Because there, in the hollow cut into the side of my chimney, sat a leather satchel, cracked with age, heavy in a way that made my breath catch.
I worked it out of the brick with shaking hands. Someone had hidden it to come back for, and the north woods had kept it in the dark for longer than I had owned the place.
Inside was gold. Not coins, but nuggets and dust in little tied pouches, panned a grain at a time from the cold streams up here across a long and solitary life. And beneath the gold, a stack of carved figures, animals mostly, whittled so fine they seemed about to move, and a journal bound in birch bark.
The journal belonged to the old trapper who died up here alone before we ever came, and in it he wrote of his years in these woods, and of the wife he had buried young, and of how he filled the empty evenings panning gold he never spent and carving creatures no one would ever see.
He had no family. No one to show his gold to, no child to teach his carving. So he hid his whole solitary life in the side of the chimney and let the woods keep it.
I sat in my old chair by the cold fireplace and I read that journal cover to cover, and I wept, because I knew that loneliness. I had been living it myself, two summers into losing my own wife, opening this cabin each spring to a silence that ached.
He and I were two men who lost our wives young and loved these woods too much to leave them. Seventy years apart, we had grieved beside the same hearth.
There was no family to find, the county confirmed, just as there had been none when we bought the cabin in 1988. The gold was mine. It is worth a great deal, more than I ever expected to hold.
But it is the carvings I treasure. I did not sell the cabin after all. I could not, not once I knew what it held, not once I understood I was not the first grieving man to warm his hands at that fire.
The little carved animals line my mantel now, a fox, an owl, a leaping trout, a solitary man keeping me company across the years. I gave one, the leaping trout, to my own grandson, and told him the story of the lonely man who carved it. And every spring I open the cabin, and it does not feel so empty, because I know the woods remember the ones who loved them, and hold their treasures safe, until the next lonely soul comes to find them.