I signed on with the Forest Service because I liked rules
that made sense outdoors. You clean up your fire ring, you
hang your food, you give the weather respect, you carry what
you need, and you tell someone where you're going.
The Superior National Forest isn't a place that cares who you
are or what you plan. It cares that you're prepared
and that you leave it better than you found it.
I started as a seasonal wilderness Ranger working out of
the Koishiwi Ranger District in Ely, and eventually kept coming
back spring into fall, then shoulder seasons, and finally
winters for snow surveys and access checks when staffing
allowed it. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area
Wilderness is where most of our time goes.
Lakes like Snowbank, Moose, Gabro, Knife, all those names
that feel plain until you've woken up on them and heard first
ice taking its hold. My job was permits and portages,
latrines and blow downs, visitor education, the occasional search
and a lot of miles that add up in quiet ways.
People picture Rangers in hats at a visitor center desk.
There's some of that. Mostly it's wet boots and or
blisters, a pull saw on your shoulder and the feeling that
every sound you hear has a 'cause you can name.
The night I'm going to talk about wasn't my first bad night
out there. We'd had drownings.
We'd hiked out, lost kids. Once we hauled a man with a
fractured tib fib from an Alder choked stretch of the Isabella
River, the sort of carry that feels like a year.
Once, in June, a black bear took a sweep through three campsites
along Lake 3 and ignored all the banging pots.
I spent two nights talking with people who had never been in the
woods after dark and all at once were asking me what you do when
something bigger than you walk straight in.
There are plenty of straight lines you can draw through those
incidents. You can explain them with wind
direction and habituation and poor food storage and water
temperature. It matters to me to be able to
explain things. It's how I sleep.
This one doesn't fit clean. I can only tell you what we saw
and heard along real trails, on real lakes, under a real
forecast, with gear I can list and maps you can pull up.
I'm using the word people use for what we ran into.
I know it's not my word and I won't pretend to own its
meaning. I'm just going to lay out what
happened and let you keep whatever you think.
It was late October. The Pegami Creek burn scar had
been leafless for weeks already, the bones of the Jack pine black
and straight against the sky in the mornings.
Low places along Wanless Rd. held frost that didn't soften
until near noon, and the ruts on the Spur Rd. stayed rigid and
white. The first thin ice was showing
on shaded Beaver ponds. You could push a boot through
and see the black water blink, and then it would reskin over
behind your heel if the air temperature kept to what the
radio said. The forecast that Monday called
for a high around 38 a night around 24.
Wind out of the northwest, starting light and building
after sunset. No precipitation.
Barometer stable, The kind of day where you pull on a fleece
under your green shirt and leave the shell loose in your pack
until you need it. We had three of us lined up to
close out a list of late season tasks on the east side of the
district. Pull a busted bear pole and
hardware at a campsite that kept failing on the powwow trail.
Check a flagged hazard along the old trail loop where a blow down
might have come down on the burned tread and run eyes on 2
fire grates people had marked with graffiti.
Those last two were nothing on their own, but it's easier to do
them while you're out for something heavier.
Our crew was me, Lydia, and Ben. Lydia had ten years in the woods
and a good sense for what mattered.
She was compact and quiet and conservative with words on
scene, the sort of person who doesn't perform being in charge.
If she said we were doing a thing, you could look down and
realize your hands had already started it.
Ben was in his second full season and had that specific mix
of competence and open curiosity that makes a person good to have
on any trail. He could carry weight without
fussing, and he didn't mind walking back 10 minutes to get a
thing done right when he realized we'd missed a step.
We drove out from the toft side in a unit F-250 because the
access from there kept us closer to the powwow entry points off
of clearly signed roads. You can reach the powwow from
Lake County Road 7 and Forest Rd. one or come in off Wanless.
We turn N off Hwy. 1, bounce the washboards, and parked at a wide
spot near the trailhead. The signboard there still shows
the old loop, even though much of it was hammered by the 2011
fire. People still hike it.
We still check it. A trail doesn't die because it
burned. It changes like everything out
here does. We left a trip plan at the
station and I texted my partner our route because that was our
off duty agreement. The trail under foot was a mix
of fist sized granite pieces, Duff that had returned in
patches, and charred roots that looked solid until they pivoted
under your boot. We headed east on the powwow
spur that used to be part of the loop and then cut toward Poe's
Lake where the flagged hazard was.
Lydia carried the Pulaski across her shoulder and a small coil of
rope for the bear pole. I had the radio with an extra
battery in an inside pocket to keep the cold from dragging it
down and the orange spray for bears clipped where I could get
it without thought. Ben carried the digging bar for
the pole hardware and the flat shovel we used to level out a
sight after removing something. We had one small pack between us
for personal gear, a tarp, A2 liter bladder, a few energy
bars, a stove and pot, and extra dry layers.
It wasn't supposed to be an overnight just to clean out and
back with daylight for all the moving parts.
There's a feeling you get in the burn when wind moves early and
you hear the bones of trees shift.
It's not leaves, it's not needle hiss, it's a tiny chuffing slide
as old fire killed trunks click against each other up high.
Nothing supernatural about it. If you've cut in a blow down
zone, you know that sound. We heard it as we crossed the
little bridge over the Isabella River.
Good cribbing, chewed by Beaver on the far side and continued
toward the Pose Lake Spur. Our flagged hazard was supposed
to be half a mile off the main. The GPS pinged us near a groove
where the tread cut through Jack pine stems that had been dead
for a decade and stood at about shoulder to head height.
It felt like walking between rows of stacked charcoal.
We found the hazard easily. A leaner hung up in a Jack Straw
waiting for a gust. It would land across the tread
and the snag points would rake. The cut wasn't tricky.
We set the rope, put a little tension on the direction we
wanted, and Lydia made the back cut clean.
The hinge did its honest work. The trunk came down where we
asked, and we nibbled it up and moved the pieces.
It was routine, and you can tell the difference between a day
that's going to turn sideways and one that will stay ordinary
by whether the routine tasks feel like a canoe in dead,
smooth water or like you've got an opposing current you can't
detect. The cut felt smooth.
We reflagged a bend, logged the coordinates and kept moving.
The bear pole at the campsite near Poe's Lake had been a
problem since spring. The crossbar hardware had come
loose twice. People keep meaning to bring
better cordage for hangs. People keep boxing food in a way
that makes sense in a kitchen and fails in a burn when there
are fewer solid trees. We found the site.
I wrote the latrine number on my pad because it needed a rake out
and Ben set the shovel and bar down to start in on the pole.
We'd replace it with nothing and note that in the campsite
description online. Better a clear statement that
there is no bear pole than hardware that suggests a
solution that doesn't work. As we worked, the day held to
cool sun in the open and cold shade in the Jack Pines.
I put my fleece on when we were in shadow and took it off when
we stepped into sunlight. The wind was a steady shoulder
out of the northwest, not enough to take a hat.
I noticed the first strange thing when I went to the water
to fill the bladder and rinse my gloves.
The shoreline had that post fire openness where you can see 50
yards in a simple Reed, logs, rocks, a Cut Bank.
The water was black, clear. I crouched, let the water push
into the bladder mouth, and saw hair stuck against the inside of
the rocks, like it had been pressed there by pause and then
peeled away. Moose hair sticks, fine and
coarse. Wolf tail hair has a softer
fall. Bare hair clumps.
This wasn't like any of those. It was very long and straight,
several strands at a time. Pale.
At first I thought fishing line because that's how your mind
tries to make sense. I picked one up off the rock
with the tip of a twig and it flexed like hair.
It was translucent at the edges. It looked human, fine in
thickness but much longer than what I normally pull out of the
water when we clean up swims. I put it in a small bag because
collecting oddities is habit, and I looked around the dirt at
the shoreline for tracks. The only sign was scuffing at
the edge of the wet, deeper toe marks, like something with long
feet had leaned down, but the shape wasn't right for boots,
and the pad mark wasn't right for bear.
The heel was too narrow, the toes stretched like a hand, but
placed in a line, not fanned. I'm putting these details down
because they mattered to me at the time and matter to me now.
You build dread by collecting facts you can't file.
You keep thinking if you get enough of them they'll click
into a box. You know they didn't.
I brought the bag back up and handed it to Lydia without
trying to name it. She looked at it, then looked at
the shore. She didn't joke.
She doesn't move like that. She said, make a photo, write
the time. I did.
I marked it down at around 1:30 in the afternoon.
We finished dismantling the bear Pole hardware and packed the
bolts and metal in because we weren't leaving that in the
woods. Then we took the tread back N
toward the Long Bend where the trail runs within earshot of the
Isabella, but you can't see it. There are voices you hear in the
boundary and anywhere in the Northwoods.
Loons if there's open water. Pileated woodpeckers that sound
like someone hitting a sheet of plywood with a broom.
Wolves, if you're lucky, in a way that puts a weight down in
your ribs without telling your brain to be scared.
People sometimes, if you're near a chain of campsites.
Laughter, Paddles clacking a pot, lid dropped on rock.
We were two miles from anyone by our permit check math and by
what we'd seen at the entry that morning.
We were also in a loop that isn't heavily used this late in
the season. When we heard a voice, it should
have been odd. What made it more odd is that it
sounded like someone we knew. I heard Ben say hey like he'd
stopped and was behind us. The voice, not loud, not forced,
was exactly Ben's tone and speed.
It wasn't a shout. It was like when someone pauses
to pick up a strap that slipped and calls ahead to make you hold
for two seconds. I turned, and so did Lydia,
expecting to see him bent at the waist fixing something.
He was three steps behind me, looking ahead at me and Lydia
with the same expression you wear when you hear your own
voice say your name in a recording.
Unexpectedly, Lydia looked from me to him the same way.
There was a little stillness in the line of her eyes.
I remember because I don't often see it.
Did you just? Ben said, and he clamped it off.
We listened. It's very simple to listen
outdoors if you remind yourself to be still with your whole
body. You shut your breath down a
notch. You move your weight into your
heels. You let your ears adjust to a
narrower frame. The wind worked the dead tops
above us. Nothing else spoke.
I walked back to where he'd been standing and looked at the
tread. There were prints.
Hours. There was a scuff to the right
where something had stepped off into the sticks.
A big step, Heels narrow, toes long.
I didn't say those words to myself yet.
I wrote that down after. At the time, I only felt my ribs
start to tighten in a way that makes you want to speak about
anything else, to keep your breath even.
I said, we're on schedule. Let's knock out the graffiti and
head back. The flagged graffiti was at a
site off the old loop where the great sits on a point with wind
exposure. The burn had opened it up.
Before the fire, it would have been a quiet place with deep
shade. After the fire, it's a place
where you can see a long way and things can see you.
We walked in. No one had camped there
recently. No ash in the grate.
Flattened grass around the tent pads like someone had come
through in the last week. Fresh scratches on the cast iron
where a knife had written a name in the year.
We take photos and remove what we can with a wire brush and a
little solvent. Sometimes we note it and replace
the great next season. We were between those options
when the air changed. I can't call it anything else
without getting dramatic. The air changed.
There's a sort of temperature drop you feel when a cloud
passes over the sun and wind comes clean from a lake.
This wasn't that. The wind was steady and then it
was gone in a way that doesn't match the movement of a front.
Lydia looked down the point toward Poe's Lake and didn't
move for three long breaths. I saw the hair on her neck
stand. And if you have worked with
someone long enough, you get that reflex too.
I stood where I was and did the scan.
Left to right, ground to sky, repeat.
No one was there. No black snout in the Alder, no
movement in the Jack pine skeletons, no canoe whisper on
the water we heard walking. I don't know how else to write
that word to make it sound like what it was.
It wasn't a twig snap or a rock roll.
It was footsteps set cleanly on dry Duff, and then another step
after a pause, and then another. And if you've listened to a
person walk anywhere in the woods, you know the human
rhythm, the cadence of it was wrong.
The pauses fell in places where astride shouldn't.
The weight sounded light, and then it sounded heavy.
It came from the Jack Pine mass to our north, from a line maybe
20 paces away. Lydia didn't say draw anything,
but she put her hand on the spray without showing it, and I
did the same. Ben's hand went to the air horn
on his vest. He waited for her nod.
She didn't nod. We stood and listened.
Another 30 seconds. Lydia said, voice level.
Hello, Forest Service, You're coming up on a closed campsite.
If you need assistance, come out in the open, please.
Slowly, a voice answered. It was my partner's voice.
The words didn't make sense, just the shape of sounds that
weren't a sentence, but the tone was exact down to the turn at
the end that she makes when she asks me over text if I need
anything from the Co-op in Ely on her way home.
The voice came straight from the Jack pine tangle where we could
not see 5 feet. If you'd asked me to swear a
thing in that moment, I would have sworn on anything that the
person who shares my bed was standing 6 yards away.
And yet I knew she was in town and I had just texted her 1/2
hour earlier with no cell service, sure, but with the
knowledge she was working a day shift and would be at her desk,
the mind does two things. It says maybe there is a hiker
in there who sounds like that, and another part of it, quieter
but hard, says no. Ben took half a step forward and
Lydia extended her fingers without looking at him, just a
small push in the air. Don't, she said then.
Louder, she said. You need to come out where we
can see you hands, where we can see them now.
The footsteps took three more steps.
The spacing of them did not match the distance they should
have covered. Then the voice spoke again, in
Lydia's own voice now, but flattened like a recording that
had been slid through a downsampled filter.
It said her name, and then hey, the way she sometimes says it
when she answers a call and knows it's me even before I
speak. I watched her face like it would
give me instructions. She didn't change.
She said back away, we're leaving.
She said it with that tone she uses for a bear that won't bluff
off. Not a challenge, not fear, just
a move. We backed, We didn't turn.
We went up the little rise toward the tread.
As soon as we stepped into the corridor of the trail, the wind
returned at full strength. The way a door closes.
I heard the Jack Pines creak again.
I heard the water lick the rock. I heard a Raven call once, hard
and matter of fact. I breathed because I discovered
I had not been doing that well for two full minutes.
Lydia didn't say anything for 20 yards.
Ben didn't make the joke he might have made on any other
day. We took the trail W when we were
far enough to see the bridge glean through the trees.
Lydia stopped and set her packed down and keyed the radio.
She tested a call to dispatch and I could feel both of us
waiting for the burst of static or the strange nothing.
The link was clean. She gave a calm situation report
that would make sense on any day.
Work completed, moving back. We'll check in on arrival.
No assistance needed. She did not mention the voice.
She did not need to. I was relieved she had not.
I was disappointed with my own relief.
At the bridge, we saw the second piece on the far bank, where
Beavers had chewed a ring around a young Aspen and left it like a
pencil on a drafting table. The bark was stripped higher
than I could reach, with long claw marks raked straight,
higher than a bear that stands even on its hind legs could
comfortably work, given the scarring we see every year.
But it wasn't the height that stopped us.
It was the blood. Not a lot, enough to wet the
gouges and set a thin line down the trunk.
Blood dries brown, red. This was glossy and fresh.
The smell was copper and sweet with a rotting edge that didn't
match the amount that was visible.
We all know what a gut pile smells like after a hunter
leaves it in November. We all know what a bear scat
smells like when berries haven't been fully digested.
This was a different thing. It was like the smell of a
freezer when it breaks and a package has thawed and refrozen
a half dozen times. I wrote the word rancid in my
notebook because I didn't have another simple one.
We didn't touch the tree we crossed and took our time
without stopping, taking a look to either side every few steps.
It is hard to admit that three trained people who spend their
lives telling the public that fear is manageable with
preparation and knowledge can develop tunnel vision and speed
on a trail we walk regularly. We did.
The day was still bright enough, but the angle of the sun had
gone to gold and in the burn. That means long shadows that
make reading the sticks at your feet more difficult.
We tripped more than we should have at the trailhead.
A Raven sat on the signboard. It flew when we came out and I
noticed the silent wing beats first.
The bird made no sound. That is not strange in itself.
They don't always call, but all day I had been noticing the
presence or absence of sound. The way you touch a bruise you
found on your shin and can't remember earning.
You prod it because you need a measurement for how you are.
We got in the truck. Lydia put the notebook on her
lap. She looked at nothing for a long
time. Then she said we're going to
stop at Bog Lake before we head back.
That wasn't on our list. The Bog Lake entry had been
reopened in the last couple of years after years closed from
the fire. It's a simple little access
where people can carry in and do a night or two for quiet.
I said OK. Ben said OK.
She didn't say why, I didn't ask.
We bump stocked the truck to the Bog Lake lot and parked under
the small sign with the number. The lot was empty.
The trail down to the water is short, A little roll through the
burn into a pocket where Living Green is trying to make a go.
We walked in without packs. I brought the spray and the
radio. At the shore the water lay cold
and flat. No canoes, no prints at the put
in except ours. The wind made a small skitter on
the surface and a band of noise in the dead tops above us.
Lydia walked the shoreline to the left and then the right and
stared into the altars at places where a bigger animal might
pass. No sign.
She stood with her hands in her pockets and didn't move for a
minute. Then she said OK and we walked
back up to the truck. On the way out we saw a vehicle
pull off onto a small spur that leads to nowhere now that a
Beaver pond has taken the old track.
It was an older half ton, dark green.
The tailgate was down, the bed looked empty.
I recognized the driver from town.
Not a friend, not a regular on any of our meetings, just a face
among faces at the Co-op or at the bait shop.
When we stopped to talk about invasive species checks.
He raised a hand to us as we passed.
I glanced down at his license plate, because that's a reflex
when our roads are this empty. The plate was coated with Rd.
dust and a legible not strange for the season.
His face didn't match a person I'd link with a problem.
He wore an orange cap and his right hand had a scar that went
from his knuckle into his wrist. This is how the mine tries to
make a Ledger of nothing. It was 230 by the time we turned
West on Wanless, headed toward Hwy. 1 and then down to Tof to
log the day and go home. The sun in October drives down
faster than you expect. By the time we hit one, the
shade and the cuts ran deep. We were 4 miles from the highway
when the truck died. It did not stutter.
It did not give us a warning light.
The engine cut, the power steering went heavy in a blink
and Lydia put us into neutral and we rolled to the shoulder
until the momentum was gone. She set the brake and we sat in
a new kind of quiet where you feel the tick of cooling metal.
We tried the ignition. Nothing.
The dash lit the way it does when a key is first turned and a
vehicle is deciding if you will go or not.
But the starter didn't grab. We tried the radio.
It worked. We had a link and a full battery
and I could hear the faint chatter of dispatch checking a
snow plow position 100 miles away and then our own channel
slapped back to us when we keyed.
Lydia called in a mechanical issue location, all our names
told them we were safe and we'd try a restart and would call if
we needed a tow routine again. She popped the hood.
We 3 stood in a huddle and looked at a thing.
None of us is a mechanic on. Hoses looked like hoses.
Cables looked like cables. No belt off its wheel.
Ben tapped the battery connection.
It was firm. We got back in.
We tried the ignition again. Nothing.
Maybe I would tell this part differently if it were just the
truck. Vehicles die in the woods.
It is part of the work. You call a tow, or you lock it
up and get a ride out. You leave a note.
The strange part wasn't the kill, it was what we heard next.
The wind had fallen off to nothing where we stopped, though
we could still see treetops moving 1/4 mile away.
The air inside the cab felt colder than the air outside,
like an uneven temperature gradient had settled inside the
glass. The smell from the bridge
returned faint through the vents, like someone had soaked a
rag in old blood and tucked it beneath the dash.
Lydia turned the key again. One bland click and then quiet.
Then a voice outside my door said my name.
I have heard hunters walking up to our vehicle and asking if we
can answer a question. I have heard lost canoeists who
finally found a road in a truck. I know what that feels like.
This wasn't like that. The voice was 8 inches from my
door and low and even. It didn't come from the ditch.
It came from a point too close to be explained by someone
standing without my seeing them in the side mirror.
I looked in that mirror. The ditch was empty.
I looked over the dash and passed the hood.
The road ahead lay bare. Lydia did not move.
Ben's jaw flexed a tick. He has when he wants to say a
thing and knows he should not say a thing.
The voice said my name again, then said hey, with the exact
turn my partner uses when she picks up and knows it's me.
I looked at the radio in my lap in case some open mic had found
our frequency and someone was messing with us out of
stupidity. The radio was clear.
This sensation, the place where hot fear turns into a fine hard
point in the center of your chest, rose with the same
steadiness it does when you fall through Spring Lake ice and the
water grabs your legs and you have to get your body flat.
It makes you precise. It burns out the words.
You don't need seatbelts. Lydia said.
Her voice was predictable. She sounded like a person saying
what you should do at any stop on windows up horn if you see
something. She keyed the radio and said,
Dispatch Unit 2, we're going to be leaving the vehicle
momentarily. I'll update.
We didn't leave the vehicle because she was frightened to
stay. We left it because the truck
stopped being a thing that would take us away and started being a
booth in the dark. She decided and we moved.
She popped her door and stepped down and pulled me with a hand
to my sleeve so we came out the same side.
Ben came out the passenger side and took a position with the
truck between him and the ditch. We locked it and started walking
W toward the highway without looking into the ditch or the
tree line. Lydia said eyes forward, move
steady. If I say stop, stop.
I heard the voice once more behind us, closer now.
Say my name again and then say don't in the exact tone my
partner used the day I took a step out onto a Beaver Dam that
wasn't as solid as it looked. The voice wasn't loud.
It didn't need to be. It put the word in the softest
part of my brain and asked me if I would obey a tone, not the
meaning. We walked.
No vehicle came. The sun slid.
Our breath smoked somewhere behind and to the right in the
patch of dead pine trunks that looks like a crowd with their
backs turned, a shape moved without reference.
I don't know how to explain motion without having a thing to
measure it against. It was like the air had a seam
in it, and the seam glided a small way left, and then a small
way right, and then was still. If I had to give it form, I
would say tall and narrow and not fast, the way any deer or
bear in alarm moves, but calm, like a person walking out of
their kitchen. I didn't look at it long.
If you've ever been under ice and your hand finds the hole and
you know you shouldn't take time to admire it, that was the
feeling in my throat. Keep your hands on the things
that matter. Keep moving.
We moved. The wind came back at us in a
cold sheet. It made my eyes water.
It carried a smell like old pennies and old meat and a wet
dog left in a closed up shed. A mile is a lot of steps when
you are counting them by feeling and not with your head.
We made the highway. The asphalt felt like a promise,
the way a landing feels when you've been on the water and
finally lift the boat and you feel the dirt under your feet.
We stepped into the road and turned S we would have cell
service a mile down and a reasonable shoulder all the way.
We walked in a line. Lydia keyed the radio and spoke
calmly to dispatch about our mechanical again, updated our
location, asked for a unit to come north and meet us.
The scream came from the trees to our E, somewhere between the
road and the Isabella River. I haven't used that word scream
since I left my teens because it's a vague word.
People mean different things by and the woods are full of sounds
that get misnamed. A red fox can sound like
something torn in half. A rabbit grabbed by a Raptor
sounds like a nightmare. A Fisher makes a high keen that
people like to call a woman crying because the human brain
looks for the closest hook. What we heard wasn't that it
started inside my chest before it ever entered my ears.
And if you have ever heard a sound that does that, you know
the lodge pole in the center of your body that tries to bend.
It was high and then low, all in the same breath, thin and then
thick, like it didn't travel through air so much as pass
through what you are. I don't know what throat makes
that, unless it is a throat that is too long and too thin to
belong to anything I should be near.
We didn't run. I want to be clear about that,
because fear makes people move in ways that make later
problems. We did not run.
Lydia didn't let us. She said keep your feet, keep
your eyes front. We did.
The second scream was closer and to our right.
It made the dead tops of the burn click as if they had heard
it and were answering with wood. We kept walking.
We rounded a curve and saw headlights coming toward us.
I have never felt that specific wash of relief in my teeth
before. Our unit headlight bar swung
once and fixed. Our driver slowed and stopped
and got out with his caution lights going.
Because he is a professional. He looked past us.
We didn't look back. We got in the truck.
The door shut. The heater smelled like dust.
Our driver said what the hell, but not in a way that asked for
a story. He got us South and into the
stronger cell band and Lydia called to cancel the tow for our
dead F-250 and asked for it to be retrieved in daylight.
We got back to Toft at dark. The parking lot had the yellow
light you only get in small towns and Ranger stations.
The flag snapped once in the wind and then hung.
We took our layers inside. We wrote a report that was
careful and responsible. We didn't write about voices or
a shape in the trees or blood on a trunk too high.
We wrote that we encountered an unknown person in the woods,
heard vocalizations we could not identify, and elected to
withdraw. We wrote that a truck failed and
we self evacuated. We wrote that a campsite and a
great were serviced and that a bear pole was removed.
We locked the equipment room and we sat in the break room and
didn't drink coffee because nobody wanted to be awake longer
than we had to be. Lydia said, if I call and ask
you to hike down to Bog Lake tomorrow and check something,
you say no, She said. It's steady.
Ben said OK, and then he said, are we going to tell anyone the
other parts? Lydia looked at him and then at
me and then lifted one shoulder and let it fall.
We'll tell what helps, she said. We'll tell what doesn't.
Get a kid out there with a headlamp looking for a story.
We all went home. I live in a small house on the
edge of town where you can hear trucks on Sheridan St. in the
morning and sometimes wolves at night when the air sits right.
My partner asked how my day went.
I said long and she said you smell like the burn and we ate
and didn't talk much and went to bed.
At 3:00 in the morning I woke to a sound I thought was the water
heater ticking after a cycle and then I heard my name said right
at the bedroom door in my partner's voice.
I sat up. The house was dark.
I walked out into the small hall and then the kitchen with my
hand flat to the wall, because I had the sense that if I let my
hand float I might feel something colder than air.
The house smelled like nothing. Outside, a truck went by
somewhere and tires hissed and then quiet again.
I walked back to bed. I don't know if I slept.
Morning came like it does Benign, ordinary.
A crow in the alley. A neighbor hauling a trash can.
I went back to work because that's what you do, and because
I needed to be around people who had heard the same thing.
The next day, we made two decisions.
The first was to go back and walk our route in daylight with
more people. The second was to bring someone
who knows the land in a way older than any of us.
We called a man from Grand Portage who has consulted for us
on cultural resource surveys and who has told us quietly once or
twice over coffee to be cautious with certain places and words.
He is not my elder to name. He is not my story to use to
make mine feel bigger. I'll say only that he agreed to
ride with us to the wandless side and walk as far as he
wanted and tell us to stop when he wanted.
He came with a small pack and a quiet coat and boots that made
less noise than mine. When we got to the bridge over
the Isabella River, he stopped and stood for a long time and
said very softly in his own language, words I don't know, We
didn't speak. He looked at the tree with the
claw Marks and the blood long since dried.
He touched the bark with the back of his fingers, not the
front. He nodded to himself once, like
a person nods when they decide not to be surprised by a thing,
even if they are. He said you should not be here
at night. He said it plainly.
He did not say never. He said not at night.
We walked to the campsite and he stood where we had stood when
the voice spoke 1st and listened and what he heard was the day
wind and Ravens and the hush of water on rock.
He didn't look into the Jack Pine mass.
He looked up as if listening for a kind of pressure more than a
sound. Then he said do not call it, do
not name it, do not make a story for guests, do not take photos
and show. He said this last part looking
at me not in anger but with the weight someone would use when
reminding you to turn off a stove before leaving a house.
I nodded like a person nods when they are ashamed and grateful.
On the walk back to the truck, he talked instead about moose
sign and the way the burn had let in a rush of Aspen and how
that would shift things for a while.
He pointed out a set of wolf tracks, fresh from the night, in
sand that the frost had held crisp.
He touched a spruce tip and pinched it and told us how his
grandmother chewed them in spring.
He put the day back. When we reached the truck, he
thanked us for calling him. We thanked him for coming.
He put his hand on the hood of the F-250 that had died the
evening before and stood like that, a moment, not reverent,
just present. Then he got in the passenger
seat of our lead rig and rode quiet back to town with Lydia so
she could drop him where he asked.
You want me to write the thing with big teeth?
You want me to describe the shape in a way that gives you
chills and some release? That is not how it was.
The worst of it was the plainness of each part and how
it's stacked like lumber. You can count hair at the
shoreline. Footsteps that showed the human
rhythm without belonging to a human.
A voice that used the most familiar parts of our lives to
lean us toward a bad step. Claw marks wrong in scale, blood
that smelled older than it could be.
A vehicle that died in a place where it shouldn't.
A scream that matched nothing I can plug into a chart.
A shadow that moved like a person who has never had to
hurry. And at the end of it, the
humbling clarity of a man older than us, telling us to be
careful without telling us a ghost story. 2 weeks later, the
first real snow came. Not a dusting, a cover.
The sort that changes the plywood color of the burn to a
thing that looks clean from far away and laces it with the
tracks of anything that moved. By dawn we drove out with skis
to check trail heads and put up season signs and track blow
downs. The lot at Bog Lake had two sets
of fresh tracks leading in one human, two people with poles and
good gait, and three sets leading out.
That happens. People meet up, people find each
other and walk out together after parking at different
times. It wasn't something to make a
note on, except in the line of habits I now held, which was
keeping track of more points on the Ledger than I might have
before. At the bog Lake Shore, I stood
and looked at the little island close in and watched steam lie
low. I felt normal.
And then I didn't. It wasn't any sound, it wasn't a
voice. It was the smell again, thinner
now in the cold, like the ghost of a smell, like a freezer 2
rooms away had its door open. I wanted to leave, I said so
Lydia said OK and we did. Ben did not make a joke.
I am writing that down because fear had done something to him
as well, and I do not want to make a bravado story that places
me apart. Before winter settled hard, we
got one more call that linked to that corridor.
A solo hiker on the powwow had left a note on his dash with a
root and had not returned by dark.
The Sheriff's Office took lead, as always, and we were support.
We ran the legs. We could run.
Weather was cold and clear, a full moon that makes the woods
feel like they're holding their breath.
We swept the obvious spurs. We called at 1:00 in the
morning. I heard three knocks far off in
the Jack pine. Be not impressed by the
Internet. Wood knocks happen because wood
knocks. Trees move, but these were
spaced like intention. Knock, wait, knock, wait, knock.
No wind during the knocks. Wind after the sheriff called
the search at 2 and held it for morning light because that was
reasonable, and the man walked out at 9:00 with a split lip and
the embarrassment of a person who had misread a spur and spent
a long cold night next to a little fire that smoked more
than it burned. He said nothing about voices.
He said nothing about screams. He said I thought I heard a
woman crying once, and I decided that wasn't my problem this time
of night. He said that without drama, just
honest. I shook his hand harder than an
officer would approve, because I needed warm human to warm human.
He laughed and flinched the way someone flinches when a
handshake goes too hard. And then he squeezed back and in
that little squeeze I felt a line tug up that had been slack
since October. If you need me to say the word
Wendigo, I've said it now. I'm saying it with the respect
of a person who knows a word can be a fence or a door, depending
on how you use it. I am not using it like a toy.
I am using it because I don't know what else to call what
stood in the trees and used what we love to bait our steps.
I don't need horns or bones or a tot in school shape.
I need the Ledger of what we heard and what we chose.
We barely got away because a person with sense told us to
keep our feet, and because a truck came around a curve and
because we listened to a quiet man who told us not to give
ourselves away at night. That's what I have.
Months later, in deep winter, we were on snowmobiles along the
Tomahawk Rd., checking gates and drifts.
The air was clean in a way it gets only in January when the
sun stays low and every breath feels like you're drinking a
glass of cold water all the way into your chest.
We stopped at a pull out to switch drivers and stretch, and
Lydia walked 10 yards into the tree line and stood with her
mittened hands touching the bark of a small spruce.
She stood like that long enough I watched the steam off her
breath turn to crystals in the fur around her hood.
When she came back she said, I know what I heard, I don't know
what it was. I am not going to make it larger
with a story. I am not going to make it
smaller with a joke. I am going to keep working here.
Then she checked the strap on her helmet and got back on the
sled. I took the other sled and fell
in behind. We moved through the trees and
the powder lifted in little clouds that sparkled and then
fell. The air smelled clean.
The wind felt like it had no edges.
For the first time since October, the woods felt like
they were letting us pass without interest.
I kept my habits. I still do.
I write more down. I tell fewer campfire stories.
When I walk the burn and the wind stops and then starts
again, I notice, and I don't pretend I didn't.
I don't go into the powwow corridor at night unless duty
requires it. And if duty requires it, I am
not alone. And I do not leave my crew.
Sometimes at 3:00 in the morning, I hear my name at the
bedroom door in the voice I love, and I do not get up.
I lie still and listen to the house breathe the way a house
breathes when there is nothing wrong and the furnace ticks and
the neighbor's garage door opens for a shift.
I do not answer. I learned that night to make
that choice. And then the next one, and then
the next. The way you set your feet along
a Portage and place them on the high spots you know will hold.
We barely got away. I'm not putting weight on that
phrase to make it carry more than it should.
If we had stayed at the campsite when the voice used our names, I
don't know what would have happened.
If we had gone into the Jack Pines to be brave or to prove
something to a story we had already started building in our
heads, I don't know what the Ledger would show today if we
had stayed in the stalled truck because it felt like a safer
shape. I don't know if we would have
heard tires on the highway and seen a bar of lights half a mile
off. Instead, we did the simple
things you do when you don't have answers and you are in a
place that does not owe you any. You back away, You keep your
head, you keep your people close, and you take the path
that has been cut before you by others who knew where not to
stand. That is the kind of story I can
live with, and I am trying to make a life where that is what I
pass on, not a costume for a thing that does not need help
looking larger than it is. We had a wall in the duty room
where Ranger names hung on magnets under districts and
tasks. Mine bounced around that wall
for a decade, but when the phone rang and someone said we've got
a late return on the east side, my name found its way to the
same column. Officially, I was resource
protection and visitor safety. Unofficially, when people went
missing for real, when the hours started to stack and their cars
sat at the trailhead in the dark with frost on the windshield, I
got the folder. I kept a notebook that first
summer. Cheap lined paper with a plastic
cover that warped in the heat. At the top of the first page, I
wrote the three words you say to families because they're true
enough to keep you honest. Terrain weather decisions.
If you respect those three, you can usually bring someone home
one way or another. The notebook lasted me 4 cases.
After that, I stopped writing the words at the top.
The first one that didn't fit was a boy who vanished in the
roar of a campground weekend. Ohana pekosh, a braided river in
a Cedar Valley, campsites tight as ribs, kids on bikes skidding
through dust. It was late August, the river
slate green and cold enough to ice your ankles.
The boy's name was Theo, 7 years old, thin, a buzz cut that made
his ears stand out. His mother showed me a picture
on her phone by holding the screen too close to my face.
He was squinting into sun, front teeth still unfinished.
He'd been riding loops between the amphitheater and their sight
while his dad coaxed a flame into damp wood.
They looked away for a stretch, long enough to butter corn when
they looked back. No bike, no boy.
Campground searches are noisy and crude.
Whistles, pots banged with spoons, strangers calling a
first name until they ruin it by saying it too many times.
We lock sights, clear restrooms, check the river holes where the
undercut banks do their quiet work.
Every 20 minutes someone thinks they saw bright red shirt,
helmet, water bottle and runs after it.
I walk the game trail north and called Ranger coming up like I
always do around blind corners. A pair of college kids waved me
down near a footbridge, saying they'd heard a splash and a cry
like a Yelp, but when I asked them to point to the spot, they
couldn't agree which route it had been.
I put a hand on the cedar and felt it's cold bark like the
back of a sleeping animal. K9 arrived before sunset.
The handler, a man who kept an old wedding band on a chain
under his shirt, showed me a T-shirt he'd just taken from the
boy's mother. Clean laundry smell overlaid by
something else. I didn't like the sweetness of
cotton warmed by small skin. He let the shepherd sniff, heal,
sit. We'll start along the river, he
said, and I nodded, then walked upstream so I wouldn't stand
there and watch them not find anything.
At 7:15, PMA volunteer spotted the bike.
It was leaned, not thrown against a cedar, 10 minutes from
the amphitheater, on a spur that dead ended at a wall of ferns.
The red helmet was hooked over 1 handlebar.
The strap had been buckled and then tidied, the tail tucked
neatly through the last loop. I crouched and looked for scuff
marks, dragging gouges where someone had kicked in a hurry.
There weren't any. A kid that age doesn't set his
helmet down like that. A kid that age drops it and does
the next thing with his whole body.
We worked through the night. A line of headlamps wavered like
a runway between the river and the road.
Around 2:00 in the morning, a storm came hard and quick.
No forecast had mentioned it, but the Cedars turned their
undersides and rattled and rain came sideways for maybe 8
minutes, then stopped clean by dawn.
The only sign of it was beads of water on spider webs.
The ground somehow dry everywhere else.
The dog never locked on. It worked a circle, then a
spiral, then at one point lay down with a look I've seen on an
exhausted human face. At 7:30 AM on the far side of
the campground, a retired teacher named Hal found a
child's cotton shirt folded on a log.
It was the right size and the right color, but it wasn't the
one in the photo. It was an older off brand red,
faded toward brick. The shirt was warm to the touch,
which could have been the light or a nervous hand, or just
warmth. But when I lifted it, the
underside of the log was dry, as if the storm had politely
skipped that one spot. We never found Theo.
The official end of that operation reads like most
extended search. Negative results.
Families want reasons and timelines.
I had topographic lines and a map of prior drownings.
I didn't tell his mother about the shirt until later, when I
was sure it wasn't a cruel trick of coincidence.
Someone's laundry blowing off a line.
She put her hand to her mouth and made a sound I still hear in
the hiss of a camp stove. I crossed out Terrain Weather
decisions at the top of the notebook and wrote Boys bike
placed, helmet buckled, tidy warm shirt, dog uninterested. 8
minute storm that left things dry.
Once you have a list like that your eyes change.
You stop seeing the whole forest and start scanning for
arrangements. Rock Cairns that point nowhere.
Flagging tape where no crew has worked in years.
Boot prints that lengthen and narrow in a way that doesn't
account for slope or stride. A spoon hung at eye level from
fishing line in the middle of a stand turning without wind.
Things you'd never mentioned in a press release because the
words on paper would make you sound unwell.
That fall, a seasoned trail runner went missing near Spray
Park. He'd done the route before,
posted the map with his pace on social, texted his girlfriend a
photo from the Ridge around noon with the caption headed down
before the clouds roll in. Hikers saw him later, moving
easy, 2 poles, tapping like metronomes.
He never came out. The first day we pushed all the
logical routes. The Ridge traverse, the feeder
paths back to the road, the gully where people bail out when
they scare themselves by looking down and misjudging distance.
On the second day we found a shoe.
It was perched on a route as if someone had balanced it there to
dry. The laces were in tied in a
double knot, 2 switchbacks down beside a boulder where the snow
lingers. We found the other one canted
into a spill of gravel. The insole pulled free and
curled like a tongue. Prints leading to those shoes
were trail runner, small light heel, purposeful toes.
After the shoes, prints, if that's what they were, went
bare. The ground was wrong for
clarity. Pea sized decomposed granite
over hard dirt, but you could see places where something had
slid and left tracks as long as the runner's feet without the
weight of a body. The line drifted toward the
boulder field and then went ambiguous, because talus always
does. A Hilo came up from the county
and did a grid. On the second pass, the pilot
called me and asked if we just updated our altitudes.
Negative, I said. He read back numbers that would
have put the helicopter 50 feet underground.
We chalked it up to some trick of pressure, a bubble of warm
air under a lid of cold. When he sat down at the Meadow
to let the machine cool, the RPM needle shivered even after he
pulled power. He tapped the glass twice with a
fingernail, and it steadied. We found the runner's watch on
the third day. It lay on a Flat Rock 4 feet
above the ground, like jewelry set out on a Bureau.
It had stopped at 12:17 PM, which would have been shortly
after his photo on the Ridge. When we tried to wind it, it
ticked once, and then the hour hand trembled and the face
fogged under the glass like a breath.
The runner's girlfriend brought us a thumb drive from his
camera. The last image was a crooked
shot at knee height. Rock the edge of a pole tip a
smear of sky. The EXIF data said 12:16 PM.
The color of the sky was wrong for that hour.
White in the way of milk instead of fall cloud.
The automatic white balance had thrown up its hands.
People tidy their own messes. Sometimes when they know they've
made too big A1 to fix, they fold shirts, coil ropes, line up
tools because it gives them a grip on fear.
But a shoe balance that way, A watch on a rock.
It felt like an arrangement made for someone else.
The field incident report doesn't have a place for that
feeling. So I wrote what would pass.
Weather change, poor visibility, possible off trail movement into
tailless. I wrote that and then stayed
another night on the Ridge so I could walk out at first light.
I lay awake listening to wind come down the troughs like
distant vehicles, then fall away and leave the silence standing
around 3:00 in the morning, something tapped the corner of
my tent twice with a precision that made me think of metal when
I got up with my light. Slow, because you do everything
slow in the dark. The fabric held two
indentations, thumb sized, as if fingerprints had pressed from
the outside. I ran my fingers over the spots
and they were cool while the rest of the tent was warm from
my breath. I didn't tell anyone about that
either. You can speak aloud a certain
number of nothings before people start hearing a pattern you
don't mean to offer. A man named Dwyer taught me what
a pattern looks like when you give it years.
He'd been a Ranger before me, before the paperwork turned Gray
and the radios got small. He'd worked fire towers back
when lightning patrol meant actual towers, not satellites
and networked sensors. We met on a weather day, when
the mountain held its head in the clouds and tourists stood at
the railing, waiting for the white to lift like a curtain.
He'd come to drop off a box of old maps.
He carried it with careful disdain, like a cat bringing you
something dead but important. The maps when I unrolled them
later were pencil marked with small private notations, shards
of handwriting at Creek curves, hatch marks where footprints had
blurred into nothing interesting.
But you mark the place anyway because you feel something you
don't say. He had drawn circles.
Some were small, around a Tarn or a Meadow, as if he wanted
himself to remember. Don't camp here, it isn't right.
Two were larger rings around regions that didn't line up with
anything geological you could point at 1 circle cut through
three different life zones in a way a rock type never would.
I asked him about those two coffees deep in the little
kitchen at headquarters, butterflies dying all afternoon
on the windows because for some reason they loved the glass that
day. He shrugged and said times and
places you need to move, just move.
He stirred his coffee with a knife, because the spoons were
all in someone's lunch box, and said, I used to give it
different names. Magnet pockets, sound holes,
breathless places. You can't write those on a form,
so you draw a circle and you know to push through if the
birds stop. What does it feel like, I said.
Like the world is waiting, he said.
Not for you, you're just there for it.
He tapped one particular circle with the knife and nicked the
paper. You'll know you're in this one
when the air tastes stale, even when the wind's on your face.
On my way home, I drove the long loop down by the river.
Even though it was late. The rain had left the blacktop
slick and the headlights swung fat arcs in the curves. 2 miles
from the gate, beside a gravel pull out where teenagers go to
teach each other to drive stick, a small stack of stones sat on
the white line, like someone had built a Cairn to help you
navigate pavement. I stopped, put on my hazard
lights, walked back and kicked it off the road.
The top stone was warm. Late the next spring, 2 mushroom
pickers turned up with a permit and a dog and then didn't turn
up where they promised to check in.
They were brothers, 60 and 62, both wearing new rain pants so
stiff they made a noise like tissue when they walked.
They parked at a bend and left a polite note under the wiper back
by 6:00 PM. If late, call this number.
It was a sweet note, really, a courtesy to the Ranger who might
be worrying. I took a picture of it and then
didn't look at it again until midnight, when I sat in my truck
with the Dome light on and pressed my fingers into my eyes
until I saw sparks. We found their car, then their
first circle of survey tape. Men like that mark their own
bread crumbs, even when they're not supposed to.
The dogs tracks came back and forth across the logging Rd.
like knitting at the second flag.
I smelled lighter fluid without the smoke that ought to follow
it. I bent and found a dark patch
where something had burned, then burned again, like someone had
put a flame under a jar and moved it slowly to make a ring.
No trees above showed scorch. At 9:00 PM, one of the brothers
called his wife. The call log showed 6 seconds.
She heard wind and something like fabric snapping.
Then a click. The cell tower hit came from a
slope we know too well. Too steep for a campfire.
Wood's too tight for a stretcher.
We went anyway. You always go at 1:00 in the
morning. We found the younger brother
sitting on a stump at the edge of a Creek with his hands in his
lap. He had mud on his knees, like a
child who'd been told to scrub before dinner.
He said 3 words. I lost him when he looked up.
His pupils were too big for my headlamp.
He didn't seem cold. He wouldn't let us put a blanket
around his shoulders, batting our hands away like he'd been
bitten. We got turned, he said, I know
where we were 100 times. And then all of a sudden, I
didn't. Where did you last see him?
I said, right there, he said, pointing at the Creek.
Right there and then not. We searched until morning, and
then for two more days, in a rain that made the hemlocks drip
steady as an IV. On day three I found the older
brothers watch tucked into a burl where a branch had been cut
years ago and the tree had grown a burl over it like a lid.
The watch had stopped at ten O 4.
I wrote it down because you write down everything.
The time lodged under my skin because ten O 4 had been the
time. On the runner's watch there are
60 minutes and 12 hours to choose from and the same time
came up twice in a line of days when I could barely remember to
eat. We found the older brother on
the 5th day in a place we had flown over twice and walked
once. He lay in the open on a patch of
Moss that made his jacket look like a misplaced storm cloud.
His boots were off, his socks were off.
His feet were clean in a way that didn't fit the ground
around him. His rain pants were unzipped and
turned inside out like you do when you peel off something wet
and hateful. In his right hand he held a
stick. It wasn't a survival stick, not
the kind you use to probe mud or water.
It was short and smoothed by rubbing the way you worry
something to get through a long car ride.
The dog found him first and then sat down 3 yards away and
refused to cross some line we couldn't see.
When I crouched by the body and listened, there was no insect
sound. Not less insect sound, none.
Just the river sawing at itself beyond the Alder.
The coroner said hypothermia, and he wasn't wrong.
People undress on the edge of dying because their nerves lie
to them about heat. He wrote what he could prove.
He wasn't charged with explaining why we had walked
that spot and seen nothing. And then when the curtain
lifted, there was a man laid out like a demonstration of a lesson
you don't want to learn. I took Dwyer's map out of my
desk and found the circle he'd drawn with the knife.
Nick, the Creek, the Moss patch, the place where the dog sat
down. They were all inside it.
The way you get in trouble with work like that isn't abrupt.
It's a slope that looks reasonable until you measure it.
I slept with my radio on the night stand and woke at chirps
that weren't mine. I drove pull outs at 2:00 in the
morning to catch the first light on a spur.
We hadn't checked when it mattered.
I went to town less and ate more standing up.
If I was home and the kettle hissed, I'd forget why it was
doing that and only remember when the smell of hot metal
caught me. Friends ask you out.
Then stop asking. A woman I'd seen twice sent a
text that said you're somewhere else even when you're here.
I didn't answer right away, and then there wasn't a right way to
answer. The files of the cases that keep
you up at night are thin and heavy at the same time.
Thin because you don't have much to put in them.
Heavy because you can feel the space where the missing should
be and paper can carry weight you can't see.
When administration had too many of those files, we met in rooms
with blinds and silver carafes that never kept coffee warm.
We said the right things. An acting Superintendent would
tap the edge of a portfolio and say we have to control the
narrative the way someone says sandbags when the river is
coming up. It isn't sinister as much as it
is fear wearing a tie. The mountain doesn't like you
any more than the sea does. It would prefer you quiet and
out of the way, but there's a different kind of fear around
numbers and budgets. You start marking overdue
instead of missing, because the first word sounds like a library
book and the second sounds like a hole in a dam.
One afternoon after a meeting like that, I sat alone in the
gear room and went through the old box of lost and found from
cases that had closed one way or another.
A compass with a bubble in it, big as a grape.
A wedding ring recessed with grit.
A small field notebook in a Ziploc bag with mud dried on the
corners so that it had the shape of something that had been
pressed, then released. The notebook belonged to a
Ranger from the year 1978. The writing was tight and neat,
the kind that makes you trust it before you know what it says.
He'd written the same thing I had written years later.
Small circles in certain clearings.
No insects in the pocket, even at dusk.
A watch that refused to keep time in one spot and worked
fine. 10 paces away. He'd drawn a line on a map of
the district that began nowhere and ended on a Ridge with a
question mark in the margin. He'd written Do not stay at last
light. I slid the notebook back into
the bag and put it in my drawer and locked the drawer and later
that night took it back out because I couldn't stand knowing
it was in there without looking at it one more time.
There is a place I'd rather not name because names stick to
things. It's a bench above tree line
where the mountain's skin shifts from forest to stone.
From the air it looks like a dry tongue between 2 dark lungs.
Water runs on either side and then disappears under the talus
in 100 cold trickles. People love it for the views and
the way marmots sit like fat ushers on the rocks and squeal
when you pass. No one had gone missing there
for years, and then in one season we had three.
One was a day hiker in a yellow shirt who posed in front of a
cornice and then walked toward the Meadow and wasn't in the
Meadow when his friend turned around. 1 was a woman in her 50s
who left her husband on a boulder while she went 20 yards
for privacy and never came back. The third was a young climber
who had been sick the night before and decided to sleep in
while his partners went on. They returned to a flat sleeping
pad with the zipper of the bag turned wrong side out like the
underside of a mouth. We pushed hard up there.
The park put money into it because that's how you show
concern when there's pressure from people who still imagine
the mountain as a single face you can ask to look left or
right. We flew.
We brought in teams from outside.
We ran grids until the numbers on my clipboard were a haze of
lat longs and Start Stop times. In the second week we had a camp
up there for the crew with caches of water and food so we
didn't have to make the full trip every morning and night.
The cash got riffled twice while we were in the field.
You can tell the difference between raccoons and people.
These were hands, but no one admitted it, and we couldn't
have missed anyone walking in or out.
The bagged meals weren't eaten, they were rearranged by
expiration date. On a Wednesday, I climbed out to
the bench alone at first light because I wanted to stand in the
quiet before the radio checks. The light came slow, the way it
does when clouds are high and thin and don't care whether you
see them. Somewhere below me, a pika
squeaked like a toy. When I stepped onto the talus, I
felt in my mouth the taste of air that had been indoors a long
time. It was the same as the closet in
my first apartment where I kept paint and old cardboard, that
papery stale tongue feel. Wind hit my jacket on the left
side and my brain said cold but my skin said still.
I know how that sounds. I tried to only say it to
myself. That day I stepped 3 more stones
then came off sideways because the rock under my boot sunk
without clacking and when I bent and lifted the piece it was so
light I knew it had a hollow underneath big enough to take my
leg. I set the rock back and the wind
stopped. Not slowed, Stopped.
The pika squeaked and the noise landed somewhere else, as if the
space between us had fattened and the sound had to detour.
I kept moving, because that's what Dwyer told me you do.
I moved across the bench to the far border, where dwarf hemlocks
hunch like old men. In that border I found a glove
in a tree, high fingertip pointing E.
We find gloves in trees all the time.
People hang them up so the owner can see them on the way back.
But this one was not dropped. Then found it was threaded
between a branch and the trunk, as if someone had pulled the
branch through the wrist and left it like a sleeve.
In the glove was a small stick, smooth like the one the older
brother had held. I touched the glove.
It was dry inside in a way that didn't fit the damp day.
I said my name on the radio and the radio made a noise like it
was thinking, then came alive and repeated my name in my own
voice. I clicked off and stood a second
and clicked back on and said bass confirm radio check.
Dispatch answered in her own calm human voice and I told
myself the echo had been the system.
I took the glove down because we collect things that might
matter, and when I looked at the branch where the glove had been,
SAP beaded at the edges of the bark as if the branch had only
then realized it had been bent. The rest of that day passed in
work, because work is the thing you do to not let the other
thing in. You keep records because someday
you might need to prove to someone, an administrator, a
court yourself, that you did it right.
I kept separate records because someday I might need to prove to
myself that I wasn't making it up.
In that second private set, I wrote the small things, clean
and without conclusion. Dogs that lose more than the
scent. They lose interest, then
composure, then dignity. The first dog lay down and
turned his head away from the handler's treat hand and hid his
eyes with his paw. The second dog tried to bite its
own flank until the handler put both hands on its snout and
talked to it like a child coming out of a nightmare.
Watches. If they weren't stopped when we
found them, they would stop later when we brought them to a
certain rock for evidence Photos.
It wasn't the whole Meadow, always a patch.
Inside the patch we'd set flagging and find the same color
flagging in the same knot on a different trunk, as if someone
had moved the tape itself without untying it.
I started tearing the end into a ragged shape so I could know
ours from not ours. The ragged end showed up three
times where we had not been. Boot prints that got crisp where
they should blur in a place where Moss took a print and held
it. Prints became ideas, charcoals
of a foot, more suggestion than form, but on gravel so loose you
could scoop it there we'd get crisp heel, crisp lug, the neat
cross of the heel stamp unshattered by the tiny falls of
stone. 2 whistles In Backcountry searches we have a simple code
on whistles for when radios fail.
One whistle means here I am. 2 means come to ME3 means help.
Busy days You'll hear 111 like a metronome as we keep ears on
each other through brush twice. 2 separate days, two different
drainages. I heard two whistles in a rhythm
that was just wrong. The sound didn't have distance,
it didn't carry like through open air or deaden like in
trees. It sounded like a recording
played with fidelity too good for the woods.
I never wrote voice calling my name from where I had just been
because even in my private notes I couldn't carry that.
But that happened to the young climber was the one that undid
me. He had been sick the night
before, nausea, a headache. He rated 3 because men his age
underrate pain. His team called down to say he
was sleeping in, left him with the stove and the bag and the
plan to descend before noon. They returned to the flat
sleeping pad and the bag with the zipper turned wrong and
nothing else. He left tea water on.
The heat never turned on the stove, fuel was full.
They had a small portable beacon they kept in camp in case
someone got turned in fog. It was still in the pocket where
he'd put it the night before. They were good climbers.
They had the decency to be embarrassed in front of us, not
because they had done something wrong, but because they had come
home without their friend. We hit that case like we were
scrubbing a stain off a shirt. We loved.
Another Hilo. More teams a dive in the Tarn
below, just in case. Even though physics and common
sense said no. On day 2, I took a line N alone
because we were flush with people on the other sides.
The weather wasn't bad, which is its own kind of insult.
When someone is gone, you want the mountain to show you drama
if it's going to keep someone. You want wind that leans you, a
sky that bruises Ravens who make you feel like you're walking
onto a stage where you don't belong.
Instead, I got a crisp, damp air that made my breath look more
serious than it felt. I set apace a little too quick
and had to pull myself back. When you walk fast in country
like that, you missed the wrong things and step hard on the
right ones. At a low pass I found a circle
of small stones the size of plums, set with care.
Inside the circle was a ring of berries, dark and shiny as eyes.
The stems had been placed under the berries, so they haloed the
fruit, green and tender, lying like garnish.
We do not have ceremony stones in that park.
Not those kinds, not marked, not known.
Children build circles for games sometimes, and men build them
when they're trying to keep their minds in order.
But the berries were too neat to be a game.
There were no pecks around the ring where birds had tested.
The pebbles were wet on their tops and dust dry on their
bottoms like they'd been turned. You tell yourself a person did
it because a person could do it. I told myself that and kept
walking the long curve of my own patients until I was through the
pass and out of earshot of whatever wanted me to stop.
When I got back to camp that night, a new tarp was hung near
the cook fly with a laminated sign.
Mental health resources. It was good and right and late.
One of the volunteers had set it up after a young EMT from town
went off by himself and sat in the altars for two hours and
then came back with the damp red rims that say a man with
training finally uncorked. I watched him stand at the edge
of the circle of light and then step into it.
When he saw me, he asked if I ever heard my name out here.
When no one was with me. I said sometimes the wind gets
up to tricks. He waited a beat, like he was
offering me one last chance, then nodded like I had said the
honest thing. The next morning he was back
before sunup, lacing his boots against his shin like he was
fastening himself into the day. That was the day the Climbers
beanie showed up on a stake near the tarp.
We hadn't put a stake there. There had been no tarp there the
night before. The beanie was knit wool, the
kind that makes a ring on a forehead.
It was folded in half on the point, like a flag.
No one admitted to moving it. I took it down, checked the tag,
bagged it. It was warm.
No one had had a fire. I wrote that down and didn't
tell anyone. The official report said we
found clothing consistent with the missing parties description
at a location within the search area.
That's true. It's also nothing.
On the 5th day, something gave a pair of volunteers in a side
drainage radio that they had found compressed grass in a
shape like a person had lain there and risen, and then
everything around that shape had lost due at once.
They saw bare footprints leading up onto rock, then nothing.
The footprints had the odd feature of seeming to enter the
center of the Meadow without coming from a direction both
volunteers swore the Prince began where there had been no
feat. I went to look.
The grass had sprung back and the dew had gone, and that made
the Meadow a dozen shades of the same color.
All of which said, you came too late.
We never found the climber. We found his pack two weeks
later, above a Creek he would have crossed if he had moved
with any sense toward a road. His pack was zipped, the waste
belt was clipped. The map was inside.
In a gallon bag, dry. The compass needle floated lazy,
a bubble, fat as an egg rising in the capsule.
The bubble made the needles swing slow and strangely,
comforting, like watching a porch fan in heat.
That night, for the first time, I drove into town, parked by the
laundromat, sat in my truck, and thought about what my life would
look like if I turn my radio off.
I imagined the way silence would settle in the cab like fog that
didn't chill you. I imagined making dinners with a
person I could ask to pass me the pepper.
I imagined peeling an apple for a child and having to tell them
gently that I didn't know where their favorite blue socks had
gone, because socks just do that.
I didn't turn the radio off. I drove back to the park because
that's what I knew how to do. You make friends in this work
not because you share hobbies, but because you carry the same
objects home in your head. Becca was one.
She was steady in the field and soft at the edges in a way that
made people talk to her when they wouldn't talk to me.
She ran a small radio clip to her pack strap so she could hear
without breaking her pace. The night we threw in our line
on the bench the first time, she walked with me down the upper
switchbacks in a fog that fuzzed our headlamps into Halos.
Do you ever feel like it's not random?
She said, And when I didn't answer, she said, I don't mean a
person, I mean timing. Like the landscape keeps
appointments. You need to sleep, I said,
because sometimes people need to be told to sleep before they
tell you what they can't take back.
Two weeks later, on a day I was elsewhere and the District was
somebody else's chart to manage, Becca's radio came alive at
11:19 AM with her voice saying two whistles up the drainage.
Moving to check no one had whistled, the team lead said,
hold your position, confirm before you move.
The radio spat like bacon grease and then went dry.
Her GPS dot drifted 100 yards, then stopped.
When the crew reached her, she was standing with her hands at
her sides, eyes open, breathing, staring at something no one else
saw. When they touched her arm, she
turned around and said very pleasantly, you shouldn't stand
there if you want to hear birds. Then she laughed once, as if
someone had told a good joke 2 seconds too late, and sat down.
We walked her out and she slept 12 hours and woke fine and
pissed off at herself in the way of someone who doesn't like
losing time. What did you see?
I asked her in the hallway outside the bathroom where the
mirrors fluorescent made us both look sick.
She shook her head. Not like that, she said.
It wasn't seeing. It was knowing that if I
listened for the world, it would listen back harder.
She looked at me like she wanted me to argue her out of it.
I don't want to learn what it would say, she added.
Then she went home, took three days and came back.
Like a person who has opted not to open a door and is proud of
themselves about it. The call that ended me started
playing a storm cell, built ugly over the West and skipped in and
out of the forecast like a coin flip.
A man and his teenage daughter didn't check in at their
campsite on the East side. Their car sat with a park pass
tucked neat under the wiper on the clipboard.
The cell coverage map looked like someone had bled on it.
Dead zones that mean for big swaths of time, you don't know
much of anything. We launched at 4:00 in the
afternoon with the plan to clear the obvious and then set up for
night operations at 7:13 PM. The storm decided it was the
coin. It came down hard for 1/4 hour
hail, big enough to make your knuckles ring when it hit your
hands. Then it was gone, leaving that
strange dry that makes you feel like you dreamed the weather.
The Creek, which should have been chatty, was sullen.
We split along the two most sensible lines.
I took 3 volunteers and a high ridgeline so we could look down
onto the benches where people like to detour to pee and take
pictures. They don't post because every
picture up there looks like a postcard in a museum gift shop.
We were up there when the radio chirped and then played two
whistles. It didn't sound like the woods.
It sounded like a recording from a training tape.
The volunteers flinched the same way you flinch when a bird flies
at your face. I said.
Anyone, just whistle. Two in the Ridge sector.
No one had. I told them to hold and let me
try a short probe beyond the break in the talus.
I walked fifty paces into the stones and the air got stale.
The wind came from my left, hit my jacket, and did not move my
face. It felt like my skin and my
sense of my skin had decoupled. I said out loud because it helps
keep walking. I found a hat.
It was a baseball cap with a faded logo.
It sat on a stone at my knee and looked like a photo staged to
tell you what we were doing out here.
I bagged it. I found a scarf 2 stones
farther. It was folded in half with the
ends tucked under like someone making a bed.
I didn't pick it up. I waited for a minute unsure of
who I was waiting for. The radio clicked and played
back my name in my voice from a transmission I knew I hadn't
made. Then in Dispatch's voice it said
hold your position which is what dispatch would say.
Except then I heard dispatch on another channel talking to the
South team. I toggled to dispatch and she
was mid sentence saying copy that.
Do you need resources? Two places at once.
The dated nightmare we all share, I told myself.
I was tired and turned back. Except the line I had walked had
become a different line. I knew, because I had been
stepping on dark lichen, slick rock, and now the stones were
bright new, the lichen thin to coins.
To my right, a drift of hail lay along a seam the shape of a
spine. It hadn't melted.
It hadn't grown. It waited for someone to name
it. I walked toward the sound of my
volunteers because I could hear them talking in the tone people
use when they think they're being quiet.
I came to a low outcrop that made me think of a submerged
back in a lake. On it, laid out neat, were four
smooth pebbles, sub fingernail size in a row, and a child's
wool mitten. My mind made a quick bright
picture of a girl with feet skidding and mud laughing weird
through chattering teeth and a man saying where did you put
your mitten? And a mitten being set down for
a second. And then I took the mitten.
It was dry on the inside and cold on the outside.
I held it to my lips and smelled wool and something like clean
copper. The air went flat.
The sound of the Ridge didn't go away.
It ducked behind something for a second, like a person stepping
into a doorway to let a car pass.
For that second I knew, with the simplicity of a draft you can
feel on your neck, that if I stayed and waited, I would learn
a thing about that Ridge that I would carry into my bed and my
kitchen and my truck and the aisles of the grocery and into
the eyes of anyone I tried to love.
And it would not leave me. Moving is not courage.
Sometimes it is merely refusing to kneel.
I kept walking. My boot rolled and something in
my ankle complained and I said the first coarse word I could
think of because it felt like an offering of a very human size.
I took 20 more steps and the wind touched my face again.
Silly as that sentence sounds, the volunteers voices were
plain, their words legible in the air.
I came out of the stones and into the low trees, and the
first thing I saw was the teenage daughter walking up
slope with one of our team leads.
She had her father's baseball cap on backward and both hands
in the pockets of an oversized jacket.
The lead said without drama. We found them in the low bench
above the Creek. They were trying to get a signal
They're OK. The girl said sorry as if she
had knocked a glass over at dinner.
I said OK, OK, because it's enough to say, and because my
own mouth didn't want to form the next questions.
She pointed to my hand where I held the mitten.
That's not ours, she said. We don't have little kid stuff.
Her father came into view, carrying a small pack.
He looked at the mitten and his face did something I couldn't
read. He said we didn't leave
anything. And then he put his hand on his
daughter's shoulder, in that too heavy, too careful way men do
when they're on the far shore of a fear they wish they'd never
had to feel. We walked them down.
The storm did its trick of coming back for 6 minutes and
then vanishing, leaving the ground dry in weird islands and
the tarp at base flapping like breath.
I put the mitten in a bag and wrote its location on the line.
I wrote in my own notes. Stale air, 2 whistles replayed
by radio arranged items, Return of wind.
Less like weather than a decision.
If there were a movie ending to give you, I could give it a
single found thing that made sense of the other things.
A human, even a bad one, because the mind can settle around human
harm in a way it cannot settle around the sense that the world
itself plays by rules you weren't told.
Instead, there was a series of days where the mountain was
normal and then not, and the knot never made a case you could
try in any court another person would respect.
I stayed that season and the next.
I acted like a person who would stay forever because I didn't
know how to be the man who left. But I started thinking about an
apartment with a working stove and a neighbor who watered their
Fern too much and a mailbox full of advertisements for things no
one needs. I started thinking about a woman
at the grocery who asked me if I wanted paper or plastic and how
I'd say paper just to have said a word that mattered only
because it said I was there. There was a night in fall, last
light bleeding out of the sky like the evening had been over
promised, when Becca and I sat on the tailgate and ate
something sweet and violent that a volunteer had baked.
The bench above us looked like a sleeping animals.
Back in the fading, the parking lot held heat.
She said, you going to stay? I didn't answer.
She said you know you can quit without losing the part of you
that's good here. What part is that?
I said The part that tries to bring people home.
She said you can do that other places.
I said something about duty. People who make something their
own fault when it never was can talk forever about duty.
She let me talk. Then she said you could also
decide you don't need to know certain things.
She put her hand on the notebook near my thigh.
You could let that fill up and not open it again.
That winter I took leave. I'd been rolling for three
years. I went S at first, just because
I could. I drove where the landscape was
open and soft at the edges. I sat in a booth at a diner that
had a big plastic clock that always told the wrong time in
the same wrong way. I met a woman because I had time
to be where people were for long enough to hear their second
sentences. On our third date, she asked
what my job used to be. I said I helped people who got
lost. She said I bet you were good at
it, and reached across the table and took my hand like she was
testing the warmth of a stone that had been in the sun.
When I went back to the park to pack my books and sign the forms
that let me leave without rancor, I stopped once at a pull
out where you can see the bench if you pretend you're just
admiring the view. I thought about Dwyer's circles
and the smooth sticks and the watches and the dogs and the
neatness of the way some things had been set down, as if
whatever did the setting either didn't understand mess or didn't
like it. I thought about men who peel
their clothes so their skin will stop lying to them about
temperature, and about a boy with a red helmet placed on a
handlebar the way a mother would do it to make sure it didn't
fall. People disappear for reasons we
can name and more reasons we can't.
Bad people take them. Sometimes the mountain takes
them, More water takes them and cold takes them, and decisions
their own and other people's take them.
But there's a fraction that sits in a column I never got to
explain, and those are the ones that visited me when the kettle
hissed and I had to grab the handle with a towel.
I cleaned out my locker. I put the notebook in a box.
I took the glove from the tree and the mitten and the Pebble I
had picked up from the circle, not because I needed souvenirs,
but because leaving them felt like letting someone else decide
what they meant. I returned the glove and the
mitten to their rightful bins and wrote the numbers on the
forms. The Pebble I kept in my pocket,
like a threat to myself that if I started making museums of
objects, I would hand the box to someone else and ask them to
throw it away. On my last day, near dusk, I
walked out to the Amphitheatre at the campground where Theo's
mother had stood with the phone too close to my face.
The Amphitheatre was empty. A javelin of light came in low
and picked out the dust in tight beams.
I walked the little loop toward the footbridge and stopped
beside the cedar where the bike had leaned that first night.
The dirt there was just dirt now.
I touched the bark, which held its cold even in that light, and
said aloud, because I had learned the trick of admitting
what you can't fix. I don't know.
It felt, in that moment, like the most honest sentence I'd
said in years. I stood there until a moth
thunked into my shoulder and I laughed that stupid little
laugh. You laugh when a small thing
breaks a spell you weren't sure you believed in.
Then I went home, and the next morning I drove out through the
gate with my name removed from the wall.
It felt like skipping a step and catching yourself out past the
Ranger housing. The radio tower looked the same
as it had looked every day, an awkward metal skeleton with a
red light that blinks at a rate you can feel in your mouth if
you pay too much attention to it.
I turned left instead of right at the highway and drove until
the mountains sank into my rearview mirror and then was
gone behind a line of trees. I live now where the evening
smells like warm dust and cut grass and the biggest hill for
miles is a freeway overpass that dogs pull their owners up
without thinking. I married the woman I met in the
diner because there was nothing to say against it and everything
to say for it and because when I told her about the stale pockets
of air and the mitten and the stopped watches she didn't try
to fix it for me with a sentence.
She said Do you want tea? And when she handed me the mug
later and I burned my tongue because I didn't wait, she
smiled and said you do everything too fast and I
thought maybe I could learn a different pace.
We have a small house with a two big tree in the backyard that
drops a million leaves. There is a room that used to be
1/2 garage that we turned into a place where the sunlight puddles
in the afternoon and sometimes I sit there and listen to the
quiet. Be plain.
The radio is off. There is no radio.
There is the buzz of an old refrigerator and the yapping of
a neighbor's small dog that must have a heart like a sewing
machine. The mountain is far away.
I know it is there because when the air is clear on certain
days, the edge of it ghosts up behind the horizon, a shadow of
a face you recognize across a crowded room.
We have a baby now. He wakes at hours.
The mountain taught me to respect In the early dark, the
monitor on the night stand gives small breaths of static, like
the ocean learning to speak. And sometimes, in the click
before the speaker comes alive, I hear a chirp that sounds too
much like a radio. It's not, I know it's not, but
there is a moment in the half second where the present loosens
and the benches under my feet again.
The trick I learned is to wait that half second out.
Not to flee it, not to chase it, to let it pass like weather.
When our son shudders himself awake and makes that awful
wonderful first complaint, I stand and pick him up and feel
the perfect animal weight of him against my chest.
People talk about circles closing.
I don't think circles close. I think they widen.
I think you step out of one and into another and carry with you
the person you were inside the 1st.
When I walk him around the room and he makes the warm hiccup
noises that means sleep is winning again.
I watched the baby's monitor light glow.
Soft, steady, mortal. If wind moves the leaves
outside, the light flickers on the wall and throws little
shadows that look like footprints walking up, then
disappearing. I let them go.
There are days when the urge lands hard to drive north until
mountains stand again where they used to stand, and to check the
pull out by the laundromat and to sit at the bench with the
stale air, and to make one last lap for a person who has been
gone so long that a lap would be for me, not them.
On those days I go to the park here, the city kind with a pond
and geese that honk like traffic, and I watched The
Walking path curve away under the trees.
If I squint, I can imagine the path climbing into talus and the
talus splitting under my boot and the wind deciding whether it
wants to touch me. Then I uncurl my hands and
remember that the job now is not to learn one more thing about a
place that doesn't want to be learned.
My job is to keep the people I love inside a circle I can hold.
We built a crib together. I measured twice, then measured
1/3 time because it felt like the kind of thing you should get
right. When we slid the mattress in and
the sheet snapped into place, it was the first bedding I'd made
in years that didn't feel like an arrangement meant for someone
else's eyes. We put the baby in and stood
there and watched him breathe, because that's the dumb
wonderful thing new parents do. My wife put her hand in the crib
and touched the baby's hair. I put my hand over hers and for
a long moment I thought of watches that stop and dogs that
lie down in the taste of old air.
And then I thought of cinnamon on oatmeal and sun on carpet and
the sound the front door makes when it closes at night and you
turn the deadbolt. And I picked our sun up when he
stirred and said to him, plain and simple, we're home.
I don't know what waits in those circles on the park maps, and I
don't think I ever needed to. Maybe the mountain keeps
appointments. Maybe there are places where the
world is thinner or thicker and if you stand there long enough
you feel yourself become part of the appointment, whether you
were invited or not. I could chase that until my hair
goes white and my knees grind. I could make a religion of it
and go back and live on dried fruit and bad coffee and make
small neat piles of found things on flat rocks and pretend the
piles made me safe. Or I could do what I did, which
was step backward out of a conversation I couldn't live
through and into one I might. When people ask what I do now, I
tell them I fix small things. A loose hinge, A jammed latch, a
neighbor's sprinkler that clicks instead of turns.
I like that, the way small things reward you for attention.
I like the map of our neighborhood cul de sacs and
right angles that trust you not to get lost if you don't mean
to. Some evenings I walk to the end
of our block and look W where the sky goes bruised and big and
I think about the bench and the circles and the things I saw and
the things I refuse to see. I allow myself 1 memory plain
and unadorned. Then I turn around and come
home. The radio is off, the kettle
hisses. My wife laughs from the next
room at something on her phone I will not find as funny and we
will laugh at anyway. The baby monitor clicks and
breathes. That's the rest of the story.
I got involved too deep and stepped back out.
I put the notebook in a drawer and closed the drawer and moved
away from the places where the rules didn't fit.
I started a family with the woman whose hand fit in mine
like a knot in a rope. You know you can trust.
I do not know more than that. And for the first time since the
boy's helmet hung neat on a handlebar, not knowing is a kind
of piece.