Some hills keep what walks inside them. That is an old way of saying it, and it was the way the men who lived in those valleys liked to put it, because it shortened a long sentence into 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 lived in isolation, 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 be in a hurry about it.

This story comes from the Boston Mountains of the Ozarks, in western Arkansas. Autumn 1932. Two men went up. Neither of them came back the same as they had been.

The reason we still have anything of this story in any form is that on the third day, before the third night fell, they reached a piece of ground that nobody thought anyone still lived on. And the man who lived there knew, before either of them spoke a word, exactly what had followed them out of the valley. The elder of the two was called Oren Thibodeau, and he was forty-two years old that autumn. He was a timber surveyor for a company town in Johnson County, Arkansas, which meant he walked the hills for a living, marking the hardwood for cutting.

Tall, narrow-shouldered, with a face so weathered it had taken on 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 almost as long. He did not talk much when he was inside a house, but he talked plenty when he was out of one. His people were originally from the high mountains, French on one side and Cherokee through his mother’s grandmother, and he had that old Ozark habit of listening before answering, which made strangers think him slow.

He was not slow. The younger was Bill Ketring, thirty-six that autumn. He ran a small farm on Ketring Heights, land his family had owned since the 1850s, 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 because of a saw he had stood too close to when he was younger.

He was a skilled hunter, the kind who could read a two-day-old track and tell you the animal’s weight and whether it was wounded. He and Oren had known each other for nearly twenty years, and they had gone into the hills together every autumn since Bill was old enough to call himself a man, 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, in the second week of the season, when the leaves had already turned and fallen, so 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 Boston Mountain, on a piece of ground Oren had surveyed for the company two summers before and noted in his logbook as good deer country and empty of people. That last part mattered.

There was a settlement road that ran about four miles from the mouth of the hollow, and beyond that it was foot and mule only, nothing else. Bill had a mule for the packs. Oren 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 tonic 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 was what Oren wrote about years later in a letter to a man trying to understand what had happened. He said the wife’s medicine bottle was the only thing he brought out of that valley that he could look at without his hand trembling, and that he kept the empty bottle on a shelf until he died. They rode up the settlement road on Sunday afternoon and made camp that evening at the foot of the hollow, on a rise of ground 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 extended out of the stream bed in flat gray-blue slabs, some as long as a barn door, so that in places the water did not sound like water but like a hand touching dry hide. They ate salt pork and the cornbread Bill’s wife had wrapped in cloth, drank coffee from tin cups, and Oren rolled a cigarette and sat looking into the hollow as the light went. He said later he felt nothing wrong that first night.

The woods seemed natural. The smell was natural. The sound of the creek was natural. The animals were where they belonged.

A raccoon came down to the water an hour before full dark. An owl on the far ridge started calling as soon as the sun cleared 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. The mule stood facing the road they had come from, and when Bill tried to turn it, it turned its head but did not move its feet.

Bill laughed at it and said the mule was tired and knew where the corn crib was, and it was Sunday. Monday morning they went up. They worked the north fork first, moving quiet, working the ridges Oren had marked. They saw no deer, no tracks, no rubs, no bedding spots.

They saw squirrels, but the squirrels were silent in the tree crowns and would not come down. They saw a hawk circle once over the ridge and then not again. Around noon they reached 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 rose and looked at Oren and said, in the low voice men use when they do not want to be heard, that there was not one single sign of any of them. No squirrel bite mark, no deer track in the leaves around them, no little diggings where wild turkey had scratched.

Just acorns on the ground as if someone had poured them from a sack. Every creature that fed in those woods had passed that oak stand by and left it alone. Oren said nothing about it. He looked at the ridge above them for a spell.

Then he said, “Easy now. Let’s go back. ”

They came back the long way 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, Oren, who had been watching the ridge, felt Bill go still in a way he knew, and turned. Bill said, “Two-footed track.

” Meaning something that walked on two feet. “Not a bear standing. A bear standing leaves a mark at the back of the foot where it puts its weight. This one didn’t have that.

Not a man in boots. No heel, no seam. And not a barefoot man either, because it’s too long and the toes are wrong. ” Bill counted the toes twice.

He said he counted twice because he thought the first time he had miscounted. He said, and Oren later set it down almost word for word, “Whatever made that track has four toes on each foot. The toes were long. And the track sank deeper at the ball than at the heel, so whatever made it was throwing its weight forward in a way a man doesn’t.

” Oren asked, “How old? ” Bill laid his flat palm on the mud beside it. “This morning,” he said. “Maybe before sunup.

” Oren stood there in the fading light and did what hunters do without knowing it, counted his rounds by touch. Then he said, aloud, “Let’s not be here after dark. ”

They reached camp with the last light, and Bill built the fire higher than a man builds a fire who only means to boil coffee on it. He built it the way you build a fire when you need light.

And in the night, at an hour they could not name, having no watch and the moon down, 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 startled by a wolf or a bobcat. Bill said later that in all his life 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. Oren was up with his rifle in his hand before Bill was out of his blanket, and they stood by the fire back to back, listening. They heard a footstep, one footstep, up in the draw above camp on the rocks.

It was clear. It was slow. Then no second footstep followed. Silence instead.

And that silence lasted, Oren said, most of an hour. They stood there most of an hour, rifle up, fire between them, and nothing came, nothing spoke, and the mule did not make that sound again, and the fire went out and they had to relight it twice. Finally, when the gray morning light came over the east ridge, they heard from up the draw, from very far away at the edge of what a man can hear, one footstep falling on the rocks again. A single step, and nothing followed it.

They broke camp in under ten minutes. That was how it was. Neither said aloud what they were doing. Bill loaded the mule without checking the straps twice, which for Bill was the equivalent of shouting, and Oren carried his rifle in his hand, not on his shoulder.

They moved down the way they had come up on Sunday evening, moving fast. The trail ran along the creek for the first mile, then rose onto a rise and out through a gap between two hills, then dropped through a stand of hickory down to the settlement road. About four miles to the road. Both of them knew that.

Both had walked it in under two hours the day before. Here is where it gets strange. They walked and walked, and the sun rose over the east ridges and crossed the sky, and at the time Oren judged to be midday, they came out of the hickory grove onto a piece of ground, and it was Sunday’s camp. It was Sunday’s camp.

That rise above the creek fork. The place where the slate stood 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 beside the ash and put his hands over his face for a minute. When he took them down, he was calm again, the way a man is calm when he has decided to stop lying to himself. He said, “We’re not going out by the trail.

” Oren said, “We tried the trail. ” Bill said, “We’re not going out by the trail, because it won’t let us. ” Oren did not answer that for a long time. He knew what Bill meant.

He also knew that a man who had been timber surveying for twenty years does not walk a four-mile loop without noticing it. He had watched the ridgelines all morning. He had watched the sun. He had watched the creek fork pass him on his right going down as it should.

And still he came back to where he started. They tried the ridge after that. All afternoon they tried the ridge. They climbed the east side of the hollow, straight up, using their hands in the steep places, until they came out on top and could see the country rolling away east and south, the low ridges of Newton County going blue on the horizon, the Buffalo River somewhere beyond.

They stood on that ridge a long time. They picked a landmark, a hill a mile 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 the camp was down there, and the mule was standing beside the fire ash looking up at them. Bill laughed then.

Oren remembered that. Bill laughed a short, dry laugh with no humor in it and said, “Well, all right. All right. ” Then he sat on a rock and drank water from his canteen and handed it to Oren, and neither 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 going to be allowed out. And whatever had left the track on the second day, and the footsteps in 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 done with them. On the third day, they did not try the road, and they did not try the ridge. They went down, down with the fork of the creek, walking in the water whenever they could, because Oren said, once in the dark, something about perhaps it not crossing running water, and Bill held onto that idea like a drowning man holds a branch.

So they walked in the creek. And here too the country was strange, because the creek kept running, 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 other choice. The mule was with them, and it was not the same mule it had been on Sunday. It followed them without any lead, staying close enough that its breath touched the back of Bill’s neck, and its eyes had the look of an animal that has decided to trust a man because the alternative is worse.

Around midday they climbed out of the creek onto a flat piece of ground, and the ground was cleared. Not naturally cleared, but a worked field, the remains of old corn. A sagging split-rail fence half gone on the far side. A hard-packed dirt lane.

And at the head of the field, a cabin. Small, chinked tight, smoke rising straight from the stone chimney in the still air. Oren and Bill knew no one in Newton County who lived on Slate Fork. No one in the county knew anyone who did.

But there was someone. They stopped at the edge of the field. They did not go closer. They stopped.

The mule stopped. They stood there. After a bit, the cabin door opened, and an old man came out onto the porch. He was old.

That was the first thing you noticed. He was 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 that was how he had always been, not from sickness.

His hair was white and long enough to tie back, and he had tied it, and his beard was white, cut square under the jaw. He wore a homespun shirt and trousers so old they had taken on the color of the earth. In his left hand was a small tin cup, in his right a stick of dark wood about as long as a forearm, 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 it from that distance, but they did: “You’ve brought it to my door. ” Then, louder: “Come up. ” Then he sat down on the porch step and waited.

The old man’s name was Cyriax Boze. That was the name Oren wrote in his letter years later. Boze, B-O-Z-E. He said the old man told them the name once and did not use it again in three days.

He said the old man was at least seventy, maybe eighty or older, and that it was not something you could ask about. Bill and Oren walked up the lane, the mule behind them, the old man watching them come. When they were close enough not to shout, he said, “Sit. ” They sat on the porch steps below him, the way a man sits at the feet of a preacher.

He looked at them for a while. Then he said, and Oren remembered the wording 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 how many nights. Bill said, “Two. ” The old man nodded once, slowly, and said, “Then we have only this night and nothing more.

” 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.

Had you answered on the second night, I wouldn’t have opened my door to you today. ” And that was the first time either of them understood, down to the bone, what they had walked into the middle of. Because no man in the Ozarks turns you away from his door inside a hollow where you might die, unless he knows he cannot help you and does not want the thing that was following you to knock on his door at night. The old man said, “Come in.

” They went in. The inside of the cabin was one room. Stone hearth, a table, a rope bed, one chair, and along the walls, shelves. On the shelves were jars.

Some of the jars held things Oren could recognize. Sassafras root, yellow root, bloodroot, ginseng, devil’s shoestring. Some 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 the mantel, set it on the table, and opened it.

Inside were salt, three iron nails, hand-forged and black, a small piece of red flannel, and a piece of chalk. He looked at them and said, “Sit. ” Then he said, “I’ll tell you what I know, and I’ll say it once, and I’ll 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 that tonight, neither of you will be here at daylight.

” Bill sat. Oren 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 came into its hollow and hunted without leaving an offering or speaking its name at the forks of the road, it would walk with him for three days and take 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. Had either of you answered, it would have come in through the door.

” Bill asked what you were supposed to leave at the forks of the road. The old man looked at him a long time, then said, “Salt on a flat rock, and a word you don’t say to anyone. But you didn’t know to leave it, and no one living in Newton County knows to leave it, because the last man who knew was my father’s brother, and he died fifty years ago. So you haven’t done wrong.

But you’re in a bad place. There’s a difference. ”

He said, “Tonight I’ll draw a circle around this cabin. You’ll stay 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, Ketring” — he used Bill’s family name now — “remember that your wife is at the foot of Ketring 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. ” Oren said, “Yes.

” The old man said, “Good. Then we’ll eat. ” They ate a stew the old man had made of squirrel, cornmeal, and something bitter Oren thought was dried burdock. While they ate, the old man did not speak.

After they ate, he went outside, and he stayed outside a long time. When he came back in, it was nearly 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. ” He sat in his chair by the fire, laid the dark stick across his knees, and said, “We’ll keep watch. ” He said, “If it speaks, you don’t answer. If it knocks, you don’t answer.

If it calls my name, you don’t answer, because I’m here beside you, and I’m not that voice. Do you understand? ” They said, “Yes. ” Again.

Then the three of them sat in the one-room cabin with the fire burning moderately, not high, moderate. The window was shuttered, the door barred, and the only light was the fire. They waited. It came at a time Oren later judged to be about 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 coals. The coals in the hearth jumped, as if something had struck them from below. Bill 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 an ordinary knock. A blow. Once, low, near the threshold. Hard enough to rattle the latch and shake dust from the ceiling.

And a voice from behind the door, calling Bill’s name. In his wife’s voice. Exactly. “Ketring,” the voice said.

“Bill. Come to the door. ” Bill’s breathing was so heavy Oren could hear it. The old man reached out 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 come up here. I’ve come up here to find you. Come to the door.

” Bill closed his eyes and did not speak. The voice called his name three more times, and each time the shape of the word changed, the way a creature speaks a word it has heard but does not understand. And then the voice was no longer his wife’s voice. Then it was not the voice of anything.

Then it was that orange sound. The sound the mule had made the first night. Then it stopped. Then the door was struck again.

Then, very quietly, the latch was tried. It was tested from outside. Oren watched the latch move. It moved a little.

But it did not lift. Then it stopped. And then, suddenly, there was dead silence. And in that silence, the old man began to speak.

He spoke very quietly, in a language Oren did not know, had never heard, could not later identify, and he spoke it for a long time. He spoke steadily, without pause, in a voice with no fear in it and no anger. Just an old certainty. And whatever was behind the door listened.

Oren 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 could hear its feet for a long time. Then they heard nothing. And the old man kept on in that low, flat voice for another hour after they stopped hearing it. He kept on until the fire fell to coals, then went silent and sat in his chair and did not speak a word until daylight.

In the morning, he opened the door. The salt ring on the porch was smeared on one side, in a place about a foot from the outer edge. Not broken, but 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, and stood.

He said, “You can go. Walk down 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, that I’ve lived here for fifty years and drawn that circle every one of those nights, and I have not been out of sight of this cabin after dark for forty of those years, and I won’t be. Do you understand me? ” Bill said, “Yes, sir. ” Oren said, “Yes, sir.

” 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 down 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, not once. Though Oren said later that at one 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. It followed them to the mouth of the hollow. And it stopped there. Neither of the men spoke of the trip to anyone in the county.

Not to Bill’s wife. Not to the men Oren worked with in the timber. They agreed while walking out to say the deer were scarce that year and they had come back empty-handed. That is what they said.

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

Oren Thibodeau kept working for the company for eleven more years, then retired. He wrote the letter from which most of this story comes in 1953, to a man named Alvin Spiers, who was collecting mountain tales for a project of his own that never saw the light. Spiers’s papers are what has come down to us. In that letter, Oren 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 Oren thought, and these are the words Oren used, a strange phrase, that 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 sound 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 when he walked out in 1932, but he had come back twice. Once in memory of Bill, and now in his own feet, and both of those were a kind of looking back, and both times, something had noticed. He never went 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 dish 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, according to the records.

There is a tax entry in the name of Cyriax Boze in the Newton County records for 1889 and 1890, for a small piece of ground in the west Boston Mountains, and after that, his name does not appear in the records again. No death was ever recorded for him. The cabin, if it was still standing when Oren 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 cornfield.

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

Nobody goes up 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 why nobody hunted Slate Fork, the old man thought about it a little. Then he said, and this is the last thing in the record, the thing I will leave you with tonight, “Some hollows keep what goes into them. ” That was exactly how he said it. Then he said, “I’ll tell you the truth.

My grandfather told me, and my father told me, that story is still in there too. ” That is Slate Fork Hollow, 1932. Two men went up, and two men came down, and a third thing took the shape of a name in the dark and, in the end, could not keep 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.