Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

All my life, I would be guided by those ringing words.

Still unsettled by my womenfolk’s escape to Florida, I needed to reach out some way, make them a parting present, and since I was penniless and my pigs too young to slaughter, I wanted to trap a rabbit or squirrel or possum for a pie. Avoided as a haunt of restless spirits, the old Tilghman place had always been my hunting ground; knowing the wild things’ passages through glades and hollows as a nesting bird knows every point throughout its territory, I ran a new trapline through its ancient forest.

One cold morning of late November, I arrived at the greening ring of the old carriage circle and immediately sensed something in the air. The Deepwood manor house, charred and hollowed out by vigilante fire, squatted half-hidden in a copse of oak and juniper. Over the black hole of the doorway, the high dormer was bound in creeper and wild grape, and the shingled roof peak, ragged now, sagged swaybacked in a failing line along the sky. The ruin had the mournful aspect of a harrow left to rust in an oldfield corner or an abandoned stack of dark rain-rotted hay, but on that day as I drew near, its aspect shifted. Though no smoke rose out of its chimney, the gutted habitation hid some form of life.

In those hungry years, any abandoned roof might shelter thieves or desperate black men without means or destination, and this day I sensed that imbalance in the air that is sign of being watched, even awaited. I passed the house, not breaking step, scanning casually for boot prints or fresh horse dung or anything untoward or out of place. I was prepared. Even so, what I now saw snapped my breath away.

I kept my head, let my gaze skip past, walking on a ways before slipping my jackknife from my pocket, letting it fall. Turning and stooping to retrieve it, I scanned that little porch under the peak, scanned further as I straightened and kept going. Beneath the wild bees’ nest under the dormer, behind the leafy rail, a dark shape crouched motionless, its eyes burning holes into my back as I walked on. That imbalance in the air was the with-held breath of a living thing too bulky for a human being but not dark enough for a black bear even if a bear would climb up in there. I moaned but seized hold of my panic and did not run and never once looked back, crossing the gullied oldfields over red iron earth where hard brambles and thin poverty grass choked the spent cotton.

When I returned to run my traps a few days later, the same gray weather lay upon the land, yet there was a lightness in the air, and a clear cold emptiness behind the frost-bronzed vine on that high balcony. The dark shape that had crouched there was gone. What had it been? The mystery frightened me.

Probably the thing had fled the region, knowing it was seen. But I had scarcely reassured myself when, at the wood edge, I came across a trail of dirtied feathers, not dove or quail killed by a hawk or bobcat but frayed feathers plucked from some old chicken, beckoning sadly from the thorns and twigs in the browning woodland air.

I stared about me, then moved into the forest, as trees fell in behind, all the while peering through skeins of bare black twigs and branches, in the chill gloom that at this time of year persisted in the deeper woods even in day. Nearing my trap, I sensed some queer vibration, as if a rabbit struggled, and with it, that shift and imbalance in the air. I moved forward in a crouch, then on hands and knees.

In a hickory hollow where low sunlight fired the shagbark, a rough shape mantled my trap like a huge owl, hunched motionless, transfixed in its deep listening. Slowly, then, a tattered head turned in my direction, crest burning in cold rays of autumn light. When the thing rose soundlessly as smoke, clutching my rabbit, I retreated in horror, fell backwards over a log- Get away! That screech tore the woodland silence, and when it died, the great owl-thing had vanished. I fled the trees and lit out across the open fields toward the Ridge road before summoning outrage and the courage to hook back toward Deepwood, wanting to make sure that old house was the thief ’s lair.

Though I had no idea what I would do next, I was desperate to get there first. Rather than leave the cover of the woods, the creature was bound to circle the long way around and approach its den through the west wall of the ruin, which was half-fallen and wide open to the weather. Panting from the run, I crept in through shaggy boxwood to the east wall window. Peering and listening, sick with fright-what did I hope to do without a weapon?-I was on the point of flight when the bulky silhouette loomed up in the jagged opening in the west wall, in failing light. Passing through without sound, it sank into the blackness. The frozen rabbit thumped onto a board. A tinder scratched, a small blaze flickered, jumped to life, casting nervous shadows. The fire glinted in the thing’s red eye, lit matted arms and chest and neck and the rough head of stubbled feathers. At the sound of my expelled breath, it rose like a great owl on man’s legs and vanished through the wall.

Scrambling backwards, slashed by the hard briar, I screamed to fright the creature that even now was circling the outside of the house, rushing through the shadows of dusk to strike me down. Making its kill, it would hunch upon my body as it had my rabbit, shifting bloody talons, the wintry moonrise glinting on its beak.

When I burst in, Papa jumped up, his ring eye crimson. Gold-red locks matted with sweat, his head loomed huge and wild. “Curse you, boy, don’t bang the hinges off my door!” Confused by grog, he would not sit down again to his thin gruel and stale biscuit but swayed beside the table, coughing thickly in the fumes from the oil lamp. He lost his balance, staggered again, bellowed, “What ails you, boy?” into my face. By the stove, Mama made no move to come forward. In her cupboard, Ninny Minnie whined.

Gruff and sullen, I told Papa that I needed the rifle. He stamped the earth floor like a bee-stung horse. “Banging in here demanding my damn rifle? Show some respect!”

“Your father is upset, Edgar. He’s been dismissed from Graniteville again.”

Not now, Mama, not now! How I hated the excitement in her face. Since leaving home, I had never been sure which parent I resented more, the red-faced violent male or this pale vindictive female who teased her spouse as a child picks at a scab, until it bleeds. But this day, my father was sick with failure, rotten with bad moonshine, and merely groaned at his wife’s queer satisfaction in their straits. He sat down hard and blinked and squinched his nose, vented a hacking cough; he drew his knife from his scuffed boot and hacked at the stale bread, gave that up, too. “We ate better on the battlefield.” Elijah Watson glowered at his bowl, as if in the bottom of this cracked clay vessel of insipid soup he might descry every last sad gobbet of a hopeless life.

“Papa? Please. I need it.”

Lige Watson heaved around, brow furrowed. “What’s got you so scared, boy? You never been the scairdy kind.”

Indifferent to my fear as well as his fatherly show of concern, Mama got back to business. “Who is to provide for us this time, Mr. Watson? Should this boy come home as head of his father’s household?”

“He don’t even live in his father’s household, last I heard.” Papa scowled at the bitter memory of my assault. “I asked a question, boy.”

I blurted out what I had seen, a strange man-thing, inhabiting Deepwood. A trap-robber. Mama told me I’d imagined things, but the man said, “Godamighty.” He kicked his chair back, lurching to his feet. His illegal musket was dragged down from the beams as its oily sacking fell to the earth floor; he slammed out of the house. The big roan, left saddled, snorted as it wheeled, and the carom of its hooves on frozen clay diminished in the darkness.