The first days were easy — so easy that Jakob began to suspect God was lulling their vigilance before the real test.
The road from Lancaster headed west through gentle hills, past well-kept farms, through towns with post offices and blacksmiths. The English watched the column pass — seven Amish wagons weren't unusual on these roads — but some tipped their hats, and one old man in Lebanon came out of his house and silently offered Beiler a basket of boiled eggs.
Twelve miles a day. Sometimes fifteen, if the road was dry and level. Wagons creaked, children sang German hymns, sheep bleated, Brut raced along the column, and everything felt like a long picnic.
On the third day, Rachel began to smile.
On the fifth, Daniel found a turtle in a roadside ditch and carried it for two hours until it bit his finger. He didn't cry. He let the turtle go, looked at his punctured finger, and said:
"Sie hat Angst." She was scared.
Jakob thought: with that temperament, the boy would make a good farmer.
On the tenth day, the land began to rise.
At first imperceptibly — the road just tilted slightly upward, and the horses pulled a little harder. Then the hills grew higher, the trees denser, the farms scarcer. By the evening of the tenth day, the column stood at the foot of the Appalachians and looked up.
The mountains weren't tall — not the Alps the elders remembered from their grandfathers' stories. But they were endless. Ridge after ridge, fold after fold, forested to their summits. The trail leading through them was visible as a pale thread on dark green cloth — and vanished around the first bend.
"How many days through the mountains?" asked Moses Yoder, the youngest of the men, twenty-three, married four months.
"Two weeks without rain," Beiler answered. "Three with rain."
"And if it snows?"
Beiler looked at Moses the way a teacher looks at a student who has asked the right question at the wrong time.
"Then we will pray harder."
The first ascent took an entire day.
The trail climbed steeply up a rocky slope, winding between boulders and roots. The wagons couldn't pass — wheels spun on wet rocks, horses slipped, axles groaned. The men walked ahead, clearing the way with axes — cutting branches, rolling stones, chopping roots. Women and children followed behind, leading sheep and cows along the narrow path.
Gretchen pulled. Jakob had never seen a horse work like that. She dug her hooves into the stones, strained her neck, and the wagon crawled upward centimeter by centimeter. When the grade became too steep, Jakob wedged stones under the wheels, let her catch her breath, and commanded again: "Hü!"
By noon they had covered a mile and a half. By evening — three.
The Yoder wagon broke an axle on a boulder. Moses stood over the wreckage in silence — all his tools were in that wagon, all his seeds, all his food. His wife Sara sat on a rock with a face the color of paper.
Beiler walked over, crouched, examined the break.
"Jakob, bring the spare axle. Stoltzfus — the jack. Graber — harness straps for binding. Everyone else — we camp here."
Nobody asked "can't it wait until morning?" Nobody said "we're tired." Six men worked by firelight until midnight. The women fed the children, put them to sleep, brewed coffee for the men.
At one in the morning, the wagon stood on a new axle. Not perfect — Jakob could see the wood was slightly crooked — but it would do for the mountains.
"Thank you," said Moses.
"Don't thank me," Jakob answered. "Thank the community."
These weren't just words. This was the law they lived by. A law worth living by.
Rachel never complained. Not once.
She rose first — before Jakob, before dawn — and built the fire. Cooked cornmeal mush, baked flatbread on the cast-iron skillet, brewed herbal tea from whatever she found by the trail. Fed the children, scoured the dishes with creek sand, packed everything into the wagon, and walked.
She walked beside the wagon, carrying Anna, holding Daniel's hand. Sometimes fifteen miles a day. Over rocks, through mud, in rain. In the same boots that by the end of the second week had begun splitting at the seams.
On the twelfth day, Jakob told her:
"You are stronger than me."
"No," she answered. "I simply have no time to be weak."