barn at the Corn House, where Charlie and his parents lived, and turned out in the broom sage field behind it at night. Charlie was intensely interested, as he was with anything new. Other than his unsatisfactory experience with Bat, he knew next to nothing about riding beyond the fact that you pulled on a single rein to turn left or right, both reins to stop, and kicked with your heels to go. Leonard Waits, who owned two big workhorse mares in addition to Bat, had let Charlie sit up on one of the mares a few times. Charlie had also watched Leonard put on the stiff, old work bridles with their twisted wire bits and blinkers. So he knew how to do that much. There were no saddles at the farm; the professor had long ago given up riding. Anyway, the time of horses was ending.

But not for Charlie.

* * *

Monday of the first week in June, the horses had arrived in George's neighbor's cattle truck. Their heads hung so far out over the side of the truck you would have thought they would either fall out or jump out at the first intersection. But they were quiet creatures and it took a lot to surprise or scare them. The neighbor backed the truck up to a bank and off they came. To Charlie's delight.

"What's his name, Mr. Maupin? He sure is big. How old is he?" Charlie began his usual flood of questions. George Maupin knew who Charlie was, as everyone did, but he had never been around him to any extent and was surprised and amused at the rush of questions.

"His name's Jim, Charlie. I reckon he's about ten. I got him when he was a colt. Give a hundred dollars for him. I knowed the mare he come from and she was a big, strong, gentle mare. I never did hear who his daddy was. Anyway, he growed up to be a good one. Strong like his mama. And you can drop the lines on him in the woods and he won't move a step till you come back.

"Can I ride him, Mr. Maupin?"

"Well, Charlie, I don't know about that. Maybe ..." His voice drifted off. He was a man who seldom spoke without cause, and he was a little bit amazed by Charlie. George wasn't used to little kids who talked a mile a minute in grown-up language, so he inadvertently opened the door to what was to become another one of Charlie's passions, because "maybe" always sounded like "yes" to Charlie.

Jim, who stood at least three feet taller than Charlie at the shoulder, was totally gentle. That first evening he munched his ears of corn and then stood quietly while Charlie figured out how to get the bridle on him. This problem was solved by leading the huge horse up to a fifty-five-gallon drum, after putting a hay bale next to it. Charlie then crawled up the bale onto the barrel and finally got on a level with Jim's head. Once the bridle was on, he coaxed him forward so he could leap to his back, clutching the little pillow he used for a saddle. That first evening when Matthew saw Charlie emerge from the barn, ducking his head down by the horse's withers so he wouldn't get knocked off by the overhead and clutching his pillow, he burst out laughing. Once in the barnyard Charlie put the pillow behind himself and hopped backward onto it. So there he was: the nearly eight-year-old boy, smiling in his blond way, proud that he had managed to get himself tacked up and mounted even if his charger was a gaunt and tired workhorse.

"Charlie, you can't just go riding that horse," Matthew said. "You know he don't belong to us. And, anyway, once George starts logging, this horse'll be tired from a day's work, so why should he have to put up with your foolishness after his dinner. It's his time to rest." This made sense to Charlie, but the urge to ride was stronger than his good sense.

The morning the logging began, Charlie walked over the hill with George, who drove the team in front of him with the two rope lines and his voice. Bill, the second and much smaller and younger horse, was on the right because he still didn't completely know the commands. With Bill on the right, it was easier for Jim to pull him over when George said, "haw," the word for left, or push him when George said "gee," for right.

Richie Settle, an eighteen-year-old white boy who helped George, drove the truck in front. Richie was what we called slow. But if you spoke quietly and clearly, he could do most anything you wanted, even drive the truck across fields rather than on the public roads. He was very strong. The two-man chain saw was nothing to him. He even understood how to service it and to tighten the chain.

But Richie couldn't handle the team. The movements of the huge animals were just too much for him. He looked George in the face when George was giving him instructions, but he never looked carefully at the horses, so he never learned to anticipate what they were going to do. The truck was okay, the living animals were not. So Richie drove the truck and George drove the team, with Charlie walking along beside, pleased as he could be that something brand new was about to happen.

The process was simple. The owner of a woods to be logged called the extension agent who sent the cruiser to mark the trees to be harvested and fix the value. Then the owner contracted with a logger to come in and do the job. Just the largest logs were taken and the branches were pulled into the open and burned. Done right, there was hardly any mess left at all. Within a year the drag tracks of the logs were gone.

That was George's arrangement. There was a deadline. The professor had to have the work completed by the middle of August so he could be paid by the pulp-and-paper company by September 1. When the deal was made, the time limit seemed fine to George. But at the end of that first day, when he stopped in at the store, he sounded nervous. He said there were a lot more trees marked than he had expected. Also, some of them were so big he wasn't sure his team could skid them out. It had been a long time since he had been in those woods — at least a couple of years before the war. They had changed. He should have known.

Everyone wondered what Professor James's hurry was.

But as the team and George and Charlie and Richie had made their way across the broom sage field that first morning, time hadn't been a factor. It was a pure June morning in Virginia. The humidity had not arrived, all the spring plants and trees were in bloom, and the bobwhite had begun their insistent shout that challenged even the snarl of the chain saw. Or so we thought.

The first tree was cut. George was on the engine end of the saw, and Richie, who was on the other end, smiled in pleasure when he felt the tree start to go. As the gap opened, the men stepped back from the tree. It scythed through the surrounding branches and hit the ground with a thud that caused the earth to shake under Charlie as he stood on the edge of the woods with the team. The horses were only mildly interested, but Charlie's eyes were round and startled. He had seen small trees cut for firewood but never anything like this huge oak, which, after it crashed to the ground, looked dead, really dead.

After the large limbs were cut off with the saw, George and Richie paused to sharpen the axes they would use to strip the rest of the trunk. George sat on the tree with his legs crossed, chewing his tobacco while he moved the file slowly across the blade of the ax. Charlie could hear the file bite into the steel.

"Want to see something, Charlie?" George called.

"Sure!" Charlie ran to George's side after almost tripping over a root that dared interfere with his lunge toward something new.

"This ax so sharp it'll shave the hair right off my arm. Watch." And sure enough as the blade moved across his arm, the thick fair hair just floated away before it. "Want to try it?"

"Yes. Does it hurt?" Before Charlie did it, he looked around, as if he wasn't sure whether he ought to be doing such a thing, as if Gretchen might not approve. But then he sat on the log next to George and carefully pushed the blade of the ax across his forearm. The pale blond hair fell onto the ax blade, just as the long grass did when Matthew went through it with his razor-sharp scythe with the mowing blade. The skin behind the ax was completely smooth, much smoother than the skin of the hogs after they had been scraped at hog- killing time.

"How do you get the ax so sharp, George? When I try to sharpen a sickle, the file just runs over the edge. I can't make it bite."

So George Maupin showed him. The two of them huddled over the ax as George explained how the file was made and how you had to hold it to make it cut into the metal of whatever blade you were sharpening. And how you moved it slow and felt the metal give way to it. And how satisfying it was to test the blade all sharp after only a few strokes.

When he got up from the log, Charlie smiled. But the smile left his face when he glanced down and saw the patch of skin with no hair, smoother even than the skin of the hogs or his father's face after he had shaved in the morning.

Meanwhile the horses dozed in the shade of the paradise trees at the woods' edge. When one would twitch off a fly, the other might stir. But usually not. Their ears hung like sails in a calm. When the big oak had been cut into logs, George took loose the singletrees that hung from the hames on the leather collars and after pulling the traces out behind, hooked the singletrees to the doubletree. By this time the two geldings were awake and ready to go. Each had sneezed and swung his head around a little and picked up his ears. While Richie held on to the doubletree, George backed the horses into position and hooked the doubletree to the log.

To Charlie the log looked huge. That evening, in his long and drawn out report to Matthew about his first day logging, he said that the log looked too big for the horses to move at all, let alone drag anywhere. Because in addition to sheer weight, there were the roots of other trees in the way, as well as whole trees. It looked impossible.

When everything was hooked up, George and Richie picked up their peavey hooks, George looped the long steering lines over his arm and hollered "Come up, boys." The two horses put their front legs deep under them, lowered their heads, and leaned into the collars. The log moved. Ahead a root protruded. As the log got to it, George and Richie rolled it sidewise with their peavey hooks just enough to clear the root. They went ten feet before George needed to change the angle so the log would miss a tree. George said, "Whoa," and the horses stopped, eased back off the traces, and seemed to go to sleep again.

Charlie was amazed. The horses and ponies he knew were for pleasure riding or foxhunting and not one would have stood still for this kind of use. Even Leonard Waits's fat workhorse mares were not as quiet as this pair. Charlie said they were like a different kind of animal, said that when they leaned into the traces, you could see all the huge sets of muscles bulge in their shoulders and hindquarters and their nostrils widen. Then they would move — slow, like you would imagine a mountain to move — skidding the huge log forward while George and Richie kept it free of roots with their hooks.

After a few moments' rest George said, "Gee," and used the lines. After three steps to the right the horses were in the clear and lined up to pull again. Of course, Charlie had to get into it at this point, figuring that since he had seen one pull, he was ready to drive the team and help out. George, who like his horses was a gentle soul, had been warned, so he wasn't surprised when Charlie wanted to jump in. And as it turned out, Charlie was a help. He could hold the lines off to the side so George was free to handle the peavey hook with both hands. Charlie knew the commands, and after the second log he could see what needed to happen next. After a while the horses listened to him and he became a part of the crew.

The horses were endlessly interesting to Charlie. The first few days he would walk around them looking at their bodies, trying to understand better how they were put together. He also liked to look at their eyes, which were much bigger than Bat's one eye. He discovered that a horse's eye has a tiny thing like a sea urchin floating in the middle of the pupil. Charlie had never noticed it before. He asked George what the little things were. George said he didn't know, but all horses had them, so he reckoned they were there for some good reason.

Charlie didn't miss a day for the first two weeks of work. He even got Gretchen to pack him a lunch so he could eat with the men, sitting in the shade at the edge of the woods while the horses ate a couple of ears of corn each and dozed. The men ate crackers and canned meat, which Gretchen thought looked rotten, or little wieners, and drank Pepsi-Colas. Charlie had a sandwich and water. Gretchen absolutely refused to buy the canned meat or the wieners or have Charlie drinking what she called soda pop at noon.

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Excerpted from "Winter Run"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Robert Ashcom.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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