Back on the porch his son, Brady, was making music and drinking beer with Duane and Roy Martin. The women sat in rocking chairs, singing from time to time, mostly laughing softly as they talked with Emily, drinking a few quiet beers of their own.

Gobe had been playing fiddle with the others, tapping his toes and rocking to the beat of the guitars until the pain in his lungs grew too sharp for him to concentrate on the music, a hot fire, burning with each breath. Placing his fiddle in the case, leaning the bow he'd made from a broken television antenna against the wall, he got up and walked off the porch. The music was good. He smiled at its sweetness, growing softer as he walked away from the house. Drifting on the breeze, the clear sounds reminded him of how his daddy used to talk about music.

"If it's good it sounds like part of nature," his daddy always said. He'd taught Gobe to hold the bow between his thumb and forefinger, lightly rocking it across the fiddle resting against his breastbone.

"The fiddle's the earth and the bow's the air," Ben Rightly had said. "The music's the sound the air makes moving over the earth. Blows too soft and don't nobody hear it. Blows too hard and things get knocked down and tossed around. You got to let it blow just right, so people know there's air around them but they don't think of it as blowing. It's just what's there when they breathe. Or dance. Or listen."

Gobe had asked his father about the fiddler. What was the fiddler if the fiddle was earth and the bow was air?

"Fire, boy. The fiddler's fire, burning away everything else in his life while he's making the music, and when the music's done, the fiddler's water, smooth and relaxed, just flowing over things."

Gobe hadn't thought of Ben much over the last sixty years. Sometimes the smell of pipe tobacco in H. Mast's store down in Valle Crucis or the rustle of denim overalls as a man walked by would trigger flashes of memory, brief images, but he didn't need to think about his father, recollect his sayings and reflect on his influence. They didn't need to be thought about. They just were part of life, as natural as the elements.

Until recently. In the last few months he'd found himself remembering a great many of Ben Rightly's sayings, his jokes, how he taught Gobe to make music and work the land, ways handed down from his Cherokee and Scotch-Irish grandparents, and how he'd talked about the pain in his chest, the agony of breathing. Gobe knew what the surge of memories meant. It was coming time for him to follow Ben off the mountain.

His memory of the cold winter day his father walked out was as clear as the music Brady and the Martin boys were making on the porch behind him. All morning Ben had been sitting in the living room, coughing the contents of his shredded lungs into a coffee can clutched between his knees. Outside, the wind whipped up the holler, screeching through the trees and rattling the house. Small ridges of snow lined the insides of the window sills where the windows couldn't be shut tight enough to keep it out.

Late in the afternoon the wind died and pale traces of sunlight broke through the clouds, faint orange streaks on the snow covered fields. Motioning to Gobe with his forefinger, Ben coughed, a long racking sound followed by several minutes of labored breathing. Then he stood, slowly, cautiously, as though fearing he might break, and leaned for a moment on his son's shoulder.

"Fetch me my jacket please, son," he had said.

Gobe got the jacket, helping his father put it on, pulling it gently over his arms.

"Now, come out on the porch with me."

As they stood looking down the valley, tier after tier of smokey blue mountains rising before them, Ben rested his hands on Gobe's shoulders.

"I'm walking out, Gobe." Ben lit his pipe as he spoke, inhaling deeply and coughing, his eyes filling with tears.

Gobe was silent. He had known for a long time that it would come to this. When he was a boy, Ben had told him about his father, Gobe's grandfather, Claude Rightly, who had walked out when he was sick and dying.

"Rightlys don't die in bed," Ben had said. "And they don't die on their land. When it comes time, we walk into the woods, deep woods, dark woods. That's where our dying ground is, where the mountain panthers wait."

Gobe had nodded. His grandparents and his grandparents' grandparents, now his father. Someday, it would be this way with him.

Hunched against the cold breeze, he watched Ben wave and walk across the whitened tobacco field toward the woods, disappearing into the trees as he followed the old Indian trails, wind blowing snow around his bent figure, its frozen powder softening the outlines of his footprints as soon as he made them.

Standing with his memories and listening to the music, Brady's fiddle soaring around the Martin boys' guitars, Gobe heard the whine of a chain saw rise above a patch of woods adjoining his land. The Florida people who had bought the first lot on the old Trivette place were clearing land as they got ready to build their summer home.

Gobe shook his head. After Roby Trivette died last year, his son Greg had sold the land to a realty corporation from Boone and they had subdivided the hundred and fifty acres into two and five acre lots.

Now the Byrds down the road were talking about doing the same thing, saying it was all they had left to do with the land.

"There just isn't a living to be made farming in this country any more," Lim Byrd had said a few days before down at H. Mast's. "Times are hard and the damn tobacco's not selling like it used to. Now the goddamn government's pushing us harder than ever with smaller and smaller allotments. I don't know what in the hell to do."

The other men sitting around drinking soda pops and smoking cigarettes nodded agreement.

Tourists were flocking to the mountains, riding around back roads looking for cheap land and trying to talk folks into selling them pieces of furniture, farm implements, old china, anything which had been kept by mountain families for generations. Soon the hills and hollers would be filled with people who came from the cities and flatlands of the south, building summer homes and ski chalets, people who had never picked a banjo or played a fiddle, never followed a mule driven plow over a field, never harvested a crop of tobacco and hauled it down to the auctions and warehouses in Boone.

Probably his land would go like that. With everything around it sold off, the Indian trails would be gone, blocked by houses, widened and scraped into streets and driveways, filled for lawns. What good would it do Brady to keep the place? Things would have changed so by the time he was ready to walk out that there would be no trails for him to walk out on, no place for him to walk to. The panthers would be gone, chased away to farther mountains and distant woods, to unfamiliar lands no Rightly would know how to find.

He stood at the far end of the field, the first trees of the woods only a few feet away, the old trail winding among them, skirting boulders and following the banks of creeks. Gobe had walked along it many times. Hunting. Fishing. Gathering. Looking for galax and ginseng, he would follow it, moving over the hills, through the hollers, along the creeks, a gunny sack over his shoulder as he harvested the wild crops.

He and Emily had taken this trail to other trails, walking to Hickory and Lenoir to visit relatives, sometimes going into Tennessee to camp on Roan Mountain or over to Mountain City to make music with Clarence Ashley. They'd followed most of the old trails and they knew where the others were. Gobe always pointed out the one which led to where the mountain panthers wait, and each time he did the trail was harder to find, more grown over with grass, more hidden by hanging branches and saplings.

One by one, all the trails were disappearing, ancient footways erased for building lots and highways, or forgotten and grown over. Looking into the woods, his eyes following the trail winding among them, Gobe remembered the day he had asked his father what the mountain panthers looked like.

Ben had shaken his head. "The only ones who know are those who've gone there, who've walked out. My daddy used to say they was fierce critters with yellow eyes and coal black fur, waiting to pounce on you the minute you come to where they waited. He figured they'd break your back and kill you before you knowed what happened, before you seen them, even. But my grandmother said it was nothing of the kind, that they was those who had walked out before you and they was waiting for you to join them. I asked her if they was their souls but she didn't think so. She just said they was those who'd walked out.

"I was just a tad at the time and I remember getting all excited and saying something about if the mountain panthers wasn't their souls, then they must be the people themselves, turned into mountain panthers. I thought it must be something wonderful, to be turned into a mountain panther with yellow eyes and coal black fur. But she said it wasn't that neither. Then I asked her what they was, exactly. She said she didn't know. Didn't nobody know. Then she went back to working in the garden and didn't say nothing more about it."

The last Gobe had ever seen of Ben was his back disappearing behind a huge ash tree as he walked out on the trail leading from the Rightly place, smoke from his pipe swirling and mixing with snow coming from the branches of surrounding trees.

The music stopped. Gobe looked back at the house and saw Brady standing on the porch waving at him.

"We need your fiddle, Daddy." The breeze carried his voice over the field.

Gobe coughed and waved back, starting toward the house.

....(to be continued next month)