Giovanni's Gift by Bradford Morrow

closely but could see no footprint.
    â€”I’ll call the phone company for you when I get back to town, said Noah.
    â€”I’m sure Edmé already did.
    Continuing up along the bank of Ash Creek, they passed the stone springhouse and veered left toward the foreyard.
    â€”Was it kids, you say?
    â€”The one I saw might’ve been a kid; he wasn’t too tall. It was hard to tell—he had a mask on.
    â€”Nobody you recognized from around here?
    â€”I never saw the mask before, if that’s what you mean.
    Henry continued to play with the idea of whether or not he should mention the effigy, the hanging, the skull head, the thing dressed in his own clothes. He hadn’t mentioned it to Edmé in part not wanting her frightened more than she already was, not to mention that she’d wondered aloud, before going to town this morning, about whether it’d been a mistake to move to Ash Creek, that maybe she’d been right to be reluctant. —Listen, Edmé, this kind of thing happens anywhere you live these days, he’d argued.
    But also, he had to admit at least to himself, as he’d later confide to me, once all the secrets had been laid bare, that he was somewhat embarrassed—was that the word?—certainly unnerved, by that vision in the high meadow the night before. Perhaps it had been a rash move to burn it, after all, but it seemed the best way to get it behind him. As if by obliterating it and keeping the matter to himself, it almost didn’t take place. Henry did have some idea why that effigy hung in the tree, but sensed it was premature to discuss it with Edmé, Noah, or anyone else.
    Noah paused as Henry undid the latch that held the yard gate to the fence post and swung the gate aside, a movement that set clanging the cluster of sheep bells attached to the rounded gate newel.
    â€”A mask, you say.
    â€”Well—
    â€”I guess it’s one of those things where you had to be there.
    Henry said nothing as Noah walked into the grassy yard still damp from the night shower. Now he wished Edmé were here to buffer Noah Daiches. But after having made her call to Noah, she had gone into town, to buy supplies while the sheriff was up at Ash Creek, so that Henry wouldn’t be by himself, though of course this was not something she would ever tell her husband. The two men crossed the yard, along the ground floor of the house, passed the double doors that led into the cellar, and climbed the craggy stone stairs which were excavated into the steep bank at the northern end of the yard.
    â€”I’m assuming, telling from what Edmé said, it was up here, then? Noah asked, as they mounted the wide cool stone steps.
    Henry said, —Let’s go.
    One after the other, for the trail was not as wide as a bridle path, they scaled the sheer slope, Henry first, although Noah knew the way well, had known it for years. There were many trails that would take a hiker up away from the house and back into the endless rugged woods, but this one was used most. If you stayed with the trail along the quasi-perpendicular gorge, overgrown with thicket on either narrow side, the strait path eventually descended until it paralleled the wild creek, with its clutter of monumental boulders and many virginal deep pools holding grayling and trout. Farther up was superior hunting: elk, bear, and mule deer. The two of them had in the past forged their way miles upstream into settings so elementary, so rigorous and fierce and sacrosanct, so uncivilized, as to seem brutal, even though it was they who’d carried weaponry and entered the inhuman forest with the intent of killing. After what had happened back in there several years ago now, maybe not quite that long, Noah hadn’t been back up to walk this trail with Henry, and were the truth to be known, Henry didn’t trek far up there much anymore himself, though once it had easily been his favorite part of the world. What before