or four days. Only a few years earlier I had carried
heavier camping loads than this without trouble, but
now I was blown, a stitch beginning in my side. My
wristwatch said only nine o’clock.
The trees thinned out as he had promised, and here the
land rose in a long slope to the north. I looked up across a
tract of eight or ten acres, where the devastation of
stupid lumbering might be healed if the hurt region
could be let alone for sixty years. The deep snow,
blinding out here where only scrub growth interfered
with the sunlight, covered the worst of the wreckage.
“Good place for wild ras’berries,” Harp said quietly.
“Been time for ’em to grow back. Guess it was nearer
seven years ago when they cut here and left this mess.
Last summer I couldn’t hardly find their logging road.
Off to the left— ”
He stopped, pointing with a slow arm to a blurred gray
line that wandered up from the left to disappear over the
rise of ground. The nearest part of that gray curve must
have been four hundred feet away, and to my eyes it
might have been a shadow cast by an irregularity of the
snow surface; Harp knew better. Something had passed
there, heavy enough to break the crust. “You want to rest
a mite, Ben? Once over that rise I might not want to stop
again.”
I let myself down on the butt of an old log that lay
264
Edgar Pangbom
tilted toward us, cut because it had happened to be in the
way, left to rot because they happened to be taking pine.
“Can you really make anything out of that?”
“Not enough,” said Harp. “But it could be him.” He
did not sit by me but stood relaxed with his load,
snowshoes spaced so he could spit between them.
“About half a mile over that rise,” he said, “there’s a
kind of gorge. Must’ve been a good brook, former times,
still a stream along the bottom in summer. Tangle of
elders and stuff. Couple, three caves in the bank at one
spot. I guess it’s three summers since I been there.
Gloomy goddamn place. There was foxes into one of
them caves. Natural caves, I b’lieve. I didn’t go too near,
not then.”
I sat in the warming light, wondering whether there
was any way I could talk to Harp about the beast— if it
existed, if we weren’t merely a pair of aging men with
disordered minds. Any way to tell him the creature was
important to the world outside our dim little village?
That it ought somehow to be kept alive, not just shot
down and shoveled aside? How could I say this to a man
without science, who had lost his wife and also the trust
of his fellow men?
Take away that trust and you take away the world.
Could I ask him to shoot it in the legs, get it back alive?
Why, to my own self, irrationally, that appeared wrong,
horrible, as well as beyond our powers. Better if he shot
to kill. Or if I did. So in the end 1 said nothing, but
shrugged my pack into place and told him I was ready to
go on.
With the crust uncertain under that stronger sunshine,
we picked our way slowly up the rise, and when we came
at length to that line of tracks, Harp said matter-of-
factly, “Now you’ve seen his mark. It’s him.”
Sun and overnight freezing had worked on the trail.
Harp estimated it had been made early the day before.
But wherever the weight of Longtooth had broken
through, the shape of his foot showed clearly down there
Longtooth
265
in its pocket of snow, a foot the size of a man’s but
broader, shorter. The prints were spaced for the stride of
a short-legged person. The arch of the foot was low, but
the beast was not actually flat-footed. Beast or man. I
said, “This is a man’s print, Harp. Isn’t it?”
He spoke without heat. “No. You’re forgetting, Ben. I
seen him.”
“Anyhow, there’s only one.”
He said slowly, “Only one set of tracks.”
“What d’you mean?”
Harp shrugged. “It’s heavy. He could’ve been carrying
something. Keep your voice down. That crust yesterday,
it would’ve held me without no web feet, but he went
through, and he ain’t as big as me.” Harp checked his
rifle and released the safety. “Half a mile to them caves.
B’lieve that’s where he is, Ben. Don’t talk unless you got
to, and take it slow.”
I followed him. We topped the rise, encountering more
of that lumberman’s desolation on the other side. The
trail crossed it, directly approaching a wall of undamaged trees that marked the limit of the cutting. Here forest took over once more, and where it began,
Longtooth’s trail ended. “Now you seen how it goes,”
Harp said. “Anyplace where he can travel above ground
he does. He don’t scramble up the trunks, seems like.
Look here— he must’ve got aholt of that branch and
swung hisself up. Knocked off some snow, but the wind
knocks off so much, too, you can’t tell nothing. See, Ben,
he— he figures it out. He knows about trails. He’ll have
come down out of these trees far enough from where we
are now so there ain’t no chance of us seeing the place
from here. Could be anywhere in a half circle, and draw
it as big as you please.”
“Thinking like a man.”
“But he ain’t a man,” said Harp. “There’s things he
don’t know. How a man feels, acts. I’m going on to them
caves.” From necessity, I followed him. . . .
I ought to end this quickly. Prematurely I am an old
266
Edgar Pangbom
man, incapacitated by the effects of a stroke and a
damaged heart. I keep improving a little— sensible diet,
no smoking, Adelaide’s care. I expect several years of
tolerable health on the way downhill. But I find, as Harp
did, that it is even more crippling to lose the trust of
others. I will write here once more, and not again, that
my word is good.
It was noon when we reached the gorge. In that place
some melancholy part of night must always remain.
Down the center of the ravine between tangles of alder,
water murmured under ice and rotting snow, which here
and there had fallen in to reveal the dark brilliance. Harp
did not enter the gorge itself but moved slowly through
tree cover along the left edge, eyes flickering for danger. I
tried to imitate his caution. We went a hundred yards or
more in that inching advance, maybe two hundred. I
heard only the occasional wind of spring.
He turned to look at me with a sickly triumph, a
grimace of disgust and of justification too. He touched
his nose and then I got it also, a rankness from down
ahead of us, a musky foulness with an ammoniacal tang
and some smell of decay. Then on the other side of the
gorge, off in the woods but not far, I heard Longtooth.
A bark, not lo
ud. Throaty, like talk.
Harp suppressed an answering growl. He moved on
until he could point down to a black cave mouth on the
opposite side. The breeze blew the stench across to us.
Harp whispered, “See, he’s got like a path. Jumps down
to that flat rock, then to the cave. We’ll see him in a
minute.” Yes, there were sounds in the brush. “You keep
back.” His left palm lightly stroked the underside of his
rifle barrel.
So intent was he on the opening where Longtooth
would appear, I may have been first to see the other who
came then to the cave mouth and stared up at us with
animal eyes. Longtooth had called again, a rather gentle
sound. The woman wrapped in filthy hides may have
been drawn by that call or by the noise of our approach.
Longtooth
267
Then Harp saw her.
He knew her. In spite of the tangled hair, scratched
face, dirt, and the shapeless deer pelt she clutched
around herself against the cold, I am sure he knew her. I
don’t think she knew him, or me. An inner blindness, a
look of a beast wholly centered on its own needs. I think
human memories had drained away. She knew Long-
tooth was coming. I think she wanted his warmth and
protection, but there were no words in the whimper she
made before Harp’s bullet took her between the eyes.
Longtooth shoved through the bushes. He dropped the
rabbit he was carrying and jumped down to that flat rock
snarling, glancing sidelong at the dead woman who was
still twitching. If he understood the fact of death, he had
no time for it. I saw the massive overdevelopment of
thigh and leg muscles, their springy motions of preparation. The distance from the flat rock to the place where Harp stood must have been fifteen feet. One spear of
sunlight touched him in that blue-green shade, touched
his thick red fur and his fearful face.
Harp could have shot him. Twenty seconds for it,
maybe more. But he flung his rifle aside and drew out his
hunting knife, his own long tooth, and had it waiting
when the enemy jumped.
So could I have shot him. No one needs to tell me I
ought to have done so.
Longtooth launched himself, clawed fingers out, fangs
exposed. I felt the meeting as if the impact had struck my
own flesh. They tumbled roaring into the gorge, and I
was cold, detached, an instrument for watching.
It ended soon. The heavy brownish teeth clenched in
at the base of Harp’s neck. He made no more motion
except the thrust that sent his blade into Longtooth’s left
side. Then they were quiet in that embrace, quiet all
three. I heard the water flowing under the ice.
I remember a roaring in my ears, and I was moving
with slow care, one difficult step after another, along the
lip of the gorge and through mighty corridors of white
268
Edgar Pangbom
and green. With my hard-won detached amusement I
supposed this might be the region where I had recently
followed poor Harp Ryder to some destination or other,
but not (I thought) one of those we talked about when
we were boys. A band of iron had closed around my
forehead, and breathing was an enterprise needing great
effort and caution, in order not to worsen the indecent
pain that clung as another band around my diaphragm. I
leaned against a tree for thirty seconds or thirty minutes,
I don’t know where. I knew I mustn’t take off my pack in
spite of the pain, because it carried provisions for three
days. I said once: “Ben, you are lost.”
I had my carbine, a golden bough, staff of life, and I
recall the shrewd management and planning that enabled me to send three shots into the air. Twice.
It seems I did not want to die, and so hung on the cliff
edge of death with a mad stubbomess. They tell me it
could not have been the second day that I fired the
second burst, the one that was heard and answered—
because they say a man can’t suffer the kind of attack I
was having and then survive a whole night of exposure.
They say that when a search party reached me from
Wyndham Village (eighteen miles from Darkfield), I
made some garbled speech and fell flat on my face.
I woke immoblized, without power of speech or any
motion except for a little life in my left hand, and for a
long time memory was only a jarring of irrelevancies.
When that cleared, I still couldn’t talk for another long
deadly while. I recall someone saying with exasperated
admiration that with cerebral hemorrhage on top of
coronary infarction, I had no damn right to be alive; this
was the first sound that gave me any pleasure. I remember recognizing Adelaide and being unable to thank her for her presence. None of this matters to the story,
except the fact that for months I had no bridge of
communication with the world; and yet I loved the world
and did not want to leave it.
Longtooth
269
One can always ask: What will happen next?
Sometime in what they said was June my memory was
(I think) clear. I scrawled a little, with the nurse supporting the deadened part of my arm. But in response to what I wrote, the doctor, the nurses, Sheriff Robart,
even Adelaide Simmons and Bill Hastings, looked—
sympathetic. I was not believed. I am not believed now,
in the most important part of what I wish I might say:
that there are things in ouf world that we do not
understand, and that this ignorance ought to generate
humility. People find this obvious, bromidic— oh, they
always have!—and therefore they do not listen, retaining
the pride of their ignorance intact.
Remnants of the three bodies were found in late
August, small thanks to my efforts, for I had no notion
what compass direction we took after the cut-over area,
and there are so many such areas of desolation I couldn’t
tell them where to look. Forest scavengers, including a
pack of dogs, had found the bodies first. Water had
moved them, too, for the last of the big snow melted
suddenly, and for a couple of days at least there must
have been a small river raging through that gorge. The
head of what they are calling the “lunatic” got rolled
downstream, bashed against rocks, partly buried in silt.
Dogs had chewed and scattered what they speak of as
“the man’s fur coat.”
It will remain a lunatic in a fur coat, for they won’t
have it any other way. So far as I know, no scientist ever
got a look at the wreckage, unless you glorify the coroner
by that title. I believe he was a good vet before he got the
job. When my speech was more or less regained, I was
already through trying to talk about it. A statement of
mine was read at the inquest—that was before I could
talk or leave the hospital. At this ceremony society
officially decided that Harper Harrison Ryder, of this
township, shot to death his wife, Leda, a
nd an individual, male, of unknown identity, while himself temporarily
270
Edgar Pangbom
of unsound mind, and died of knife injuries received in a
struggle with the said individual of unknown, and so
forth.
I don’t talk about it because that only makes people
more sorry for me, to think a man’s mind should fail so,
and he not yet sixty.
I cannot even ask them: “What is truth?” They would
only look more saddened, and I suppose shocked, and
perhaps find reasons for not coming to see me again.
They are kind. They will do anything for me, except
think about it.
Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)
Luella Miller
M ary E. Wilkins Freeman was in her day one of the
best-known American writers. She was championed by
William Dean Howells for her literary value and awarded
the Howells M edal for fiction of the American Academy in
1926. Her reputation however, and her work, declined after
entering an oppressive marriage in 1902. Like Kate Chopin, Sarah O rne Jewett, and others, she has been consigned to the ghetto of "local colorists" by critics for most of this century. Primarily a short story writer, Freeman was
popular and prolific, but produced only eleven supernatural
stories, six o f which w ere collected in her volume, The
Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903), which is. according to Everett Bleiler, “of greater critical and historical importance than its uniqueness might suggest. It is one of the very few bodies of work that combine domestic realism with supernaturalism, and it
has been the founding document of a minor school within
supernatural fiction (notably August Derleth and his followers)." Derleth ranked her as one of the four "absolute formative masters” of the horror genre following the Gothic
vogue. His press, Arkham House, released the definitive
Collected Ghost Stories (1974), with a useful introduction
by Edward Wagenknecht. "Luella M iller" is her most
horrific tale. Told by an unreliable narrator, it is at the same
time an attack on the helpless child-woman and paradoxically on the independent single woman, the outsider. It is a ghost story and a vampire story at once. O ne must gauge
the narrator’s prejudices. It is an interesting contrast to
272
Mary W ilkins Freeman
Violet Hunt, Madeline Yale Wynne, and at an opposite pole
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 33
