Reed had a hard time believing such rage could ever die.
His mother had bought him cowboy boots in the older of the two department stores in Four Corners when Reed had been ten. He was thrilled, and so nervous about scuffing them up he never wore them outside. He’d wear old shoes to school with the boots wrapped in paper under his arm, then change into them before class started, changing to the old shoes again when recess time came. That’s how he lost them; somebody stole the precious boots while he was outside playing.
Four Corners hadn’t changed much—the paint was clean and bright—and in that, Reed realized, it was very much unlike Simpson Creeks. In the Creeks people painted their houses and buildings but once every ten years or so. No one much cared. Amos Nickles usually had a well-painted house, but he was probably the only one.
Flowerbeds were well kept, and everyone appeared to have a garden. Every town family with a car. Very, very different from Simpson Creeks, he thought. In many ways Four Corners was the town the Creeks might have dreamed of being, if they’d cared that much.
Still, there were many similarities—the slow rhythm of the people’s speech, coupled with the long pauses between thoughts or between questions and replies that could drive an outsider half-crazy to listen to. The open friendliness with strangers who didn’t look too much out of the ordinary, which proved to be a thin veneer over a basic uneasiness with anyone from outside the community.
And the sense of there being a hard life out there, an existence barely won from nature, a momentary stay against danger.
At the Pork & Pie Restaurant the proprietor stared at him. Every time Reed looked back his way the man averted his eyes. Finally, he came over and smiled.
“Aren’t you the Taylor boy?”
“I guess…Reed Taylor is my name.”
The man beamed and grabbed his hand. “Your family had dinner here…oh maybe ten years ago. You ain’t changed much; just a little taller. And thinner…I’d say. Nice to see you again! Be in town long?”
Suddenly he was the Taylor boy again. He was the Taylor son. And once again, he was shy.
“No, I’ll be taking the train to the Creeks in about an hour.”
“Well, you say hello to your folks for me, will you? Tell ‘em we’d like to see ‘em again real soon!” The man smiled expectantly.
“Sure,” Reed said. “I’ll tell them…when I see them.”
The man looked at him oddly for a moment, then walked back to his kitchen, glancing at Reed’s table now and then, unsmiling.
Reed tried the soup and it seemed too cold; he tried a soft drink, with ice, and it burned going down. He started to choke, coughing into his napkin, and knew that the owner was trying not to notice. Reed caught the man spying on him once more—that look of complete suspicion—and he got up and left the restaurant.
So much for a homecoming…
Darkness fell swiftly in Four Corners; the mountains here were high on all sides, and cut off the sun’s rays early. It was already pretty dark an hour before Reed was supposed to get back on the train. He spent part of that time on a park bench near the courthouse watching two dogs struggle for a piece of scrap meat. They were small dogs, their fight a playful one, until one of them decided to go for the throat of the other. The black terrier’s neck suddenly spouted blood and Reed leaped to his feet.
The dog turned and snarled, would have had his right hand if Reed hadn’t jerked it out of the way. Reed shouted and kicked out at the dog, and it was gone around the corner of the courthouse.
He looked around. Several people watching him. Whispering. He tried to think it was because he was a stranger here, and of course people down here distrusted strangers.
They didn’t let anyone back on the train until fifteen minutes before departure. The conductor said they were cleaning, but Reed was unreasonably suspicious. Everything seemed suddenly awry, the town of Four Corners like his hometown of Simpson Creeks in one of his nightmares. Nearly dark and the minimal light distorted. As the sky grew darker and shadows blended, the edges of buildings began to waver and disappear. His fever grew worse; his head pounded. He walked to the train station and sat on a concrete loading platform in front of the train. He wanted to be as close as possible, the first one to leap aboard when the conductor granted permission. Two station hands eyed him from a freight doorway and he turned his head, told himself they weren’t looking. He coughed and his throat and mouth took fire in succession; he spat up a spot of darkness into the palm of his hand, and wiped it clean on his pants without checking to see what it was.
Finally the conductor stepped outside the train and waved. Relieved, he began to step up, then hesitated, suddenly afraid to go home.
Charlie could hear the hounds baying in the distance, their hollow voices distorted among the columns of trees and the rock abutments of this part of the Big Andy. It had been a long time since he’d been this high up on the mountain, not since he was a teenager in fact. The woods here were mostly conifers, more similar to woods up north than those lower down on Big Andy’s slopes. Remnants of that great forest that once covered the entire continent, Charlie knew. A dinosaur of a forest.
It had turned chilly; they were up about six thousand feet. Fog had shrunk their world to a rough oval about fifty feet across. Charlie stared past the campfire at the white cloud surrounding them, broken limbs protruding here and there out of the mist like arthritic fingers.
They’d all been surprised by the turn the hunt had taken, even Amos Nickles, who appeared to have encountered almost everything in the way of bear antics. They’d picked up on the trail almost immediately—so quickly it seemed as if the bear had been waiting for them to follow him—tracked it around the edge of the old Taylor property, and before they knew it the bear was leading them straight up the Big Andy, right to the top, where bears had never been before, according to Amos Nickles, even when he was a boy.
The dogs were near exhaustion; Amos said he’d never seen a bear run animals so hard. “Ain’t no natural bear.”
Charlie didn’t know if it was fear or cold, but he was shaking.
There were bits of the Ice Age left behind here, he thought. Thick tree trunks dark with damp. Shallow pools of still black water. On the climb up he noticed how the shortest trees were on the cold, windward side, and most of these trees bare of branches on this side. Ice had built up and broken the branches off during the winters, he supposed. Further up the slope many trees had been blown down, hanging in the upper branches of their neighbors like fallen soldiers. Other trees were leaning or twisted crazily.
Brittle gray lichen covered large areas of the trees and stone, like pale, luminous shadows in the dark. Charlie had heard that some of these growths might be over two thousand years old. Here and there you’d run into a muskeg, or “trembling earth” as the Indians called it. Bog. Most of them were small, a thick mat of vegetation you could stand on covering a shallow pool of water and sediments. You always wondered if there might be larger bogs out there; the Indians certainly did. There were a number of old tales about Indians being swallowed up by the trembling earth. There were also stories about missing white hunters.
Charlie, Joe, and Ben Taylor had remained by the fire. They were exhausted, and didn’t have the enthusiasm for the hunt shown by Amos Nickles and Jake Parkey. They’d rejoin the party later, but Charlie had some doubts the hunt would continue much longer. They were all tired, and after the bear had led them this far, he seemed to have just disappeared into the fog.
Charlie didn’t like it here. There were supposedly few animals at this altitude, but their presence seemed to be everywhere. Not just the bear, although his leading them to this remote spot seemed strange enough in itself, but all the other animals, now insubstantial as fog, that had once existed. On similar mountaintops in the area, the bones of the great ground sloth had been discovered, over seven feet high at the shoulder. Saber-toothed tiger, mastodon, mammoth, then later the musk ox, elk, and Eastern bison. All of them go
ne.
Amos had told them there had been timber wolves up on Big Andy when he was a boy, as well as cougars. But that had been a long time ago.
Charlie found it hard to put all that together. So many different forms of the beast in one place. As if you could just sprinkle some bog water on an ancient stone and some bizarre form of life might sprout there, uproot itself, and bound after a rabbit. Suddenly the luminous fog seemed alive with wet nostrils and eyes.
A bear was actually a throwback to all of that, but something more. A bear was more human than elk or mastodon. Like a human swollen with darkness. So empty of purpose it eats constantly trying to fill itself, that it might be ready for its six-month dreamsleep. A bear ate the kind of things people ate; human garbage was a treat. Then wild apples and horse plums, shadberries, and watercress for dessert. And its front and back paws were different because they’d been used differently. Just like a man’s. Manlike wails and grunts. “Wild-man-of-the-woods,” some of the Indians had called it, what you might imagine a neighbor might become, if left in the woods for generations, deprived of companionship and forced to live in the dark.
Charlie thought the most frightening thing about a bear was that face. Just like a mask with its hidden eyes and unmoving muzzle. You couldn’t tell what a bear was thinking by looking into that face, if he was planning to run or rip you apart. And that smell—there was nothing like it. A bear smells like everything he’s eaten, dying there in the bear mask mouth.
Joe Manors stirred the fire lazily and looked past Charlie into the fog. “Wet one, huh, Charlie?”
“That it is.”
“S’pose they’ll shoot the damn thing?”
Ben Taylor chuckled. “I expect those eager beavers are more likely to shoot each other.”
Joe squirmed closer to the fire. “Hey, Charlie? Why don’t you tell us one of those famous spook stories o’ yours?”
“Yeah, Charlie. Tell the one about the big toe!” Ben Taylor said, laughing.
“Yeah, Charlie; that’s a goodun.”
Charlie gazed into the fire, eyes fixed on the glowing embers near the bottom. He didn’t think they really wanted to hear the tale; they just wanted to kill some time. And he didn’t want to tell the story, having told that particular old folktale a hundred times. Everybody knew it. But strangely, he found himself beginning, as if the way the flames danced were forcing him to speak.
“An old, ragged-looking man was out walking in the woods,” he began.
Joe interrupted. “Hey, Charlie, weren’t that a little boy last time you told it?”
Ben Taylor waved his hand at Joe and looked at Charlie Simpson with a worried expression on his face. Charlie spoke dully, as if half-asleep or half-dead, his eyes rigid, only his mouth moving. Now and then the eyes gleamed before the firelight, as if on their own.
“The man had been out in those woods a long time, so long he couldn’t even remember when was the last time he’d seen another human being. His clothes were all ragged; he ate wild berries, roots, grubs, birds—just like an animal. He couldn’t remember the names for most things, and when he opened his mouth to speak, it was growls and snaps and yappings that came out of it.”
Joe and Ben drew closer together on the opposite side of the fire. Across the flames Ben could see Charlie Simpson’s narrow, almost meatless face, his eyes reflecting the campfire with red highlights. Ben wondered why Charlie was changing the story; it didn’t sound like one of Charlie’s at all.
“One day he found himself in the darkest part of the forest, a place he had never been before. So dark it was hard to see where one tree ended and another tree or the night between them took up. Great trees leaned crazily over him, curtains of moss bending the boughs almost to the ground. Exposed roots lay everywhere like amputated knees and elbows, and he had to walk carefully so as not to fall flat on his face.
“He was hungry now, hungrier than he could remember ever being before. That’s when he found the root. It looked so juicy and tender, but when he stooped down to examine it, he saw that it looked like somebody’s big toe.”
Joe Manors chuckled softly, but Ben Taylor detected a strain in the laugh. This was a part of the story Ben recognized, and it made him think about the fun of the rest of the tale. But everything else about the story was so strange and disturbing, he was having a hard time enjoying it. This wasn’t like one of Charlie’s stories. This wasn’t like Charlie at all.
“He hesitated picking up the root, or the toe—it was really hard to tell for sure which it was, it was caked with so much dirt. But he was so hungry. He popped the toe in his mouth and began to chew, thinking it mighty delicious.”
Ben smiled.
“He started to walk away then, and he heard this faint voice that he’d heard before whispering, ‘Where is my to-o-o-o-e?’
“He turned around quick when he heard that, but there was no one around to be seen. Then he looked down at the ground. The dirt was stirring around the hole where he’d pulled up that root, and suddenly this voice came, a groanin’ and a creakin’ up out of that hole, saying ‘Where is my to-o-o-o-e?’
“So he took off running.”
Joe Manors poked Ben in the ribs with his elbow.
“That old man ran as fast as he could, leaping over logs and dodging branches, trying his damnedest to get away from that voice, but he kept hearing it, ‘Where is my to-o-o-o-e?’ over and over again. Sometimes he’d look back over his shoulder and never see anything coming, but he’d always hear that voice, and sometimes the sound of crashing footsteps, and sometimes branches being snapped in two, and sometimes water splashing.”
Staring into Charlie’s burning eyes through the campfire, Ben was sure Charlie didn’t even know where he was. The hounds were wailing their excitement, getting closer now.
“Finally he stumbled into where he’d been staying that season, a cave hollowed out by hand in the riverbank, brush piled here and there to hide it from the other animals.”
“Other animals, Charlie?” Joe Manors said. Ben grabbed his arm and Joe shook it off. “But Ben…he said other animals. But it’s a man he’s talking about, ain’t it?” Ben gestured at the woods around them. The hounds were nearby, baying as if half-crazed.
Charlie’s voice was getting louder, even louder than the hounds. The two men stopped tussling and listened.
“But he kept hearing it. ‘Who’s got my to-o-o-o-e? Who’s got my to-o-o-o-e?’ getting closer and closer, the branches crashing all down the riverbank, the mud slapping and the grass groaning as the thing approached.
“Finally it was right outside. The old man shook and cried. The brush in front of the opening was swept away. He smelled stinking breath.
“He saw a face, wild, bleeding, full of sores, hair matted with mud. ‘YOU HAVE!’ the face shouted, and the breath was like a dozen corpses set out to rot a month in the summertime.
“Then the thing stepped in. There was a bloody stump where the big toe should’ve been. It was then the old man realized what he was looking at, what it was like looking at this horrible, stinking thing that had just come up out of the ground, come up like some crop grown from rocks and roots and garbage.”
Charlie looked across the campfire at the two men with dull, heat-seeking eyes. “It was like looking in the mirror.”
He stopped, looking up at the two men in surprise. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember just how he had told that story, but somehow he knew he had told it wrong. What was the matter with him? Was he getting old or what?
Two hounds burst into the center of the campsite; one of them, a black-and-tan, stumbled over the flames, yowling when its hair was singed. The rest of the pack exploded then out of the night and fog, mouths gaping, teeth gnashing, circling the fire as if panic-stricken, searching, searching…
“Where’s the damn bear!” Amos shouted, coming into the light. “We tracked him right here!”
“Ain’t no bear here, Mr. Nickles,” Joe said.
“Hell, the
m dogs know better!” Jake was suddenly behind them, shouting, tossing his gun around dangerously. “Bear’s gotta be here somewhere! They got his smell! Just look at ‘em!”
The dogs did seem to be hot on the trail, but a trail that ended right in the middle of their campfire. Ben and Joe looked around in confusion. Jake and Amos were angry, shouting, cursing the dogs and the fog. Charlie Simpson just sat there, still staring into the flames, all life gone from his face.
Then they heard it. A sound like a wild man howling from deep down inside his belly. Turning into a growl. Bear.
The hounds raced around the fire and off into the darkness, Amos and Jake running and shouting behind them. Ben Taylor found himself crazily trying to figure out where all the hounds had come from instead of looking for the bear—he’d never realized Amos Nickles had so many. Blueticks and Walkers were most prevalent, but there were black-and-tans, Plotts, and redbones, too. Just about every kind of dog you could work on a bear. The last few almost knocked poor Charlie into the fire, and Joe and Ben ran to help him to his feet.
Incredibly, the dogs had the bear treed halfway up an oak only thirty feet or so away from the campfire. As if he’d been spying on the hunting party.
“That’s it, Flap! That’s it, boy!” Amos was shouting at his lead pull dog, a handsome Walker almost mad with the chase. All the dogs looked mad, Ben thought, that glassy look, the scarred and flattened muzzle, grasshopper legs shaking like a spastic, thin tail whipping, nose snorting and popping like some machine run far past its limits. And no wonder—dogs like these were kept penned up all year waiting for such rare chances at action. They couldn’t even forage their own food when lost in the woods.
Amos ran to the tree and began thumping the trunk with a stick. The bear howled above him, trying not to look straight down. The hounds swirled around the tree flashing wet hide; the men circled with lanterns in hand.
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