In the winter of 1891, a 68-year-old trapper named Ransom Teague was summoned from his mountain home to investigate the disappearance of a young man in a remote hollow that had been avoided for four decades. Orin Gabe, 27, had been working a trapline in Bog’s Hollow despite local warnings, and had not returned for nine days. The search party sent by Verily Combs, who ran the general store at Coker’s Mill, found Gabe’s camp abandoned. His dog had worn the bark off a tree circling in terror, and his traps had been pulled from the ground and hung neatly along the creek, each one sprung shut on nothing.
At the end of the line hung a single boot. Combs sent for Teague not because of a personal connection, but because she knew he was the one man in the high country who would not turn back. The old trapper went up the hollow in early December, alone, with a pack mule named January and a plan to find out what had taken the young man. Bog’s Hollow had a dark reputation.
Around the early 1850s, the families who had settled there had all left within a span of two years, some loading their wagons and refusing to explain why, others simply vanishing overnight. The old accounts held that the last man to stay through the final winter had been called up the draw by the voices of the very people who had left, and was never seen again. From that time, no one crossed the old burying ground on the knob above the creek after dark. No trapper had worked the high end of the hollow in 40 years.
Teague set his own line below the high end, keeping his camp behind a rock wall with a clear field around it. On the second night, his mule became terrified of something in the dark down the hollow, though Teague could see nothing. Later, from above his camp where no traps were set, he heard the distinct double click of traps springing, one after another, going up into the high end of the draw. In the morning, he went up where no one had gone.
He found a dead hemlock hung with rusted, ancient traps, all sprung shut and swaying though there was no wind. He found a creek that ran silently, and then he heard a voice calling for help, which he recognized as the voice of Orin Gabe. As he rushed toward it, the voice stopped and called a name — his own. He had told no one in that hollow his name.
The voice called his name again, stretched slightly, as if practicing it. Then it used the voice of his dead wife. Teague turned back, and the voice followed him down, never gaining, never falling back, until it stopped at the edge of the high hollow like it had reached the limit of a chain. Teague realized he was dealing with something bound to the high end of the draw, something that could not cross the line at the burying ground.
It had taken the voices of the men who came, and it had been learning his. Over the next four days, it came closer to his camp each night, leaving almost-footprints in the snow. It learned the voice of his mule and drove the animal near mad. It was learning him, and he understood he could not leave it to learn the next man.
He made a plan. He carried pitch pine soaked in grease and oil up the draw and laid it in a line from the mouth of a cave at the top of the hollow down to the burying ground line. At the cave mouth, he built a large pile and ringed it with his traps. Then, as dark fell, he crossed the line and walked up the draw, lighting the piles behind him until a line of fire ran the length of the hollow.
At the cave mouth, the dark gathered and came at him low and fast. His ring of traps caught it. He fired both guns into it. Then he threw the last oil and pine into the great pile, sealing the cave mouth with fire, and watched the thing burn.
It took a long time, and at the end, he would only say, it made every voice it had ever taken — the lost men of Bog’s Hollow, his wife, and Orin Gabe — and then his own voice calling his own name. Then it was gone. Teague came down four days later, a changed man who looked like he had aged a year in a month. He told Verily Combs the hollow was clear, but that no one would trap the high end.
He never told anyone what he had seen until the very end of his life. Of Orin Gabe, no trace was ever found. Teague lived 11 more years. He never trapped again.
In his final days, he told the full story to the one man he trusted, and he added one last thing: every winter, on the coldest nights, he would wake to a silence with a weight to it, and hear his own name called from the corner of the room — almost his own voice, but not quite, still practicing. He told the man that when a hunter corners such a thing and burns it, he does not kill it. He takes it on. That it went into the iron, and the iron was his.
And that one night, the voice would be exactly his, and he would answer it. He died on such a night. He opened his eyes, fixed on the dark corner past the lamp, smiled, and said one word: “Coming.
“