The map came into his hands on a Thursday morning in the last week of November 1948, and by the following Monday, Isham Prather had a name for something he had walked past for nineteen years without knowing it was there. He was forty-seven that winter, a ranger in the Eastern Ozarks since he was twenty-eight, which meant he had been reading that country longer than most men rid their own faces. He was tall for the region, a hair over six feet, and thin in the way rangers get thin over time. His hair had gone silver at the temples the year the war ended.

He kept his father’s silver pocket watch on a chain, and he checked it not because he needed the hour, but because his father had checked it that way, sitting still on a stump, waiting for a deer that would not come. He worked out of a two-room cabin on the edge of what was then called the Sinkhorn Ridge Preserve. On paper, the preserve covered thirty-one thousand acres, and on paper its boundaries were tidy. In practice, the country did not care what the paper said.

Sinkholes opened where nothing had been mapped. Creeks ran one way in spring and another way in fall. There were hollows a man could walk into three summers running before he found the far side of them. Isham used to say the land in there was older than the deed to it, which was another way of saying the deed did not fully apply.

He was not a superstitious man in the way most people mean the word. He did not carry a rabbit’s foot. He did not spit for luck. But he had been in the woods long enough to know that certain places felt wrong for reasons he could not name, and he had learned to trust that feeling and to walk around it.

By the time the map arrived, he had been to almost every hollow inside the preserve at least twice. There was a stretch of Sinkhorn Ridge on the northeast face where he had never spent more than a passing hour, and he could not quite say why. He had made a habit, without knowing he had made it, of taking the long way around it. If you had asked him, he would have told you that the deer were not in there, that the timber was not worth serving, that those sinkholes made bad going.

All of that would have been true. He would not have mentioned that his father, who had also known that country, had told him once: “Do not camp on the north face of Sinkhorn, boy. Not because of anything. Just do not.

”

That was where the cave was on the map that Buford Coyle brought him. Buford was a hunter out of Cane Hollow, forty-four years old, a mechanic by trade, and a coonhound man by preference. He had been running his dogs the week before Thanksgiving down in Copperhead Bend, a stretch of low country a couple of ridges over from Sinkhorn. The dogs had run themselves into a cabin that Buford said had no business standing.

It was set back off a game trail up under an overhang, with the roof half sunk into itself. Buford said the wood was so old it had gone gray past gray into that soft bluish color they get before they give up. He had gone in mostly to get the dogs out. Inside, the cabin had one room.

There was a rusted iron stove tipped on its side. There was a broken chair. And there was the part Buford kept coming back to: a section of the back wall that had been chinked up with fresh clay, right in the middle of a rotten wall. Not fresh recent, but fresh compared to everything around it.

Somebody, some decades back, had taken the trouble to seal a hollow behind that wall. Buford’s older dog, a redbone he had had ten years, would not go near it. He came home that night and thought about it for two days. Then he went back with a hammer.

Behind the chinked-up section, wrapped in oilcloth, he found the map. He brought it to Isham on the Thursday morning. It was cold enough that the stove in the ranger station had been going since before dawn. Buford came in stamping his boots and blowing on his hands and not quite meeting Isham’s eyes.

He said, “I have got something I want you to look at, and I want to be shed of it. ” He laid the map out on Isham’s desk. It was a US Geological Survey draft, hand-lettered, dated at the top June 4th, 1873. It was drawn on linen paper that had gone the color of weak tea.

Somebody had taken care with it. The contour lines were done in a very fine hand, in a brown-black ink that had faded but not run. The names of the creeks and ridges were mostly the old names, from before the state came in and renamed them. Sinkhorn Ridge on that map was called Aaron’s Hill, after a man who was buried there in 1842.

Isham had seen old survey drafts before. He was not at first unsettled. Then he found the cave. It was drawn about two-thirds of the way up the north face of Aaron’s Hill, in a place that on the modern preserve map showed nothing but a stretch of timber and one small sink.

On the 1873 draft, the cave was drawn as a small crescent shape, opened toward the northwest, with a line of tight cross-hatching across the mouth. That, Isham knew, was the survey shorthand for a barrier, a wall, something man-made closing the opening. Above the cave, in the same fine hand, someone had written a single word in Latin: non aperiendum. Below it, in a different hand, thicker, more hurried: not to be opened.

Below that, in the same hurried hand: nor spoken of. Below that, three names had been written, and then, from the look of it, drawn over with a heavy line, the way you black out a word you have decided you should not have set down. Isham looked up from the map. Buford was standing by the stove, holding his hat in both hands.

“I do not want it,” Buford said. “I have had it in my house four days, and I want it out of my house. ”

Isham did not ask him why. He had known Buford long enough to know that a man like Buford would not have used those words about a piece of paper without a reason he did not want to speak.

He said, “Where is the cabin? ”

Buford told him, working it out with his finger on Isham’s own preserve map, following the line of Copperhead Bend up along the game trail toward the little sink under the overhang. Isham marked it in pencil. When Buford was done, he did not stay for coffee.

He turned at the door and said, “I do not know what your daddy used to tell you about that country, but whatever it was, he was not wrong about it. ” Then he left. Isham sat at his desk for a long time. He took his father’s watch out and set it beside the map.

He did not check the time. He simply set it there. After a while, he took a pencil and a piece of tracing paper and made a copy of the cave and the annotations. He put the tracing in his own field notebook.

He folded the original back into eighths, the way it had been folded when Buford brought it in, wrapped it in a clean piece of oilcloth from the supply cupboard, and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk under a stack of grazing permits from 1939 that he had never gotten around to filing. Then he went to see Alnie Witkam. Alnie kept the potbellied stove going at Kegley’s general store in Cane Hollow, and had done since about 1930. He was eighty-three years old that November.

He was born on a farm two miles up Buffalo Creek in 1865, the year the war ended, and he had been in that country every day of his life since. He was small and stooped, and his eyes had gone the color of skimmed milk, and he could still tell you what the weather did on any given month in 1892. Old-timers said his memory got sharper as everything else about him faded, and old-timers were not wrong. Isham found him in his usual chair by the stove, with his cane between his knees.

Wardell Kegley, who kept the store, nodded at Isham and went back to a ledger. Isham sat down across from Alnie and took the tracing out of his notebook and unfolded it on his knee. He said, “Mr. Witkam, I have got something here I would like you to look at.

”

Alnie looked. He took a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles out of his pocket and settled them on his nose. He was quiet for a long moment. His hand, resting on the head of the cane, tightened.

“Where did you get this? ” he said. Isham told him. Alnie said, “You bring me the original.

”

“I have got it locked up. ”

“Good,” Alnie said. He handed the tracing back. “Burn it.

”

Isham did not answer at once. Alnie said, “You are going to want to know things. I understand that. I know how you people are wired.

So I will tell you what I can. Then you are going to burn that tracing, and you are going to burn the original, and you are going to sit in this store with me until the smoke goes up. ”

Isham did not agree, and he did not disagree. He put the tracing back in his notebook.

Alnie said, “My grandfather was on that survey. ” His voice went flat, the way old men’s voices go flat when they mean to keep something down. “His name was Silas Witkam. He was thirty-one years old in 1873.

He had been through Vicksburg on the wrong side of it, and he had come home missing part of his left ear and most of his patience for foolishness. The government hired a party of six that spring to draft the topography of the eastern Ozark Plateau. They started in the middle of April. They were supposed to be finished by August.

They came off Aaron’s Hill in the second week of June with three men. Two were dead. One was, my grandfather said, no longer fit to be called by his name. ”

Isham said, “What happened up there?

”

Alnie looked at him for a long time. “You have to understand,” he said. “My grandfather told me this exactly one time. He told me the summer I turned twelve.

He told me because he was dying, and he wanted somebody in his blood to know it, so that his blood would stay away from it. He did not tell my father. He did not tell my uncles. He told me.

He made me swear on his Bible not to speak of it. And I have not, until this hour, with the exception of one man who is dead now. ”

He took his spectacles off. His hands were not steady.

“They were mapping the north face of Aaron’s Hill, which you people now call Sinkhorn Ridge. They had come up from the south the day before and camped on the little bench you can still find there if you look for it. My grandfather said the country got quiet as they went up. Not the sort of quiet where the birds stop.

The birds had stopped a mile back. The kind of quiet where the wind stops, where a leaf you drop off the back of your hand goes straight down and lands flat and does not turn once. ”

He rested a moment. Wardell had put down his ledger and was listening now.

“They found the cave on the second day. It was already sealed. Somebody had put a wall of dry-laid limestone across the mouth, waist high, and set two iron rings into the stone above it and run a chain through the rings. The chain had a lock on it.

The lock was old. My grandfather said it looked old the way things in a museum look old. He said the iron of it was not the iron he knew. ”

He looked up at Isham.

“Understand? This was 1873. The Osage had been moved out fifty years by then. The French had been through there.

The Spanish. There were old trappers who had known that country. Nobody in any story anybody had ever told had put a wall and a chain across a hole in Aaron’s Hill. And yet there it was, and by the look of it, it had been there longer than any story anybody could remember.

”

Alnie’s voice dropped a notch. “Two of the party were of a scientific bent. They took it upon themselves to open the seal. They believed it was Aboriginal work, and that they had made a find of some importance.

My grandfather and one other man told them not to. There was a discussion. It went about the way you would expect. The two who were of the scientific bent had the authority.

They cut the chain. ”

He stopped. The stove ticked. “My grandfather would not tell me what they found.

Not what it looked like, not what it did. He said only that the two men who cut the chain never came back out of the hole. He said the third man, the one who came out changed, was named Emmett Veaman, and that he sat in a chair on my grandfather’s porch for six weeks after and did not speak, and that when he finally did speak, he said one sentence, and then he was dead within an hour of saying it. My grandfather would not tell me the sentence.

He said only that he never repeated it in his own head or otherwise, because he understood on hearing it that repeating it was the thing you were not to do. ”

Alnie put his spectacles back in his pocket. “My grandfather and the two other survivors put the chain back. They dry-laid more stone.

They took a hand drill and set two more iron rings on either side of the first ones, and they ran a second chain. They wrote out the record you have in your notebook there, and they hid the map in the wall of the cabin under Copperhead Bend, which was my grandfather’s cabin, which he never lived in again after that summer. They went to the land office in Springfield in July and reported that the survey party had been reduced by illness, and that the north face of Aaron’s Hill had been found unremarkable, and that the tract should be marked as of no economic value and left off future work. Which is why, Mr.

Prather, you have thirty-one thousand acres of preserve on that ridge, and no road cut into that face, and nobody in Jefferson City who has ever wondered why. ”

Isham said, “You said you told one man. Who was that? ”

Alnie said, “My son.

In 1941. He was going into the Pacific, and I did not think he was coming home, and I told him because I did not want to die with it in me alone. He did come home. He died in a car three years ago, on the way up from Poplar Bluff.

I have carried this by myself since. Now you have some of it. I would rather you burn the map and forget. ”

Isham said, “Somebody chinked up that wall in the cabin under Copperhead Bend.

Somebody put the oilcloth over it. That was your grandfather. ”

“That was my grandfather. ”

“He wanted it found,” Isham said.

“He did not have to. He could have burned it. He chose to put it where a hunter someday would put a hammer through the wall. He was seventy-one years old when he did that.

”

Alnie said softly, “He did not tell me why. I have wondered. ”

“You have a guess. ”

Alnie looked at the stove.

“My guess, sir, is that he did not trust the chain. ”

They sat with that for a long time. Isham finally said, “The Latin. Non aperiendum.

That was your grandfather. ”

“That was the man of scientific bent who did not cut the chain. His name was Whitten. He wrote that out on the map that afternoon and gave it to my grandfather.

He died three years later of pneumonia. He was thirty-nine. And underneath, in the second hand, my grandfather wrote that when he put the map behind the wall. 1917.

”

Isham said, “I have to see it. You understand? ”

Alnie did not seem surprised. He said, “I am eighty-three years old, Mr.

Prather. There is not a great deal I have failed at, but I appear to have failed at persuading a ranger. So I will say this to you, and then I will be done. If you go up there, you go alone.

You do not tell your office. You do not tell your wife. If you get to that stage in your life, you do not take a photograph. If the wall is still whole, you leave it whole, and you come away, and you never go back.

If the wall is not whole—” He stopped. “If the wall is not whole, then I do not know what to tell you, because my grandfather did not tell me. And he was a man who considered his omissions carefully. ”

Isham said, “Do you think it is still there?

”

Alnie said, “I think it has never been anywhere else. ”

Isham left the store a little before noon. The temperature had dropped while he was inside. The sky had gone that flat pewter color that comes before a hard snow in the Ozarks, the color that means you have about eleven hours before the roads close.

He stood on the porch of the store and looked north toward Sinkhorn Ridge, which was one long, low back of a hill on the horizon, blue with distance. He drove home slowly. That night he did not sleep well. He did not go up on the ridge for eleven days.

He did not go up because a hard snow came in that Thursday night and stayed on the ground for a week. He did not go up because he did not want to go up. He worked his ordinary rounds. He filed his reports.

He replaced the wick in the lantern at his cabin. He drove into Cane Hollow twice to buy coffee, and looked in the window of Kegley’s store and saw Alnie in his chair, and did not go in. He read the tracing every night by the stove. The Latin was a fine hand, careful, a schoolmaster’s letters.

The English below it was in Silas Witkam’s hand, written quickly, standing up, by a man who had a decision to make and had made it. The three crossed-out names at the bottom he could not read. The line through them was thick and had been drawn with a heavy dip of the pen. Whoever crossed them out had not intended for them to be recovered.

On the eleventh day, the snow went. A warm south wind came up in the night, and by noon the ridges were bare again, except in the north-facing hollows. Isham stood at his cabin door with a cup of coffee, looked at the sky, and knew that he had run out of reasons. He packed the way he had been taught to pack in the year he first came to the preserve: two coils of manila rope, seventy-five feet each; three carbide lamps and spare charges; a hand drill; a short-handled miner’s pick; a pouch of dry oats; a tin cup; a wax-cloth ground sheet; a wool blanket; his father’s watch; his revolver, which he had drawn twice in twenty years and fired never; a pencil and his notebook; the tracing folded small.

He left the original in the drawer under the grazing permits, because he did not know what to do with it, and because he did not want to bring it up on the ridge. He drove the truck to the trailhead at Copperhead Bend and left it there. He signed the logbook the way he always did. He wrote, “Rounds.

North face, Sinkhorn,” which was true, and which was also the last honest thing about the trip. He set out on foot a little after ten in the morning. The country of Copperhead Bend was familiar. Post oak and chinkapin underfoot.

He walked past the game trail Buford Coyle had told him about and looked briefly up under the overhang where the cabin was said to be. He could not see the cabin from the trail. That was fine. He was not going to the cabin.

He crossed the low saddle onto the shoulder of Sinkhorn Ridge a little before noon, stopped there and ate part of the dry oats and drank water from his canteen and let his heart come down. Then he turned north and worked his way up the east flank of the ridge. By the time he came onto the north face, the sky had gone that same pewter color. He knew the north face.

He had said he did not, but he did. He had been through it at speed half a dozen times in nineteen years. He simply had not stopped in it. He had never made camp on it, never eaten a meal on it, never set his pack down on it.

He had passed through the way you pass through a room in another man’s house at night. He began to work along a bench of limestone about two-thirds of the way up the face. The bench ran roughly east and west. On the 1873 map, the cave sat on such a bench, with a small sink about thirty yards to the northwest of it.

Isham found the sink first. It was still there, a round throat of stone about six feet across, going down at an angle he could not see the bottom of. He knelt at the edge and looked in. He did not smell anything unusual.

He did not hear anything unusual. He stood up and walked slowly east along the bench, counting his paces. At forty-two paces he found the wall. It did not look like anything from the trail.

It looked like a piece of the bench itself. Somebody a long time ago had dry-laid limestone across the mouth of a cave in courses so careful that after seventy-five years of weather, the wall and the mountain were of a color. If Isham had not been counting, and not been looking, and not been standing at exactly the angle he was standing at, he would have walked past it, as he had walked past it before. He stopped.

He set his pack down. He could not, in fact, make himself go closer. That was the moment he later came back to most often, not what he saw inside, not what came after: that moment on the bench, with his pack on the ground beside him, and the wall about ten feet away, and the wind not doing what wind ought to do. The wind on the bench had gone still.

Not still like a lull. Still like it had been switched off. The little gusts that had been running along the shoulder of the ridge all morning simply were not there anymore. And under the stillness, there was another thing.

Not a sound, but something adjacent to a sound. The way a room feels when somebody has just spoken in it and stopped. He made himself go forward. The wall was, as Alnie had said, waist high.

Above the courses of dry-laid stone, set into the living rock on either side of the opening, were the iron rings. There were four of them, not two. Two heavier and older ones on the inside, and two lighter ones outside of those. The heavier rings showed the marks of a cutting tool on the ring itself.

The chain that had been cut in 1873 had never been replaced. On the outer rings, the two that Silas Witkam and the other survivors had set in that summer, a second chain hung. The links were as thick as a man’s little finger. The chain looked, considering its age, extraordinarily sound.

It had, however, been cut. Not sawn, not filed. Cut, in one place, as cleanly as if somebody had put a stonecutter’s chisel to a link and struck it once. Isham looked at the cut for a long time.

The link had not fallen. The chain was still hanging in the ring, but the loop was open, and the wall was no longer bound. He crouched down and put his hand flat against one of the wallstones. It moved.

Not much, about the width of a fingernail, but it moved. Somebody had, at some point recently, taken down the top course of the wall and put it back, and put it back well, but not well enough that a man who was looking for the seam would not feel it. Isham took his hand away. He stood up.

He turned in a slow circle and looked at the ground around the wall. Under a scatter of last year’s oak leaves pressed into the thin soil at the base of the wall was the print of a boot. Not his. Not an old one.

Modern rubber, the sort of tread a man would have on him now. It could not have been more than six weeks in the ground, if that. Somebody had been up here. Somebody had cut the chain.

Somebody had taken the top course down and gone in and come back out and put the top course back. And whoever they were, they had not been carrying so much as a canteen, because the ground held no other prints. Isham looked at the bootmark for a long time. Then he did the thing that he later understood he had been going to do since Buford had walked into his office.

He took the top course of the wall down himself, stone by careful stone, and set the stones in a row to the west. He crouched, and he shone his lantern into the space beyond. The cave went back. He could see that at once.

It was not a shallow overhang. The floor of it sloped down at an easy angle into dark. The walls were dry. There was no water sound.

There was no bat guano, which is the thing you notice first in the Ozarks when you go into a cave. There was not any. There should have been. The walls of any cave that mouth-size in that country would have been thick with it.

This was as clean as a swept room. He climbed over the lower courses of the wall. Inside, the air was different from outside. It was warmer than it should have been.

Not warm exactly, but room temperature, which for late November on the north face of a ridge is unnatural, and he knew that immediately, though he did not linger on it. And it was still. The way the wind on the bench had gone still, so had the air inside. There was no draw.

A cave that size and shape should have breathed. This one did not. He lit the second carbide lamp and left it burning on top of the wall, a mark to come back to. Then he went down.

The passage went about forty feet at that easy grade. The walls were smooth in a way that puzzled him, because they did not look shaped. They looked as if the stone had, over time, decided to be that shape. And that was the trouble with them, because stone does not decide anything.

At forty feet the passage opened. He stopped at the lip of the opening and lifted the lantern. He was standing at the mouth of a chamber much larger than the passage he had come down. It was roughly circular.

He judged it to be forty feet across, and the ceiling about twenty feet high, though the light did not reach all of it well. The floor was flat. That was not natural either. The floors of natural caves in the Ozarks are almost never flat.

Around the perimeter of the chamber, at intervals of about four paces, iron rings had been driven into the stone. Not modern iron. The heavy black hand-forged sort of iron that a man in the seventeen hundreds might have hammered out at a bloomery. There were nine of them.

Isham counted twice. The rings were set at about the height of a man’s chest. Between them, all the way around the chamber, somebody had cut symbols into the wall. They were not letters he knew.

They were not letters, he thought, of any alphabet he had ever seen. They were straight-edged and angular. They ran in a continuous band, unbroken, from the ring on the left of the passage all the way around to the ring on the right. They had been cut deep.

Whoever had cut them had known what they were doing. In the center of the chamber floor, there was a shallow depression about a yard across, circular, perfectly round. It looked as though it had been ground down by something turning in the same place for a very long time. There was nothing in the depression.

There was, however, a smell. It was faint. He could not have described it under oath, but he knew it. He had known it his whole life.

It was the smell of a room a very sick man has been in for a long time, after he has been carried out. Isham stood at the lip of the chamber and did not step in. He raised his lantern. He looked at the iron rings, and he counted them again.

He looked at the band of cut symbols. He looked at the depression in the center of the floor. He did not step in. He did not, at any point in his life afterward, remember making the decision not to step in.

He simply did not. He thought at one point that the depression moved. It did not. He said so to himself out loud in the dark.

He said, “It did not move. ” He said it because the alternative was to accept that he had seen it move, and he was not prepared to accept that then or ever. After that he turned and went back up the passage. He did not run.

He did not trot. He walked at the pace of a man who is telling his legs very firmly that they are going to walk. He kept the lantern in front of him. He did not look back.

When he came out into the mouth of the cave, he climbed back over the courses of the wall, and he replaced the stones he had taken down, one by one, in the order he had taken them. He was careful about the seam. He did not, however, do anything about the cut chain. He thought about whether he could carry a length of new chain up here in a week.

He thought about whether it would matter. He thought, standing there, that the chain was for something on the outside. He did not know why he thought that. He put the thought down and turned away from it.

He picked up his pack and walked off the north face. By the time he came down onto Copperhead Bend, the sun was gone. The wind, which had been absent all afternoon, came back in a slow pull from the northwest, cold and steady. Isham stood on the trail for a moment and let it hit his face.

Then he walked to his truck. He wrote nothing in the logbook that evening. He drove home in the dark. He did not sleep that night.

He sat by his stove until the coals had gone gray, and he watched the door of his cabin, and he did not know why he was watching the door. Nothing came to the door. The dog he had had until October, an old blue heeler named Rusty, had died of a growth in his belly the previous month, and Isham was still that winter forgetting sometimes that the dog was not there. He would have been glad that night of the dog.

Toward morning he wrote three pages in his field notebook, in a hand that later, when he read them again, he would not quite recognize as his own. He described the cave. He described the wall. He described the chain.

He wrote twice the phrase “did not step in. ” He wrote once, “I do not know what to do. ” He did not write about the depression. He did not, in the notebook or elsewhere, ever write about the depression.

In the second week of December, he drove into Cane Hollow. He went to Kegley’s store. Alnie was in his chair. Isham sat down across from him and did not take his hat off.

Alnie looked at him. “You went up. ”

Isham nodded. “The wall.

”

“It has been opened,” Isham said. “It has been opened, and it has been closed again, by somebody who wanted it to look untouched. The chain was cut. ”

Alnie did not speak for a while.

“When? ” he said finally. “I would say inside two months. You saw a bootprint?

”

“I did. ”

Alnie looked at his hands. He said, “You know, I have wondered for sixty years what my grandfather meant when he said he did not trust the chain. ”

“So have I, these last three weeks.

He put the map in the wall so somebody would find it. ”

“Yes. But not so somebody would go up there. ”

“No.

So somebody would know. ”

They sat with that. Alnie said, “I have a question. It is going to sound like an odd one.

When you were in the cave, did you go into the chamber? ”

Isham looked at him. “You know about the chamber? ”

“My grandfather told me about the chamber.

”

“No. I did not go into the chamber. ”

Alnie closed his eyes. “Good.

” He said, “Mia, Mr. Prather. ”

“What was? ”

Alnie’s eyes were still closed.

“The sentence. Emmett Veaman said before he died. On my grandfather’s porch, in July of 1873. ”

Isham waited.

Alnie said, “It is under the stone in the floor, and it is waiting to be walked over. ”

The stove ticked. Alnie opened his eyes. “I understand you did not step in.

”

“No. I did not. ”

“Then you did well, Mr. Prather.

You did the only thing there was to do. ”

They sat. Alnie said quietly, “Somebody else has, though. ”

“I do not know.

”

“Somebody else has, or somebody else will. ”

He did not press further. He said, “You are not going back up there. ”

Isham said, “No.

” He was not at that moment entirely sure he was telling the truth, but he said it. Three weeks later, on the second of January, 1949, a shepherd named Isaiah Coyle, Buford’s uncle, was found in his bed by his wife, dead of no assignable cause. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been in good health.

The doctor from Poplar Bluff, who had known Isaiah his whole adult life, wrote “heart failure” on the certificate, because there was no other word for it. Isaiah’s wife, whose name was Vera, said something to the doctor at the door on his way out that the doctor did not put in the certificate. She said he kept dreaming of the mountain. He would wake up and say the mountain was waiting.

Vera did not know, and would not have said, which mountain. The Coyles had land on the south side of Sinkhorn Ridge. They had grazed goats up on the shoulder there for two generations. A month after that, in the first week of February, a farm wife named Melva Ashcraft, who was thirty-four years old and lived up Buffalo Creek, told her sister that she had woken in the night with the certainty that somebody was in her house.

She got up. She lit a lamp. She checked every room and every window and every door and found nothing. When she came back to her bedroom, there were bootprints on the floorboards on her side of the bed, wet, as if a man had been standing there in the wet grass.

There were no bootprints on the sill of the window. There were no bootprints on the floor of the hallway. The wet marks stopped at the edge of her rug and started again on the other side of it. She never slept in that room again.

She moved with her husband to Poplar Bluff in the spring, and she did not go back into the country north of Cane Hollow for the rest of her life. Isham heard about the shepherd through the county clerk. He heard about Melva Ashcraft from her brother, who was on his crew for a road-clearing job in March. He did not go back up the ridge.

He drove out to Kegley’s store one afternoon in late March, and Alnie’s chair was empty. Wardell said Alnie had died in his sleep the previous Sunday. He had been fine at supper on Saturday. The coroner had put it down to old age, which is what they put down when they do not know.

Wardell said, “He left something for you. ” He went into the back and came out with a small brown paper package tied with kitchen twine. Isham opened it in his truck. Inside was a length of hand-forged iron chain, black with age, the same weight as the one on the wall, uncut.

There was a note in Alnie’s hand. It said only, “For if you change your mind. A. Witkam.

”

Isham drove home with the chain on the seat beside him. He did not go back up. He thought about it every day for the rest of that winter, and every day of the spring, and every day of the summer that followed. Toward the end of August, he went into his cabin one morning and found the bottom drawer of his desk open.

Not much, about an inch. The grazing permits were disarranged. The oilcloth bundle at the bottom of the drawer was gone. The original map was gone.

Nothing else in the cabin was touched. His revolver was where he had left it, in the top drawer, loaded. His father’s watch was on the nightstand. The tracing, which he kept in his field notebook, was still there.

There were no bootprints on the floor. There was, on the doorsill, a small patch of wet. Isham Prather kept working the preserve until 1962. He never married.

He never took another dog. He replaced the wick in his lantern every year. He drove into Cane Hollow twice a month for coffee, and he sat in Alnie Witkam’s old chair by the stove at Kegley’s store, and Wardell Kegley never asked him about it. He walked the north face of Sinkhorn Ridge two times more in his life.

Once in the fall of 1951, when a hiker went missing on the east flank and a party of rangers was sent up, Isham took the western approach and stayed on the shoulder and came off without going near the bench. Once in the spring of 1958, when a lightning storm set a small fire on the ridge and he was part of the crew that walked the burn, he kept to the fire line and did not look east. He never told a soul in either instance that he had passed within four hundred yards of the wall. He retired at sixty-one.

He moved into a small house on the edge of Poplar Bluff. He was quiet and neighborly and known for being generous with his time, and known for keeping his lights on at night. He died in 1971 of a stroke in his kitchen. He was seventy years old.

His nephew from Kansas City came down to settle the estate. In the bottom of a locked footlocker in the attic, the nephew found a field notebook, a length of hand-forged iron chain, a silver pocket watch on a chain, and a folded piece of tracing paper with a drawing of a small crescent-shaped cave on it, and above the cave, in Latin, the words non aperiendum. The nephew did not know what any of it meant. He gave the notebook and the tracing to the historical society in Cane Hollow, which filed them in a folder marked “Prather, Isham — Misc.

field notes” and put the folder in a box. The box is still there in the basement of the Cane Hollow Public Library, and the folder is still in it. The iron chain the nephew took with him back to Kansas City and used to secure the gate of his backyard, and it hung there for thirty years. It was one of the last things he sold when he moved into a nursing home.

A man he did not know bought it for six dollars. No one knows where it is now. There is a bench still, about two-thirds of the way up the north face of Sinkhorn Ridge. If you were to go there, and I am not suggesting that you go there, you would find, if you counted your paces east from a small round sink, a stretch of wall of dry-laid limestone across an opening.

You would find at the top of the wall that one course of stone is very slightly out of true. You would find above the wall four iron rings. You would find on the outer pair a length of chain that hangs open still, at a single cut link. You would not, at any point in your walk up onto that bench, hear a bird.

You would not, when you got there, feel the wind. If you leaned close to the wall, you might notice that the air inside is warmer than the air outside, which for a hollow on a north face in the Ozarks is a thing that ought to have an explanation, and does not. I would not lean close. I would not go up there at all.

Isham Prather did not, in the last twenty-three years of his life, ever again speak the name of Sinkhorn Ridge out loud. His nephew told me that. His nephew is still alive. He is very old.

He asked me when I found him whether I intended to look for the cave myself, and I told him no. And he said, “Good. It is a place that is easier to find than it is to leave.

”