Otherworldly Maine (6 page)

I wasn't laughing. It wasn't my first glimpse of the contemporary medievalism and won't be my last if I survive another year or two. I wasn't laughing, and I said nothing. Mike sat smoking, expertly driving his twentieth-century artifact while I suppose his thoughts were in the seventeenth, sniffing after the wonders of the invisible world, and I recalled what Johnny Malcolm had said about the need for legends. Mike and I had no more talk.

Adelaide Simmons was dourly glad to see me. From her I learned that the sheriff and state police had swarmed all over Harp's place and the surrounding countryside, and were still at it. Result, zero. Harp had repeatedly told our story and was refusing to tell it any more. “Does the chores and sets there drinking,” she said, “or staring off. Was up to see him yesterday, Mr. Dane—felt I should. Couple days they didn't let him alone a minute, maybe now they've eased off some. He asked me real sharp, was you back yet. Well, I redd up his place, made some bread, least I could do.”

When I told her I was going there, she prepared a basket, while I sat in the kitchen and listened. “Some say she busted that window herself, jumped down and run off in the snow, out of her mind. Any sense in that?”

“Nope.”

“And some claim she deserted him. Earlier. Which'd make you a liar. And they say whichever way it was, Harp's made up this crazy story because he can't stand the truth.” Her clever hands slapped sandwiches into shape. “They claim Harp got you to go along with it, they don't say how.”

“Hypnotized me, likely. Adelaide, it all happened the way Harp told it. I heard the thing, too. If Harp is ready for the squirrels, so am I.”

She stared hard, and sighed. She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers that I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say, she doesn't go on talking.

I got up to Ryder's Ridge about suppertime. Bill Hastings was there. The road was plowed slick between the snow ridges, and I wondered how much of the litter of tracks and crumpled paper and spent cigarette packages had been left by sight-seers. Ground frost had not yet yielded to the mud season, which would soon make normal driving impossible for a few weeks. Bill let me in, with the look people wear for serious illness. But Harp heaved himself out of that armchair, not sick in body at least. “Ben, I heard him last night. Late.”

“What direction?”

“North.”

“You hear it, Bill?” I set down the basket.

My pint-size friend shook his head. “Wasn't here.” I couldn't guess how much Bill accepted of the tale.

Harp said, “What's the basket?—oh. Obliged. Adelaide's a nice woman.” But his mind was remote. “It was north, Ben, a long way, but I think I know about where it would be. I wouldn't've heard it except the night was so still, like everything had quieted for me. You know, they been a-deviling me night and day. Robart, state cops, mess of smart little buggers from the papers. I couldn't sleep, I stepped outside like I was called. Why, he might've been the other side of the stars, the sky so full of 'em and nothing stirring. Cold . . . You went to Boston, Ben?”

“Yes. Waste of time. They want it to be something human, anyhow something that fits the books.”

Whittling, Bill said neutrally, “Always a man for the books yourself, wasn't you, Ben?”

I had to agree. Harp asked, “Hadn't no ideas?”

“Just gave me back my own thoughts in their language. We have to find it, Harp. Of course some wouldn't take it for true even if you had photographs.”

Harp said, “Photographs be goddamned.”

“I guess you got to go,” said Bill Hastings. “We been talking about it, Ben. Maybe I'd feel the same if it was me. . .! better be on my way or supper'll be cold and the old woman raising hell-fire.” He tossed his stick back in the woodbox.

“Bill,” said Harp, “you won't mind feeding the stock couple, three days?”

“I don't mind. Be up tomorrow.”

“Do the same for you some time. I wouldn't want it mentioned anyplace.”

“Harp, you know me better'n that. See you, Ben.”

“Snow's going fast,” said Harp when Bill had driven off. “Be in the woods a long time yet, though.”

“You wouldn't start this late.”

He was at the window, his lean bulk shutting off much light from the time-seasoned kitchen where most of his indoor life had been passed. “Morning, early. Tonight I got to listen.”

“Be needing sleep, I'd think.”

“I don't always get what I need,” said Harp.

“I'll bring my snowshoes. About six? And my carbine—I'm best with a gun I know.”

He stared at me a while. “All right, Ben. You understand, though, you might have to come back alone. I ain't coming back till I get him, Ben. Not this time.”

*    *    *

At sunup I found him with Ned and Jerry in the stable. He had lived eight or ten years with that team. He gave Ned's neck a final pat as he turned to me and took up our conversation as if night had not intervened. “Not till I get him. Ben, I don't want you drug into this ag'inst your inclination.”

“Did you hear it again last night?”

“I heard it. North.”

The sun was at the point of rising when we left on our snowshoes, like morning ghosts ourselves. Harp strode ahead, down the slope to the woods without haste, perhaps with some reluctance. Near the trees he halted, gazing to his right where a red blaze was burning the edge of the sky curtain; I scolded myself for thinking that he was saying good-bye to the sun.

The snow was crusted, sometimes slippery even for our web feet. We entered the woods along a tangle of tracks, including the fat tire marks of a snow scooter. “Guy from Lohman,” said Harp. “Hired the goddamn thing out to the state cops and hisself with it. Goes pootin' around all over hell, fit to scare everything inside eight, ten miles.” He cut himself a fresh plug to last the morning. “I b'lieve the thing is a mite farther off than that. They'll be messing around again today.” His fingers dug into my arm. “See how it is, don't y'? They ain't looking for what we are. Looking for a dead body to hang onto my neck. And if they was to find her the way I found—the way I found—”

“Harp, you needn't borrow trouble.”

“I know how they think,” he said. “Was I to walk down the road beyond Darkfield, they'd pick me up. They ain't got me in shackles because they got no—no body, Ben. Nobody needs to tell me about the law. They got to have a body. Only reason they didn't leave a man here overnight, they figure I can't go nowhere. They think a man couldn't travel in three, four foot of snow . . . Ben, I mean to find that thing and shoot it down . . . We better slant off thisaway.”

He set out at a wide angle from those tracks, and we soon had them out of sight. On the firm crust our snowshoes left no mark. After a while we heard a grumble of motors far back, on the road. Harp chuckled viciously. “Bright and early like yesterday.” He stared back the way we had come. “They'll never pick up our trail without dogs. That son of a bitch Robart did talk about borrying a hound somewhere, to sniff Leda's clothes. More likely give 'em a sniff of mine, now.”

We had already come so far that I didn't know the way back. Harp would know it. He could never be lost in any woods, but I have no mental compass such as his. So I followed him blindly, not trying to memorize the route. It was a region of uniform old growth, mostly hemlock, no recent lumbering, few landmarks. The monotony wore down native patience to a numbness, and our snowshoes left no more impression than our thoughts.

An hour passed, or more, after that sound of motors faded. Now and then I heard the wind move peacefully overhead. Few bird calls, for most of our singers had not yet returned. “Been in this part before, Harp?”

“Not with snow on the ground, not lately.” His voice was hushed and careful. “Summers. About a mile now, and the trees thin out some. Stretch of slash where they was taking out pine four, five years back and left everything a Christly pile of shit like they always do.”

No, Harp wouldn't get lost here, but I was well lost, tired, sorry I had come. Would he turn back if I collapsed? I didn't think he could, now, for any reason. My pack with blanket roll and provisions had become infernal. He had said we ought to have enough for three or four days. Only a few years earlier I had carried heavier camping loads than this without trouble, but now I was blown, a stitch beginning in my side. My wristwatch said only nine o'clock.

The trees thinned out as he had promised, and here the land rose in a long slope to the north. I looked up across a tract of eight or ten acres where the devastation of stupid lumbering might be healed if the hurt region could be let alone for sixty years. The deep snow, blinding out here where only scrub growth interfered with the sunlight, covered the worst of the wreckage. “Good place for wild ras'berries,” Harp said quietly. “Been time for 'em to grow back. Guess it was nearer seven years ago when they cut here and left this mess. Last summer I couldn't hardly find their logging road. Off to the left—”

He stopped, pointing with a slow arm to a blurred gray line that wandered up from the left to disappear over the rise of ground. The nearest part of that gray curve must have been four hundred feet away, and to my eyes it might have been a shadow cast by an irregularity of the snow surface; Harp knew better. Something had passed there, heavy enough to break the crust. “You want to rest a mite, Ben? Once over that rise I might not want to stop again.”

I let myself down on the butt of an old log that lay tilted toward us, cut because it had happened to be in the way, left to rot because they happened to be taking pine. “Can you really make anything out of that?”

“Not enough,” said Harp. “But it could be him.” He did not sit by me, but stood relaxed with his load, snowshoes spaced so he could spit between them. “About half a mile over that rise,” he said, “there's a kind of gorge. Must've been a good brook, former times, still a stream along the bottom in summer. Tangle of elders and stuff. Couple, three caves in the bank at one spot. I guess it's three summers since I been there. Gloomy goddamn place. There was foxes into one of them caves. Natural caves, I b'lieve. I didn't go too near, not then.”

I sat in the warming light, wondering whether there was any way I could talk to Harp about the beast—if it existed, if we weren't merely a pair of aging men with disordered minds. Any way to tell him the creature was important to the world outside our dim little village? That it ought somehow to be kept alive, not just shot down and shoveled aside? How could I say this to a man without science, who had lost his wife and also the trust of his fellow men?

Take away that trust and you take away the world. Could I ask him to shoot it in the legs, get it back alive? Why, to my own self, irrationally, that appeared wrong, horrible, as well as beyond our powers. Better if he shot to kill. Or if I did. So in the end I said nothing, but shrugged my pack into place and told him I was ready to go on.

With the crust uncertain under that stronger sunshine, we picked our way slowly up the rise, and when we came at length to that line of tracks, Harp said matter-of-factly, “Now you've seen his mark. It's him.”

Sun and overnight freezing had worked on the trail. Harp estimated it had been made early the day before. But wherever the weight of Long-tooth had broken through, the shape of his foot showed clearly down there in its pocket of snow, a foot the size of a man's, but broader, shorter. The prints were spaced for the stride of a short-legged person. The arch of the foot was low, but the beast was not actually flatfooted. Beast or man. I said, “This is a man's print, Harp. Isn't it?”

He spoke without heat. “No. You're forgetting, Ben. I seen him.”

“Anyhow there's only one.”

He said slowly, “Only one set of tracks.”

“What d' you mean?”

Harp shrugged. “It's heavy. He could've been carrying something. Keep your voice down. That crust yesterday, it would've held me without no web feet, but he went through, and he ain't as big as me.” Harp checked his rifle and released the safety. “Half a mile to them caves. B'lieve that's where he is, Ben. Don't talk unless you got to, and take it slow.”

I followed him. We topped the rise, encountering more of that lumberman's desolation on the other side. The trail crossed it, directly approaching a wall of undamaged trees that marked the limit of the cutting. Here forest took over once more, and where it began, Longtooth's trail ended. “Now you seen how it goes,” Harp said. “Any place where he can travel above ground he does. He don't scramble up the trunks, seems like. Look here—he must've got aholt of that branch and swung hisself up. Knocked off some snow, but the wind knocks off so much, too, you can't tell nothing. See, Ben, he—he figures it out. He knows about trails. He'll have come down out of these trees far enough from where we are now so there ain't no chance of us seeing the place from here. Could be anywhere in a half-circle, and draw it as big as you please.”

“Thinking like a man.”

“But he ain't a man,” said Harp. “There's things he don't know. How a man feels, acts. I'm going on to them caves.” From necessity, I followed him . . . .

I ought to end this quickly. Prematurely I am an old man, incapacitated by the effects of a stroke and a damaged heart. I keep improving a little—sensible diet, no smoking, Adelaide's care. I expect several years of tolerable health on the way downhill. But I find, as Harp did, that it is even more crippling to lose the trust of others. I will write here once more, and not again, that my word is good.

It was noon when we reached the gorge. In that place some melancholy part of night must always remain. Down the center of the ravine between tangles of alder, water murmured under ice and rotting snow, which here and there had fallen in to reveal the dark brilliance. Harp did not enter the gorge itself, but moved slowly through tree-cover along the left edge, eyes flickering for danger. I tried to imitate his caution. We went a hundred yards or more in that inching advance, maybe two hundred. I heard only the occasional wind of spring.