Deep in the Missouri Ozarks, past the last gravel turnoff on Decker's Road, there's a ravine where the phone signal dies and the deer don't go. I met a man there in November of 2022, sitting on a fallen oak at the bottom of the gorge, staring at a straight line of stones he'd laid across the dry creek bed. He told me he'd been laying that line for three years, every dawn, one stone at a time. He said it was keeping something from coming up the ravine from the south. I asked him what. He just pointed at the line and said, 'That's not the question.' This is a story about a line, a man named Hollis, and the thing I saw move under the frost heave on the other side. No neat answers. Just a walk down into a place where something is waiting.