In the third week, with the sap slowing and the crust gone soft every morning, Makoons and Sorley went up the ridge with a borrowed compass, a hundred-foot cord that Makoons had knotted at every link, a bundle of whittled pins, and the field notes Makoons had copied by hand from the mill's timber cruiser in the fall, which he had been keeping wrapped in birchbark inside his shirt.
They found the corner post first. It stood where it had always stood, a squared cedar with the township and section numbers cut into its faces, the cuts weathered silver now. Sorley put his hand on it. He did not feel anything particular. It was a post.
Then they found the creek, and the big hemlock with the old blaze above it, the one Makoons had paced from as a boy. And then, a long while later, two hundred yards upslope and partly hidden in a windfall, they found a second hemlock with a second, fresher blaze, and a surveyor's iron stake driven at its foot with a brass cap that said what it was and who had placed it. Ingle's stake. And when they had laid out the bearings in Merriwether's original notes, which Sorley could still half recite, and in the cruiser's copied figures, and run the cord between them and back again three times through the slush and the windfall, with Makoons calling the counts and Sorley walking the back end, sober, with every pin in his fist and his heart going hard in his chest, they found that Makoons was right, and also that he was not.
Ingle's men had started from the wrong tree. Their line was off too, by a good four chains to the west. The true section line, as near as two men with a knotted cord could find it, ran neither where Sorley's crooked post said nor where Ingle's iron stake said, but in between, along the upper shoulder of the ridge. It put most of the old trees inside the boundary. It did not put all of them. The oldest grove at the top of the hill, where Giizhigookwe had been born, a stand of forty or fifty maples so huge they looked like pillars in a church, fell outside.
They sat in the snow at the top of the ridge afterward and looked down at the camp, at the smoke going up from the lodges, at the people moving among the trees. Neither of them said anything for a long time.
"So," Makoons said finally. "Now we know."
"Now we know," Sorley said.