A trapper named Elias Vance walked down off Cusk Mountain on the morning of the ninth day after a snowslide buried him, and the men of Sorrel Gap who saw him said he should not have been standing. He was 41 years old in the autumn of 1874 when he carried his outfit up the back of the mountain for the last time, a solitary man who had trapped marten, fox, and beaver along the high creeks for 20 winters. He had a cabin near the tree line that he built himself, and he came down to the trading hollow only to trade. The day he laid his pelts on the counter at Sorrel Gap, the storekeeper, Amos Thorlby, warned him.
Thorlby told him about Silas Orne, a trapper who had worked the same shoulder of Cusk 30 years earlier and vanished during a bad stretch of weather. Men who went up to recover his body found the cabin standing, the fire cold, and no Silas. Since then, Thorlby said, every few winters, a man working that side of the mountain came back down swearing there was smoke coming off a chimney where no cabin stood and a tall figure on the ridge lifting a hand. Elias took his coin and his goods and told the old man he would keep clear of any chimneys.
Amos replied quietly that it was not the chimney he would worry over, saying some mountains do not let go of what they get a hold of, and Cusk is greedy. Elias went back up. For a while nothing happened. In the second week, he found his traps along the high stretch of his line sprung and empty, one after another, with no tracks around any of them but his own.
He reset them all, and on his way back he noticed a quiet that was not ordinary silence, but the held quiet of a room where two people were talking and stopped the moment you walked in. A fox barked far down the slope, and the world started again. He laughed at himself and went home, but he did not sleep well. In the morning, when he opened the cabin door, the smell was there.
It was the smell of something burned, wood or more than wood, burned and then rained on and left out long enough to go sour and cold. Wet ash and old copper. A gust came up the slope, and it was gone, just clean cold pine again. He told himself it was a kill somewhere up the mountain.
He told himself many reasonable things in those first weeks, and not one of them was the truth. By mid-November, the weather turned. It came in off the north end of the range in a single afternoon, and the snow did not stop for two days and a night. Elias stayed in, kept the stove fed, and waited.
On the third morning it broke, a world made over in white. He knew he ought to wait another day for the snow to settle, but his line was buried, and a buried line means dead animals left to spoil. So he strapped on his snowshoes and went out to walk the loop. He never finished it.
On the steepest part of the shoulder, he felt a shudder come up through his snowshoes into his knees. He looked up and the whole face of the slope was moving. There was no time. The last thing he saw of the ordinary world was the sky narrowing to a bright slot above him as the snow came down and folded him under.
Then dark, then cold, then nothing for a long time. By every reckoning, that should have been the end of him. The men of the gap counted the days he lay under the snow. Nine days from the morning of the slide to the morning he came down off the mountain, and he came down on his own two feet.
When he came back to himself, he was packed in snow hard as stone. He could not move his arms, his legs, or his head. His face was clear, a small pocket of air against his mouth, and that was all. He could breathe and blink and feel his own heart going slow and thick.
The cold he described later was not the cold of weather. It started somewhere behind his breastbone, a deep low ache like a hand closing, and spread into his shoulders, down his arms, along the backs of his legs. It was not the numbness of a man freezing. A freezing man goes warm at the end, sleepy and warm, and gives up easy.
Elias kept waiting for that warmth to come and take him because he understood it would be a mercy. It never came. He lay there, and the cold worked into every part of him, and it did not kill him. It just kept on.
He told Amos Thorlby later that he wanted to let go more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, and the mountain would not let him. Somewhere in the middle of that long time, he stopped being alone. There was nothing to see in the black and nothing to hear, but a man knows when he is being looked at. Something was down there in the cold with him.
It did not touch him and did not speak, but it was close, and it was patient, and it was glad. That was the word he used, and he hated using it. It was glad to have him. He understood then that the smell he had caught on the morning air for weeks, the wet ash and old copper, was the smell of this.
The sprung traps and the held quiet and the cold from inside had all been the same thing leaning closer week by week. It had been getting ready. It was not going to let him go, and it was not going to let him die, because the dead are no company at all. On the ninth day, the snow above him gave.
He found himself lying on the surface of the slide in the hard blue cold of the morning, alive. He got to his feet, found his staff lying near him as if it had been set down beside him, and started down the mountain. He was not cold anymore. He carried his own cold now, the deep one behind the breastbone, and against that, the weather was nothing.
The first man to see him was Wendell Sarn, a boy of 19 who clerked for Amos. Wendell dropped his armload of stovewood and stood in the road with his mouth open, because everyone in the gap had given Elias up for dead a week gone. Amos Thorlby came out onto the store porch and went white to the lips. The first thing he said, low and almost to himself, was, “It let you walk.
” Elias stopped in the road and looked up at him, and after a long moment he said, “For now. ”
He stayed in the gap three days. On the evening of the third day, he told Amos the whole story, the slide, the cold from the inside, the thing in the dark that was glad. He told it plain, the way a man reports a thing.
Amos listened and did not interrupt once. When Elias was done, the old man said, “Then you can’t go back up. ” Elias said he knew it, and that he meant to leave the mountains entirely. He set out the very next morning down the wagon road that ran south out of the gap.
He walked all day, and in the evening, he came around a bend in the road expecting to see the lowland farms opening out ahead of him. He saw the store at Sorrel Gap instead. He had walked all day south on a straight road, and the road had brought him back. He tried again the next morning, going east on the old miners track.
In the evening, he came down a slope expecting strange country, and the store stood at the bottom of it with the lamp already lit. He tried north and the high cut to the west. Every road out of Sorrel Gap brought him back to Sorrel Gap by nightfall. Other men could leave.
Wendell Sarn rode the south road clear to the lowlands and back inside a day to prove it could be done. The road was a road. It went where roads go. It was only Elias it would not release.
The mountain had let him walk, but it had not let him go. The thing in the dark was not under the snow anymore. It was the whole shoulder of the mountain, the whole gap, the whole stretch of country in the shadow of Cusk. And Elias Vance was inside it.
That winter was a hard one, and Elias spent it in the back room of the store. He changed in ways no one could point at. The men noticed he had stopped trying the roads. He ate less and less and slept less and less, and the hot coffee was the same as the cold one to him now.
Sometimes in the deep of the night, anyone passing the store would see him standing at the back window in the dark, his head turned a little, leading with his good ear, listening toward the mountain. Twice that winter, in the dead cold hour before dawn, the smell came down into the gap. It came down off Cusk on a still night and rolled through the hollow, and those who were awake said it was strongest at the store, strongest at the back window where Elias stood. Both times when the morning came, Elias was a little less there.
His voice came thinner. The frost in his beard from the morning he walked down off the mountain never melted all winter, no matter how close he sat to the stove. Wendell Sarn swore that toward the end, you could stand close to Elias and feel the cold coming off him the way you feel cold coming off a windowpane in January. One morning in the early spring, when the snow on the high country had just begun to soften, Elias Vance was gone from the back room of the store.
His bedroll was folded, his pack untouched. He had taken nothing. The door was open to the cold, and in the soft snow outside, his tracks led north toward the mountain in a straight, unhurried line, the stride of a man walking home. Amos sent Wendell and three other men after him.
They followed the tracks north and up the back of Cusk, up the shoulder where Elias’s old line ran, a single line of footprints climbing steady toward the high creek. They came up over the last rise below the tree line in the gray of the afternoon, and they stopped because there was smoke coming off the chimney. The cabin stood whole the way it always had, and a thin gray thread of smoke rose straight up into the still cold air. The smell was everywhere.
And up above the cabin on the bare rock of the high ridge, a tall figure stood against the white sky. It lifted a hand to them. Wendell, young and not yet wise enough to be as afraid as the others, took a step forward and opened his mouth to call out. One of the older men, a hard quiet fellow named Obadiah Chraele, caught the boy by the collar and held him.
“Don’t you call to it, and don’t you go up,” he said. Because they had all seen by then what Wendell had not. The figure on the ridge was not alone. A little below it stood a second figure, just as tall, just as still, and it too lifted a hand.
The smell came down on them, and the silence came down, the held silence, the waiting silence of a mountain that has gotten a thing it wanted and would very much like to get another. Obadiah turned the boy around and said they would go down now, and none of them would ever come back up, and none of them would tell it the way it happened. In the record kept at the county seat, the entry for Elias Vance says only that he was a trapper of Sorrel Gap who was lost in a snowslide on Cusk Mountain in the winter of 1874 and whose body was not recovered. That page was removed sometime after it was written.
Somebody took a knife to the binding and cut that page out clean, and the record of Elias Vance went missing from the official account for the better part of a hundred years. It was the same with Silas Orne 30 years before him, and with the name before Silas, older still, a trapper lost on Cusk in a winter near the beginning of the county. Somebody, for a long time, has been very careful that the men Cusk Mountain keeps should be quietly forgotten. Sorrel Gap is gone now.
The wagon road is grown over, and the hollow has been given back to the spruce. But Cusk Mountain is still there. The people who hunt and walk that high country today, the few who go that deep, come back down every few winters white and quiet. They tell of a cabin up near the tree line where no cabin is marked on any map, standing whole with smoke coming straight up off the chimney into the still air.
They tell of a smell on the wind near the top, wet ash and old copper, that gets into a man and won’t wash out for days. And they tell of figures up on the bare rock, tall and still, more of them now than there used to be, that lift a hand to anyone who climbs that high. They never come down to meet you.
They just stand there and wave and wait.