It made me mad. If he was hurt, why in the hell didn’t he stay in one place so somebody could help him? It was probably some idiot drunk out of his mind on whiskey, wandering around with a sprained ankle or something, lost.

There was nothing moving down there. Just the great brown trunks and grapevines and the dead brown leaves. I went down the side of the hollow slowly, trying to slip with the loaded rifle. A fine steady rain had begun, and my head was soon wet. That was all I needed, pneumonia on top of hypothermia and frostbite. I decided that if I found the guy and he was drunk, I might just let him find his own way out. Or by God even prosecute him. We had posted signs every fifty feet along the road. Even an illiterate knows what a posted sign looks like.

When I got down to the creek, the voice had moved away again. Somehow, in some way that I couldn’t understand, he knew where I was and wasn’t letting me get any closer. I stopped then. I sat down, winded, and held my rifle between my knees. I was sweating underneath my long underwear. That was going to bring a chill later. I wasn’t going to chase some nutty asshole over half of Lafayette County.

“Hey!” I yelled. heyeyeyeyeyeyey, the echo said.

“Where you at?” at tat tat tat

The sounds rolled back into silence. Everything quiet. Except: oooooooooooooooh plleeeeeeeeeeeeeee haaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyylllppp

Shit, I thought. What in the … I began to not like it very much at all. I could have been anybody. You read the papers every morning, what do you find? Absolutely insane people, maniacs, wandering loose, murdering other people. Dead nude women who’ve had car trouble, missing people who are never found. Someone disappears and the police look for them for a while, but after a few days it’s not news anymore. You stop hearing about it. But the missing people are still missing. It matters deeply to a family somewhere. Their loved one is somewhere, make no mistake. You read the small articles and you say to yourself: Dead. Murdered. They’ll find her in five or six years. Or never. Anything or anybody could be out in the woods. Lunatics escaped from maximum security, luring people deeper back into the woods. … I stuck cartridges into the Marlin until her belly was full. I wasn’t taking any chances.

I had made up my mind to fire three shots when I saw Bobby. He was coming slowly down the hollow ahead of me, stopping and listening. He and I were both listening to the same thing. It was weaker, softer, it didn’t want him going the wrong way. I knew that then.