“Jokes?”

“Oh, like I’m dead. Anyway, I’ve got company. Gracie and the coons and whatever else comes around at night.”

“Such as?” Lionel said. “Bear? Deer? Ghost horses?”

Herzog rocked gently on his heels. The lantern light cast a shadow over him and he could’ve been a woodblock illustration of Rip Van Winkle after that long nap, or Rumpelstiltskin, crouched near a campfire in a fairy-tale forest, gloating that the queen would never guess his name.

“Well, let me tell you.” He scratched his dog’s ears. “Gracie’s a hell of a watchdog. The other morning, she stalked the edges of the yard, whining and growling. I kept my rifle handy. Bear are thick in this area and that was her bear growl. Blackies this time of year want a few last meals before they go to sleep. They aren’t normally a threat, but a man can’t be too careful. A couple of nights later, Gracie barked her head off. I figured she’d treed a coon or somethin’, right there ten feet from the door in that old pine.”

We reflexively turned our heads to follow his gesture to the tree in question.

“I shined my light at the crown and saw a man ogling me. Face white as dust, and half-hid among the branches. He hung there, upside down, like a spider. Then he grinned.”

“What did you do?” Lionel said. His eyes were wide.

“Ran inside and barred the damned door is what I did,” Herzog said. “It had to be Shanks Mathis, a logger. Disappeared one autumn in the nineties. He was cutting the top out of a tree and it corkscrewed. Shanks and the top of that tree were flung into Twenty-Mile Gorge.”

“Logging is a hazardous business,” I said.

“Rangers didn’t recover his body. They brought in dogs and a chopper. Rough piece of country, you know. Now we see Shanks in the woods. People round here leave offerings for him on his jaunts.” To demonstrate, he popped the top on a beer and set it on the porch. “If Shanks is passing through, this’ll be gone come sunrise.”

I was thinking if he turned his back on Lionel, it would be gone in two seconds.

“Why do they call him Shanks?” I asked the obvious.

“On account of his rusty climbing hooks.” Herzog pointed at his shin. “Buckle it on like cowboy spurs, except these are yea-long spikes. A veteran climber with hooks and a strap can scamper up a tree faster than a coon.” He rose and limped over to the pine and rubbed the bark. “See these gouges where the sap bleeds? Fresh. More of them go all the way near to the crown. Spurs made those marks.”

I pointed at a mobile of bird bones dangling from another tree.

“Aren’t those charms supposed to keep bad spirits at bay?”

“There’s worse than Shanks. That’s what them charms are for.”

Bellow produced a crumpled pack of Benson & Hedges and drew one. An inveterate smoker since youth, he’d told me he wanted to quit during one of our periodic conversations. As a former brother in bondage to nicotine, I empathized with the struggle. He considered the cigarette and stuck it back into the pack with a forlorn sigh. A quiet demonstration of a man holding on to his temper with both hands.