and the number of pins, and the creek, and the flask in his coat. He wrote that his brother Ledyard Dace had not miscounted. He wrote that no one had moved the post. When he had finished he read it through three times and found that he could not make it sound like anything but what it was, which was the confession of a frightened young man who had been drunk at his work and let someone better than him take the blame. He did not try to make it sound like anything else. He folded it into an oilcloth packet and put it in his coat.
Makoons came on the ninth of March, with a crust on the snow that would hold a man in the early morning and turn to slush by noon. He looked at the new chimney with deep interest and said nothing about it at all, which Sorley took, correctly, to be a form of tact.
They went south three days to Ajijaak, Sorley and Makoons and the mule, traveling at dawn when the crust was hard and lying up in the afternoons. On the third evening they came over a low rise and saw the sugar camp below them, and Sorley stopped walking.
He had been on that ridge before, of course. He had chained across it, drunk, six years ago, and seen nothing but the brush in front of him and the back of his brother's coat. Now he saw it. The hill rose gently from the frozen lake in a long shoulder of grey trunks, the maples so old and so thick that a man could not have put his arms around most of them, and among the trees, everywhere, there were people. Bark lodges stood in a loose village along the slope with smoke going up from them straight and blue in the still air. There were kettles hung over long fires, and stacks of birchbark buckets, and children running between the trees with their arms full of wood. Every maple he could see had a cedar spile driven into its trunk, and under every spile there was a bucket, and the sap was running. He could hear it. It was a sound he had never heard in his life, a faint, ceaseless, overlapping ticking in the cold dusk, hundreds and hundreds of drops falling into hundreds of buckets all across the hillside, like rain that had decided to fall upward out of the trees and then thought better of it.
"There," said Makoons, beside him. "You have been eating that for six years."
Sorley found he could not say anything at all.