In the autumn of 1887, a 34-year-old surveyor named Wendell Crumrine was hired by a coal speculation company out of Philadelphia to map a stretch of unclaimed ridgeland along the border between Eastern Kentucky and what was then still being called West Virginia.
The company wanted to know whether the timber was worth cutting and whether the coal seams beneath the ridges were thick enough to justify bringing in a railroad. Crumrine cared little for any of that. He cared about finishing his work and returning to a rented room in Lexington.
The country he was sent into did not appear on any map in Philadelphia. The few locals who lived in the hollows below the ridges called the area Otterskin Bend, after a creek that bent four times in the shape of an animal swimming.
At the foot of the ridge sat a small settlement of cabins clustered around a general store run by a widow named Amelia Ashlock. She was 59 years old, had buried two husbands, and ran her store with the quiet authority of someone who had outlived most of her arguments.
Crumrine took a room in her loft for two dollars a week. He ate her cornbread and salt pork in the mornings and rode out before sunup with his theodolite, his chains, and his notebooks strapped to a gray mule named Grizzle.
The first night in the loft, he lay awake listening to the house settle. A slow, regular tap came from somewhere in the walls, like a finger drumming on wood. In the morning, the widow did not look up from the stove when he asked about it. She said only that old houses talk to themselves.
For the first ten days, his work went well enough. The ridge was steep but walkable, and the trees were old, mostly oak and hickory, with a few enormous tulip poplars he estimated at 300 years by the girth of their trunks.
He saw deer, and once a black bear that lifted its head, looked at him for a long moment, and turned away as if he were not worth remembering. One morning he saw a fox cross the path carrying something dark in its mouth.
In the muddy bank of a small spring, he found the print of what he took to be a very large barefoot man. It was longer than his own boot, without the proper arch of a human foot, and with toes too long and too widely spaced. He put his boot beside it and the print made his boot look small. He told himself it was a black bear that had briefly stood on its hind legs, and he kept walking. He did not write the print down, and he did not measure it.
On the eleventh day, he first felt the woods notice him. He had set up his instrument on a flat shelf of rock about two-thirds of the way up the western face of the ridge. The light was good and the sky was the color of old pewter.
As he bent over the eyepiece, he became aware that the woods behind him had gone quiet. Not the quiet of birds settling, but the quiet of birds leaving. He straightened, listened, and turned in a slow circle. He saw nothing. The trees stood as they had stood, and the wind moved through the leaves the way wind moves. But the small creatures had gone away.
Crumrine had been a surveyor for eleven years. He had worked in Michigan, in the Carolinas, and in the dry country west of the Missouri. He knew the silence that comes when a predator is moving. This was not that silence. It was older, and it had no direction. He could not tell whether the thing he was meant to fear was in front of him or behind him, above him or below him. He could only feel that he was being measured.
After a long minute, the small sounds came back. A wren called. A squirrel scolded something farther down the slope. Crumrine let out a breath he had not known he was holding and went back to work. On the way down at dusk, he kept catching himself looking over his shoulder and finding nothing there.
That night, over the salt pork, he asked the widow casually whether anyone in the settlement had ever had trouble on the ridge. She chewed slowly, set down her fork, and looked at him for what felt like a long time.
She told him there was a man he ought to talk to before going up again. His name was Aldous Two Winters. He lived about four miles south, on a piece of land nobody else wanted because it sat where the creek bent sharpest. He was part Cherokee on his mother's side and part something else on his father's side that nobody around there had ever quite settled on. He was older than anyone knew, did not talk much, but knew the ridge.
She told Crumrine to go the next morning before light, because the old man liked the early hour. Then she added, almost as an afterthought, that when the old man told him what he had to tell, he should not interrupt, and should not try to be clever. She said he had buried better arguers than Crumrine.
Crumrine rode out before the sun had cleared the eastern ridge. The path was narrow, following the creek for about three miles before turning up a small draw marked by a bent oak. The oak grew straight for about six feet, bent at a hard right angle, grew sideways for another ten feet, and then bent again toward the sky. It looked like writing in a script he did not know.
At the top of the draw was a small clearing and a cabin built of squared logs gone dark with age. Smoke rose from the chimney in a thin straight line. A dog of indeterminate breed lay on the porch and watched him ride up without barking.
The door opened before Crumrine had dismounted. The man who stood in it was tall, with a long narrow face the color of weathered cedar and white hair worn in two long braids past his collarbone. He wore a faded red wool shirt and wool trousers held by a leather belt with a brass buckle worn smooth. His hands were enormous, with long fingers, broad palms, and knuckles that had been broken at some point and never quite reset.
He said, "You are the surveyor." Crumrine said, "Yes, sir." The man told him to come in and tie his mule on the post.
Inside, the cabin was warm and smelled of wood smoke and something herbal and faintly bitter, like tea made from bark. There was a single room with a fireplace, a table, two chairs, a narrow bed under the window, and shelves lined with jars and bundles of dried plants.
On the mantle were objects Crumrine did not recognize: a small piece of bone polished smooth, a flat oval stone with a hole worn through the center, and a bundle of dried grass tied with what looked like horsehair.
The old man sat in the chair closest to the fire and gestured for Crumrine to take the other. He offered no food or drink. He simply sat and looked at Crumrine with eyes so dark they were nearly black, and waited.
Crumrine, never comfortable with silence, tried to fill it. He explained who he was, who he worked for, what he was doing on the ridge, and how the widow Ashlock had sent him. The old man listened without interrupting.
When Crumrine ran out of words, the old man looked into the fire for a long moment. Then he said his mother's people had called the ridge by a name that did not translate into English. The closest meaning was "the place where the dirt remembers."
His father's people, who had come through when he was a small boy, had called it something different, but the meaning was much the same. The dirt remembered, he said, because something was buried in it that should not be there, and it had been buried there longer than his mother's mother's mother. What was buried there was not asleep. It was only waiting.
Crumrine asked what it was waiting for. The old man looked at him for a long moment and said Crumrine was a man who measured the world, who walked with chains and instruments and wrote numbers on paper, and who believed that writing the numbers down meant he understood a place.
He said he was going to tell Crumrine something, and that Crumrine would want to laugh, would want to write it down, and would want to take it back to the men in Philadelphia who paid him. He asked him not to do any of those things. He asked him to listen, put his work away, and leave the country before the leaves were off the trees.
He said Crumrine had been on the ridge for eleven days. It had noticed him. It had not yet decided about him. If he left now, it would forget him within a season. If he stayed, it would not.
Crumrine was a polite man. He did not laugh, but he did not believe either. He asked what the thing was, because a surveyor's instinct is always to ask for the dimensions of a problem.
The old man closed his eyes for a moment, as if gathering something from a long distance. Then he opened them and began to speak. He spoke for nearly two hours. Crumrine sat in that chair and did not move. The fire burned down to embers, and the morning light moved across the cabin floor and out the other side.
Aldous Two Winters told the surveyor that in 1843, when he was four years old, his mother took him up onto the ridge to gather a root that grew only on north-facing slopes. He remembered the day clearly because it was the day he first saw what lives there.
They had walked most of the morning. The sun was high and his mother had filled half her basket. He sat down on a log to rest and was told to stay still while she gathered a little farther up.
He sat there for what felt like a long time, and then he noticed the woods had gone quiet. He felt it before he saw it, the way a person feels someone watching them in a room they thought was empty.
He turned his head slowly and looked between two trees about thirty paces away. Something was standing there looking back at him.
He described it only once, because it was not a thing that should be described more than once in a single conversation. It was tall, taller than a tall man. It was thin in a way no living thing should be thin, with arms that hung past where its knees should have been.
Its skin was the color of wet bark, and it was not skin in the way that people have skin. It was something else, something the woods had grown around a shape that did not belong to the woods. Its head was bent forward, its eyes were set deep, and they were the color of old amber. And it was smiling, not the way an animal bares its teeth, but the way a man smiles when he is about to ask a question he already knows the answer to.
His mother came back down the slope just then. She saw his face and did not look at the place where he was looking. She took his hand and told him not to turn his head and not to run, but to walk with her.
They walked slowly back the way they had come, and she sang under her breath the entire way, a song her grandmother had taught her, a song with no words he could understand. They did not stop until they were back inside the cabin.
With the door barred, his mother sat down on the floor and cried, which he had never seen her do before. She said, "Aldous, it saw you and now it knows your face." She told him he must never go up that ridge alone, not as a young man, not as an old man, never alone.
That night, his mother told him a story her grandmother had told her. There had once been people in those mountains before the people who came to be called the Cherokee, and before the people who came before them, and before the people who came before them. People so old that the languages they spoke had not been spoken in the open air for a thousand years.
Those people had known the thing on the ridge. They had not worshipped it. They had not fought it. They had bargained with it. They had buried something with it in the deep dirt of the high meadow. They had agreed in some way that the agreement could not be broken, that as long as what was buried stayed buried, the thing on the ridge would keep to itself.
His mother told him the agreement was not eternal. It was only for as long as the dirt remembered, and the dirt was beginning to forget.
The old man paused, poured himself a small cup of cold water from a clay pitcher, drank it slowly, and set the cup down.
He said he had lived there for 81 years. He had followed his mother's instruction. He had gone up the ridge only with company, only in daylight, and never in the seasons when the leaves were turning. He had been careful.
In those 81 years, he had lost neighbors. He had lost friends. He had helped bury what was left of men who did not heed his warnings.
There was a hunter named Obed Stillwagon who went up in the autumn of 1859. He was a confident man who had killed three bears in his lifetime and believed there was nothing in those woods he could not handle. He laughed at the warnings and said the old people made up tales to keep outsiders out of the good hunting ground.
He went up on a clear, cold morning with his rifle, his dog, and a satchel of dried meat. Three days later, they found his rifle at the foot of the ridge, leaning against a tree as if he had set it down to tie his bootlace, with his coat folded neatly beside it, the buttons still buttoned.
They did not find him. They did not find his dog. What troubled them most was the coat. A man in flight does not stop to fold his coat. A man taken by a bear does not have time. The coat had been folded carefully, sleeves tucked under, the way a careful housewife folds a coat to put it away for the season, as if something had picked it up after he was gone and put it down where it was sure to be found.
There was a circuit preacher named Jeremiah Callaway who rode up in 1871 to pray over the place because he had heard the stories and believed his faith would protect him. He was a serious and kind man. He had preached a service for a friend of the old man who had died of a hard winter.
Callaway came to the cabin before he went up and told the old man what he intended. The old man asked him to wait at least until spring, when the days were longer and the woods were not yet thick. Callaway said, "Brother, the Lord does not wait on the seasons, and neither shall I."
He went up on a Tuesday morning. Three days later, they found his horse standing in the creek, the saddle still on, the reins trailing in the water. They found his Bible on a rock in the middle of the path, open to a page he had marked, the page folded back so hard the paper had torn. The page was Psalm 23, and the verse folded was the one about the valley of the shadow. They did not find him either.
Some say that on certain summer evenings, when the wind is from the west, a man can be heard very faintly singing a hymn somewhere up on the high meadow. The hymn is always the same one, the one Jeremiah Callaway used to sing before his services. Nobody who has heard it has gone up to look.
There was a young stonemason from over the mountain named Cyprian Whitlow who went up in 1883 with a friend looking for a place to quarry. The friend came back. Cyprian did not.
The friend, whose name was Ansel Marrowbone, would not speak of what had happened. He left the country within a week and was last heard of in St. Louis, where he was said to have died of drink within two years.
Before he left, Ansel came to the old man's cabin one night and sat in the chair Crumrine was sitting in. He was a man who had not slept for four days and looked it. He drank three cups of strong tea and stared into the fire.
He said he could not tell what he had seen, because if he told it, the listener would see it too, and he did not wish that on any man. He would say only this: they were on the high meadow, and Cyprian had gone ahead to look at a face of rock, and Ansel had stayed back to fill his pipe. Then he heard Cyprian call out, and his voice was not right.
It was Cyprian's voice, but it was saying Ansel's name in a way Cyprian had never said it, as if it had only just learned the word. Ansel did not answer. He stood very still. He heard the voice call again and again, and each time it was a little better at saying his name. By the fifth time, it sounded almost exactly like him.
Ansel turned around and walked down off that meadow without looking back. He said he had not slept since. He told the old man not to let anyone go up on that meadow, not for any reason. Then he stood up, walked out of the cabin, and was never seen again.
Crumrine sat very still through all of this. The fire had burned down, and the herbal smell in the cabin had grown stronger, as if the warmth was drawing it out of the bundles on the wall. In a voice that was not quite steady, he asked what the thing was.
The old man said he did not know. He did not believe anyone living knew. His mother said it was older than the people who first came into those mountains, older than the people who came before them. She said the woods grew up around it the way a scar grows over a wound.
She said it 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, if it left anything behind, was no longer the man who walked up the ridge.
Sometimes after one of these disappearances, people in the settlement would see a figure in the trees at the edge of the high meadow just at dusk, a figure that looked almost like the man who was lost. The figure would lift a hand as if to wave. Anyone who had been told the stories knew not to wave back. Anyone who waved back did not come home.
The old man's own father waved back in the autumn of 1851. The family had been told he died of a fever in a town two days' ride away, and that the body had been buried there respectfully. Three weeks after the burial, the old man's mother saw her husband standing at the edge of the cornfield at dusk, smiling, lifting his hand.
She did not wave back. She walked into the cabin, barred the door, and sat with her back against it for the entire night, singing the song her grandmother had taught her, the song with no words her son could understand. In the morning, the figure was gone. The cornfield had been trampled in a perfect circle about twenty feet across. Nothing was eaten. Nothing was taken. It had simply been walked around and around all night long.
After that, the old man and his mother left the place where they had been living and came to the cabin behind the bend of the creek, because moving water, his mother said, was one of the few things the thing did not like to cross. Whether that was true, he could not say for certain. He had lived there 81 years and was still alive.
When he finished, the old man stood, went to the shelf, took down a small leather pouch, untied it, and shook a few small dark seeds into his palm.
He told Crumrine to take them and carry them in his pocket. They were from a plant that grew there before the white men came. His mother's people called it the listening seed. It did not grow anymore; the patches where it once grew had been burned out by men who did not know what they were burning. These were the last he had.
He said the seeds would not save a man if he was foolish, but they would give him a moment of warning. If Crumrine was on the ridge and the seeds in his pocket grew warm, he must turn around immediately and walk down. He must not look behind him. He must not run. Walking was important. Running told it that a man was afraid, and it was a thing that followed fear the way a hound follows a wounded deer. Walking told it only that a man was leaving, and most of the time, leaving was enough.
He pressed the seeds into Crumrine's hand and closed his fingers around them. He told him to finish his map if he must, but to finish it quickly, and not to be on the ridge after the equinox. The equinox was nine days away. After that, the country up there did not belong to the living.
Crumrine rode back to the widow's house in a daze. He told himself the old man was a storyteller, the kind mountain people used on flatlanders who came into their country with money and instruments and a habit of looking down on everything.
He told himself he would put the seeds in his coat pocket because it would be rude not to, but that he would not let an old man's stories interfere with his work. He had been hired by serious men who expected serious results, and he had nine days to finish, which was less time than he needed. He had no intention of leaving early.
The next morning, he rode up the ridge again. He set up his instrument and worked through the morning. The seeds in his pocket lay quiet. The woods were ordinary. He told himself Aldous was a kind old man with a head full of his mother's stories.
He worked through the afternoon and came down at dusk. He ate the widow's cornbread. He slept poorly and dreamed of a smile he could not see clearly. He woke at three in the morning with his heart beating hard for no reason he could name.
The next day he went up again. The day after, again. He kept the seeds in his coat pocket, kept his work moving, and tried not to look too long into the dim places between the trees.
On the third day after his visit to Aldous, something happened that he did not write down in his notebook, did not tell the widow about that evening, and tried for years to convince himself had not happened at all.
He had been working along the eastern slope, sighting markers across a small ravine, and stopped to drink from his canteen. He sat down on a fallen log, uncorked the canteen, took a long swallow, and set the canteen on the log beside him.
Then, very clearly, he heard a voice in the woods behind him say his name. Not call his name, but say it, the way a man says the name of a friend he is glad to see. The voice said, "Wendell." Just that. Just his given name, spoken once, soft and clear, from no more than ten paces away.
Crumrine did not turn around. He sat very still and listened. He heard nothing else. After a long minute, he stood, picked up the canteen, and walked slowly back to where his instrument was set up. He packed it down without sighting another marker and came down off the ridge two hours earlier than planned.
That night in the loft, he lay awake until the first gray light came in the window. He thought about who in the world knew his given name. Verna knew it. The man in Philadelphia knew it. The widow knew it because he had signed her register. Aldous Two Winters did not know it. He had never told the old man his given name. He had only said "Mr. Crumrine." He turned that fact over in his mind for a long time and could not make it go away.
On the fifth day after his visit to Aldous, he had a moment he would later try, for the rest of his life, to explain away. He was on the eastern slope, sighting a marker, and as he bent to the eyepiece, he saw in the perfect circle of the lens a figure standing in the trees behind the marker. A figure that had not been there a moment before. A figure that was tall and thin and bent slightly forward at the neck.
He stood up so fast he knocked the instrument off its tripod. He looked at the place. There was nothing there. There were only trees. He stood there for a full minute, breathing hard, his heart in his throat.
He looked down at his pocket and put his hand inside. The seeds were warm. Not hot, not burning. Warm the way a cup of tea is warm an hour after it has been poured. Warm when the air around him was cold enough that his breath was visible.
He stared at his hand. He told himself the seeds had been against his body, so of course they were warm. He told himself the figure was a trick of the light. He told himself he had only three more days of work and would not be chased off the ridge by a feeling.
He picked up the instrument, set it back on its tripod, and kept working. But his hands, he noticed, were not quite steady. And every time he bent to the eyepiece, his stomach went tight and he had to force himself to look. The figure was never there again, but the expectation stayed.
He finished the day's work and came down the ridge slower than usual. The light was failing, and he had to lead Grizzle by the bridle along the steep parts. He kept hearing things in the woods on either side of the path. Not loud things. Small things. A twig snapping where no twig had reason to snap. A leaf falling sideways instead of down. A breath once that he was almost certain was not his own and not the mule's.
He did not stop to investigate any of it. When he reached the bottom of the ridge, where the path met the road back to the settlement, he stopped and turned around just once. There was nothing on the path behind him. The woods were ordinary, and the light was the ordinary blue of a fall evening. But the seeds in his pocket were warm enough now that he could feel the warmth through the heavy wool of his coat.
That evening, he did not stop at the widow's house. He rode straight to Aldous's cabin. The old man was sitting on the porch, watching the light fade. He looked up as Crumrine rode in, and his face did not change, but his eyes did, in some small way Crumrine had no word for.
Crumrine dismounted, walked up the steps, and held out the seeds in his open palm. He said, "They were warm." The old man looked at the seeds, then at Crumrine, and asked how warm. Crumrine said, "Warmer than my body."
Aldous nodded slowly and asked whether Crumrine had turned around and come down. Crumrine said no. He said he had told himself it was nothing.
The old man closed his eyes and sat that way for a long time. When he opened them, he said Crumrine must not go back up. Not tomorrow, not the day after, not for the rest of his life. Crumrine said he had three more days of work. The old man said he had no more days of work. His work on that ridge was finished, whether he wrote it down on his maps or not.
He asked, "Did you hear it speak?" Crumrine said nothing for a moment. The old man asked again. Crumrine said, "Yes." The old man asked what it said. Crumrine said, "It said my name." The old man asked whether it was his given name or the one men called him by. Crumrine said, "My given name."
The old man looked at the floor of the porch for a long time. He said, "Then it is further along with you than I had hoped."
He told Crumrine to ride back to the widow's that night, pack his things, and not wait for morning. He was to leave that night in the dark, because there was something he had not yet told him.
The thing on the ridge was bound mostly to the high country. It did not come down into the hollows often, but it had been known to. It had been known to follow. And once it had spoken a man's given name, that man was no longer just any man on the ridge. He was someone it had named for itself. He was on its list.
The seeds would keep it from finding him if he carried them always for the rest of his life. He must not lose them, must not give them to anyone else, and must not take them out of his pocket except to check them. If they grew warm, he would know it had come closer than it should. If they grew hot, he would know it was in the room with him, and he would have only the time it took to leave by the nearest door.
Crumrine said he understood. The old man said, "Then go."
Crumrine stood there in the failing light, holding the warm seeds, and understood suddenly and completely that he had been a fool. He understood the way a man understands when he has stepped onto a frozen pond and heard the first crack beneath him. He nodded, did not argue, and said he would leave that night.
The old man told him to leave within the hour, pack only what he needed, and leave the mule with the widow. He was to take the road south on foot to the railhead. Walking was better than riding because the seeds worked better when a man was moving on his own two feet. He was to get on the first train and not get off until he was at least three states away. The equinox was the day after tomorrow, and he did not want to be in that country on the equinox.
As Crumrine turned to leave, the old man stopped him with one more thing. If he ever saw, in a window or a piece of polished glass or still water, a tall figure standing behind him, he was not to turn around. He was not to look. He was to pretend he had not seen it, walk away, and tell himself it was his imagination, even if he knew it was not. Especially if he knew it was not.
Crumrine rode back to the widow's house and told her he was leaving that night. She did not seem surprised. She was already pulling things from her pantry as he walked in, wrapping bread, salt pork, and a small jar of preserves into a parcel.
She asked whether the old man had told him to go that night. He said yes. She said, "Then you should go." She helped him pack and did not ask what had happened on the ridge. She asked only one question: "Did the seeds grow warm?" He said yes. She nodded and said the old man was right.
He left the mule with her and paid what he owed plus a little extra. He shouldered his pack, his coat, and the small leather case that held his instruments, and walked out into the dark. She stood in the doorway with a lantern and watched him go. He turned once at the bend in the road and lifted his hand to her, and she lifted hers. Then he kept walking, and the light of her lantern grew smaller behind him, and the woods on either side of the road grew larger, and he did not look back again.
He walked all night and through the next day, stopping only to drink from creeks and eat a little of the bread and pork. The seeds in his pocket grew gradually cooler as he walked. By the second evening, they were no warmer than the air. By the time he reached the railhead, they were cold.
He bought a ticket to Lexington, then from Lexington to Indianapolis, then from Indianapolis to a small town in southern Indiana he had never heard of. He stepped off the train, rented a room above a hardware store, and stayed there three weeks before sending word to anyone of where he was.
He did not return to Lexington for two months. When he did, he found Verna, asked her to marry him, and she said yes without asking why he had been gone or why his face looked older than it had when he left. They were married the following spring.
He delivered an incomplete map to the company in Philadelphia, citing illness, and refunded a portion of his fee, the kind of thing that ended careers in his profession. The men in Philadelphia were not pleased and sent two letters demanding an explanation. He answered neither.
He took a position teaching mathematics at a small college in southern Indiana, where the country was flat and the horizons were long, and he never again worked as a surveyor.
He kept the seeds in a small wooden box on the mantle of his study. Once a year, in late September around the equinox, he would take them out, hold them in his hand, and check them. They never grew warm again.
But once, in 1903, walking home from the college on a cold October evening, he passed the darkened window of a closed shop and saw out of the corner of his eye, in the reflection, a tall figure standing on the sidewalk behind him. He did not turn his head. He kept walking. He walked the long way home that night through the lighted streets and did not pass another window that did not have a lamp burning behind it.
When he reached his house, he put his hand in his pocket. The seeds were faintly warm. Only faintly, but warm. He sat in his study that night with the lamp turned up high and did not sleep. In the morning, the seeds were cold again.
He never told Verna any of it. He never told anyone. He died in 1909 of pneumonia at the age of 56. His wife outlived him by 22 years.
After his death, she found among his papers a letter he had written but never sent. It was addressed to a man named Aldous Two Winters, in care of the general store in Otterskin Bend, Kentucky.
The letter said, "I have thought of you every day for 21 years. I have not been back. I have not told a soul. I have done as you asked, but I want you to know that I have not had a peaceful night's sleep since I came down off your mountain because I dream sometimes of standing on a railway platform and seeing a thing in the window glass that I will not describe even here. I dream that it is still there on that platform waiting for me to come back, and I am writing to ask you, before I die, whether you think the seeds have kept it from finding me or whether it is only being patient. Please write to me. I am afraid to ask anyone else."
The letter was never sent. Verna kept it in the box with the seeds. When she died in 1931, the box passed to a niece, and from the niece to a grandnephew, and from the grandnephew to a small historical society in Indiana that cataloged it and put it in a drawer, where it sat for the better part of a century.
The seeds, when the box was last opened, were still intact, dark, small, and dry. A woman who works at the historical society said the box had been opened only twice in the last 50 years. Both times, the person who opened it remarked that the seeds, against all expectation, were warm.
Aldous Two Winters lived another nine years after Crumrine left his cabin. He died in 1896 in his sleep at an age local records list, perhaps inaccurately, as 90. He was buried on his own land near the creek at his request, and a small stone marks the place.
Before he died, he sat down with a young man from the settlement named Volney Gardner, who had taken an interest in the old stories, and told him in one long sitting much of what he had told Crumrine in 1887. He told Volney to write it down, put the writing in a tin box, bury the box under the third stone of his hearth, and dig it up only if a stranger came to the settlement and began to ask questions.
Volney did as he was told. The tin box was dug up in 1962 by a folklorist from a university in Ohio who had been told by an old man in the settlement that something was buried there. The folklorist read the contents, published a short article in a regional academic journal, and the article was not widely read. The journal went out of print three years later. The contents of the tin box were donated to a university library, where they remain in a folder marked simply "Otterskin Bend Papers."
The settlement of Otterskin Bend lasted another generation. Then, in the years after the First World War, when the young men did not come back from France and the coal company never did build the railroad, the cabins emptied out one by one. The widow Ashlock's general store was bought by a man who closed it within a year. By 1930, no one was living in the bend. The cabins fell in. The road grew over. The ridge stood as it had always stood, the same long blue shape against the sky.
Hunters from outside the region sometimes go up there even now. Most of them come back. Some do not. The county, when asked, will say it is rough country and that men do sometimes get lost in rough country, and that nothing more should be read into the matter.
The county sheriff's office, in the years between 1940 and 1960, recorded 11 disappearances on or near that ridge, in a county whose entire population in those years never exceeded 4,000 souls. Most were quietly attributed to other causes: drowning, bear attack, a man who wandered off drunk and froze in a draw.
The actual files tell a different and more careful story. In nine of the 11 cases, no body was ever found. In the two cases where remains were located, the remains were not such that they can be described here. In one of those cases, the official cause of death, written in a careful hand by a county coroner who had clearly been instructed to keep things simple, was exposure. In the file, in pencil, in the margin of the report, in handwriting that does not match the coroner's, someone had written three words: "It took him."
The ridge itself remains much as it was. The cabin is gone. Nothing is left of it but the stones of the chimney and the iron hinges of the door lying in the leaves like the bones of a small animal. The woods there are quiet, in a way that those who have visited have since learned to recognize.
Wendell Crumrine, in his last year, when he knew the pneumonia would take him, made a small request of his wife. He asked that when he died, the wooden box on the mantel, the one with the seeds in it, should not be buried with him. He said, "I do not want them in the ground with me. I want them above the ground in a dry place where they can keep doing whatever it is they do."
Verna agreed. She kept the box on the mantel for the rest of her life. After she died, the box passed from hand to hand until it came to rest in a drawer in the historical society in Indiana.
The seeds inside remain dark and small and dry, exactly as the records describe. And those who have held them in recent years have reported the same thing each time: against all expectation, they were warm. Not hot. Warm the way a cup of tea is warm an hour after it has been poured.