The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

As a young boy, when the lilacs bloomed, Chris would gather a bouquet and give them to his mother. “I
like the odor and the color, and it’s one of the first flowers in spring. I remember thinking I’d found
something new,” he said. Otherwise there were few overt expressions of love. “We didn’t feel the need to
communicate everything all the time,” Chris continued. “We’re not emotionally bleeding all over each other.
We’re not touchy-feely. We weren’t in the habit of being physically demonstrative. In my family, the boys
could not express feelings. We relied on unspoken understandings. It was the way it was.”
People who knew Chris as a child called him “quiet” and “shy” and “nerdy,” but no one detected any
deeper malaise. “I didn’t find him to be all that weird,” said Jeff Young, who went to elementary school,
junior high, and high school with Chris and often rode the bus with him. “He was a wicked smart kid, and
he had a really good sense of humor.” Knight could also be silly and mischievous in a high school sort of
way. Young recalled that when they took driver’s education classes together, one time Chris deliberately
drifted too close to the side of the road, rubbing the car against some bushes. It had recently rained, and the
instructor, in the passenger seat with the window open, got drenched.
The Knight family never went skiing; they did not eat lobster. “Not our socioeconomics,” said Chris.
They owned snowshoes—“the long wooden ones, with the bear-claw bindings”—and they fished the local
rivers with live bait. In winter, the family would head up to a relative’s hunting camp in the North Woods
and the Knight boys would ride snowmobiles until one or two o’clock in the morning.
Once, Chris went skydiving with his brother Joel. They listened to the instructions, took off in a small
airplane, then jumped out. It was the only plane flight of Chris’s life. “So I have taken off in a plane, but I
have never landed in one. How amusing.”
As the youngest son, Chris was, of course, ribbed by his older brothers. They bestowed upon him the pet
name Fudd, perhaps after the cartoon character Elmer Fudd, rube to Bugs Bunny. Chris detested the name.
His parents were strict—early curfews, finish your homework, no junk food. One cousin, Kevin Nelson,
told the Kennebec Journal that he used to bicycle over to the Knights’ house carrying treats for the boys.
“They would lower a string from a bedroom window, and they’d raise a bag of snacks,” Nelson said. “I don’t
believe they ever had soda pop.”
Hunting was Sheldon’s passion. His obituary in the Morning Sentinel contained a total of four words
about his leisure time: “He enjoyed deer hunting.” He kept a bearskin rug at the foot of his bed, from a
black bear he had shot. Sometimes Chris joined his father on hunts. “A couple of hunting trips, I slept in
the back of the pickup,” he said, “but never alone and never in a tent. I slept in my bed in my family home,
where my parents knew exactly where I was.”
Chris was once a winner in the Maine moose-license lottery, a lucky chance. He was sixteen years old
and went into the woods near the Canadian border with his father, who lent him a .270 Winchester boltaction
rifle. Chris shot a seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound female moose and field-dressed it himself. “I was
quite proud. My license, my kill. We ate well that year.”
At Lawrence High School, where his class had two hundred and twenty-four students, Chris felt
“invisible.” He attended no social events, played no sports, joined no clubs. He never went to a football
game and he skipped the prom, though he did have, he said, “two or three” friends. His classmate Larry
Stewart recalled spending a few evenings hanging out with Chris. “I remember one night in particular,” said
Stewart. “We were driving around in a guy’s car, and Chris was in the backseat. We just did what kids do
up in Maine—we didn’t tip over any cows or anything, but maybe we snuck a few drinks out of someone’s
beer, or drove around the old Concourse listening to Foreigner and Aerosmith, and went to McDonald’s or