The Old Man's Map

There's a map in this tale you won't find in any archive. It was drawn in the dirt. In March of sixteen sixty-nine a German-born fellow named John Lederer set out for these mountains with three Native men, and he did a thing men of his day hardly troubled to do. He wrote down their names. Magtakunh. Hopottoguoh. Naunnugh. That's all anybody knows of them, so I'm glad to say them out loud. Nobody can tell you where he climbed. The ridge wouldn't take a horse, so he left his with one of the three, and went up the rocks with the other two. It took all day. Next morning he claimed he could see the Atlantic Ocean, washing the Virginia shore. An optical illusion, one historian says, or wishful thinking. So the first European account of going up this ridge opens with a man seeing what he came to see. He wandered that high country in the snow for the better part of a week, till his hands and feet went numb. When he finally came down, he found his man at the foot of the mountain, waiting with the horse. One of those three names. He doesn't say which. He was back the next spring, with a Major Harris, twenty English horsemen and five Native men, going up the James. At a Monacan town they asked how to reach the mountains. An ancient man took a staff and drew two paths on the ground, one to the Mahock and one to the Nahyssan. "But my English companions," Lederer wrote, "slighting the Indians direction, shaped their course by the compass due west." He was honest about how that went, to his credit. He said it fell out with them like land-crabs, that climb up over every tree in their road and down the other side, and after a day's labor gain about two feet. "Thus we obstinately pursuing a due west course," he wrote, "rode over steep and craggy cliffs, which beat our horses quite off the hoof." For better than a week they wandered those mountains, with little to eat for man or horse. Major Harris came on a river and decided it was "an arm of the lake of Canada," and he'd have raised a pillar to his discovery if he hadn't been hungry and afraid. A compass will tell you where the needle points. It can't tell you where a horse can walk. That old man could. Lederer got three names onto paper, and I've said them for you. The fourth he never got. What I've got in its place is a staff moving in the dirt, one line and then the other, and twenty horsemen looking down at a needle.