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house, through pine and fir and larch trees widely spaced in an arroyo that stayed in deep shade most of the day. At the top of the trail was the old Plum Creek logging road, shaped like a horseshoe and partially eroded and caved in and dotted with seedlings and heaped in places with piles of barkless and worm-eaten trees that had slid down from the bluff during the spring melt. The incline at the top of the trail was steep, and I was perspiring and breathing harder than I wanted to admit when we gained the road near the ridge. The wind was cold on my face, the sun shining through the canopy like shafts of light in a cathedral, my head reeling. When I looked back down at the valley, Albert’s three-story house looked like it had been miniaturized.
“You okay, skipper?” Molly said.
“I’m fine,” I said, my heart pounding. I looked in both directions on the road. I expected to see oil and brake fluid cans and lunch trash left behind by loggers, but the road was clean and the slopes below it carpeted with pine needles, the outcroppings of rock gray and striated by erosion and spotted with bird droppings.
It was an idyllic scene, one that seemed to have healed itself after years of clear-cutting and neglect. It was one of the moments when you feel that indeed the earth abideth forever, and that all the industrial abuse we’ve done to it will somehow disappear with time.
At the place where the logging road dead-ended in a huge pile of dirt and burned tree stumps, I saw the sunlight flash on a metallic surface. “Stay behind me,” I said.
“What is it?” Molly asked.
“Probably nothing.”
I walked ahead of her along the base of the bluff, through a low spot in the road where the soil was dark from the morning rain and marked by the tracks of someone wearing needle-nosed cowboy boots. The tracks were deep and sharp-edged and beaded with moisture in the center, as though the soil under the boot had been compressed only minutes earlier. Farther on, lying in the dirt next to a round boulder, were an empty potted-meat can, broken pieces of saltine crackers, and a spray of what looked like fingernail clippings.
There was no movement in the trees, no sound anywhere, not even a pinecone rolling down the hillside. A line of sweat ran from my armpit down my side. Below, I saw the wind bend the grass in Albert’s pasture, then climb the hillside and sway the canopy against the sun.
“Good God, what’s that smell?” Molly said.
I walked another ten yards up the road and held up my hand for her to stop. “Don’t come any farther,” I said.
“Tell me what it is.”
“It’s disgusting. Stay back.”
Someone had defecated in the middle of the road and made no attempt to dig a hole or cover it up. Horseflies were swarming on the spot. Up above, behind a cluster of bushes, was an opening to a cave. I picked up a rock the size of a baseball and chunked it through the brush and heard it strike stone. “Come on out here, podna,” I said.
There was only quiet. I threw a second and then a third rock with the same result. I grabbed hold of a tree trunk and pulled myself up on the slope and walked toward the cave, the ground spongy with rainwater and pine needles. I could hear Molly climbing the slope behind me. I turned and tried to signal her to stop. But that was not the way of Molly Boyle and never would be.
“Hey, buddy, we’re not your enemies,” I said. “We just want to know who you are. We’re not going to call the cops on you.”
This time when I spoke, I was close enough to the cave to create an echo and feel the cool air and smell the bat guano and pooled water inside. I took a penlight from my pocket and stepped under the overhang and shined the light on the back wall. I could see the dried skin of an animal on the floor, ribs poking through the fur, eye sockets empty.
“What’s in there?” Molly said.
“A dead mountain lion. It probably got hurt or shot and went in here to die.”
“You don’t think a homeless person has been living there?”
“We’re too far from the highway. I think the rodeo clown came back and was watching the house.”
“Let’s get out of here, Dave.”
I turned to leave the cave; then, as an afterthought, I shone the penlight along the walls and ledges. The surface of the stone was soft with mold and lichen and bat droppings and water seepage from the surface. Close to the ceiling was a series of gashes in the lichen, a perfect canvas on which a throwback from an earlier time could leave his message. I suspected he had used a sharp stone for a stylus, trenching the letters as deep as possible, cutting through the lichen into the wall, as though savoring the alarm and injury and fear his words would inflict upon others.
I was here but you did not know me. Before there was an alpha and omega I was here. I am the one before whom every knee shall bend.
“Who is this guy?” Molly said.
THE SHERIFF’S NAME was Elvis Bisbee. He must have been fifty and a good six and a half feet tall. He had a long face and pale blue eyes and a mustache he had let grow into ropes, the white tips hanging down from either side of his mouth. He stood with me in the shade at the foot of the arroyo at the back of the house, gazing up the slope at the bluff above the logging road. “The guy was wearing cowboy boots?” he said.
“I can show you the tracks.”
“I’ll take your word for it. You’re pretty convinced Wyatt Dixon is stalking your daughter?” He wore a departmental uniform and a short-brim Stetson and a pistol and holster with a polished belt. His eyes seemed to see everything and nothing at the same time.
“I don’t know who else would be out here,” I said.
“Albert likes to stoke up things. Right now it’s these heavy rigs that pass at the foot of your road on their way to Alberta.”
