Otherworldly Maine by Noreen Doyle Page A

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 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?”
    â€œNot 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 I 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 Long-tooth had broken through, the shape of his foot showed clearly down there 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 flatfooted. 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.”
    â€œAnyhow there’s only one.”
    He said slowly, “Only one set of tracks.”
    â€œWhat 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