Compass and pine tree on a lower leg

The survey came back from the high valley on Tuesday, and I am writing before the ink has dried on my own copy, because I cannot make it agree with the compass. Brother Tobias walked the ridge line with the old brass rose and took his bearings at every spring. Each one says north lies three hands to the left of where the abbot's map puts it. I have checked the needle against the sundial in the cloister twice. It holds.

The trouble, I think, is the great pine at the bottom of the lower meadow. You remember it, the one the brothers call Old Sentry, which we drew in the margin of the first sheet as a mere ornament. Tobias says he walked from its roots due north for a full day and never once came to the boundary stone. Yet when I laid the rose over the drawing, the pine's shadow fell exactly where the stone should stand, and its trunk ran south into the ground as though it had been planted to point the way back.

Last night I went up with a lantern. The trunk does not end at the soil. Below the roots the bark breaks into a scatter of fine dots, the way ash falls from a brazier, and each dot seems to lie a little further along the line Tobias walked. I counted nineteen before my lamp guttered. I am not superstitious, Ambrose, but I have begun to suspect the forest is not lost at all. It is only waiting for someone to follow the dots to the place where the map was drawn wrong.

Send word whether the old brass rose still hangs in your scriptorium. I would rather it be checked by a man who has never seen the valley.

Yours in haste, Brother Anselm