Creek footprints moving upstream: a hiker's account

We went out after the rain because the air felt rinsed and the creek trail keeps a kind of honesty about it after a storm. You can see what’s passed through: deer, raccoon, the neighbor’s lab mix with its big splayed paws. The rocks wear a film of silt like a fresh coat of paint. We parked at the gravel lot and took the narrow path that drops through sycamores down to the bend where the creek bends twice and fans into slate-bottomed shallows. The trunks there are white as bone and the roots clutch the bank like hands with mud in their knuckles. It smelled of wet leaves and iron and that green, clean smell that rides on water when the sun finally steps out again.

Mara walked ahead, stepping around puddles and doing that thing where she taps the ground with her trekking pole like she’s talking to the path. We weren’t looking for anything. The sky was the color of a nickel and holding. Gnats swarmed then settled. The world felt put back in place, like after a fever breaks.

We found the first tracks just upstream of the big cottonwood snag, where the bank slumps in and makes a gentle little beach of dark mud. They weren’t dog. They weren’t boot. Bare, mostly. You could see the whole spread of toes pressed in clean as if molded, the heel a little shallow, the forefoot wide and blunt with a squarish big toe. They went in a line along the bank, each one set almost straight ahead like the way a careful person walks when they don’t want to turn an ankle.

I crouched to look. The edges were crisp, water still curling into the low spots like tiny poured ribbons. You could press your fingertip into the edge and the mud would sag back slow with the same bright shine. There were only two sets in the mud on the bank and then they stepped down onto the stone and clay of the creek bed itself. I figured they’d smear out there and be gone, like everything is in moving water. You step, the silt lifts and the current takes it. That’s the rule. But the prints kept going.

They didn’t just keep going; they continued in the creek like something had set a foot down in that watery skin and pressed right into the clay underneath. The water ran over them, pearled against the edges and made those tiny smooth swirls you see when a stone interrupts the flow. Each new depression was clear as a footprint in cement. The toes were there, even the dip where the arch didn’t fully touch. It was as if the creek had frozen itself for each step long enough to remember it.

Mara looked up the length of the bend and shaded her eyes. The creek there is straight for a while between the sticky black roots of the banks, shallow enough that the light finds the bottom. No one was ahead. No pale legs lifting, no flash of a backpack. Just water shoulder-rolling over itself and minnows flicking near the edges.

“Who comes out here barefoot?” she said, not really to me. “In March?”

We followed, like people do, because it was right there and right there has always been a powerful argument. The prints stepped from one pocket of clay to the next. Where the bottom turned to gravel the impressions were fainter, but you could still make out the path by the way the little pebbles had been scuffed to one side in a crescent. The stride was longer than mine, longer than Mara’s, but not impossible if a tall man stretched himself. Four feet, maybe. I matched one, heel to heel with my boot, and the ball of my foot didn’t quite reach the forefoot of the print. My own step next to it tore up the silt and sent a trembling cloud downcurrent. The prints we were following didn’t seem to bleed that way. They lay there, weight having made a place, the water polishing the edges a little but not erasing them.

It bothered me more the farther we went, not less. The creek was talking, the way creeks do in low runs, but the rest of the woods had taken a step back. When we first dropped in, there’d been a woodpecker up by the power cut who’d been making a racket. I noticed I couldn’t hear him anymore. No titmice with their little scold songs near us. The arterial hiss of the highway beyond the ridge was there, faint, but everything close felt tucked in and listening.

The stride began to stretch. Four feet became five, then something more. The gaps between the impressions made a kind of breath you had to pace yourself to. There’s a place where the creek swells a little over a shelf of hardpan, about ankle-deep. The prints ran right up that, one after another, and the spacing jumped. Seven feet. Eight, leaning on eight and a half unless my eye was fooling me. I looked for any sign that the maker was slipping, lunging, playing a trick of large leaps. But the depth held even, the toe impressions dug in with conviction, not skid. It was the way you step when you aren’t fighting to keep your balance.

We reached a little side pool where leaves spin and collect, caught behind a fallen branch. The print there had pressed into that tea-brown mat and made a perfect negative of a foot with the red-brown underclay kissing through, the water working itself around the edges in tight rings. I put my hand near it and felt the cold sliding over my knuckles. No warmth, nothing telling on the water that something had passed there seconds ago. Just the shape of it, insisting.

“I don’t like this,” Mara said. Her voice came out too quietly, like she was afraid the creek would hear her.

We could have turned around right there. We should have. Instead, we kept to the inside edge where the bank dips low and you can walk on leaves and soft dirt under the sycamores. Every step we took made the ordinary sounds of people in a wet place: the gentlest suction of mud releasing a boot, the whisper of nylon, the metallic click of her pole. The prints in the water made no sound that I could tell. They simply existed, strung ahead of us like stepping stones, the kind that promise something on the other side if you keep your feet dry.

There was a long, clear run ahead where the creek had sheared off to expose a flat stripe of clay the color of coffee with cream. No rocks, no leaves. We were twenty feet from the last print when the water at the far end of that stripe dimpled. It was subtle, like the way you see a fish nosing the surface from below, a little lens flexing. Then the shape pushed down, slow and definite, and a foot-shaped hollow formed while we watched, the edges rolling down into themselves like cake batter poured into a pan. The water curled over the lips of it and slid into the toes and for a second there was a little burp of trapped air that wriggled up and popped. Nothing stood there. Nothing lifted. The space around it was just water and the bright, clean sheen of the afternoon, and the impression of weight where no one was.

Mara’s pole made a small, dry click against a stone. That was the loudest sound I think I’ve ever heard. Another step appeared farther up, deeper, the toes biting, the heel separate, the stride between them too long now to take as a person without running. The creek seemed to pause to take that weight and then forgot it, the surface smoothing over while the bottom remembered too well. All the way back down the run behind us the previous prints held their shape, unsoftening, like a row of open mouths.

“We should go,” I said, and saying it broke something. The world did not rush back; it stayed listening. We turned and moved steady but fast along the bank. Neither of us wanted to step in the water anymore. The leaves were slick and made everything feel slanted. Branches whispered above us in a wind that hadn’t been there five minutes ago and then wasn’t there again. I kept thinking about that slight swell before the foot pressed down, how the water had bowed to something you couldn’t see before it let itself be cut.

We didn’t talk. The path back seemed longer and a little wrong, as if some turns had been pulled wider and others pinched together. There’s a place where the trail skirts a low place that floods and you have to duck around a tangle of grapevine; we both forgot it was there until it was right in front of us and my sleeve caught a tendril and snapped me back. I glanced behind once and felt sure I would see prints on the damp leaves, but it was just our own scuff and the dark fists of deer tracks going about their normal deer business, ignoring what we were ignoring.

The lot was empty when we came up over the last rise except for a county truck far off by the gate. Our car sat with a skin of wet pollen dried to a powder under the low sun. It gave the hood that chalky look, the kind that keeps handprints for a second before the outline turns faint and the wind takes it. Mara fished the keys out of the front pocket of her jacket and I walked ahead to throw my pack in the back. Then I stopped.

There were prints on the hood. Not chalky like dusted. Wet. Two of them near the edge above the headlight, and then a third higher, like something had stepped up and then stridden across the paint. They were the same shape as the ones in the creek: the blunt forefoot, the slight arch, the fan of toes with the big toe set a little squarer than it should be. You could see where water had beaded at the edges and was just beginning to dry from outside in, the outline going fuzzy as the sun worked on it. There was a faint line of fine beige grit left by the water, the same color as the clay shelf we’d stood beside watching the impressions arrive without a maker.

“No,” Mara said, flat, when she saw. She didn’t ask whose they were. There wasn’t a whose that would make sense. The spacing between the first and third print on the hood was too far for a person to have stepped without bracing a hand, and there were no handprints, no drips showing where someone had maybe climbed on, no skid of a heel on the painted metal. Just the three, as clean as dipped into us, the last one up by the wiper, its toe angled toward the windshield as if there would have been another if there had been room.

I put my fingers near the closest one and felt the cold off it. It smelled like creek: that mineral tang and a little rot from the leaves, something thin and sour the rain brings up from the bottom. The water there bled into my fingerprint and then began to go clear again.

We got in. I didn’t look back driving out, though I wanted to see if the wet shapes would stay or dry before we hit the blacktop. The heater came on and made the inside of the car smell like damp wool and the peppermint gum Mara keeps in the console. We went down the dirt lane slow, the stones popping under the tires, turned onto the county road, and the trees fell away.

At home that night I took my boots off on the porch and knocked the soles together to get the mud out. Fine pale silt sifted down like flour, lighter than the black garden loam under it. I set them by the door, thought again of that place in the water where the surface bowed for something that should have shivered and splashed and didn’t, and of the way the prints on the hood had been drying from the edges first, as if the center held on to the creek longer. On the counter, my phone buzzed with a weather alert for another line of storms rolling in after midnight. I checked the porch one last time before bed, like you do for nothing in particular, and the night poured that somewhere-else smell into the stairwell, the cool of wet bark and distant river stone and something animal beneath it, going where the current said and not where it should.