In April 1886, a United States cavalry patrol of sixteen men crossed the border from Arizona into the Sierra Madre of Sonora, Mexico. They were under the command of Captain Garrick Voorssen, a West Point graduate and a careful officer who had ridden with General Crook into these same mountains three years earlier. That earlier expedition had cost him thirty pounds and left a tremor in his right hand that never fully went away. But he had come back, which was more than could be said for three men who had not.
The patrol was chasing a small band of hostile Chiricahua, estimated at three to nine in number, who had hit a Mexican ranch the week before and killed two vaqueros. The treaty with Mexico permitted pursuit up to fifty leagues into Sonoran soil. The treaty did not say what they were supposed to do if they found something else. Among the scouts riding with the patrol was an Apache the cavalry listed on the payroll as Closson, a man of about forty-two who had been a scout for almost a year.
He wore the dark blue blouse and canvas trousers the army issued, but under the blouse, around his throat, he carried a small leather pouch that no man ever saw him remove. He had been Chiricahua, or part Chiricahua, and there were stories about him. One version said he had killed a man of his own band and been driven out. Another said he had found his own brother dead in a wash near the headwaters of the Bonita, and that the body had been wrong somehow.
The scout who told that story would not say what wrong meant. On the fourth day, Closson found the first sign at the mouth of an unnamed dry canyon, where a seep of bad water had made a flat of pale alkaline mud. There was a print in the mud, very clear: the front paw of a mountain lion, a big one. Nothing strange about that.
What was strange was what came after it. There was no second paw print. Instead, about a yard ahead, was the print of a man’s bare left foot, and then another bare footprint farther on, and then nothing but dry rock. Closson squatted by the mud for a long time without speaking.
When Voorssen pressed him, he said in his careful thin English, “This is not the man we are looking for. ” The other two scouts, a Tonto Apache called Biduya and a White Mountain Apache the men called Nilan, went still. Biduya finally translated with one word: a wearer of skins. He said they should go back.
Voorssen looked at the print, looked at the scouts, and laughed a tired laugh. He had a job to do. He told them to mount up and find him a track he could understand. Closson did as he was told.
But as he passed the youngest man in the patrol, Corporal Wendell Crane, the scout looked at him and shook his head once, very slowly, in a way Crane would never forget for the rest of his life. That night they camped at a place the Mexicans called El Cuello del Lobo, the wolf’s throat. The wind came out of the south carrying a smell none of the men could name, sweet the way old fruit is sweet when it has gone past ripe and into something else. The horses would not lie down.
They stood all night. During his watch, Corporal Crane heard what he took for a coyote, but it sounded as if it were directly above him, in the air at the height of a man on horseback, calling down from nothing. He did not see it. He told no one.
By the morning of the fifth day, the patrol had lost two spare mounts. One had pulled its picket and vanished in the night without a sound. The second lay on its side, breathing fast, eyes rolled white, with no mark and no sign of sickness. It died around noon.
That morning, the older arriero, one of the two Mexican civilian packers, led the captain and the sergeant and Closson to what was left of the third missing horse, downwind of the camp. The corporal was not allowed to go. When the captain came back, he had taken his hat off, and his trembling right hand was shoved into his trouser pocket to keep the men from seeing it. The men were not told what had been found.
Voorssen said only that the horse had gotten into trouble with predators. That evening, Crane brought the captain his coffee. Voorssen took the cup without looking up and said, very quietly, more to himself than to anyone, “It was the way it had been opened. That is what I cannot get past.
”
They rode deeper into the Sierra Madre. On the sixth day they came down into a basin with the ruin of a small Spanish mission at the far end, La Misión de San Lázaro de los Ojos, Saint Lazarus of the Eyes, abandoned since the 1760s. The Mexicans avoided the place. They called it un lugar que se acuerda, a place that remembers.
Voorssen camped the patrol at the upper end of the basin, well away from the ruin. The arrieros refused to go near it. They camped with the horses, built no fire, and whispered prayers all night. Around midnight, the watch fire went out, which should not have happened in the dry season.
The corporal looked across the camp and saw the private on watch from Ohio standing twenty paces beyond the fire, facing the mission, utterly still. Crane called his name. The private would not turn. He shook him.
He slapped him. Nothing. Crane turned the man bodily away from the mission, and the moment his eyes lost their line of sight, he gasped and stumbled and began to cry, insisting he had been watching the fire. Crane sat by the dead fire the rest of the night with his rifle across his knees and did not look toward the mission again.
He could feel it looking back. In the morning, the private from Ohio was gone. His boots were set neatly together under the edge of his blanket. His rifle was leaning against his saddle.
His canteen was full. Four men searched the basin and found a single set of barefoot prints in the sand of the dry creek bed leading south toward the mission. The footprints stopped halfway across the basin. They did not turn around.
They simply stopped, as if the man making them had been lifted up out of his stride. Closson rode out alone and worked the ground himself. When he came back, he reported to Voorssen in private. Crane, currying his horse on the far side of the picket line, heard most of it.
Closson told the captain that the thing they were hunting had a name his people would not say out loud, because the name was a door. It put on the shape of what hunted. In open country, a lion. In timber, a bear or a wolf.
In the dark places, it put on a man. It hunted by waiting. It chose one out of a group and waited, sometimes for days, until that one walked out alone. Then it took him.
Voorssen asked why this patrol, and Closson answered: “Because one of your men is already looking at it the way the dog looks at the door before the door opens. ” He told the captain it was not in the mission. It had been in the camp the whole time. Then he told Voorssen he would go to find it, and that if he was not back by the second sunrise, Voorssen was to ride, not look behind him, not wait for any man who was missing, and not bury the men who fell.
He took two canteens, a satchel of pemmican, his Winchester, and a knife with a horn handle, and he rode south toward the mission alone. The patrol waited through that day and into the night. The watch fire stayed lit, and Sergeant Threlfall doubled the watch. Around ten o’clock, Crane and the private from New Jersey saw a man standing out beyond the picket line in the long grass at the edge of the basin floor, two hundred yards off, very still, in what looked like a dark blue cavalry blouse with canvas trousers.
Crane raised his Springfield and sighted on the figure. He knew, without being able to say how, that it was not Closson. It was someone else, or something else, wearing a Closson shape. He lowered the rifle.
He did not fire, because some part of him understood that if he missed, it would know he could see it, and it would come. Around three in the morning, Nilan the White Mountain scout walked over to Crane in the dark. He told him not to stand watch the next night, or the night after. He pressed a strip of red cloth into his hand.
The corporal tied it around his upper arm, under his blouse, where no one would see it. The next day, Sergeant Threlfall fell asleep in the shade of his picket, and when he woke, he was not the same. Crane noticed it first. Threlfall’s voice was Threlfall’s voice, but slightly off, slightly too smooth.
He was doing all the things Threlfall always did. Crane could not put a single thing wrong. And yet he could not stop watching. Around four, Threlfall squatted down in front of Crane, smiled, and asked about the lump under his sleeve.
Crane, calm because he understood that calm was the only thing that would save his life, said it was a tobacco pouch. Then he asked the sergeant a question only the real Threlfall could answer: the name of his first wife’s sister. The thing wearing Threlfall’s face did not move for three seconds. Then it stood up.
It did not answer. It did not blink. It walked back across the camp and began to clean its rifle. Crane crossed the camp to Nilan and said, barely moving his lips, “It is the sergeant.
” Nilan said, without looking up, “No, it is not yet the sergeant. It is sitting beside the sergeant, but it has not finished putting him on. ”
At first light on the seventh day, Closson came back. He came on foot down the basin from the south, his horse gone, dry brown blood on his blouse.
He stopped a hundred yards out and called for the captain by name. Voorssen came out alone. He walked down the rise and stopped ten paces away and looked at the scout for a long time. They spoke, too low for Crane to hear.
Then Closson walked the last three paces forward, stood so close their hats almost touched, leaned in, and whispered something into Voorssen’s ear. Six words. Crane could not hear them. The captain stepped back two steps, the way a man steps back from a fire that has flared up.
His face went white. He turned and walked steadily back to the camp and gave the order. They would ride north in twenty minutes. They would not stop until dark.
They would not stop at El Cuello del Lobo. They would not stop at the seep. They rode. Closson rode at the back of the column, a quarter mile behind the rest, alone.
When Crane asked why, Voorssen said, “He is making sure. ” Crane did not ask of what. They rode all day and made a cold camp on an exposed ridge with no fire, sleeping in their boots with their rifles in their arms. Closson sat on a rock at the edge of camp and watched the southern horizon all night without moving.
The corporal who looked at him in the morning said he had aged ten years in a night. On the third day they crossed back into Arizona. At the small customs post, Voorssen ordered the men to salute the American flag. The thing wearing Threlfall’s face did not raise its hand.
It had stopped pretending very hard. It walked strangely, held its head at an angle Threlfall never would have used, and did not eat. When its horse threw it and ran, it got up and walked behind the column on foot. That night before they reached the outpost, Crane stood watch and saw the thing in the moonlight.
He saw that its mouth was full of something dark, and it was working its jaw the way an animal works its jaw when it is trying to chew something too big to swallow whole. In the morning it was gone. The tracks leading south toward the mountains were mountain lion tracks. This time they did not turn into anything else.
They simply went south and did not come back. The patrol reached the outpost at noon. Voorssen reported three losses: one private to desertion, one sergeant to an unknown malady he asked be entered in the file as brain fever, and one civilian arriero to dehydration. The renegades had not been found, he said, and were presumed to have moved south of the authorized depth.
The file was closed. Sergeant Augustus Threlfall of Ottumwa, Iowa, was entered on the rolls as deceased on the 22nd of April, 1886, cause of death listed as brain fever in the field. No body was returned. The file said he had been buried in Sonora in accordance with regulations.
The grave’s coordinates were never recorded. Closson was honorably discharged from the Indian Scout Detachment three weeks later, on the 15th of May. His discharge papers list expiration of service. He drew his final pay of fourteen dollars and forty cents, drew rations for one week, left the post on foot walking east, and was never seen at any cavalry post in the territories again.
Biduya the Tonto stayed in service for another six years. Nilan left two days after Closson, also walking, also east. Neither was seen again. Voorssen finished his career on garrison duty in Wyoming, never accepted another field command, retired as a major in 1898, and died a year later of a heart condition.
His sister wrote in a letter that her brother had taken to sleeping with a lamp burning, and that he had said more than once that he did not want to be alone when he died, because of something he had heard a long time ago. Corporal Wendell Crane served out his enlistment, mustered out in 1889, drifted south, did some prospecting, married a Mexican woman in Cananea in 1892, and lived in northern Sonora until his death in 1941, at sixty-two. He took confession only twice in his life: when he married, and on his deathbed in the parish house at Bavispe. He told the priest the whole story.
At the end, the priest asked what the six words were. Crane told him. The priest copied them into the back of the parish register, writing them in Latin because he was afraid of them. The register sat in the back room of the parish house for the next ninety years, until it was sold to a collector and ended up in a private collection in Tucson.
The words, in the priest’s neat Latin, translate roughly into English as: It came back wearing my face. That is what the scout whispered to Captain Voorssen on the morning of the seventh day. That is why the patrol pulled out at a dead run, and why the thing riding home with them was riding behind the column and not in it. Closson had gone into the mission, fought the thing, and survived.
He had told the captain to watch for the second one. But the corporal could not stop thinking about it for half a century. If Closson warned Voorssen so plainly, in the captain’s own language, that was exactly the kind of proof a thing wearing Closson’s face would have given him to make him trust it. The real Closson would have used a sign only the two of them knew.
Either way, one Closson had gone into that mission, and one Closson had come out. On the night he died, Crane told the priest that for fifty years he had checked his own eyes in every mirror for the pale color that was almost blue, looked at strangers’ hands for a tremor, and crossed himself whenever he saw a man walking alone in the long grass at the edge of his vision. Nilan had told him to never take off the red cloth, and he never had. The priest looked under the corporal’s sleeve and found a strip of red cloth so old and worn it was almost the color of dried blood.
It had been tied to his arm for fifty years and seven months. He removed it after the corporal died, according to Crane’s last wish, to be buried with the cloth in his hand, not on his arm. At the very bottom of the page, the priest wrote a single Latin phrase he did not translate: Audi me, Domine, quia non finita est ista historia.
Hear me, Lord, for this story is not finished.