In the autumn of 1889, a 29-year-old feature writer for the Knoxville Sentinel rode into the hills above the Oconaluftee River. His editors wanted a piece on the old Cherokee who had remained in the mountains after removal. Most of those people did not want to be written about. A Tohe Long Walker was different.
A Tohe was 83 years old and lived alone in a cabin above a creek the maps did not name. He had sent word through a peddler that if the writer wanted the story he had to tell, he should come before the first hard frost. The writer went the next week.
The cabin sat in a notch above the river, hidden so well that a man could pass 30 paces from it and never see the smoke. A Tohe was on the porch when the writer climbed up. He did not greet him. He looked at the young man a long moment, then said, in English so plain it sounded like a man laying down a coin, "You came for the dark one. Sit."
He pointed at a stump he had set out as if he had known the day and the hour. The writer sat. A Tohe poured something from a clay jug into a tin cup, set it beside him, and looked out at the mountains for the time it takes a careful man to count to a hundred. Then he began.
He said his grandfather knew the place by a name he would not say twice in one telling, because to name it twice was to call it. So he called it the hush. Not because it was silent, he said, but because "you would learn to hush."
The hush lay on the north flank of a ridge above Cardiff Branch, in a section of the high country the settlers had not built into. The Cherokee had not built into it either. A Tohe said his people had marked the trails away from it for as long as they had walked the mountains, the way a man marks a snake hole with stones. The marks were not warnings. The marks were courtesy. Don't trouble what is sleeping. Don't ask a question whose answer you will not survive.
Then the surveyors came.
It was the spring of 1873. The state of Tennessee had set itself to finishing work begun before the war and abandoned during it. Plat maps were needed for tax purposes, boundary lines for timber speculators who had bought sections of countryside unseen. A man named Cornelius Grimshaw had the contract for the eastern section.
Grimshaw was 44 years old, born in Maryland, trained at the topographical bureau before the war. His employers counted him as the steadiest hand they had. Sober, patient, a man who could spend a full week in the field without raising his voice. He had a wife in Knoxville and wrote her a letter every Sunday, whether he had anything to say or not.
His party for the eastern section was four men. Lemuel Ashcraft, his rodman, was 31, a Pennsylvanian he had worked with for six seasons. Hosea Tillman, chainman, was 26, raised on a hog farm outside of Maryville, a quiet fellow who carried a Bible in his coat and never let anyone see him read it. Vernon Crowley, the cook and wagon driver, was 50 years old, missing the smallest finger on his left hand. The hired guide was a man named Mordecai Pickering, raised in the very hills they were going into, who knew the country as well as any white man living.
They came up through Cardiff Branch in the third week of April. The road was muddy from a wet spring. They stopped that first night at the only homestead within an hour's ride of the foot of the ridge, a cabin held by a widow named Velma Thornwood.
She was 38, raised in the hollow, married at 20 to a logger named Edwin Thornwood. Six years before, Edwin had walked into those hills and never walked out. Velma did not turn the surveyors away. Hospitality in those hills was a kind of religion. She fed them cornbread and a stew thinner than it should have been, gave them the floor of her front room to sleep on, and on the second cup of cider asked Grimshaw plain what he meant to do.
Grimshaw was a polite man. He explained the contract, the lines, the markers, the timber survey. He showed her on a folded map where they would be and for how long. She listened. Then she said, "Don't go up there."
Grimshaw said something kind and obvious about understanding the dangers of high country, about being well outfitted, about the season being good. Velma waited him out. When he was finished, she said it again. "Don't go up there."
Edwin went up, she told them. He was the best timberman in the hollow. He went up to scout a tract for a buyer out of Asheville and never came back. The buyer hired three more men, two locals and a Welshman from down by Murphy. They went up. The Welshman came back. The two locals were still up there somewhere.
The Welshman did not speak for the rest of his life. He lived 22 more years and never said a word. He wrote a few things. Most of what he wrote, they burned. The little they did not burn, the preacher took.
Grimshaw, polite still, asked her, "What did he write?"
She said, "He wrote over and over the same line. I have written it down once and I will not write it again." She did not say it.
Mordecai Pickering, who had been silent until that moment, set down his cup. He said to Grimshaw, "I'll take you to the foot of the trail. I won't go past the second cairn. I'll wait 3 days. If you're not back by the third evening, I'll wait one more and then I'll go down and tell them in Cardiff Branch that you did not come. That's the most I'll give you. And I'll give it because I took your money, but no other reason. I'm sorry."
Grimshaw looked at him long. Then he said, "That's fair. We will be back by the third evening."
He was wrong.
The next morning was clear and cold. Velma stood in the door of her cabin and watched them go. A Tohe said her face was the face of a person who has stopped hoping and made her peace with that. The peace had cost her everything but her good manners. She did not wave. She watched until they were out of sight.
They took the wagon as far as the lower stream and then unhitched. Vernon stayed with the mule. The four of them, Grimshaw, Ashcraft, Tillman, and Pickering, started up on foot with the gear in packs.
The first cairn was a low pile of river stones at the place where the trail crossed a small spring. Mordecai stopped and put his hand on the topmost stone for the space of a breath, then took it off and crossed his palm against his trouser leg as if drying it.
They climbed for two hours. The hardwoods gave way to mixed pine. The sky narrowed. Around midday they came to the second cairn, a taller pile of slate and quartz at the top of a low saddle with a broken stick laid across it.
Mordecai stopped here. He set down the bag he had been carrying for them. He raised his hat. He said, "This is where I stop. Three days, I'll wait below. After that, I'll go. May whatever is left of you have the good sense to come back with you."
Grimshaw shook his hand. Tillman shook his hand. Ashcraft did not shake his hand. He laughed at something Mordecai had said earlier about the second cairn and said something A Tohe did not repeat. Then they went up.
Mordecai sat down on a stone and watched them out of sight. He waited a full hour to see if anyone came back. Nobody came back.
For the first half hour past the second cairn, the going was easy. The trail was clear. The slope was kind. The woods opened into a long swale of yellow grass with a creek running through it that Ashcraft said was not on any of the survey maps he had seen.
Grimshaw made the first note in the survey book that would later be found. It said, "A watered swale, half a mile long, oriented north-northwest. Not in our previous data. Position to be confirmed." Below that, in the same neat hand, "Time 12:40 in the afternoon."
The next note, four lines down, said, "Time 2:15. We have been walking. The swale is below us still."
The note after that said, "Time 2:40. Swale still below us. Estimated elevation gain since last note, no more than 50 ft. We have walked an hour and 25 minutes uphill."
They had been walking uphill for an hour and 25 minutes, and the swale, which they had crossed and left behind them, was still right below them. Not behind them. Below them. As if they had walked in a circle they could not feel.
Grimshaw took out the compass at 2:40. He noted, "Needle steady, bearing northwest as intended. Slope underfoot rising." And, "Sun position consistent with the hour. No explanation."
He did not turn around. A Tohe said that was the moment he should have turned around. He didn't.
By 3:00 the woods had changed. The pines thinned, and what stood between them were trees Ashcraft could not identify. He had identified hundreds of species over six seasons of fieldwork in three states. They were the right shape for hardwoods, but the bark was wrong, smooth where it should have been rough, dark like wet slate. The leaves were the wrong color for the season.
Tillman said, mostly to himself, that they looked like they had been painted by a man who was working from memory and getting most of it right.
The light was wrong, too. A Tohe said this was the part nobody who survived an encounter with the hush could ever explain in a way that made sense. The light was not darker, not brighter. It was wrong. As though it was coming from a direction the sun was not in. Tillman noted in his own pocketbook that the shadows on the trunks did not match the position of the sun in the sky. He noted this twice. He underlined it the second time.
At 4:00 they came on the first thing that should not have been there. It was a surveyor's chain, a 66-foot Gunter's chain, the kind used in the eastern survey before the steel tape came in. It hung from the lower branch of one of the smooth-barked trees, looped over the branch and back upon itself, and the tree had grown around it. The bark had closed over the chain like flesh over an old wound.
Ashcraft cleaned the dirt off the handle plate with his thumb and read it aloud. 1831.
The chain was 42 years older than they were, hung from a tree that had grown around it across the better part of a man's lifetime. There was nobody in that country in 1831. There was nobody supposed to be.
Ashcraft started to laugh and then he stopped. There is a difference between the laugh of a man who has found a curiosity and the laugh of a man whose mind is trying to walk away from something. The second laugh he made was the second kind. Grimshaw put a hand on his arm.
They left the chain in the tree. They did not touch it. Mordecai had told them weeks earlier by a fire in Cardiff Branch that the one rule on the high ridge was do not take what is given. A Tohe said even the surveyors knew that rule by then, though none of them could have said where they had learned it.
They went on past the chain because Grimshaw was the kind of man who could not unfinish a contract. And because Tillman was a man who would follow Grimshaw. And because Ashcraft was now a man who did not want to be left alone with his own thoughts.
They climbed another 40 minutes. The slope kept rising. The swale, when Tillman looked back, was no longer below them. It was beside them, off to the right, at the same elevation as they were.
Tillman, the quiet one, the Bible carrier, sat down on a fallen log and said, very low, that he would like to go back now.
Grimshaw said, "A little farther. We are close to the top of the ridge. We will mark the contract point and then we will go back."
Tillman did not look up. He said, "I would like to go back now."
Grimshaw said, "A little farther."
They left Tillman on the log.
A Tohe made a point of stopping there in the telling and looking at the writer hard. He said, "You do not leave a man on a log. You do not. There is something about a man sitting down and saying he wants to go back that you must respect. And a man who does not respect that thing is no longer a friend to the man on the log. He is a thing the man on the log is now afraid of."
He said Tillman watched them go up the slope, and Tillman in his pocketbook wrote, "They have left me. The Lord have mercy. I am alone and I am not alone."
Tillman waited an hour. Then, because the light had stopped behaving the way light behaves, and because something he could not see had moved twice in the corner of his eye and twice through the brush beside him without making a sound a deer would make, he got up and started back down the trail, or what he believed was the trail.
His pocketbook was found later in 1876, three years after, four miles to the south of where the survey party had left the second cairn. The book had been left on a flat rock in the open, as if set there for finding. The leather was bleached white.
The last entry in the book was dated April 23rd, 1873, the very day he sat down on the log. It said, "I have been walking down for 3 hours and I am at the same place where they left me. The light is wrong. The trees are wrong. I can hear them above me still, though they have gone on past me a long time. There is something walking beside me on the right that will not let me look at it."
Then the last line, smaller, written by a hand that was no longer steady, said, "If you find this, my name was Hosea Tillman of Maryville. Tell my mother I tried to come home."
That was all. He was not found. The pocketbook was.
By the time Tillman was writing his last line on the flat rock, Cornelius Grimshaw and Lemuel Ashcraft were standing in a clearing that the survey note said should not have been there.
The clearing was perfectly round, about 60 feet across. The ground was bare and dark and oddly fine, as if it had been sieved. There was no grass, no fallen leaves, though the woods on every side were full of them. In the center of the clearing was an old fire ring made of river stones, and the stones were warm.
Grimshaw put his hand on one of them and pulled it back. The stones were warm, and there was no ash in the ring, and there had not been a fire there that day or that week. But the stones were warm.
Ashcraft stood at the edge of the clearing and did not enter it. He said, "I'll wait here."
Grimshaw walked in. There was a notebook in the fire ring. He took it out. It was bound in dark leather, swollen with damp. On the inside cover, in a hand that was not modern, was a name. A Tohe told the writer the name once and only once, and he would not say it twice. The name was the name of one of the men who had crossed the ridge in 1831, when no one was supposed to have been there.
Grimshaw did not know the name. He opened the notebook anyway.
The first pages were a record of a surveyor's work, notes on bearings, sketches of slopes. The handwriting was clean. Then, around the 11th page, the bearings stopped making sense. The same bearing was recorded over a dozen times.
The next page had only a sentence. "I am not where I think I am."
The next page, in the same hand, said, "I have been writing in this book for the better part of a week, and I find, when I turn back the pages, that what I have written is not what I remember writing."
The next page was blank. The next page had a sketch of a face. Not a human face, exactly. Not an animal face. Something in between. Drawn with an attention to detail that suggested the man with the pencil had spent a long time looking at it.
The next page said, "It sat with us by the fire last night. It was wearing Pemberton's coat. Pemberton has been gone since Tuesday."
The next page said, "I have been writing in this book for 9 days. Today I went back and counted the pages. There are 44 pages of writing. 9 days. Today is the ninth day. There should not be 44 pages."
The last entry in the book was a single line, written very lightly, almost not pressing the pencil at all. It said, "If I leave the book in the ring, it may find another to read it."
Grimshaw closed the notebook. He did not put it back in the ring. He put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He turned to call to Ashcraft.
Ashcraft was no longer at the edge of the clearing. Grimshaw walked to where Ashcraft had been standing. The leaves there were undisturbed. There was no track of a man going back into the woods. There was no track of a man going anywhere. It was as if Ashcraft had been lifted out of his own footprints.
Grimshaw, who had once written in a letter to his wife that he had never been afraid in the field, was afraid then. He called Ashcraft's name. He called it three times and then stopped, because the third time the woods answered him.
The woods said, "Cornelius." In Ashcraft's voice, it said, "Cornelius, I am over here." It said, "Cornelius, please come over here."
He did not go. It said, "Cornelius, why won't you come over here?"
He turned the other way and he began to walk. A Tohe said, "He did not run. A man who runs in those woods is a man who is hunted by his own breath."
Grimshaw walked in a direction that he believed was down, because the slope was tipping that way. After 20 minutes, he was at the second cairn. It was, by Grimshaw's watch, 5:00 in the afternoon on the day they had come up.
Mordecai was not there.
There were no tracks at all in the soft dirt around the cairn. Including, when Grimshaw looked, his own. He had walked across that dirt twice that morning going up and that evening coming down, and there were no prints. None. Not boot, not barefoot, not animal. The soft dirt was smooth as a swept floor.
Grimshaw went down on one knee and put his hand in it. He could feel the give. He could feel the way good loam takes a print. He stood up and looked back and saw the prints of his hand. But where he had walked just then to look at the dirt, his boots had left no mark.
He looked at his boots. They were clean. Not muddy from the climb, not wet from the spring, not dusty. Clean as if he had put them on that morning out of a closet.
He sat down on the cairn for a while. He could not have told you how long. The light was still wrong. He did not look at his watch, because he did not want to know what time it said.
At some point, he heard somebody coming up the trail from below. He stood up. He waited. The somebody came up around the bend and into view, and it was Lemuel Ashcraft.
Ashcraft was walking the way Ashcraft walked. Same gait, same slight favor of the left knee, because Ashcraft had been kicked by a horse the spring before. Same jacket, same hat, same canteen.
Ashcraft came up to within 10 feet of Grimshaw, and he stopped, and he smiled the way Ashcraft smiled, which is to say, he smiled mostly with the left side of his mouth. He said, "Cornelius, there you are. I have been looking for you for the longest time."
Grimshaw said nothing.
Ashcraft said, "Aren't you going to come down with me? The wagon is just below. Vernon is making supper. We need to get off this ridge before dark."
Grimshaw said, "Where were you?"
Ashcraft said, "In the clearing. Where you left me."
Grimshaw said, "I did not leave you. You left me."
Ashcraft kept the smile. He said, "You are tired, Cornelius. Come down."
Grimshaw said, "Take off your hat."
Ashcraft did not take off his hat. The smile did not change. Ashcraft said, "I am very tired, too. Let us go down."
Grimshaw said again, "Take off your hat."
Then the thing in front of him did something that A Tohe did not describe, because A Tohe was telling the writer what the man who lived to tell the story had told him. And the man who lived to tell the story would not say what the thing had done.
He would only say that he turned and walked off the trail, and he walked until full dark. When he came out of the woods at last, he was not at Velma Thornwood's homestead. He was 12 miles to the south on a dirt road outside a town called Webb's Cross, walking barefoot. His boots were gone. The survey notebook from his own coat was gone. The 42-year-old leather notebook was still in his pocket.
He never opened that notebook again. He kept it in a locked box in his attic in Knoxville for the rest of his life. After his death, his wife gave the box to a Methodist preacher who came to call, and the preacher took it home and burned it without opening it.
He told her on the porch before he left that he had known a man years ago in West Virginia who had brought something out of high country in a leather book, and that the man had not done well by it. The preacher said it was the second time in his life he had taken such a book to burn. He said he hoped it was the last.
Cornelius Grimshaw returned in body. He took the train back to Knoxville the morning after he came out at Webb's Cross. He did not write to his employer. He did not file the survey. He walked into his own house, kissed his wife, sat down in his armchair, and did not speak for two days.
When he did speak, it was to ask for water and then for the doctor. The doctor came. The doctor's note, which the doctor's nephew showed the writer in 1888, said only this: "Patient appears physically unharmed. Patient cannot give a coherent account of events. Patient asks repeatedly that all the windows of the house be locked at night and that the curtains be drawn. Patient does not sleep in his own bedroom. Patient does not look in mirrors. Patient is, I believe, of sound mind, which is the part of this that troubles me most."
Lemuel Ashcraft was never seen again. Hosea Tillman was never seen again, except for the pocketbook on the flat rock that the hunter found three years later.
Vernon Crowley waited at the wagon for two days, then drove the wagon down to Velma's, then drove it down to Cardiff Branch. He did not survey again. He took work as a teamster in Sevierville and lived to be 71. He told the story once, very late at night, to a young man named Ezra Holloway. Ezra Holloway repeated it to a clerk in 1893 when he was filing an affidavit on an unrelated matter. The clerk wrote it down because there was something in the way Ezra told it that made the clerk think it should be written down.
Mordecai Pickering was not there at the second cairn that 5:00 because, as he later swore to anyone who would listen, he had waited there one hour and seen something walk across the trail below the cairn that he refused to describe. He went home. He sat in his cabin with the door barred for three days. He came out on the fourth day, hitched his mule, rode into Cardiff Branch, and told the story to the postmaster, who told the sheriff, who took it down in writing.
He died in 1881 of nothing in particular, in his sleep. He had told his sister, his last spring, that he had not been right in his sleep since '73. She did not know what he meant. He did not explain.
Velma Thornwood, the widow at the foot of the ridge, lived on at her cabin for nine more years. The buyer from Asheville, the one who had hired her husband, sent a man around the next summer to make her a fair offer for the homestead. She would not sell. The man came back. She would not sell. The third year, the man stopped coming.
She told the postmaster, when he asked her once on the road, that she could not leave because Edwin was up there still, and that as long as she was at the cabin, he might find his way back down some night. And somebody had to be there.
She believed that until the night she died in 1882, peacefully, of a winter fever. The cabin stood empty after. It is, the writer was told, still standing. He has not been to see it.
When A Tohe was finished with the story, he sat very still for a while on the porch. The afternoon light had gone the long way around. The shadow of his cabin was reaching out across the swept dirt of his yard, and beyond it the ridge stood the way it stands today. A long blue line against a paler blue sky, no different than it had been when Cornelius Grimshaw walked up it in 1873.
The writer sat with his cup of cider untouched, and he did not speak.
After a while, A Tohe said, "That is one of the stories. That is the one I tell when somebody comes who has the kind of face you have. You have an honest face. An honest face will carry a story without breaking it."
The writer asked him then, because he had come a long way, and he was a journalist after all, the question he had been holding for the last hour. He said, "A Tohe, what is it? What is up there? What did Grimshaw see? What walks around in Lemuel Ashcraft's coat? What sits by fires in stone rings in the middle of bare ground in clearings that aren't there? What is the hush?"
He looked at the writer a long time. He looked at him the way a man looks at a horse he is not sure he will buy. Then he said, "You're asking the wrong question. The question is not what. The question is who."
The writer said, "All right then, who?"
He shook his head. He said, "That is also the wrong question."
Then he turned his face away and looked out at the ridgeline again, and he said, in a voice that was lower than it had been all afternoon, that the mountains were not haunted. He said that was the white man's word for what the white man could not understand.
He said what was up in the high country was not a ghost. It was not a spirit that had been a person. It was not a demon out of any book the missionaries had brought up the river. It was older than any of those things, and it was patient, and it had a habit his people had known how to honor and the new ones had forgotten.
The habit, he said, was this. It would meet you. It would meet anyone who walked into its country. It would meet you as you, as the you that you most expected to find. It would speak with your voice. It would wear your coat. It would smile your smile. And if you stayed long enough, it would learn you so well that when you came home you would not be sure which of you was the one that came down off the mountain.
He said, "The people who went up the ridge in '73 were not afraid of what they did not know. That was their mistake. They were afraid of what they thought they did know, and the hush taught them the difference."
The writer asked him then, because he could not help it, "Are you saying that the Cornelius Grimshaw who walked into his house in Knoxville and did not speak for two days was not the Cornelius Grimshaw who had walked up the ridge?"
A Tohe did not answer him right away. He poured a little more of whatever was in the clay jug into his own tin cup and he drank it and he set the cup down. Then he said, "I am saying that the man who came home came home, and the man who went up went up, and those two things may not be the same statement."
The writer did not know what to do with that. He left as the light was failing. A Tohe stood up to walk him to the place where the path went down to his horse, and at the head of the path he stopped and put a hand on his shoulder. It was the only time he touched him.
He said, "Write it down if you must. We need our stories told. But before you write it, I want you to do one thing."
The writer asked what.
He said, "When you get home tonight, look at yourself in the mirror by your front door. Look a long time. Make sure you know who is looking back. If you're not sure, do not write the story. Do you understand me?"
The writer said he did.
He rode home that night. He did look in the mirror by his front door. He looked a long time. He was satisfied with what he saw. He sat down to write the story the next morning.
But he will tell you something now, 12 years later, that he has not told anyone. He has a photograph from that afternoon. A Tohe let him take it before he left. Sitting in the cane chair on his porch, the ridgeline behind him. He sent it to a friend in Boston to be developed, because they did not have the chemicals in Knoxville at the time.
When it came back weeks later, he unwrapped it on his desk by the window. The picture was good. A Tohe's face was clear, the ridge was clear behind him, the cabin was clear, the cane chair was clear.
There was somebody else in the chair. Not in front of him, not behind him. In the chair, a faint second face set just over his, as if two photographs had been printed on top of one another by mistake. The second face was not his. It was not anyone the writer had ever seen. The eyes were open. The mouth was not.
The writer wrote his friend in Boston and asked if the plate had been double exposed. His friend wrote back to say he was the most careful man in his trade, and the plate had not been double exposed, and the negative was clean, and he had no explanation. He sent the negative. The second face was on the negative.
The writer keeps the photograph in a drawer of his desk. He does not show it. He has not destroyed it.
A Tohe died, the writer was told, the winter of 1892 in his cabin above the Oconaluftee. The writer never went back to that country. He has thought more than once about going back. He has not gone.
Sometimes late at night, when he cannot sleep, he takes the photograph out of the drawer and he looks at it. The face over A Tohe's face has not moved. It has not changed. It is there the way it was the day the print came back from Boston.
He does not know who it is. He does not know whose it is. He has not in 12 years taken it out of the drawer and not put it back. There is a part of him that is afraid that one of these nights he will look at the photograph and the face will be familiar. He is not yet sure whose face he is afraid will look back.
There is one last thing A Tohe said on the porch that the writer has been carrying with him. As he was leaving, just before he reached the path, A Tohe called his name once. He turned. A Tohe was still on the porch.
He said, "The hush is not the only place. It is the one that was easiest to keep a name on. There are others. The country between the high ridges has more than one of them. Most are smaller. Some are larger. The largest is not in these mountains at all."
He did not tell the writer where the largest one was. The writer has wondered in the 12 years since whether he meant a place he could find on a map, or whether he meant something else by the word place. He is still not sure.