In the autumn of 1887, a 34-year-old surveyor named Wendell Crumrine was sent by a Philadelphia coal speculation company to map an unclaimed stretch of ridgeland along the border between Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. The company wanted to know if the timber was worth cutting and if the coal seams beneath the ridges justified building a railroad. Crumrine, a meticulous man from flat, orderly Ohio, cared little for the company’s ambitions. He wanted only to complete his work and return to Lexington, where a woman named Verna sometimes came to mend his shirts.
He took a room above the general store in a small settlement called Otterskin Bend, run by a 59-year-old widow named Amelia Ashlock. For ten days, his work went well. The ridge was steep but walkable, the trees old, and he saw deer and once a black bear. But on the eleventh day, the woods around him went quiet.
Not the quiet of birds settling, but the quiet of birds leaving. He felt he was being measured, though he saw nothing. He told himself it was nothing. That night, the widow Ashlock suggested he speak with an old man named Aldous Two Winters, who lived four miles south.
Part Cherokee on his mother’s side and of uncertain origin on his father’s, Aldous was older than anyone knew and understood the ridge. The widow warned Crumrine not to interrupt him. “He has buried better arguers than you,” she said. Crumrine rode out before sunrise.
He found the old man’s cabin in a small clearing, its door opening before he had dismounted. Aldous was tall and weathered, with white hair in two long braids and enormous hands. He told Crumrine that his mother’s people called the ridge “the place where the dirt remembers,” because something was buried there that should not be. It was not asleep, he said.
It was only waiting. Then, for nearly two hours, Aldous spoke. He told Crumrine what had happened to him as a four-year-old boy in 1843, when he had first seen the thing on the ridge: tall, impossibly thin, with skin the color of wet bark and deep-set eyes like old amber. It had smiled at him the way a man smiles when he is about to ask a question he already knows the answer to.
Aldous spoke of his father, who had waved back at a figure at the edge of a cornfield in 1851 and was never seen again. He spoke of a hunter named Obed Stillwagon, who went up in 1859 and was never found, only his rifle and his coat folded neatly at the foot of the ridge. He spoke of a circuit preacher named Jeremiah Callaway, who went up in 1871 believing his faith would protect him. They found his horse and his Bible, open to Psalm 23 with the page torn, but never found him.
In 1883, a stonemason named Cyprian Whitlow went up with a friend. Only the friend came back, refusing to speak of what he had seen, saying only that he had heard a voice calling his name, each time a little better at saying it than the last. Aldous told Crumrine that the thing did not eat the way an animal eats. It took.
It took the part of a man that made him a man, and what it left behind was no longer the man who had walked up the ridge. He gave Crumrine a small pouch of dark seeds from a plant that no longer grew, called the listening seed. If the seeds grew warm, Crumrine was to turn around and walk down. Never run.
Running told it he was afraid, and it followed fear like a hound follows a wounded deer. The old man pressed the seeds into his hand and told him to finish his work quickly. The equinox was in nine days, he said, and after that, the country up there did not belong to the living. Crumrine rode back in a daze.
He told himself the old man was a storyteller, but he kept the seeds in his coat pocket. For three days after his visit, he worked steadily, and the seeds lay quiet. Then, on the third day, he heard a voice in the woods behind him say his name. Not call it.
Say it. Soft and clear, from no more than ten paces away. “Wendell. ” He did not turn around.
The voice was his given name, which he had never told Aldous Two Winters. Two days later, he saw the figure through his instrument lens, standing in the trees behind his marker. He knocked the instrument off its tripod, and when he looked up, nothing was there. His hand went to his pocket.
The seeds were warm. Warm the way a cup of tea is warm an hour after it has been poured, though the air was cold enough for his breath to be visible. He told himself it was a trick of the light, the warmth of his own body. He kept working.
But every time he bent to the eyepiece, his stomach tightened, and the expectation stayed. When he reached the bottom of the ridge that evening, he stopped and turned to look back. The path was empty, but the seeds were warm enough to feel through the heavy wool of his coat. He did not stop at the widow’s house.
He rode straight to Aldous’s cabin. He held out the seeds. “They were warm,” he said. The old man asked if he had turned around immediately.
Crumrine admitted he had not. He had told himself it was nothing. Aldous closed his eyes for a long time. When he opened them, he said, “Did it speak?
” Crumrine said yes. When Aldous asked what it had said, Crumrine told him. His given name. “Then it is further along with you than I had hoped,” the old man said.
He explained that once the thing had spoken a man’s given name, that man was no longer just another person on the ridge. He was on its list. The seeds would keep it from finding him if he carried them always, but he had to leave that night. Not in the morning.
That night. He was to walk, not ride, to the railhead and take a train until he was at least three states away. Crumrine rode back to the widow’s house. She was already packing bread, salt pork, and preserves.
She asked only one question. “Did the seeds grow warm? ” When he said yes, she nodded. “Then the old man is right.
Go. ”
He left the mule with her, shouldered his pack, and walked out into the dark. He walked all night and through the next day. The seeds in his pocket grew gradually cooler.
By the time he reached the railhead, they were cold. He bought a ticket to Lexington, then to Indianapolis, then to a small town in southern Indiana he had never heard of. He did not return to Lexington for two months. When he did, he asked Verna to marry him.
She said yes without asking why his face looked older than it had been. He delivered an incomplete map to the company, citing illness, and refunded a portion of his fee. He took a teaching position at a small college in southern Indiana, where the country was flat and the horizons were long. He never worked as a surveyor again.
He kept the seeds in a wooden box on the mantel of his study, and once a year, around the equinox, he would take them out and check them. They never grew warm again, until one cold October evening in 1903, when he passed a darkened shop window and saw, in the reflection, a tall figure standing behind him on the sidewalk. He did not turn his head. He kept walking, taking the long way home through the lighted streets.
When he reached his house, the seeds in his pocket were faintly warm. He sat in his study with the lamp turned up high and did not sleep. In the morning, the seeds were cold again. Wendell Crumrine died of pneumonia in 1909 at the age of 56.
After his death, his wife found a letter he had written but never sent, addressed to Aldous Two Winters. In it, he confessed that he had not had a peaceful night’s sleep in 21 years, because he dreamed of standing on a railway platform and seeing a thing in the window glass. He asked whether the seeds had kept it from finding him, or whether it was only being patient. The letter was never sent.
Aldous Two Winters lived nine more years. He died in his sleep in 1896, at an age the local records list, perhaps inaccurately, as 90. Before he died, he told the same story to a young man named Volney Gardner, instructing him to write it down, seal it in a tin box, and bury it under the third stone of his hearth. The tin box was dug up in 1962 by a folklorist from an Ohio university.
His article about its contents was published in a regional academic journal that went out of print three years later. The settlement of Otterskin Bend emptied out in the years after the First World War. By 1930, no one lived there. The cabins fell in and the road grew over.
But the county sheriff’s office, between 1940 and 1960, recorded eleven disappearances on or near that ridge in a county whose population never exceeded four thousand. In nine of the eleven cases, no body was found. In two cases where remains were located, the official cause of death was listed as exposure, but written in the margin of the report, in handwriting that did not match the coroner’s, were three words: “It took him. ”
The wooden box with the seeds passed from Wendell Crumrine’s wife to a niece and eventually to a small historical society in Indiana, where it sat in a drawer for the better part of a century.
When the box was opened, the seeds were still intact, dark and small and dry. The woman who worked there said that both times the box had been opened in the last fifty years, the person who opened it had remarked that the seeds, against all expectation, were warm.