On the damp first morning of September 1874, Deputy Marshal Garrett Auslin lay flat on a wet rock ledge above a hollow called Dark Hollow, on the eastern slope of the Black Mountains of North Carolina, counting chimneys through his father’s brass telescope. Eleven chimneys, nine of them smoking at exactly a quarter past six. Seven dogs. Fourteen men moving between cabins, barn, and smokehouse.

The number fourteen came from his cousin, who had come down from the hollow nineteen days earlier to the Marion courthouse, hat in hand, eyes fixed on the floorboards. The cousin told the marshal that a child had been taken, that she was not of their family, that she had been forced to walk a path she was never meant to walk, and that this walking had changed a stone on the mountain in a way that was not meant to happen. If the marshal did not go up into the hollow before the first frost, there would be more takings, because the family had decided that taking was the only way left to them. The marshal asked the family’s name.

The cousin said: Bledsoe. The marshal asked why he was being told this. The cousin lifted his eyes from the floorboards and said: “Because the child they took is still alive, and they will try again by October, and the next child they take will not be alive when they are finished, because it will be a boy, and they have decided the problem last time was that it was a girl. ”

Garrett Auslin lowered the telescope and turned to his deputy standing on the wet ground beside him, a young man named Alpha Roach, twenty-nine years old, married four months, who intended to record everything he saw that day in a leather journal that would not be read outside his family until 1971.

Auslin said: “We go in at seven through the gap, and we do not fire first unless they fire first, and we take the child, and we take the uncle, and we take every man between us and the cabin with the blue door. ” Roach said: “Understood. ” Auslin folded the telescope and said aloud, to the wet ground and the steaming cove below: “Lord, I wish I were anywhere else today but here. ” Then he rose and went down into Dark Hollow.

Nothing that followed was anything a man could prepare for. And nothing that followed was the end of it, because the end is still ahead of us now. To understand what Auslin faced, you have to understand the hollow, the mountain above it, and the family that had lived at the bottom of the hollow for four generations before he arrived. They were not there by chance.

They were not there fleeing the law. They were there because someone had been sent there four generations earlier, in the first years after the Revolution. The sending came with instructions, and those instructions concerned something on the mountain. The instructions had been written down once, and the writing was lost by about 1820.

After that, the family kept the instructions by practicing them, the way a song is kept by singing it rather than writing it down. By 1874, no living Bledsoe could tell you in words what the instructions were or where they had come from. But every member of that family could tell you what you were supposed to do on the mornings of the solstices and equinoxes. Whether you were the chosen one of that generation to walk, or you were not, every Bledsoe could tell you your part in keeping what the walker kept.

The creek was called Dark Hollow in English from about 1790. Before that, the Cherokee who lived in this country before removal called it something that translates, in the only surviving note, written by a Moravian missionary in 1781, as the place where the mountain’s side is shaded longest. The hollow lies on the eastern flank of a peak locals called Shelter Knob. Shelter Knob rises to about 4,100 feet.

The bottom of the hollow sits at 2,600 feet. The hollow was shaped like a cupped palm, ringed by three ridges, with a narrow gap at its southern end. That gap was the only way in without climbing. It could be crossed by wagon from April to October.

From November to March the gap was closed by snow and meltwater running strong enough to wash a wagon off the track into a ravine where, in September 1874, lay the remains of six wagons that had tried to leave the hollow in winter at some point since 1790. The nearest town was Marion, thirty-one miles to the southeast, a full two days’ walk, three if the weather turned, with most of a day spent on a horse that knew the way. Marion had a courthouse, a jail, three churches, and a permanent population of about nine hundred. Most of the Bledsoes living at the bottom of the hollow in September 1874 had visited Marion no more than six times in their lives.

The Reverend Elem Bledsoe, the family elder, seventy-one years old in the summer of 1874, had visited Marion three times. The first in 1827 to settle a boundary, the second in 1844 for a funeral, the third in 1861 to file a document related to the war. He never returned to it, and never would. He died on the twelfth of August 1874, three weeks before the marshal came down through the gap, and somehow everything that followed happened because Elem Bledsoe died in August and was not there to settle the family’s fate.

The Bledsoes had arrived in the hollow in 1789. The first of them was Thomas Elem Bledsoe, later called Thomas the First, born in 1756, who served in a Virginia regiment during the Revolution, came home to find a dead father and a confiscated farm, drifted south through the Carolina backcountry for six years, and reached the mouth of Dark Hollow in September 1789 with a wife, two children, a mule, a Pennsylvania long rifle, an iron pot, and a piece of parchment he kept inside the lining of his coat. The parchment is the main reason a story exists to be told. The parchment was never found.

Thomas the First spoke of it to his eldest son, who in turn spoke of it to his eldest son, down through the generations until by 1874 it was only a memory of a memory. In 1923, when a Marion schoolteacher named Miss Earline Buckholt began asking the surviving old people of the Black Mountains what they remembered of the Bledsoes, three people were still alive who had grown up hearing stories of the parchment, and all three told her, each separately, in interviews conducted over months, the same three things. The parchment was written in a language that was not English, not Latin, not Cherokee, and not any other language anyone who saw it knew. The parchment was given to Thomas the First in a Virginia tavern in 1783 by a man who gave only a single letter as a name, and who paid for the writing with a gold coin minted in a country the tavern keeper did not recognize.

The parchment bore a map drawn in black ink showing a hollow and a mountain above it, and a line running from the bottom of the hollow to the top, and seven short vertical bars crossing that line near the summit. Thomas the First built his first cabin near a spring on the western wall of the hollow. By 1795 he had built a second cabin for his eldest son. By 1810 there were four Bledsoe cabins on the hollow floor.

By 1850 there were nine. By 1870 there were eleven. The clan grew but did not spread. The Bledsoe sons who would inherit the management of the place, whose duty each generation was to keep the thing on the mountain going, stayed in Dark Hollow.

By 1874 the hollow floor held about forty-seven Bledsoes by blood or marriage, and almost none of them had ever lived anywhere else. Four generations in one hollow is enough for a family to become something other than a family. They were a clan in the old sense. They married cousins.

When they married out, either the outsider moved in and became nominally one of them, or the Bledsoe left Dark Hollow and did not come back. They were poor, but not destitute. The land was good for corn and hogs, and for a small apple orchard planted in 1814 and still bearing. They traded a little corn whiskey, bacon, and ginseng through the gap every autumn.

They paid no taxes, took part in no elections, attended no church outside the hollow. They held their own services on the hollow floor, led by whichever Bledsoe of that generation carried the title of preacher. In 1874 the preacher was Elem Bledsoe. Elem could read and write, and could recite from memory the first four chapters of Genesis in a version that did not quite match the King James, handed down orally in the family since before the manuscript was lost.

He preached the first Sunday of every month, standing on a flat rock his grandfather had placed in the hollow in 1793. The rock is still there today, on state land, marked on a 1979 geological survey map as a mysterious carved stone possibly of pre-contact origin, a description both true and untrue in a way the surveyors could not have known. Elem Bledsoe was tall, just over six feet, thin, with a white beard and dark hair. His wife Mahala had died at sixty-eight, outliving him by only four months.

He had two grown sons, Micah and Hollis, and a daughter named Rhinda, who had married her second cousin in 1855 and so had children who were Bledsoes on both sides. Rhinda Bledsoe was born in 1831, forty-three in the summer of 1874, and had borne six children, of whom four lived. Her youngest living child was a daughter named Vesta Bledsoe, seventeen that summer, born in 1857 in the second cabin from the east on the north side of the hollow floor. Vesta was the one who walked.

We have to talk about what that meant. Since the time of Thomas the First, the clan had kept something on the mountain. It was not a crop, not a mine, not a still, not a trap line, though the Bledsoes also ran a trap line and told any stranger who asked that the line was why they went up the mountain so much. The thing was not something the clan had made.

It was something they had found. More precisely, Thomas the First had been guided to it by the parchment. When he climbed to the top of Shelter Knob in October 1789 with the parchment folded in his coat lining, he found what the parchment predicted, and what he found was not what he expected. Thomas the First expected a mine.

He thought the line was a shaft and the seven bars were passages. From 1783 until that morning he thought he was going to be rich. Instead he became the keeper of something he did not understand. What Thomas the First found on top of Shelter Knob that morning was a line of polished stones running out from among the fallen leaves, visible in a few places where rain had washed the leaves away, invisible in most.

He followed the line uphill for nearly a mile. In places he had to search for the stone with the muzzle of his rifle. The stone was polished. The stone was fitted.

It was laid in rectangular blocks three feet long, eighteen inches wide, and eighteen inches thick, set edge to edge at roughly eleven-foot intervals, with joints so tight his hunting knife would not go through them. There was no mortar. There was no sign mortar had ever been washed away. The stones were cut and set with such precision that Thomas the First, who had helped build a stone chimney for his father at age eleven and knew what good stonework looked like, could not in his imagination find an equal to it in any tool he knew.

He followed the line a mile up the mountain’s crown until it came to an end. At the end the stone did not stop but turned and fanned out into a platform. Seven low steps, each faced with polished stone, each about two feet high and wider than the one below, so that from a certain angle the whole thing looked like the base of a building that was not there. Above the seventh step was a flat platform about twenty feet wide.

In the center of the platform was a shallow stone depression about four feet across and six inches deep, carved into a single piece of polished stone. The depression was dry. When Thomas the First climbed the steps and stood on the platform, he realized two things at once. He realized the platform was oriented, and he realized its orientation.

The platform faced east. The depression was set in its center so that the first direct sunlight of morning would fall on it. When he came down the steps and walked back down the causeway to the bottom of the dark hollow, he walked slowly, because he was thinking about who might have carved these stones and faced the platform toward the sunrise. And he was also thinking that the man he had met in the Virginia tavern in 1783 had not given him a treasure map, but something else, and that something else was now his problem.

He was right on all four counts. What Thomas the First worked out before his death in 1822 was that the causeway and platform had been built to receive something connected to the four points of the year when the sun stands still or crosses, and that the receiving had once been done by a family, and that this family had stopped doing it before he climbed up into the dark hollow. Thomas the First did not at first know how to do the receiving. He worked at it slowly over about twelve years.

By 1801 he had concluded that the receiving was done by one person walking the causeway on foot, in silence, on the morning of a solstice or equinox, so that the walker reached the top step the moment the first direct sunlight fell on the depression. And he decided the walker had to be a certain kind of person. He reached this decision because on the morning of the summer solstice 1800 he tried to walk the causeway himself. He did walk.

The sunlight fell. The depression did nothing. It stayed dry. The one who discovered who the walker was, was Thomas the Second, the eldest son of Thomas the First, nine years old when the family reached the hollow.

Thomas the Second grew up walking the causeway with his father on those four mornings of every year, and he saw that the walking did not work. When his first child was born in 1807, a boy named Micajah, Thomas the Second noticed something on the back of the child’s neck. The midwife had not noticed it; she was counting fingers and toes. Thomas the Second noticed it because he was looking for it.

He had been looking since the first pregnancy, because his father had told him that the man in the tavern said the walker would be known. What Thomas the Second saw on the back of baby Micajah’s neck in 1807 was a thin vertical stripe of silver hair, about three-quarters of an inch wide, running from the hairline at the base of the skull down the back of the neck about three inches. It was there from birth. Thomas the Second took the infant from the midwife, held it in his arms, looked at the stripe, and said: “This is the one.

”

Micajah Bledsoe was the first of the Bledsoe line to walk the causeway. He walked it for the first time on the morning of the summer solstice 1817, age ten, with his father staying at the base, because Thomas the Second had decided by then that the walker walked alone. That morning Micajah climbed the seven low steps in time to reach the top as the first direct sunlight struck the stone depression in the center, and the depression, which had been dry since Thomas the First first climbed those steps in October 1789, filled with water. The water rose from inside the stone.

It did not fall from the sky; the sky was clear. The depression was carved from a single piece of polished stone. The water rose as water rises when it is asked. It was clear.

It filled the depression to a half-inch below the rim and stopped. The water stayed in the depression. It did not evaporate when Micajah came down the steps. It stayed until the morning of the autumn equinox that same year, when Micajah walked the causeway again and reached the top as the first direct sunlight touched the center of the depression, and the water, which had been clear for three months, went dry.

It did not leak over the rim. It went into the stone, as light goes into a window at sunset. By the time Micajah reached the bottom of the steps the depression was dry. At the winter solstice it filled again.

At the spring equinox 1818 it went dry again. This continued in Dark Hollow at every solstice and equinox for fifty-seven years, until the death of Vesta Bledsoe of fever on the fourteenth of April 1874. Vesta was not the only one to walk the causeway between 1817 and 1874; there were four. Micajah walked from 1817 until a day in May 1843, when a falling pine struck him in the chest during a storm, and he died within the hour.

He was thirty-six. There was no walker in the next generation. The clan lived six months without a walker. During those six months the depression held the water Micajah had put there at the spring equinox of 1843, his last walk, and the water did not go dry at the summer solstice for lack of anyone to drain it.

It did not go dry at the autumn equinox either. By October 1843 the clan was in a state of silent panic. Elem Bledsoe, then forty, born 1803, who had taken the preacher’s office from his father a year earlier, examined the backs of the necks of every Bledsoe child in the hollow under the age of five, looking for the stripe of silver hair, and found it at last on the back of the neck of a two-year-old named Josiah, his own youngest son, who became the second walker. Josiah walked from the summer solstice 1846, age five, until the winter solstice 1870, when he died of a cough that settled in his chest in October and never left him.

He was twenty-nine. By then another walker had been born. There was always, in the mountains, a working assumption that another walker would be born before the current walker died. Vesta Bledsoe, born 1857, was the third walker, and the one who followed the line, identified by Elem on the day of her birth as the next walker.

Vesta walked her first causeway at the summer solstice 1863, age six. She walked, counting seasonal walks, two hundred seventeen times in her life, until her death of fever on the fourteenth of April 1874. She was seventeen. There was nothing unusual about the cause of death.

Fever went through the hollow that spring. Three other Bledsoes caught it and recovered. Vesta caught it on the fourth of April and died on the fourteenth. She was buried on the fifteenth in a pine coffin her uncle Hollis made that morning.

Her eyes, clear brown in life, had gone a pale gray by the time the coffin was closed within three hours of her death. This happened to every walker of the Bledsoe line at death, as far back as Micajah in 1843. The eyes go gray within three hours. No other change.

No one outside the family had ever seen it, because the Bledsoes never announced the deaths of their walkers. No doctor was ever summoned from Marion to the hollow. Vesta’s death on the fourteenth of April was not the problem. Fever is common, and walkers die.

The problem was what the family discovered in the two weeks after her burial: there was no walker in the generation behind her. Four children had been born in the hollow between 1865 and 1873. All had been examined at birth. None of them had the stripe.

Every earlier generation had assumed another child would be born with the stripe before the current walker died. The gap would close itself. On the fourteenth of April 1874, the spring equinox walk Vesta had made eighteen days earlier, on the twenty-seventh of March, was still in effect. The water was in the depression.

It would stay there until the summer solstice walk scheduled for the morning of the twenty-first of June, nine weeks away. Elem Bledsoe called the family together on the afternoon of the fifteenth of June, the day after Vesta’s burial. Every Bledsoe over twelve was present. He stood on the flat rock his grandfather had placed in 1793.

He told the family there was no walker. He told them the solstice walk was nine weeks away. He told them they would pray. He told them one of the pregnant Bledsoe women would give birth before the solstice, and the child would carry the stripe.

Two women were pregnant. One, Melba, a niece of Rhinda, was due in late May. The other, a cousin named Tamar, was due in early July. Melba’s child would come in time.

Tamar’s child would not. Melba gave birth to a boy on the twenty-third of May. The boy was healthy. Elem examined him within the hour.

The boy did not have the stripe. The hair on the back of his neck was dark, like his father’s. The boy lived a full life and died in 1953 in a boarding house in Knoxville, where he lived under a name that was not Bledsoe. He was not the walker.

Elem knew it when he turned the child in his hands. He said nothing to Melba. He handed the child back. He left the cabin.

He left the hollow through the gap for the first time in thirteen years. He sat on a stump on the next ridge for about three hours. Then he walked back. Even if Tamar’s child had the stripe, which was uncertain, Tamar’s child would not come in time.

Even if the child came in time, a newborn cannot walk the causeway. The walker must climb the seven steps on his own feet. Vesta first walked at six, Josiah at five. Even if Tamar’s child were the walker, and the clan could wait until the child was old enough, the gap between the spring equinox of 1874 and the next possible walk by the child would be at least five years.

The water would stay, and the sun would rise on the solstice. Nothing in the clan’s records told them what would happen during those five years. Nothing in Elem’s upbringing, nothing in the lost parchment. There was no precedent.

The family did not know the purpose of the depression, or what the water was that filled it, or what the sunlight did to the center of the stone. They had walked for four generations without being able to say why. It was Hollis Bledsoe who proposed the other way. Hollis was Elem’s second son, Rhinda’s brother, Vesta’s uncle.

He was forty-eight, lean, short-bearded, steady with a rifle, known for making decisions quickly and holding to them. He had not been raised to be the preacher. His older brother Micajah, named for the first walker, had been raised to be the preacher, but died of a horse kick in 1857. Elem had then intended to raise Hollis to the office but found him lacking in steadiness.

He did not pass on the title, which is why Hollis remained a preacher until he was seventy-one. Hollis had developed a way of acting without consulting his father. When the walking became the family’s problem on the fifteenth of April, it was Hollis who proposed, three nights later, in talk with his wife, his cousin Hershel, and his nephew Clyde, what the family would later call, in the years when they spoke of it at all, “the other way. ”

The other way was this: if the walker was not born into the family in time, the walker would have to be brought in from outside.

The silver stripe, as far as the family knew, appeared only on Bledsoe children. But the family was not certain it appeared only on Bledsoes. The manuscript, as far as any of them knew, did not say the walker had to be of a particular line. It said the walker would be known by a mark on the back of the neck.

And if that mark appeared on a child who was not a Bledsoe, then a child would be found outside the hollow with the mark, brought into the hollow, and walked on the solstice. His wife, Hershel, and Clyde did not agree at once. They asked how they would find such a child. Hollis said they would look.

They asked where. Hollis said they would begin with the children within a day’s walk of the gap. They asked what they would do if the parents would not give up the child. Hollis said they would decide that when the time came, but the solstice was the twenty-first of June, and there was no time to hesitate.

They did not tell the Reverend Elem Bledsoe. They did not tell Rhinda. They did not tell any other adult Bledsoe in the hollow. Hollis, Hershel, and Clyde began in the last week of April to walk out through the gap and move through the hills for roughly ten miles in each direction, examining the backs of children’s necks.

They did it covertly, under a story about looking for stray hogs. They examined, from a distance, the backs of the necks of about forty children in the surrounding country over three weeks, and found the stripe on none of them. On the morning of the sixth of June, Thaddeus Treadway, a government surveyor from Virginia, contracted by the state of North Carolina to survey a long-disputed boundary of a tract on the eastern slope of the Blacks, pitched his tent in a flat spot about ten miles southeast of Dark Hollow, half a day’s walk from the gap. He had with him his nine-year-old daughter, Rowena, whom he had brought because her mother had died in Richmond the previous winter.

Rowena was a thin, dark-haired girl, polite to strangers, eager with her father’s instruments, pressing Black Mountain flowers between the pages of a notebook. On the morning of the eighth of June, after Hollis Bledsoe and Hershel had watched the surveyor’s camp for two days, they came out of the laurel on the north side of the camp and saw Rowena Treadway sitting on a stump beside her father’s tent, her hair pinned back in a loose bun because the morning was warm. From about twelve yards away, through the laurel, Hollis Bledsoe saw on the back of Rowena Treadway’s neck, between the base of her skull and the collar of her dress, a thin vertical stripe of silver hair, about three-quarters of an inch wide and three inches long. He did not move for several minutes.

He watched her father come out of the tent, ask her a question, then walk up the hill carrying a brass instrument on a tripod. He watched her stand and press a flower into her notebook. He watched her for twenty minutes. He turned to his cousin Hershel, sitting beside him in the laurel, and said: “That is the walker.

” Hershel said: “You can’t know that from here. ” Hollis said: “I can know it from here, and I have known it for twenty minutes, and you will help me take her. ”

They did not take her that morning. They took her two days later, on the morning of the tenth of June, during the two hours her father was on the hill with the brass instrument while the chainmen on the far ridge called out a line.

Rowena was alone in camp, reading. Hollis and Hershel came out of the laurel. Rowena saw them. She stood and said: “Good morning.

” Hollis said: “Good morning. ” He asked if her father was in the tent. She said: “No, sir, he is on the hill. ” He told her to come with them, because her father had sent them to bring her to the survey site.

Rowena, nine years old, raised by a man careful to notice what was wrong, said: “I would like to see my father’s letter. ” Hollis said there was no letter. Rowena said she would wait in camp until her father returned. Hollis said that was not possible.

Hershel took her by the arm. Rowena made a single cry. Hollis put his hand over her mouth. They carried her up the hill to the north, away from her father’s work and the chainmen.

Within two hours they were five miles inside the country, moving toward Dark Hollow. By nightfall she was in the hollow. The Reverend Elem Bledsoe learned of Rowena at midnight on the tenth, when Hollis came to his cabin with the child wrapped in a wool blanket and laid her by the fire. Elem looked at the child and saw she was asleep.

She had drunk a cup of corn whiskey and molasses in the first hour of her journey, and that cup was enough to keep her sleeping most of the day. Elem looked at his son and asked: “What have you done? ” Hollis said: “I found the walker. ” Elem said: “That is not our walker.

” Hollis said: “There is a stripe on the back of her neck. Come and see. ” Elem Bledsoe, seventy-one years old, who had buried his seventeen-year-old granddaughter three weeks earlier, who had been searching for two months for the stripe of silver hair on the back of a Bledsoe child’s neck, knelt by the fire and lifted the hair from the back of Rowena Treadway’s neck and saw a vertical stripe of silver hair, three-quarters of an inch wide and three inches long, running from the hairline down the back of her neck, exactly as it should be. Exactly as it had been on his daughter, and his nephew, and his father, and his grandfather.

He knelt a long time. He did not speak. Then he stood and said to his son: “You have buried us all in the ground. ” Hollis said: “No, Father.

I have kept us all out of it. ”

Elem Bledsoe died eight weeks later, on the twelfth of August. He did not die of shock. He died of a mild heart seizure an hour after supper.

He had been eating a bowl of beans and cornbread. He finished the beans, set the bowl on the table, and said he wanted to lie down. He walked to his bed, lay down, and died within the hour. During the eight weeks between the tenth of June and the twelfth of August, he did two things his family would remember.

On the morning of the twenty-first of June, the summer solstice, he took Rowena Treadway out of the hollow, walked her up the polished stone causeway to the top of Shelter Knob, to the base of the seven low steps. And every evening between the tenth of June and the twelfth of August, he sat on the porch of his cabin after supper and watched the mouth of the gap at the southern end of the hollow, the way a man watches a road he is expecting a rider on. The walk of the twenty-first of June 1874 was not a walk in the sense of the fifty-seven years that had come before. Rowena Treadway did not want to walk.

She had been in the hollow eleven days. She was fed, locked in a back room at night, allowed to sit by the spring in the day. Hollis, Hershel, and Rhinda, who had been brought into the plan on the fourth day, told her that if she walked a certain path up the mountain on a certain morning, climbed the seven steps at the top, stood on the upper platform, and let the sunlight touch a stone in the center, she would be allowed to go home. Rowena asked where her father was.

They told her he was looking for her, and that if she walked the path and climbed, they would take her out through the gap and leave her where he could find her. Rowena knew she was being lied to. Nothing in these people’s speech sounded like the speech of people who would let her go. She also knew she had no way to leave the hollow alone.

The gap was watched, the cabin was watched, the spring was watched. She decided to do what they asked and see what happened. On the morning of the twenty-first, before dawn, Elem Bledsoe, Rhinda, and Hollis took Rowena out of the hollow and up to the top of Shelter Knob. The causeway was wet with dew, the air still, and no one spoke the whole way.

They reached the base of the seven steps about twenty minutes before sunrise. Elem Bledsoe pointed to the top, then to the center of the upper platform, and gestured for Rowena to climb. She looked at him, then climbed. She climbed the seven steps and stood on the upper platform, looking down at the depression in the center, which was dry, because Vesta Bledsoe’s spring equinox walk had been drained by the mountain in the usual way at the usual hour.

The solstice walk was supposed to refill it. Rowena stood on the upper platform. The sun came over the ridges to the east. The first direct sunlight struck the center of the stone depression where Rowena was standing.

And nothing happened. Nothing happened for a slow count of twenty. The sunlight was on the stone. The depression was dry.

Elem stood at the base of the steps with his face in his hands. Rhinda stood behind him. Hollis stood behind Rhinda. After a slow count of about thirty, the stone depression began to fill with water, but it did not fill the way it had filled on all of Vesta Bledsoe’s two hundred seventeen walks.

It filled slowly, the way a well fills. It filled unevenly. The water was not clear. It was a dull dark color, like weak tea.

It did not fill to a half-inch below the rim and stop. It filled to within an inch of the rim and stopped. There was a slight motion in it, the motion of water when something pushes it from below. Rowena, still on the upper platform, looked into the water and said aloud, to the three Bledsoes at the base of the steps: “I think there is something looking at me.

” Elem Bledsoe closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands and did not lift his head for a long time. They walked Rowena back down the causeway. They brought her back to the hollow. They locked her in the back room of Hollis’s cabin.

Over the next three days they discovered three things. The dogs, which had gone silent throughout Vesta’s walks and resumed barking the moment she returned, did not bark for a full twenty-six hours after Rowena’s walk, lying with ears back, refusing to eat. The water in the stone depression, now watched by alternating pairs of Bledsoe men who climbed the causeway twice daily, was not draining at the usual rate and was not steady; it was slowly rising about a quarter-inch every twelve hours, and by the evening of the twenty-fourth of June it had reached the rim of the depression, something it had not done in fifty-seven years. And the hair on the back of Rowena Treadway’s neck, which had been three-quarters of an inch wide at the hairline, was now a full inch, and the silver stripe that had run three inches down her neck now ran four, widening about a quarter-inch a day.

Whatever was happening at the top of the causeway was also happening on the back of a nine-year-old girl locked in the back room of Hollis Bledsoe’s cabin. Elem Bledsoe watched the gap for the whole eight weeks between the twenty-first of June and the evening of the twelfth of August, waiting for Thaddeus Treadway, the deputy marshal, anyone who might come to end what his son had begun. No one came. Thaddeus Treadway was searching, but he was searching in the wrong direction.

On the morning of the tenth of June, when he came back from the hill and found Rowena’s book on the stump and the camp empty, he assumed at first she had wandered off. By the morning of the eleventh he had walked seven miles south to the nearest settlement and sent a rider to Marion. By noon on the eleventh a party of fifteen men was moving north from Marion. By the fourteenth of June the search covered forty square miles of ridges and hollows without a trace.

The search never turned northwest toward Dark Hollow, because it was on no map the search party used. The search lasted sixteen days and ended on the twenty-sixth of June. Thaddeus Treadway stayed in the field with his instruments and his daughter’s pressed flowers for three more weeks, because he could not leave the country where she had last been. On the eighteenth of July he left, went to Marion, filed a report, took a stage toward Richmond, and began writing letters.

His letters did not reach Deputy Marshal Garrett Auslin in Marion. They reached the United States Marshal’s office in Raleigh, where they were filed among a stack of unresolved missing-children cases, nineteen of them at that time. Garrett Auslin did not see that stack until October. It was not the letters that brought Garrett Auslin to Dark Hollow in September 1874.

It was his cousin. The cousin was a Bledsoe, named Lanson. Lanson was Hollis’s nephew, forty-one in 1874, married to a woman from the next ridge over, father of three. He had married in 1864 a girl whose family refused to go up through the gap, so Lanson had left Dark Hollow and built a cabin on the ridge above his wife’s family’s land, about four miles east of the gap.

Lanson had not been part of Hollis’s plan. He was not told of it until the twentieth of June, when he came up through the gap for the first Sunday service, and his cousin Hershel, drunk since morning, unable to look his cousins, aunts, and uncles in the face since the morning of the twenty-first, took him aside behind the preacher’s cabin and told him what the family had done. Lanson Bledsoe did not go to the deputy marshal that day, or the next, or the next week, or the next month. He returned to Dark Hollow on the first Sunday of July and the first Sunday of August.

On each visit he saw Rowena alive in the back room of Hollis’s cabin, growing thinner, the stripe on her neck widening, his cousins drinking heavily. He went home. On the twenty-seventh of August, Lanson Bledsoe came out of his cabin, saddled his horse, and rode to Marion. He reached the courthouse at a quarter past four and asked for the deputy marshal.

He slept on a bench. At eight twenty-eight the next morning Auslin came in, the clerk gestured to him, and Lanson stood, took off his hat, looked at the floor, and said: “There is a child in Dark Hollow who was taken, and the family will try again by October. ”

Garrett Auslin took three days to form a party. He took eleven men.

He took Deputy Marshal Alpha Roach, twenty-nine, married four months. He took a Marion physician named Benelvik, fifty-four, a doctor in Marion for twenty-two years, with a daughter the age of the missing child. He took eight men sworn in for the occasion, local farmers who knew the ridges, former Union soldiers who had stayed in Marion after the war, clerks who could carry a rifle. He had Lanson draw a map of the hollow floor on heavy paper.

He asked Lanson to mark the cabin where Rowena was held, the cabin with the blue door, second from the east on the southern side. Then he asked him to say when the next walk was. Lanson said the autumn equinox walk would be on the morning of the twenty-third of September, and if they came before that, Rowena would still be with the family, but if they came after, it was unclear, because he did not know what the family would do with her after the autumn walk, and he did not want to know. Garrett Auslin decided to come before.

He decided to come on the first of September, which gave him three days to reach his position. He left Marion on the night of the twenty-ninth of August. He moved his party up through the ridges in two days, camped two nights without touching water, and placed his party on the ridge above Dark Hollow on the night of the thirty-first of August. In the small hours of the first of September he lay on his stomach on the wet ground beside Deputy Alpha Roach and counted eleven chimneys through his father’s telescope.

What happened on the floor of Dark Hollow between 7:06 and 7:41 on the morning of the first of September is described in detail in two surviving accounts. The first is the official report Garrett Auslin filed with the United States Marshal in Raleigh on the eleventh of September. The second is the private journal of Deputy Alpha Roach, kept all his life and given by his granddaughter to a nephew in 1971. The two accounts agree on the sequence of events, but Roach’s account is the more detailed.

The party came down off the ridge at 7:06 in two columns, five men on the east column led by Roach, six men and the deputy marshal on the west. Rifles ready. A dog began barking at 7:07, about thirty seconds after the first Bledsoe woman on the north side saw a man in a dark coat come out of a laurel thicket sixty yards from her door. The woman screamed.

The scream brought men out of their cabins. As the men came out armed, Hollis Bledsoe came out of the second cabin from the east on the south side, a long rifle in his hands and a pistol in his belt, and saw the deputy marshal coming toward him with ten men. He stopped at the door and raised the long rifle to his shoulder. In Roach’s journal there is a sentence: “I think he aimed at the marshal for a moment, and I think he lowered the rifle because he knew he would miss.

” Hollis lowered the rifle, but he did not fire. He stood at the door. Garrett Auslin approached him, pistol drawn, to within twenty feet, and asked: “Hollis Bledsoe, where is the child? ” Hollis said: “In the back room, Marshal, and I will take you to her, and then this will be over.

” But it was not over. Three of Hollis’s cousins, coming around behind the smokehouse from the west, fired on the east column. The first bullet caught a clerk in the thigh, the second a local farmer in the shoulder, the third missed. Roach’s column returned fire, and two of the Bledsoe men fell in the yard between the smokehouse and the barn, while the third ran back into the smokehouse.

There was about six seconds of silence as both sides reloaded. In those six seconds Hollis went back into his cabin and did not come out, and Auslin followed him. Roach, on the other side of the hollow, found his column pinned behind the barn by fire from the smokehouse and could not see what was happening at Hollis’s cabin. He wrote in his journal: “I heard three shots from the marshal’s direction in the cabin of the uncle, and for about a minute I did not know who was firing and who was hit.

”

Three shots. The first was Hollis Bledsoe firing at Auslin from the door of the back room, and missing by about four inches because his hand was shaking too badly to hold the pistol steady. The second was Auslin returning fire and hitting Hollis Bledsoe in the chest, about two inches above the heart. The third was Rhinda Bledsoe, who had been in the back room with Rowena when the shooting started outside, who came out of the room when she heard the first two shots, snatched her brother Hollis’s pistol from his hand as he fell, and fired at the deputy marshal.

Her bullet caught Auslin in the left arm just above the elbow, breaking the bone, and her next shot would have hit his chest or head had not Rowena Treadway, nine years old, eleven weeks in the back room, come out of the room behind Rhinda and put her two small hands on the small of Rhinda’s back and pushed her. Rhinda fell forward. The pistol fired into the ground. Auslin, bleeding, stepped forward, wrenched the pistol from Rhinda’s hand, picked up Rowena Treadway in his good arm, and carried her out of the hollow, down along the hollow floor past the barn where Roach had the smokehouse men pinned, past the burning woodpile one of the Bledsoes had set to flush out a cousin, past the preacher’s rock in the middle of the hollow, and out through the gap at the southern end.

He did not put her down until he was five hundred yards out, where he handed her to Dr. Benelvik, waiting with the horses. Then Garrett Auslin went back into Dark Hollow with his left arm hanging and his pistol in his right hand, and he and his deputies finished what they had come for. Nine Bledsoes died in Dark Hollow between 7:06 and 7:41.

Hollis died in his cabin. Rhinda did not die that day. She was arrested, taken out through the gap in a wagon, and held in the Marion jail until her trial in November. The other eight were cousins and nephews, shot in the yard between the smokehouse and the barn, and in the clearing before the preacher’s cabin.

Three of them were hanged in Marion on the eighteenth of November 1874, after a four-day trial. Rhinda was one of the three. Hershel was another. Clyde was the third.

The remaining thirty-eight Bledsoes were given an option by the state under a court order unusual for the time: stay in Dark Hollow on condition of taking no new land, building no new cabins, and submitting to monthly inspection by the sheriff, or leave. Twenty-one stayed. Seventeen left, scattering south and west, most into Tennessee, and abandoned the name Bledsoe within a generation. By 1900 only eleven Bledsoes remained in Dark Hollow.

By 1920 only four. By 1930 none. The cabins were abandoned. The preacher’s roof collapsed in a storm in 1937.

By 1945 nothing was left on the floor of Dark Hollow but the preacher’s rock in the middle and the stone foundations of three cabins. In 1948 the hollow was taken into the state forest by eminent domain. In 1952 it was closed to logging. In 1956 it was closed to grazing.

In 1961 it was closed to any permanent habitation. It has been closed ever since. Rowena Treadway was taken to Marion in the back of the same wagon that took Rhinda to jail, though she was placed at the opposite end under the care of Dr. Benelvik, who held her hand for the entire thirty-one miles.

She was returned to her father on the morning of the second of September. Thaddeus Treadway had arrived in Marion two days earlier, found by a rider Auslin had sent from his camp on the night of the thirty-first of August, and had been waiting at the courthouse since the night before. He had not slept. When the wagon stopped, he was standing on the steps.

He saw his daughter sitting in the straw. He did not speak. He came down, and he lifted her in his arms as Auslin had lifted her from the hollow. She was conscious.

She was thin. The silver stripe on the back of her neck had grown to two inches wide and eight inches long, running from her hairline down her spine, still growing. Thaddeus carried her into a room at the Marion hotel. Dr.

Benelvik followed with his bag. The father, the doctor, and the child spent that evening and all of the next day in the hotel room. What passed in that room was recorded by Dr. Benelvik in a notebook he kept for difficult cases.

What Rowena told him on the afternoon of the third of September, while her father sat in a chair by the window, was this. She told him the Bledsoes had taken her because they needed her to climb a hill and stand on a stone. She told him she had climbed the hill once on a morning she thought was June and stood on the stone. She told him the stone had filled with water while she stood on it, and that the water was darkish.

She told him that something had looked at her from the water. She did not say what it looked like. Dr. Benelvik wrote that he asked her twice to describe it gently, and both times she said only that it looked at her.

She told him that after she came down, the Bledsoes locked her in a room. They came in once a day to feed her. They looked at the back of her neck every evening. And one evening a woman named Rhinda said to a man named Hollis, within Rowena’s hearing, that the stripe was becoming wrong.

It was wider than it should be. If it kept growing at that rate, the child would not stay a walker, she would become a thing in the water. Rowena did not understand the sentence then, but she had repeated it to herself every night since, trying to understand it. Dr.

Benelvik recorded it verbatim. After that day, the records suggest, Rowena never again spoke of Dark Hollow. Her father took her to Richmond on the sixth of September. She lived with him until his death in 1891.

She never married. For the last thirty years of her life she worked as an archivist at the Virginia Historical Society. She died in 1946 at eighty-one. The silver stripe on the back of her neck, two inches wide on the morning she was returned to her father, began to narrow about four weeks later, and had returned to its original three-quarters of an inch width and three-inch length by the end of 1875, and stayed that way for the rest of her life.

She was buried in Richmond. She asked in her will to be buried with the notebook of pressed flowers she had kept on the mountain when Hollis Bledsoe and his cousin came out of the laurel. The notebook was placed in the coffin with her. She was buried on the morning of the eighth of November 1946.

Her eyes, dark brown in life, had gone a pale gray by the time the coffin was closed. The undertaker recorded it on the form he filed with the state of Virginia. The form survives in the Virginia State Archives. The three hanged Bledsoes died on the eighteenth of November in the public square behind the Marion courthouse at a quarter past ten.

Rhinda was buried first, then Hershel, then Clyde. They were buried in a single plot at the north end of the Marion cemetery. The plot was unmarked at the time of burial. In 1904 an anonymous donor placed a plain granite marker.

The marker says only: Three Bledsoes died here November 18, 1874. The marker is still in the Marion cemetery today, overgrown. No one tends it. It is still legible.

The twenty-one Bledsoes who stayed in Dark Hollow after the trial never completed another walk. There was no walker among them, and none would be born among the children born to them over the next forty years. The cabins were abandoned. No Bledsoe visited the depression above the causeway after the autumn equinox of 1874, as far as has been established.

The water that filled the depression on the morning of the twenty-first of June did not go dry that day, for lack of anyone to walk the causeway and drain it. It stayed through the winter of 1874 and spring of 1875, then summer, autumn, winter. In October 1875, Deputy Alpha Roach examined the depression when he climbed Shelter Knob with a judge from Raleigh investigating a petition Thaddeus Treadway had filed for a formal inquiry into whether the Bledsoe hollow should be opened up. The water was in the depression, level with its rim, the color of weak tea.

Alpha Roach wrote in his journal that the judge dipped his finger in the water and withdrew it immediately, saying: “Shall we go back now, please. ” The judge’s petition did not advance. It was denied, and the water stayed. In October 1891, a traveling Methodist preacher named the Reverend Josiah Kincaid, seven years working the Black Mountains and the only outside preacher the remaining Bledsoes had allowed into the hollow since the hangings, was summoned to the bedside of Hershel Bledsoe the Second, younger brother of the hanged Hershel, a man who had taken the name in mourning for his brother, a practice the family had adopted, and who was dying at fifty-three of what the preacher described as a slow kidney failure, likely cancer.

Hershel the Second had not been part of the plan to take Rowena. He had been twenty-three on the morning of the raid, in the smokehouse when the shooting started, and survived by crawling out under the floorboards. He stayed in Dark Hollow. On the night of the eighteenth of October 1891, as the Reverend Kincaid sat by his bed in the cabin that had been Hollis Bledsoe’s, Hershel the Second asked the preacher if he would hear a confession.

The preacher, a Methodist who did not hear confessions in the Catholic sense but understood what the dying man was asking, said he would listen to what Hershel had to say. Hershel the Second spoke for about four hours, and the preacher did not interrupt. The preacher later recorded in his journal what Hershel said, and the journal is now held in the Methodist archives of western North Carolina. The important passage comes near the end of the four hours, where Hershel was describing the morning of the twenty-first of June 1874, when one of the Bledsoe men watching the walk from the base of the causeway.

He said that when the first direct sunlight struck the center of the stone depression at the top of the platform, and the water rose slowly and darker than usual, and Rowena said from above that something was looking at her, every Bledsoe man standing at the base of the steps looked up and saw the child standing there, and also saw, in the air just behind the child, something that was not a shape, not a shadow, not merely a trick of light, but was there, and was looking down the causeway toward the men at the base of the steps, and was looking at them the way one looks from a window at something small moving in a yard. Then the preacher recorded the following sentence verbatim. “We kept a window shut for four generations with the walkers, and that morning we opened it from the wrong side because the walker was wrong. And what was on the other side of the window saw us for the first time.

And ever since, Reverend, I have slept with the lamp lit every night of my life, because I believe it saw me in particular. ”

The Reverend Kincaid did not publish the content of Hershel’s confession. He kept it in his journal. He died in 1907, and his daughter gave the journal to the Methodist archive in 1909.

The paragraph concerning Hershel Bledsoe sat unfiled in a box in the basement of a Methodist seminary in Greensboro from 1909 until the summer of 1967, when it was received by Dr. Garner Pyle, who had been working on the Bledsoe archive for two years, and who had written to all the major Protestant denominations active in the Black Mountains in the second half of the nineteenth century. A reply came from the seminary archivist saying a record existed and he was welcome to see it. Between Kincaid’s confession night in 1891 and Miss Earline Buckholt’s oral history project in the 1920s, the Bledsoe case was only a local rumor told around general-store stoves on winter nights, reduced in the minds of Marion people to a simple story of a backward clan that had kidnapped a child and been shot or hanged for it.

The thing on the mountain was not part of the public story. The causeway and platform and the water that did not drain were not part of it. The polished stone had been seen only by Deputy Alpha Roach and the judge in October 1875, by two state surveyors in 1883 who did not record it because they did not know what it was, and by Miss Buckholt herself, who climbed Shelter Knob on the morning of the spring equinox 1925, accompanied by a seventy-year-old mountain man named Hoyt Lanning, who agreed to show her the place where the Bledsoes used to walk. What Miss Buckholt saw that morning is recorded in her field notes, written in 1927, now in the Marion county library.

She climbed the causeway with Lanning. It was mostly covered in leaf litter, but Lanning knew where to brush the leaves aside, and the polished stone was still there, the joints still as tight as they had been the day Thomas the First walked it in October 1789. She reached the base of the seven low steps. She climbed to the top.

She stood on the platform. The depression in the center was full of water. The water was the color of weak tea. It was level with the rim.

Miss Buckholt wrote that the water was still, with no leaf on it, no insect on it, no insect flying over it, although the morning was warm and the forest around the platform was thick with insects in the early morning. She wrote that she stood on the upper platform for about twenty minutes, that she did not step into the depression or reach her hand to touch the water, and that she came down the seven steps without turning her back to the platform. She wrote that Hoyt Lanning, waiting at the base, asked her when she came down whether she had seen the water. She said yes.

He asked whether she had seen anything else. She said no. He said he had climbed to the top three times in the last forty years, and each time he had had a strong impression that something behind the water was looking up through the surface and then disappearing quickly, and he had not walked the causeway again until she asked him. She asked him why he had come up with her if the three previous visits were so disturbing.

He answered with a sentence she recorded verbatim: “Because I am a man in his sixties, and I wanted a reliable witness. ”

Miss Buckholt also recorded, in the spring of 1926, an interview with a lady named Mrs. Delta Treadway Fowler, born in Richmond in 1871, a second cousin of Rowena’s, who had met Rowena once, in 1908, at a family funeral. Delta asked Rowena that day, in a quiet moment on the porch, whether she would tell her what had happened.

Rowena said she would tell her only one thing. She said the thing in the water had no face. And she said it did not need a face. And she said that what it did through the water was look, and that looking was its only purpose, and she had understood that in the twenty seconds she stood on the upper platform.

And she said that if the water had been drained properly, the way it was supposed to be, the looking would have ended with the walk, and the window would have been shut, and the thing would have gone back to what it was when it was not looking. She did not think the water had been drained properly. For most of her life, she said, she had a strong feeling at certain moments, in certain rooms, in certain weathers, that the thing was still looking for her, and that it had not been able to find her because she had left the mountain, but that it had not stopped looking either. Delta recorded this conversation that night in a diary her niece gave to Miss Buckholt in 1926.

Dr. Garner Pyle, born 1917 in eastern Kentucky, began a project to collect every remaining record of the Bledsoe family in the summer of 1965. He worked on it for seven years. By 1972 he had assembled twelve sources, from the official report of Deputy Marshal Auslin, through the private journal of Deputy Roach, the notebook of Dr.

Benelvik, the trial transcript, the Kincaid journal, Miss Buckholt’s field notes, Mrs. Fowler’s diary, to a composition book of a man named John Hensley, who in 1901 recorded stories told to him by his grandfather Otis about the Bledsoes, including Otis’s account of what the preacher Elem had told him in late life about what Thomas the First expected to find on the mountain and what he actually found. The twelfth source was the polished stone itself, which Dr. Pyle visited eleven times over six years, and described in a sealed section of his archive, held under his will at his death in 1991, with a restriction to be lifted on the first of January 2050.

On every visit Dr. Pyle made, the depression in the center of the upper platform was full of water, level with the rim, the color of weak tea. There was no leaf on it, no insect on it, no insect flying over it. On a summer solstice visit in 1970, Dr.

Pyle and a graduate student named Margaret Thornbury sat on the top step without climbing onto the platform and watched the first direct sunlight strike the center. The water did not change in any way they could see. It did not rise, did not fall, stayed as it was. On the autumn equinox 1970, Margaret Thornbury, twenty-six, climbed the causeway alone against Dr.

Pyle’s advice. She set foot on the platform, which neither of them had done. She knelt beside the depression and looked into the water for ten minutes. The first direct sunlight came over the eastern ridges and struck the center of the depression where she knelt.

In her notebook, which she gave to Dr. Pyle three days later, there is a single sentence written in a less careful hand than the rest of her field notes: “When the sun hit the water I knew I had been seen, and I believe I will be seen for the rest of my life, and I will not come here again. Please, Doctor, do not ask me to describe what I knew, because I could not describe it. ” She finished her doctorate at Berea in 1972, took a position at the University of Georgia, married in 1974, retired in 2006.

She is still alive, eighty-two years old. She has never spoken publicly about that morning. She has kept a lamp burning in her bedroom every night since 1970. Dr.

Pyle made his last visit on the autumn equinox 1972, alone. He wrote that he climbed the causeway slowly and sat at the base of the seven steps for about an hour before dawn, and at the end of that hour decided he would not climb the steps that morning or ever again. He sat at the base. He had a clear, simple impression that something behind the stone looked up into the sunlight the way a man in a room looks up when the light at the window changes, and then looked for him and did not find him, because he was at the base of the steps and not on the top of the platform, and after a moment lost interest.

He sat another twenty minutes to be sure. Then he walked back down the causeway and out of the woods, and never climbed Shelter Knob again, and closed the archive, and in 1988 wrote his letter to Berea setting 2050 as the date for reopening the site. Dark Hollow today is inside a state forest. The hollow has been closed to permanent habitation since 1961.

The stone foundations of three cabins can be seen in a clearing on the hollow floor by anyone who knows where to look. The preacher’s rock sits in the middle, with the initials of Thomas the First’s eldest and the date 1793 carved into its eastern face. The polished stone causeway is still there, covered in leaf litter and tree roots. The stepped platform is still there.

The depression in the center still holds the water that filled it on the morning of the twenty-first of June 1874. The water is still the color of weak tea, and still level with the rim. The gap at the southern end of the hollow is closed by a steel gate the state forestry service installed in 1978. Hikers walk around the gate, but most do not go in.

The hollow is on no common trail map, and the depression is dark in the afternoon. Anyone who goes in will tell you it is a quiet place, but the quiet is not ordinary. It is the kind you come out of quickly without knowing why. The mountain still rises on schedule.

The sun still rises on the right mornings. The stone still catches the light the way it was designed to catch it. The water is still in the depression. The window is open from the wrong side.

In a hollow on the eastern slope of the Black Mountains, a family lies that was the last to keep something older than the Cherokee. Their names are not much spoken, not preserved, and nothing has climbed to the upper platform for a hundred and fifty-two years to tell the thing on the other side of the stone that it is still being watched by the right person on the right morning in the right pattern. And the thing on the other side has been looking steadily into this country for a hundred and fifty-two years, and is still looking tonight, and was looking an hour ago. It will still be looking an hour from now.

We do not know what it has been doing while it looks, and we will not know until the first of January 2050. Whatever light the thing behind the stone used to catch in the center of the depression on the mornings of the solstices and equinoxes will meet, on some night, darkness for the first time in fifty-six years, in some place in Kentucky. And the thing on the other side will have this whole country’s darkness to look through from then on.