An hour later, I was roasted on one side by a big open fire and generally warmed to a glow throughout from bourbon and a venison dinner, all spiced by the prospect of the shoot next day with Doc Jopson and Dwight Shull, who owned the camp. The meal finished; talk turned to hunts of the past. Where did the name Camp Janie come from, I wanted to know.
Dwight told the story:
"It's near a century gone," he started. His eyes focused to a distance as he talked as if alone in the room. "Janie Moats lived in the hollow down near the bottom of Briary Branch where it breaks out of the mountain. She was young and some say beautiful, but her man was a rotten drunk. Beat her for the fun of it. Real mean sort.
"One night she left him to climb over the mountain in a blinding blizzard headed for the West Virginia hills where she had folks to take care of her. She may have made it along Wolf Run to the trail that leads to the top of Reddish Knob, but she never made it to the other side.
''Janie only appears to old hunters and it must be snowing when she comes out of the shadows. Guess she doesn't want anyone to get lost like she did.''
"I've been up there a hundred times. If she's for real, how come I've never seen her?" I asked.
Dwight poured himself a drink. "Maybe you weren't scared enough, or maybe you weren't old enough," he said.
Forty-five minutes later the trail met a woods road that turned sharply to the right to cross Wolf Run. Beyond the ford, the road led to the top of a steep hill, the beginning of a five-mile climb to Reddish Knob. Immediately after crossing the stream and to the right, the tracks skirted a cliff. Halfway to the top, a ledge creased the strata, creating the mouth of a cave—Hanging Rock—a landmark well known to hunters. I stood watching the opening for a few minutes as I had many times before. Perhaps an ancient Indian shelter? A bear's hibernation retreat? Certainly a shelter for a hunter lost.
I waded across the stream using a heavy stick for balance and climbed slowly step by step up the hill past the hanging rock where I found an old friend from years past, a stump that made a good stand and a place to rest. The sun was just up and quite suddenly the woods became alive, as so often happens after the silent hour that precedes sunrise. I had an uncanny, eerie sense of presence. I moved down the trail to view the stand above the rock with the scope. On the high side of the cliff, the background of oaks, mixed with a little mountain laurel, widely spaced between large, leaf-covered flats, revealed no hunter.
As the sun drove the shadows down the slope, I moved slowly up the mountain half a mile or so to another stump. After repeating this process two or three times, I reached a plateau, the top of Reddish Knob's first ridge. There I ate lunch, swigged water from the canteen and nearly slept in the warm, noon-day sun. Once again the woods were quiet as in the hour before sun up.
By 3:30, the sky clouded over. By four, it was strangely dark. I was high up on the mountain, an hour away from the woods road that led to camp, but down led out. No way I could be lost. I had an hour yet to hunt. I began to move slowly down, 100 yards at a time, but the odd darkness bothered me. I heard the clatter on the leaves before my jacket turned white. Freezing rain came in a cold gust from the hollow, whistling through the tall pine trees and brushing the oaks.
The rain quickly changed to powder, followed by heavy snow. The trail disappeared in an instant, the ground covered with a white blanket, and with the visibility cut to 100 feet. I lost direction. The ice-cold wind was a sting in my face. Snow blasted my eyes. So quickly did a fine day in the woods turn into a dread-filled winter storm.
Panic. I had 45 minutes of light. Only the slope told where the path must lie. I shouldered the rifle and with both arms free for balance started the descent. At first, I picked my way carefully to avoid a fall, but as darkness settled on the hill, my pace quickly turned to panic's helter skelter.
I was sweating when the ground leveled and I knew I was close to Wolf Run. Once across the stream, I would hit the woods road. But beyond the blanket of white, the forest showed black with no outline and the flakes themselves were now a veil against the darkness. Time was running out. I could see the dreadful headline: “'Hunter Lost in National Forest.”
I pushed along the level until the shadows of the forest began to lose identity into the darkness.
And then ahead and to the left, Hanging Rock seemed to hover above the trees, a giant black monster even blacker than the night. Still the outline showed and I could see the mouth of the cave. A small gray figure was standing there. A bear?
No, it was a woman wrapped in a long gray cloak, her hair and face hidden in the shadow of the hood. She turned toward me and pointed to the left, her arm outstretched. A heavy gust blew a flurry of ice in my face. I staggered back, my arm shielding my face against the cold. When the bitter wind had passed, she was gone.
I set my compass for the stream as I remembered it to be and pushed on into the night with a flashlight. Not more than 100 yards ahead, I stumbled across the ford which led to the trail. A quarter of a mile further the trail crossed the woods road. Then I had only a couple of miles to go. No longer frightened, I pushed on at a slower pace.
"We were beginning to wonder where you were,'' Doc said. Translated, he meant: ''Do you have a deer down? Were you lost? Are you hurt?"
I wrapped myself around a tot of bourbon and told about the storm and my panic from the fear of being lost. I finished with my finding the Rock and my vision.
"Maybe a tree trunk or a scrub pine covered with snow," I concluded.
"So now you've seen her," Dwight said.
Francis Rhein lives in Winchester. Va. This is his first piece for Blue Ridge Country.
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.