The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

Knight stood. He had on a black ski cap and a blue jacket over a hooded sweatshirt and was clean-shaven.
The father, Roger Bellavance, held up his hands, one clutching a pair of binoculars, demonstrating that he
had no gun. Knight’s hands had been in his pockets, but he pulled them out. He showed that he had no
weapon, either. “I tried to convey the idea that I was harmless, no threat, using only my hands. I did not
come close to them.” Knight insisted that he did not speak a word—“I communicated nonverbally”—though
the Bellavances recalled him a mumbling a few phrases.
The grandfather, Tony Bellavance, sensed immediately that they’d encountered the North Pond hermit. He
knew the legend; he realized that cabins had been robbed. But in the presence of the hermit himself,
Bellavance, who was convinced that the hermit was a military veteran, was struck with a very strong idea of
what needed to be done.
“He said we had to leave him alone,” recalled the father. “He said that he’s not hurting anyone. He’s up
here for a reason, he said, and he doesn’t want to deal with people. My father’s a little Frenchman with a big
heart, and he just thought this guy needed to be on his own, unbothered.” The son and father did not want to
go against the grandfather’s wishes, so they did what he asked.
The three men all promised out loud that they would let the hermit be. “We made an oath,” said the
grandfather. “We swore we would never say anything.”
The hermit nodded. Then, his arms still held out, palms open, as if ready to catch a beach ball, he leaned
forward at the waist and bowed before the three men. “I don’t know why I bowed,” said Knight. “To convey
the idea of thanks, I think.” The entire encounter lasted no more than a couple of minutes.
The ice fishermen kept their promise, though Roger, the father, did tell his wife, who was unsure whether
he was speaking the truth. No one took a photo or video. Roger said that later he had to fight the urge,
several times, to return to the woods and try to talk to the hermit. But he respected Knight’s privacy. The
men said nothing until after Knight was arrested; then Roger, thinking he might be able to help law
enforcement find the campsite, told Trooper Vance the story. She didn’t believe it.
Knight said that he hadn’t mentioned this incident with the ice fishermen to anyone because he felt that
their pact remained in place. The agreement, the way he understood it, was that no one would ever say
anything. But I’d just informed Knight, during a visit in the county jail, our seventh one in eight weeks, that
the Bellavances had, in fact, spoken to others about it. Knight now felt that the pact was broken.
“What about other pacts?” I asked. “Did more people find you?”
“No, there were no other encounters,” Knight swore. People had been looking for him for years. If
there’d been any hint that anyone had found his site, word would have spread in a flash.
“Will you make a pact with me that you’re not covering up any others?”
“Yes.”
The ice-fishermen encounter seemed like just the sort of event for which Knight had established his
emergency cache. He could have abandoned his camp well before the men saw him and moved somewhere
else. Or he could have decamped immediately after.
He said he seriously thought about evacuating, but there was a lot of snow. “To move, I’d have to leave
footprints. I had little food. I took a chance they were good people.” Also, Knight admitted, the notion of
starting over seemed exhausting. Had he been younger, he almost certainly would’ve moved. This was when
he understood, he said, that “the circle was closing in.”
Just two months after seeing the ice fishermen, as the snow was receding and the chickadees had started