Orin said, "Yes, sir." And the old man said, "Good. Now go, and do not turn around." They went. They walked down the creek with the mule behind them.
And this time the creek took them out. Two hours down, the fork opened into the settlement below the hollow. And the settlement road was there and the sun was up. And they walked out onto that road at about midmorning of the fourth day. And neither of them turned around, not once, though Orin said later that at one point, about a mile down, he heard something behind him on the trail walking.
He heard it walking behind them for the better part of a quarter mile, and he did not turn, and it followed them to the mouth of the hollow, and it stopped there.
Neither man ever spoke of the trip to anybody in the county, not to Pel's wife, not to the men Orin cruised timber with. They agreed on the walk out that they would say the deer had been off that year, and they had come back empty. And that is what they said. Pel went home to his farm on Ketaring Ridge and he never hunted again in his life. He kept the rifle, but he never carried it out of the house.
He died in 1949 of a bad heart in his own bed. And Pel's wife said that in the last week of his life he woke up twice in the night with his hands flat down on the coverlet, palms down, and did not answer her when she said his name, and only came back to himself after she had said it four or five times.
Orin Thol kept working for the company for another 11 years, and then he retired. He wrote the letter that most of this story comes from in 1953 to a man named Alvin Spears who was collecting mountain accounts for a project of his own that never saw print. Spears's papers are what came down to us.
In that letter, Orin also wrote that in the spring of 1941, he went back up to the mouth of Slate Fork Hollow. He did not go into it. He stood on the settlement road at the foot of the hollow with his hat in his hand for the better part of an hour. He said he did it because a man he had known his whole life, meaning Pel, was not doing well. And Orin thought this is the phrase Orin used, and it is a strange phrase.
He thought he would ask if it was still keeping any part of Pel up there. He said he did not know what he meant by that, and he did not know what he expected. He said he stood there for the better part of an hour and did not hear any sound out of the hollow at all. Not a bird, not a squirrel, not the creek. He said that was the loudest silence he had ever stood inside of, and that when he put his hat back on and walked back down to his truck, he understood for the first time what the old man had meant on the porch that morning about not turning around.
Because he had not turned around on the walk out in 1932. But he had come back twice, first with Pel in his memory and now with his own feet, and both of those were a kind of turning around, and both times something had noticed. He did not go back a third time. He died in 1961 at his sister's house in Fort Smith. His sister said he was of clear mind to the end.
She said in the last week he asked her to leave a small dish of salt on the windowsill at night and she did and she did not ask why.
Sirax Boze the old man on the porch was never seen by any officer of the county after the 1890s so far as any record shows. There is a tax entry for a Sirax Boze in the Newton County rolls for 1889 and 1890 on a small acreage in the western Boston Mountains and after that his name is not in the rolls again. No death is recorded. The cabin, if it was still standing when Orin wrote his letter, is not standing now. A timber company logged the western slope in the late 1960s and their maps show only creek and slope.
No clearing, no structure, no old cornfield.
Slate Fork Hollow is still on the topographical maps of Newton County. It is not on any list of good hunting country. People who grew up in that part of the mountain, when asked about it, tend to answer in the way people answer when they have been told by somebody they trusted to leave a thing alone. They say, "Oh, that hollow. Yeah, nobody goes up in there."
And if you ask them why, they shrug. They shrug and they change the subject.
And if you press them and if they like you, they might say what one old man said to a folklorist in 1978. When the folklorist asked him why nobody hunted Slate Fork, the old man thought about it for a while. Then he gave the last thing on the record: "Some hollows keep what walks into them." That is how he said it. Then he added, "And I will tell you the truth. My granddaddy told my daddy and my daddy told me that one keeps two."
That is Slate Fork Hollow, 1932. Two men up, two men down. And a third thing of some kind that took the shape of a name in the dark and did not in the end get to keep it. And if the old man on the porch was right, it is still up there. And if the old-timer in 1978 was right, it is not alone up there.