They heard the river before they saw it. A low, continuous roar that made the air vibrate and the horses uneasy. Gretchen flattened her ears and snorted. Hans shifted nervously.
The Susquehanna revealed itself around a bend — wide, turbid, fast. Spring rains had turned it into a muddy brown torrent carrying branches, logs, and ragged foam. Width — a hundred and fifty paces. Depth — unknown.
"The ford should be here," said Beiler, consulting his son's hand-drawn map. "In summer it's waist-deep."
"It isn't summer," said Graber.
Beiler folded the map and stared at the water for a long time.
The solution came from Stoltzfus — a quiet, enormous man who almost never spoke, but when he did, everyone listened.
"Raft," he said.
That was all. One word.
The men felled trees all day. Pine — straight, light, abundant. Twenty logs a foot in diameter, bound with rope and braced with crossbeams. The raft was crude but wide — three by five meters. Enough for one wagon.
"Who goes first?" asked Beiler.
"I will," said Jakob.
Rachel looked at him. Said nothing.
The crossing took three hours per wagon.
Graber devised the system — before his baptism he had worked on a log drive: a rope tied to a tree on this bank, threaded through a block on the raft, and back to shore. Three men on the raft with poles, two on shore holding the safety line. Horses crossed separately — swimming, led by halter.
Jakob's wagon went first.
He stood on the raft, driving his pole into the bottom, and felt the current pulling — not hard, but relentless, like a hand that doesn't squeeze but simply pulls, pulls, pulls. The raft tilted. The wagon creaked. Water sloshed over the logs, and Jakob stood ankle-deep in icy, muddy water.
At midstream the current strengthened. The pole couldn't reach bottom. The raft swept downstream — ten meters, twenty, thirty. The rope went taut, groaned, but held. Graber shouted something from shore. Jakob couldn't hear — only the roar of water.
He drove the pole deeper, found bottom, pushed off. The raft rocked, turned, and the current itself carried it to the far bank — at an angle, wet, but whole.
Jakob jumped onto the rocks and tied the rope to an oak. His hands were shaking. He put them in his pockets.
Five wagons crossed before dark. The sixth — the Weavers' — went at dusk, because Beiler said the water would rise further overnight.
The raft was at midstream when a log — huge, black, invisible in the dark water — struck the side. The raft tilted. The wagon shifted. Weaver's wife screamed.
Beiler yanked the safety rope. Stoltzfus leaped into the water — chest-deep — and braced his shoulder against the raft's side. Three men on shore hauled the rope.
The raft leveled. The wagon stayed put. But the barrel of salt pork — the heaviest load, standing at the edge — slid into the water and vanished in the current.
Weaver watched the dark water carry away his family's meat supply for half a year.
"We will share," Beiler said when all were ashore. "Each family gives the Weavers one-tenth of their salt pork."
No one argued. No one even sighed.
The last wagon crossed in the morning. The water had risen a foot overnight. One more day and the crossing would have been impossible.
Jakob stood on the west bank and looked back at the river. It flowed, indifferent and eternal. It didn't know seven families had just crossed it.
"Jakob!" Rachel called from the wagon. "Anna is saying her first word!"
He walked over. Anna sat on the featherbed, red-haired and serious, and looked at him with green eyes.
"Pferd," she said. Horse.
Not "mama." Not "papa." "Horse."
Jakob laughed — for the first time in twelve days — and his laugh was loud and hoarse, and Gretchen turned her head, and Daniel laughed too without knowing why, and even Rachel — Rachel, who didn't cry or laugh in front of others — pressed her palm to her lips and quietly shook.
The community stood on the west bank, wet, exhausted, one barrel of salt pork poorer — and laughed.