Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  “He’s all right. Someone saw him out on Route 2 yesterday,” the policeman said.

  “He’s all right,” the dispatcher said, “they seen him on the highway.”

  “I was just wondering about the rain and snow we’ve been having, how he gets by.”

  “He wants to know about the rain,” the dispatcher said. He didn’t seem to like the fact that the policeman was speaking to me directly.

  “He gets by,” the policeman explained. “He’s a real loner, though. Won’t even come into jail on bad nights. He always tells us to get lost when we stop by to check on him.”

  The dispatcher nodded authoritatively and remained silent, glaring.

  Rudolph was not the only person who might have left tracks in the grove. It was possible that the Green Man had returned. I had first moved to the ridge in the early 1970s, when my wife and I had found a run-down farmhouse on the lower slope on the eastern side. The area had been even more deserted then than it was when I built my cottage several years later. The single road that crossed the eastern edge of the slope was narrow and rutted and had very little traffic; you could lie down on it at midday without danger. Two of the farms along the road were still working, and there were a number of deserted barns and houses. In the first week after I moved in I got into the habit of taking long walks through the fields and woods. Sometimes I went in search of mushrooms, sometimes in search of birds or plants, but mostly I went just to walk—simply to explore the empty forest. After a few months of this exploration I came to know the ridge; I got to know all the little secret hollows and sunny hillsides and even the individual trees. I began ranging farther and farther afield, and sometimes I would allow myself to become intentionally lost and would spend the better part of an afternoon simply finding my way back. Occasionally I outdid myself and returned home just before dark exhausted, my legs aching, but satisfied that I had, in the course of the day, happened on yet another beautiful, lonely spot which I would never be able to find again. It gave me a sort of perverse pleasure to know that such undiscovered, and perhaps undiscoverable, places existed.

  During the second spring that I lived there, I set out for a walk on a classically beautiful morning in May. The flush of new leaves was just out on the woodland trees so that the whole forest was filled with a dappled splatter of light, reminiscent of a pointillist painting; the air was warm, birds were singing, and I began running when I got into the woods and soon reached the edge of my known world. I crossed a stream, climbed a hill, and raced down the other side into a small ravine with a soggy floor. I climbed out, walked over more hills, crossed another stream, and began to head west, toward an area I knew where there were no trails or roads. I got another burst of energy and, just to put myself farther afield, began running with wild abandon. I imagined that something was chasing me. I could almost hear its steady panting, and I ran all the harder until I dropped, wonderfully exhausted, on the slope of one of the hollows.

  Suddenly behind me I heard a bird call that I had never heard before. I was familiar with most of the local bird songs, but this was something entirely out of the ordinary, a low, flutelike whistle, very much like a thrush song but somehow unbirdlike. I got up to follow the sound and saw, standing behind me, leaning casually against an oak tree with one leg propped up behind him, a wild man. He was full-bearded, with a long tangle of hair that fell to his shoulders, and he was dressed in a motley combination of denim and khaki and the skins and fur of animals. He had a deerskin cape thrown across one shoulder, and slung across the other shoulder was a sack or pouch also made from animal skin.

  He was one of the craziest-looking people I had seen since I left New York City, but he seemed friendly and relaxed, as if it were perfectly normal for us to meet in the forest at eight o’clock on a May morning. He told me, after a requisite amount of small talk, that his name was not Tarzan or Running Deer, as you might expect, but Bill. It turned out Bill had seen me on many occasions even though I had not seen him. He asked me if I was a marathon runner. “You always seem to be so intent on getting somewhere,” he said. I noticed that in spite of his wild appearance, Bill spoke in an educated voice.

  It seemed that Bill and I had a lot in common; we were, after all, neighbors in a curious sort of way, and he knew well sections of the woods I thought I was the only one to have discovered. We talked for a while about our neighborhood, and then, with due respect, I thought, I asked him about his costume. He said that he had lived in the woods in various places for almost two years and that he found it more comfortable to dress as the Indians dressed, only he didn’t call them Indians. “Our forebears,” he said, and then a little later, in another context, “woods dwellers” or “woods-dwelling peoples.” He said that several times, I remember, during our first conversation: “woods-dwelling people, such as myself.”

  It was hard to pin down Bill’s age. He had young, clear eyes and a full head of long hair, but his face was creased and weathered and smeared in spots with ash and grime. His hands were rough and scratched, I noticed, and thickly calloused. Bill told me he had been living on the ridge since March, in spite of the late snows. And he told me that before that he had lived here until late December of last year. I was curious to know exactly where, since I had never seen any cabins nearby, and I asked him politely where his house was. He cocked his head in a strange way and a slow, repressed smile crossed his lips.

  “Well,” he said slowly, nodding his head a little, “I don’t exactly live in a house. Not a man-made one at any rate.”

  “You have a teepee?” I asked him.

  “No, not that either, not even a wickiup, although two winters ago I lived in one, out by New Boston in the Berkshires.”

  After a short silence he said abruptly, “I live in a cave now.” He seemed a little embarrassed by the fact.

  “It’s a dry one, I’ve made it that way. It’s not really even a cave. I dug it in one of the hollows. But it’s very dry.” Quickly he changed the subject and began to talk about bobcats.

  “I saw one at dawn one day when I lived in the Berkshires. It was peering into my sleeping quarters. It stayed where it was when I woke up, and it was staring at me with its gray-green eyes. I didn’t move for twenty minutes—tried to outstare it, but it finally got the better of me. I had to shift, and when I looked up, it was gone. I thought I had dreamed the event for weeks after—it was so weird—but I saw its scat nearby a few days later. They’re common you know, but ordinary people—” and here he tried to correct himself so as not to offend me, “I mean people who don’t spend a lot of time in the woods—don’t see them.”

  He went on like this for five minutes or so, telling me about his adventures with bobcats. Then he began to talk about bears, saying that they were common too, and if you frightened one badly, it would walk in a straight line for five days.

  I enjoyed his rambling, probably erroneous stories about bears and bobcats, and since I sensed that he didn’t want to tell me more about his cave, I didn’t ask. I did ask him about his satchel, though, and he willingly turned out the contents. They consisted mostly of roots and tubers; one was a large grayish thing that looked like an overgrown potato.

  “This is very rare,” he said, “at least in this region. It is a wapato—man of the earth. In all my years here I have only found one. But it is good eating.”

  He also showed me some arrowhead tubers that he had collected, and a huge fistful of various woodland greens, each of which he described to me. “All this, you see, is my dinner. I don’t eat much now that I have stopped hunting. I only hunt in fall and winter. I don’t eat much in early spring, but I think that is right. This great spirit that everyone talks about, this thing, whatever it is, provides. Do you understand? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in a god, not a big one anyway. I believe in the little ones. But I think there is a system of sorts, and it makes sense to eat meat only when there are no plants around. So that is what I do.”

  Because of the rambling nature o
f his conversation, his way of crowding everything in on itself and telling me everything all at once, I could have concluded that he was crazy. But I once spent some time alone in the woods myself, and I know what it is like when you see another human being, when you get someone to share your ideas with; I indulged him with silence.

  I asked him if he knew whether there were any morels growing in the area; it was the second week in May, the height of morel season. He smiled at me with that almost smug, repressed smile.

  “You like morels, don’t you?” he said. “I have seen you looking for mushrooms. I like them too. I would tell you where they were, except it wouldn’t do you any good.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because I have eaten them all up!”

  He began to laugh at this, a sort of giggle, and then, as if amused by his own reaction, he giggled louder and then broke into a strange, loonlike laugh. There was something comforting about this, and I began to laugh too.

  “Well, I’d better get back,” I told him. It seemed an opportune moment to part.

  “Oh, well, I’ll go back with you,” he said.

  It crossed my mind that I might have taken on more than I cared to with this man and that he would follow me home and ask to move in, but he seemed to sense my concern.

  “I mean I’ll go up over the ridge to the hemlock stand you always visit. I don’t like to go much beyond there you know.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Why don’t you like to go past the hemlocks?”

  “You know. Beyond that is the wall, and then down the hill, there . . . well, you know what’s there—the road.”

  He winked at me as if to say that it was beyond physical possibility for him to be near a road. It was obvious, though, that he knew my land. He seemed to know every spot on the ridge.

  We were not far from the southern end of the lake, at a low spot where there is a slow-running stream. As we crossed it, he stopped and pulled up some plants that were growing on the bank. There were little pea-sized white tubers along the roots.

  “You must know these,” he said. “Hog peanuts. They are very good. If only there were more of them.”

  He washed them off in the water, stripped them from the roots, and ate a few.

  “Eat one,” he said.

  They tasted like raw peas.

  As we stood by the stream I noticed that he was younger than I thought. He was not a young-looking older man but a person who had aged early. Life seemed to have weathered him. His face was creased, and his tangled, blondish hair was streaked with gray. I guessed he was somewhere in his thirties.

  I saw Bill several times that summer and early fall. He always found me first, announcing himself with bird calls or animal noises and allowing me to discover him.

  Our second meeting was on a still, early June afternoon. The only sounds in the forest were the singular buzz of a fly or two and the lazy, repetitive call of the red-eyed vireo. Once again, in the midst of this huge silence, I heard an odd, flutelike whistle, followed by a series of quick snorts, like the grunting of a pig.

  “How are you?” he asked. “I see you have come again. We will look for more plants today if you like. I have found a good patch of goldthread. Have you ever tasted it? It is very good for your health—very bitter, but good for you. I make a drink with it sometimes. Just add it to a little stream water. You want to see?”

  Bill’s pace wore me out. He had a high-stepping gait, and he seemed to have a predilection for the harder, more obscure routes. He would burrow through dense tangles of shrubs, race up the side of the hollows, spring over logs and boulders like a goat. When we finally stopped on a dark bank among some hemlock trees, I noticed that he was not out of breath.

  “I am like you,” he said. “I often run through the woods. You have the right idea. Keep at it and you will someday be able to run down rabbits and deer. Did you know that I can catch a rabbit bare-handed? Turn left every time you chase one. After a short burst it will always turn one way or the other. If you always turn left, you will catch half the rabbits you run after. I could show you someday if you like.”

  He was off again with his machine-gun-like blasts of information. I spent the afternoon with him, wandering through his domain while he showed me plants and told me about animals and the adventures he had had on the ridge and in other woodlands he had inhabited.

  I met him again during that summer, and then again in the fall. There was no regularity to our meetings. Sometimes I would go out into the woods, often to a place where I had met him before, and he wouldn’t be there. Other times I would see him in unexpected places; once he was very close to my house in the hemlock grove. Once or twice I tried to find him to introduce him to my wife and friends, but he never revealed himself then, even though I had a suspicion that he was watching us.

  Bill changed the nature of the ridge for me. I had once enjoyed a sense of solitude and freedom there, but his presence, the possibility of meeting him or having him observe me, somehow populated the whole woodland. Still, I did enjoy talking with him. He was always so full of information and good spirits. I could tell from the occasional biological or botanical terms he used that he must have had some formal education in the sciences, but for all his talk he revealed very little of himself or his past. One October day that year, during the course of a conversation on the coming winter, I managed to spring a personal question on him. I should have known better.

  We were discussing animals and the hardships they have to endure during the winter months. I began to talk about the adaptability of the human species, how humans range from the very hottest places on the earth to the very coldest. He looked at me knowingly.

  “Ah, well, a man,” he said. “A man can get used to anything.” He seemed to be indicating by this something more than simple physical survival. “That’s not necessarily true of animals,” he said. “Not true of the cats. Capture them, cage them, and they die. You don’t see that death. But those lions in the zoos of the world, the mountain lions and the tigers. They are all dead. Dead inside, you understand. If they only knew about suicide it would be bad for the zoos.”

  I noticed that he seemed slightly upset by his own observation. He fixed my eye when he had finished speaking and was uncharacteristically silent for a few seconds.

  “But you,” I asked. “Why do you choose to live like this, away from all human company? I mean, I understand. But how did you happen to come to this?”

  “Long story,” he said. “But the truth of it is that this is the proper way to live. All the rest—all those houses and that central heat and processed food. That is a lie. A human being is meant to live in this way. We are animals. You did know that, I hope? Man is a species, Homo sapiens. Two million years we lived as I live. A thousand, at most six thousand, we live as you live. So who is right? And I ask you this: Who is the more human of the two of us. You or me?”

  “That depends on your viewpoint,” I said.

  “Time is viewpoint. Two million years, my friend. Maybe more. Go home to your house life now and think. I will see you here again.”

  “When?” I asked him. “When will I see you?”

  “I will see you when I see you.”

  I thought I heard his whistle a few days later. But when I looked for him he wasn’t around. I called, but even though the woods were bare and it was almost impossible to walk without rustling leaves, I neither saw nor heard him. It snowed not long after that day, a light November dusting that left the woodland floor and the fields covered with a patterned mixture of leaves, grass, and snow. In the morning after the snow I went out the back door and up through the gardens to the woods. I saw by his tracks that he had been there. He had come up from the woods above the house, circled the yard, and stood below a large pine tree. Presumably he had been staring through the windows. I had a sharp image of him standing there, his long rat-tailed hair falling about his shoulders, his motley, animal-skin coat wrapped tightly around his upper body, and the little flakes
of new snow catching in his graying beard. It all seemed unimaginably forlorn, and later in the day I went out to find him. I felt that he was suffering terribly.

  The snow had melted by then and I couldn’t find his tracks, and although I went from haunt to haunt hoping to hear his call, the forest was empty. A huge, momentous silence such as occurs only in the bleakest seasons of the year filled the landscape. I began to feel in myself something of the loneliness of this man.

  Another incident took place about this time that may have had some bearing on Bill’s apparent disappearance. Higgins and I had been visiting Emil and Minna and were returning along the old carriage road that passed their driveway. Just before the intersection with the main road a group of men stepped out of the forest in front of us and waved us down. They were a rough looking bunch with grim, serious mouths, and they were armed. Some had baseball bats, one had a rifle, and another was packing an ammunition belt and a pistol. I pulled over and asked them what they were doing.

  “We got some trouble here,” one of them said. The others were looking inside the car and peering around into the surrounding forest.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “You live around here?” he countered.

  I told him I lived on the other side of the ridge.

  “Yeah, well, we got some trouble here,” he repeated in a more friendly tone.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “In plain English,” he said, “peeping Tom.”

  About half a mile down the road toward the lake there was a little spur road with a group of houses strung along it. Several of the women in the houses had seen a man looking in the first-floor windows. Needless to say, he would disappear into the woods as soon as he was spotted. The men explained that there had been another incident that evening, and the males of the neighborhood had formed a posse to catch the man.

  Although I was reluctant to admit it to myself, my thoughts went immediately to Bill. He was, after all, an odd sort, and he had apparently come one evening and looked into my windows. I could have mentioned him to the men, but the thought of them scouring the forest for him, capturing him, perhaps even shooting at him, was too much, and I kept my mouth shut and wished them luck. It occurred to me then that perhaps the tracks I had seen were those of the peeping Tom, and that Bill had disappeared shortly after our last vaguely intimate conversation.