The compass needle stayed still for a moment, then slowly drifted. It turned about ninety degrees to the west and stopped. He shook it. It swung back to north.

He waited. It drifted again, the same ninety degrees, and held steady. He knelt down. He placed the compass on a flat rock and stepped back from it.

He watched it for a full minute by his watch. It did not move. It pointed steadily toward a clump of laurel about forty yards up a slight rise. The needle had chosen something, and it was pointing at it the way a hunting dog points at its quarry.

Ephraim stood up. He looked at the laurel. He waited for something inside it to move. Nothing moved.

He picked up the compass and walked twenty paces away from the rock, then set it down on another flat spot. The needle swung. It settled toward the laurel. It held there.

That was the first strange thing. He wrote it down in his journal. The second thing he almost did not notice. He was walking a trail about an hour later along the north face of a slope that dropped steeply toward the creek below.

He reached a place where he had marked a beech tree the day before. He remembered the tree. It was a huge tree, and he had cut a piece of bark from it at chest height, as a man does, so he could find his way back to his line. The cut was there, but it was fresh.

The sap in it was still bright and wet. And that cut, according to his watch, had been made twenty-three hours earlier. Beech sap does not stay wet that long. Beech sap dries within a few hours in spring weather.

He put his finger in it. It was wet all the way through, as if he had made the mark that very morning. He stepped back from the tree. He stood looking at it.

He wrote in his journal: “Beech cut fresh. Not possible. ” He drew a small picture of the tree with an arrow pointing to the cut. He recorded the time.

He wrote: “Have I lost my way? ”

He had not lost his way. His compass told him he had not lost his way. His watch told him so, and the sun told him so.

The shape of the hill told him he was in the right place. The tree was in the right place, and the cut made twenty-three hours ago was as fresh as a wound. He turned then and walked his line back toward camp. He walked with his compass in his hand, which was not his habit, but it was how he walked now.

He kept his eyes on the needle, and the needle was perfectly steady. He walked for about forty minutes. He came around the shoulder of the hill to where the ground opened a little into a flat space above the creek, and he saw a boot print in the mud at the edge of a shallow bench. It was his boot print.

He knew it by the wear on the outside of the heel. He had worn that boot for a year and a half, and it carried a mark no other boot in the county carried. The boot print was facing the same direction he was walking. It pointed the way he was going.

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

It was his print. It was fresh. Its edges were sharp in the wet mud, and no water had seeped into it yet. He stood up.

He looked around. He was alone. He kept walking. Ten minutes later, he turned at the next bend, and there was another print, his own, going his direction.

He stopped. He wrote in his journal, standing there in the woods with the journal balanced on his forearm. He wrote: “Third warning, footprints. ” He drew one line under it.

Then he drew another line under it. Then he closed the journal and put it in his coat and began to walk a little faster. He came out of the hollow that evening earlier than he had planned. He was not panicked.

He wanted to say that to himself carefully, and I believe he said it to himself carefully, and I believe he was telling the truth, mostly. He was not panicked. He was deep in thought. There is a difference between a man who has been frightened and a man who has been given something new to think about.

And Ephraim Rooker, at that moment, was the second kind of man. He walked back to Dockers Fork. He unsaddled his mule. He ate at the store.

He went and sat on a bench outside the blacksmith shop in the last daylight. After a while Alton Witcher came out and sat down beside him without a word. They sat for a while. Then Ephraim told him about the compass and about the mark.

He told it plainly. He did not decorate the story. Alton listened. When Ephraim finished, Alton said: “That’s your first day, is it?

” Ephraim said it was the second day. Alton nodded slowly. He said: “You’ve had your watch warning. You said your watch was running fine.

Was it? ” Ephraim thought about it. He said his watch was running fine. He said he was sure of it.

Alton said: “Check it against the sun tomorrow. ” Ephraim said he would do that as his first task. Then Alton said: “You’re going to keep going, aren’t you? ” Ephraim said he had to.

He said it was his job. Alton nodded again. He said: “Then let me tell you something else, something I never told the others, because they were the kind who would misunderstand it. You seem to me like the kind who will take it for what it is.

”

He told Ephraim about the Rooneys. Ivory Rooney had come to the hollow in the fall of 1893 with her husband Thelbert and his mother. Thelbert had bought the land cheap from a man in Pineville who wanted to be rid of it. They built a cabin two miles up the creek on a flat piece of ground between two large beech trees.

They kept a few hogs. They kept a milk cow. Alton said Thelbert Rooney was a stubborn man, and stubborn men do not listen to warnings. So he did not listen when he was warned, and Ivory was the kind who followed her husband wherever he went, so she was with him in the hollow.

They stayed there all winter. They came out in the spring for supplies, and Ivory bought a roll of calico from the store at Dockers Fork. Alton had seen her that day, and he said she looked healthy and at ease. She said the winter had been quiet and the cow had wintered well, and that was the last time anyone ever saw her.

They were supposed to come out for the summer trade. But they did not. A man went up in July to check on them. He found the cow in the yard alive, her udder swollen fit to burst from not being milked for what he judged to be four days.

He found the hogs in their pen. He found the cabin door standing wide open. He found the fire long dead. He found a pot of beans on the table with the spoon still in the pot.

He found Ivory’s sewing on the bench by the window, the needle stuck in the cloth, as if she had set it down for a moment to answer the door for someone. He found no bodies. He found no missing clothes. He found the shotgun still on its pegs over the fireplace.

He found Ivory’s shoes, a pair of them, beside the bed. He found Thelbert’s boots, mud-caked, on the porch. He did not find Thelbert’s mother’s shoes. He searched and could not find them.

He went outside, as Alton said, and called for them. He called and called. There was no answer. The dog came from behind the cabin, whining.

The dog led him to the creek. At the edge of the creek, where the bank sloped down a little into a shallow pool, he found three sets of footprints. Ivory’s, Thelbert’s, and Thelbert’s mother’s. They had gone down into the water.

They had not come out of it. On the far side of the pool, in the wet gravel, there were no prints leading away. They had gone into the creek. They had not come out of it.

The sheriff came out. The sheriff at that time was Alton’s own uncle, a man named Cavender. Alton heard the story from him directly. Cavender searched the hollow for six days with twelve men and every dog they could borrow or command.

They found nothing. They found the prints going in and no prints coming out. They found no sign of a struggle. They found no drop of blood.

They found no torn cloth on a thorn bush. What Cavender wrote in the county ledger was: Rooney and family, three persons missing under unknown circumstances, presumed drowned in a flash flood. He wrote that because he had to write something. There had been no flood.

The creek had been low. The bodies were never found. There were no bodies to find. Alton believed that.

His uncle believed it too. It was a family story the way some families carry stories of war. Alton said the cow was brought out by the search party and given to a family that needed it. She gave sweet milk for six years, then dried up and was butchered.

That is what happened to the cow. That is the only part of that story that ends in a natural ending. Ephraim wrote all of it down. He wrote the names.

He wrote the details of the cabin, because he had a good memory and could see it in his mind while Alton spoke. He wrote “presumed drowned” and “flash flood. ” He drew a small line under it. He wrote “no flood.

” Then he wrote: the cabin should still be there. Two miles up, left bank. The next morning he went back in. He found the abandoned cabin on the fourth day.

It was where Alton had said it would be, on the left bank about two miles up. There was a clearing there once. It was now half-covered with young poplars and rhododendron, and the cabin itself leaned to one side. The roof had fallen in and the chimney still stood like a gray tooth.

He circled it. He did not go in at first. He did not want to. He marked the location with his compass, which held steady this time, and noted it in his journal.

He walked to the creek. The bank was still there as it had been described to him. The pool was still there. He knelt down and looked into the water.

The water was clear enough to see the gravel at the bottom, and there was nothing in the water that should not be there, and yet he could not force his hand into it. He could not. He tried. His hand would not move.

He wrote this in his journal, and drew two lines beneath it. He wrote: “The water does not accept me. ” Those were the words he used: “The water does not accept me. ” I have thought about that phrase a great deal over the years.

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

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

A different spoon. A newer kind than was made in 1893, because it carried the mark of a company in Ohio that had not opened until 1906. The spoon had been set carefully on the table, handle to the left, as if someone had put it there and forgotten it. He picked up the spoon.

He turned it in his hand. He put it in his pocket. He told his wife later that he wished he had not picked it up. He said he wished he had left it where it was.

He said that spoon was not meant for him, but he picked it up and put it in his pocket and walked out of the cabin. And that night at his camp at the mouth of the hollow, he took it out and looked at it by the firelight, then set it on a rock away from him, and in the morning it was gone. The rock was there. The spoon was not.

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

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

He wrote in the journal: “Thinking of coming out. ” He crossed the sentence out. Beneath it he wrote: “The work is not finished. ”

That was the kind of man he was.

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

He wrote that he woke in the early hours to the sound of someone walking around his fire. Not near his fire. Around it. Slow, even steps, as someone might walk around a table while setting a meal on it.

He lay still in his blanket and listened. He did not open his eyes at first. He counted the steps. Twelve steps around the fire, then they stopped.

Then they came back the other way, twelve steps back. Then they stopped. Then a third time. And the third time, they stopped.

And then, this is what he wrote in the journal. Whatever it was that had been walking, it sat down on the other side of the fire and breathed. He said he could hear it breathing. A slow breath, not far, not near.

He wrote: “Not animal, not man, but between. ” He opened his eyes. There was nothing on the other side of the fire. The fire had burned down to coals.

He could see the shape of the woods beyond it. Blackness against blackness. He could not see anything sitting there. He heard the breathing continue for another minute, perhaps.

He counted his own breaths against theirs. One of theirs to three of his. It was slower than any human breath. Then it stopped.

Then from the woods behind him, he heard his name called. Ephraim. Once. In a voice he knew, and I will tell you whose voice, because he wrote it in the journal and underlined it.

It was his wife’s voice. Her name was Soudy. She was one hundred forty miles away that night in Whitesburg, in the house they had lived in for fourteen years, asleep in the bed they shared. It was her voice.

He was as certain of it as he was of his own name. He did not answer. He wrote later that he almost did. His mouth opened.

He almost said, “I’m here. ” He caught himself. He closed his mouth. He lay perfectly still.

He did not answer. And whatever it was, after a long silence, walked away. He heard the steps going back into the trees. He heard them receding for a long time.

He did not sleep the rest of that night. He kept the fire going. He kept his rifle across his lap. When light came, he broke camp and walked to Dockers Fork without stopping to eat.

He sat on the bench outside the blacksmith shop, and Alton Witcher came out of the shop and looked at him and said: “Well, then. ”

Ephraim did not go back in for four days. He wrote a letter to his wife and sent it with a man headed to Pineville. He did not tell her what had happened.

He asked how she was. He asked about the daughter. He asked about the garden. He asked her, and this was the only strange line in the letter, whether she had spoken his name aloud at any time in the past week, and if she had, at what hour, and would she be good enough to write back and tell him.

He did not receive an answer while he was still there, because letters travel slowly in that country. But he learned later that she had not spoken his name aloud at any point in that week. She had thought of him often. But she had not spoken his name.

While he waited for the courage to go back in, he sat at the crossroads of Dockers and listened. He asked a few questions. He was careful about it. He did not want to be seen as a troubled man.

He asked Alton first. He asked the woman in the store. He asked a farmer named Halbert Souders, who came in on a Friday to buy nails, and Halbert Souders was the one who told him about his mother. Halbert’s mother was Mahala Souders, the midwife and herb woman who lived about a mile from town in a small house with a garden.

Halbert said: “You want to know about Cold Brand? Go talk to my mother. She sat with a man who came out of there in 1908, and she was the one who closed his eyes in the end. ”

Ephraim went that evening.

Mahala Souders was a small woman with a bent back and pale clear eyes and hands so scarred from her work that they looked at first glance as if they were made of tree bark. She was sixty-one years old. She sat Ephraim at her kitchen table and gave him coffee and said, before he could ask her anything: “You’ve been up there. ” He said he had.

She said: “You came back. ” He said he had. “You haven’t come all the way back. ” She said: “So you know, no one ever comes all the way back, but there are degrees of it.

Some come back more, some come back less. I’ll tell you about the one who never came back at all, and then you’ll know why I tell you this. ”

She had sat with four of them over the years, she said. Four men who had come out of that hollow carrying something.

One had gone on and lived his life, and she did not know what became of him after. One had gone home and shot his dogs and then walked to the river at Cumberland Falls, and was found three days later a mile downstream. One she had sat with for a week, and he had lived and moved to Missouri, and she received a letter from him once a year, and the letters were getting shorter. And the one she would tell him about, he was the worst of them all.

He was the worst because he came out with a whole body, but he was empty in the part of a person that has nothing to do with the body. Before she went on, she told him something about herself. Her grandmother had known a woman who lived in that hollow. That woman had lived there before Dockers Fork existed, before anyone with a name she could give him existed.

Her grandmother used to take her up the road when she was a child, and she would point to the ridge over the hollow and say: “There’s an old woman on that ridge who knows every soul in every house between here and Pineville, and she knows the day and the hour each of them will leave, and she keeps the list. And when your time comes, she comes down and reads your name. ” Her grandmother believed that. She did not know if she believed it herself, but she would tell him one thing.

Her grandmother had died at four in the morning one March day, in her bed, her hand in hers. And the last thing she said before she died was a name, a woman’s name. And she said: “She’s outside. ” And she smiled, and then she was gone.

That was fifty-one years ago. She remembered it as if it were this morning. She told him about Lester H. Hallstead.

Lester Hallstead was a surveyor, like him. He had come to that country in the summer of 1908. He worked for a different timber company, out of Cincinnati, buying up tracts in Harlan and Letcher counties. He was hired to do the same work Ephraim was doing four years later.

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

He did not know what he was getting into. They said if he had known, it might not have gone the way it went. Or maybe it would have gone the same way. There was an argument to be had about that.

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

He had no compass. He had no rifle. He had no bedroll. He had no coat.

He was wearing his trousers and his boots and a single shirt. And his shirt was turned inside out. His hair had turned entirely white. Not gray.

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

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

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

He answered no question put to him. He looked at people when they spoke to him, but he did not answer. Mahala said his eyes were not the right shape. She said she could not explain it better than that.

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

He slept in her back room. He would not sleep in the dark. He would not allow the lamp to be turned down. If she tried to lower the light, he would wake at once and raise his hand and shake his head in refusal.

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

Then he lay back down. Then he died. He died within a minute. Mahala said his eyes were closed by his own hand before she could reach him.

She said his face returned to its proper shape in that moment. The features settled back into place at last, but he was already gone. They buried him in the cemetery at Dockers Fork. His people came from Ohio and took him home after a week.

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

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

Ephraim thanked Mahala. He walked back to the store.

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

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

His wife did not need the money that badly. The timber company would not have punished him if he had quit. He could have found other work. That was not the reason.

It was something else. He wrote in the journal later, on his last day there. And this is the only piece of his writing I have that reads like a man trying to explain himself. He wrote: “If something walks around your fire, it has walked around your fire.

Whether or not you get up to follow it, if it calls your name, it has called your name, and it will call it again in whatever town you return to. The only way out is through. ”

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

I know he believed it. I know he went back. He went farther up the creek than he had ever gone, past the first crossing, past the second bend, past the third. The trees grew thicker.

The light faded until there was almost none, even at midday. He reached a place where the creek divided around an outcrop of black limestone. Above that rise was a stand of laurel, about two acres, and inside it the ground was level and covered with green moss, so thick and even it looked as if it had been laid by hand. There was no bird sound in the laurel.

He noticed that first. There was no sound of wind. He stood at its edge and listened, and there was nothing at all. His own breathing seemed loud.

His heartbeat seemed loud in his ears. He went in. He walked, by his own estimate, about forty steps. The moss made no sound under his boots.

He noticed that. He noticed that the ground felt slightly warm through the leather of his boots, warmer than the air, which was cold in that place. Cold as a spring house in July. He walked slowly.

He held his rifle across his chest in both hands. He kept his eyes on the ground ahead of him, then raised them because something in the pattern of light within the laurel had changed, though he could not say how. Then he stopped. There was a woman standing before him.

She was about twenty feet away. She was standing on the moss. She was facing him. He wrote: “She does not move.

” He wrote: “She does not breathe, as far as I can tell. ” She was tall. She was wearing something dark. He could not tell whether it was a dress or a robe or leaves arranged in the shape of a dress.

She had a face. He wrote about the face carefully. He wrote that the face was a face. He wrote that it was not right.

He wrote nothing more about the face. He never wrote more about the face than that. When his wife asked him years later what he had seen, he said: “I saw a face I do not want to describe. ”

He wrote: “We stood like that” for a length of time he could not measure.

His watch, when he looked at it later, showed a time two hours later than it should have been. He did not remember two hours passing. He remembered standing. He remembered looking at her.

He remembered that at some point she smiled. He wrote about the smile. He wrote: “She smiled the way a person smiles when they know something you do not. ” He wrote: “Her mouth was in the wrong place on her face for a smile.

” He wrote: “When she smiled, I saw her teeth, and there were more than there should be. ” He wrote: “Then she said my name. ” He wrote that line clearly. Then she said his name.

Not in his wife’s voice this time, but in a voice he had never heard. A voice that seemed, as he wrote, to come from under the ground, and had been traveling a long time, and had only now reached a place where it could be heard. She said: “Ephraim. ” She said it slowly.

She said it the way you might call the name of a horse you were trying to catch in a pasture. And he wrote: “Then she took a step toward me. ” He wrote about that step. He wrote: “She did not lift her foot.

” He wrote: “She moved without lifting her foot. ” He wrote: “She came closer without walking. ” And he wrote: “Then I turned and ran. ”

He ran back through the laurel.

He ran back along the creek. He fell twice. He wrote about those falls. He said he fell going down a bank and thought he had broken his wrist, and it turned out he had not.

He said he fell a second time over a root and thought he had broken a rib, and it turned out he had. He had broken a rib. He kept running. He did not look back.

He wrote: “I could hear her behind me, but I did not look back. ” He wrote: “She was not running. ” “She was keeping pace with me without running. ” That was what kept him going, that she was not running and yet she kept pace.

He ran, by his own estimate, for nearly an hour. His legs gave out twice, and he forced them to work again. He came out of the hollow into the fields above Dockers Fork at dusk, and he did not stop running when he came out of the hollow. He kept going.

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

Alton looked at him. Alton said: “Did you look at her? ” Ephraim said he had. Alton said: “Did you follow her?

” Ephraim said he had not. Alton said: “Then you are lucky. ” Ephraim said: “Am I? ” Alton did not answer for a while.

Then he said: “Luckier than some. ”

He left Cold Brand two days later. He did not finish the survey. He wrote a letter to the timber company.

In the letter he stated that the land was not suitable for surveying. He said the timber was not of commercial quality. He said the ground was unstable and the risks to the workers would be too high. He recommended in the letter that the company not proceed with the purchase.

He signed his name to the letter. He gave it to a man going to Pineville to mail it. The timber company received the letter. They did not press him about it.

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

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

If you drive that road on a spring evening, you can see the mouth of the hollow between the trees. The creek still runs. The creek still never freezes. He went home to his wife.

She said, when she spoke to me years later, that when he came through the door of the house in Whitesburg on the evening he returned, she did not recognize him for a moment. She said his face was his face, but she had to look twice before she was sure. She said he stood in the doorway for a moment as if he were waiting to be invited in. Then he came in.

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

He said: “I will not go back there again. ” She said she understood. She did not ask why. She said she waited.

She said she thought he would tell her when he was ready. He told her, she said, about six years later. Not everything. Not about the face.

Not about what he ran from. He told her about the compass. He told her about the mark on the tree. He told her about hearing his name spoken in her voice in the woods at night.

He told her about the Rooney family and about Lester H. Hallstead. He never told her what the woman looked like. He never told her what he had seen at the end of the laurel.

And what I know of that part comes from the journal. And I do not know all of it, because he did not write all of it. He did not sleep well for the rest of his life. That is the simplest way to say it.

He slept, but he did not sleep well. His wife said he would wake in the middle of the night and sit on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and stay that way for half an hour, then lie back down. She said he did not like the dark. He always kept a low lamp burning in the room.

She said that sometimes when they sat on the porch in the evening, he would look at the treeline at the edge of their yard and fall silent for a long moment, then pick up where he had left off, and she never asked him what he was looking at. She said she knew what he was looking at. She said it was the same thing every time. She told me one other thing, when I was young enough not to know what to do with it, and old enough now to know I should write it down.

She told it once, and only once. She had come home in the middle of a winter afternoon in 1931 with a basket of laundry from the line, and came in through the back door, and heard him speaking to someone in the front room. She said he was answering in the tone of voice a man uses when he is being polite to someone he does not want in his house. She could hear his side of the conversation.

She could not hear anyone else’s side of it. She stood in the kitchen with the basket in her arms and listened. He said: “No, ma’am. ” He said: “I told you.

” He said: “You know I won’t. ” He said: “Go now. ” Then silence. Then he came out of the front room and saw her in the kitchen and did not seem surprised to see her.

He took the basket from her hands. He set it on the table. He said: “I’ll fold these. ” He never said who had been in the room with him.

She never asked. She said she went into the front room a few minutes later for another reason, and the room was empty, and the front door was shut and latched from the inside, and there was no one in that room but him. She told me that once. She never told me again, and I never asked.

She died in 1957 of pneumonia, in the same bed she had shared with him. And the last thing she said, according to my grandfather who was with her, was that she was ready to go and that she hoped Ephraim was in a quiet place. He died in 1948 of heart failure, at age seventy-two. He was found at his kitchen table with a half-empty cup of coffee.

His ledger was in the drawer where he always kept it. She lived nine more years and gave the ledger to my grandfather, who was her nephew, and it has come down through the family to me. There is a note in the ledger in his hand dated 1942, six years before his death. It says only: “Wife heard him last night.

Second time. She did not answer. He went away. ” I have read that page many times.

I do not know how to interpret it. I know she lived until 1957. I know she was of sound mind at the end. I know she never once walked into woods deeper than her own yard.

The last thing I will tell you before I go is that in 1955 a hunter was lost in Cold Brand for four days. His name was Curtis Fardan. He was fifty-nine years old, and he was chasing a wounded deer he should have let go. They found him on the fourth day, sitting on a stump a quarter mile from the mouth of the hollow.

He was fine. He was unharmed. He said he had been sitting on that stump for all four days. He said he had watched the sun rise and set four times from that stump.

He said he had not been tired or hungry or thirsty. His watch had stopped on the first day and never ran again. He was brought home. He lived eleven more years.

He never spoke of it again except once, to his son. And his son told me that while he was on the stump, he saw the deer he had been chasing pass in front of him three separate times, at different times of day, and each time the deer was less than it had been the time before. He said nothing more than that. Less of a deer than the time before.

That is what he said. His son told me one other thing that the old man never said anything about, but the son saw it with his own eyes. When they brought Curtis Fardan home on that fourth night and put him in his bed, his wife took his clothes off and washed him, because he had been in the woods for four days and needed cleaning. She found something on his lower back.

A circular mark the size of a silver dollar, dark against his skin like an old bruise, but with no bruising around it. She asked him where he had gotten it. He said he did not know. He said he had probably slept on a rock.

She let it go. The mark did not fade in the eleven years he lived after that. Not one degree. His son helped his father bathe in his old age, and he saw it every time.

It was the same mark on the day they buried him as it was on the day he came home. That is what the son told me. He told me on his own porch in 1971. He was an old man by then.

And he said: “I don’t tell anyone that part, because I don’t want anyone looking for it on my body. ” He rolled up his sleeve. There was nothing on his arm. He rolled his sleeve back down.

He said: “But I check. ” “I check every morning. ”

That is the whole story. I will leave you with this.

The mountains held him for four days, then let him go. They have held others longer. They are still there, doing what they do, in a hollow that is not on any map you can buy.