Our cabin sits in a small clearing on the side of Bear Mountain in western Maine, miles from anything that could even remotely be considered civilized. Eons ago, long before I was born, long before even Pop was born, a local hunter got lost on the mountain and was presumed dead and gone. Three weeks later he appeared, dehydrated, half-starved, filthy, and confused. The story goes that as he stumbled back into civilization he kept mumbling something about surviving Fear Mountain. The name stuck with the locals and the peak has been called such ever since. The closest town to Bear Mountain is the village of Woodsmall, ten miles down route 34, and route 34 is a good five miles down the mountain, if you are a crow. If not, the drive along the rutted and winding service road as it snakes its way down Bear Mountain is no less than seven or eight miles. And Woodsmall, though officially designated a village, is hardly that. It consists of eleven homes (twelve if you count the O’Malley’s oversized and ostentatious dog house for their black lab, Duke), one barbershop, one farm supply store, and one grocery with an ice cream parlor.
Bear Mountain rises out of miles and miles of patchworked farmland and forest dotted with villages no larger than Woodsmall. We live on a 100-acre farm ten miles from Woodsmall. Someday I plan to leave the farm and travel the country, preaching the good news of God’s Word.
Looking up into the abyss that sprawled above us, watching the darkness enclose and swallow the flashlight’s beam much like an octopus envelopes its prey in a tangle of tentacles and slowly, steadily, draws the helpless victim toward its beaklike mouth, I realized how suffocating a moonless night really was, as if the sky were an eight-armed predator and we its helpless prey. I closed the cabin door behind me and huddled close to Henry. After all, he was the one with the shotgun and if something sinister and violence-craved with a beak for a mouth was waiting for us, I’d much rather him pull the trigger than me try to blind it with my flashlight.
We both stood still for a minute or two, quieting our breathing, listening. I heard nothing. Not the rustle of leaves as a gentle breeze played in their branches, not the crunch of pine needles as wildlife foraged for food or buried treasure, not the hooting of an owl, not even the high-pitched chirp of a bat. The morning was eerily silent and still. I thought of the lost hunter all those years ago and his ramblings about Fear Mountain.
I ran the beam of the light over the tree line, back and forth. The light highlighted the massive trunks of ancient oaks and maples, sycamores, walnut, and white spruce, but did nothing to illumine the forest behind them. It reminded me of plays I’d seen where the cast, illuminated by several strategically placed spotlights, is back-dropped by a thick black curtain.
Keeping my voice to a whisper so any beaked, tentacled, rapacious carnivores lurking behind the curtain, off-stage, wouldn’t hear, I said, “Where are they? I don’t see them.”
Henry turned his head but kept his eyes scanning. “Don’t know. You’d think we’d at least hear ‘em, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s so quiet.” I raised the flashlight, following one of the rough-barked trunks of a walnut to where branches, like the arms of giants, split into two, four, six, eight appendages. About mid-way up, the light faded into the darkness and never reached the top branches, the canopy. “I wish Aaron was here.”
Aaron was our brother, the oldest son of Marlene and Ned Harding. The last we heard from him, he was in Europe fighting the Nazi war machine.
In September of 1944, Aaron had left our farm to join arms with hundreds of thousands of other American boys, eager to poke his finger in the eye of the great Nazi beast. We only heard from him occasionally and never gleaned much information from his letters. They all sounded the same: doing fine, thankful to be alive, can’t wait to come home.
Finally, in May of 1945 we received a telegram from the United States Army informing us that Aaron had gone missing in action. He was last seen in the Ardennes Forest in France following the infamous Malmedy Massacre. Mom cried for a week. Dad lost himself in the farm.
I did wish Aaron were there. He would have known what to do. He was four years my senior, twenty-one years old.
Henry gave me a sideways look; I couldn’t tell if he meant it as agreement or chastisement. “Think I should holler for ‘em?” he asked, still whispering.
“Maybe.” Though I wasn’t sure what a whispered holler would do.
Henry had something else in mind. “Dad!” His voice bounced off the trees and penetrated the silence like the first crack of thunder before a summer storm. It startled me and sent a chill along my jaw line and in back of my ears.
Instinctively, Henry raised the shotgun to his shoulder. I guess he thought the sound of his voice might startle something else and send it in a panicked charge. It’s not called Bear Mountain because it boasts a growing population of wild goats. We both stood still, holding our breath in our mouth, listening.
I think I heard it first. At least, if Henry did he made no indication of it. It came directly from our left, from somewhere deep in the woods. First, a crunching of dry leaves and pine needles, footsteps, uneven but quick, then a low moan followed by a grunt. It sounded human but I wasn’t totally sold on the idea. Sometimes animals make noises that can sound very humanlike. When I was little, Pop had peacocks on his farm. I remember many a summer’s eve sleeping in Pop and Gram’s house, listening to the screams of the peacocks in the dead of the night, allowing my imagination to concoct all sorts of grisly scenarios that could have been unfolding outside the bedroom window. The scream of a bobcat is a very haunting, chilling, and mortal sound as well.
I swung the light over to where the noise, the moan, had sounded and gripped Henry’s shoulder with my free hand. A tingle had started in the back of my head and now slithered down the nape of my neck. “Did you hear that?” I tried to keep my voice under control but it cracked and quivered.
Henry nodded and pulled the barrel of the gun around. “Sure did.”
Then the noise came again, the moan or grunt or whatever it was. This time it was a little louder and came still from our left but now at a forty-five degree angle. Whatever was producing such a sound was on the move.
Suddenly, from our right, came a rustle of leaves, breaking of branches, snapping of twigs. Both Henry and I jumped and spun around to face the sound. It came toward us at a high rate of speed. My imagination got away from me, and I imagined a beast twice the size of Henry, all tentacles and suckers and snapping beak, barreling out of the woods, taking the clearing in three easy leaps and pouncing on both of us, blinding us with a squirt of its ink, then devouring us alive. Fortunately, what came out of the woods, what burst into the clearing, covered in leaves and sticks and glistening with sweat, was no octopus-boogeyman bent on inking first, then feasting, it was Dad.
He ran toward us, eyes wild, shotgun gripped with both hands, boots still unlaced, breathing heavy. I shined the light at him, just to make sure it was really Dad and not the beast pretending to be Dad. He threw a hand up, shielding the light from his face with his forearm. “Get that light outta my face, Billy,” he snapped, then swatted at the barrel of Henry’s gun. “And don’t point that thing at me, boy.”
I lowered the beam and aimed it at his waist. Traces of light still reached his face, reflected in his eyes. His chest heaved and neck muscles tightened like iron cords with each inhalation. Dad was a big man, barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, with meaty hands and forearms like tree branches. I was surprised Henry hadn’t pulled the trigger and blown Dad back into the woods. In this darkness, he could have easily been mistaken for the many-armed, fire-eyed creature I had pictured in my mind. But no monster that had ever haunted me in my dreams or imagination had worn flannel. For that I was grateful. And I was glad Henry didn’t share my imagination.
“What is it, Dad?” I asked.
“Where’s Pop?” Henry said, his voice a little shaky.
Dad rubbed the sweat from his brow and wiped his hand on his pants, then looked past us into the darkened woods. “Boys, Pop’s gone
missing.”
3
“Missing.” I dropped the flashlight a little so the beam now highlighted Dad’s thighs and knees. “What do you mean, missing?”
Dad lowered his brow and pressed his lips into a thin line. He shifted his eyes from me to Henry then back to me again then let them fall to the ground. “Boys, Pop’s got oldtimers disease. He was diagnosed a few months back by Doc Richards. Said he’s not a hundred percent sure but all the ways Pop’s been acting lately says it is.”
I looked over at Henry, not sure if he knew what Dad was talking about. The confused look on his face confirmed my suspicion. “Alzheimer’s,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. Somehow, Dad’s “oldtimers” seemed less sinister, less final, less vicious. There’s not a lot known about Alzheimer’s, its cause and cure, but one thing that is known is that it’s brutal, merciless. Like a cunning con man, it slowly robs its host of his memories, stealing the one thing he thought could never be taken from him. And what it leaves is a shell of the person you once knew, a hollowed out flesh and blood shell. The person inside is lost forever, like Pop wandering in the woods with no idea where he was.
Henry gave me a blank look that said more than he ever could have in words. He bounced the butt of the shotgun on the ground. “What’s that got to do with him missing?”
“Alzheimer’s is a disease that slowly eats away at a person’s brain. They slowly lose their mind. You know we’ve been kidding Pop about his forgetfulness for years, and how he tells you the same thing every time you see him.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen the symptoms before now. Thinking about it and saying it out loud made it all so real. I could have diagnosed him months, maybe years ago.
“One symptom is wandering,” I said, “especially at night. The person will just wander off and not know where he’s going or why he’s going there. Sometimes they realize later what they’ve done, sometimes they don’t.”
The thought of Pop roaming the woods at this hour twisted my stomach into a knot. He wasn’t lost and looking to be found, he was just lost. And didn’t even know he was lost. A new sense of urgency came over me then. We needed to find him before he hurt himself. Or got hurt by something else. I didn’t even want to think about the wildlife—bears, coyotes, bobcats—that also roamed these woods at night.
“Eventually, he won’t even recognize us, won’t remember the memories we’ve shared, won’t even remember his own name. His mind will be a blank slate, an empty box.”
Tears pooled in my eyes and blurred the image of Dad and Henry. Both glanced at the tree line, and I took the opportunity to swipe at the wetness now on my cheek. It’s unthinkable how an entire lifetime of living and feeling and loving and experiencing can be erased, obliterated, expunged, as if the life had never been lived. You go through life storing up images and names and memories of every variety in hopes that when you’ve come full circle and you’ve lost your ability to see or hear or taste or walk that at least, at the very least, you’ll have your memories. People can rob you of anything and everything . . . except your mind, I once heard someone say. But your mind can be robbed and though everyone around you may remember that you lived, as far as you’re concerned, they never existed, their lives were only vapors, appearing as a mist then gone with no memory or residue of a life lived, well or otherwise. Alzheimer’s was an awful beast, a devil of a disease, a merciless thief of life.
“It’s my fault,” Dad said, his voice thick. “Should have never brought him here. I thought maybe being out here at his cabin, in the woods, hunting, would jog his memory. He told me a few weeks back that he couldn’t remember ever hunting. Asked me if he’d ever shot anything.”
Pop was one of the greatest hunters in Maine. A legend. Everyone from the western farming land to the central woodland to the coastal region had heard the name Elmer Harding at least once. Harding and hunting were synonymous. Had he ever shot anything? Only more buck than any other hunter in the state, more bear than I could count on two hands, and more moose than most whole towns saw in a lifetime. And he shot more than wildlife too. Pop served as an officer in World War I and came home with a breast full of polished medals.
Dad continued, “I heard him get out of bed, heard the cot creak. By the time I was fully awake and knew what was happening, he was out the door. At first I thought maybe he was just going outside to pee, you know how he is, then I saw he’d left behind his slippers and boots. He’d never do that. That’s when I knew he was wandering off again. Gram said he’s done it maybe four, five times already. I grabbed my gun and ran outside, even forgot my flashlight, but he was gone that quick. I didn’t even think, just went tearing into the woods looking for him.”
“So what, Pop’s got some bug in his head?” Henry asked in all sincerity.
He was looking at me as I had unwittingly established myself as the resident Alzheimer’s expert. “Bugs?” I questioned.
“You said something’s eating away at Pop’s brain. Isn’t there some medicine or something Doc Richards can give him to kill it?”
Apparently, my description of the disease’s unpitying and relentless attack on the brain cells led my brother to believe Alzheimer’s was a living, breathing creature not unlike the meningeal worm that plants itself inside the cranium of deer or sheep, spreads out its picnic blanket, and enjoys a smorgasbord of gray and white matter.
“Alzheimer’s isn’t a bug,” I said. “It’s not alive, it’s just a disease. No one really knows what it is.”
Looking like a student who didn’t fully trust his teacher’s claim that sightings of eight-foot hairy hominoids in the Texas forestland were nothing but some drunk hunter’s imagination or his ill-shaven, overweight cousin, Henry said, “So they could be bugs.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m sure they’ve done autopsies on people who’ve died with Alzheimer’s and they would’ve found the bugs then.”
Henry shrugged and turned his eyes toward the tree line.
I glanced at Dad. “Did you hear the moan?”
Dad nodded and looked directly into my eyes. He was an authoritative man, the dominant type, and the weight of his stare always made me cower just a little. “Yeah. But it didn’t sound like him.”
I shook my head, brushed the hair off my forehead. “No it didn’t. It came from over there—” I pointed behind me at the trees standing like sentries, guarding the woods and whatever secrets it held, “—then there.” I showed him where the last moan was heard, at a forty-five degree angle from where we stood. “He—the sound—was moving.”
“Let me get my flashlight and we’ll split up, look for him.”
Dad disappeared into the cabin, leaving Henry and me standing alone outside. My brother’s quietness told me he was troubled. Henry is not a talkative person by nature, but he’s not an introvert either . . . except when he’s upset about something. Then, like a turtle, he pulls into his shell and folds up within himself, not letting anyone see the hurt that is eating away at him. I’m not sure why he does that, whether because he just can’t find the words to express himself or because he’s too proud, too tough on the exterior, to show the softness that hides behind the shell. Exposing his belly, his soft spot, would be too vulnerable for him. Dad’s like that too. So is Aaron.
While we waited, I asked Henry, “You okay?”
He nodded, but didn’t look at me. I watched his Adam’s apple bob with some difficulty in his throat and knew he was battling the same lump I was. “I’m fine. We just need to find—”
From somewhere deep in the woods, still to our left, the moan came again, crawling over the leaves, slithering between the trees, into our clearing. It was low and prolonged this time, lasting maybe three, four seconds. A chill, like a cold hand, raced down my spine and settled at the top of my buttocks when the recognition came: it was the sound of pain, the moan associated with great grief or agony, when words fail and the only sound that can escape a tightened jaw and clenched teeth is from somewhe
re deep in the throat, from the soul. I pictured Pop lying on the ground, ankle twisted at an odd angle, too frightened and injured to holler or shout, able only to expel a pained groan. Then an image, unbidden, flashed through my mind of Pop being dragged by the back of the neck by some angry bear or pack of coyotes, or, God forbid, an eight-foot, hairy ape-man, dragged off to some remote location where he’d be eviscerated and eaten alive. I closed my eyes hard and pushed the gruesome image from my head.
Henry must have recognized the moan too. He nearly dropped his gun and ran into the cabin. “Dad, let’s go. We heard it again.”
Dad came barreling out of the cabin like a steam engine, breathing hard, clutching his gun in one hand, the flashlight in the other. He swept the beam of light back and forth over the tree line. The sight of those trunks, pushing up from the ground and standing immovable for decades, probably centuries, made me think of giants. And I knew we’d be crossing the border, trespassing into their land, walking among them.
“We need to split up,” Dad said. “I’ll go that way—” he pointed the flashlight to our immediate left, where we first heard the moan, “—and you two go that way.” He pointed in front of us, in front of the cabin. “We’ll go out maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty yards, then move toward each other. He’s gotta be somewhere in that area.”
“We’ll find him,” Henry said, trying his hardest to sound confident and brave like Dad. I could tell he was scared, though, maybe even as much as I was.
We watched as Dad and his light faded into the trees, then we walked forward, huddled closer than we needed to be, me with my trusty light and Henry with his shotgun.
With one step we left the mottled, dry grass of the clearing and entered the land of the goliaths and a world of unknowns.
4
When I was young, six or seven I think, I wandered off into the woods surrounding the north field of our farm and got lost. If I remember correctly, I went in search of some imaginary treasure. Mom had just finished reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and I was certain I was destined to follow in the footsteps of young Jim Hawkins and find a long-buried treasure. And I was certain said treasure just so happened to be buried in the woods beyond our fields. I thought Indians or explorers or revolutionaries must have come through this way, buried a treasure to be recovered at some later date, only to die in some most unfortunate accident and leave the cache hidden until a young lad such as myself read about a buried treasure in someone’s novel, got the idea that he was meant to find a treasure, and went in search of a treasure he knew nothing about.
Fear Mountain Page 2