In the autumn of 1897, a hunter named Catawba Ledford stood on a ridge in the Smoky Mountains, watching the woods watch him back. He was thirty-four years old, the son of a Cherokee mother from the Qualla Boundary and a Scotch-Irish father from up around Cataloochee. He was tall for his people, lean from a life of walking steep country, with black hair tied back with deer hide and a scar across his left hand from a misjudged knife in his boyhood. He hunted for a living, mostly bear, selling the meat and rendered fat in the lowland towns.
Men in Bryson City and Whittier said he could walk up on a sleeping bear without the bear knowing he was there until the rifle came up. That autumn, he had been hired by a timber speculator out of Asheville named Renick Halsey. Halsey wore a city suit in the mountains and did not understand why everyone he met looked at him sideways. He wanted a survey of the high country around what the Cherokee called Tennessee Bald, to see if the timber was good enough to bring in a crew.
Catawba took the job because the money was good and because his wife, Atsila, had been ill that summer and the doctor in Sylva was not cheap. But there was another reason, one he did not speak aloud. His grandfather Onacona, who had taught him to hunt and to ask the small permissions of the trail, had died the previous winter. On a cold February night, hours before he went, Onacona had taken Catawba’s scarred hand and held it a long time.
He said that there were places he had not been in forty years, places he had never taken Catawba because he wanted him to grow old. But Catawba was not a young man anymore. If something ever called him back up there, he should go. See what was left.
Tell someone before he also went. The mountain does not keep secrets. It only likes to. The first three days of the expedition were ordinary.
They went up the watershed of the Oconaluftee in fine cold weather, and Halsey proved a stronger walker than expected. He asked questions about timber and wrote in a leather book. On the third night they camped above Soco Gap, and Halsey asked what Catawba knew about a creature the Cherokee called Tsul’kalu. Catawba set his plate down, rolled a cigarette slowly, and said the name meant “he who has them slanting.
” The old people called him the lord of the hunt, master of the game, said he lived in a place called Tsunegunyi, that he was very tall and could move through the woods without a sound, and that any man who went hunting without first asking his permission might not come home. Halsey asked if Catawba believed it. Catawba said he believed his grandparents believed it, and that when his grandfather went hunting, he asked permission first and came home every time. So Catawba did the same.
Halsey laughed, not unkindly, and said they were not hunting; they were looking at trees. Catawba answered: up here, looking at trees is hunting. You just do not know what is hunting back. The next morning broke cold and gray with low fog.
Partway up the ridge, Catawba stopped, set his rifle butt against his foot, and took out a small bundle tied in faded red trade cloth. He spoke under his breath in Cherokee, scattered a pinch of dark powder into the wet leaves, and kept walking. Halsey asked what that was. Catawba said, without turning: permission.
They camped that fourth night higher than intended. It was a place Catawba knew well, with a stone hearth built a generation earlier by his family. Halsey noticed it first. Three young hickories at the edge of the bench had been twisted.
Each had been taken in someone’s hand near the top, bent over, woven through the branches of its neighbor, and tied off, so they made an arch over the trail from the spring. The trees were alive, still drawing sap. The bend was above Catawba’s own head. He put his hand on the wood and felt the tension, like a drawn bow, the strength of three or four men at once.
Halsey asked who would do that. Catawba said nobody he knew of. They did not sleep well. Catawba let the fire burn low and sat with his rifle across his lap, watching the gap in the trees.
Around midnight he heard a single tap, wood on wood, far off. Then another from a different direction. Then a third. The taps had the cadence of a signal.
He woke Halsey, put a finger to his lips. When Halsey reached for his small revolver, Catawba caught his wrist. That little gun would only make it angry, he whispered. And if it was not what he thought it was, they did not know what it was yet.
The taps moved around the camp in a slow circuit, always at the edge of the dim firelight. They stopped sometime before dawn. In the morning, Catawba found prints in the soft mud by the spring. Five toes, but the proportions were wrong.
The big toe was too long, the arch too narrow. The print was a foot and a half long and deep enough that whatever made it weighed far more than any man. Catawba smoothed the prints out with his boot before Halsey came down to the water. He could not say why he did that, only that some things become real once you tell another person about them, and he was not ready that morning for those prints to be real.
They broke camp, and Catawba told Halsey they should drop down and try a different line up the ridge. By mid-morning they were back below the spring, and Catawba felt something loosen in his chest. He was planning how to tell Halsey he wanted to turn around, that the survey was done. He never got the chance.
Around noon they came upon a cabin. It was small, one room, logs gray with age, the roof half collapsed. It was not on any map Catawba owned. He had walked past that spot at least a dozen times in his life and had never seen it.
He went up alone. Inside were a packed dirt floor, a cold stone fireplace, a clay jug in the corner. On the back wall, scratched into the wood, was a figure: tall, long arms, two long slanted slashes for eyes. Underneath it, four words cut in rough English: He comes at night.
Above the figure, in the Cherokee syllabary, two words: Tsul’kalu. The Cherokee letters were old, the wood chips darkened all the way through. The English was newer, cut within the last twenty or thirty years by someone who had read the Cherokee, understood it, and added his own warning on his way out. Catawba did not see any sign of what had happened to the man who carved it.
He walked back to Halsey. We’re going home, he said. They made good time that day. That night, for the first time in his career as a guide, Catawba did not make a fire.
He told Halsey the wood was wet, which was a lie. They ate cold biscuit and dried venison in the dark. Around the middle of the night, he heard it again. Not taps this time.
A whistle, long and low on a falling note, the kind a man might use to call a dog. It came from up the slope, then from the other side, then from everywhere at once. It moved down the far side of the creek, and at one point Catawba was certain whatever was doing the whistling stood not thirty feet from them behind a curtain of laurel. He could hear it breathing, slow and deep, the breath of something large.
He could smell it: a little like a wet dog, a little like an old tobacco barn, a little like the inside of a cave where bats have lived a long time, and a little like something else for which he had no word. After a long minute it walked away. He heard a foot come down on a fallen log, the wood giving under real weight, then a branch high up brushing against something taller than the branch. In the gray of morning he crossed the creek alone and found a single print in the mud.
He looked up at a beech tree ten feet away. A green leaf at eight or nine feet had been pulled, lying fresh on the wet ground at the foot of the tree, as if a hand had just torn it down. He came back across the creek and told Halsey nothing. They walked all day, and around mid-afternoon the trail dropped them into a clearing Catawba did not remember.
He knew that country, had hunted it as a boy and a man, and he had never seen this clearing. In the center stood a single low field stone, about the size of a small barrel laid on its side, with a flat top free of leaves in a way the surrounding ground was not, as if something had brushed it clean recently. Halsey walked toward it. Catawba caught him by the elbow and shook his head no.
They went around the clearing on the high side, keeping to the trees. When they were past, Halsey asked what was wrong with the stone. Catawba said he did not know that anything was wrong with it, but he was not the one it was set out for, and he would prefer not to be. By dusk they were back in familiar country.
That night they slept in a settlement called Bird Town, at the home of one of Catawba’s mother’s cousins. Halsey paid him in full the next morning, plus a little extra. He shook Catawba’s hand and asked what they had seen up there. Catawba said he did not know.
Halsey said he would not be going back. Catawba said good. That should have been the end. It was not.
In May of 1898, a letter came from Halsey in Asheville. He had something he wanted Catawba to see, something he could not describe in writing. Catawba took the train into the city. Halsey met him at the station.
He had lost weight, the way men lose weight when they have not been sleeping. He took Catawba to a plain hotel near the square and closed the curtains without explaining. On the table under the lamp was a new wooden box. Halsey told him what had happened.
After the mountain, he had tried for three weeks to put it out of his mind. By the New Year he had almost convinced himself. Then, in January, he had a dream. The same dream came in February, and again in March.
By April he was not sleeping much. He sent a survey crew up to work only the lower watershed, without telling them why. Five men went up. On the eleventh of April, four came down.
The fifth man did not. He went out one night to relieve himself and did not come back. In the morning they found his boots set neatly side by side a hundred yards from camp, standing upright in the leaves, as if he had stepped out of them and walked away barefoot. No sign of struggle, no animal, no track, no blood.
One of the men had taken photographs of the timber. He had also taken a photograph of a ridge above their camp at dusk, because the light was pretty. He did not see anything when he took it. But when he developed the plates, there was a shape on the ridge line, standing between two trees.
It was about the height of the trees on either side. It had a head set forward on the shoulders, long arms down at its sides. And where the eyes would be, two pale slashes of unexposed silver, two long slants that were not shaped like ours. Halsey pushed the tintype across the table and said he did not want it in his house anymore.
He wanted it gone from him. Catawba took the photograph and went home. He thought about it for a long time, sitting on his porch in the warm May evenings. He did not burn it.
He did not bury it. In early June he carried it, wrapped in the same faded red trade cloth, up into the high country—not to Tennessee Bald, which he would never return to, but to a high meadow on a different ridge where the wind always moved and nothing could come up on you unseen. He sat down. He looked at the photograph one last time, and the shape on the ridge looked back with its two pale slants.
He spoke to it in Cherokee for a long time. What he said was between him and the mountain, and he never told another living soul. Then he wrapped the tintype back up, dug a small hole at the base of a large gray rock at the meadow’s edge, laid the bundle in, and covered it over. He marked the rock with a small carved sign in the syllabary that meant, roughly: here is something that should stay.
Then he went home. He never spoke of any of it again, not to Atsila, not to his sons, not to his grandsons. He guided hunters for many more years, but only in the lower country, the safe country. He turned down every job that asked him to go up high.
He grew old. His wife went before him. His sons buried him in the Cherokee way in the autumn of 1941, in a small graveyard on the boundary. On his stone they cut his name, the dates, and the word hunter.
Just that. In 1958, sixty-one years after Catawba Ledford and Renick Halsey came down off Tennessee Bald, a young man named Tewanima Welch, Catawba’s great-nephew, went into the high country on a deer hunt. He was twenty-six, raised on the boundary, schooled in Cherokee and Asheville, and he did not believe much of the old family stories. He was hunting alone, late in the season, in country he had been told as a boy to avoid.
On the second day he came up onto a high meadow. There was a large gray rock at the edge of it, and a small weathered mark in the syllabary that he could still read. He knew the family story: his great uncle had buried something up here, and no one ought to dig it up. He was a young man of the modern world.
He dug. After about a foot of soft black earth, his fingers found a square of red cloth, very rotted. Inside was a tintype photograph, badly tarnished, the silver pitted with age. The image was mostly destroyed.
He could make out the curve of a ridgeline and a darker blur of trees, but nothing on the ridge itself. Whatever had been there was long gone. He sat at the base of the rock holding it, thinking about the man his great uncle must have been. Then he heard, from somewhere up the slope behind him, a single tap.
Wood on wood. A second tap from a different direction. A third, from everywhere at once. His body told him to leave.
He wrapped the tintype in his own clean white handkerchief, bought at a store in Asheville, laid it back into the hole, pushed the dirt over it with his hands, and packed it down hard with the heel of his boot. He stood up. For one long moment between two distant trees, he thought he saw something the height of a tall man that stood very still. He walked off that meadow.
He did not run, because he had learned from his uncles, who had learned from their uncle, that you do not run. He told his family what he had done. His grandfather, a very old man, did not yell. He asked if Tewanima had put it back.
Tewanima said he had. The old man said then it was between him and it now. Go on with his life. Do not go back up there.
Do not speak of it. If it is a patient one, and the old people say it is the most patient of the patient ones, perhaps it will let it lie. Tewanima did not go back. He married, had a family, worked for the park service for thirty years, walking the lower trails and pointing out birds to tourists.
He was a quiet, well-liked man. He died in his bed in 2001, of natural causes, an old man. But every year on the anniversary of the day he found that rock, in the late autumn, he would wake in the night with the certain sense that someone was standing at the foot of his bed. He would not open his eyes.
He had been told as a child that there are some things you do not give the satisfaction of looking at. He would lie there in the dark, feeling on the still air the slow breath of something that smelled a little of wet fur, a little of an old tobacco barn, a little of the inside of a cave, and a little of something else for which there is no word. It always left. In the autumn of 2000, the last autumn of his life, he sat down with his oldest grandson and told him the whole story for the first and only time.
He told him about the taps, the figure between the trees, the photograph he had put back into the ground, and the hand he had felt on it in his great uncle’s red cloth when he pushed the dirt over it the second time, which he had never told anyone. The grandson asked why he was telling him now. The old man said because he was going to go soon, and someone needed to know so that someone could know not to dig. The grandson promised.
He kept the promise. He is alive today. The rock, the gray rock with the small weathered Cherokee letters carved on its face, is still there, in country that is now part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The high meadow above the head of Caney Fork is not on any of the maps, because it is the kind of place trails do not go and the few rangers who know about it do not advertise it.
The rock is about the height of a man’s hip, with a patch of pale lichen on its north face. The mark is on its east face, low down near the ground. If you ever find yourself on a high meadow you cannot find on any map, with a gray rock at the edge carrying a sign you cannot read, the instruction is simple. Walk past it.
Do not touch it. Do not dig. Do not speak of it loud enough that the wind can carry the words up the slope.
Walk on.