OLD HAT

Originally appeared in Amazing Stories, May 1958.

What brings the thing I’m going to tell you to mind, is this in the papers about that girl elephant running loose on Mt. Pisgah in the Catskills. Says here, galloping horses frightened her while her trainer was watering her at her winter quarters and she took to the woods.

The elephant’s name is Siam and just look at this headline: “Has Trunk, Still Travels.”

And get this. “In a vain effort to catch the beast the hunters even played a record on a public address system of the mating calls of a bull elephant.” Tusk, tusk! Such goings on in the snoozing grounds of R.I.P. Van Winkle.

Now, why this didn’t lift me a bit is because down in the Cumberlands a few years back something much more unlikely than an elephant, white, pink, or whatever, was running loose and—but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

When it began was March third. How it began was, they sighted this UFO. First they thought it was a shooting star. But they found it didn’t lose mass as it streaked down through the thickening air.

How they looked into it was, they sent Col. Philip Cartwright and me, together with a squad of enlisted men. Our team ’coptered out to the coordinates they gave us.

The fix was in the wildest stretch of the Cumberlands. We found the FO. Far as I know it’s still essentially U. It was the size of a beach ball. Its glossy skin was no alloy we know of. But that part of it wasn’t our immediate concern. It wasn’t the sphere that troubled us but what had come out of the sphere.

It was empty but for a midget-sized seat facing a battery of tiny controls, A sentient being had disembarked. There was nothing in sight.

We cut for sign and found small tracks, faint on the hard clay. They headed uphill from the opening but soon petered out on rocky ground. We sent for bloodhounds.

The bloodhounds took one sniff of the spoor and looked worried. But they were game and were quickly afoot, springing forward with sounds that stirred my blood. The chase was on!

The chase was off, the hounds skidding to a surprised stop. Their wrinkles deepened as they muttered to one another, consulting anxiously. Like Buridan’s ass, they had to choose between two diverging and equally beckoning directions. They came out of the huddle whining pitifully over the two leads. They cringed and moved in a light circle.

Col. Cartwright had the look of pain. He was thinking. After a moment he resolutely dug a penny from his pocket. He fingered it purposefully as if about to flip it.

“Sir,” I said, “why not split the pack in two and follow both leads?”

Col. Cartwright waved me down, boy as though I distracted him. The look of frustration deepened. Suddenly his face cleared. With masterful decision he put back the cent.

“I have it!” he said.

We split the pack in two.

The chases were on!

The chases were off. Again the hounds showed signs of incipient schizophrenia. The being seemed to be reproducing as it progressed and I had a wild and terrifying vision of it populating the world, overrunning everything.

Impulsively I voiced this thought.

Col. Cartwright censored it with a frown.

“Nonsense, Lt. Breed,” he said sententiously. “Why shouldn’t terrestrial dogs be frightened by extraterrestrial odors?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

But my sense of wonder is like a duck’s back. The good colonel could never dampen my enthusiasm. So when after a fruitless day a possible explanation struck me, I didn’t hesitate to sound off.

“Sir,” I said opening my honest blue eyes wide, “do you suppose our visitor suffered from some spatial version of the bends and exploded into vagrant whiffs?”

Col. Cartwright was a pacer. He stopped short, fixed me for a moment, shrugged slightly, and resumed his pacing.

“Unprofitable speculating, Lt. Breed,” he said bitingly. “We need facts. Facts, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I understand.” And I did. He meant facts.

But there were no facts. That day and the following we got nowhere in our tracking.

The Army, the National Guard, Civil Defense, Civil Air Patrol, and Boy Scouts came on the scene. Because we didn’t want extreme panic, we let out that we were hunting down a rare beast that had escaped en route to a zoo.

Even so, nearby communities took alarm and for the next few months kids went to school in convoys and folks stayed home nights.

During those months people sighted the beast in 666 different places and in as many guises.

Then bit by bit the tension slackened. Army, National Guard, CD, CAP, and Boy Scouts faded away. Kids went alone to school and folks went out nights. Most people forgot there ever was a beast running loose.

But every once in a while there was some happening someone could lay to the beast—a chicken coop raided, a forest fire, a cow gone mysteriously dry, a mine disaster. Yet the mystery of the beast’s whereabouts remained a mystery.

Col. Cartwright came up with the theory that some spatial version of the bends had exploded the visitor to whiffs. The Pentagon bought this with a sense of relief.

In the meanwhile the government, exercising its right of eminent domain, had appropriated the tract of land, finding it necessary by the way to keep vested interests from popping buttons about their dollars and cents by reassuring private enterprise nothing so radical as extending TVA was in the wind. A reinforced concrete blockhouse now enclosed the sphere. If and when the being returned it would need a pass to get in.

Our team stayed on the job. Or since we breathed it waking and dreaming, in the job. We had covered the area time and again. It was a day in May and we were covering it still another again.

I had let the vagaries of the terrain separate me from the rest and was striking off through the brush on my own. Anything to get away for a bit from the reins of Col. Cartwright. I broke through to a magnificent view.

The mountain scenery took my breath away, not only by its beauty but by its steepness. I was still breathing hard when I sat down on a rock near the edge. Suddenly, before I had time to get my breath back. I sensed a presence.

I felt it even before I heard brush crackling stealthily behind me. If my breathing hadn’t already stopped it would have stopped then. The hunted had turned hunter. I swiveled my head and gazed into a rifle barrel. Above it, a double-barreled glare.

“Nice weather we’re having,” I said. No reply. I tested a few more gambits but it wasn’t until I hit upon “I’m not a revenuer” that the glare softened from downright hostility to mere mistrust of a stranger and he came out in the open. A real old-time long knife, from deerskin moccasins to Davy Crockett hat.

Tall, angular, grizzled, he struck me as almost too much the part. Again the chill. Could the visitor have taken on this guise? If so, it had grown some.

I held out my hand. “I’m Nick Breed.”

“Anse Fox.” His hand swallowed mine.

We stood looking out over the land. Every breath of air and every tick of time wrought some sensuous change in the hues and shapes of clouds and hills.

“What a wonderful view,” I said softly.

He spat into the view thoughtfully.

“Going to come down? Might’s well wait out the rain at my place.”

It was darkening. I murmured my thanks and hurried after him.

On the way he barked a squirrel. The bullet slammed into the wood beside the squirrel’s head and brought it down with nary a hole.

He hung his rifle on the wall of his log cabin and I saw a nicer barrel to look into. A keg of liquor. I fed the fire while he skinned the squirrel. Before long I was sniffing appreciatively and soon after that we were gnawing the meat. It was wild and tough but moonshine and hunger rendered it toothsome, and before long I was belching appreciatively.

I felt the same inner fire that led Anse to hang up his fur hat and fringed buckskin jacket. His face—what I saw of it through an eye glassily—shone greasily in candle stump flicker. I unbuttoned my collar and loosened my belt.

We passed the dipper back and forth. It demanded finer and finer sense of balance to hold the world still and keep the precious dew from spilling.

I was awfully fond of Anse. Good old Anse. A wave of pity suffused the warmth I felt for him. My sense of duty—sodden or not—was impelling me to break this sentimental idyll.

Maybe he thought the white mule had kicked me in the head. But he listened without misgivings, without widening his eyes, without expressing any feelings at all as I told him of the landing of the sphere and warned him to watch out for the visitor from space. Maybe his lack of fear was merely lack of imagination, the inability to envision harm befalling himself. Then he was all the more worth the renewed wave of pity.

He was in a real sense a living fossil, plodding from day to day while sensational happenings reshaped a world that for a long time now had not been his world. Nothing of all that could filter through his clogged sensibility. Even if he could become aware of these wonders he would only withdraw further from them, become a silence in the wilderness.

However, he gave me his word he would traipse down to tell us if he saw anything out of the way. We drank to that.

I got to my feet and then staggered—but not from drink.

It was Anse’s coonskin cap. The first time I’d really looked at it. It hung there on the wall and the rings on the tail weren’t rings at all.

They were spiral.

I grew a bit sober. Still spiral. My sense of wonder was working. I managed to creep up on the hat. I jabbed at it. I missed it. Got it next time around though. Steadied it. Studied it.

“Never saw a raccoon like this.”

Anse shrugged. “Me neither.”

The fur was strangely silky. “Dress the pelt yourself?”

“Kilt it and dressed it myself.” He took a swallow and went on. “Don’t want to brag, but my finger’s curved to a trigger. Night I got that I was so liquored up I saw it stepping along on its two hind feet, but I got it first crack.”

I was a good bit more sober. I tried to sound calm. “Remember when you got it?”

He reckoned several times by knife scratches on the deal table. “Night of March third it were.”

I sat down. The chair was shifty, but Anse seemed to see nothing strange about my sitting on the floor.

“That varmint I was telling you about,” I said.

“Which varmint?”

Anse shrugged. He suddenly tensed, listening, and moved to put the rifle within reach.

I heard squelching sounds.

Col. Cartwright. He stopped short in the doorway and panned rudely with glaring irises, as if asking himself what in thunder kind of place he had come to. He whipped off his dripping hat.

“It’s raining, sir,” I said. I was right there with a fact.

He took a step back in alarm, then saw me. His eyes blazed as I rose. He sniffed. “Lieutenant Breed!”

“That’s right, sir,” I said admiringly.

His gaze made my bar a sin of commission. Maybe that sparked my sin of omission. Anyhow, I omitted to speak of the Davy Crockett hat.

This wasn’t malice. It was sudden anger at Cartwright, anger even at Anse, for lacking the sense of wonder as I saw it.

I left the Air Force soon after, but far as I know we’re still hunting the beast, still getting reports of sightings. I don’t feel guilty. What qualms my sense of duty might stir my sense of proportion quiets.

My sense of wonder is still active. That’s why I’m sorry they finally caught Siam. Not that there was any doubt of it, an elephant is big. Who could possibly use one for a hat? Or an overcoat for that matter?