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 gone.
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.