10 Bando Finds Some Old Adirondack Furniture

Chapter 10 IN WHICH Bando Finds Some Old Adirondack Furniture At dawn we return our campsite pretty much to its original pristine appearance and walk on down the brook. Shortly we are out of the forest and standing in a field. A large farm lies in the valley below. "We've lost Alice's trail somewhere," I say. "If I were her, I would not go down through a farm with a pig on a leash." "I would," Bando says. "There's a corncrib down there. Pigs like corn, you know." We look at each other as the same thought strikes us. Alice has already been to the farm. About a hundred yards back we had noticed several corncobs along the shore of Fitches Brook. Still unaccustomed to thinking like a pig, we had agreed that raccoons had been at work on some farmer's crop.

Back we go, avalanching rocks as we scramble up the shaley streambed and arrive at the embankment where we had seen an ear of corn. It's gone. I am searching upstream for it and any others when Bando calls. He is pointing to the stream bank. Four corncobs have been laid there in the shape of an arrow. Alice has been here. They point to a big flat rock where a squirrel is now stuffing kernels from another ear of corn in his cheeks. You can't leave anything sitting around in the woods or someone will get it. Even hard deer antlers are eaten by white-footed deer mice. I leap across the stream on the rocks, the squirrel runs, and I pick up his ear of corn. There are broad teeth marks on it which are not squirrel. Could be deer, but it's not. It's pig. Pig droppings nearby clinch the identification, and then, looking around, I see Crystal's tracks in the soft loam. I'm off. "Not so fast," Bando calls. "Come back. I've found something else." On bare earth in the sun is another compass. This one is different from the first. Alice has propped up a stick at a 45-degree angle to the ground. On it hangs a stone on a string. Under it is a north-south

directional stick. Smiling, I recall how Alice and I made a compass like this last spring. We placed a marker on the shadow that the hanging rock cast in the morning. Then, when the sun passed the meridian, we put another marker on the afternoon stone-shadow. Between the two marks and directly under the suspended rock, we laid a stick. We had a north-south line. "She's checking her direction," I say. "Well, she's got north, all right," Bando says, looking at his compass. "Her stick points to within 3 degrees of true north." "And she plotted her directional line too," I say, pointing to the little pebbles lined up there. "Ah, ha!" Bando lays his compass with the directional arrow lined up with the pebbles. Carefully he turns the compass housing until the arrow and north are lined up. He looks at the bearing marker. "She's going more easterly now— 80 degrees." We spread the county map on the ground and lay a grass blade from our stream location across the page at 80 degrees. The blade crosses the

Schoharie Reservoir and intercepts Manorkill Falls. I count contour lines and multiply by twenty. "Wow," I say. "That waterfall drops almost straight down a hundred feet." "Manorkill Falls," Bando says. "I've read it's spectacular. If I were a girl who loved waterfalls, I'd be headed right for it." "In fact," I say. "I'm so sure she's going there that we should go directly to it without losing any more time following pig tracks." "Good idea," Bando agrees. There are no trails or roads up here, so, by lining up trees to keep us going in a straight line, and by reading the quadrangle maps to avoid cliffs and marshes, we strike off across the top of the mountain range. We traverse fields and forests, walk through barren lands where quails and woodcocks fly up at our feet, and, after twelve miles of bushwhacking, enter the Plattekill State Forest. We are greeted by a flock of wild turkeys, big, noisy, and glorious. They gobble and fly off, miraculously missing

limbs and trunks as they zip through the forest. I could never hit one of those with my sling. Although we're tired, the top of the mountain we're climbing calls to us, and we scramble on to its summit. Here we can see the Catskill, Helderberg, and distant Adirondack Mountains. I understand why people climb mountains. I am an eagle. Bando sits down. We've been walking hard since 6:00 A.M., almost ten hours, and we're both glad to rest. The trek was rough because we stayed in the forests, where the understory is a jungle of hazelnut, viburnum, and twisted young hardwoods fighting for the sun. Travelling through them was work. I offer Bando some smoked venison and dried apples. He eats heartily. "I'm ready to stop for the night," he says. "I don't think we have to hurry now. If I were Alice and had reached Manorkill Falls, I'd stay for at least a day or two, wouldn't you?" "I sure would," I say, noting the scratches on his arms and the smudges of dirt on his cheeks. "You're right, we don't have to hurry."

While he makes his bed, I practice with my sling. On the trek today, I missed nineteen out of twenty targets. I'm not doing so well. I guess it takes a lot of practice. Later, Bando sleeps. I watch the stars and think of Frightful. I wake early, pick a few Labrador tea leaves and brew them in Bando's tin cup. Then I gather a batch of daylily buds for our breakfast. These I moisten in dew and dip in hazelnuts I pounded to a powder with a stone. I steam them in spicebush leaves. With a catbird diving at us to chase us away from his nest, we leave the mountaintop on a northeasterly course. Bando is a little stiff and sore this morning, so we walk slowly, enjoying the vistas from the skyline of this mountain range. We stop frequently to consult the map, whether we need to or not. Map reading gives us a good excuse to rest. "Sam, look here," Bando says during one of these stops. "There's a power line below us. It leads to the road at the bottom of Manorkill Falls. It'll be a