Suspicion of any stranger was still ingrained in the Swedish settler; apprehensively he stopped a few paces from the stump of the newly felled pine. The stranger heard him and turned around. His face was lean and weather-beaten, with high cheekbones and deep hollows. Tufts of sweaty, thin hair clung to his forehead; his chin was covered with a long brown beard.
The man eyed Karl Oskar from head to toe, his alert eyes those of a person accustomed to danger.
Before Karl Oskar had time to phrase a greeting in English, the stranger said, “You’re Swedish, I guess?”
Karl Oskar stared back in astonished silence; deep in this wilderness he had encountered a stranger who spoke to him in his native tongue.
Leaning his ax against the stump, the man offered Karl Oskar his hand: “I’m Petrus Olausson, from Alfta parish in Helsingland. I’m a farmer.”
Karl Oskar Nilsson gave his name in return, and added that he was a farmer from Ljuder parish in Småland.
“I knew you were a Swede!”
“How did you know?”
“By looking at your feet!” The Helsinge farmer smiled good-naturedly and pointed to Karl Oskar’s footgear. “Your wooden shoes, man! Only Swedes wear wooden shoes!” He grinned, showing long, broad upper teeth.
Karl Oskar knew that the Americans called the Swedish settlers the wooden-shoe people.
Petrus Olausson took off his hat and uncovered a bald spot on top of his head. He seemed to be about forty, ten years older than Karl Oskar. His clothes and his speech indicated he was no newcomer to America. He used the same mixed-up language as Anders Månsson of Taylors Falls, one of the first Swedes in the Territory.
“What kind of wood do you use for your wooden shoes, Mr. Nilsson?”
Karl Oskar replied that as alder trees did not grow in this valley he used basswood, the American linden tree. It was softer than Swedish linden wood and easy to work. But he had poor tools and was unable to make comfortable, light shoes.
He looked at the newcomer’s ax next to the stump; it had an even broader and thinner blade than his own American felling-ax.
“You can work faster with American tools,” said the owner of the ax. “The Yankees do everything easier. Better take after them.”
He took Karl Oskar for a newcomer here and looked disapprovingly at the Swedish ax he was carrying, with its clumsy head and thick edge. Karl Oskar explained that it was an old split-ax he used for post-making, and added, “From Helsingland, eh? You look like an American to me.”
He need not ask Petrus Olausson his errand here; no one felled trees for the fun of it. Olausson had come to stay.
The sound of timber axes in the forest had brought together two Swedish farmers. They had met as strangers but as soon as they had inspected each other’s axes they felt they had known each other before and were now merely renewing acquaintance. They were both men of peaceful occupation, wielding the tools of peaceful labor. Karl Oskar Nilsson from Ljuder, Småland, and Petrus Olausson from Alfta, Helsingland, sat down on the stump and talked at ease, talked intimately as if for many years they had lived on neighboring homesteads in the same village.
Around the men rose the great, ageless pines, and as far as the eye could see not a human habitation was in sight. It was an unbroken, uninhabited land, these shores of Lake Ki-Chi-Saga.
“Good land,” said the Helsinge farmer. “I aim to settle at this lake.”
“You are welcome,” said Karl Oskar, and he meant it. “Plenty of room, empty of people so far.”
“Yeah, we needn’t push for space.”
Olausson pointed to a hut of branches between two fallen pines, about a gunshot’s distance from where they sat; that was his shanty. He had begun felling timber for his cabin, and as soon as it was ready his wife and children would come. He had come to this country with his family, he told Karl Oskar, in the company of the prophet Erik Janson; that was seven years ago, in 1846. They had been living in Illinois but did not like it on the flat prairie; they wanted to live in wooded country, like their home province Helsingland. Another farmer from Alfta, Johannes Nordberg, had been up looking over Minnesota, and he had come back and told them the country up here was rich growing land and suitable for settling. It was on the advice of his neighbor that Olausson had come here. Nordberg himself would never return — he had died of cholera in Andover last summer.
Karl Oskar had heard that a farmer from Helsingland by the name of Nordberg was at this lake several years ago; he pointed to an island in line with a tongue of land. There were remnants there of a hut in which Nordberg had stayed. In summertime there were hordes of Indians here, and he had probably lived on the isle to be in peace. This first land seeker’s name was linked to the place; it was still called Nordberg’s Island.
“Johannes told the truth,” said his onetime neighbor. “This is a land of plenty.”
Petrus Olausson had picked a good place for himself, with fine timber forest and rich grass meadows. And he told Karl Oskar that several more countrymen were on their way to the St. Croix Valley, attracted by Nordberg’s descriptions.
“Well, the country is getting to be known,” said Karl Oskar. “How did you happen to stake your claim next to mine?”
“I went to the land office and picked it from the map,” he said. “The east part of section 35, township 34, range 20.”
The Helsinge farmer knew how to claim land; he had been in America twice as long as Karl Oskar, who, talking with him, felt like a newcomer beside an older and more experienced settler.
“I think my wife has something cooking — would you like to eat with us?” he asked.
“How far is it to go?”
“Less than a mile. I have the northeast claim.”
“All right. Might as well see your place.”
From the top of a young pine dangled a piece of venison he had intended to fry for his dinner, but it wasn’t very warm today and the meat would keep till tomorrow.
The settlers got up from the stump. The younger man walked ahead and showed the way.
“When did you come and settle here, Nilsson?”
Karl Oskar told him that next Midsummer Eve it would be three years since he and his family had landed in New York, and they had arrived in the Territory the last day of July. In the same year, 1850, he had taken his claim here at the lake.
Without being conscious of it, Karl Oskar walked today in longer strides than usual. He was bringing home news that would gladden Kristina; after three long years of isolation they now had a neighbor.
— 2—
The two men stopped where the path left the shore and turned up the hill to the log cabin. Olausson looked about in all directions: pine forest to the west, oaks, maples, elms, and other leaf trees to the north and east, Lake Ki-Chi-Saga to the south. At their feet lay the broad meadow, partly broken, and a tended field.
“A likely place, I must say! First come gets the best choice!”
And Karl Oskar agreed — he had had good luck when he found this place. He called his settlement Duvemåla (dovecote) after his wife’s home village in Sweden. A most suitable name, thought the Helsinge farmer; here too were so many doves that they obscured the sun.
The children playing outside the cabin had seen their father and came running toward him. They came in a row, according to age: Johan, the oldest, first; next Lill-Marta; after her, Harald; and behind them toddled little Dan, who had walked upright on this earth barely a year; his small, unstable legs still betrayed him so that he fell a couple of times, delaying his run behind his brothers and sister. But he was close to the ground and did not cry when he fell.