He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time. He listened to the stars and spelled out what the stars were saying. He had found the creature that lay imprisoned in the stone. He had climbed the tree that in other days had been climbed by homing wildcats to reach the den gouged by time and weather out of the cliff’s sheer face. He lived alone on a worn-out farm perched on a high and narrow ridge that overlooked the confluence of two rivers. And his next-door neighbor, a most ill-favored man, drove to the county seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief.
The sheriff dropped by within a week or so and walked across the yard to where the man was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch that faced the river hills. The sheriff came to a halt at the foot of the stairs that ran up to the porch.
“I’m Sheriff Harley Shepherd,” he said. “I was just driving by. Been some years since I been out in this neck of the woods. You are new here, aren’t you?”
The man rose to his feet and gestured at another chair. “Been here three years or so,” he said. “The name is Wallace Daniels. Come up and sit with me.”
The sheriff climbed the stairs and the two shook hands, then sat down in the chairs.
“You don’t farm the place,” the sheriff said.
The weed-grown fields came up to the fence that hemmed in the yard.
Daniels shook his head. “Subsistence farming, if you can call it that. A few chickens for eggs. A couple of cows for milk and butter. Some hogs for meat—the neighbors help me butcher. A garden of course, but that’s about the story.”
“Just as well,” the sheriff said. “The place is all played out. Old Amos Williams, he let it go to ruin. He never was no farmer.”
“The land is resting now,” said Daniels. “Give it ten years—twenty might be better—and it will be ready once again. The only things it’s good for now are the rabbits and the woodchucks and the meadow mice. A lot of birds, of course. I’ve got the finest covey of quail a man has ever seen.”
“Used to be good squirrel country,” said the sheriff. “Coon, too. I suppose you still have coon. You have a hunter, Mr. Daniels?”
“I don’t own a gun,” said Daniels.
The sheriff settled deeply into the chair, rocking gently.
“Pretty country out here,” he declared. “Especially with the leaves turning colors. A lot of hardwood and they are colorful. Rough as hell, of course, this land of yours. Straight up and down, the most of it. But pretty.”
“It’s old country,” Daniels said. “The last sea retreated from this area more than four hundred million years ago. It has stood as dry land since the end of the Silurian. Unless you go up north, on to the Canadian Shield, there aren’t many places in this country you can find as old as this.”
“You a geologist, Mr. Daniels?”
“Not really. Interested, is all. The rankest amateur. I need something to fill my time and I do a lot of hiking, scrambling up and down these hills. And you can’t do that without coming face to face with a lot of geology. I got interested. Found some fossil brachiopods and got to wondering about them. Sent off for some books and read up on them. One thing led to another and—”
“Brachiopods? Would they be dinosaurs, or what? I never knew there were dinosaurs out this way.”
“Not dinosaurs,” said Daniels. “Earlier than dinosaurs, at least the ones I found. They’re small. Something like clams or oysters. But the shells are hinged in a different sort of way. These were old ones, extinct millions of years ago. But we still have a few brachiopods living now. Not too many of them.”
“It must be interesting.”
“I find it so,” said Daniels.
“You knew old Amos Williams?”
“No. He was dead before I came here. Bought the land from the bank that was settling his estate.”
“Queer old coot,” the sheriff said. “Fought with all his neighbors. Especially with Ben Adams. Him and Ben had a line fence feud going on for years. Ben said Amos refused to keep up the fence. Amos claimed Ben knocked it down and then sort of, careless-like, hazed his cattle over into Amos’s hayfield. How you get along with Ben?”
“All right,” Daniels said. “No trouble. I scarcely know the man.”
“Ben don’t do much farming, either,” said the sheriff. Hunts and fishes, hunts ginseng, does some trapping in the winter. Prospects for minerals now and then.”
“There are minerals in these hills,” said Daniels. “Lead and zinc. But it would cost more to get it out than it would be worth. At present prices, that is.”
“Ben always has some scheme cooking.” said the sheriff. “Always off on some wild goose chase. And he’s a pure pugnacious man. Always has his nose out of joint about something. Always on the prod for trouble. Bad man to have for an enemy. Was in the other day to say someone’s been lifting a hen or two of his. You haven’t been missing any, have you?”
