from Black Hawk out to the north
country; to my grandfather's farm, then on to the Shimerdas' and to the
Norwegian settlement. Everywhere else it had been ploughed under when
the highways were surveyed; this half-mile or so within the pasture
fence was all that was left of that old road which used to run like
a wild thing across the open prairie, clinging to the high places and
circling and doubling like a rabbit before the hounds.

On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared--were mere shadings
in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever
the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made
channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deeply that the sod had
never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's
claws, on the slopes where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the
hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips
of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the
slanting sunlight.

This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when
we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw,
wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close
my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again
overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night
were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I
had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a
little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been
the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune
which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood
that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had
missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

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