In the winter of 1891, a trapper named Ransom Teague set out for Boggs Hollow. He was sixty-eight years old, a man who had spent more than fifty years reading the land and the tracks left upon it. He went because a younger man, Oren Kapp, had vanished from that hollow after reporting something strange: traps that had been sprung and neatly laid beside their chains, and footprints that circled and circled before stopping abruptly, as if whatever made them had been lifted away.
Boggs Hollow had a reputation that kept hunters away for nearly forty years. A family had once settled there, along with a few others, but they left in the early 1850s without explanation. Some loaded their wagons and departed in daylight. Others were simply gone one morning, leaving cabins open and livestock behind. The story passed down through the years held that a man who refused to leave heard voices calling him up the hollow one night, voices of neighbors who had already gone. He went to them and was never seen again. After that, the people who left would not speak the name of the place, and no one who knew the country would set traps there.
Oren Kapp was twenty-seven and new to the region. He set his line on the lower benches of Boggs Hollow, above the creek, where the grass was thick and untouched. He ignored the warnings of Fairlee Combs, who ran the store at Coker’s Mill. She told him plainly to stay off the upper ground and to be down before dark. He did not listen. In the third week of November, he went up to pull his traps before the deep cold set in. He did not come back.
Three men from the valley went up to find him. They found his camp untouched, his dog tied to a tree and nearly mad with fear. They found his traps, all twelve, hung from low branches along two hundred yards of creek, each one sprung on empty air. At the end of the line, caught in the jaws of the last trap, was a single boot. The men turned back and came down the mountain. Fairlee Combs did not call the law. She sent for Ransom Teague.
Teague went up alone in the first week of December. He brought a mule named January, two rifles, a supply of food and powder, and a set of steel traps. He set his camp on a flat shelf with a rock wall behind it and open ground in front, where the snow would show him anything that approached. He laid his own trap line on the lower benches, smoothing the snow around each one so that any visitor would leave a clear mark. Then he waited.
On the second night, the mule sensed something in the dark below the camp. The animal stood trembling, staring into the blackness. Teague felt a weight in the darkness, something watching him. Then, from above his camp, he heard the sound of traps snapping open, one after another, climbing the hollow in order, as if something was counting itself. He sat the rest of the night with his rifle loaded.
In the morning, he went up. He found an old dead hemlock at a bend in the hollow, hung with rusted traps, some of them fifty years old. They hung at the height of a man’s head, all sprung, all arranged with care. The snow beneath was clean. Nothing had come to that tree. Nothing had left it.
He continued higher. The hollow narrowed, the walls closed in, and the creek ran silent. He could see the water moving, but he could not hear it. Then he heard a voice ahead, calling out as a man in distress would call. It was the voice of a man in trouble, and it was calling his name. Ransom. He had told no one in that hollow his name. He had spoken to Oren Kapp only once, in the store, and had not given his name. But the voice called it clearly, then again, softer, almost affectionate. The third time, it was wrong. The vowels were too long, the pace too slow, as if something had heard a name spoken once and was practicing it.
Teague turned and came down the hollow as fast as he could move. The voice followed him, calling his name, and once it called with the voice of his dead wife. That nearly stopped him. He reached his camp, where the mule stood straining at its rope, and the voice stopped at the edge of the upper hollow, as if it could not cross a line that had been drawn long ago.
He understood then what the valley had known for forty years. There was something in the upper end of Boggs Hollow. It was not an animal. It left no tracks because it did not walk. It hung traps because it had watched men hang them. It had no voice of its own, so it took the voices of the men who came. It had taken Oren Kapp’s voice, and it would have taken his.
Teague spent four days preparing. The thing came closer each night, leaving marks in the snow at the edge of his firelight. It learned. It practiced his mule’s cry of fear. It called to him with the voice of his wife and the voice of the missing young man. Teague understood that it could not be left alone. It was bound to the upper hollow, but it was learning, and given enough winters, it would learn enough to cross the line that held it.
He found the place where the hollow ended, at a wall of broken rock beneath the high ridge. There was a black opening in the stone, low and wide, like a bear’s den. Around that opening, in the snow, were tracks. Tracks that went in. None came out. They were not the tracks of any animal he knew, and not quite the tracks of a man. Something had pressed shapes into the snow, imitating what it had seen.
Teague cut and split a large quantity of resinous pine, rich with pitch, and bound it into bundles. He carried them up the hollow in silence, while the voice whispered around him, calling his name and the names of the dead. He laid the bundles in a straight line from the mouth of the rock to the edge of the old graveyard, the line the thing could not cross. He soaked them in oil and grease and lamp oil until the last drop was gone. At the mouth of the den, he built the largest pile of all, and set his traps in a ring around it.
When darkness came, he walked up the hollow with a burning torch, touching it to each pile of pine as he passed. A line of fire roared up the center of that black valley, from the graveyard to the den. He walked in the middle of it, a rifle in each hand, while the voice of his dead wife called to him gently from the dark ahead.
What happened at the mouth of the den, he could never fully describe. He told one man, near the end of his life, and even then he could not shape it clearly. He said the darkness did not retreat from the fire as darkness should. It gathered. It came down off the rock face and out of the black opening, not as a shape but as an absence of shape, a hole in the firelight where something should have been. It came low and fast across the snow, and his ring of traps caught it. He heard them snap, the whole ring, one after another. He heard the steel bite and hold. He raised his father’s long rifle and fired into the center of the dark, then emptied the second rifle into it as fast as he could work the lever.
Then he took the last torch and threw it onto the great pile at the mouth of the den. A wall of fire rose across the opening, sealing it. Whatever was caught in the traps was caught in the fire, pinned by its own steel, unable to pull back into the dark or cross the burning snow. He stood in the red light with both rifles empty and watched it burn.
He would not describe the burning. He said only that it took a long time, longer than anything should, and that near the end it made every sound it had ever taken, one after another. The lost men of Boggs Hollow, calling from the flames. His wife’s voice among them. The young man Oren Kapp. And the last sound, just before the fire took it, was his own voice, calling his name from the fire as it had called from the upper hollow.
Then there was nothing left but the fire, the snow, and the silence.
Teague came down the mountain four days later, leading the mule. Fairlee Combs said he looked like a man who had been gone a year. He told her it was finished, that the hollow was empty, that any man could trap there now if he was fool enough to want to. He never told her what he had seen. He told no one, not for a long time.
He lived eleven more years. He kept a small cabin below the ridge, raised pigs and a garden, and came to the store on Saturdays. He never trapped again. Near the end, with the one man he trusted sitting with him through the long nights, he told the whole story. And he told one thing more.
He said that every winter, on the coldest and stillest nights, he would wake to a silence he knew. It was the muffled silence of the upper hollow, settled now in the corner of his small room. And in that silence, faint and patient, from somewhere beyond the edge of the lamp light, he would hear a voice. It was almost his own voice, but not quite. The vowels were a little too long, the pace a little too slow, as if something had heard a name spoken once and was still turning it over, practicing it.
He never saw anything. He was always alone in the room. But he believed that when a man traps something like that and burns it, he does not kill it so much as adopt it. It enters the iron, and the iron was his. It learned his voice better than anything else, there at the end in the fire. And he believed that on one of those cold, deep winter nights, it would finish learning. The voice would be his voice, exactly, with no slowness and no long vowels. And on that night, he would answer it, because how could a man not answer his own voice calling his name from the dark?
He died on a night like that. The man who sat with him said the room went still near the end, a silence you could feel. The old man’s eyes opened suddenly, fixed on the dark corner behind the lamp, the way the mule’s ears had fixed on the dark of the hollow all those years before. And Ransom Teague smiled, the way a man smiles when he hears a voice he has been waiting for. He said one word, softly, into the dark corner.
He said, “Coming.”
Then he was gone.