The Rustling -- Part Two: The Second Clearing

He walks into the trees after the sound. What's waiting has been letting itself be half-seen for sixty years.

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On the third night I gave him more. I'll admit that freely. I made the rustling louder and let it run longer than I ever had, the two nights before — because three nights is long enough to be neighbors and not say hello, and because I had decided, the way I decide about one man in a great many, that this was one I'd let come find me.

He stood, and switched on his flashlight, and walked straight into the trees toward the sound, a good staff in his hand. And some shrinking part of him was telling him to go back to the fire, I'm sure of it; they always hear that voice, and the ones worth knowing never listen to it. I led him a little — moved ahead, slow, drawing him through a stand of young hemlock into the second clearing, the one where the moon comes down clean and silver between the crowns.

And then I let him see me.

I watched his light find my boots and climb. I am a head and more above a tall man, even hunched the way the very old will hunch, and I was dressed as I have dressed for half a century, in soft-tanned hide gone dark, with this beard the color of wood ash and old snow down my chest. His flashlight shook. He couldn't make his voice work, so I made mine.

"You'll want to point that somewhere else," I told him. "It's rude, shining a light in a man's eyes. And you've come a long way to be rude."

He lowered it.

"I'm — sorry. I heard — there was a noise, three nights —"

"That was me." I let him see the beard move; it takes them a moment to understand it's a smile. "I've been keeping you company. Quietly. You came up here to be left alone — I could see that. I do know the feeling." I lowered myself onto a fallen trunk, slow, and it groaned the way they all do under me. "But three nights is long enough. Sit. You've let your fire go down. We'll use mine."

He hadn't seen my fire. He'd walked right past it — a banked ring of coals under an overhang of root and stone, a black iron kettle sitting in the embers. I fed it a handful of branches and brought the light up between us, and Peter, because his legs had quit consulting him, sat down on a stone across the fire from a giant in the woods.

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"You're him," he said at last. "Aren't you. The — you know. The stories."

I laughed. I can't help it; it's my favorite part. "Tell me the stories. I want to hear which ones reached you."

So he told me. Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The thing in the trees, eight feet tall, that screams in the night and throws stones at cabins and leaves footprints in the snow longer than a man's forearm. The grainy films, the plaster casts. The hunters with their thermal cameras, and the men who'd built whole lives proving I was real, and the men who'd built whole careers proving I wasn't.

I enjoyed every word of it. By the end I was wiping my eyes.

"The screaming, I'll claim," I told him. "Some cold nights a man's joints ache and he lets the mountain know about it. The stones —" I held up a hand, and he could see in the firelight it's the size of a dinner plate — "if you camp under my walnut tree in October, friend, I am going to drop walnuts on you, and you may write what you like about it after."

"You've been letting them," he said, slow. "The footprints. Letting yourself be half-seen."

"For sixty years." I felt no shame telling him, and I'll feel none telling you. "Understand — when I was young it was a torment, being looked at. People couldn't see me. They saw the size and nothing else, and they were frightened, or cruel, or they wanted to make money off me, which is the cruelest of the three. So I came up where the trees don't stare. And I'll tell you, I didn't set out to be anybody's monster — that took years, and it crept up on me a piece at a time. A hunter would catch a shape between the trunks at dusk and not be sure what he'd seen. A girl picking huckleberries would hear something big move off through the brush and run home white. A trapper would find a track in the spring snow longer than his own forearm and not sleep right for a week. One glimpse here, one footprint there, twenty, thirty years of them — and none of those people ever met to set their stories side by side, but the mountain keeps what it's given, and over time the stories found each other the way creeks find a river. By the autumn two boys saw me crossing a meadow at dusk and ran down screaming about a monster, the thing was already grown past me. I lay awake half that night laughing — because I understood by then what had happened, and that I couldn't have stopped it if I'd tried, and that I didn't want to. They'd turned me into a story. And a story can walk anywhere and never be caught. A story doesn't get put in a cage, or on a stage, or in a sideshow. They invented a monster to be afraid of, and in the doing they set me free. So now and again, yes — I leave a print. I let a hunter catch my shape between two trees. It costs me nothing and gives them something to talk about all winter. An old man is allowed his amusements."

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We talked a long time, the fire burning down and built up again. Somewhere an owl asked its one question and got no answer it liked. And because he asked — because the good ones always work their way around to asking — I told him my life.

My name is Halvard. Hal, my mother called me, in the logging camp in the Cascades where I was born at the back end of the big war. My people were Norwegians, lumber men, and all of us ran tall, but I ran taller than any doctor could account for — something in the blood, in a gland behind the eyes, that tells a man's bones to keep going long after other men's stop. By twelve I looked my father level in the eye. By sixteen I did the work of two grown fallers and ate the food of three, and the men in the camp wouldn't meet my gaze, and the camp boss showed me off to visitors like a prize bull.

I told him about the winter a tree came down wrong. A widow-maker. It killed a man — a good man, a friend — and it was no one's fault; the mountain does what it does. But I was the big one. The strange one. And when a thing goes wrong, people need a shape to hang it on, and I was a very large and convenient shape. They didn't come for me with ropes — it wasn't that. It was the way they stopped speaking when I came near. The way a man you've shared a fire with for ten years won't look at you. I understood I had two choices: spend my life being the monster in other men's stories down in the valley, or go up where there was no one to be a monster to. I was twenty. I went up for a season, and the season never ended.

"And here is the thing nobody tells you," I said to him, "about going up the mountain to be left alone. You're very good at it for about four years. And then one day you're sitting at your fire, exactly as you wanted, with not one living soul to need anything from you, exactly as you wanted — and you understand that left alone and lonely are the same country with two different maps."

He didn't say anything to that. A man who's driven three days into the wilderness to be left alone usually doesn't.