He stood up out of the laurel taller than the door of my barn, with his hair hanging down past his shoulders like a woman’s, and he told me in plain English to put my rifle up. Those are the words of Virgil Acres, a state game warden in the Red River country of Kentucky, about a Monday in November of 1931. He had been eleven years in the job. He met a living giant on a ridge above Swift Camp Creek, and it spoke to him.

Before the year was out, the state let him go. It wasn’t the giant that cost him the job. It was what the giant said to him, and that he wrote it down. There is one sentence he never said out loud while he wore the badge.

It is the last thing the giant told him at the edge of the road before it went back into the trees. He kept quiet about it for twenty-five years. Then, in March of 1956, sick and sixty-six and living in his daughter’s front room on the square in Booneville, he sent for my grandfather. Clell Vawter was the coroner of Owsley County then.

Over the years, he had taken down a good many statements from men who knew they were dying, and he kept them in the back of the book behind the last inquest. Acres talked for three afternoons. My grandfather wrote it all down, forty-one pages, read every one back, and Acres signed the bottom of each page with a hand that shook. The statement is in the book now.

Folded inside it are two more papers Acres kept until he died. One is the letter from the state that ended his career. The other is a page torn from his own field book, dated the night he came down off that ridge. What follows is his statement, in his words.

“My name is Virgil Akers. I was born in 1890 at Hazel Green in Wolfe County, Kentucky. From 1920 to the end of 1931, I was a deputy game warden for the state, working five counties along the Red River. I wanted you to know what kind of man I was before any of this, so you can weigh what comes after.

I’d pulled two drowned men out of the Red River with my own hands. I’d walked a still house at night with a shotgun pointed at my belly from the dark and talked the man holding it into setting it down. I’d tracked a wounded deer three days in January snow to put it out of its misery. I wasn’t a man who scared, and I wasn’t a man who believed in much I couldn’t put my hand on.

”

And there was one more thing. There is an old story on those ridges about tall people. The old folks up Swift Camp Creek said they lived under the cliffs before anybody came over the mountains, and some of them said they were still there. Acres laughed at that story for eleven years.

Every time some farmer told him he’d seen a man ten feet high in the edge of his corn, he wrote it down in his book as a bear, and he laughed about it riding home. That was Virgil Akers in October of 1931. On the nineteenth of October, a man named Lonzo Palfrey went out squirrel hunting on the ridges above the Red River and didn’t come home. He was thirty-eight.

He’d hunted those ridges since he was a boy. His wife said he’d taken his rifle, a poke of cornbread, and a tin of shells, and told her he’d be back by dark. The sheriff of Wolfe County sent for Acres the next morning because he knew those ridges better than anybody drawing county pay. Acres said plainly what he expected.

He expected a broken leg at the foot of a cliff. That country is all cliffs and rock houses, and a man running a squirrel along a ledge can step off one in the time it takes to sneeze. They’d find him in two days, cold and sorry, and his wife would give him what for. They searched five days.

The sheriff, two deputies, eleven men from Hazel Green, and Doc Swango with his two blue tick hounds. On the second day, on the east side of a ridge above Swift Camp Creek, Acres found tracks in the soft ground under a rock house. Barefoot. Long.

Longer than his arm from the elbow to the end of his fingers. The stride between them was more than he could cover in two of his own steps. He knelt there a long time, then told the sheriff it was a bear, walked on its back feet in mud, and that the mud had spread the print. There hadn’t been a bear seen in that country in twenty years.

The sheriff knew it. He didn’t say a word. On the fourth day, Swango’s hounds came to a laurel thicket at the head of a draw and stopped dead. They wouldn’t go in.

They wouldn’t bark. They lay down flat with their ears back and their bellies on the ground and whined, a sound Swango said he’d never heard a hound make in thirty years of running dogs. He beat one of them. It still wouldn’t go.

Acres said it was bear scent. He wrote bear in his field book that night. That was the second time he wrote that word when he didn’t believe it. On the fifth day, the sheriff called it off.

The men had crops to get in, and the weather was turning. Lonzo Palfrey’s wife sat on her porch and watched them all ride by her gate. Acres couldn’t look at her. He went home.

But he couldn’t let go of it. What stuck with him wasn’t the tracks. It was where they went. He’d followed that line of barefoot prints up the draw and lost them on bare rock.

And when he laid it out in his head that night, the line ran straight back toward ground their own men had walked the first day. Whatever made those prints had stood near enough to hear them call Lonzo’s name. Nine days later, on Monday, the second of November, he went back by himself. He knew better.

Every warden knows better. You don’t go into rough country alone with nobody knowing where you are. He told his wife he was checking traps on Stillwater and rode the other way. He left his horse at a farm at the mouth of Swift Camp Creek and walked in at first light with his rifle and a canteen.

The woods felt different with nobody else in them. Quieter than woods ought to be in November, when every squirrel on the ridge is cutting hickory nuts. He went up the draw where the hounds had laid down. At the top of it, where the laurel thinned out at the foot of a cliff, there was a big beech.

He’d passed that beech on the fourth day with Swango and never looked at it. This time he looked. About nine feet up the trunk, the bark had been stripped. Not gnawed.

Stripped in four long scrapes running down. Each one was as wide as two of his fingers, spaced even, the way a man’s fingers would lie if he dragged his hand down a tree. He reached up as high as he could. His fingertips came about a foot short of the top of those marks.

He stood under that beech thinking about what kind of hand reaches nine feet up a tree. He stood there too long. A stick broke behind him. Not a twig.

A dead limb as thick as his wrist. The sound it makes when weight comes down on it. He turned around with the rifle up. There was nothing but laurel and rock.

He told himself it was a deer. He knew it wasn’t. A deer that close would have blown and run. He started walking back down the draw the way he’d come, and he didn’t hurry, because if you hurry in front of something, it figures out you’re scared.

Another limb broke. Off to his left this time, uphill, and farther off than the first. Louder. Something heavy moving along the slope above him and keeping pace.

Between two big hemlocks for about as long as it takes to blink, he saw a piece of it. A shoulder. Dark, bare skin like an old saddle, and long dark hair hanging off it. Moving low and quick.

Then, nothing. He ran. He wasn’t ashamed of that. He ran down that draw as hard as he’d ever run, and it came with him.

He could hear it in the laurel above him. Coming close, then dropping back, then close again. Never out in the open. He’d catch the top of the laurel shaking forty feet off.

A branch whipping back. Once he heard it breathe. Slow and deep. Not the way a thing breathes when it’s running hard.

The way a man breathes when he’s walking. A thing chasing you that isn’t even winded. He cut right down toward the creek thinking he’d get to open ground. It was already below him.

He heard it in the rhododendron along the water before he got there. He cut back up the slope, and it came up with him on a line parallel to his, just inside the thick stuff. It took him a while to understand. And when he understood it, it went through him cold.

It wasn’t trying to catch him. It was turning him. Every time he picked a way out, it was standing in it. It was walking him where it wanted him to go, the way a good dog walks sheep.

He went over a ledge he didn’t see, about a six-foot drop onto loose rock. His right foot came down on a rock that rolled, and his ankle went over with a crack he heard before he felt it. He knew it was broken before he tried to stand. He tried anyway.

It folded under him like a wet rag. He sat there at the bottom of that ledge with his back against the rock and his rifle across his knees and waited for it to come and finish it. It didn’t come. The crashing stopped.

The whole ridge went quiet. No birds, no wind, no squirrels. Then he heard it walking. Slow, down through the laurel above him, one step and then another, taking its time.

He’d rather it had charged. A charge is a scared animal. This was something making up its mind. It came out of the laurel about forty feet from him and stood up straight.

He would tell it as near as he could. He had twenty-five years to get it right. It was a man’s shape, two arms, two legs, a head on its shoulders like his or yours, but it was ten feet tall if it was an inch. Its head would have cleared the top of his barn door with room to spare.

Its arms hung down past its knees. It wore nothing at all, and its skin was dark and creased like leather left out in the weather, and its hair came down off its head past its shoulders, black with gray in it. Its hands were the size of a shovel blade. The fingers were long, the way the marks on the beech had told him.

And its eyes were set deep under a heavy brow, and they caught the light like a man’s eyes do, not like a dog’s or a cat’s. Like a man’s. There was somebody in there looking out. He’d laughed at that story for eleven years, and there it was, forty feet off, and him with a broken ankle.

He hollered at it to stay back. It came on, not fast, just steady. He put the rifle on its chest. He had a thirty-thirty, and he’d killed bucks at two hundred yards with it, and his hands were shaking so bad the barrel was moving a foot either way.

It stopped. It looked at the rifle, then it looked at him, and it talked. He wanted to set down exactly how it sounded, because people who’ve heard this secondhand always ask. It wasn’t a growl made into words.

It wasn’t a parrot. It was a voice, deep and slow and rough at the bottom, like it came up through gravel, but every word was a word, and it put them together like a man does. It talked like the oldest people he knew as a boy, like his great-grandmother who came over the mountains from Virginia, who said “yonder” and “afeared” and called a sack a poke. It said, “You can keep that on me if it eases you.

You’re pointing it the wrong way. ”

He didn’t lower it. He wanted that understood. It wasn’t courage that kept his finger off the trigger.

He just couldn’t make his hand believe what his ears had heard. He asked it what it was. His voice came out a whisper. It thought about that.

It tipped its head down and to one side, like a man thinking whether a question’s worth his trouble. Then it said, “I’m the one you ought to be least afeared of on this ridge tonight. ”

He didn’t understand it then. He was too busy trying to keep from passing out.

It had told him the whole thing in the first two things it ever said, and he didn’t hear it. He asked it what it wanted with him. It looked at his foot. It looked a while, the way a doctor looks.

“The low ones are out,” it said. “Come with me or stay and meet them. ”

He took that as a threat. Of course he did.

He heard “the low ones” and thought it meant more of its own kind, a whole family of them coming down through the laurel. He heard “come with me” as something four or five hundred pounds bigger than him telling him how it was going to be. He was wrong about nearly all of it. It took him most of the afternoon to find out how wrong.

He asked it who the low ones were. It didn’t answer. It came over, slow, and he let it. It took the rifle out of his hands like you’d take a stick from a child, and handed it back to him barrel down.

Then it picked him up. It picked him up like a sack of meal and laid him over its shoulder and started walking. He’d ridden fast horses. He’d never moved through the woods like that.

It went up that slope through laurel he’d have had to cut with a hatchet, and it never slowed. Where there was a ledge, it stepped up it. Where there was a gap between two rocks, it went over it in one stride. It knew that ground the way he knew his own kitchen in the dark.

His rifle was in his hand the whole time. He never fired it. He talked because talking was the only thing he had left that was his. He said, “You talk English.

” It was a fool thing to say. It answered anyway. “I’ve heard it a long while. Since before your grandmother’s grandmother.

The first ones who came over the mountains talked it to each other at their fires. We listened. ”

He asked where it learned it, and it said, “From you. Your people talk in the woods like nobody can hear.

Hunting, hollering for dogs, hollering for each other, calling a man’s name up and down a hollow for five days. ”

That’s when he knew it had been with them the whole search. Every time they’d stood on a ridge and hollered “Lonzo,” it had been close enough to hear it. It had heard them tell each other where to look and where they’d already been.

He asked it straight out. He said, “You watched us the whole five days. ” It didn’t answer in words. It just shifted him higher on its shoulder and kept walking and kept its eyes on the trees in front of them.

And after a while, he understood that was the answer. He asked it what he should call it. He didn’t know why. It seemed wrong being carried through the woods by something with no name.

It said, “We never needed a name, there being so few of us. Your old people called us the tall ones. I’ll answer to that. ”

Then it said, like it was talking about the weather, “There’s others in this ground that ain’t tall.

You’ve been hunting one man. You’ve not been hunting in the right place for what took him. ”

That turned the whole thing over in his head. Five days he’d thought bear, and then he’d thought it was this thing carrying him, and now this thing was telling him in its own voice that it wasn’t, and that there was something else.

He said, “You mean a bear, a painter, something with a name? ”

“No. ” It cut him off, the only time it ever did. “Nothing you have a name for.

Not like me, neither. They live under the rock, down where the cliffs go back into the hill, in the cracks, where it’s always dark. We kept them there, my people did, a long time. ”

He asked it if it was afraid of them.

He didn’t mean to ask it, it just came out. It didn’t make anything of it. It said, “Yes, and so ought you to be, more than you are of me. ”

He would tell you how that sat with him.

A thing ten feet tall that could carry a grown man up a cliff without breathing hard, telling him there was something on that ridge it was scared of. He asked it if they’d killed Lonzo Palfrey. It slowed down, the first time it had slowed. “I didn’t see it,” it said.

“I found him after. I’ve found men like him before. Not many, some in some years, more now. ”

Partway along a ridge it stopped all at once and stepped in under a rock house, a big overhang of sandstone, and pressed them both back against the rock.

Its arm came across his chest like a bar. Down below them in the gorge, something made a sound. It was a clicking, like two dry sticks knocked together, quick, then a pause, then quick again. And under it a kind of humming, low, that he felt in his teeth more than heard.

It came up from down in the hemlocks by the river and moved along, and then it stopped. The tall one didn’t move. He could feel it holding its breath. Its whole body had gone hard as the rock behind them.

It counted something in its head. He could see it doing it. Then it stepped out and went on, faster than before. “Close,” it said, not to him.

“They oughtn’t be up this high, not in the daylight, not this early in the winter. ”

He asked it what it meant, this soon. It said, “You think I mean today. I don’t mean today.

I mean these last years. When I was young, they never came up past the creek. Now they come up on the ridges in the day. ”

He asked it why.

It said, “The lumber company took the big trees off these cliffs. When I was young, you couldn’t see the sky from the creek. Now the sun gets down in under the rock where they live, and they’ve come up looking for new dark. They’ve found it in the hollows, in the barns, in the rock houses where your people go to get out of the rain.

”

It set him down at last in a narrow hollow between two ridges, the kind of place you’d walk past a hundred times and never know was there. The laurel closed over the top of it. The cliffs on both sides kept the light out. You couldn’t have seen into it from the ridge top or got into it from the creek unless you knew the way.

He’d go slow there, because that was the part he sent for the coroner to hear. He smelled it before he saw it. Anybody who’s pulled a man out of the water after a week knows that smell and doesn’t ever forget it. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked where the tall one was looking, through a gap in the laurel at the back wall of a little rock house.

Lonzo Palfrey was sitting against the back of it. His rifle was across his knees. His hat was still on. He knew him by his coat and by the tin of shells beside him, still full.

He’d never fired a shot. Acres would not put in a sworn paper what had been done to him. He told the coroner of Wolfe County, and the coroner wrote it down and didn’t put it in his report either. There were tracks in the dry dust of that rock house floor.

Not the tall one’s. Small ones, bare and narrow, about the length of a child’s foot, but with the toes long and spread apart like fingers. A lot of them, going all around where Lonzo sat. Around and around.

“More than one,” Acres said. “They don’t go alone,” the tall one said. “That’s the difference in us. One of me can stand on a ridge by himself.

One of them never comes by himself. ”

He asked it how many there were. It went still. It didn’t answer for a while.

Then it lifted one of those long arms and moved it slow across the whole gorge, every ridge and every cliff line you could see from there. “More than last year,” it said. “That’s the number you want, not the count. How much the count has grown.

”

He asked it why it helped him. He wasn’t anything to it. It said, “You were going to be the next one sitting against a rock, and your people don’t listen to a thing they can’t see. Maybe they’ll listen to you.

”

It picked him up again and carried him out a different way, down off the ridge toward the road. Partway down, it stopped hard and stepped into a stand of young hemlock and held still, and he felt its whole body go tight. Below them, maybe sixty yards off, the leaves on the slope moved in a long low line, fast, too low to the ground for anything walking upright. He never saw what made it.

Just the leaves moving, and that dry clicking, once and then gone. “Just the one,” the tall one said when it had passed. “Looking. If it had been hunting, you’d not have heard a thing.

”

He asked it if he should come back, if any of them should come back up there. It said, “Don’t. Not this year. Maybe not next.

”

It carried him the rest of the way to where the woods opened onto the wagon road along the creek, and set him down at the edge of the road as gentle as a mother laying a baby in a bed. His pack strap had twisted on his shoulder. It reached down with that big hand and straightened it. Then it squatted down so its face was near his, close enough he could smell wood smoke on it and something like cold creek water, and it said the thing he never said to anybody until now.

“My people held them under the rock since before yours came over the mountains. There’s too few of us left to hold them now. Tell yours. ”

Then it stood up and stepped back into the trees, and he never saw it again.

He crawled a mile up that road on his hands and one knee to the farm where he’d left his horse. The farmer set his ankle with two boards and a bed sheet and drove him home in his wagon. That night he wrote it in his field book, all of it. And eight days later, with his foot in a cast, he wrote his report to the commission in Frankfort.

He wrote that he’d found Lonzo Palfrey dead in a rock house above Swift Camp Creek. He wrote that he’d been killed by something living under the cliffs that was not a bear. And he wrote that he’d been carried to him by a man ten feet tall who spoke English and warned him there were more of the others every year. He signed his name to it.

He thought it was his duty. He thought about that tall one every night for twenty-five years. Here is what he thought, and then he was done. It wasn’t the monster.

It was the guard. It had been the guard for longer than anybody’s people have been in Kentucky, and there was nearly none of them left, and it had no way to tell anybody but to pick up the first fool with a badge that came through its woods alone and carry him where he could see. He hoped he was enough. He didn’t believe he was.

That was where his statement ended. He died nineteen days after he signed the last page. The letter is folded inside the statement. It’s on the commission’s letterhead, dated the seventeenth of December, 1931, two paragraphs long.

It thanks Deputy Warden Acres for his eleven years of service. It says that the commission has reviewed his report of the ninth of November and finds it inconsistent with the dignity and the standards of the service. It says his commission is withdrawn as of the thirty-first of December. Nobody signed it by hand.

It’s stamped. The page from his field book is dated the second of November, 1931, in pencil, and the pencil skids where his hand shook. Most of it is the same story he told my grandfather twenty-five years later, almost word for word. He never changed it.

At the bottom of that page, there’s one line written smaller along the edge, like he didn’t want to give it room. Tell yours. My grandfather didn’t just file it. That isn’t how he was.

In the summer of 1956, he wrote to the coroner of Wolfe County and asked for the inquest on Lonzo Palfrey. The answer came back on a postcard. There was no inquest file to send, but the clerk had found the docket line. Lonzo Palfrey, 38, Swift Camp Creek, November 1931.

And beside it, two words in the old clerk’s hand, not viewed. The coroner didn’t view the body. Acres told him what he’d seen, and the coroner ruled on what Acres told him and never went up there. The Red River country is national forest now.

People climb those cliffs on ropes on a Saturday and camp in the rock houses on a Saturday night. Ninety years is a long time for a tree, and the beech is gone. The rock houses are still there, their floors dry and dusty and full of boot prints. The tall one told him there were more of the low ones every year.

That was 1931. Count the years since, and ask yourself what’s under the rock houses now.