Retracing the improbable steps of Henry Knox, guess by educated guess

OTIS — Tom Ragusa padded through thick woods in the Berkshire Hills near Twenty-Five Mile River recently, a compass dangling from his neck, and pointed toward a leaf-blanketed, half-sunken depression about 20 feet wide in the forest.

This space, not easily found, is part of a military road that Henry Knox, a young Boston bookseller, used 250 years ago to haul 60 tons of artillery over the rugged, snow-covered mountains of Western Massachusetts to Cambridge and General George Washington, who used them to force the British army out of Boston.