The Rustling -- Part One: Something Lonely, Trying to Be Polite

He came up the mountain to hear nothing. Something out there had other plans.

There is an old man in the high timber, and the men who meet him do not speak of him. That is how the story stays a story, and how the story keeps me free.

So let me be the one to break it, this once — the way I broke it for him.

His name was Peter, and he came up the mountain to hear nothing.

He told me the whole of it before the night was through, so I can tell you. He hadn't come to fish, though he'd brought a rod. He hadn't come to think, though God knew he had things to think about. The papers had been final eleven weeks before — dissolution of marriage, the county called it, as though a marriage were a tablet you dropped in water and watched come apart. Sixteen years with a woman named Claire, signed away in a conference room that smelled of carpet cleaner. Then an apartment with rented furniture, and his daughter's bedroom in it — Nora, nine years old — that she used every other weekend and that stayed, the rest of the time, terribly clean. He had driven three days and hiked half of one past the last marked trail because somewhere in the long unraveling of it he had forgotten what silence sounded like, and he wanted it back. He wanted a place where no one needed anything from him. That was the lie he came up carrying. The truth, which I have heard a hundred times in a hundred shapes, was that down in the world it had started to feel as though no one did, and the wilderness is at least an honest version of that.

He found his nothing in a clearing beside the creek, a flat shelf of ground ringed by old growth so tall it makes a cathedral of the sky. I know the spot. I have known it for sixty years. He pitched his tent and built his ring of stones, and on the first night, hunched over the small orange knot of his fire with his coffee going cold in his hands, he heard the rustling.

That was me. I want that plain from the start.

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I had seen him come up the trail. A man alone, walking like a man with a weight on him, and I have never in my life been able to leave that kind be. So I came down through the trees behind his clearing, and I shifted the branches the way I do — low and slow, too heavy for a bird, too smooth for the panic of a squirrel — just to sit a while near another living soul. I forget, sometimes, how it sounds from the other side of a fire.

He was on his feet before he'd decided to stand. I heard the coffee go into the dirt.

"Hello?" he said. The word fell into the dark and didn't come back, because I didn't answer it. I never do, the first night.

He stood a long time, listening so hard I imagine his ears rang. Then I stepped off to the east, and I set my feet down the way I've learned to — careful, unhurried, so as not to frighten a man worse than I already have. He heard it. He told me later he'd half believed he invented it: footsteps, but soft. Almost delicate, he said, as though whatever made them set each foot down with courtesy. He thought of a bear. A bear, he told himself, lying awake. Bears are quiet when they want to be. He read that somewhere, he said. He believed it for whole minutes at a stretch, which is about as long as any of them manage.

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The second night I came again, because I am an old man and I do as I please.

He was readier. He sat with his back to a fallen log so nothing could come up behind him, and he'd built the fire higher than he needed. When the branches started their slow shifting he didn't shout.

"I know you're there," he said, quiet.

And I'll tell you, that stopped me. Not the words — they all say some version of the words. It was that he said it the way you'd say it to a person. Not a threat thrown at the dark. An acknowledgment. So I held still, and the whole forest held still with us, and then I drew back gentle and let the rustling close over the place I'd been like water over a stone.

He sat up the rest of that night feeding the fire. He told me he wasn't afraid by then, or the fear had turned into something stranger, because whatever walked out there didn't move like a thing that hunts. It moved, he said — and he was a little embarrassed saying it to my face — like something lonely, trying to be polite about it.

He had me dead to rights, and didn't know it yet.