I do not believe I really saw a ghost. A symbol, perhaps, but not a ghost. I did not want to follow it or study it too much for fear there would be a simple explanation, and I did not want an explanation of it, nor do I want one now. I want it left just the way it was.
We were in northern California and it was shortly after World War II. Our expedition was pleasant but not glamorous. We had been on a varmint hunt with pistols and we left from some hilly ranch country before dawn to drive back down the coast to San Francisco. Fog had closed in solidly and there was only a gradual transition between dark and daylight, so I was driving with the lights on at about the time dawn should have been.
I do not recall having met another car on the road and I could have been going no more than 25 miles an hour, hoping for a break in the gray monochrome that held visibility to 30 or 40 yards. There was barbed wire on both sides of the road and it was foothill country, not extremely steep--grazing land.
The first hound appeared against the fog on the road shoulder, larger than life somehow because it was there as if projected on a screen with no reference for size, a great dark fellow moving at a lope to cross the road, and I braked instantly as he passed. If he or the two immediately behind him saw or heard the car they gave no sign, and they had almost reached the fence when the man appeared on the same course, moving somehow at what seemed an incredible half-run, half-walk, swift and silent, and the fog revealed the upper part of him before his legs and feet as if he were floating above the ground.
He seemed neither to see nor hear the car and crossed very close ahead, a rawboned giant in a broad-brimmed, slouched felt hat, and I am vague about his clothing. Was it all gray or was that an effect of the fog? I think it was only shirt and pants; no coat. He had a long gray beard and long hair and in those days, many years after one fashion for beards and many years before a new style, he had a wild look as if he had followed his great hounds forever and would follow them forever more.
He stared straight along the route the dogs had taken and seemed to step over the highway fence with hardly a break in stride, but I am sure he simply pushed the top strand down and crossed without waste motion.
His rifle must have been a long-barreled Winchester '73; at least the outline was the same, and I know that the bluing was worn so that it was the color of bare metal.
He was plainly outlined against the fog and then gone completely and I heard nothing. The car windows were up and there had been no trace of the hounds' baying although they must have been trailing. When I turned off the engine and rolled down the car windows I heard nothing and it felt as if the world were fenced by cotton batting. The sun came out a little later.
I like to think he still follows his hounds on an endless trail he has kept since his rifle was new. There is probably a prosaic explanation of him and his dogs but I'd rather not hear it.
This story originally appeared in The Part I Remember by Charles F. Waterman.
Copyright (c) 1974 by Charles F. Waterman. All rights reserved.