Keith nodded. "So you don't believe such a thing could happen?"

"Huh-uh." With all the certainty of twenty-four summers. "Toads just can't live inside rocks. Nothing could. No air. No sustenance." Speaking of sustenance, I offered him a pull on my hip flask. Keith accepted, then said: "But these miners here-they don't claim to have found a toad exactly, now, do they?" He was watching my face narrowly all the while through a pall of cigar smoke, gauging my reactions.

"No sir. They say they've found a whoosit."

"A whoosit."

"Exactly that. A whoosit, just like P.T. Barnum shows on Broadway. A jackalope. A did-you-ever. An allamagoosalum."

"Jersey devil," said Keith, entering into the spirit of the thing.

"Feegee mermaid," I amplified. "Sewn-up mess of spare parts from the taxidermy shop. Catfish with a monkey's head. That's the ticket." I felt pleased we'd nailed the whole business on the head. Maybe we could be back in Washington by this time tomorrow evening.

Keith was nodding still. He showed every sign of agreeing with me, right up until he said-musing aloud it seemed-"So, how does a thing like that get inside a slab of coal, do you suppose, Mr. Fenwick?"

"Well, that's just it. It doesn't, sir." Had I not made myself clear?

"But this one did." His deep-set eyes bored into me, but I held my ground.

"So they say. I guess we'll see for ourselves in the morning, sir."

Unexpectedly, Keith dropped me a wink. "The h.e.l.l with that. I was thinking we might take a stroll down to the courthouse after dinner and save ourselves a night of playing guessing games. Skip all the foofaraw the mayor's got planned. That is, unless you have plans for the rest of the evening?" A wave of his cigar over sleepy downtown Oram.

I spread my hands, palms up. "What do you know? Clara Bow just phoned to say she couldn't make it."

And so, in the absence of Miss Bow's company, I found myself walking out down the main street of Oram with Horton Keith, headed for the courthouse. We'd pa.s.sed it in the mayor's car earlier that afternoon; Kronke had told us that was where the whoosit was being kept, under lock and key and guarded by his best men. If the man who was on duty out front when we arrived was one of Kronke's best, then I'd have loved to have seen the ones he was keeping in reserve. He was a dried-up, knock-kneed old codger with hardly a tooth left in his head, and when Keith told him we were the men from Washington come to see the whoosit, he waved us right through. "In there," he said, without bothering to get up off his rocking chair. "What there is of it, anyways."

"What there is of it?" Keith's heavy brows came down.

"Feller who found it, Lamar Tibbs? Had him a dispute with the mine bosses when he brung it up last week. They said, any coal comes out of this shaft belongs to the company, and that's that. So Lamar, he says well, thisyer freak of nature ain't made of coal though, is it? Blind man can see that. And they say, naw, it ain't. And Lamar, he says, it's more in the nature of an animal, ain't it? And they say, reckon so. And Lamar says, well, I take about a thousand cooties home out of this d.a.m.n pit of yours ever' day, so I reckon this big cootie here can come along for the ride as well. And he up an took it home with 'im." The caretaker cackled with senile glee at Lamar's inexorable logic. I guess it was a rare thing for anybody to get the better of the company, let alone some poor working stiff. But more to the point: "You're saying the whoosit isn't actually in there?"

"No sir. It's over to Peck's Ridge, up at the Tibbs place. Mayor's plannin' to take you there in the automobile tomorrow, I believe-first thing after the grand civic breakfast."

This was starting to look like a snipe hunt we'd been sent on. Keith jabbed his cigar b.u.t.t at the courthouse. "So what have you got in here?"

"Lump o' coal it came out of," said the caretaker proudly. "Got an exact imprint of the whoosit in it, see? Turn it to the light, you can see everything. Large as life, twice as ugly."

"Is that right?" Keith said. "Company hung on to the lump of coal, I guess?"

"That they did," agreed the last surviving veteran of the Confederate army. "All the coal comes out of that mine's company coal-them's the rules. Mayor's just holdin' it for safekeeping, is all."

"Exactly so," said Keith. "Well, thank you, sir." He slipped a dollar into the caretaker's eager hand-a.s.suming it was eagerness that made it tremble so. "Now if you could see your way to showing us where they're keeping it, we'll quit bothering you."

"They got it in the bas.e.m.e.nt," said the caretaker, leaning back in his rocker and expelling a gob of tobacco juice. "Keep goin' down till you can't go down no more, mister, an' that'll do it."

The bas.e.m.e.nt of that courthouse was like a mine itself; you might almost have believed they'd dug the whoosit out right there, in situ. Keith and I came to the bottom of a winding flight of stairs and found ourselves in a musty sort of crawls.p.a.ce, its farther corners filled with shadows the single electric bulb on the ceiling couldn't hope to reach. The ceiling was low enough that we both had to stoop a little, and most of the floor was taken up with trunks and boxes and filing cabinets full of junk. Thank G.o.d we weren't looking for anything smaller than a pork barrel. We'd have been down there all night. As it was, we began on opposite sides of the bas.e.m.e.nt and aimed to get the job done in something under an hour.

"This is annoying," Keith called over his shoulder. "These d.a.m.n rubes don't realize what they've got a hold of here."

"Toad in a hole," I called back. Keith ignored me.

"This miner fellow-"

"Lamar Tibbs," I sang out in a poor approximation of the caretaker's Virginian tw.a.n.g.

"-he probably thinks he's sitting on a crock of gold, just like the mayor here and the mining company with their slab of coal. But the two things apart don't amount to a hill of beans, and they don't have the sense to see it."

"How so?" I didn't think the whole thing amounted to much, myself.

"Because the one authenticates the other, don't you see? Look here, I'm the authorities, okay? This here's some sort of a strange beast you claim to have found in the middle of a piece of coal. Who's to say it's not a, a, what-d'ye-call-'em-"

"Feegee mermaid."

"Feegee mermaid, exactly." A grunt, as he moved some heavy piece of trash out of the way. "Nothing to make a man suppose it ever saw the inside of a slab of coal-without the coal to prove it. The imprint of the beast in the coal goes to corroborate the story, see?"

"Yes, but-" I was going to point out that you didn't find beasts, living or dead, inside slabs of coal anyway, so there was no story there to corroborate, only a tall tale out of backwoods West Virginia. But Keith didn't seem to be interested in that self-evident proposition.

"And it's the same thing with the coal. Suppose there is an imprint of something in there? What good is it without the very thing that made that imprint? It's just the work of an few weekends for an amateur sculptor, is all." He bent to his task again, shoving more packing cases out of the way. "They don't understand," he muttered, almost to himself. "You need the two together."

"Even if you did have the two things, though-" I wasn't letting this one go unchallenged-"it still wouldn't prove anything, in and of itself. It might go some way towards the appearance of proof-h.e.l.l, it might even make a good enough story for page eight of the newspaper, I guess. That's your business. I just take the pictures, that's all. But at the end of the day-"

At the end of the day, Keith wasn't listening. I happened to glance in his direction at that moment, and saw as much immediately. He was standing in the far corner of the bas.e.m.e.nt, hands on hips, staring at something on the floor-from where I was, I couldn't make it out. I called his name. I had to call again, and then a third time, before he even noticed. When he did, he looked up with an odd expression on his face.

"Come over here a second, Fenwick," he called, and his voice sounded slightly strained. "Think I've found something."

I crossed to where he was standing. In that corner the light was so dim I could hardly see Keith, let alone whatever it was he'd found, so the first thing we did was lay ahold of it and drag it to the centre of the bas.e.m.e.nt, right beneath the electric bulb. It was heavy as h.e.l.l, and we pushed it more than carried it across the packed-mud bas.e.m.e.nt floor.

It was lying inside an open packing-case, all wrapped up in a bit of old tarpaulin. You could see the black gleam of coal where Keith had unwrapped it at one end. "You raise it up," muttered Keith, and again I heard that unusual strain in his voice; "I'll get the tarpaulin off of it."

I laid hold of it and heaved it upright, and Keith managed to get the tarp clear. It was just one half of the slab, as it turned out; its facing piece lay underneath wrapped in more tarpaulin. Stood on its end, the half-slab was roughly the size of a high-back dining chair: it would have weighed a lot more, more than we could have dreamed of shifting, probably, except that it was all hollowed out, as if someone had sawn a barrel in half right down its centre.

The hollow s.p.a.ce was nothing more than an inky pool of shadow at first, till I tilted the slab toward the light. Then, its shiny black surfaces gave up their secrets, and the electric light reflected off a wealth of curious detail. I gave a low whistle. Whoever's work this was, he was wasted on Oram. He ought to have been knocking out statues for the Pope in Rome. For it was the finest, most intricately detailed job of carving you ever saw-intaglio, I believe they call it, where the sculptor carves in hollows instead of relief. There was even a kind of trompe l'oeil effect: if you looked at the cavity while turning the whole thing round slightly, the contours seemed to stand out in projection, that strange hollow form suddenly becoming filled-out and real. I'd have to say it was actually a little bit unsettling, for a cheap optical illusion. It was as if you were looking at the sky at night, the black gulf of s.p.a.ce, and the stars all of a sudden took on a shape, the shape of something vast and unimaginable . . .

"My G.o.d." A fellow would have been hard put to recognise Keith's voice. It made me turn from the slab of coal to look at him. He was staring open-mouthed at the hollow s.p.a.ce at the heart of the slab, with an expression I took at first to be awe. Only later did I come to recognize it as something more like horror.

"It's pretty good at that," I allowed. "The detail . . . "

"It's exact in every detail," said Keith, in wonderment. "You could use it for a mold, and you'd cast yourself a perfect copy." He shook his head, never taking his eyes off of the coal slab.

"Copy of what, though?" I squinted at the concavity, turned it this way and that to get a sense of it in three dimensions. "It's like nothing I've ever seen-it's a regular whoosit, all right. Are those things supposed to be tentacles, there? Only they've got claws on the end, or nippers or something. And where's its head supposed to be?"

"The head retracts," said Keith, almost as if he was reading it from a book. "Like a slug drawing in on itself."

I stared at him. "Beg your pardon, sir?"

"You said it's like nothing you've ever seen," said Keith. "Well, I've seen it. Or something exactly like it"

"You have?" It was all I could think of to say.

Keith nodded. "Let's get out of this d.a.m.n mausoleum," he said abruptly, turning away from the packing-case and its contents. "I'll tell you up in the real world, where a man can breathe clean air, not this infernal stink." And with that he turned his back and was off, stumping up the wooden steps and out of the bas.e.m.e.nt, leaving me to rewrap and repack the slab of coal as best I could before hastening after him.

I was full of questions, all of them to do with the strange artifact we'd been looking at. I have to confess, the level of realism the unknown sculptor had managed to suggest had impressed me-not to say unnerved me. I mentioned before the optical illusion of solidity conjured out of the void, that sensation of seeing the actual thing, not just the impression it had made. That actually began to get to you after a while. Three-dimensional, I said? Well, maybe so. But the longer you looked at it, the dimensions started to looked wrong somehow; impossible, you might say.

On top of that was Keith's admission that he'd seen the like before. What did he mean by that? And over and above everything . . . well, Keith was right. We needed to be in the fresh air. Fact was, it stank in that d.a.m.n bas.e.m.e.nt: I've never known a smell like it. It was as if a bushel of something had gone bad, and been left to fester for an long time.

An awful long time, at that.

Back at the hotel Keith went straightaway up to his room for about an hour, leaving me to pick at my evening meal in the all-but-empty dining room. The smell down in that bas.e.m.e.nt had killed my appet.i.te, pretty much; in the end I pushed my plate aside and went to the smoking lounge. That was where Keith found me.

He looked better than he had back outside the courthouse, at least. I'd found him leaning against the side of the building, looking as if he was going to be sick: he had that gray clammy cast to his face. I asked him was he all right, and he waved me away. Now, there was a little more color in him, and his eyes were focusing properly again, not staring off into the middle distance the way they do when a fellow is on the verge of losing his lunch.

"You got any of that brandy left?" he said, taking the chair opposite mine. "Medicinal purposes, you understand."

"You're in luck, as it happens," I said, offering him the flask. "I've just taken an inventory of our medical supplies."

"Good," said Keith, and took a long swallow. His eyes teared up a little, but that was only natural. It had kind of a kick to it, that bathtub Napoleon. You could have used it to open a safe, if you'd run out of blasting gelignite.

"Well, then." Keith handed me back the flask. "I believe I owe you a story, Mr. Fenwick. Recompense for leaving you with the baby, down there in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

I waved a hand, which could equally be taken to mean, no problem, don't trouble yourself about it, or-as I hoped Keith would read it-Go on, go on, you interest me strangely. The reason I waved a hand instead of actually saying either of those things was because I'd just taken a pull on that flask myself, and was temporarily speechless.

Keith settled back in his armchair and crossed his long thin legs. "It might help explain why I took this a.s.signment," he said, throwing me a cigar and lighting one himself, "why I asked for it." He puffed on his stogie till it was properly lit, sending up a wreath of smoke above his head. Then from the heart of that smokescreen he told me the following tale, in about the time it took us to reduce those big Havanas down to ash.

"I was thirty at the time: a dangerous age, Mr. Fenwick. You'll learn that, soon enough. I was working on the Examiner in San Francisco when gold fever hit up in the Yukon, back in '98. The news came at exactly the right time, so far as I was concerned-a lot of other folks too, among that first wave of prospectors and adventurers. I was missing something, we all were: the frontier had been closed, and the wild days of excitement out West were history, or so it seemed. For better or worse, the job of shaping the nation was finished, over and done with, and us latecomers had missed the chance to leave our stamp on it. We felt as if we'd all been running West in search of something-something magical and unique, that would make real men out of us-only once we'd gotten there, it had already set sail out of the Golden Gate, and there was no way we could follow. The Gay Nineties, you say? I tell you, there were folks dying in the street in San Francisco. Hunger, want . . . maybe nothing more than heartbreak.

"So you can bet we jumped at the chance to go prospecting, away up in the frozen wastes. That was a new frontier, sure enough: maybe the last frontier, and we weren't about to miss it. And we piled on to those coffin-ships out of Frisco and Seattle, hundreds of us at a time; stampeders, we called ourselves. There was about as much thinking went into it as goes into a stampede.

"The Canucks wouldn't let you into the country totally unprepared, though. You had to have a ton of goods, supplies and suchlike, else they'd stop you at the docks. And that took some getting together; eleven hundred pounds of food, plus clothing and equipment, horses to carry it with, that sort of thing. I was travelling light-reckoned to hire sled-dogs up in Canada-but even so, my goods took some lugging at the wharf.

"So we sailed North. A thousand miles out of Seattle we made the Lynn Ca.n.a.l, which was where every one of us bold prospectors had to make his first big decision. Where was he going to disembark? 'Cause there were two trails, see, up to Dawson and the goldfields, six hundred miles due north. You could take the easy route, avoiding all the big mountains-that was Skagway and the White Pa.s.s. The other route started in Dyea, and it took in the Chilkoot Pa.s.s, leading on to the lakes. Even us greenhorns knew about the Chilkoot by that time.

"A lot of folk chose Skagway, but I never heard anything good about that town. In Indian it's "the place where a fair wind never blows", which pretty much sums it up, I guess. Leave it to the Indians to know which way the wind blows. Soapy Smith's gang ran the town-he was an old-time con artist out of Georgia, and he knew a hundred ways to pick the pockets of every rube that staggered down the gangplank. Twenty-five cents a day wharf rates on each separate piece of goods. Lodging-houses where they fleeced you on the way in and the way out. Saloons and wh.o.r.ehouses; casinos with rigged wheels and marked cards. Portage fees. Tolls all the way along the trail-and bandits too, armed gangs and desperadoes, hand in glove with the 'official escorts,' like as not. No sir: I chose Dyea, which was not a h.e.l.l of a lot more salubrious, but at least you didn't have Soapy's hand in your britches all the while.

There was ice all over the boat as it hove into Dyea. It looked like a ghost ship, and I guess we were a sorry-enough looking bunch of ghosts as we stumbled off. The mountains came right down to the outskirts of town; took us two weeks of hard going to climb as far as Sheep Camp, at the base of the Chilkoot. I tell you: there were lots of men took one look at that mountainside and gave it up on the spot, stayed on in camp and made a living for themselves as best they could. You couldn't call them the stupid ones, not really. A thousand feet from base to summit, sheer up and down, straight as a beggar can spit? Any sane man would have tuned round and said 'scuse me, my mistake, beg your pardon.

"We were obliged to stay in Sheep Camp for the best part of March, till the pa.s.s came navigable. Bad weather, and the worst kind of terrain; even the Indian guides wouldn't touch it in those conditions. It was just before spring thaw, and the weather was ornery in the extreme. Minus sixty-five one night, by the thermometer in Lobelski's General Store. It stayed light from nine-thirty in the morning to just before four in the afternoon. The rest of it was pitch dark and endless cold.

"They were building some sort of a hoisting-gear up the Chilkoot, the tramway they called it, but I never saw it finished. I hauled my goods up there, the old fashioned way. I could have paid the Indians to do it for me, a dollar a pound, but I didn't have two thousand dollars to spare. That was why I was bound for the Yukon in the first place. So I hauled every last case up that mountain side, forty trips in all. I was raw from the chafing of the ropes on my shoulders, and I was nigh on crippled by the exhaustion and the cold-but I managed it. Somehow. Don't ask me how. It'd kill me now if I tried it.

"Truth is, I don't know how it didn't kill me back then. Fifteen hundred toeholds in the ice, up a trail no more than two feet wide. Take a step to left and right, and you were in the powder stuff, loose and treacherous. If a man slipped, it was all up with him; you never saw him again. That pa.s.s was filled with the bodies of good men.

"Anyway! Come April I was over the Chilkoot and heading toward Dawson, a mere five hundred and fifty miles off. The trail led along Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett: if you waited for the thaw, the sheer volume of melt coming down off the mountains turned the rivers into rapids. If you went early, like I did, it was just a question of praying the ice wouldn't break. You put it out of your mind, till it came time to camp at night and you'd hear the ice creaking and groaning below you. We rigged up the sleds with sails, and the wind used to push us along at a fine clip. All we had to do was trust in the Lord and watch out for the cracks.

"The lakes weren't properly clear of ice till the end of May, and by that time we bold sled-skaters were already in Dawson, just six months after we'd first set out to strike it rich. Dawson was a stumpy, scroungy kind of town at the bend of the river, set on mudflats and made of nothing much but mud, or so it seemed. Five hundred people lived there as a rule: gold fever pushed that up to twelve thousand by the start of the year, thirty thousand by that summer's end. It was a breeding ground for typhoid-I stayed clear of the place, except when I made my victualling run once a week.

"I was working my claim south-east of Dawson city, out among the dried-up river beds. That was where I got my crash-course in mining-a year earlier, I'd have thought you just scuffed around in the dirt with the toe of your boot till you turned up some nuggets. Not in Yukon territory. You had to dig your way down to the pastry, we called it, the layers where the gold lay, through forty, fifty feet of rock and frost-hard river muck; tough going? Yes, sir. You broke your back on nothing more than a hunch and a hope. Besides that, all you had was the comradeship of your fellows and the one chance in a hundred thousand your claim would pay out big. I almost came to value the one more than the other, because when the chips were down you could rely on the comradeship at least. Money ain't everything, not in those lat.i.tudes. Maybe not in these.

"All through that summer I dug away in the dried-up beds, till it came autumn, and time to make another big decision. The last boat out of Dawson sailed on September the sixteenth, and a lot of fellows I knew were on it, the ones who'd struck it rich and the ones who'd simply had enough. I didn't fall into either camp: I waved that boat away from the landing, and made my plans to stay on through the winter. Plenty did: the proud and foolish ones like me, who couldn't quite bring themselves to admit defeat and go home with only a few grains of gold in their pokes; the optimists, who couldn't believe that the best was over, that the juicy lodes were already worked out and the rest only dry holes; and worst of all the hard core, the ones who'd caught it worst of all, who had no place left for them back in the real world. Quite a bunch.

"I remember one evening in that October of '98, standing up on the banks outside my camp and looking out over the dry gulches. Some of the fellows were burning fires at their workings, trying to melt the frost so the digging would go easier. It lit up all that strange and beautiful landscape like the surface of some alien planet, the fires like lanterns shining out in the gloom, and the way the wood smoke smell drifted up across the bluffs . . . I could have stayed there for the rest of my life, or so I told myself. I sat and watched those fires till it got full dark, anyway, and later on that night I saw the aurora for the first time, the Northern lights, how they flickered green and magical in the moonless sky.

"The week after, it began to snow for real, and I had to strike camp and head back for Dawson. Some didn't; some stayed out on the flats, and that's where the story really begins.

"I must've been back in Dawson a couple of months, because it was nigh on Christmas when we got word from out on the workings that they'd found something strange-not gold, which would have been strange enough by that time, but something weird, something the likes of which n.o.body had ever seen. At least, that's what Sam Tibbets told us, when he come in to Dawson for supplies. It was the three Tibbets brothers worked the claim, along with a half-dozen other fellows all hailed from Maine: they were a syndicate, all for one and one for all. They hadn't found a lot of gold-hardly enough for one man to retire on, let alone nine-but Sam reckoned if the worst came to the worst, they could always go into the exhibition business with this thing they'd dug up out of the frost. 'It's a new wonder of the world, or maybe the oldest one of all,' I can hear him saying it, hunkered down by the stove in the saloon with the frost melting in his mustache and the steam rising off his coat; 'I reckon it must 'a turned up late for last boarding on the ark, or else Noah throwed it overboard on account of its looks.'

" 'What d'you mean?' I asked him.

" 'Aw, Horton, you never saw such a cretur as this,' he said earnestly-he was straight-ahead and simple, was Sam Tibbets. He was one of the original ice-skaters from back on the lakes in the spring: I liked him a lot. 'It's like a plug-ugly dried-up old thing the size of one of them barrels there-' he pointed at a hogshead in the corner-'and about that same shape, 'cept maybe it comes to sort of a narrow place up top. It's got long thin arms, only dozens of 'em, all around, and there's nippers on the end, same as a lobster? I swear there ain't never been such a confusion. Wait till we haul it back out of here, come the thaw. They'll pay a dime a head back in Frisco just to clap eyes on it, I tell you!'

"It was a plan at that, and if nothing else it made me mighty curious to take a look at this thing, whatever it was. The way Sam told it, they'd been digging through the frozen subsoil when they turned it up: he thought it must have gotten caught in the river away back, stuck in the mud and froze up when the winter came. How deep was it, I asked him, thinking the deeper it lay, the older it must be; 'bout twenty feet, he reckoned.

" 'So it's dead, then, this thing?' That was Cy Perrette, who was not the smartest man in the Yukon territory, not by a long chalk. He was staring at Sam Tibbets like a dog listening to a sermon.

" 'It better be,' said Sam. 'It's been buried in the earth since Abraham got promoted to his first pair of long pants, ain't it?' Men started laughing all through the saloon, and pretty soon Sam had a line of drinks set down before him. Dawson folks appreciated a good tale, see: something to take their minds off the cold and dark outside, and the endless howling winds. I remember the aurora was particularly strong that night; when I staggered out of the saloon and the cold knocked me sober, there it was, fold upon fold, glowing and rippling from horizon to horizon. I remember thinking, that's what folk mean when they say 'unearthly.' Something definitively not of this planet, something more to do with the heavens than the earth.

"Come morning there was quite a little gang of us, all bent on following Sam Tibbets back to his camp for a look-see at the eighth wonder. Sam was agreeable, said he'd waive our admission fees just this once, on account of the circ.u.mstances, and we set off towards the workings. It was a cheerful excursion; the sleds were always lighter when you had company along the trail.

"Sam broke into a run when we reached the banks of the river bed; wanted to welcome us to the site of their discovery, I suppose, like any showman would. He clambered up a snowdrift; then, when he reached the top, he stopped, and even from down below I thought he looked confused. He let go his sled; it slithered down the bank and I had to look sharp, else it'd have taken me off at the shins. 'Sam!' I called him, but he didn't look round. I scrambled up after him, cussing him for a clumsy oaf and the rest of it; then I saw what he'd seen, and the words got choked off in my throat.

"Straight away you could see something was wrong. Sam and his partners had built themselves a cabin by the workings, nothing fancy, but solid enough to take whatever the Yukon winter could throw at it, they'd thought. Now, one end of that cabin was shivered all to pieces. The logs were snapped and splintered into matchwood, just exactly as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. Only the cannon would have had to be on the inside of the cabin, not the outside: there was wreckage laying on the ground for a considerable distance, all radiating out and away from the stoved-in part.

"That wasn't the worst part, though. In amongst the wreckage you could see the snow stained red, and there was at least one body mixed in with the blown-out timber. I saw it straight away; I know Sam had too, because he turned around and looked at me as I grabbed his arm, and I could hear this high sort of keening noise he was making, like some kind of machine that's slipped its gears, about to break itself to pieces. It was the purest, most fundamental sound of grief I'd ever heard coming out of a human being. I've never forgotten it to this day.

"My first thought as we began running down the banks was: dynamite. Plenty of the miners used it to start off an excavation, or to clear whatever obstructions they couldn't dig around. It wasn't unusual for a camp such as this to have a few sticks laying around in case of emergencies. Now, if you got careless . . . ? You understand what I'm saying. That was my first a.s.sumption, anyway. It lasted until I got in amongst the wreckage.

"Dynamite couldn't account for it, was all. It couldn't have left cups and bottles standing on the table, and still blown a hole in the cabin wall big enough to drive a piled-up dogsled through. It wouldn't have left a man's body intact inside its clothes, and taken his head clean off at the neck. And it couldn't have done to that head . . . the things I saw done to the head of poor Bob Gendreau. Put it this way: my second a.s.sumption was bears; them, or some other wild animal. Bears roused too soon from their hibernation, hungry and enraged, coming on the camp and smashing it all to pieces. But again, when you looked at all the evidence, that didn't sit right either.

"There was a side of bacon hanging on the wall still; bears would have taken that. And they wouldn't have stopped at knocking off the head of Bob Gendreau; that's not where the sustenance lies, and all a bear ever looks for is sustenance. Whatever took Bob's head off, then mauled it so his own mother wouldn't have known it; that thing wasn't doing what it did out of blind animal instinct, nor yet the need for nourishment. That thing was doing what it did because it wanted to-because it liked it, maybe. Some say man is the lord of all creation because he's the only creature blessed with reason; others, that he's set apart from the rest of the beasts because he takes pleasure in killing, and there's no other animal does that. But up in that cabin I learned different. Now, I believe there's at least one other creature on this planet that draws satisfaction from its kills, and not just a square meal. I got my first inkling of that when I saw what was left of Harvey Tibbets.

"He was jammed into an unravaged corner of the cabin. It looked as if he'd been trying to dig clean through the packed-mud floor; there was a hole in the ground at his feet, and his fingers were all bloodied and torn. You could see that, because of the way he was laying; hunkered down on his haunches, facing out towards the room, for all the world like a Moslem when he prays to Mecca. His forehead was touching the earth, and his arms were stretched out before him. His hands were clenched in the dirt, still clutching two last handfuls of it even in death. There was no mistaking his att.i.tude: he'd been grovelling before whatever had pa.s.sed through that cabin. Begging it for mercy.

"And whatever it was had looked down upon him as he crouched there; listened to his screams, I guess. And had it granted him mercy? I don't know. I can't speak as to its motivations. What it had done, was sever both his hands, cut 'em clear off at the wrists. Remember before, when I said he appeared to have been digging in the dirt, trying to escape? Both his hands were still there, torn-up and b.l.o.o.d.y like I said. And he was kneeling down with his arms outstretched; you remember that. But in between the stumps at the end of his forearms and the tattered beginnings of his wrists, there was nothing but a foot of blood-soaked earth. Whatever had killed him had cut off both his hands, and watched him bleed out on the floor while he begged it for leniency. Now what sort of a creature does that sound like to you?

"Indians, was what some of the men thought; Indians touched with the wendigo madness. But how could any man, crazy or sane, have knocked an entire gable end out of the cabin that way? There was an Indian with us, one of the portageurs, a quiet, dark-complected fellow named Jake: he wouldn't come within ten yards of the devastation, but he told me it wasn't any of his kin. 'Not yours either,' he said after a pause, and I asked him what he meant by it.

"He took me aside and pointed in the snow. There was a mess of our prints, converging on the cabin so that the ground outside the blasted-out place was practically trampled bare. All around the snow was practically virgin still, and Jake showed me the only thing that sullied it. A single set of tracks, leading from the cabin and headed away north, down along the gulch. I say leading from the cabin, mostly because there wasn't anything in the cabin could have made those prints, living or dead. If it wasn't for that, then I don't know that I could have told you what direction whatever made the prints was traveling in. They weren't regular footmarks, you see, and they were all wrong in their shape, in their arrangement-in their number, even. And the weirdest thing about them? They stopped dead about fifty yards out. A step, then another, then nothing but the undisturbed snow, as far as the eye could see.

"Later on, once the shock of it had pa.s.sed, I asked Jake what could have made those prints, and he told me an old legend of his people, about the time before men walked these northern wastes, when it was just G.o.ds and trolls and ogres.

"Back then, he said, there were beings come down from the sky, and they laid claim to the Earth for a long season of destruction. They were like pariahs between the stars, these beings: not even the Old Ones, the G.o.ds without a worshipper, could bear to have them near. They were cast out in the end, as well as the Old Ones could manage it: but the story goes that some of them escaped exile by burrowing down into the earth and waiting their time, till some cataclysm of the planet might uncover them. They could wait: nothing on Earth could kill them, you see. They couldn't die in this dimension. They would only sleep, through geologic ages of the planet, till something disturbed them and they came to light once more.

"That was the legend: I got it out of Jake later that same day, when the party had split up and we were searching all the low land around the arroyo. The mood of the party was shocked and unforgiving: something had done this to our friends, and we were bound to avenge them the best we could. The trail of footprints had given some of the fellows pause for thought, but I think most of them just took the prints as simple evidence of something they could go after, some critter they could corner and shoot. They didn't reflect too much on what could have made them. If they'd stopped and thought it through, I doubt whether any one of them would have been prepared to do what we ended up doing that night: lying in ambush and waiting for the culprit to come back to the cabin.

"The reasoning-so far as it went-was, if it's an animal, it'll come back where there's food. If it's a man, it'll come back because that's what murderers do: revisit the scene of the crime. Pretty shaky logic, I know, but the blood of the party was up. We were really just looking for trouble, and we d.a.m.n near found it, too.

"As night fell we set up an ambuscade in the ruins of the cabin. We'd buried the bodies by then, of course, but inside the cabin still felt bad; stank, too, like something had lain dead in there all through the summer, and not just a few hours in the bitter icy cold. We had the stove going: we had to, else we'd have froze to death. We had guards at all the windows, and a barricade at the wrecked end of the cabin. It didn't matter what direction trouble might be coming at us from, we had it covered. Or so we thought.

"G.o.d, we were so cold! The wind died down soon after dark, and that probably saved us all from the hypothermia. Still it was like a knife going through you, that chill, and you had to get up and move around every so often, just to prove to yourself you were still alive. We pa.s.sed around a bottle of whiskey we found among the untouched provisions, and waited.