He was a big man and his hand was a big hand and there was room around his fingers on all sides. He got up and walked back to the fire and did not speak of it.
That night they did not sleep. That is not a figure of speech. They sat on either side of the fire with their backs to it so they could see out into the dark and they took turns not looking at the fire. And in the small hours the second night the thing came closer. It did not walk on the slate this time.
It walked on the leaves and it walked in a circle around the camp. One wide slow circle that took the better part of 10 minutes to complete and that they could follow by the sound of the leaves. And halfway around on the uphill side, in the black between two big hickories, it stopped and it made a sound. It made the sound of Pel's wife calling his name. That is what Pel said.
It called his name in his wife's voice, and it called it twice, at the pitch and cadence, and with the little rise at the end that she used when she called him in from the field to eat. And it called it from 30 feet away in the dark. Pel did not answer. Pel put both hands flat down on the log he was sitting on and did not move.
Orin, on the other side of the fire, said very quietly, "Do not get up. Do not say a word." Pel did not. He sat there with his hands flat on the log and his eyes closed and did not move.
After a long minute, the voice called a third time, and it was still the voice, but the shape of the word was different. The word was still his name, but it was said the way a thing says a word it has heard but does not understand. It was said the way a bird says a word.
And then it moved on. It moved on around the circle and up the hollow and away. And by the time the first gray came, it was gone. And Pel sat there on the log with his hands flat on it and had not moved. And Orin said his name three times before Pel heard him.
On the third day they did not try to leave by the trail, and they did not try the ridge. They went down down down the fork of the creek, walking in the water when they could, because Orin had said in the dark that perhaps it might not cross running water, and Pel had grabbed at that the way a man grabs at a branch going over. So they walked in the creek, and here again the country was strange because the creek ran and the creek ran and it took them somewhere. But the somewhere was not down and out. It was down and across where the creek should have opened out into the settlement below the hollow, it instead turned into another hollow, and that hollow ran back east and up.
They walked it anyway. There was no other choice. The mule was with them, and she was not the same mule she had been on Sunday. She followed them without any lead on her at all, and she kept close enough that her breath was on Pel's back, and her eyes had gone the way an animal's eyes go when it has decided to trust a man, because the alternative is worse.
About midday they came up out of the creek onto a bench of ground, and the ground was cleared. Not a natural clearing, a cleared field, old cornstubble, a split rail fence gone half to nothing on the far side, a hardpacked footpath, and at the head of the field, a cabin, small, chinked, smoke coming out of the stone chimney straight up in the still air. Nobody in Newton County that Orin or Pel had ever known lived up in Slate Fork. Nobody the county knew of, but somebody was there. They stopped at the edge of the field.
They did not go closer. They stopped and the mule stopped and they stood there and in a little while the door of the cabin opened and a man came out onto the porch. He was old. That was the first thing about him. He was old in a way that made you understand you had been using the word too easily on other men.
He was tall. He was thin in a way that suggested lifetime and not sickness. His hair was white and long enough to tie back, and it was tied back, and his beard was white and cut square below the jaw. He was in a homespun shirt and trousers so old they had gone the color of the ground. And he had in his left hand a small tin cup and in his right hand a stick of some dark wood about the length of a forearm worn smooth by his palm.
He looked out across the field at them. He did not say hello. He said quiet enough that they should not have been able to hear it from that distance, but they did. You have brought it to my door. come up. He said that and then he sat down on the porch step and waited.
The old man's name was Sirax Boze. That is the name Orin wrote in a letter years later. Boze, spelled B-O-Z-E. He said the old man told them the name once and did not use it again in three days. He said the old man was seventy years old at the least and might have been eighty and might have been older than that.
And he said it was not a thing you could ask. He and Pel walked up the path with the mule behind them, and the old man watched them come. And when they were close enough that they did not have to raise their voices, he said, "Sit."
They sat on the porch step below him, the way you sit at a preacher's feet, and he looked at them for a while. And then he said, and Orin remembered the shape of the sentence exactly: "I know what has walked with you. I know its name. I will not say it aloud on this porch. Do not ask me."
Then he asked them how many nights.