They made it back to camp with the last of the light, and Pel built the fire up higher than a man builds a fire when he only means to boil coffee on it. He built it up the way you build a fire when you want the light. And in the night, some hour they could not name, because neither of them was wearing a watch, and the moon was down, they were both woken at the same second by the mule. The mule made a noise. It was not the noise a mule makes when it is startled by a coyote or a bobcat.
Pel said afterward that in his whole life on the mountain, he had heard a mule make three or four different sounds when a thing came near it in the dark, and he had never heard this one before. He said the mule made a sound like a woman being held underwater. That was his phrase. Orin was up with the rifle before Pel was out of his blanket and they stood by the fire back to back listening. And they heard a footstep, one footstep up the hollow above the camp on the slate.
It was clear. It was slow. And then there was no second one. There was instead silence. And the silence lasted.
Orin said, "The better part of an hour." They stood there the better part of an hour with the rifle up and the fire between them, and nothing came and nothing spoke, and the mule did not make the noise again, and the fire burned down and had to be built up twice. And finally, when the first gray of morning came over the east ridge, they heard from up the hollow, very far, at the edge of what a man can hear, a single foot come down on the slate again, one step, and nothing after it.
They broke camp inside of 10 minutes. That is how it stood. Neither of them said out loud what they were doing. Pel put the pack on the mule without checking the straps twice, which for Pel was as good as a scream, and Orin carried his rifle in his hand and not on his shoulder, and they moved down the trail they had come up on the Sunday afternoon, and they moved fast. The trail ran along the creek for the first mile, and then it climbed up a bench, and out through a saddle between two ridges, and then down through a stand of hickory to the settlement road.
It was maybe four miles of trail to the road. Both of them knew it. Both of them had walked it in less than two hours the day before. And here is where the thing gets strange. Because they walked it, and they walked it, and the sun came up over the east ridge, and the sun crossed the sky, and by what Orin judged to be midday, they came out of a stand of hickory onto a bench of ground, and it was Sunday's camp.
It was Sunday's camp, the bench above the fork. The place where the slate ran up out of the water. The ashes of their fire were on the ground, cold. The bent grass where the mule had stood was still there. They had gone four miles, and they had come back to where they started.
Pel sat down on the flat rock by the ashes, and put his hands over his face for a minute. And when he took them down, he was calm again. In the way a man is calm who has decided to stop lying to himself. He said we are not going out the trail and Orin said we tried the trail and Pel said we are not going out the trail because it will not let us. Orin did not answer that for a long time.
He knew what Pel meant. He also knew that a man who has been a timber cruiser for 20 years does not walk in a circle for four miles and not know it. He had watched the ridge lines all morning. He had watched the sun. He had watched the fork of the creek run past him on his right hand going down the way it should.
And he had come out where he started.
They tried the ridge next. The whole afternoon they tried the ridge. They climbed up the east side of the hollow, straight up, hand overhand, in the steep places, until they came out on top and could see the country lie away east and south, the low ranges of Newton County going off blue in the distance, the Buffalo River somewhere down beyond them. They stood on that ridge for a long time. They picked a landmark, a knob a mile east, and they walked to it.
When they got to it, it was the head of Slate Fork Hollow, and the hollow was under them, and their camp was down at the bottom, and the mule was standing beside the ashes of the fire, looking up at them. Pel laughed then. Orin remembered this. Pel laughed a short, dry laugh with no humor in it and said, "Well, all right. Well."
Then he sat down on a rock, drank water from his canteen, and passed it to Orin. And neither of them spoke for a while. This is the point where they knew. Whatever else they did not know yet. Whatever else was coming, they knew this much.
They had been led up into the hollow, and now they were not being led out. And whatever had made the track on the second day, and the footstep on the second night was not somewhere else in the woods. It was in this hollow with them, and this hollow was where they were going to stay until it was done with them.
They went back down the way they had come up, and they came down easily. That was the second strange thing. The ridge that had taken them 4 hours to climb took them under an hour to descend. When they reached the camp, the mule turned her head to them, but did not shift her feet, and Pel put a hand on her neck and stood there with her for a long time. Then he built the fire.
It was not full dark yet, and he built the fire, and he cut wood for it enough to last the night three times over. Orin, meanwhile, walked out a small perimeter around the camp with the rifle in the crook of his arm and looked at the ground. What he found in a soft place 40 feet up the hollow from where they were sleeping was a set of prints. not the two-footed track, but a different set. Four prints, meaning something on four feet. But the four prints were laid out in the pattern of a walking man. heel-toe, heel-toe. one in front of the other, straight up the hollow, going away from camp.
Whatever had made them had been on four feet, and it had walked past their camp on the line a man walks. Orin stood over those prints for a while. Then he did something he did not tell Pel about until years later. He knelt down and put his own hand into one of them. His hand fit inside the print with room around the fingers.