Dreamcatcher

under his arm, namely that death was in the neighborhood, or perhaps even Death, a hurrying figure like something escaped from an early Ingmar Bergman film,
something carrying a concealed implement in the coarse folds of its robe. Scissors, perhaps. Or a scalpel.
And the worst of it was that the man would not die, or at least not at once. He would
fall down and lie there screaming, as Jonesy had lain screaming in the street. He couldn’t

remember screaming, but of course he had; he had been told this and had no reason to disbelieve it. Screamed his fucking head off, most likely. And what if the man in the brown coat and orange accessories started screaming for Marcy? Surely he would not-not
really-
but Jonesy’s mind might report screams of Marcy. If there was eye-fever-if he could look at a man’s brown coat and see it as a deer’s head-then there was likely the auditory

equivalent, as well. To hear a man screaming and know you were the reason-dear God, no.
And still his finger would not loosen.
What broke his paralysis was both simple and unexpected: about ten paces from the
base of Jonesy’s tree, the man in the brown coat fell down. Jonesy heard the pained, surprised sound he made-
mrof!
was what it sounded like-and his finger released the trigger without his even thinking about it.

The man was down on his hands and knees, his brown-gloved fingers (brown gloves,
another mistake, this guy almost could have gone out with a sign reading SHOOT ME
taped to his back, Jonesy thought) spread on the ground, which had already begun to whiten. As the man got up again, he began to speak aloud in a fretful, wondering voice.
Jonesy didn’t realize at first that he was also weeping.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” the man said as he worked his way back to a standing position.
He swayed on his feet as if drunk. Jonesy knew that men in the woods, men away from
their families for a week or a weekend, got up to all sorts of small wickedness-drinking at ten in the morning was one of the most common. But Jonesy didn’t think this guy was drunk. No reason; just a vibe.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” And then, as he began to walk again: “Snow. Now it’s

snow. Please God, oh God, now it’s snow, oh dear.”
His first couple of steps were lurching and unsure. Jonesy had about decided that his
vibe was incorrect, the guy
was
loaded, and then the fellow’s gait smoothed out and he began to walk a little more evenly. He was scratching at his right cheek.
He passed directly beneath the stand, for a moment he wasn’t a man at all but only a
round circle of orange cap with brown shoulders to either side of it. His voice drifted up,

liquid and full of tears, mostly
Oh dear
with the occasional
Oh God
or
Now it’s snow
thrown in for salt.
Jonesy stood where he was, watching as the guy first disappeared directly beneath the
stand, then came out on the other side. He pivoted without being aware of it to keep the
plodding man in view-nor was he aware that he had lowered his rifle to his side, even pausing long enough to put the safety back on.

Jonesy didn’t call out, and he supposed he knew why: simple guilt. He was afraid that
the man down there would take one look at him and see the truth in Jonesy’s eyes-even through his tears and the thickening snow, the man would see that Jonesy had been up there with his gun pointed, that Jonesy had almost shot him.
Twenty paces beyond the tree, the man stopped and only stood there, his gloved right

hand raised to his brow, shielding his eyes from the snow. Jonesy realized he had seen Hole in the Wall. Had probably realized he was on an actual path, too.
Oh dear
and
Oh
God
stopped, and the guy began to run toward the sound of the generator, rocking from side to side like a man on the deck of a ship. Jonesy could hear the stranger’s short, sharp
gasps for breath as he pounded toward the roomy cabin with the lazy curl of smoke rising

from the chimney and fading almost at once into the snow.
Jonesy began to work his way down the rungs nailed to the trunk of the maple with
his gun slung over his shoulder (the thought that the man might present some sort of danger did not occur to him, not then; he simply didn’t want to leave the Garand, which
was a fine gun, out in the snow). His hip had stiffened, and by the time he got to the foot

of the tree, the man he’d almost shot had made it nearly all the way to the cabin door…
which was unlocked, of course. No one locked up, not way out here.
5
About ten feet from the granite slab that served as Hole in the Wall’s front stoop, the
man in the brown coat and orange hat fell down again. His hat tumbled off, revealing a sweaty clump of thinning brown hair. He stayed on one knee for a moment, head lowered.
Jonesy could hear his harsh, fast breathing.

The man picked up his cap, and just as he set it back on his head, Jonesy hailed him.
The man staggered to his feet and turned tipsily. Jonesy’s first impression was that the man’s face was very long-that he was almost what people meant when they called someone “horsefaced”. Then, as Jonesy got closer, hitching a little but not really limping

(and that was good, because the ground underfoot was getting slippery fast), he realized the guy’s face wasn’t particularly long at all-he was just very scared and very
very
pale.
The red patch on his cheek where he had been scratching stood out brightly. The relief that
came over him when he saw Jonesy hurrying toward him was large and immediate. Jonesy

almost laughed at himself, standing up there on the platform in the tree and worrying about the guy reading his eyes. This man wasn’t into reading faces, and he clearly had no
interest in where Jonesy had come from or what he might have been doing. This man looked like he wanted to throw his arms around Jonesy’s neck and cover him with big gooey kisses.
“Thank God!” the man cried. He held out one hand toward Jonesy and shuffled

toward him through the thin icing of new snow. “Oh gee, thank God, I’m lost, I’ve been
lost in the woods since yesterday, I thought I was going to die out here. I… I…”
His feet slipped and Jonesy grabbed his upper arms. He was a big man, taller than Jonesy, who stood six-two, and broader, as well. Nevertheless, Jonesy’s first impression was of insubstantialness, as if the man’s fear had somehow scooped him out and left him
light as a milkweed pod.

“Easy, fella,” Jonesy said. “Easy, you’re all right now, you’re okay. Let’s just get you
inside and get you warm, how would that be?”
As if the word
warm
had been his cue, the man’s teeth began to chatter. “S-S-Sure.”
He tried to smile, without much success. Jonesy was again struck by his extreme pallor. It
was cold out here this morning, upper twenties at best, but the guy’s cheeks were all ashes

and lead. The only color in his face, other than the red patch, was the brown crescents under his eyes.
Jonesy got an arm around the man’s shoulders, suddenly swept by an absurd and

sappy tenderness for this stranger, an emotion so strong it was like his first junior high school crush-Mary Jo Martineau in a sleeveless white blouse and straight knee-length denim skirt. He was now absolutely sure the man hadn’t been drinking-it was fear (and maybe exhaustion) rather than booze that had made him unsteady on his feet. Yet there
was

a smell on his breath-something like bananas. It reminded Jonesy of the ether he’d sprayed into the carburetor of his first car, a Vietnam-era Ford, to get it to crank over on
cold mornings.
“Get you inside, right?”
“Yeah. C-Cold. Thank God you came along. Is this-”
“My place? No, a friend’s.” Jonesy opened the varnished oak door and helped the
man over the threshold. The stranger gasped at the feel of the warm air, and a flush began

to rise in his cheeks. Jonesy was relieved to see there was some blood in him, after all.
6
Hole in the Wall was pretty grand by deep woods standards. You came in on the
single big downstairs room-kitchen, dining room, and living room, all in one-but there were two bedrooms behind it and another upstairs, under the single eave. The big room was filled with the scent of pine and its mellow, varnished glow. There was a Navajo rug

on the floor and a Micmac hanging on one wall which depicted brave little stick-hunters
surrounding an enormous bear. A plain oak table, long enough to accommodate eight
places, defined the dining area. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the living area; when both were going, the place made you feel stupid with the heat even if

it was twenty below outside. The west wall was all window, giving a view of the long, steep slope which fell off to the west. There had been a fire there in the seventies, and the
dead trees stood black and twisted in the thickening snow. Jonesy, Pete, Henry and the Beav called this slope The Gulch, because that’s what the Beav’s Dad and
his
friends had called it.
“Oh God, thank God, and thank you, too,” the man in the orange hat said to Jonesy,

and when Jonesy grinned-that was a lot of thank-yous-the man laughed shrilly as if to say
yes, he knew it, it was a funny thing to say but he couldn’t help it. He began to take deep
breaths, for a few moments looking like one of those exercise gurus you saw on high-number cable. On every exhale, he talked.
“God, I really thought I was done-for last night… it was so cold… and the damp air, I
remember that… remember thinking Oh boy, oh dear, what if there’s snow coming after

all… I got coughing and couldn’t stop… something came and I thought I have to stop coughing, if that’s a bear or something I’ll… you know… provoke it or something only I
couldn’t and after awhile it just… you know, went away on its own-”
“You saw a bear in the night”,” Jonesy was both fascinated and appalled. He had

heard there were bears up here-Old Man Gosselin and his pickle-barrel buddies at the store loved to tell bear stories, particularly to the out-of-staters-but the idea that this man, lost and on his own, had been menaced by one in the night, was keenly horrible. It was like hearing a sailor talk about a sea monster.
“I don’t know that it was,” the man said, and suddenly shot Jonesy a sidewards look

of cunning that Jonesy didn’t like and couldn’t read. “I can’t say for sure, by then there was no more lightning.”
“Lightning, too? Man!” If not for the guy’s obviously genuine distress, Jonesy would
have wondered if he wasn’t getting his leg pulled. In truth, he wondered it a little, anyway.
“Dry lightning, I guess,” the man said. Jonesy could almost see him shrugging it off.
He scratched at the red place on his cheek, which might have been a touch of frostbite.

“See it in winter, it means there’s a storm on the way.”
“And you saw this? Last night?”
“I guess so.” The man gave him another quick, sideways glance, but this time Jonesy saw no slyness in it, and guessed he had seen none before. He saw only exhaustion. “It’s
all mixed up in my mind… my stomach’s been hurting ever since I got lost it always hurts
when I’m ascairt, ever since I was a little kid…”
And he was
like
a little kid, Jonesy thought, looking everywhere at once with perfect

unselfconsciousness. Jonesy led the guy toward the couch in front of the fireplace and the
guy let himself be led.
Ascairt. He even said ascairt instead of afraid, like a kid. A little
kid.
“
Give me your coat,” Jonesy said, and as the guy first unbuttoned the buttons and then reached for the zipper under them, Jonesy thought again of how he had thought he was looking at a deer, at a
buck

for Chrissakes-he had mistaken one of those buttons for an eye and had damned near put a bullet through it.
The guy got the zipper halfway down and then it stuck, one side of the little gold mouth choking on the cloth. He looked at it-gawked at it, really-as if he had never seen such a thing before. And when Jonesy reached for the zipper, the man dropped his hands
to his sides and simply let Jonesy reach, as a first-grader would stand and let the teacher

put matters right when he got his galoshes on the wrong feet or his jacket on inside out.
Jonesy got the little gold mouth started again and pulled it the rest of the way down.
Outside the window-wall, The Gulch was disappearing, although you could still see the black scrawled shapes of the trees. Almost thirty years they had come up here together for
the hunting, almost thirty years without a single miss, and in none of that time had there

been snow heavier than the occasional squall. It looked like all that was about to change,
although how could you tell? These days the guys on radio and TV made four inches of
fresh powder sound like the next Ice Age.
For a moment the guy only stood there with his jacket hanging open and snow
melting around his boots on the polished wooden floor, looking up at the rafters with his

mouth open, and yes, he was like a great big six-year-old-or like Duddits. You almost expected to see mittens dangling from the cuffs of his jacket on clips. He shrugged out of
his coat in that perfectly recognizable child’s way, simply slumping his shoulders once it
was unzipped and letting it fall. If Jonesy hadn’t been there to catch it, it would have gone
on the floor and gotten right to work sopping up the puddles of melting snow.
“What’s that?” he asked.

For a moment Jonesy had no idea what the guy was talking about, and then he traced
the stranger’s gaze to the bit of weaving which hung from the center rafter. It was colorful-
red and green, with shoots of canary yellow, as well-and it looked like a spiderweb.
“It’s a dreamcatcher,” Jonesy said. “An Indian charm. Supposed to keep the
nightmares away, I guess.”
“Is it yours?”
Jonesy didn’t know if he meant the whole place (perhaps the guy hadn’t been

listening before) or just the dreamcatcher, but in either case the answer was the same. “No,
my friend’s. We come up hunting every year. “‘How many of you?” The man was
shivering, holding his arms crisscrossed over his chest and cupping his elbows in his
palms as he watched Jonesy hang his coat on the tree by the door. “Four. Beaver-this is his camp-is out hunting now. I don’t know if the snow’ll bring him back in or not. Probably it

will. Pete and Henry went to the store.”
“Gosselin’s? That one?”
“Uh-huh. Come on over here and sit down on the couch.” Jonesy led him to the
couch, a ridiculously long sectional. Such things had gone out of style decades ago, but it
didn’t smell too bad and nothing had infested it. Style and taste didn’t matter much at Hole
in the Wall.
“Stay put now,” he said, and left the man sitting there, shivering and shaking with his

hands clasped between his knees. His jeans had the sausagey look they get when there are
longjohns underneath, and still he shook and shivered. But the heat had brought on an absolute flood of color; instead of looking like a corpse, the stranger now looked like a diphtheria victim.
Pete and Henry were doubling in the bigger of the two downstairs bedrooms. Jonesy

ducked in, opened the cedar chest to the left of the door, and pulled out one of the two down comforters folded up inside. As he recrossed the living room to where the man sat
shivering on the couch, Jonesy realized he hadn’t asked the most elementary question of
all, the one even six-year-olds who couldn’t get their own zippers down asked.
As he spread the comforter over the stranger on the outsized camp couch, he said:

“What’s your name?” And realized he almost knew. McCoy? McCann? The man Jonesy
had almost shot looked up at him, at once pulling the comforter up around his neck. The
brown patches under his eyes were filling in purple. “mcCarthy,” he said. “Richard
McCarthy.” His hand, surprisingly plump and white without its glove, crept out from beneath the coverlet like a shy animal. “You are?”Gary Jones,” he said, and took the hand

with the one which had almost pulled the trigger. “Folks mostly call me Jonesy. “‘Thanks,
Jonesy.” McCarthy looked at him earnestly. “I think you saved my life.” “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jonesy said. He looked at that red patch again. Frostbite, just a small patch. Frostbite, had to be.
Chapter Two
THE BEAV
1
“You know I can’t call anyone, don’t you?” Jonesy said. “The phone lines don’t come

anywhere near here. There’s a genny for the electric, but that’s all.”
McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. “I was hearing the
generator, but you know how it is when you’re lost-noises are funny. Sometimes the sound
seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you’d swear it’s behind you and you
better turn back.”
Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the

week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs
and pain, he had never been lost.
“I’m trying to think what’d be the best thing,” Jonesy said. “I guess when Pete and
Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?”
It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been
walking, solidified Jonesy’s impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one

night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.
“Four,” McCarthy said, after that minute to think. “Just like you guys. We were
hunting in pairs. I was with a friend of mine, Steve Otis. He’s a lawyer like me, down in
Skowhegan. We’re all from Skowhegan, you know, and this week for us… it’s a big deal.”
Jonesy nodded, smiling. “Yeah. Same here.”
“Anyway, I guess I just wandered off.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, I was

hearing Steve over on my right, sometimes seeing his vest through the trees, and then I… I
just don’t know. I got thinking about stuff, I guess-one thing the woods are great for is thinking about stuff-and then I was on my own. I guess I tried to backtrack but then it got
dark…” He shook his head yet again, “It’s all mixed up in my mind, but yeah-there were
four of us, I guess that’s one thing I’m sure of Me and Steve and Nat Roper and Nat’s sister, Becky.”

“They must be worried sick.” McCarthy looked first startled, then apprehensive. This
was clearly a new idea for him. “Yeah, they must be. Of course they are. Oh dear, Oh gee.
“Jonesy had to restrain a smile at this. When he got going, McCarthy sounded a little like
a character in that movie,
Fargo
.
“So we better take you out. If, that is-”
“I don’t want to be a bother-”
“We’ll take you out. If we can. I mean, this weather came in
fast
.”

“It sure did,” McCarthy said bitterly. “You’d think they could do better with all their
darn satellites and doppler radar and gosh knows what else. So much for fair and seasonably cold, huh?”
Jonesy looked at the man under the comforter, just the flushed face and the thatch of
thinning brown hair showing, with some perplexity. The forecasts
he
had heard-he, Pete, Henry, and the Beav-had been full of the prospect of snow for the last two days. Some of

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