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that requires a pipe,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Perhaps two pipes.” From the pocket of his coat he took out a strangely curving white pipe made of English clay and lit it with a taper from the fire.
    “Years ago, when I was younger,” he said, “I had a mind—well, half a mind, anyway—to see something of the world. The mountains. The seas. The jungles. And the deserts. I traveled far and wide in search of, what exactly? I don’t know for sure. Perhaps an answer to the question of what I was going to do with my young life. You’ll ask yourself a question like that one day. Anyway, when you’re young you always make the mistake of believing that you have to go somewhere else to find yourself, when the plain and boring fact of the matter is that you need only stay at home and just take a look inside your own head.”
    “I don’t understand,” said Billy.
    “One day you will,” said Mr. Rapscallion. “Anyway, one of these travels in search of how I was going to live my life took me to a great, high, northern wilderness of endless, endless forest, high mountains and deep, deep snow. Somewhere along the way, I forget how exactly, I took up with
three
companions. They were all experienced, hairy woodsmen who knew how to survive in that desolate place. How to build a fire. How to put up a tent. How to fish and hunt. How to stay alive. How to avoid losing your mind in that empty wilderness. Which is easily done, let me tell you.
    “I can still remember their names. These men were not made for towns or cities. Even their names had a strange touch of the wilderness about them. There was Jim Screech. Tom Lurker. And Bill Tremor. But of the three, Old Screech was the one who truly belonged to the forest. He didn’t wash very much and was a terrifying sort of character, just to look at. Old Screech had never even slept in a bed. Always slept under the stars. Truly the wilderness was in his blood.
    “For several days we walked north into the big forest, fishing in the river and hunting small game. We saw no other men. There were no other men. Not for hundreds of miles. All you could hear was the sound of the river, the occasional bird and the cold wind in the trees. And not just any wind. This was a wind that played tricks on a man’s mind. A wind that sometimes, you fancied, could do more than just moan and groan. It seemed like a wind that might even speak to you. Whisper your fortune. Call your name. Tell you a story. Well, one night it did just that. Almost, anyway.
    “We’d had a good day’s fishing and were sitting around the blazing campfire, much as you and I are now. Smoking pipes. Exchanging stories. Ghost stories. I always loved a ghost story. We each agreed to tell a story. And having done so, we’d all vote on who’d told the scariest one, and the winner would be excused from any camp duties the next day. I went first. Then Tom Lurker. Then Bill Tremor.
    “Well, Bill Tremor told us a story that left us frozen with fear. Two of us, at least. And it’s odd, but to this day I can’t remember anything about it. Not one thing. And yet I agreed with Lurker that it was quite simply the most unnerving story we’d ever heard. Maybe it was what happened afterward that drove it from our minds. I don’t think it had scared Screech very much. Because even while we were complimenting Tremor on scaring us half to death, Old Screech was gazing up at the stars like a timber wolf and shaking his head slowly. Then he stood up and raised one of his hairy ears into the air and seemed to be listening to something.
    “ ‘Listen,’ said Screech. ‘Do you hear that?’
    “ ‘What is it?’ we asked Screech, looking around nervously. There was no moon. Beyond the flickering light of the fire there was only darkness and yet more darkness. ‘What can you hear? A bear, perhaps?’ (The bears in that part of the world are enormous. As big as a truck at the shoulder with teeth as long as a man’s foot and claws