The compass needle held still for a moment, then drifted. Not the slow, easy swing of a needle finding north, but a deliberate, unhurried turn, ninety degrees to the west, where it stopped and held. Ephraim Rucker shook the instrument. The needle returned to north.

He waited. Again it swung, the same ninety degrees, and settled, and stayed. He knelt, placed the compass flat on a rock, and stepped back. For a full minute, by his watch, it did not move.

It pointed steadily toward a clump of laurel about forty yards up a slight rise. The needle had chosen something, and it pointed the way a bird dog points at game. Ephraim stood. He looked at the laurel.

He waited for something inside it to move. Nothing moved. He picked up the compass and walked twenty paces away, set it down on another flat spot, and watched the needle turn and settle toward the same laurel. That was the first strange thing.

He was a timber cruiser, a man who went ahead of the logging companies to survey which trees were worth cutting and which were not. In the spring of 1912, at thirty-six years old, he had been sent into Cold Brand Hollow in the eastern part of Harlan County, Kentucky, to survey roughly eight hundred acres. He stood exactly six feet tall, lean as forest men tend to be, with hands steady enough to hold a compass in the rain without losing the needle. He had a wife in Whitesburg and a grown married daughter.

Above all, he was known as a man not easily frightened. That was why he had been sent to Cold Brand after other men refused to go back. Cold Brand Hollow. You can look for it on a map today and you will not find it under that name.

Locally it was called Cold Brand. Before that, Long Rick. Before that, it had a name in a language no one there had spoken in three centuries. The head of the hollow sat beneath a shelf of black limestone that ran for about a mile in an arc.

Inside that arc, the trees grew so close that even at noon in July the light was the color of wet iron. A creek ran the length of the hollow, small and slow, and it never froze, even in the hardest winters. That was the first thing anyone noticed about the place: the creek did not freeze. Ephraim had heard about that creek before he ever set foot there.

He wrote about it in the small notebook he kept in his coat pocket, the one I was later able to read. He arrived at Dockers Fork on a Tuesday, riding his mule. Dockers Fork was the nearest town, which is to say a store, a blacksmith shop, and about eleven houses strung along a wagon road. He left his mule at the smithy, paid a week’s keep in advance, and rented a room in the back of the store.

The first thing anyone said to him, when he told them his business, came from a woman in the store. She was about sixty, tall and thin, with hands that trembled slightly. She said, “You’ll want to talk to Alton before you go up there. ”

“Which Alton?

” Ephraim asked. “Witcher,” she said. “Alton Witcher. He’ll be at the smithy after supper.

Ask for him by name. Tell him you’re the man they sent, and he’ll tell you what you need to know. ”

That was the entire conversation. She did not say she was worried.

She did not ask him not to go. She said, “You’ll want to talk to Alton,” and went back to writing in her ledger. That evening Ephraim went to the smithy. Alton Witcher sat there on an overturned bucket, mending a leather saddle with fingers like old tree roots.

He was about seventy-two, small and dark and slow-moving. When Ephraim called his name, he did not look up right away. He finished his stitch. Set the saddle aside.

Looked Ephraim over the way a farmer looks at a horse he does not intend to buy, and said, “So you’re the one. ”

Ephraim said he was. “Well, sit down,” Alton said. Alton rolled a cigarette, lit it from a coal in the forge, and offered one to Ephraim.

Then he began to talk. “I’ll tell you what I told the last one, and the one before him,” Alton said. “I told your company too, but they didn’t want to hear it. That’s their business.

But you’re the one who’ll walk in there, so you need to hear it. Cold Brand goes back further than anybody knows. The Cherokee never hunted it. The Shawnee never hunted it.

When the first white men came into these mountains, people who knew the truth told them there was land here you shouldn’t set foot on unless you were ready to leave part of yourself behind. Most of them ignored it, because they ignored everything the Indians told them. Most of them died. The ones who lived learned the lesson.

My grandfather learned it. He stayed away, and he lived to be ninety-one. My father went in twice and came out both times. He never told me what he saw either time, and he died at fifty-three of a sickness nobody could name.

I haven’t been past the first bend of the creek in thirty-eight years. But I’ve lived a day’s walk from it. ”

He smoked his cigarette down to the end. Then he said, “You’ll know your watch has stopped before your compass does.

Your watch will stop, or run backward for a minute, or jump a quarter hour ahead while nothing else has moved. That’s the first thing. The second is the compass. It will settle on the wrong direction and stay there.

If you shake it to correct it, you’ll find it wants to point toward a certain way. That way is up the hollow, not out of it. The third thing is your own tracks. You’ll come back onto your own tracks after you’ve walked a straight line for two hours.

That’s the third warning. The fourth, which means you’ve already had the first three, is that the mountain is asking you to go home. If you reach the fourth and keep going, everything after that is your responsibility. You won’t be the first to keep going.

You won’t be the last. ”

Ephraim wrote all of this in his notebook that night by lamplight. I keep that notebook now. It is water-damaged in places, the ink smeared where he pressed hard, but most of it is readable.

He wrote, “Old Alton says the mountain warns you three times. The watch. The compass. The tracks.

He believes it. ” Then, “I have never met a man who did not believe in his own hollow. ”

The first day in was easy enough. He covered about ten miles of light survey work, marking corner trees with his hatchet, taking bearings from ridges he could see clearly.

The weather held. The woods were quiet the way spring woods are quiet, full of small sounds: the rustle of thrushes and towhees scratching in the leaves, the occasional drum of a grouse from up the slope. He crossed the creek four times and noticed the water was warmer than the air, strange but not impossible. Warm springs rise in these mountains here and there.

He noticed the fish in the pools were brightly colored but small. He noticed he had not seen a single snake, though it was warm enough for them. He camped that night at the mouth of the hollow, on a patch of ground that had once held a cabin. You could see where the chimney had been, and a piece of the door threshold still lay there, half-rotted into the earth.

He built a small fire, heated a can of beans, and ate them from the can with his knife. He wrote in his notebook, “First day easy. Rough ground but readable. Nothing strange worth noting.

” Then, in a different hand, as if added later, “Watch is correct. Compass is correct. Slept badly. ” He did not say why he slept badly.

The second day was different. He walked about a mile and a half farther up the creek than the day before. The trees changed. An old-growth forest keeps its own air, and Cold Brand carried that air heavy.

Tulip poplar trunks there were as wide as a small kitchen. Rhododendron rose over his head and closed the trail above him like a green tunnel. When he took out his compass at what should have been about eleven in the morning, the needle held still for a moment, then drifted slowly, ninety degrees west, and stopped. He shook it.

It returned to north. He waited. It drifted again, same angle, and held. He knelt, put the compass on a flat rock, and stepped back.

It did not move. It pointed steadily at the laurel. He picked it up, walked twenty paces away, set it down again. The needle turned and settled toward the laurel.

That was the first thing. The second thing he almost missed. He was walking a line about an hour later along the north face of a slope that dropped steeply to the creek below, and he came to a beech tree he had marked the day before. He remembered the tree.

It was enormous, and he had cut a blaze in the bark at chest height, the way a man does to find his way back. The blaze was there, but it was fresh. The sap in it was still bright and wet. The cut—by his watch—had been made twenty-three hours earlier.

Beech sap does not stay wet that long. It dries within a few hours in spring weather. He put his finger in it. It was wet as if he had made the mark that morning.

He stepped back from the tree and looked at it. He wrote in his notebook, “Beech blaze fresh. This is not possible. ” He drew a small picture of the tree with an arrow at the blaze.

He recorded the time. He wrote, “Have I lost my way? ”

He had not lost his way. His compass told him so.

His watch told him so. The sun told him so. The shape of the hill told him he was in the right place. The tree was in the right place, and the blaze cut twenty-three hours ago was fresh as a wound.

He turned and walked back toward camp with the compass in his hand, which was not his habit, but it was how he walked now. He kept his eyes on the needle, and the needle held true. He walked about forty minutes. He rounded a shoulder of the hill where the ground opened a little into a flat space above the creek, and he saw a boot print in the mud at the edge of a shallow spring.

It was his boot print. He knew it by the wear on the outside of the heel. He had worn these boots for a year and a half, and they carried a mark that distinguished them from any other boot in the county. The print faced the same direction he was walking—pointed the same way he was going.

He should have crossed his own line to reach that spring, but he had not crossed his line. He had come to the spring from an angle no one could have come from, and left a print pointing that direction. He knelt and measured the print against his boot. It was his print.

It was fresh. The edges were sharp in the wet mud, no water yet seeped into it. He stood. He looked around.

He was alone. He kept walking. Ten minutes later, at the next bend, there was another print, his print, going his way. He stopped.

He wrote in his notebook, standing there in the woods with the book balanced on his forearm, “Third warning, footprints. ” He drew one line under it. Then another. Then he closed the notebook and put it in his coat and walked a little faster.

He came out of the hollow that evening earlier than he had planned. He was not panicked. He wanted to say that to himself carefully, and I think he did say it carefully, and I think he was mostly telling the truth. He was deep in thought.

There is a difference between a man who has been frightened and a man who has been given something new to think about. Ephraim Rucker, at that moment, was the second kind. He went back to Dockers Fork, unsaddled the mule, ate at the store, and sat on the bench outside the smithy in the last daylight. After a while Alton Witcher came out and sat down beside him without a word.

They sat a long time. Then Ephraim told him about the compass and the beech. He told it plainly. Alton listened.

When Ephraim finished, Alton said, “This is your first day, is it? ”

Ephraim said it was his second. Alton nodded slowly. “You’ve had your watch warning,” he said.

“You said your watch was running fine. Was it? ”

Ephraim thought about it. He said his watch had been running fine.

He was sure of it. Alton said, “Check it against the sun tomorrow. ”

Ephraim said he would, first thing. Then Alton said, “You’re going to keep going, aren’t you?

”

Ephraim said he had to. It was his job. Alton nodded again. “Then let me tell you something I never told the others, because they were the kind that would take it wrong.

You seem like the kind that will take it right. ”

He told Ephraim about Ivory Roane. Ivory Roane had come into the hollow in the fall of 1893 with her husband Thelbert and his mother. Thelbert had bought the land cheap from a man in Pineville who wanted to be rid of it.

They built a cabin two miles up the creek on a flat between two big beech trees. They kept a few hogs. They kept a milk cow. Alton said Thelbert Roane was a stubborn man, and stubborn men do not listen to warnings.

So he did not listen when he was warned, and Ivory was the kind who followed her husband wherever he went, so she was in the hollow with him. They stayed through the winter. In the spring they came out for supplies, and Ivory bought a bolt of cotton cloth at the store in Dockers Fork. Alton saw her that day, and he said she looked healthy and easy.

She said the winter had been quiet and the cow had wintered well. That was the last time anyone saw her. They were supposed to come out for summer trading. They did not.

A man went up in July to check on them. He found the cow in the yard, alive, udder swollen so tight it was about to burst, not milked for what he judged to be four days. He found the hogs in their pen. He found the cabin door standing wide open.

He found the fire long cold. He found a pot of beans on the table with the spoon still in the pot. He found Ivory’s sewing on the bench by the window with the needle stuck in the cloth, as if she had set it down for a moment to answer the door. He found no bodies.

He found no missing clothes. He found the shotgun still on its pegs over the fireplace. He found Ivory’s shoes, one pair, beside the bed. He found Thelbert’s boots, mud-caked, on the porch.

He did not find Thelbert’s mother’s shoes. He searched and could not find them. He went outside, Alton said, and called for them. He called and called.

There was no answer. The dog came from behind the cabin, whining. It led him to the creek. At the edge of the creek, where the bank sloped down a little to form a shallow pool, he found three sets of footprints.

Ivory’s, Thelbert’s, and Thelbert’s mother’s. They went down into the water. They did not come out. On the far side of the pool, in the wet gravel, there were no tracks leaving.

They had walked into the creek. They had not come out. The sheriff came, and the sheriff at that time was Alton’s own uncle, a man named Cavender. Alton heard the story from him directly.

Cavender searched the hollow for six days with twelve men and every dog they could borrow or beg. They found nothing. They found the tracks going in and no tracks coming out. They found no sign of a struggle.

No drop of blood. No scrap of cloth torn on a thornbush. What Cavender wrote in the county ledger was: Roane and family, three persons missing under unknown circumstances, presumed drowned in a flash flood. He wrote that because he had to write something.

There had been no flood. The creek had been low. The bodies were never found. There were no bodies to find.

Alton believed it. His uncle believed it too. It was a family story the way some families have war stories. Alton said the cow was brought out by the searchers and given to a family that needed her.

She gave sweet milk for six years, then dried up and was slaughtered. That is what happened to the cow. It is the only part of that story that ends in a natural way. Ephraim wrote all of it down.

He wrote the names. He wrote the details of the cabin, because he had a good memory and he saw it in his mind while Alton talked. He wrote “presumed drowned” and “flash flood. ” He drew a small line under it.

He wrote, “No flood. ” Then he wrote, “The cabin should still be there. Two miles up, left bank. ”

The next morning he went back in.

He found the abandoned cabin on the fourth day. It was where Alton said it would be, on the left bank about two miles up. There had been a clearing once. It was now half-grown over with young poplars and rhododendron, and the cabin itself leaned to one side.

The roof had collapsed and the chimney still stood like a gray tooth. He circled it. He did not go in at first. He did not want to.

He fixed the location with his compass, which settled true this time, and recorded it in his notebook. He walked down to the creek. The bank was still there as it had been described. The pool was still there.

He knelt and looked into the water. It was clear enough to see the gravel on the bottom, and there was nothing in it that should not have been there, and yet he could not make himself put his hand in it. He tried. His hand would not move.

He wrote this in his notebook and drew two lines under it. He wrote, “The water does not accept me. ” That was the phrase he used. I have thought about it a great deal over the years.

I do not know whether he meant his hand refused, or the water, or both. He went into the cabin, ducking under the collapsed roof. The floorboards were rotted through in most places, so he walked carefully. The table was still there.

The pot was long gone. The sewing table was still there, but the sewing things were gone. On the sewing table he found a spoon. Not the pot spoon—a different spoon.

A newer spoon of a kind that was not made in 1893, because it bore the mark of a company in Ohio that had not opened until 1906. The spoon was laid carefully on the table, handle to the left, as if someone had set it down and forgotten it. He picked it up. Turned it in his hand.

Put it in his pocket. He told his wife later that he wished he had not picked it up. He said he wished he had left it where it was. He said that spoon was not meant for him, but he picked it up and put it in his pocket and walked out of the cabin.

That night at his camp at the mouth of the hollow, he took it out and looked at it by firelight, then set it on a rock a little away from him. In the morning it was gone. The rock was there. The spoon was not.

He looked around the rock. He searched his pack. He turned out his pockets. It was not with him.

He had been inside five days by then. The timber company did not expect him out for another week or ten days. He could have quit and gone home. He thought about quitting.

He wrote in the notebook, “Thinking of coming out. ” He crossed it out. Under it he wrote, “Work not finished. ” He was that kind of man.

I do not say he was a good kind of man. I only say he was that kind. He slept at his camp at the mouth of the hollow that fifth night. And that night, according to his notebook, things stopped being about the land and started being about him.

He wrote that he woke in the small hours to the sound of something walking around his fire. Not near it—around it. Slow, steady steps, the way you might walk around a table you are setting for a meal. He lay in his blanket and listened.

He did not open his eyes at first. He counted the steps. Twelve steps around the fire, then a stop. Then back the other way, twelve steps.

Then a stop. Then a third time. And the third time, a stop. And then—this is what he wrote in the notebook—whatever it was sat down on the other side of the fire and breathed.

He said he could hear it breathing. Slow breathing, not near, not far. He wrote, “Not animal, not human. Between.

” He opened his eyes. There was nothing on the other side of the fire. The fire had died to coals. He could see the shape of the woods beyond it, black on black.

He could not see anything sitting there. He heard the breathing continue for another minute, maybe. He counted his own breaths against it. His one breath to its three.

It was slower than a human breath. Then it stopped. Then, from the woods behind him, he heard his name spoken. Ephraim.

Once, in a voice he knew—and I will tell you whose voice, because he wrote it in the notebook and drew a line under it. It was his wife’s voice. Her name was Soudie. She was one hundred forty miles away that night in Whitesburg, in the house they had lived in for fourteen years, asleep in the bed they shared.

It was her voice. He was as sure of it as he was of his own name. He did not answer. He wrote later that he almost did.

His mouth opened. He almost said, “I’m here. ” He caught himself. He closed his mouth.

He lay perfectly still. He did not answer. And whatever it was, after a long silence, walked away. He heard the steps going back into the trees.

He heard them receding for a long time. He did not sleep the rest of that night. He kept the fire up. He kept his rifle across his knees.

When light came, he broke camp and walked to Dockers Fork without stopping to eat. He sat on the bench outside the smithy, and Alton Witcher came out, looked at him, and said, “Well, well, then. ”

Ephraim did not go back in for four days. He wrote a letter to his wife and sent it with a man going to Pineville.

He did not tell her what had happened. He asked how she was. He asked about his daughter. He asked about the garden.

And he asked—this was the only strange line in the letter—whether she had spoken his name aloud at any time in the past week, and if so, at what hour, and would she write and tell him. He did not get an answer while he was still there, because mail moves slowly in that country. But he learned later that she had not spoken his name aloud at any time in the past week. She had thought of him often.

But she had not spoken his name. While he waited for the courage to go back in, he sat at the crossroads of Dockers and listened. He asked some questions. He was careful about it.

He did not want to be seen as a troubled man. He asked Alton first. He asked the woman in the store. He asked a farmer named Halbert Sowder, who came in on Friday to buy nails, and it was Halbert Sowder who told him about his mother.

Halbert’s mother was Mahala Sowder, the midwife and herb woman who lived about a mile from town in a small house with a garden. Halbert said, “You want to know about Cold Brand? Go talk to my mother. She sat with a man who came out of there in 1908, and she closed his eyes at the end.

”

Ephraim went that evening. Mahala Sowder was a small woman with a bent back, clear pale eyes, and hands so scarred from her work that at first glance they looked made of bark. She was sixty-one. She sat Ephraim at her kitchen table, gave him coffee, and said, before he could ask anything, “You’ve been up there.

”

He said he had. “You came back,” she said. He said he had. “You haven’t come all the way back,” she said.

“Just so you know, nobody ever comes all the way back. But there are degrees. Some come back whole, some come back less. I’ll tell you about a man who never came back at all, and then you’ll know why I’m telling you this.

I’ve sat with four of them over the years,” she said. “Four men who came out of that hollow carrying something. One went on his way and I don’t know what became of him. One went home and shot his dogs, then walked to the river at Cumberland Falls and was found three days later a mile downstream.

One I sat with for a week, and he lived and moved to Missouri and I get a letter from him once a year, and the letters get shorter. And the one I’ll tell you about—he was the worst of them all. He was the worst because he came out with a whole body, but he was empty in the part of a man that has nothing to do with the body. Do you understand what I mean by that?

”

She waited. Ephraim said he thought he understood. She said, “You will. ”

Then she said, “Before I finish, I’ll tell you something about myself.

My grandmother knew a woman who lived in that hollow. That woman lived there before Dockers Fork existed, before anyone with a name I can give you. My grandmother used to take me up the road when I was small, and she would point to the ridge above the hollow and say, ‘There’s an old woman on that ridge who knows every soul in every house between here and Pineville, and she knows the day and hour each one of them will leave. And when your time comes, she comes down and reads your name.

’ My grandmother believed that. I don’t know if I believe it, but I’ll tell you something. My grandmother died at four in the morning on a March day, in her bed, my hand in hers. The last thing she said before she died was a name—a woman’s name.

And she said, ‘She’s outside. ’ And she smiled, and she was gone. That was fifty-one years ago. I remember it as if it were this morning.

I’m not saying that’s what came for your surveyor. I’m saying there are things on that mountain more than most people have counted. ”

Then she said, “Lester H. Hallstead.

He was a surveyor like you. ” Lester Hallstead came into the same country in the summer of 1908. He worked for a different timber company, out of Cincinnati, buying acreage in Harlan and Letcher counties. He was hired to do the same work Ephraim was doing four years later.

He was thirty-one. He was not from the mountains. He was an Ohio man who had learned surveying in a school, and he had never spent a night in country like this. That was what was said about him afterward.

He did not know what he was walking into. They said if he had known, things might have gone differently. Or maybe they would have gone the same. There is an argument to be made.

He went into Cold Brand on a Monday morning in July. He was out of sight for eleven days. On the twelfth day, he walked out. He came out of the hollow around three in the afternoon, in full sun, without his gear.

No compass. No rifle. No bedroll. No coat.

He wore his trousers and his boots and one shirt. His shirt was on inside out. His hair had turned completely white. Not gray—white.

Mahala said she saw him with her own eyes an hour after he came out, and his hair had been dark brown when he went in. It was white as milk when he came out. She was not the only one who said it. There are three witnesses to the color of that hair.

It is written in the county paper for that year, if you know where to look. He did not speak a word. He walked to the store at Dockers Fork and sat on the bench. He sat there the rest of the day.

People brought him water. He drank it. People brought him food. He ate it.

He did not answer any question put to him. He looked at people when they spoke, but he did not answer. Mahala said his eyes had changed shape. She said she could not explain it better than that.

She said his eyes were a different shape, and his face was the same face but it no longer fit him the way it had. They took him to Mahala’s house because she was the closest thing to a doctor in the country, and she was known for tending to minds that had come loose. She kept him for eleven days—the same number of days he had spent in the hollow. She said later she thought that was deliberate, though she could not say whose deliberate it was.

He slept in her back room. He would not sleep in the dark. He would not let the lamp be turned down. If she lowered the light, he woke at once and raised his hand and shook his head.

He did not speak for those eleven days. On the morning of the twelfth day, when she came in with his coffee, he was sitting up in bed, looking at the wall, and he said, in a normal voice, as if in the middle of a conversation with her, “She stood in the door for two hours. ” She stood at the door. She did not move once.

Then he lay down. Then he died. Within a minute. Mahala said his eyes were closed by his own hand before she reached him.

She said his face regained its shape in that moment. The features settled back into place finally, but he was already gone. They buried him in the cemetery at Dockers Fork. His family came from Ohio and took him home a week later.

But before they took him, Mahala said, she went through his pack, which had been brought out of the hollow by the search party sent to collect what he had left behind. In his pack was his notebook, just like Ephraim’s. And on the last page he had written on, there was one line. It read, “She is not a woman.

” That was all. Under it, three lines drawn: “She is not a woman. ”

Ephraim thanked Mahala. He walked back to the store.

He sat on his bed in the back room and wrote in his notebook everything she had told him. He copied Lester Hallstead’s line about the woman in the door. He wrote, “She stood in the door for two hours. ” He wrote, “She is not a woman.

” Under it, in smaller letters, he wrote, “So that’s what it is. ” He wrote nothing else that night. He went back in the next morning. I want you to understand—because this is something I have thought about a great deal—why he went back in.

His wife did not need the money that badly. The timber company would not have punished him for quitting. He would have found other work. That was not the reason.

It was something else. He wrote in the notebook later, on his last day there, and this is the only piece of his writing that reads like a man trying to explain himself: “If something has circled your fire, it has circled your fire. Whether you get up and follow it or not. If it has called your name, it has called your name, and it will call it again in the town you return to.

The only way out is through. ”

That was his thinking. I do not know if he was right. I know he believed it.

I know he went back. He went farther up the creek than he had gone before, past the first bend, past the second, past the third. The trees grew denser. The light failed almost completely, even at midday.

He reached a place where the creek split around a rise of black limestone. Beyond that rise was a stand of laurel, maybe two acres, and inside it the ground was level and covered with green moss, so thick and even it looked laid by hand. There was no bird sound in the laurel. He noticed that first.

There was no wind sound. He stood at the edge and listened, and he heard nothing at all. His own breathing sounded loud. His heartbeat sounded loud in his ears.

He went in. He walked, by his own estimate, about forty steps. The moss made no sound under his boots. He noticed that.

He noticed the ground felt slightly warm through the leather of his boots, warmer than the air, which was cold there—cold the way a spring house is cold in July. He walked slowly. He held his rifle across his chest in both hands. He kept his eyes on the ground ahead of him, then raised them because something in the pattern of the light inside had changed, though he could not say how.

Then he stopped. There was a woman standing in front of him. She was about twenty feet away. She stood on the moss.

She faced him. He wrote, “She did not move. ” He wrote, “She did not breathe, as far as I could tell. ” She was tall.

She wore something dark. He could not tell whether it was a dress or a robe or leaves arranged to look like a dress. She had a face. He wrote about the face carefully.

He wrote that the face was a face. He wrote that it was not a natural one. He did not write more about the face. He never wrote more about the face than that.

When his wife asked him years later what he had seen, he said, “I saw a face I do not want to describe. ”

He wrote that they stood like that for a length of time he could not measure. His watch, when he looked at it later, showed a time two hours later than it should have been. He did not remember two hours passing.

He remembered standing. He remembered looking at her. He remembered that at some point she smiled. He wrote about the smile.

He wrote, “She smiled the way a person smiles when they know something you do not. ” He wrote, “Her mouth was in the wrong place on her face to be a smile. ” He wrote, “When she smiled, I saw her teeth, and there were more of them than there should have been. ” He wrote, “Then she called my name.

”

He wrote that clearly, that line. Then she called my name—not in his wife’s voice this time, but in a voice he had never heard. A voice that sounded, he wrote, as if it came from deep under the ground, and had been on its way for a long time, and had only now reached a place where it could be heard. She said, “Ephraim.

” She said it slowly. She said it the way you might call the name of a horse you are trying to bring in from a pasture. And he wrote, “Then she took a step toward me. ” He wrote about that step.

He wrote, “She did not lift her foot. ” He wrote, “She moved without lifting her foot. ” He wrote, “She came closer without walking. ” And he wrote, “Then I turned and ran.

”

He ran back through the laurel. He ran back along the creek. He fell twice. He wrote about those falls.

He said he fell coming down a bank and thought he had broken his wrist, and found he had not. He said he fell a second time over a root and thought he had broken a rib, and found he had. He had broken a rib. He kept running.

He did not look back. He wrote, “I could hear her behind me, but I did not look back. ” He wrote, “She was not running. She was keeping pace without running.

” That was what drove him on—that she was not running, and yet she kept pace. He ran, by his own estimate, for about an hour. His legs gave out twice, and he forced them to go again. He came out of the hollow into the fields above Dockers Fork as dark fell, and he did not stop running when he came out.

He kept going. He ran until he reached the town. He ran into the store, shut the door behind him, sat on the floor with his back against the door, and did not get up for a long time. Alton Witcher came into the store an hour later.

Ephraim was still on the floor. Alton looked at him. Alton said, “Did you look at her? ”

Ephraim said he had.

Alton said, “Did you follow her? ”

Ephraim said he had not. Alton said, “Then you’re lucky. ”

Ephraim said, “Am I?

”

Alton was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Luckier than some. ”

Ephraim left Cold Brand two days later. He did not finish the survey.

He wrote a letter to the timber company. He said the area was not suitable for survey. He said the timber was not of commercial quality. He said the ground was unstable and the risk to workers would be too high.

He recommended the company not proceed with the acquisition. He signed the letter. The company received it. They did not press him.

He was not fired. He was not asked for an explanation. He worked for them eleven more years. He never returned to Cold Brand, and no one who worked for that company ever went in either.

The land was never bought. The land was never cut. As far as I know, it has never been cut to this day. There is a road that passes it now, on the county line.

If you drive that road on a spring evening, you can see the mouth of the hollow between the trees. The creek still runs. The creek still does not freeze. He went home to his wife.

She said, when I spoke to her years later, that when he walked in the door of the house in Whitesburg on the evening he came home, she did not recognize him for a moment. She said his face was his face, but she had to look twice before she was sure. She said he stood at the door for a moment, as if waiting to be asked in. Then he came in.

Then he sat at the table. Then he asked for coffee. She made it. He drank it.

He said, “I’m not going back there again. ” She said she understood. She did not ask why. She said she waited.

She said she thought he would tell her when he was ready. He told her, she said, about six years later—not everything, not about the face, not about what he ran from. He told her about the compass. He told her about the beech.

He told her about hearing his name spoken in her voice in the woods at night. He told her about the Roane family and about Lester H. Hallstead. He never told her what the woman looked like.

He never told her what he had seen at the end of the laurel. What I know of that part comes from the notebook. And I do not know all of it, because he did not write all of it. He did not sleep well for the rest of his life.

That is the simplest way to say it. He slept, but he did not sleep well. His wife said he would wake in the middle of the night and sit on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and stay that way for half an hour, then lie down again. She said he did not like the dark.

He kept a low lamp burning in the room always. She said sometimes when they sat on the porch in the evening, he would look at the tree line at the edge of their yard and stop talking for a long moment, then start again where he had left off, and she never asked what he was looking at. She said she knew what he was looking at. She said it was the same thing every time.

She told me one other thing, when I was young enough not to know what to do with it and old enough now to know I should write it down. She told it once, and only once. It was a winter midday in 1931. She had come in from the clothesline with a basket of wash, through the back door, and she heard him talking to someone in the front room.

She said he was answering in the tone of voice a man uses when he is being polite to someone he does not want in his house. She could hear his side of the conversation. She could not hear anyone else’s side. She stood in the kitchen with the basket in her arms and listened.

He said, “No, ma’am. ” He said, “I told you. ” He said, “You know I won’t. ” He said, “Go now.

” Then silence. Then he came out of the front room and saw her in the kitchen and did not look surprised to see her. He took the basket from her hands. He set it on the table.

He said, “I’ll fold these. ” He never said who had been in the room with him. She never asked. She said she went into the front room a few minutes later, for another purpose, and the room was empty, and the front door was closed and latched from the inside, and there was no one in that room but him.

She told me that once. She never told me again, and I never asked. She died in 1957 of pneumonia in the same bed she had shared with him. The last thing she said, according to my grandfather, who was with her, was that she was ready to go and hoped Ephraim was somewhere quiet.

Ephraim died in 1948 of heart failure at seventy-two. He was found at his kitchen table with a half-empty cup of coffee. His ledger was in the drawer where he always kept it. His wife lived nine more years and gave the ledger to my grandfather, who was her nephew, and it came down through the family to me.

There is a note in the ledger in his hand, dated 1942, six years before his death. It says only: “Wife heard him last night. Second time. She did not answer.

He went away. ”

I have read that page many times. I do not know how to interpret it. I know his wife lived until 1957.

I know she was in full possession of her mind at the end. I know she never once entered a wood deeper than her own yard. The last thing I will tell you before I go is this. In 1955, a hunter was lost in Cold Brand for four days.

His name was Curtis Vardan. He was fifty-nine, and he was tracking a wounded deer he should have let go. He was found on the fourth day sitting on a stump a quarter mile from the mouth of the hollow. He was fine.

He was unhurt. He said he had been sitting on that stump for all four days. He said he had watched the sun rise and set four times from that stump. He said he had not been tired, hungry, or thirsty.

His watch had stopped on the first day and never ran again. He was brought home. He lived eleven more years. He never spoke of it again except once, to his son, who told me that while he sat on the stump, he saw the deer he had been tracking pass in front of him three separate times, at different times of day, and each time the deer was less than the time before.

He said no more than that. “Less deer than the time before. ” That is what he said. His son told me something else, which the old man never mentioned, but the son saw with his own eyes.

When they brought Curtis Vardan home on that fourth night and put him to bed, his wife undressed him and washed him, because he had been in the woods for four days and needed cleaning. She found something on his lower back. A circular mark the size of a silver dollar, dark on his skin like an old bruise, but with no bruising around it. She asked where he got it.

He said he did not know. He said maybe he slept on a rock. She let it go. The mark never faded in the eleven years he lived after that.

Not by a single degree. The son helped his father bathe in his old age, and he saw it every time. It was the same mark the day they buried him as it was the day he came home. That is what the son told me.

He told me on his own porch in 1971. He was an old man by then. He said, “I don’t tell anyone that part, because I don’t want anyone looking for it on my body. ” He rolled up his sleeve.

There was nothing on his arm. He rolled the sleeve back down. He said, “But I check. I check every morning.

”

That is the whole story. I will leave you with this. The mountains held him for four days, then let him go. They have held others longer.

They are still there, doing what they do, in a hollow that is on no map you can buy. Do you have a place like that near where you live? A place the old folks do not go? A place the old folks were told not to walk?

Before you go, leave me a comment. Tell me its name. Tell me what is said about it. I read them all.

And some of them I go to see, on the days I feel brave.