The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

hemlock board and batten that was hewn from trees on the lot. This is the place three minutes from the
campsite.
Here, a muddy driveway forms one of the borders of Knight’s forest. Though, of course, it’s not his
forest. Every night of his stay he was illegally trespassing. I was likewise trespassing, and had resolved to
keep as quiet as possible. Knight’s campsite was somewhere on a two-hundred-and-twenty-acre parcel, with
one year-round house on it, from which Knight never stole. It’s a large piece of property, but the North
Pond area sees a regular procession of hikers and hunters and cross-country skiers, and the community hosts
an annual boat parade, ice-fishing derby, and loon count. With all these people around, it seemed strange
that Knight’s spot remained unknown for so long. Perhaps there was a good explanation.
As I stepped off the driveway and into the woods, the mash of trees and shrubs was so dense that the
forest held its own humidity. My eyeglasses promptly fogged. The Chris Knight woods are an old-growth
multispecies forest, a couple of enormous eastern hemlocks towering above the crowd, the undergrowth
bursting with ferns and brilliant red-topped mushrooms. The explanation for the site’s secrecy was the
jumble of boulders—vehicle-sized, possibly glacier-borne gifts from the last ice age, scattered wildly and
everywhere, carpeted with moss and lichen. Half the steps I took required handholds, rocks grabbed for
support while branches cracked and crunched, quiet as a car alarm.
Other than central Maine, there are not too many places in the United States that could host a hermit like
Knight. The Maine woods are ideally thick—in the western U.S., as well as all of Alaska, the forests are
generally far more open—and the population in this part of the state is perfectly distributed, neither too
dense nor too widely scattered, either of which could hinder a thieving habit. Plus in Maine there’s both a
keep-to-yourself ethos and a lax adhesion to private property boundaries, so that if you do happen to spot a
stranger walking about, it’s common to simply disregard him or her. One North Pond cabin owner who
lives most of the year in Texas, where trespassing is less tolerated, said that no one like Knight would have
survived undisturbed in the Lone Star State.
The cryptic instructions from the handyman were this: “Keep the late-afternoon sun in your face and walk
up the hill.” Okay, but there were a dozen little hills back there, and with the boulders it was impossible to
move in anything close to a straight line. No paths exist, but summer is rife with mosquitoes and poison ivy
and thorns. Pine needles stick to your sweat, and you have to roll down your shirtsleeves to fend off the
bugs. You can’t see more than a few feet in any direction; it’s claustrophobic and disorienting. “The billygoat
woods,” Sergeant Hughes called it. The locals’ term for this patch of forest, known for repelling
hunters and holding snow, is “the Jarsey,” sharing a name with the unpaved Jarsey Road, which cuts through
it.
I had never lost my bearings in a forest more quickly, so I gave up, fumbled back to the muddy driveway,
and sat on a rock to reset, gulping water. The second battle with the Jarsey was no better. Even after
carefully aligning myself with the sun—it was, indeed, late afternoon—once again I was soon wandering
randomly in the Brillo forest. The third attempt was worse. The moss covering the boulders was damp,
slick as ice, and my foot slipped and the weight of my backpack, stuffed with camping gear and food,
yanked me off balance. I tumbled face-first, bumping my forehead on a rock with enough force to raise an
immediate lump. One of my hiking boots was torn, no match for these woods. Knight walked here all the
time. Silently. Without injury. At night. How was this possible?
The day before, at his office in the Skowhegan barracks, Sergeant Hughes had sat with perfect posture in
his starched green game warden uniform and black combat boots and described what it was like to follow