The burned country stopped off at the left of a range of hills.
All ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain.
Far off to the left was the line of the river.
Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun.
There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land.
He could hardly see them faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain.
If he looked too steadily they were gone.
But if he only half-looked they were there, the far-off hills of the height of land.
Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette.
His pack balanced on the top of the stump harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back.
Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country.
He did not need to get his map out.
He knew where he was from the position of the river.
As he smoked his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock.
The grasshopper was black.
As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started grasshoppers from with dust.
They were all black.
They were not the big grasshoppers with yellow and black or red and black wings whirring out from their black wing sheathing as they fly up.
These were just ordinary hoppers, but all a sooty black in color.
Nick had wondered about them as he walked without really thinking about them.
Now, as he watched the black hopper that was nibbling at the wool of his sock with its fourway lip he realized that they had all turned black from living in the burned-over land.
He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now.
He wondered how long they would stay that way.
Carefully he reached his hand down and took hold of the hopper by the wings. He turned him up, all his legs walking in the air, and looked at his jointed belly.
Yes, it was black too, iridescent where the back and head were dusty.
"Go on, hopper," Nick said, speaking out loud for the first time. "Fly away somewhere."
He tossed the grasshopper up into the air and watched him sail away to a charcoal stump across the road.
Nick stood up.
He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps.
He stood with the pack on his back on the brow of the hill looking out across the country, toward the distant river and then struck down the hillside away from the road.
Underfoot the ground was good walking.
Two hundred yards down the fire line stopped.
Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again.
Nick kept his direction by the sun.
He knew where he wanted to strike the river and he kept on through the pine plain, mounting small rises to see other rises ahead of him and sometimes from the top of a rise a great solid island of pines off to his right or his left.
He broke off some sprigs of the leathery sweet fern, and put them under his pack straps.
The chafing crushed it and he smelled it as he walked.
He was tired and very hot, walking across the uneven, shadeless pine pram.
At any time he knew he could strike the river by turning off to his left.
It could not be more than a mile away.
But he kept on toward the north to hit the river as far upstream as he could go in one day's walking.
For some time as he walked Nick had been in sight of one of the big islands of pine standing out above the rolling high ground he was crossing.
He dipped down and then as he came slowly up to the crest of the bridge he turned and made toward the pine trees.
There was no underbrush in the island of pine trees.
The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches.
The branches were high above.
Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor.
Around the grove of trees was a bare space.
It was brown and soft underfoot as Nick walked on it.
This was the over-lapping of the pine needle floor, extending out beyond the width of the high branches.