The Hunter Hunted

The county had eleven hours, from the moment the front door of the Sayre house shut on the Monday night to the moment it ended on the Tuesday morning, and in those eleven hours it did everything a rural county can do and none of it worked, and what finally ended it was not the sheriff or the state police or the helicopter out of Portland.

At eleven o'clock on the Monday night he took clothes off a man in the parking lot of the Millvale boat ramp, which was a thing he had needed to do since the first of February and had done, in that whole month, five times, and which had cost him, by then, two work coats and a pair of boots he could never wear in front of a human being and a flannel shirt that had spent four days in a hedge on the east side of Bellhaven.

He had the man on the ground for nine seconds and the man never saw him and the man went to the paper on Wednesday and said that whatever it was had not hurt him, which was not quite true and which was the kindest lie in the whole file.

Then he went down to the water.

He did it because he had to, and he knew he had to, and of all the things that had been done to him in the four weeks since the window, the worst and the most constant was the cleanliness. You cannot imagine it if nobody has told you. A man who cannot be seen can have exactly one thing and that thing is his own spotlessness: the dust of a county road, the ash of a woodstove, the salt of a body, the crumbs of a stolen sandwich, all of it lies on him as fact, and the fact is an outline, and to live at all he had to be washing four, five, six times a day, in sinks in public buildings, in the campground shower at Kestrel Park with the water cold, in the horse trough at the fairgrounds, in a cattle tank, and every wash was twenty minutes of standing naked in the cold doing the one thing in the world that could not be done in a hurry.

So he went down to the mill's waste ponds.

They are four acres of standing water behind a chainlink fence the state put up in 2011, and the ice on them is the color of a badly made cup of coffee and there is a sign on the fence with a paragraph on it that nobody in the valley has ever read, and in February the ice will hold a man at the edges and will not hold him in the middle, and there is no other water in that county big enough to wash a person in that nobody can see.

He went in off the northeast corner, at the shallow end, in the dark, and the ice broke, and he washed.

That was where the loggers found the prints.

What hunted him in the end was not a manhunt. The state police had four roadblocks and a helicopter and a thermal camera borrowed from a search-and-rescue team in Vancouver, and the thermal camera had found nothing, because a perfect thermal signature four inches wide and five feet long moving at walking pace across a frozen field is a thing a camera operator will report as a deer, and reported it as a deer twice.

What hunted him was the mill.

Bellhaven is a town that was built by people who worked at eleven thousand r.p.m. in a building with three shifts, and the one thing that valley has left, more than the money and more than the church, is a specific competence: four hundred men and women in that county can read a line of marks on ground or snow or gravel or blood and say what made it and when, because that is the only skill a mill town ever teaches anybody.

At two in the morning on the Tuesday, Arnie Bledsoe, who had run the kiln at the mill for nineteen years and who had been out at the ponds at six that morning because his brother-in-law called him, walked the bank at the northeast corner with a flashlight and read it like a page.

"It went in here. Section of print, that's a foot, that's the left foot. It stood in the water and it went up and down about twenty times at this one spot, which is nothing but a man washing. Then it came out here and put on that flannel shirt, and then it crossed the field on the old spur road, and there's the boot print, that's a nine and a half work boot, and it went up toward Cedar Hollow."

Sheriff Wade Ordway stood on the bank in the dark with his hands in his pockets and said, "How do you know it came out onto the spur road."

"Because the snow's tracked," Arnie said, "and I know what tracks it. You go look at the spur road. Every kid in this town has been up that spur road on a four-wheeler since 1979. There's a rink in there, and a firepit, and a lean-to, and there's two hundred gallon of forty-year-old diesel in a tank nobody's pumped since 1989, and if you want my opinion, that's where it is."

At twenty past four in the morning, the county did the thing it had been going to have to do, which was to put forty people on a line across the Cedar Hollow grade in the dark because there was nothing else to do, and at twenty to five the line closed on the old spur road.

What happened at the lean-to is in three sworn statements and a coroner's report, and the three statements do not agree about the order and they agree completely about the thing that everybody in that county has been asked about since and that everybody answers the same way.

He was not found in the lean-to. He was found in the yard of the Sedgwick place, a quarter of a mile down the grade, because by then he had one place left to go and it was the only address in the county where a man had once had a duffel bag and a truck and a reason to be afraid, and because the arithmetic had finished in his head at four in the morning and the arithmetic was this: a man with the first half of the sequence in his memory and a bench in a garage on Ridgeline Terrace and no way on earth to get back into that garage was a man who had better find out who had bought his notebooks, and the only person in Oregon who had ever held them was a failed dairy farmer who could not read them and would have to sell them to somebody.

So he walked into Dale Sedgwick's lane at twenty to five in the morning, and the line of forty people closed on the yard behind him, and the fire chief of the Bellhaven volunteer department, whose name was Ardis Pell and who was Vera Pell's niece, was the second person through the gate.

There was a fight and it lasted four minutes and it happened in the dark in a farmyard, and it happened to people who had grown up on that ground: a mill town's fire department, three loggers, four deputies, two state troopers, and a woman who had been running the jaws of life since she was nineteen.

He was not invisible in that yard.

That is the sentence. That is the sentence in the report that has been read aloud in fourteen documentaries and that nobody has ever managed to improve: he was not invisible in that yard.

The diesel tank had been tipped and there was forty gallons of it loose and there was a burn barrel going, and the yard was lit all at once and orange from the ground up, and in the middle of that yard, on ground that was already half mud, there was a shape.

What the men said afterward is that it was a boy. Every one of them said a boy. There was a shape of a man about five foot nine and a hundred and forty pounds made out of mud and diesel and sawdust, out of everything that had been thrown at it and everything that had been on the ground, and it ran, and it went down, and when it came up off the ground it had taken the whole of the yard with it and you could see it, you could see it perfectly, you could see every hit land.

Four minutes. The coroner's report lists a fractured left orbital, four ribs, a ruptured spleen, a fractured wrist, and a depressed fracture of the temporal bone, and gives the cause as blunt force trauma, and does not and cannot list who did any of it, and there are four people in that county who have never in their lives been able to say which blow was theirs, and one of them is the fire chief, one is a state trooper with nine years in, and one is a man who was driving his cattle truck past the gate at twenty to five in the morning and who got out to see what was going on, and who is in no report anywhere, and who has never told anybody in his family what he did in that yard.

And it is in the three statements, and it is in the coroner's report, and it is in the four photographs taken in the yard before the ambulance came, and it is the thing the county has been arguing about in the Bitterroot for two years: that in the last two minutes of his life, the mud stopped moving, because the mud had nothing to hold on to, and the shape on the ground in the yard of the Sedgwick place, under nine flashlights and one burning barrel, came back.

Nathan Sayre identified him at the state medical examiner's office in Portland on the Wednesday morning, four days before the DNA came back, from a photograph and from the tattoo on the inside of the left forearm, and what he said to the examiner was: "That's Brandt. He's thirty-two. He was the best man at his own funeral in March."

Owen Ketcham was buried in Millvale eleven days later and there were four hundred people in the church and his daughter came up from Boise and read a paragraph about the banana.

The county attorney filed nothing against Nathan Sayre, and the state medical board gave him eighteen months of supervision and a letter, and the Journal carried a two-page piece in July under the headline THE MAN WHO WAS NOT THERE, and the reporter who wrote it published the nine lines off the legal pad and misquoted two of them, and the retraction was quietly amended in August, in a footnote, which is where such things go. The sealed envelope under the garage workbench was found by a maintenance crew in the winter, thirty-one pages of the complete method in a small level hand, and it is now in a box in a federal records center in Seattle that four people have applied to read. The four thousand three hundred and forty dollars in new twenties came back to the First Baptist Church of Bellhaven in November, and it is still in the building fund.

And in December, in a motorcycle shop in Eugene, Oregon, a young man who worked the parts counter was offered, for nine hundred dollars, a set of three marbled composition books with masking tape on the front and a rubber band around each, and he did not buy them, because they looked like homework.

The Wayfarer Inn on Vine Street in Bellhaven was sold in April, with the front room upstairs stripped to the studs and rebuilt, and Dale Sedgwick bought it out of a bankruptcy, paying cash, in new twenties, and put a new sign over the porch and never changed the name.

He is a heavy man now, two years on, forty-three, and he keeps a clean kitchen and he is careful with the fire insurance and he has not had a drink in fourteen months and counts every bottle in the place on Sundays, and he lives in two rooms at the back, and there is a locked drawer in the desk in the office that his housekeeper has never once seen open.

And if you go in there on a Tuesday in February and sit at the end of the bar and buy a drink, he will pour it and put the change down and stand with the rag in his hand and talk about the mill, and about the school, and about the weather, and if a car comes up Vine Street with its lights on and slows down a little at the porch, you will see him look at it.

Everything else he keeps in the drawer.