In the winter of 1887, a West Virginia fur trapper named Obadiah Kestrel set out on a line he had avoided for 18 years: a stretch of black timber on Cheat Mountain so old that the word for it meant “the place that is sleeping. ” Kestrel, then 46, was the last of a thinning trade;most men of his generation had already come down off the mountain. He had not. He intended to die there, he once told his sister.
Nobody owed him a coffin. His decision that winter came down to economics: fur prices had gone strange, the country to the north had been overworked, aand a man in Elkins told him there were silver fox sign in the black timber. Against whatever instinct had kept him out of there for almost two decades,he packed his irons and set out on December 2nd. ,
The first day cutting his line into the deep snow,he wrote in the small book he kept, notes that the woods felt wrong.
There were no tracks, not a hair, not a grouse, not a single mouse trail. And he heard a humming, slow,like a man humming a hymn with his mouth closed, only deeper,that stopped when he turned to face it. He also noted marks on one tree that were too high for a bear: four long scrapes about 9 feet up the trunk. Kestrel was not a superstitious man, but he wrote everything down anyway.
By his second morning,the trap line had already been disturbed. The fourth set was sprung, not closed, jestjaws snapped shut, nothing in them. The trap had been moved, about four feet, toward the creek, and he could read no track in the snow explaining how it got there. He reset it.
He told himself a bear, possibly. He underlined the word possibly twice,and then wrote the counter-evidence:: no track, no smell,no breath fogging the cold air. ,
On the third night,he woke around 3:00 in the morning to that same humming, now outside his cabin door. He sat up in the bed and listened to it walk the perimeter of his house, three full circles,always patient,always low.
Then it stopped at the door, and a voice,kind as his mother’s,said his name. Obadiah. Three times,each closer,until the last came from the window six inches from his ear. He did not answer.
He did not look. He kept his eyes on the ceiling beam and waited, and eventually it stopped. ,
In the morning,he circled the cabin three times looking for tracks. The snow around the house was untouched.
No print at the door,no print at the windows,no scuff. He wrote that he felt watched, not from the timber, from above,and that looking up,he saw nothing. ,
He thought about leaving,but staying was what a man did. As he wrote,paraphrased:a man who is run by a thing he did not see is not a man any longer.
He’s a rabbit. So he stayed. ,
On the fourth day,he found his own footprints, a third set. , His boots,his size,his wear pattern on the heel from an old hatchet injury.
But the third set went20 yards off his line and simply ended mid-snow,no continuing prints in any direction,no sign of turning. He counted them 12 steps from the line. The prints were only half as deep as his own,and he wrote,and crossed out,:or whatever was wearing my boots was not standing on the snow the way a man stands. ,
That night,he wrote one question in his book before the candle died:“How did it know my mother’s voice?
”
On the fifth day,he did not go out. He wrote almost nothing,only,“Quiet, too quiet. ” He noted that even the wind had stopped,
That night,the humming came back, but it was inside. He woke to a weight pressingdown the foot of his bed,and he heard someone humming the hymn his mother used to hum while working at the stove,one he had not heard in40 years.
In the absolute black of the cabin,athe voice,very close and kind,said,“Ohia, why did you come into the timber? We had a quiet thing here. ” It gave him terms:. keep the line,keep the cabin,but do not walk past the eighth set.
If he did,it would take him home,and keep him. He nodded twice in the dark. The weight lifted,and he heard the bolted door open and close by itself. He did not sleep again.
,
In the morning,one thing was different. On his table sat a piece of soft pine,whittled into the exact same shape he had been carving since boyhood,the shape his mother had taught him to keep a man’s hands honest. But this one was not his. It was newer.
It was wet. He wrote in a hand that sloped down the page like a man walking a hill:“It made me one. It knows who I am. It knows the shape my mother taught me.
There is no man alive who knows that shape but me. It went into me while I was sleeping. ”
Against reason, he stayed. For nine days,it worked.
He checked his first seven sets, pulled three pelts, did not look at the eighth set at the edge of the deep timber. The humming did not come back. He began to sleep. He began to think he could live with a thing at his door when it kept its word.
,
On the 10th day,he found a man sitting on his chopping block outside. The man was wearing the coat of Cases Whurl,a trapper who had worked the country south of Cheat Mountain20 years prior,and who had walked into the timber one fall and never come out. The man had Cases’s face,his black beard,the small scar from a childhood horsekick. He smiled,spoke in Cases’s voice,asked Obadiah to come sit and talk like old days.
Obadiah stood ten feet away,rifle in hand,and asked,“What are you? ‘
The thing smiled wider,and said Cases was not dead. Cases was at home,with the others,and had been kept a long time,not lonely. Then it opened its mouth,and from inside came the voices of other men,at least four,and one was the voice of his uncle Eustace,who had walked off into those woods in1861 and never come home.
And under all those voices,another voice,a woman’s,called him by a pet name nobody alive knew. ,
In that moment,Obadiah understood the contract had never been a contract. The leash. The thing had been keeping him close,waiting for the day it was hungry enough to sit on his chopping block in another man’s coat and call him home.
He raised his rifle,aimed not at the thing,at the cabin door behind it,and fired one shot. Then he ran. ,
He did not run for the trail down. He ran the other way,straight into the deep timber,into the country he had been forbidden,and he ran until he could not run anymore.
He sat with his back against a tree in the dark,and he discovered the deep timber was not empty,. It was full of life:. birds,rustling,water moving under ice. He understood:.
the thing had hollowed out the country around its lair,the way a man clears ground around a cabin so nothing can sneak up on him. The thing could not cross its own edge. ,
For two days he sat in the deep timber,drinking creek water,eating jerky,not lighting a fire. At night,the humming swept the country,calling namesangersHis mother’s voice,his uncle’s,the voice of a woman he had loved when he was22.
Other names,too,names from a hundred years gone. He did not answer. ,
On the third morning,he walked out. He followed a creek down off the mountain,took it to a river,to a logging road,to a camp.
The foreman there,an old man named Pimmen Brace,asked where he had come from. “Cheat Mountain. ” “What trap line‰ ‘The deep timber. ” The foreman looked at the other men,then said quietly,“Nobody traps the deep timber.
You know that. ” Then he asked,“Did you hear the humming? ” His grandfather,he said,had worked country east of Slatter Fork in1849 and had told him,never set a line east of the ridge. The country there,he said,was somebody else’s country.
Obadiah did not eat any more of the stew. He gave Pimmena Brace the piece of soft pine from his pocket. Brace looked at it a long time,then handed it back.. “You should keep it,” he said.
“It will remember you longer than you remember it. ”,
Obadiah Kestrel never went back for his furs or his cabin. He moved to Marietta,Ohio,took up cabinet work,never married,never went back to the mountains. He kept the piece of wet pine in his pocket his whole life,and told one man at a tavern that a thing in the woods knew his mother’s voice.
,
The book was found two years later by a hunter named Lucius Marrowbone,came across the abandoned cabin,took the book,and walked off the mountain so fast he wore a hole in the heel of his boot. He gave it to a county clerk in Pocahontas who read it and put it in a drawer for30 years until he was dying. He told his son,and his son added something:the cabin when Lucius found it had three salted pelts still hanging in the loft,a cold stove,a neatly made bed,and on the wall above the bed,a row of small whittled pieces of soft pine,12 of them,all the same shape,all wet,as if someone had been sitting in the empty cabin for two years,whittling and waiting. ,
Obadiah’s sister,Hester,came to visit twice over those 21 years.
The second time,in1905,she said her brother had changed. He no longer slept in a bed,only in a chair by the window with a rifle across his knees. He never openeda window. He had a row of whittled pieces on his mantle,and he counted them every night.
One night while she visited,there was one more piece than there had been the night before. She said she heard him say,very quietly,“You found me. It took21 years,but you found me. ”
He died in the spring of1908in his bed in Marietta.
The doctor said a weak heart. His sister said something else. In his final week,he told her he could hear humming again,at the edge of the wind,at the edge of the house. “It found me,” he said.
“I should have known it would. There is no place far enough. ‰
The night he died,she heard from his room the sound of someone humming a hymn,slow and kind. When she went in,the window was open,snow on the sill though it was April,and on the table beside him,piece of soft pine,freshly whittled,still wet,in the shape his mother had taught him.
She counted the pieces on the mantle before the undertaker came:. 13 now,one more than the night before. She put all13 in a sack,took them to the river,and threw them in one at a time. She wrote to a cousin that she did not believe water could take a thing like that.
But they floated down the dark water,and they went out of her hands,and that was all she could do. ,
People in West Virginia will still tell you that the deep timber on the far side of Cheat Mountain is empty country. They are wrong,. It is the country around it,they say,that is empty,and that is what you should be afraid of.
If you are ever in those mountains alone in the winter and you hear a voice you know calling your name from the dark,do not answer. Do not open the door. Do not nod even in the black. Something has been listening for your name your whole life,and it is patient,and it is kind,and it remembers your mother.
,