FIELD NOTE 001
THE LEDGER OF UNFINISHED ERRANDS
The saddle from 1911 came back on a Tuesday, hung over the porch rail of the Fenwick place. To be clear nobody had lived at the Fenwick place since the war.
I knowed it because I wrote it down. That is the job of whoever keeps the ledger, and for eleven winters that has been me, mostly because I was the only one who did not mind the cold in the back room where it is stored.
It is a tall book with a cracked green spine. Somebody rebound it once with what smells like harness leather. First you think nothing of it- just leather. But come time- you find there is nothing quite like that mustiness. Near the front there is a section headed only the returned, in a hand I do not know. The first pages are brown at the edges and soft as cloth. The Search & Rescue has been keeping it longer than the Search & Rescue has had a name. Nobody on the current roster can tell you who started it. I asked the two oldest members, and they each told me it was the other one's uncle.
The entries are simple. A date. A place, usually approximate. A word or two.
October 9. Lantern, brass, dented. North fork, under the split cedar. Returned.
March 30. Coffee pot, enamel. Ridge trail, on the flat rock. Returned. Still warm.
I underlined that last one when I first read it. Then I rubbed the underline out, because it was not my book to mark up, and because I did not care for the feeling of having underlined it.
There are seventeen saddles. I have counted them four times, because the number bothers me, though I could not tell you why seventeen is worse than sixteen. Some are working saddles, cracked at the horn, with the stirrups still tied up the way a rider ties them when he means to come back. One is a lady's sidesaddle, and I do not know what to make of that. Men lose saddles when a horse goes down or a river takes them. It is not a thing men lose in the ordinary way, the way they lose gloves.
What I could not get past, when I first started reading, was the placing.
A tool lost in a gully does not simply turn up in the gully. That would be luck, and I have nothing against luck. These things turn up where they have no business being. A miner's pick was found standing upright in the middle of the Dunmore road at dawn, the head wiped clean. A pair of spectacles sat folded on a stump above the treeline where the trail gives out, and the lenses were not so much as dusty. A boot came back with a sprig of dried sage tucked into it. Somebody had thought about that. A person can tell the difference between a thing that has been dropped and a thing that has been set down.
I will say the obvious once so we can be done with it. I looked for a person. I walked the ridges in the wet season and the dry, I sat up at the Fenwick place with a thermos and a rifle I had no intention of firing, and I found no person. I found deer sign, and old bear scratching on a doorframe, and once, in the mud by the porch, a print I chose to leave alone.
I will also say that I did not sleep well at the Fenwick place, and that this had nothing to do with fear. It was closer to the feeling of sharing a room with someone who is pretending to be asleep. Out there the air held a thousand small stories, and I could read most of them. Who had crossed the yard at dusk. What had died under the porch in the spring. And something else, faint and patient, that I recognized the way you recognize your own handwriting on an envelope you don't remember sending.
I do not talk about that part. It is not the sort of thing that helps a search.
The ledger has plenty of ordinary pages. Most of the entries are what you would expect: a hiker recovered, a child found asleep in a hunting blind, an old man who wandered off from his own porch and was discovered the next morning sitting calmly beside a creek with no particular explanation. Those I can account for. It is the section at the front that keeps me at the desk past closing, with the coffee gone cold and the radiator knocking.
One entry near the end of the returned pages I have never understood. It is not in the old hand or in mine. It is a small, even script, and it reads:
Not yet.
There is no date. There is no object. It sits between a lantern and a snowshoe like a note left for someone who is expected.
The younger volunteers think it is a joke. I have let them think so.
Last week a bridle came in. Braided rawhide, well kept, left on the hood of the Search & Rescue truck sometime before dawn, with the frost undisturbed on the glass around it. I did the paperwork the way I always do. I found the ledger, uncapped the pen, and wrote the date, and the place, and the word.
Then I sat a while with the pen still in my hand and the window going gray, and I listened to the pines, and to the thing in the pines that was listening back.
I have kept the accounting honest all these years. There are only two things I have never written in the book: what I think is doing the returning, and what I think it has been waiting for one of us to understand.
I closed the cover and put the pen away, and went out to see about the coffee.
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