Wilderness
Forests, mountains, lakes and empty country. These stories are about how small a person becomes far from roads and lights, and about the things that might live where nobody goes.
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The Willows Classic
Two friends canoeing down the Danube make camp on a tiny island of willows in a vast, flooded marsh, and the willows seem to move.
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Burn Morels
The spring after a wildfire, the burned forest fills up with morels, and pickers come from all over the West to pick them. The buyer at the Okanogan camp gave me eight rules on an index card. The one about the green tree is the only one I broke.
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July Ice
On the night of July 11th the reservoir above our town in Montana froze solid, in the middle of a heat wave. Half the town walked out onto it. Under the ice, the lights of the old town were on.
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Young Goodman Brown Classic
A young Puritan leaves his wife Faith for one night to keep an appointment in the forest outside Salem village.
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Next Row Over
My great-aunt picked huckleberries in the Washington Cascades every August for seventy years. She taught me two rules. If you hear someone picking in the next row over and nobody's there, don't answer when they call your name. And never eat from a bucket you didn't fill.
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Smoke Report
Letters from a seasonal fire lookout to her sister, written from a tower on a remote peak. She has been reporting a column of smoke in the valley below every evening. It doesn't drift with the wind.
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Last Pass
I drive a county snowplow on the night route up to Tamarack Pass. The road ends at a gate at the summit, and on the worst nights of the year, it doesn't.
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The Interlopers Classic
Two men whose families have feuded for generations meet one winter night in a disputed Carpathian forest, rifles in hand.
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The Boarded Window Classic
Why did the old hermit of the Ohio woods board up the only window of his cabin? The answer begins with his wife.
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The Dead Valley Classic
As boys in Sweden, two friends took a shortcut over the hills and found a valley where nothing grows and nothing sounds.
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A Haunted Island Classic
Left alone for the end of the summer in a cottage on a remote Canadian island, a student starts to feel he is not the last guest after all.
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Metes and Bounds
A land surveyor is hired to retrace an 1884 deed in the hill woods before a sale. The deed carves out a single acre that is "not to be entered." Its corners are not where they ought to be.
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Yuki-Onna Classic
Two woodcutters caught in a blizzard shelter in a ferryman's hut, and only one of them survives the visit of a woman dressed in white.
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Thermal
Every winter I count elk from a helicopter over the Idaho backcountry with a thermal camera. Elk show up as bright white shapes on the snow. On a ridge above the Lochsa, the camera showed twenty-three shapes standing in a circle, and they were not elk.
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The Damned Thing Classic
At an inquest in a remote cabin, a coroner's jury hears how a man died while out hunting and is asked to believe the unbelievable.
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Buddy Check
The summer I was nineteen I lifeguarded at a lake camp in the pines. Every twenty minutes I blew the whistle and the kids raised their hands in pairs. That was the summer the count stopped coming out even.
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Gabriel-Ernest Classic
An English country gentleman finds a naked boy sunbathing in his woods who says he hunts by night on four feet.
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The Glamour of the Snow Classic
A writer wintering in a Swiss mountain village meets a mysterious young woman on the moonlit ice rink, and she offers to take him skiing.
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Unsigned Turnout
Every spring, crews dig the North Cascades Highway out from under thirty feet of snow. The highway is closed to the public the whole time. The rule on the crew is simple. If you see a viewpoint sign that isn't brown, don't read it, and don't pull in.
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Phenology
For thirty years I have kept a record of my backyard's seasons, the first crocus, the first robin, the first frost. This spring there is a circle of lawn under the old apple tree where it is still last October.
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The Terror of Blue John Gap Classic
A doctor convalescing on a Derbyshire farm hears rumours of missing sheep and of something in the old Roman mine.
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The Music on the Hill Classic
A newly married town woman persuades her husband to move to his remote family estate, where she mocks the old woodland superstitions.
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The Horror-Horn Classic
At a Swiss ski resort, a visitor hears a local legend of creatures living on the high, lonely mountain, and goes skiing alone anyway.
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Occultation
Pages from the observing log of an amateur astronomer in the high desert of eastern Oregon. He was timing stars as they blinked out behind the Moon. Then they started blinking out where the Moon wasn't.
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The Wendigo Classic
On a moose-hunting trip deep in the Canadian backwoods, a guide hears something calling his name from the wind above the trees.
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The Man Who Went Too Far Classic
A young man living in a riverside village has devoted himself to communing with nature so completely that birds land on his shoulders.