The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

Or them. Nobody knew. Because of the type of articles that were stolen, one family called him the Mountain
Man, but that frightened their children, so they changed it to the Hungry Man. Most people, including the
police, began referring the intruder simply as the hermit, or the North Pond hermit, or, more formally, the
hermit of North Pond. Some police reports mentioned “the legend of the hermit,” and on others, where a
suspect’s full name was requested, he was recorded as Hermit Hermit.
Many North Pond residents were convinced that the hermit was actually a neighbor. North and Little
North Ponds are in central Maine, away from the summer-congested coast and its moneyed enclaves. The
roads that twist along their shorelines are mostly unpaved and bumpy, with about three hundred cabins
scattered around the roughly twelve-mile circumference of the two ponds, the majority occupied only in
warm weather. A few of the cabins still don’t have electricity. Neighbors tend to know one another; there’s
not a lot of turnover. Some families have owned the same plot for a century.
Maybe, people speculated, the break-ins were carried out by a group of local teens—a gang initiation, a
prank. Or, some locals guessed, it could have been the work of an antisocial Vietnam vet. More likely,
others thought, it was an inside job at Pine Tree. There were also these suspicious-looking deer hunters who
came from out of state. It might’ve been one of those airplane hijackers from the 1970s, still on the run.
Possibly a serial killer. And what about that guy who was always fishing by himself—had anybody been
inside his cabin? Perhaps you’d find your mattress there.
One summer, a family had an idea. They taped a pen on a string to their front door along with a
handwritten note: “Please don’t break in. Tell me what you need and I’ll leave it out for you.” This sparked a
small fad, and soon a half dozen cabins had notes fluttering from their doors. Other residents hung shopping
bags of books on their doorknobs, like donations to a school fund-raiser.
There was no reply to the notes; none of the shopping bags were touched. The break-ins continued: a
sleeping bag, an insulated snowmobile suit, a year’s worth of National Geographic magazines. Batteries
and more batteries, including the blocky ones from cars and boats and ATVs. The same couple who lost
their mattress had a backpack stolen, which triggered a panic—that was where they’d hidden their passports.
Then they saw that the burglar had removed the passports and placed them in a closet before departing with
the pack.
Many families eventually decided to reinforce their cabins. They installed alarm systems, motion lights,
stronger windows, sturdier doors. Some spent thousands of dollars. A new phrase joined the lexicon of the
lakes—“hermit-proofing”—and an unfamiliar tinge of distrust settled over the community. Families that
never locked their doors began locking them. Two cousins, who own nearby cabins, each thought the other
was taking his propane. Several people blamed themselves for constantly misplacing items and halfjokingly
worried that they were beginning to lose their minds. One man suspected his own son of burglary.
The mattress-and-backpack couple decided that every time they left their cabin, even for an hour, they
had to latch all the windows and set the bolt, no matter how stuffy it got inside. At the end of summer, one
man returned from the hardware store with fifty sheets of plywood and a Makita screw gun, and used every
one of his thousand screws to entomb his cabin for winter.
The thousand screws worked, but nothing else did. Gone from other cabins were pillows and blankets,
toilet paper and coffee filters, plastic coolers and Game Boys. Some families were burglarized so frequently
that they learned the hermit’s tastes: peanut butter rather than tuna fish, Bud over Bud Light, briefs not
boxers. He had a major sweet tooth. One kid lost all his Halloween candy; the Pine Tree Camp was short an
industrial-sized tub of fudge.