The Rustling -- Part Five: Water Over a Stone

They kept coming back. Then, one autumn, they climbed to the clearing and found the fire cold.

For twenty years now they have been coming back. Not in trouble — not most times. Not carrying anything too heavy. They climb up some long weekend in the good weather and they find me, or they let me find them, and they sit at my fire the way they sat the first night, only easier now: two old friends, and the dark, and the creek talking to itself.

The trapper came back every spring until the spring his knees wouldn't bring him, and then his son came up the once, to tell me, and sat the night in his father's place. The surveyor brings nobody, but he leaves things — a good knife, a sack of coffee, a paperback, set on the flat stone by my fire and gone again by morning. Twenty years of small payments on a debt that was never a debt. The boy who meant to fill his pockets with stones is a gray man now, with stones of another kind — children, grandchildren — and he comes up every October, and we don't speak much, and we don't have to.

Peter came back. Of course he did. The first time he brought the girl — Nora, nine years old and not the least afraid of me, because nobody had taught her yet, and she climbed me like I was scenery while her father laughed in a way I don't think he'd laughed in years. Then she was twelve, and sullen, and came anyway. Then she was grown and didn't come for a while, the way they're meant to go down into the world. And then she came back up with little ones of her own, and they climbed me too.

A whole brotherhood, and not one of them knew the size of it. Each thought himself the one strange man keeping the one strange secret. None had ever met another. I was the only one who held the whole of it — every face, every fire, sixty years of men who'd wandered up off the map carrying too much and gone back down carrying a little less.

They are still out there, the men. But they will not find me now.

There came an autumn — I'll not say which, and they could not say either — when they climbed to the clearing and found the fire cold, the kettle cold, the cabin door standing open on a swept and empty room. They came back the next year, and the year after, the way they always had. They walked the slopes and the high meadows and the south face. They found the larch, and Marta's stone, and sat there a while. But they did not find me, and they never have, and they never will. No body. No bone. Not one track a man could swear was surely mine. Only a mountain that keeps its own.

I'll tell you the truth of it. I am old past the counting now, and there comes a time when an old creature has to choose where it will do the last of its living, and who will be let to watch. I decided the men had been given the story whole, and I would not be the one to spoil it for them — a cousin to the kindness I'd always done the women in the trees. No deathbed. No grave with my name on it to shrink me back down into a man. No giant gone small and gray and ordinary at the end. I went up to where not even they could follow, and I let the legend close over me like water over a stone.

So the thing in the trees lives on. Let it live. There is no headstone up here, no photograph, no plaster cast, no proof a single soul could carry down and lay before the world — only a story, walking everywhere, never caught, exactly as a story should be, and a handful of old men who know there was once someone inside it, and who will go to their own graves without ever telling. Not because I asked. I never asked.

The world gave me its monster, and for the gift of it, it let me be. I'd not change one line of that long bargain. But here at the end I'll set down the one truth the monster never knew, and the men never once guessed — that for twenty years I was not the one giving.

I was the hungry one, and every man of them was feeding me.

---

There is a woman climbing to the clearing now.

She comes up the way the men always did — alone, off the trail, carrying something she has told no one — but she comes up unafraid, which not one of them ever managed the first time. Strong, she is, and undaunted: broad through the shoulder, sure-footed on the wet rock, a woman who has never once in her life run from a noise in the dark. She finds the flat shelf of ground above the creek, and the old fire-ring with the stones gone green, and she builds her fire in it like a woman come home to a house she has never seen.

When the brush stirs low at the tree line — only some small animal, a fox or a marmot about its dusk — she does not jump. She does not reach for a light. She lifts her head and says it loud and level into the dark, the way you would say it to a person:

"I know you."

And then, lower, with something underneath it she would never let slip down in the world below:

"...Dad?"

The brush goes quiet. Whatever moved there, it was not him. It was never going to be him — she knew the shape of that hope before she ever started up the mountain, and she climbed it carrying the hope anyway, the way they all do.

But there are footsteps after that. Soft. Unhurried. Set down one at a time, so as not to frighten her — coming down through the timber toward the light of her fire. Not the animal. A man. Old, and tall, though not so tall as the stories say. He stops at the edge of her firelight and looks at her across the flames a long, long moment — the way a man looks at a face he is sure he has seen somewhere before, years ago, when it was smaller, or younger, or belonged to someone else.

He knows her from somewhere. He cannot say where. Not yet.

But he will.