Some hills keep what walks into them. That was the old way of saying it, the way the men who lived in those valleys preferred, because it took a long sentence and cut it down to six short words. It did not matter whether you believed in anything beyond your own porch, whether you were a religious man or a man who kept to himself, whether you carried a Winchester or a Ballard or nothing at all. If the valley wanted you, it would take you, and it did not have to hurry about it.

Two men climbed into the Boston Mountains of the Ozarks, in western Arkansas, in the fall of 1932. Neither of them came back the same. The only reason we still have any piece of this story at all is that on the third day, before the third night fell, they reached a patch of ground that no one believed was still inhabited. And the man who lived there knew, before either of them spoke a single word, exactly what had followed them out of the valley.

The older of the two was named Orin Thibodeau. He was forty-two that autumn, a timber surveyor for a company town in Johnson County, Arkansas, which meant he walked the hills for a living, marking the hardwood for the cut. Tall, narrow-shouldered, his face weathered until it had the color of a good old pipe. His hands were the hands of a man who had swung an axe for twenty-five years and carried a hunting rifle for about as long.

He did not talk much inside a house, but he talked plenty outside one. His people came from up in the mountains, French on one side, Cherokee on his mother’s grandmother’s side, and he had that old Ozark habit of listening before he answered, which made strangers think him slow. He was not slow. The younger man was Bill Kettering, thirty-six that fall.

He ran a small farm up on Kettering Hill, ground his family had owned since the 1850s, which was long enough in that country to make you the oldest thing on the road. Broad-chested, sandy-haired, missing the tip of his left index finger to a saw he had stood too close to when he was younger. He was a skilled hunter, the kind who could read a track two days old and tell you the animal’s weight and whether it was hurt. He and Orin had known each other for nearly twenty years and had gone into the hills together every autumn since Bill was old enough to marry, nine seasons straight.

They knew each other’s silences. That was the important part. They knew what to say about the other man’s silence, and what not to say. They set out on a Sunday in late October, the second week of the season, the leaves already turned and fallen so that the ground you looked at looked more like a floor than a forest.

Their plan was to spend six days in a place called Slate Fork Hollow in Newton County, on the western slope of the Boston Mountains, a tract Orin had surveyed for the company two summers earlier and noted in his book as good deer ground and free of people. That last part mattered. There was a settlement road running about four miles into the head of the hollow, and beyond that it was foot and mule traffic only. Bill had a pack mule.

Orin had a Winchester Model 1894 in . 30-30, a canvas bag, and the kind of boots you buy once in your life. They took coffee, flour, salt pork, matches in two tins in case one got wet, a lantern with a spare wick, an axe, a whetstone, thirty rounds of ammunition, and a small brown bottle of quinine bitters that Bill’s wife had pressed on him because her father had died of malaria at Vicksburg and she had never made peace with the idea of a man walking the lowlands without something on him. That last detail is what Orin wrote about years later in a letter to a man trying to understand what had happened.

He said his wife’s medicine bottle was the only thing he brought out of that hollow that he could look at without his hand trembling, and that he kept the empty bottle on a shelf until he died. They rode their horses up the settlement road on Sunday afternoon and made camp that evening at the foot of the hollow, on a rise above a fork in the creek where the water ran clear over slate. That was how the place got its name, Slate Fork. The rock jutted out of the stream bed in flat, blue-gray slabs, some as long as a barn door, so that in places the water did not sound like water at all but like a hand brushing over dry skin.

They ate salt pork and the cornbread Bill’s wife had wrapped in cloth, drank coffee from tin cups, and Orin rolled a cigarette and sat watching the hollow as the light went. He said later he felt nothing wrong that first night. The woods felt normal. The smell was normal.

The sound of the creek was normal. The animals were where they should be. A raccoon came down to the water an hour before full dark. An owl started up on the far ridge the moment the sun went behind the mountain.

The only strange thing, he said, and he only remembered it later, was that the mule would not stand facing into the hollow. It stood facing the road they had come in on, and when Bill tried to turn it, it turned its head but would not move its feet. Bill laughed and said the mule was tired and knew where the corn bin was. That was Sunday.

Monday morning they went up. They worked the north fork first, moving quietly, covering the ridges Orin had marked. They saw no deer, no tracks, no rubs, no beds. They saw squirrels, but the squirrels were quiet in the treetops and would not come down.

They saw a hawk circle over the ridge once, then not again. Around noon they came to a stand of white oak on a rise about a mile above camp, and Bill knelt to examine the fallen mast, the acorns on the ground, and stayed still a long time, then stood and looked at Orin and said, in the low voice men use when they do not want to be heard, that there was not one sign of any of it. No squirrel bite, no deer print on the leaves around them, no little scratchings where wild turkey had worked, just acorns on the ground as if someone had poured them from a sack. Every creature that fed in those woods was walking past that oak stand and leaving it alone.

Orin said nothing about it. He looked at the ridge above them for a moment. Then he said, “Easy. Let’s go back.

”

They took the long way back toward camp, along the east side of the hollow, and about an hour before dusk they came on a track in a soft spot near the creek. Bill knelt at it. He was that kind of hunter. You could not walk him past a track without him kneeling at it.

After a minute, Orin, who had been watching the ridge, felt Bill go still in a way he knew, and turned. Bill said, “It’s a two-foot track,” meaning something that walked on two feet. “Not a bear standing. A bear standing leaves a mark at the back of the heel where it puts its weight.

This one doesn’t have that. Not a man in boots. No heel, no seam. Not a barefoot man either, because it’s too long and the toes aren’t right.

” Bill counted the toes twice. He said he counted twice because the first time he thought he had miscounted. He said, and Orin recorded it later almost to the letter, “Whatever made this track has four toes on each foot. The toes are long.

And the track sinks deeper at the front than the heel, so whatever made it pushes its weight forward in a way a man doesn’t. ” Orin asked, “How old is it? ” Bill laid his flat hand on the clay beside it. He said, “This morning.

Probably before sunup. ”

Orin stood there in the fading light and did what hunters do without knowing it, counted his cartridges by touch. Then he said, out loud, “Let’s not be here after dark. ” They reached camp with the last light, and Bill built the fire higher than a man builds it who only intends to boil coffee.

He built it the way you build a fire when you need the light. In the night, at an hour they could not name because they had no watch and the moon had set, they both woke at the same instant because of the mule. The mule made a noise. It was not the noise a mule makes when it spooks at a wolf or a bobcat.

Bill said later that in all his years on the mountain, he had heard a mule make three or four different sounds when something came near it in the dark, but he had never heard this one. He said the mule made a sound like a woman being pushed under water. Those were his words. Orin was on his feet with the rifle in his hand before Bill was out of his blanket, and they stood by the fire back to back, listening.

They heard a footfall, one footfall, in the draw above camp on the rocks. It was clear. It was slow. Then no second footfall followed it.

Instead there was silence. That silence lasted, Orin said, for the better part of an hour. They stood there for the better part of an hour, rifle up, the fire between them, and nothing came, nothing spoke, the mule did not make that sound again, and the fire died and they had to relight it twice. Finally, when the gray morning light came up over the east ridge, they heard from high in the draw, from a long way off at the very edge of what a man can hear, one footfall fall on the rocks again.

A single step, and nothing followed it. They broke camp in under ten minutes. That was how it was. Neither of them said out loud what they were doing.

Bill loaded the mule without checking the rigging twice, which for Bill was the equivalent of shouting, and Orin carried his rifle in his hand, not on his shoulder. They moved down the trail they had come up on Sunday afternoon, moving fast. The trail ran beside the creek for the first mile, then rose to a saddle and came out through a pass between two ridges, then dropped through a grove of walnut trees to the settlement road. The distance was about four miles to the road.

They both knew that. They had both walked it in under two hours the day before. Here is where it gets strange. Because they walked and walked, the sun came up over the east ridges, crossed the sky, and at the time Orin judged to be noon, they came out of the walnut trees onto a patch of ground.

It was Sunday’s camp. It was Sunday’s camp. That rise above the creek fork. The place where the slate came up out of the water.

Their fire ash was on the ground, cold. The bent grass where the mule had stood was still there. They had walked four miles and come back to where they started. Bill sat down on the flat rock by the ashes and put his hands over his face for a minute.

When he lowered them, he was calm again, the way a man is calm when he has decided to stop lying to himself. He said, “We aren’t going out by the trail. ” Orin said, “We tried the trail. ” Bill said, “We aren’t going out by the trail, because it won’t let us.

” Orin did not answer that for a long time. He knew what Bill meant. He also knew that a man who had worked timber survey for twenty years does not walk a four-mile loop without noticing. He had watched the ridge lines all morning.

He had watched the sun. He had watched the creek fork pass him on his right, running downhill as it should. And still he had come back to where he started. They tried the ridge after that.

All through the afternoon they tried the ridge. They climbed the east side of the hollow, straight up, using their hands on the steep places, until they came out on top and could see the country running away east and south, the low ridges of Newton County fading blue on the horizon, the Buffalo River somewhere behind them. They stood on that ridge a long time. They picked a landmark, a hill a mile to the east, and walked toward it.

When they reached it, they found it was the head of Slate Fork, and the hollow was below them, and their camp was down there, and the mule was standing by the fire ash looking up at them. Bill laughed then. Orin remembered that. Bill laughed a short, dry laugh with no humor in it and said, “Well, that’s fine.

” Then he sat on a rock and drank water from his canteen and handed it to Orin, and neither of them spoke for a while. This was the moment they knew. Whatever else they did not know yet, whatever was waiting for them, they knew at least this much. They had been drawn into this hollow, and now they were not being allowed out.

And whatever had left the track on the second day, and the footfalls on the second night, was not somewhere else in the woods. It was in this hollow with them. And this hollow was where they would stay until it was finished with them. On the third day, they did not try the trail, and they did not try the ridge.

They went down, down with the creek fork, walking in the water whenever they could, because Orin said, once, in the dark, something about the thing possibly not crossing running water, and Bill held onto that idea the way a drowning man holds a branch. So they walked in the creek. And here too the country was strange, because the creek kept running, and kept running, and took them somewhere, but that somewhere was not down and out. It was down and across.

Where the creek should have opened onto the settlement below the hollow, it instead turned into another hollow, and that hollow ran east and up. They walked it anyway. There was no choice. The mule was with them, and it was not the same mule it had been on Sunday.

It followed them without any lead rope, stayed close enough that its breath touched the back of Bill’s shirt, and its eyes had the look of an animal that had decided to trust a man because the alternative was worse. Around noon they climbed out of the creek onto a flat piece of ground, and the ground was cleared. Not naturally cleared. A worked field.

Old corn stubble. A sagging fence, half gone, on the far side. A hard-packed dirt lane. And at the head of the field, a cabin.

Small, chinked, smoke rising from the stone chimney straight up into the still air. Orin and Bill did not know anyone in Newton County who lived on Slate Fork. No one they knew lived in the county at all. But someone did.

They stopped at the edge of the field. They did not come closer. They stopped. The mule stopped.

They stood there. After a while the cabin door opened and an old man came out onto the porch. He was old. That was the first thing you noticed.

Old in a way that made you realize you had been using that word too loosely on other men. He was tall. He was thin in a way that suggested he had always been that way, not that he was sick. His hair was white and long enough to tie back, and he had tied it back, and his beard was white and cut square under his jaw.

He wore a homespun shirt and trousers so old they had taken the color of the ground. In his left hand was a small tin cup, in his right hand a stick of dark wood about forearm length, polished by his palm. He looked across the field at them. He did not say hello.

He spoke in a voice so low they were not meant to hear him from that distance, but they did. “You’ve brought it to my door. ” Then, louder: “Come up. ” He sat down on the porch step and waited.

The old man’s name was Cyriax Boze. That was the name Orin wrote in the letter years later. Boze, spelled B-O-Z-E. He said the old man told them the name once and never used it again in three days.

He said the old man was at least seventy, maybe eighty or older. He said it was not the kind of thing you asked about. Orin and Bill walked up the lane with the mule behind them, and the old man watched them come. When they were close enough that they did not have to raise their voices, he said, “Sit.

” They sat on the porch step below him, the way you sit at the feet of a preacher. He looked at them for a while. Then he said, and Orin remembered the phrasing exactly, “I know what’s walked with you. I know its name.

I won’t speak it aloud on this porch. Don’t ask me for it. ” Then he asked them how many nights. Bill said, “Two.

” The old man nodded once, slowly, and said, “Then we have tonight and nothing else. ” Bill asked if he had answered the voice. Bill said, “No. ” The old man closed his eyes for a moment when Bill said that, then opened them and said, “Good.

That’s why you’re on my porch and not somewhere else. If you’d answered on the second night, I wouldn’t have opened my door to you today. ” That was the first time either of them understood, down to the bone, what they had walked into the middle of. Because no man closes his door on you in the Ozarks, inside a hollow where you might die, unless he knows he cannot help you and does not want the thing that was following you knocking on his door at night.

The old man said, “Come in. ” They went in. The inside of the cabin was one room. There was a stone hearth, a table, a rope bed, a chair, and along the walls, shelves.

On the shelves were jars. Some of the jars held things Orin could recognize. Sassafras root, yellowroot, bloodroot, ginseng, devil’s shoestring. Some of the jars held things he could not recognize, and he did not ask.

The old man put wood on the fire, then took down a cloth bundle from above the hearth, set it on the table, and opened it. Inside the bundle was salt, and iron nails, three of them, hand-forged and black, and a small piece of red flannel, and a piece of chalk. He looked at them and said, “Sit. ” Then he said, “I’m going to tell you what I know, and I’m going to say it once, and I’m going to tell you because if you don’t know, you won’t do what I ask you to do tonight.

And if you don’t do it tonight, neither of you will be here at daylight. ” Bill sat. Orin sat. And the old man told them.

He said this hollow was one of them. There were hollows in these hills, and in the hills farther east, that kept something. It had been in this hollow longer than his people had been in this country. And his people had been in this country longer than the county itself.

It was not a ghost. It was not of the dead. It was something that had been here before there was anyone to die. It did not want them.

It had no desires. It had a habit. And its habit was that when a man entered its hollow and hunted without leaving an offering, or without speaking its name at the fork, it accompanied him for three days and took him on the third night. Some came out.

Most did not. Those who came out did not come out whole. He said, “The reason it took your names first is that your names were the door. It came in through your names.

If either of you had answered, it would have come in through the door. ” Bill asked what you were supposed to leave at the fork. The old man looked at him for a long time, then said, “Salt on a flat rock, and a word that is told to no one. But you didn’t know you were supposed to leave it, and no one alive in Newton County knows it, because the last man who knew it was my father’s brother, and he’s been dead fifty years.

So you didn’t do wrong. But you’re in wrong. There’s a difference. ”

He said, “Tonight I’m going to draw a circle around this cabin.

You’ll sit inside the circle and you won’t leave it for any reason, and you won’t answer any voice you hear, and you won’t open the door, and you won’t open the window. And if you hear your wife, Kettering,” and he used Bill’s family name now, “you remember your wife is at the foot of Kettering Hill, and she is not in this hollow, and the thing that sounds like her is not her. Do you understand me? ” Bill said, “Yes.

” Orin said, “Yes. ” The old man said, “Good. Then we’ll eat. ” They ate a stew the old man had made of squirrel and cornmeal and something bitter that Orin took to be dried burdock.

While they ate, the old man did not speak. After they ate, he went outside, and stayed outside a long time. When he came back in, it was near dark. He said, “The circle is drawn.

It’s drawn with salt and ash and something else I won’t tell you. It’s closed now. ” The old man sat in his chair by the fire, laid the dark stick across his knees, and said, “We’ll watch. ” He said, “If it speaks, you don’t answer.

If it knocks, you don’t answer. If it speaks my name, you don’t answer, because I’m here beside you. And I am not that voice. Do you understand?

” They said, “Yes. ” Again. Then the three of them sat in the one-room cabin with a fire burning moderate, not high, moderate. The window was closed, the door barred, and the only light was the fire.

They waited. It came at a time Orin later judged to be around midnight. There had been no wind that night. There had been no wind all afternoon.

The first sign was the fire jumping. Not the flames. The embers. The embers jumped in the hearth as if something had struck them from underneath.

Bill’s face went pale. The old man did not move. Then there was a step on the porch. One step.

Slow. Deliberate. The boards took the weight. Then another step.

Then a third, and it was at the door. Then the door was struck. Not a knock. A blow.

One blow, low, near the threshold. Hard enough that the latch rattled and dust fell from the ceiling. And a voice from behind the door, calling Bill’s name. In his wife’s voice.

Exactly. “Kettering,” the voice said. “Bill. Come to the door.

” Bill’s breathing was so heavy Orin could hear it. The old man reached over and put his hand on Bill’s forearm and held it there. No one spoke. The voice from behind the door said, “Bill, I’ve walked up here.

I’ve walked up here to find you. Come to the door. ” Bill closed his eyes and did not speak. The voice called Bill’s name three more times, and the shape of the word changed each time, the way a creature speaks a word it has heard but does not understand.

And then it stopped being his wife’s voice. Then it stopped being the voice of anything. Then it was that orange sound. That sound the mule had made the first night.

Then it stopped. And then the door was struck again. Then, very quietly, the latch was tried. The latch was tested from outside.

Orin watched the latch move. It moved a little. It did not lift. Then it stopped.

And then, suddenly, there was absolute silence. And in that silence, the old man began to speak. He spoke very quietly, in a language Orin did not know, had never heard, could not identify later, and he spoke it for a long time. He spoke steadily, without stopping, in a voice with no fear in it and no anger.

Just an old certainty. And whatever was behind the door listened. Orin swore to that later. He said, “The thing behind the door listened to the old man the way a slave listens when his true master speaks to him.

” Then the thing on the other side of the door left the porch. It walked away slowly. Down the three steps and across the field. They heard its steps for a long time.

Then they heard nothing. And the old man kept talking in that low, steady voice for another hour after they stopped hearing it. He kept talking until the fire had burned down to coals, then he went quiet and sat in his chair, and did not speak another word until daylight. In the morning, he opened the door.

The salt ring on the porch was smeared on one side, at a spot about a foot from the outer edge. Not broken. Smeared. As if a foot had touched its edge and then been pulled back.

The old man looked at that mark for a moment, then covered it with fresh salt from a small horn he carried, then stood. He said, “You can go. Walk out through the fork. It will let you pass now.

Don’t look back. Not once. Not for any sound. Not for any call.

Not even if you drop something. Not once. ” Bill said, “Sir, what do we owe you? ” The old man looked at Bill for a long moment.

He said, “A story you don’t tell to anyone who can’t use it. And one more thing. ” He said, “Don’t come back to this hollow, either of you. Not to hunt, not to explore, not on a dare.

And if you hear of any man from your county planning to hunt Slate Fork Hollow, tell him what happened to you. And if he doesn’t believe you, tell him what happened to me, which is that I’ve lived here fifty years and drawn that circle every night of it, and I haven’t been outside the sight of this cabin after dark for forty of those years, and I won’t be. Do you understand me? ” Bill said, “Yes, sir.

” Orin said, “Yes, sir. ” And the old man said, “Good. Now go. And don’t look back.

”

They went. They walked along the creek, the mule behind them, and this time the creek brought them out. After two hours of walking the fork, the way opened onto the settlement below the hollow, and the settlement road was there, and the sun was up, and they came out onto that road in the middle of the morning of the fourth day, and neither of them looked back even once. Though Orin said later that at some point, about a mile out, he heard something behind him on the road, walking.

He heard it walking behind them for at least a quarter of a mile. He did not turn around. And it followed them to the mouth of the hollow, and stopped there. Neither of the two men spoke of the trip to anyone in the county.

Not to Bill’s wife. Not to the men Orin worked with in the timber. They agreed, coming out, to say that the deer were scarce that year and they had come home empty-handed. And that is what they said.

Bill went back to his farm on Kettering Hill and never hunted again in his life. He kept the rifle, but he never took it out of the house. He died in 1949 of heart disease, in his bed. His wife said that in the last week of his life, he woke twice in the night with both hands flat on the blanket, palms down, and would not answer her when she called his name, and only came back to himself after she had called him four or five times.

Orin Thibodeau kept working for the company for eleven more years, then retired. He wrote the letter that most of this story comes from in 1953, to a man named Alvin Spears, who was collecting mountain tales for a project of his own that never saw the light. Spears’s papers are what survived. In that letter, Orin also wrote that in the spring of 1941, he went back to the mouth of Slate Fork Hollow.

He did not enter the hollow. He stood on the settlement road at the foot of the hollow, holding his hat in his hand, for nearly an hour. He said he did it because a man he had known all his life, meaning Bill, was not well. And Orin thought, and this was the phrase Orin used, a strange phrase, he thought he would ask whether the hollow still held any part of Bill in there.

He said he did not know what he meant by that. He did not know what he expected. He said he stood there for nearly an hour and heard no sound come out of the hollow at all. No bird, no squirrel, no murmur of the creek.

He said it was the loudest silence he had ever stood in, and that when he put his hat back on and walked back to his truck, he understood for the first time what the old man on the porch had meant that morning about not looking back. Because he had not looked back coming out in 1932, but he had come back twice. Once in memory of Bill, and now in person, and both of those were a looking back, and both times something had noticed. He did not go back a third time.

He died in 1961 at his sister’s house in Fort Smith. His sister said he was clear-minded to the end. And she said that in his last week, he asked her to leave a small bowl of salt on the windowsill at night, and she did, and she did not ask him why. The old man Cyriax, on the porch, had not been seen by any county official since the 1890s, as the records show.

There is a tax entry in the name of Cyriax Boze in Newton County records for 1889 and 1890, for a small piece of ground in the west Boston Mountains, and after that his name never appears in the records again. No death was ever recorded for him. The cabin, if it was still standing when Orin wrote his letter, is not standing now. A timber company cut the western slope in the late 1960s, and their maps show only the creek and the slope, no clearing, no buildings, no old corn field.

Slate Fork Hollow is still on the topographic maps of Newton County. But it is not on any list of good hunting ground. The people who grew up in that part of the mountain, when asked about it, tend to answer the way people answer when they have been warned by someone they trust to leave something alone. They say, “Oh, that hollow, yeah.

Nobody goes up in there. ” And if you ask them why, they just shrug. They shrug, and they change the subject. And if you press them, and they like you, they might say what an old man said to a folklore researcher in 1978.

When the researcher asked him why nobody hunted Slate Fork, the old man thought about it a little. Then he said, “Some hollows keep what walks into them. ” That was exactly how he said it. Then he said, “And I’ll tell you the truth.

My grandfather told me, and my father told me, that story is still up there, too. ”

That is Slate Fork Hollow, 1932. Two men went up, two men came down, and a third thing took the shape of a name in the dark and in the end could not hold on to it. And if the old man on the porch was right, it is still up there.

And if the old man in 1978 was right, it is not alone.