"Perhaps." Yellow Cloud almost smiled. "Then we will make sugar on what we have, and we will go back the next year, and the year after. My grandmother's grandmother made sugar here before there were any lines. I would like my sister's grandson to make sugar here when there are other lines, ones none of us can imagine. That is a long way to walk. Longer than from the Couderay to your door."
They went down to Bayfield at the end of April, when the ice was out of the rivers: Yellow Cloud and Zhingwaak, recovered and thin and insisting on paddling, and Makoons with his birchbark bundle of field notes, and Waabigwan, who had announced the evening before they left that she was coming because she did not trust any of the three of them to speak plainly to an agent, and Sorley Dace in a blue cap with an oilcloth packet in his coat. They went by canoe, two of them, down the Namekagon and the St. Croix portages and north to the big lake, and Sorley, who had been a voyageur's hand at nineteen and had not been in a canoe in six years, was clumsy at it for two days and then was not.
On the last evening before Bayfield they camped on a point above the lake, and the water was enormous and grey and calm, and far out on it the light was going gold. Makoons was asleep. Zhingwaak and Waabigwan were arguing, companionably, about something to do with a cousin. Yellow Cloud sat by the fire with a cone of the new sugar from the camp in his hand, turning it over, and after a while he broke off a piece and handed it to Sorley.
"This year's," he said. "From the old grove. Giizhigookwe sent it. She said to tell you it tastes the same."
Sorley put it on his tongue. It was dark and rich and faintly smoky from the fires, and it tasted, as far as he could tell, exactly like every cake of sugar he had bought from these people in six years, and also not like any of them at all.
"What happens tomorrow?" he said.
"Tomorrow," said Yellow Cloud, "we go into the agent's house and we tell him a long story with two endings, and we see which one he writes down." He broke off another piece of the sugar for himself and looked out at the darkening water. "And then, whatever he writes, we go home, and next spring we tap the trees."
Out on the lake a loon called, once, the first Sorley had heard that year. Neither of them said anything else. The fire burned down. In the morning they put the canoes in the water and paddled toward the town.