it was without them, but how could anyone explain them after they were gone?
Over the years, most of the Driftless villages grew into towns and cities. Other villages, however, grew up like most other living things, reached a certain size and just stayed there. Still others, like Words, Wisconsin—a cluster of buildings and homes in a heavily wooded valley—noticeably shrank in size, and entered the twenty-first century smaller than years before.
To get to Words you must first find where Highway 47 and County Trunk Q intersect, at a high, lonely place surrounded by alfalfa, corn, and soybean fields. The four-way stop suggests a hub of some importance, yet there are no other indications of where you are. This lack of posted information can be partly explained by the constraining budget of the Thistlewaite County Highway Commission and partly by the assumption of its rural members: people already know where they are. No provisions are made for those living without a plan.
Still, there is some mystery why a four-way stop should be placed here, impeding the flow of mostly nonexistent traffic. Grange, for instance, with a population of five thousand by far the largest town in the area, has a justifiable need for four- way stops and even several stoplights; but Grange is fifteen miles to the east on 47.
Red Plain, to the west, has grocery, feed, and dime stores, a gas station, a grain elevator, four taverns, and one stop sign on a highway that connects after sixty miles to the interstate.
Heading south on Q does not take you directly anywhere, but for those knowing the roads this is eventually the shortest route to Luster.
Eight miles north of the intersection, the unincorporated village of Words has no traffic signs at all. County Trunk Q is the only way into the tiny town, which sits at the dead end of a steep valley. Few people go there. State maps no longer include Words, and though Q is often pictured, the curving black line simply ends like a snipped- off black thread in a spot of empty white space. Even in Grange, most people don’t know where Words is.
NO REASON
THE MORNING RIPENED SLOWLY. TEN O’CLOCK FELT LIKE NOON. July Montgomery cut open a sack of ground feed and poured it into the cement trough. He looked out of the barn window into his hay field, where a low-lying fog stole silently out of the ground, filling space with milky distance. Beyond the fence, the tops of maple, oak, and hickory formed a lumpy, embroidered edge against infinity.
July had lived here for more than twenty years, but because of the dreamy quality of the morning, the landscape now appeared almost unfamiliar. The row of round bales of hay—which he’d placed near the road only weeks before—seemed foreign and completely removed from any history that included him. The road itself looked different, and when a hawk stepped off a utility pole, opened its wings, and sailed up the blacktop road toward the nearby village of Words, it disappeared into the looming fog as though entering another world. July marveled at how easily the characters of even the massive, stationary things of reality could be changed by a little moisture in the atmosphere.
On the other side of the barn he could hear his small dairy herd hurrying back from the pasture. He had let them out just an hour before, and it seemed odd that they would be coming back. Normally, they preferred to graze all day, knee-deep in grass, even in the most inclement weather.
Several cows anxiously butted their heads against the wooden sides of the building and he opened the doors, allowing them back into the barn. Agitated, they bellowed and crowded against each other, milling nervously from one area to the next, swarming in slow motion.
Something had frightened them, and July stood in the opening and searched for an explanation—a pack of dogs, perhaps. But he could see nothing, and indeed it wasn’t always possible to identify the reason for a herd’s agitation. Like the fear that often seizes human society, it sometimes had no tangible cause. Given the social nature of animals, an errant yet terrifying idea could flare up in a single limbic system and spread into the surrounding neighborhood, communicated with the speed of a startled flock of birds. Before long, a climate of fear was established, perpetuated through the psyche’s network of instinctual rumor.
A movement caught his eye. Several hundred yards away, at the very edge of where the fog swallowed objects wholesale, a large black animal jumped the fence into his hay field, turned around in an almost ritual manner, and looked directly at him.
Now there’s something, July thought, staring back. It appeared to be a very big cat, a panther, also known as a cougar, puma, or mountain lion. He’d seen them out west and up north, but never here. Though they had once been native to the area, there had been no reports of them, as far as he knew, for generations. It wasn’t even necessary to actually see one, of course; a stray scent of the beast—inhaled by a single cow—and the whole herd would vibrate with primordial anxiety.
Moving slowly, the panther paced with elastic ease along the old fence, carefully measuring its distance from the barn, keeping partially hidden in the fog, like a ghost not willing to assume corporeal form. As it moved, it continued to stare at July, and July continued to look back.
He wondered why a panther would reenter an area its ancestors had long ago abandoned. The larger reasons, of course, included the encroachment of human civilization and depletion of natural habitat; but July wondered what the urge itself must have felt like—from the inside—to compel it to leave its familiar haunts. If it was a male, the pursuit of a female might lure it into the unknown; a female, on the other hand, might venture out in search of food or the protective seclusion needed to raise its young. July also imagined that both male and female might, like some people, simply enter an unknown area for the sake of discovering how it compared with what they already knew.
As he watched the panther striding slowly, elegantly on the edge of the woods, July also saw no reason to deny to the creature the possibility of acting without a compelling motivation. Perhaps it ended up in his hay field without knowing why it had come.
July remembered his own journey to the Driftless Region, more than twenty years ago.
He recalled first that nothing had hurt. He’d woken up in a surprisingly comfortable ditch along an unrecognizable road in the middle of the night, near the end of September, somewhere in Wyoming. The stars seemed especially thick and chaotic above him, brilliant but mixed up, as though they had been stirred with a silver oar. He had no memory of how he’d come to be here—wherever here was—and he felt to see if some parts of his body were perhaps broken, bleeding, or missing. But nothing seemed out of place, and nothing hurt.
After more checking, he discovered that his wallet was missing. And his duffel bag, lying next to him in the long grass and weeds, had been ransacked. Most of his personal belongings—rope, stove, cooking utensils, hatchet, knife, compass, lantern, bourbon, dried food, candy bars, matches, soap, maps, and a couple books—were gone. All that remained were a couple items of clothing, his sleeping bag, and his water bottle.
But nothing hurt and that seemed like a good omen. Things could be much worse. Whoever had left him here had not found the flat canvas money belt tied snuggly around his abdomen. He then fell back to sleep and woke up an hour later at the sound of an approaching vehicle.
A pickup moved east along the highway. It was closely followed by a noisy single-axle trailer, pulled by a bumper hitch. As though extending a carpet of light before its path—a carpet it never actually rode on—the truck came to a rattling stop at the nearby intersection. The driver climbed out and walked back to check on the trailer. Cramped from sitting and arthritic with age, he moved stiffly.
July dusted off his clothes, walked out of the ditch, and joined the old man at the trailer.
“Everything
