In the autumn of 1881, a surveyor named Obadiah Kestrel rode out of Fayetteville, Arkansas, with a hired man and a pack mule, bound for the western edge of Washington County. He had been hired by a railroad concern considering a route through the lower Ozarks. He carried a Colt on his hip and a small notebook in his coat pocket.
The notebook is the only thing of his that ever came home.
Kestrel was 44 years old, tall, with a face that did not move much and hands calloused from years of holding a transit and chain. The hired man was Caspian Vellum, about 26, who had come down from St. Louis looking for steady wages. Vellum was short and thick through the shoulders, with a habit of whistling between his teeth when nervous and going dead silent when he was past nervous.
They left Fayetteville on October 23 with two weeks of provisions and a list of section markers to confirm. At the livery that morning, the keeper asked where they were headed. When Kestrel told him, the man's hand stopped moving on the bridle he was working.
He said there were pieces of that den country that were not on the maps. Kestrel said he was aware. The man said, "I don't mean the rocks, I mean the people."
That night Kestrel wrote down what the livery man had said. He underlined the word "more."
On the second night out, October 24, they camped at the edge of a settlement called Winslow. Kestrel noted the wind direction and the temperature. In the smaller, tighter handwriting he used when uncertain, he noted that the dogs had not barked. There were no dogs with them. He meant the dogs he could hear faintly from somewhere down in the hollow. He could hear them moving, but not one of them made a sound.
The next morning Vellum said he had heard them too, and something else as well. Something further off he could not name. A sound like a woman humming, but lower than a woman would hum and slower, with a long pause between each note, as if whoever it was had to remember the melody piece by piece.
Kestrel wrote down what Vellum told him. Underneath it he wrote, "We keep working."
On the third day they pushed deeper into the den country. The land there folds wrong. A ridge that looks flat will fall away beside you so suddenly you have to grab a sapling to keep from going down with it. Caves open out of the rock at odd angles, some barely wider than a man's shoulders, some broad enough for a wagon to roll into and disappear.
On the afternoon of October 25, Kestrel found a path. He noted it was not a game trail, because game trails meander and this one did not. It was not an old logging trace, because there were no stump cuts and no wagon ruts. It was about three feet wide, packed hard, and recently used. The leaf litter on either side was undisturbed in a way the litter on the path itself was not.
Kestrel did what a surveyor in 1881 was trained to do. He followed it.
He followed it for the better part of two hours, with Vellum behind him leading the mule. The path wound deeper into a part of the den that did not appear on any map the railroad had given him.
The trees got older. The timber had not been cut, not once, by anyone. The trunks were thick enough that two men holding hands could not have reached around them, and the canopy was so dense that even with the leaves mostly down, the light on the ground was the color of old tea.
There were no birds. He wrote that down twice, once on the page he was working on and again in the margin with a small line drawn under it.
Then there was the smell. It was not a bad smell, which is what bothered him. He had expected something dead, or the smell of an animal den. What he got instead was something sweet, almost like cooked apples and wood smoke, the kind of smell that comes out of a farmhouse kitchen in the fall.
There were no farmhouses out there. Not on any map he had ever seen.
He stopped on the path. Vellum stopped behind him. They stood there for what Kestrel later wrote was a quarter of an hour by his watch without speaking.
Then Kestrel said, "We'll camp back along the ridge. We'll come back in the morning." Vellum, who by his own later admission could feel the hair standing up along the back of his neck in a way it never had before, said, "Yes, sir."
They turned around and walked back up the path. The path was longer going back than it had been going in.
Kestrel counted paces the way other men breathe. On the way in, the path had been 1,412 paces from where he first set foot on it to where they stopped. On the way out, it was 2,090. He counted twice. He counted because Vellum, behind him, kept asking if they were close to the top yet. Kestrel, who did not lie, kept saying, "Soon."
They got out by full dark and made a cold camp on the ridge above. They did not light a fire, because Kestrel did not want to be seen from below. Neither of them slept much.
That night Vellum wrote a letter to his sister in St. Louis by the light of a candle stub held inside his coat to hide the flame. The letter was found later, folded in the breast pocket of his shirt. It was the only piece of his own writing that survived.
In it he wrote, "I do not think we should go back down there tomorrow, but I do not think I can tell him so."
The next morning, October 26, they went back down. Kestrel marked the path with his own chalk every 50 paces in case the distance played its trick again. Vellum carried the rifle.
They reached the place where they had stopped the day before. The chalk marks were still there. The count came out right, 1,412 paces. Whatever had stretched the path on their way out had not stretched it on their way back in.
That should have been a comfort. It was not. Past the point where they had stopped, the path continued. About 300 paces further on, it opened up.
Kestrel wrote, in the same level hand he used to record elevations and the angles of slopes, "Settlement. Six structures. No smoke. No livestock visible. No sound. Population unknown."
What was actually there was a village. A village the state of Arkansas did not know existed. A village the railroad maps did not show, that the federal land surveys had missed, that the people of Winslow, nine miles away, had never spoken of, and that by every law of the country in 1881 should not have been there at all.
Six buildings arranged in a rough horseshoe around a packed earth yard. The logs had grayed in a way that takes a long time, and the chinking between them had been redone, but not recently. The roofs were a kind of shingle Kestrel had only ever seen in books about the early settlers who came down through the Cumberland Gap before the territory was even a territory.
There was a stone well in the middle of the yard. The stones around it were worn smooth by a great many hands over a great many years. There were footprints in the dust around it, fresh ones. The smell of cooked apples was stronger here, coming from the largest building at the back of the horseshoe.
There was no chimney smoke. No one came to a window. No dog ran out to bark, though Kestrel, listening, could hear what he was sure were dogs somewhere breathing. Just breathing.
Kestrel called out a greeting, the words a man uses in that country and that century when he comes up on a homestead and does not want to be shot. "Hello the house." Nothing answered. He called a second time.
From inside the largest building, something moved. Kestrel wrote that the sound was as of a chair being pushed back from a table. Then, in the margin, in that smaller hand, "many chairs."
The door opened. A man stepped out. He was old, 70 at least, possibly older. He was thin to the point of looking like he was made of sticks tied together with leather. His clothes were clean but cut in a style that had not been current in Arkansas since before the war with Mexico. His beard came down past his sternum. His eyes were a very pale gray, almost white, and they did not move the way a man's eyes move. They settled on Kestrel and stayed settled, the way an owl's eyes settle on a thing it has decided about.
"You're a long way off your road," the old man said. His voice was soft, pleasant even.
Kestrel introduced himself and explained slowly that he was a surveyor working for a railroad company and had not meant to intrude on private land. The old man listened. When Kestrel finished, he said, "There isn't a road through here, so you can't be off it. You're just here." He smiled. Kestrel wrote later that the smile did not reach the pale eyes, and that the teeth behind it were yellow but very even, as though they had all come in at the same time and had all been used the same amount.
The old man gave his name as Ambrose Threlkeld. He said the settlement had been there "a long while" and did not put a number on it. He said his people kept to themselves and did not trade in Winslow because Winslow was a loud town. Asked how many they were, he said, "14 of us, give or take." Asked how many of those were grown, he said, "All of them," in a way meant to close the question.
Kestrel asked anyway. He asked gently, "No young ones at all, sir?" Threlkeld looked at him for a long moment and said, "Not for a long time. We don't have those here anymore." He did not explain.
He invited them in for a meal. Vellum made a small sound in his throat, the sound a man makes when he wants very badly to say no and cannot find a way that won't be rude. Kestrel, who was hungry and curious past the point where caution could pull him back, said yes.
There were 11 people inside. Counting Ambrose, that made 12, which was fewer than the 14 he had claimed, but no one offered to explain the difference and Kestrel did not ask. They were all old, every one of them. Kestrel wrote, "I could not place an age on any of them under 60. I could not place an age on most of them under 70." Three he would have called 80 or more.
The youngest-looking person in the room was a woman, very thin, with the same pale gray eyes as Ambrose. Kestrel guessed her at about his own age, 44, maybe less. She did not speak. She set a wooden bowl in front of him and sat down at the far end of the table with her hands folded in her lap, and she watched him eat.
The food was stewed apples and a coarse bread, "dark, with a strong sweet taste I did not recognize." There was no meat. He noted that twice. In a settlement of 14 people deep in the Ozarks in late October, with deer and turkey and feral hog running through every hollow within a day's walk, there was no meat at the table.
There was also no salt. He wrote that in the margin with a question mark after it. Salt was the one thing every homestead in the Ozarks kept. You salted meat, hides, and the dough you used to keep rats out of the cornmeal. Salt was how you survived a winter. Kestrel had been in cabins with no flour, no sugar, no coffee, no tea, no whiskey, no tobacco. He had never been in a cabin with no salt.
The bread had no salt in it. The apples had no salt in them. The 11 people at the table drank water out of wooden cups. Kestrel watched the water carefully and wrote later that it was the clearest water he had ever seen come out of a well. It looked like it had been strained. Through what, he did not write.
Ambrose did most of the talking. He asked about the railroad and about Fort Smith. He asked who the president was now. When Kestrel told him it was Chester Arthur, who had taken office only weeks before after the killing of Garfield, Ambrose nodded slowly as if filing the name away and said, "Arthur, that's a good name. We had an Arthur once." He did not say when.
The pale-eyed woman at the end of the table never blinked. Kestrel wrote that he watched her off and on throughout the meal and was certain she did not blink once.
When they were done eating, Ambrose stood and said, "You'll want to be getting back to your camp before dark." It was the middle of the afternoon, not even three o'clock. But Kestrel, who had not until that moment realized how much he wanted to leave, said, "Yes, sir. We surely will."
Ambrose walked them to the edge of the yard. He stopped at the well, put one hand on the smooth stones around its rim, and said very softly, "I'd ask you, sir, as a kindness, not to mention us when you go back. We've been here a long while without being mentioned. We'd like to stay that way."
Kestrel recorded that he gave his word. He recorded in the margin that he did not intend to keep it. He was a surveyor for the state of Arkansas and a railroad concern, and he had just discovered an entire settlement of human beings that did not appear on any record anywhere, on land the government believed to be unclaimed. He had a duty. He intended to report it.
They walked back up the path. Vellum counted this time. The count came out to 1,412, just as it should have been. They reached the ridge and made camp and lit a fire.
In the night, the first of them came up out of the woods.
Vellum saw it first. He was on the second watch, sitting with his back against a tree and the rifle across his knees, looking out over the dark hollow below. He saw what he thought was a deer. It was moving the wrong way. Deer in that country at that hour move up toward the ridges to bed down. This thing was coming up too, but it was moving on the path the surveyors had used, and it was moving in a way that was not a deer's way of moving.
It was upright. Vellum watched it for a long time before he understood what he was seeing. It was a person, walking on the path, carrying something cradled in both arms the way a woman carries a load of firewood or a sleeping animal.
It stopped at the edge of the firelight. It did not come closer. It stood there.
Vellum later wrote down everything he could remember about that night and gave the writing to the sheriff in Fayetteville. He said he could see the eyes catch the coals the way a cat's eyes do, the way a possum's eyes do, the way no human eye should ever do. The eyes were pale. The person was old. He could see that much. Beard down to the chest, same gray skin in the firelight as the people at the table.
Vellum sat very still. He did not raise the rifle. He wrote later that he had thought about raising it, that his hands had wanted to raise it, but that some other part of him, some part older than his hands, had told him clearly that the moment he moved the rifle, the old one at the edge of the firelight would move too, and that whatever came next would be worse than what he was already doing, which was nothing.
So he did not move. He breathed through his nose and kept his eyes on the eyes and listened. He could hear the old one breathing. It was slow and even. It was the breathing of a man who was not afraid, not excited, not in any particular hurry. It was, Vellum wrote, the breathing of a man taking a measurement.
The thing in its arms moved. Vellum wrote only this about it: "It was not what I had thought it was at first. I have decided I will not say what I had thought it was. I will say only that when it moved, the old one shifted his grip on it and stroked the top of it with one thumb, the way you would gentle a thing you did not want to wake up."
That is all he wrote about that.
The old one turned after a while and walked back down the path the way he had come. Vellum did not wake Kestrel. He sat up the rest of the night with the rifle across his knees and the coals burning down to nothing.
In the morning he told Kestrel what he had seen. Kestrel listened and wrote it down. At the bottom of the page, in a hand that was not as steady as it had been the day before, he wrote: "We will leave for Fayetteville this morning. Survey suspended. I will report directly to the marshal."
They broke camp and walked the mule back up to where they had left their second cache of supplies, two ridges over. It took them three hours. They got there at about ten in the morning.
The cache was gone. Not scattered, not torn into by an animal. Gone. The canvas wrap they had used to cover it was folded neatly and placed on top of the empty spot where the supplies had been. Folded, Kestrel wrote, in the same manner my mother folded linens with the corners square.
He stood and looked at the folded canvas for a long time. He picked it up. Underneath, on the bare ground where the cache had been, was a single dried apple, sitting in the exact center of the cleared spot. It had been placed there carefully.
It had not been there when they left the cache four days earlier, because they had not brought any dried apples with them. They had brought hardtack, salt pork, coffee, beans, and a little dried beef. There were no apple trees in that part of the timber. The apple on the ground was the same kind of dried apple the village people had stewed for them the day before.
Kestrel did not touch it. He left it where it was, folded the canvas back over it, and placed a heavy stone on top. He wrote in the book that he had done so to mark it for any party who might come looking later. He did not say what he thought about the apple.
It had taken them three hours to walk from the camp on the ridge to the cache. Whoever had taken the supplies had walked at least that far through the dark, two ridges over, in country with no path, and known exactly where to look. They had not been followed. Vellum had watched the path all night and seen only the one old man. They had been gotten ahead of.
Kestrel noted the time and the temperature. In the margin he wrote, "They know where we are going."
They started moving fast. They did not stop for the noon meal or to rest the mule. Kestrel pushed them up out of the den country at a pace he wrote was harder than I have driven any beast in my employ before.
They came out of the timber a little before sunset on October 27 into the open ridges above Winslow. Waiting for them on the trail was a man. He was not one of the village people. He was a farmer Kestrel recognized, having spoken to him on the way in four days earlier.
His name was Hosea Trant. He had a small holding on the edge of Winslow, three goats and a sow, a patch of late corn, and a wife and a cousin living with him. He was about 50, broad in the chest, with a graying beard and a missing finger on his left hand. He was sitting on a stump beside the trail with a long gun across his lap.
When he saw the surveyors come out of the trees, he stood up and said, "You came back out." He said it as if he had not, until that moment, believed they would.
He looked at them both for a long time, then asked, "How many of them did you see?" Kestrel told him: 12 at the meal, 14 by the old man's count.
Trant closed his eyes for a moment. He said, "There weren't 12 last time anybody came back out of there. There were nine, three years ago. A trapper from over in Madison County. He came out and he counted nine, and he died of a fever six weeks later, and his wife burned his journal because she said the things he was writing in it at the end were not Christian."
Kestrel asked how he knew. Trant said, "Because I'm the one she gave it to first to read, to see if I could make sense of it before she burned it."
He told them to come down to his house. He told them not to stop in Winslow, not to speak to anyone they passed on the road, to keep their hats low, and to look like they were just coming back from a survey, which they were, but to look like it. He said, "They have people in town." Kestrel asked what he meant. Trant did not answer.
At the house, Trant's wife Tabitha, a small woman with a face that had been beautiful once and was tired now, made them coffee. His cousin Linus sat in the corner and cleaned a rifle and did not speak to them.
In the long evening that followed, Trant told the surveyors what he knew. He had grown up in Winslow, and so had his father, and so had his father's father, who had come into the territory before it was a state, in the 1820s. The people in Devil's Den had been there before any of them. Nobody knew when they had come.
There was an old story that they had come down from the Cumberland with one of the first parties, and that something had happened to them in the mountains on the way that made them decide not to go any further west. They had stopped at the den. They had built six cabins. They had never built a seventh.
Trant said his grandfather had told him there were two versions of the Cumberland story. The first said the party had been caught in a winter and had done something to survive it that no Christian people would speak of after, and that the others in the party refused to travel with them once the snow broke and sent them on alone with what was left of their wagons. They had gone south instead of west and stopped at the first piece of country that would have them.
The second version said the people of the den had not come from the Cumberland at all. It said they had already been there when the first wagons came through, already living in those six cabins. The wagon party had been afraid of them and moved on, and told the second wagon party behind them, and the second told the third, and that was how the story of the Cumberland had gotten attached to them. Because the people who told the story did not want to think about the other possibility: that the people of the den had built their cabins before any white man had ever come to those mountains and had been there in the same cabins waiting the whole time.
Trant said his grandfather had liked the second version better. He said the people of the den did not look like anyone he had ever seen in any account, in any book, in any picture. They did not look like white men, and they did not look like the Cherokee or the Osage who had been in that country before the removal. They looked, his grandfather said, like nobody.
In the 1830s, Trant's grandfather had gone down there to trade. He had come back. He said the people there were strange but harmless, and that there were about 30 of them.
In the 1850s, a circuit-riding preacher went down to bring them the gospel. He did not come back. His horse did. The horse had been brushed and watered and turned loose at the edge of the woods, and it was wearing a hat band around its neck. A plain leather hat band, the kind a man tied to the inside of his hat to keep the sweat off his brow. The preacher's wife identified it as her husband's. The Winslow blacksmith identified the leather as the same piece her husband had bought from him three weeks before. The hatband had been removed from the inside of the preacher's hat, taken outside, and tied very carefully around the horse's neck like a ribbon on a Christmas gift. The preacher's wife could not look at the horse after that. She gave it to a neighbor, who sold it to a man going west. Nobody in Winslow saw that horse again.
In the 1860s, during the war, a small unit of Confederate irregulars rode into the den looking for deserters they believed were hiding there. Five men went in, one came out. He would not say what had happened to the other four. He spent the rest of his life in a county asylum, and the things he said there, when he said anything at all, were written down by a clerk who later left that work and refused to take it up again.
The clerk's notes survived him. Trant said his father had read them once after the clerk's death, when the clerk's effects were being sold off in Fayetteville. He bought the notebook for a quarter and read it on the ride home, and burned it in the kitchen stove that night without showing it to anyone. When his son asked later what had been in it, his father would say only this: the soldier in the asylum had been saying over and over that the other four were not dead, that he had seen them, that he had seen them in the den still walking on the days he was permitted to look out the window of his cell, that he had seen them coming for him slowly, a little closer each year, across country he should not have been able to see across, because the asylum was 40 miles from the den.
In the 1870s, a logging company tried to claim the land. The first survey crew did not come back. The second crew came back, but only two of the four men, and one of those died on the road home of, the county doctor said, "exhaustion of an unusual character." The logging company quietly let the claim lapse.
In every one of those decades, Trant said, the count had gone down. Thirty in the thirties, 20-some in the fifties, 15 maybe by the time of the war, 11 by the trapper's count three years ago. Now Kestrel was telling him 14.
"That's the part I don't understand," Trant said. He said it three times in different ways over the course of the night. Because the people of Devil's Den did not bring in outsiders, not ever, not by marriage, not by adoption, not by any means anyone in Winslow had ever been able to see. And they did not have any young ones. They had not had any young ones for as long as anyone alive could remember.
But the count this autumn was higher than it had been three years before by five. Five new people, in a village of old men and old women deep in the den, where no one came in and no one went out and no one had been born for half a century.
Kestrel, listening, took out his notebook and turned to a fresh page. He wrote that the supplies were taken by people who knew where they were going, that they did not follow but got ahead, going around them in the dark in country with no paths, through two ridges of timber, without making a sound that woke either of them.
He wrote, "There are not 14 of them." He wrote, "There were never 14 of them. The old man was telling us a number he wanted us to repeat." He wrote, "I think there are more." He wrote, "I think they have been more for a long time."
Then, in the margin, the last thing he ever wrote in the book: "I think we have been seen by all of them. I think they were watching us from the trees on the way in. I think the village was the only part of themselves they let us see."
The next morning, October 28, before sunrise, Obadiah Kestrel left Hosea Trant's house alone on the mule, riding for Fayetteville to make his report. He told Vellum to stay at the Trant holding and wait for him. Vellum stayed.
For three days Kestrel did not come back. On the fourth day, Trant and his cousin Linus rode to Fayetteville themselves to find out what had become of him. They learned that Kestrel had never arrived.
The county marshal, a man named Pleasant Crowder, took the matter seriously. He gathered a posse of six men, sent word to Fort Smith, and rode out on November 2 with Trant, Linus, Vellum, and four deputies back toward the den. They followed Kestrel's route in reverse.
Three days into the search they found the mule, tied to a tree about a mile inside the timber line on the wrong side of the ridge. The mule was alive. It had been brushed. The saddlebags were intact. They contained Kestrel's bed roll, his transit, his chain, and his notebook.
The notebook had been wrapped very carefully in a piece of clean linen and tied with a length of dark blue ribbon. Trant said when he saw it that the ribbon was the kind his wife Tabitha used on her sewing. He went home and checked her sewing box. A length of that exact ribbon was missing. She had not given it to anyone. She had not noticed it was gone.
The posse went deeper into the den. They found the path Kestrel had described. They followed it for what should have been 1,412 paces. They followed it for almost 5,000. The path did not end. It just kept going.
It wound down through the old timber, and the men counted their paces and marked the trees with chalk and did everything by the book, and the path did not end. They followed it until they could no longer see the light of the sky above them, and past that, and until the deputies began to refuse to go any further, and then for another two hours, and the path did not end.
There was no village. No clearing. No six cabins arranged in a horseshoe around a stone well with hands smooth on its rim. There was only path.
One of the deputies, a young man named Reuben Carmody, sat down at the 4,000 mark and would not get up. He had been brought along because he was a tracker, hired out of Madison County for this kind of work. He had spent 12 years tracking through Ozark timber and had a reputation for being calm. He had a wife and a homestead back over the ridge.
He sat down on a fallen log, put his rifle across his knees, and said very quietly that he would not take another step in that direction, and that if the marshal made him, he would shoot the marshal. He did not say it as a threat. He said it as a statement of fact, like a man telling you the weather.
The marshal looked at him for a long time, then asked what he was seeing that the rest of them weren't. Carmody said, "The path." The marshal said they were all on the path. Carmody said, "Look at it. Look at it close."
The marshal looked. In his report, which is held in the historical office in Fayetteville in the same file as the notebook, he wrote that the path was packed earth and that the packed earth bore the prints of feet, and that the prints went both ways, both in the direction they were traveling and in the direction from which they had come. The prints in the direction from which they had come, the marshal wrote, were fresher than the prints going the other way. Many people had walked back up this path recently, behind them, while they had been walking down.
The marshal turned them around. They walked back. The walk back, Vellum wrote later, was the worst part, because the path on the way out was the right length again, 1,412 paces exactly. Whatever had stretched the path going in had let them go on the way out. But it had let them go without showing them anything.
The notebook was the only thing they brought back. Obadiah Kestrel was never found. Not his body, not his coat, not the boots he had been wearing. The Colt on his hip was never recovered. The pocket watch his wife had given him on their wedding day was never recovered. Nothing of him came back at all except the notebook the mule had been left holding for them.
Caspian Vellum quit the survey trade and went back to St. Louis. He lived another 41 years and died in 1922 of pneumonia, with his sister beside him.
She wrote a letter to the historical society in Fayetteville after his death. In it she said that her brother had, every year of his life from 1881 to the year of his death, on the 26th of October, sat up the entire night with a loaded rifle across his knees. He would not go to bed. He would not let anyone else in the house go to bed either until the sun was up. He never explained to her why.
She mentioned two other things in the same letter. The first was that in the last week of his life, when the fever was high and he was sometimes lucid and sometimes not, he had asked her several times to count for him, to count out loud, to count to 1,412. She had done it. He had thanked her each time, very politely, in the way she remembered him being polite as a younger man.
The second was that her brother had kept on his writing desk in St. Louis for 41 years a length of dark blue ribbon. He had not displayed it openly. He kept it in a small wooden box. Once a year, on the 26th of October, when he sat up with the rifle, he would take the ribbon out of the box and lay it on the desk in front of him and look at it through the night. In the morning he would put it back in the box and close the lid.
She did not know where the ribbon had come from. She did not know what it meant. She wrote at the end of her letter that she had buried the ribbon with him. She had thought, she said, that he would want it close.
Kestrel's notebook is still held in a box in the basement of the Washington County Historical Office in Fayetteville. Transcripts of it are public. The notebook itself is not on display because, according to a note in the catalog, it has been requested off display by the family in perpetuity.
The Trant small holding burned down in the spring of 1883. Hosea Trant died in the fire. His wife Tabitha and his cousin Linus survived and moved to Missouri. Tabitha is on record in a deposition taken by a Missouri county clerk in 1885 as having said that the fire was set, and that it was set by old people who came up out of the den in the night with their arms full. She did not say what was in their arms. She was not asked.
Devil's Den is now a state park. Visitors walk there today. The caves are mapped, the ridges are signed, the trails are marked, and the leaves in the fall are the color of old copper. There are picnic tables and a parking lot.
The path Obadiah Kestrel walked is not on any of the modern maps.
In the records of the Arkansas State Historical Society, in a file that has been digitized and is available to anyone who knows where to look, there is a single photograph taken in 1934 by a Civilian Conservation Corps surveyor named Wendell Locke, who was working on the new park trails.
The photograph shows a section of timber on the western edge of the park, in country that by the modern survey has never been logged. In the middle distance between two old trees is what appears to be a figure. The figure is upright, small with distance but visible, and has what looks in the photograph to be a beard that comes down past the chest.
Locke, in the note attached to the photograph, wrote that he had not seen the figure at the time he took the picture. He wrote that he had been alone on that ridge. He wrote that when he developed the plate three weeks later in a darkroom in Little Rock, he had looked at the figure for a long time, and then filed the photograph, and then requested a transfer to a different project. He never returned to the den country again.
The note continues for another paragraph. In it, Locke wrote that he had developed two other plates from that same day, from the same roll, taken within minutes of the one with the figure in it. He had taken them from positions on the same ridge, looking in slightly different directions, the way a surveyor will do when documenting a piece of country from more than one angle.
In the other two plates, in the same middle distance, between similar pairs of trees, in places where no figure should have been visible at all, there were also figures. Three figures in three pictures, all in the same part of the woods, all with beards. None of them, he wrote, in the same place.
He filed all three plates. The note specifies that he filed them with the third plate, the one with the clearest figure, on top, so that anyone going through the file in the future would see that one first and might not look further. He wrote that he had done this because he did not want anyone else to have to see the other two.
According to a separate note in the catalog, the other two plates are no longer with the collection. They were lost sometime between 1941 and 1946. Nobody is sure when. Locke died in 1951. The transfer paperwork is still in his file.
The photograph he left on top is still in the archive, in the public collection, cataloged under his name. It is not a clear photograph. It is not the kind of thing that would convince a skeptic of anything. It is a grain of light between two trees in a piece of country where, by every official account, no one had any business being.
But the figure is there. And the eyes, if you look at them in the right light, are pale.
The people of Devil's Den were never accounted for. No descendants ever came forward. No graves were ever found. No bodies were ever recovered. No bones, even, were ever turned up by the trail crews who worked that country in the 1930s and forties. The cabins, if they were ever real, were never located.
Hosea Trant's grandson, a man named Ezell Trant, gave a single interview to a folklorist from the University of Arkansas in 1959. Asked about the family stories, he said only this: "My grandfather told me, before he died, that the worst thing about them wasn't what they did to my granddaddy's house. The worst thing was that they had been there longer than we had been a country. And they were going to be there longer than we were going to be a country. And they didn't need anything from us. They had everything they needed. They had been adding to it, my granddaddy said, for a very long time."
The interviewer asked Ezell what his grandfather had meant by that. Ezell said his grandfather had put it like this: "They keep what they take."