A man, or something worse.

     In the black night, they hear it: a screaming breaking through the low and ceaseless roaring of the river, its ache or anger or fear or whatever desperate thing might make an animal or man make such a sound echoing around the canyon, off of the boulders, then sinking beneath the hush of rushing water, before coming again.

     On the bank, listening, two men and a boy. The biggest man is white, bearded, balding, a rifle in his hands. The other is dark skinned beneath his black mustache, a kanaka, native to the Sand- wich Islands, crouched beside his dog, fingers buried in its neck fur. The boy is still too young to shave, though within the year he won't be, his fuzz-soft face faintly lambent in the last reaches of the fire- light. He grips a knife, slick and stinking from the gutting of fish. Behind them, the campfire is a red unsteadiness, a whiff of trout skin burning. Beyond it: the mules' uneasy shifting.

     “Could be a catamount,” the boy's father whispers.

     The kanaka shakes his head. “Too low. Their sound more like a woman.”

     “You think it's a man?” the boy says.

     Another scream. In the strip of sky above the canyon, there is no moon, just stars, their light too faint to show more than a riffling of rapids, the stillness of stones, the black mass of the far bank like some great weight the boy can feel tilting the earth beneath his feet toward whatever over there is screaming.

     Then his father is shouting across the ravine. “Hey, you okay? You need help?” But each word seems to only push the screaming louder. And as the boy watches his own fire-thrown shadow shiver before him on the river's surface, the realization shoots through him: for all he cannot see, the same is not true for whatever over there is watching them. The dog's teeth flashing with each bark. The gleam of the blade at the boy's side. On his fingers, the fish slime has glued the handle to his fist, and as the stone-clatter crashes closer down the far bank, he grips it till it seems to fuse with his own skin. His father's rifle rises—its glinting streak—into a sud- den silence: the stone-clatter stopped, the screaming stopped. As if whatever—whoever—had been rushing for them had recognized the glint, known the meaning of a gun.

     Though later that night, the three of them back around the fire, the boy sits gouging with his fingers at a blackened shell of fish, listening to his father argue with the kanaka about whether the sav- ages up here, so much higher in these unknown mountains than any other miner had ever been, could be acquainted with the weapons of whites. Whether there could even be a white come here before them. Or if it might have been a bear. Or some other creature as yet undiscovered, save by the Indians. Which is when the kanaka, ripping the crisped head off another charcoaled trout, tells them about the bohemkuleh.

     He is sucking out the insides when he says it, and through his mouthful they cannot make out the word, but this is why they partnered with him: his long-ago migration from his island home to here, his years lived in the lowlands, his marriage to a digger squaw, her valley language near enough that of the diggers here.

     “Road women,” he tells them now, flames shifting fish grease across his face. “They call them road women.”

     The boy's father reaches to the pan, pulls out another trout. “You said it didn't sound like a woman. Said it couldn't be a—”

     “I said they call them that.” With his nails, the kanaka scrapes away the charring. “But it ain't a woman. And it ain't a man.”

     “What is it?” the boy says, and his father turns that look on him, that mix of disappointment and tenderness that comes when the man remembers his son is still a kid.

     The kanaka sits shaking clumps of charred fish off his hand for long enough that the dog, still by the river, gets off three barks. “Both,” he says. “At the same time. Or able to switch back and forth. But always bad.” A spirit, he tells them, or some kind of creature, he isn't sure, only knows his wife's tribe believes they haunt the woods at night, flitting through the darkness between trees, screaming so plaintively they lure you out.

     “Why?” the boy says.

     “To get inside. Your skin, your body. Get at your head. Make you go mad.” Like a parasite, he explains, except it feeds off your mind, leaves you less than human, unfit to be with the tribe, unable to do anything but weep and cry, let loose that same plaintive screaming, lure another softhearted soul into the woods, so the bohemkuleh can exchange your body for the next.

     “Well”—the boy's father smacks the small fish against a rock, a sudden spray of blackened bits—“I, for one, don't feel particularly lured.” He grins at his son, says, “How about you?” And the boy, his own jaw stiff as the frozen river stones, has to turn away. Behind him, he hears his father still talking, but he is listening to the dog. The echo of its barking coming back across the river. It had sounded sad. Something in the screaming stirred by more than rage or pain. Maybe that is why the picture he cannot shake is of the digger squaw he once saw grieving someone who'd died. She'd smeared soot and pitch over her face, so thick the tattoos on her cheeks and chin barely showed through, her hair stiff with it, her eyes stark white inside the crusty blackness. Remembering the screaming, he sees it coming from her mouth. The tears in her eyes. The moon has broken over the ridge, crept halfway down the other side. Soon he will see her, crouched there on that far bank, hunched and shaking in her silent grief, waiting for him to wade across and help her. Her face snaps up: teeth white as her eyes, tongue black as her throat.

     A hand on his back. He turns to see his father's face, the big beard moving with his chewing.

     “No, son.” His father's smile is a slight brightening beneath his beard. “It was just a catamount.” And turning back to the kanaka across the flames, he says, “Isn't that right?”

     The kanaka spits a slurry of manducated fishbones, wipes his mustache with his wrist.      

     “Who's to say there ain't some kind of cougar up here sounds like a man?” the boy's father says. “Nobody. Nobody been up here. Nobody'd know. No.” He stands. “It was a catamount. Smelled this.” Gives his half-eaten fish a shake. “Simple as that. Big old cat out there wailing away 'cause it wants a bite.”

     This time he smiles a grin so big the boy can't help but smile back. His father gives the fish another flap, sends a quick-lipped kiss- ing sound toward the river—kiss-kiss-kiss—and the boy can almost believe it had just been a cat. The longer it goes on—the flapping fish, the kiss-kiss-kissing—the more likely it seems. Stirred by his father, the dog barks faster, and it is a relief to remember the dog is a hunter, bred to go crazy at coons and cougars, a relief to think that's what got it worked up, to cast his fears away with the fish when his father at last rears back and throws it.

     In the morning the fish-half is still there, lying blackly on a rock. But the dog is gone.