of its direction.
He must be mistaken, he thought. No one would be out and chopping on a
night like this. Coon hunters might be the answer. Coon hunters at times
chopped down a tree to dislodge a prey too well hidden to be spotted. The
unsportsmanlike trick was one that Ben Adams and his overgrown, gangling
sons might engage in. But this was no night for coon hunting. The wind would
blow away scent and the dogs would be unable to track. Quiet nights were the
best for hunting coon. And no one would be insane enough to cut down a tree
on a night like this when a swirling wind might catch it and topple it back
upon the cutters.
He listened to catch the sound again but the wind, recovering from its
lull, was blowing harder than ever now and there was no chance of hearing
any sound smaller than the wind.
The next day came in mild and gray, the wind no more than a whisper.
Once in the night Daniels had awoken to hear it rattling the windows,
pounding at the house and howling mournfully in the tangled hollows that lay
above the river. But when he woke again all was quiet and faint light was
graying the windows. Dressed and out of doors he found a land of peace —
the sky so overcast that there was no hint of sun, the air fresh, as if
newly washed but heavy with the moist grayness that overlay the land. The
autumn foliage that clothed the hills had taken on a richer luster than it
had worn in the flooding autumn sunlight.
After chores and breakfast Daniels set out for the hills. As he went
down the slope towards the head of the first hollow he found himself hoping
that the geologic shift would not come about today. There were many times it
didn’t and there seemed to be no reason to its taking place or its failure
to take place. He had tried at times to find some reason for it, had made
careful notes of how he felt or what he did, even the course he took when he
went for his daily walk, but he had found no pattern. It lay, of course,
somewhere in his brain — something triggered into operation his new
capability. But the phenomenon was random and involuntary. He had no control
of it, no conscious control, at least. At times he had tried to use it, to
bring the geologic shift about — in each case had failed. Either he did not
know how to go about it or it was truly random.
Today, he hoped, his capability would not exercise its option, for he
wanted to walk in the hills when they had assumed one of their most
attractive moods, filled with gentle melancholy, all their harshness
softened by the grayness of the atmosphere, the trees standing silently like
old and patient friends waiting for one’s coming, the fallen leaves and
forest mold so hushed footfalls made no sound.
He went down to the head of the hollow and sat on a fallen log beside a
gushing spring that sent a stream of water tinkling down the boulder-strewn
creek bed. Here, in May, in the pool below the spring, the marsh marigolds
had bloomed and the sloping hillsides had been covered with the pastel of
hepaticas. But now he saw no sign of either. The woods had battened down for
winter. The summer and the autumn plants were either dead or dying, the
drifting leaves interlocking on the forest floor to form cover against the
ice and snow.
In this place, thought Daniels, a man walked with a season’s ghosts.
This was the way it had been for a million years or more, although not
always. During many millions of years, in a time long gone, these hills and
all the world had basked in an eternal summertime. And perhaps not a great
deal more than ten thousand years before a mile-high wall of ice had reared
up not too far to the north, perhaps close enough for a man who stood where
his house now sat to have seen the faint line of blueness that would have
been the top of that glacial barrier. But even then, although the mean
temperature would have been lower, there had still been seasons.
Leaving the log, Daniels went on down the hollow, following the narrow
path that looped along the hillside, a cow-path beaten down at a time when
there had been more cows at pasture in these woods than the two that Daniels
owned. Following it, Daniels noted, as he had many times before, the
excellent engineering sense of a cow. Cows always chose the easiest grade in
stamping out their paths.
He stopped barely beyond the huge white oak that stood at a bend in the
path, to have a look at the outsize jack-in-the-pulpit plant he had observed
throughout the years. Its green-purple hood had withered away completely,
leaving only the scarlet fruit cluster which in the bitter months ahead
would serve as food for birds.
As the path continued, it plunged deeper between the hills and here the
silence deepened and the grayness thickened until one’s world became
private.
There, across the stream bed, was the den. Its yellow maw gaped beneath
a crippled, twisted cedar. There, in the spring, he had watched baby foxes
play. From far down the hollow came the distant quacking of ducks upon the
pond in the river valley. And up on the steep hillside loomed Cat Den Point,
the den carved by slow-working wind and weather out of the sheer rock of the
cliff.
But something was wrong.
Standing on the path and looking up the hill, he could sense the
wrongness, although he could not at first tell exactly what it was. More of
the cliff face was visible and something was missing. Suddenly he knew that
the tree was no longer there — the tree that for years had been climbed by
homing wildcats heading for the den after a night of prowling and later by
humans like himself who wished to seek out the wildcat’s den. The cats, of
course, were no longer there — had not been there for many years. In the
pioneer days they had been hunted almost to extermination because at times
they had exhibited the poor judgment of bringing down a lamb. But the
evidence of their occupancy of the cave could still be found by anyone who
looked. Far back in the narrow recesses of the shallow cave tiny bones and
the fragmented skulls of small mammals gave notice of food brought home by
the wildcats for their young.
The tree had been old and gnarled and had stood, perhaps, for several
centuries and there would have been no sense of anyone’s cutting it down,
for it had no value as lumber, twisted as it was. And in any case to get it
out of the woods would have been impossible. Yet, last night, when he had
stepped out on the porch, he had seemed to hear in a lull in the wind the
sound of chopping — and today the tree was gone.
Unbelieving, he scrambled up the slope as swiftly as he could. In places
the slope of the wild hillside slanted at an angle so close to forty-five
degrees that he went on hands and knees, clawing himself upward, driven by
an illogical fear that had to do with more than simply a missing tree.
For it was in the cat den that one could hear the creature buried in the
stone.
He could recall the day he first had heard the creature and on that day
he had not believed his senses. For he had been sure the sound came from his
own imagination, was born of his walking with the dinosaurs and
eavesdropping on the stars. It had not come the first time he had climbed
the tree to reach the cave-that-was-a-den. He had been there several times
before, finding a perverse satisfaction at discovering so unlikely a
retreat. He would sit on the ledge that ran before the cave and stare over
the froth of treetop foliage that clothed the plunging hillside, but
afforded a glimpse of the pond that lay in the flood plain of the river. He
could not see the river itself — one must stand on higher ground to see the
river.
He liked the cave and the ledge because it gave him seclusion, a place
cut off from the world, where he still might see this restricted corner of
the world but no one could see him. This same sense of being shut out from
the world had appealed to the wildcats, he had told himself. And here, for
them, not only was seclusion but safety — and especially safety for their
young. There was no way the den could be approached other than by climbing