The ridge above his cabin was a long climb, and Augustus Pell was a heavy man. The snow had crusted on top, and he broke through with every step. By the time he reached the top, sweat was running through his wool coat and the day was thinning into afternoon. Then he found the tracks.

They began in the middle of a clearing with no prints leading to them. They were Obadiah Renshaw’s boot prints. Pell recognized the heel cleats, the star pattern Obadiah had hammered in himself against the ice of winter trails. The prints ran in a straight line for forty yards.

Then, halfway through the forty-first yard, they stopped. Not faded, not covered over. Stopped. The left boot print was complete.

The right boot print, the one that should have come next, was only the heel and the back half of the sole. The toe and the front half were not there. As if Obadiah Renshaw, in mid-stride, had stepped down with his right foot onto something that was not snow, that was not ground. And the front half of his boot had gone into it.

And the rest of him had followed. Pell stood there in the silence. He later said he did not hear a single living thing. Not a chickadee, not a squirrel, not the wind.

He stood for what he judged to be the better part of an hour, and not one creature of the woods made a sound the entire time. Then he walked back down to the cabin, closed the door behind him, and rode the twenty-three miles back to Hollow Leaf with the journal in his coat pocket, his hand pressed flat against it like a man pressing his hand against a wound. The man who had written that journal, and who had walked out of his cabin on the morning of November 3rd, 1873, never returned. Obadiah Renshaw was forty-six years old, a trapper by trade and by temperament.

Tall, lean as a fence rail, with a face weathered into something that looked carved rather than grown. His hands, the ones that wrote the journal Pell now carried, were enormous and crooked, the knuckles thickened from forty winters of cold steel and wet rope. He had hair the color of iron filings and a beard he kept short with a straight razor and no mirror. He wore a long oilcloth coat the color of swamp water, breeches of waxed canvas, boots resoled three times.

He lived alone deep in a stretch of the Ozark forest in northern Arkansas, in a one-room cabin he had built himself from white oak and river stone, twelve miles from the nearest road and twenty-three miles from the nearest town, a small place called Hollow Leaf. He did not go to Hollow Leaf often. He went when he needed sugar, salt, lamp oil, and lead. That was about it.

The Renshaws were not a family of many words. Obadiah’s father had run a trap line on the same ridges in the 1840s, and his grandfather, a man named Cornelius Renshaw, had come west out of the Carolinas after the War of 1812. They were a family of long looks and quiet hands. They listened to the woods.

They learned the woods. And in the case of Obadiah, the woods had begun that autumn to say something he didn’t recognize. He had a wife once. Her name was Rosaline.

She had died of a fever in the winter of 1864, alone with him in that same cabin while a snowstorm closed the trail to Hollow Leaf for nine days. He had buried her in the spring when the ground thawed, in a little clearing he could see from his front step. After that, he had not spoken much to anyone. He ran his line.

He cured his furs. He read, in the long winter evenings, a single battered book of essays his father had owned and a worn copy of the Bible his grandmother had pressed into his hands the year he came of age. That was the whole of his library. He kept a small Jersey cow for milk and an old half-hound named Pirate for company.

He spoke to both of them more than he spoke to any human being. He knew the silence of the woods the way a sailor knows the silence of the open sea. He could read its weather. He could feel the difference in his back and in the soles of his feet between a silence that meant a storm was coming and a silence that meant a panther had crossed the ridge an hour before.

It started in late September. Obadiah had been running a trap line along the upper fork of a creek the locals called Sallow Branch. It curved down out of a high hollow, ran past a stand of black walnuts, and disappeared into a swampy bottom no man with sense crossed after dark. He had run that line for nineteen years.

He knew every stump, every blowdown, every place where a beaver might dam, every place where a fox might pass. On the morning of September 28th, 1873, he found a print in the soft mud beside the creek that he could not name. It was deep, deeper than a bear, but it wasn’t a bear. A bear has five toes and a wide pad.

This print had four. Long, narrow toes splayed wide, with what looked like the gouge of a claw at the tip of each one. The whole impression was about the length of his forearm from wrist to elbow. He stood there a long time looking down at it, the morning fog curling along the surface of the creek, his breath rising slow.

Then he set his rifle down, knelt, and measured it with his belt. Twenty-one inches long. Eleven inches across at the widest. He sat back on his heels and looked up the creek, then down it, then around at the bare trees.

The back of his neck began to feel cold in a way that had nothing to do with the morning. He found no other prints. Just the one. As if whatever had made it had stepped down out of the air, set its weight onto the mud, and stepped back into the air again.

He worked along the creek for another hour, slower now, looking everywhere a thing that heavy might have stepped. The bank was soft. The leaves were damp. A deer would have left a trail you could read like a sentence.

Whatever had made the print had left him one word and walked away into nothing. He went home that day without checking his traps. He took the long way back along the high side of the ridge, where the wind came from the north and the trees were thinner and a man could see for half a mile in any direction. He stopped twice to listen.

He heard nothing he could not name. A crow far off, the dry rattle of the last oak leaves, the creak of his own boots. But he felt, for the first time in nineteen years of trapping that country, that he was being watched. Not stalked.

He knew what being stalked felt like; a panther had stalked him once in 1858 for the better part of a morning. This was different. This was the feeling of a man standing across a room from you, perfectly still, looking at you. Not coming closer, not moving away, just looking.

That night, by the light of a single tallow candle, he wrote in his journal: “I have seen a print today which I cannot account for. I do not know what made it and the not knowing has put a weight in my chest that I have not carried since my father died. ”

Two days passed. Obadiah did not go back to the upper fork.

He told himself he was working the eastern line, and that was true. But the truth underneath the truth was that he didn’t want to see what else might be there. He set new traps along a small creek called Mason’s Run. He stayed close to the cabin in the evenings.

He ate his suppers fast and went to bed with the lamp still lit. On the third day, October 1st, he came home at dusk to find his cabin door standing open. He had latched it that morning. He was sure of it.

He stopped in the clearing, lowered his rifle slowly off his shoulder, and listened. Nothing. The forest had that thick stillness that comes just before full dark, when the day birds have gone quiet and the night creatures haven’t started yet. He approached the cabin sideways, the way a hunter approaches a wounded animal.

He pushed the door open with the muzzle of his rifle. Inside, nothing was missing. Nothing was moved. The blankets on his cot were exactly as he had left them.

The cast-iron pan on the table held the same heel of cornbread. His powder horn hung from the same peg. The coins in the tin behind the stove were still there. But the air inside the cabin smelled wrong.

It smelled like an animal had been there, but not any animal he recognized. A deep, rank, oily smell, like wet fur left to mildew. Underneath it, something sweeter. He wrote that it reminded him of the way a deer carcass smells on the second day, when the meat is just beginning to turn.

Not rotten, but beginning. He searched the cabin twice by lamplight. There was nothing. He stepped outside again, holding the lamp high.

The clearing was empty. He went to the lean-to where he kept the cow, Bess, the only living creature he ever spoke to in full sentences. Bess would not come out. She stood at the back of the lean-to, against the far wall, with her head down, breathing hard, the whites of her eyes showing.

He spoke to her softly. He laid his hand on her flank. She trembled under his hand the way no animal he had ever owned had trembled before. He stayed with her for an hour until her breathing eased, then went back inside and bolted the door.

Pirate, his old half-hound, lay in his usual place by the stove. The dog had not moved when Obadiah came in. He looked up with his one good eye, and his tail thumped once against the floorboards. That was all.

The dog, the bravest animal Obadiah had ever known, lay flat against the floor and kept his eye on the door. He slept that night with the rifle across his knees, sitting upright in the corner farthest from the door. Nothing came. But around the hour he later judged to be three in the morning, he heard, very far off, somewhere up toward the ridge above his cabin, a single sound.

It was not a howl. It was not a scream. He wrote that the closest he could come to describing it was the sound a tree makes when it is being slowly bent past its breaking point. A long, low, woody groan.

Then silence. When the sun came up, he walked the perimeter of his clearing. He found no tracks, not one. But on the north side of the cabin, where his wood pile stood against the wall, three of the split oak rounds had been moved.

Not knocked over. Moved. Lifted carefully off the top of the stack and set on the ground beside it. Each one stood upright, like a man might stand a glass on a table.

Three of them, in a perfect line. He picked one up. It was heavy, the way oak is heavy. A man would have had to bend, lift, carry, and place.

It was not the kind of thing a wind did. It was not the kind of thing an animal did. He set the round back where it had been, in its perfect upright spot in the perfect line, because he could not think of any reason to move it. And because moving it felt somehow like an answer he didn’t want to give to a question he didn’t yet understand.

For the next ten days, he kept to the cabin and the near woods. He chopped firewood. He oiled his traps. He cleaned his rifle three times in a week, which was twice more than he ever cleaned it.

Nothing else happened. By the second week of October, he had begun to talk himself out of what he had seen. He told himself the print had been a freak shape made by a falling tree, that the door had been left unlatched by his own hand, that the smell had been a possum under the floorboards. He even told himself the wood pile had been disturbed by a black bear, though no bear in the world stacks oak rounds in a row.

By the third week of October, Obadiah Renshaw had stopped keeping a regular trap line. He still went out, but he didn’t bother with sets. He carried his rifle and a long knife and a small leather satchel. He was looking for something now, though he wouldn’t have been able to tell you what.

He was the kind of man who, when he didn’t understand a thing, walked toward it instead of away from it. It was October 18th when he found the bone. He had followed Sallow Branch farther up than he had ever gone, past the stand of black walnuts, past the swampy bottom, into a high hollow where the creek narrowed into a thin silver thread between two long ridges. He had heard from his grandfather that there were caves up there, old caves, long dry, not the kind the bears used.

Older. The hollow felt different from the rest of the country. The trees, oak and hickory and a few twisted cedars, grew farther apart, and the ground between them was bare in a way that felt swept rather than empty. There was no birdsong.

He noticed that around midday and tried to remember when he had last heard one. He could not. He had been in the hollow perhaps two hours by then, without the sound of a single bird. The creek itself was wrong.

It was the same creek he had followed for nine miles, but here, in the high hollow, it ran without sound. He knelt beside it and looked. The water was moving, he could see the current, the small swirls around the stones, the slow drift of a yellow leaf. But the water made no noise.

Not the chuckle a creek makes over its bed, not the slow plash of a deeper place. The water was somehow silent. He found the cave a little after noon, set into the base of a limestone bluff, half hidden behind a curtain of dead grapevine. The mouth was narrow, maybe four feet across, but it widened inside.

He didn’t go in right away. He stood in front of it for a long while, holding his pipe unlit. He looked at the ground in front of the cave mouth. What he saw was nothing.

No tracks, no droppings, no bones, no fur on the rock, no scratches around the entrance. Animals leave a story. This cave had no story. It was as if no living thing had been near it in a long time.

He went in. He had a small brass lantern in his satchel, the kind with the glass on three sides and the little reflector on the back. He lit it outside in the daylight, watched the wick steady, and then ducked under the curtain of dead vines and stepped into the dark. The cave widened almost at once.

The ceiling rose over his head. The floor was dry and dusty and even, almost as if it had been swept. The walls were the color of old bread. The air inside was cold and dry and still.

There was no smell of bat, no smell of damp, no smell of anything at all. He stopped after the first ten paces and held the lantern up. He turned slowly, looking at the walls. They were smooth.

Not natural smooth. Worked smooth, or worn smooth, or both. He ran his free hand along the limestone at shoulder height and found the rock cool under his fingers, even, free of the small ridges and knobs limestone always carries when no one has touched it. He let his hand drop.

He told himself he was imagining things. He had walked maybe forty feet when the lantern light fell on it. It was lying near the back wall. A bone.

Just one. It was so large that for a moment his mind refused to take it in. It looked at first like a length of pale curved log. Then he stepped closer and the shape resolved.

It was a femur, a thighbone. But the size of it was wrong. He paced its length. It came up to the middle of his chest when he stood it on end, and Obadiah Renshaw was a tall man.

The ball joint at one end was the size of a pumpkin. The other end was broader still, flared with the unmistakable shape of a knee. It was a legbone. But it was not the legbone of any animal he had ever seen or read about or heard tell of from any hunter, trapper, naturalist, or Indian elder in his entire life.

There were no other bones in the cave. Just the one, lying alone on the floor in the dust, in the dark. He did not touch it. He stood looking at it for a very long time, and he became aware, slowly, that the bone was not where it had originally lain.

It was clean. There was no dust on it. The floor around it was dust, but the bone itself was clean. Something had moved it.

Something had set it there. The way three rounds of split oak had been moved at his cabin, set there in a row. He raised the lantern higher and turned slowly in place. The cave continued back beyond the bone, deeper into the hill.

He could see the dim shape of a passage, a narrowing of the walls, perhaps thirty feet farther on. He thought for one bad moment of walking that way, of seeing what else the cave kept. He took half a step toward it, and then he stopped. In the dust of the floor between him and the dark of the passage, the lantern light caught something he had not seen before.

A line. A faint, scuffed line in the dust. Not a footprint. Not yet.

A drag mark. As if something had been pulled slowly across the floor of the cave, from the deeper dark into the place where the bone now lay. The mark ran from the back of the cave to the bone and stopped there. The bone had not walked itself out of the dark.

Something had brought it. He left the cave faster than he came in. He did not run; Obadiah Renshaw was not a man who ran. But he walked at the brisk, unhurried pace of a man who has decided to be elsewhere very soon.

He stepped back out into the cold afternoon light and closed his eyes for a moment and breathed. When he opened them, the light over the hollow had changed. The sky had been clear when he went in. It was not clear now.

A heavy, low ceiling of slate-gray cloud had come in from the north. The wind, which had been still, now moved through the bare branches above him with a steady, long sound, like a held breath. And there, on the bare ground in front of the cave mouth, where there had been no tracks at all when he arrived, there were now three prints. Each one identical to the one he had found by Sallow Branch three weeks before.

Twenty-one inches long, eleven inches across, four narrow toes splayed wide. And they were arranged not in a line of travel, but in a triangle, with the cave mouth at its center. As if something had stood at three points around the cave while he was inside it, and waited. He started home walking fast, the lantern still lit even though it was full daylight.

He didn’t realize he hadn’t blown it out until he was halfway down the ridge. He stopped, looked at it, laughed once, a short dry laugh that didn’t have any humor in it, and pinched the wick. He looked over his shoulder more times than he had ever looked over his shoulder in nineteen years of trapping. He saw nothing.

He felt the entire way down out of the hollow the way a man feels when he has crossed a line he did not know was there. He got home at dusk. He latched the door. He bolted it with the iron bolt his father had forged for it forty years before.

He drew the heavy shutter across the one window. He set his rifle within reach and his powder horn beside it, and he sat down at his table and lit the candle and opened his journal. He wrote for two hours. The last paragraph was different.

“I do not believe this is an animal of any kind I have known. I do not believe the bone is recent. The way it lay in the dust, the way the floor was undisturbed but for the bone itself and the drag mark behind it, I believe it was placed there a long time ago by hands not unlike a man’s, but greater. And I believe whatever moved it and moved my woodpile is not the same thing whose bone now lies in that cave.

The bone is dead. The thing that moves it is not. I will not go back. I will not go back.

I will not go back. ”

He underlined that last sentence three times. You can see it in the journal. The ink is gouged into the paper.

The pen broke at the end of the third line. There are two accounts of what happened to Obadiah Renshaw between October 18th and November 3rd, 1873. There is the account he wrote himself in his own journal. And there is the account that the man who came looking for him gave to the deputy sheriff in Hollow Leaf two weeks later.

And those two accounts do not match. In the journal, the entries continue almost daily. He kept the door bolted, cooked over the fire, slept little, listened to the woods. On the night of October 21st, he tried to read the book of essays his father had owned and found he could not hold the words in his head.

He read the same paragraph eleven times, and at the end of the eleventh reading he could not have told you what the paragraph said. On the night of October 22nd, he heard something walk across the roof of his cabin. Not run. Walk, slowly, deliberately, from one end to the other.

He counted the steps. He wrote: “There were 11 steps from one end of the roof to the other and the cabin is 14 ft long, which means the stride was a handsbreadth more than a foot. ” He waited for the sound to come down. It did not come down.

Whatever it was walked off the cabin and onto, he believed, the air, because there was no thump on the ground, no rustle in the leaves. The sound simply ended. On the morning of October 23rd, he found Bess dry. She had given him milk every morning for seven years.

That morning she gave him nothing. He wrote that her udder was slack and cold, as if she had not held milk in days, though he had taken half a pail from her at sunset the night before. He stood in the lean-to with the pail in his hand and looked at her, and she looked back at him with eyes that were, he wrote, “the eyes of a creature that had given up. ” He never got another pail of milk from her.

In January, she lay down in the lean-to and did not get back up. On October 24th, he walked out to the grave of his wife Rosaline. The air around the grave was warm, warmer than the rest of the clearing, warm the way a pile of leaves is warm in the autumn when the underside has begun to rot and give off heat. He laid his hand on the stone he had set there nine years before, and the stone was warm to the touch, though the day was cold and the sun was behind the ridge.

He wrote: “I do not know if she is restless. I do not know if it is something else. I will not ask the question I want to ask because I’m afraid of who would answer it. ”

On October 25th, the smell came back inside the cabin.

Not as strong as before, but there. The wet fur, the sweet rot underneath it. He found nothing missing, nothing moved. But on his table, in the thin layer of flour dust where he had been kneading hardtack the day before, there was a mark.

The print of one finger. And the finger had been the length of a man’s whole hand from wrist to tip. He scraped the flour off the table. He did not eat the hardtack.

He buried it in the woods that afternoon, far from the cabin. On October 26th, he walked the perimeter of his clearing again and found on the south side a place where the leaves had been pressed flat, as if something heavy had stood there for a long time watching the cabin. He estimated from the area of pressed leaves that whatever had stood there had been at least ten feet across at the base. He measured it carefully with a length of twine he carried in his pocket.

He noted the measurement in the journal. On October 27th, his old dog Pirate would not leave the cabin, would not go out the door, would not eat. He lay under the cot and shook. Obadiah wrote: “He is the bravest creature I have ever owned.

I have seen him stand to a sow bear with cubs and not move a step and tonight he will not put his head out the door. He knows something I do not and I do not believe he is wrong. ”

On October 28th, the dreams began. He said he was not a man given to dreams, but every night, beginning that night, he dreamed of the cave.

He dreamed he was walking back into it. The lantern was in his hand and the bone was on the floor. But in the dream, when he came close, he saw that there were now two bones, and then three, and then four. In the dream of November 1st, the cave floor was full of bones, all of them the wrong size, all of them clean, all of them arranged, not piled, arranged like pieces of a puzzle being slowly assembled.

In the dream there were footsteps behind him coming into the cave. He never turned around. He always woke up before he had to. On the morning of November 2nd, he found his old dog Pirate dead at the foot of the cot.

There was no mark on the dog, no wound, no blood. The dog had simply stopped. Obadiah wrote that the dog’s good eye was open and pointing at the door, and that he could not bring himself to close it. He buried the dog that morning behind the cabin in the cold ground.

When he came back inside he sat at his table for a long time without moving. Then he wrote one line. “The woods are quieter today than they have ever been and I do not think I am the one keeping them quiet anymore. ”

There is a second entry that day, added in the evening in a hand not quite as steady.

“I went to the lean-to tonight to give Bess her hay. The door was closed. I had not closed it. She was inside.

She had been inside the whole day. I stood in the doorway with a lantern and Bess turned her head and looked at me and I do not believe she knew me. Her eyes had no recognition in them. They were the eyes of a creature looking at a stranger.

I gave her the hay. I came back to the cabin. I have bolted the door. I do not know what is happening here.

I do not know if it has come for me or if it has been here the whole time and I have only just begun to see it. ”

The last entry in the journal is dated November 3rd, 1873. It is short. “The dreams have stopped.

The smell is gone. The woods today are quiet and it is the wrong kind of quiet. I am going to walk to the ridge above the cabin to see what is there. If I do not return by dusk, whoever finds this, do not look for me.

Burn the journal. Burn the cabin. Leave the cave alone. The thing that walks does not want to be known.

”

That is the last line he ever wrote. Fourteen days later, on November 17th, a fur buyer named Augustus Pell rode out from Hollow Leaf to the Renshaw cabin. Pell did this every November. He bought Obadiah’s autumn furs.

He had been doing it for twenty-two years. He found the cabin shut up, the door bolted from the inside, no smoke from the chimney. He shouted for an hour. He walked the perimeter.

He saw no tracks of any kind, human or animal, in the snow that had fallen the week before. The snow around the cabin was unbroken. Pell broke down the door. Inside, the cabin was empty.

The journal was on the table, open, the candle burned down to a stub of black wax. The rifle was on its peg, the powder horn beside it, the blankets folded on the cot, the cast-iron pan clean. There was no sign of struggle, no blood, no overturned chair. But the door had been bolted from the inside.

Pell checked the lean-to. Bess was lying dead on the straw, peacefully, her head turned toward the door. By his judgment she had been dead perhaps three days. He saw no sign of injury.

In the corner of the lean-to he found a single feather, longer than his forearm, dark gray, the quill thicker than his thumb. He had never seen a feather like it. He took it with him, and two days later he gave it to the deputy along with the journal. The deputy, according to his diary, placed the feather in a separate envelope and sent it to a naturalist at the state university in Fayetteville, who returned it three months later with a brief note: “I am unable to identify the species.

I would appreciate any further specimens you may obtain. ”

Pell read the last entry of the journal. He put it in his coat. He sat at the table for a long time, looking at the open door and the unbroken snow beyond it.

Then he went outside and walked north, to the ridge, where he found the boot prints that began with no tracks leading to them, ran forty yards in a straight line, and stopped mid-stride. That is what Augustus Pell told the deputy sheriff in Hollow Leaf on November 18th, 1873. The deputy went out himself two days later with three other men. By the time they arrived, fresh snow had covered the ridge.

There were no prints to be found. The cabin was searched again. The journal was taken into evidence and transferred to the office of the county clerk in the town of Marrowford, where it sat in a locked drawer for sixty-one years, until a fire in 1934 destroyed most of the building and most of the records inside it. The journal survived because it had been borrowed three weeks earlier by a writer for a regional newspaper who never returned it.

The newspaper folded the year after the fire. The writer, an old man by the time he died in 1948, left his papers to a niece in Missouri. The niece kept the box of papers in her attic for thirty years. When she died in 1979, her grandson sold the contents of the attic to a small antiquarian dealer in St.

Louis. The dealer recognized what he had. He kept the journal in a glass case at the back of his shop until his own death in 2001, when his stock was scattered to the winds at auction. That is how it ended up where it ended up.

There is one more thing. In the spring of 1874, a hunting party out of Hollow Leaf went up Sallow Branch looking for a missing horse. They went past the stand of black walnuts, past the swampy bottom, up into the high hollow where the creek thinned to a silver thread between two ridges. And they went, on the advice of one of them who had heard the story, to the cave at the base of the limestone bluff.

There were five of them, taken from the deputy’s diary entry of April 7th, 1874: Augustus Pell, the same fur buyer who had found the empty cabin five months earlier; a country doctor named Eustace Merrowby; a blacksmith named Jeremiah Tindall; a freight clerk named Wilbur Sneed; and a guide named Pleasant Haliburton, who had been born in the hollows and was said to know every fold of the ridge country between the White River and the Buffalo. Pleasant Haliburton was the man who led them to the cave. They had to look for it for the better part of a morning. The curtain of dead grapevine was gone.

The vines themselves were gone. Pleasant said, in the deputy’s notes, that he had walked past the cave mouth twice before he saw it, and that the second time he saw it, he was not sure he was looking at the same hollow he had been looking at before. Eustace Merrowby, the country doctor, made a separate set of notes that night in a journal of his own, which a great-granddaughter of his still owns. Merrowby was a careful man, trained in observation.

He wrote that as the five men climbed up into the high hollow, the temperature dropped. He had a small thermometer in his medical bag, which he carried for the diagnosis of fevers, and he took readings every quarter of an hour. “At 9:00, in the lower part of the creek, the air was 48°. At 10:00, halfway up, 46°.

At 11:00, in the high hollow itself, the thermometer read 31°, though the sun was full on us and the day was still, and there was no wind. The drop was not a drop a man would expect. The drop was the drop of stepping into a different country. ”

The horses, which had been calm all morning, refused to enter the high hollow.

They had to be tied at the lower end, and the men went on by foot. He wrote that as they walked the last half mile, none of the five of them spoke. He found himself, for the first time in his life, walking with his hand on the butt of the small revolver his father had given him. At the cave, Pleasant struck a match and lit a pine knot torch.

The five of them went in together in single file, with Pleasant in front and Augustus Pell at the back. The cave was empty. Not just of the bone. Of everything.

The dust on the floor was gone, swept clean as if a wind had passed through. The walls were bare. The drag mark Obadiah had described was gone. The vines that had hung over the mouth had been pulled clear and laid in a careful pile to one side of the entrance, arranged in a tight, even spiral, the way a snake coils itself.

In the back of the cave, on the floor where Obadiah Renshaw had said the bone lay, there was a single mark in the stone itself. Not a carving, not a scratch. A depression, the shape of a long oval, as if something heavy had rested there for a long time and the rock had worn slowly beneath it. Around that depression, in a wide circle, there were three more depressions, smaller ones, the shape of feet.

Each one twenty-one inches long, eleven inches across. Merrowby knelt and laid his hand inside one of the foot-shaped depressions. He wrote that night: “The rock was warm, warmer than the rock around it. Not hot, warm the way a chair is warm in the moment after a man has stood up out of it.

I do not know how to account for this observation. I am setting it down because I observed it. I make no claim about it. ”

The torch sputtered.

Pleasant Haliburton later said to the deputy, and to no one else, that as the five of them stood there looking at the depressions, he heard, very faintly, somewhere deeper in the cave, beyond the narrowing of the walls he had not yet walked toward, a sound he could not name. Not a footstep. Not a breath. A small, dry, careful sound, as of something setting an object down on stone, just once.

And then nothing. He turned and walked out of the cave without speaking. The other four followed him. Merrowby wrote that as they came out of the cave, the temperature in the high hollow had risen back up to forty-six degrees.

He took the reading himself. “The cave is the cold. The hollow around the cave is normal. Whatever causes the cold lives in the cave or comes out of it.

I do not say this in any spiritual sense. I say it as a man who has measured what he measured. ”

The hunting party mounted up and rode straight back to Hollow Leaf without speaking. The man who later told the story said the silence between them on that ride was the deepest silence of his life.

None of them ever went back to that hollow. The story spread the way stories spread in mountain towns, in low voices, on porches, in the back of stores. By the 1880s, no trapper would set a line on Sallow Branch above the swampy bottom. By 1900, the trail up the hollow had grown over and disappeared.

By 1940, when the last of the men who knew the story had died, the cave’s location had been forgotten. The county records in Marrowford list Obadiah Renshaw to this day as a missing person. Status unresolved. I have looked for the cave.

I have walked Sallow Branch in three different summers with maps drawn from the journal, with a compass, with the testimony of two old foresters who said their fathers had heard of the place. I have not found it. The hollow is there. The ridges are there.

The creek is there. The cave is not. Or perhaps it is, and I have walked past it, and the curtain of dead grapevine hangs again across the mouth, and the floor is dust again, and a bone lies again upon the dust, and something stands in a triangle around the entrance and waits. What I know is this.

Obadiah Renshaw was a careful man, an honest man, a man not given to fantasies, and he wrote down what he saw in his own hand, in a journal I have held in my own hands, with the broken pen mark gouged through the paper at the end of his entry on October 18th. He went into a cave in the Ozarks in the autumn of 1873, and he saw something there that should not have existed. Seventeen days later, he walked into a clearing on a ridge above his cabin and stepped in mid-stride into something the rest of the world cannot see. His last entry asked whoever found the journal to burn it.

I did not burn it. I have wondered more than once whether that was a mistake. I keep it now in a wooden box, in a drawer, in a room in my home. On certain nights, when the wind is high and the house is settling, I find myself thinking of that drawer, of the box inside it, of the journal inside the box, of the broken pen mark on the page, of the entry that ends “I will not go back” three times, and the entry after that which says, “The dreams have stopped.

The smell is gone. The woods today are quiet and it is the wrong kind of quiet. ”

I have not had any dreams about a cave. Not yet.

But I am older now than Obadiah Renshaw was in 1873, and the older I get, the more I think about the things he wrote, and the more I wonder whether the thing that walks in those hollows knows that I have read its story, whether it cares, whether it is patient enough to wait the way it waited at the cave mouth for Obadiah, the way it waited on the ridge above his cabin for him to take that one last step.