- even the site of his grave was no longer known. The name for that large piece of forest was, so far as Ev knew, still the one most commonly used in Haven and the other towns which were a part of it, but he could understand how the cartographers responsible for the Maine Atlas might not have wanted to put a word like 'Injun' in their book of maps. People had gotten touchy about such casual slurs.
Old tales sometimes have a grain of truth in them, his dad had said ...
Ev, who also crossed himself when black cats crossed his path (and, truth to tell, when one looked likely to, just to be safe), thought that his dad was right, and that grain was usually there. And, cursed or not, Big Injun Woods had never been very lucky.
Not lucky for Wahwayvokah, not lucky for the Clarendons. lt had never been very lucky for the hunters who tried their hand in there, either, he recalled. Over the years there had been two ... no, three ... wait a minute ...
Ev's eyes widened and he made a silent whistle as he thumbed through a mental card-file labeled HUNTING ACCIDENTS, HAVEN. He could just offhand think of a dozen accidents, most of them shootings, which had taken place in Big Injun Woods, a dozen hunters who had been lugged out bleeding and cursing, bleeding and unconscious, or just plain dead. Some had shot themselves, using loaded guns for crutches to help them climb over fallen trees, or dropping them, or some damn thing. One was a reputed suicide. But Ev now remembered that on two occasions murder had been done during November in Big Injun Woods - it had been done in hot blood both times, once in an argument over a card game at someone's camp, once because of a squabble between two friends over whose bullet had taken down a buck of recordbreaking size.
And hunters got lost in there. Christ! Did they ever! Every year it seemed there was at least one search party sent out to find some poor scared slob from Massachusetts or New Jersey or New York City, and some years there were two or three. Not all of them were found.
Most were city people who had no business in the woods to start with, but that wasn't always the case. Veteran hunters said compasses worked poorly or not at all in Big Injun Woods. Ev's dad said he guessed there must be a helluva chunk of magnetic rock buried somewhere out there, and it foozled a compass needle to hell and gone. The difference between city folks and those who were veterans of the woods was that the city folks learned how to read a compass out of a book and then put all their trust in it. So when it packed up and said east was north and west was east or just spun around and around like a milk bottle in a kissing game, they were like men stuck in the shithouse with diarrhoea and no corncobs. Wiser men just cursed their compasses, put them away, and tried another of the half-dozen ways there were of finding a direction. Lacking all else, you looked for a stream to lead you out. Sooner or later, if you held a straight course, you'd either hit a road or a set of CMP power pylons.
But Ev had known a few fellows who had lived and hunted all their lives in Maine and who still had to be pulled by a search party or who finally made it out on their own only by dumb luck. Delbert McCready, whom Ev had known since childhood, had been none of these. Del had gone into Big Injun Woods with his twelve-gauge on Tuesday, November 10th, 1947. When forty-eight hours had passed and he still hadn't shown up, Mrs McCready called Alf Tremain, who in those days had been the constable. A search party of twenty went into the woods where the Nista Road petered out at the Diamond Gravel Pit, and by the end of the week it had swelled to two hundred.
They were just about to give Del - whose daughter was, of course, Hazel McCready - up for lost when he stumbled out of the woods along the course of Preston Stream, pale and dazed and twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he went in.
Ev visited him in the hospital. 'How'd it happen, Del? Night was