I left Idaho Falls at 6:15 in the morning because I wanted to
be on the trail with the first clean light.
The drive to Swan Valley was empty and quiet the whole way
down US 26, the river off to my right, pale and flat under a
thin band of fog that hadn't burned off yet.
I'd picked Palisades Creek because it's straightforward.
Follow the water up to the lower lake.
Keep going. If you feel good turn around
before dark. I've hiked it a few times and
always told myself I'd finally push past the lower lake and see
the upper. I had a day pack with the
basics. Headlamp filter, a space
blanket, a cheap compass, a paper map that showed the
general basin, plenty of calories, a first aid pouch,
bear spray clip to the shoulder strap.
I signed the trail register at the kiosk, wrote my plate number
on a scrap of paper and tucked it under the windshield wiper
like I always do when I'm solo. The air smelled like wet wood
and cold granite. It was late September.
Aspen along the Creek were already turning coins of yellow
against the darker fur on the slopes.
The first couple miles are easy. The path is wide, loping
alongside Palisades Creek, the water pushing fast over bedrock
and fallen limbs loud enough you have to.
Raise your voice if you're close to someone.
I passed a dad with two kids in hoodies and a woman in waiters
working a run below an old log jam.
There's a spot where the Canyon narrows and the trail is shaved
into the wall, with a decent drop on your left and the Creek
chewing away below. Everyone gives each other space
there without talking about it. Past that it opens and you can
walk without thinking. I kept a comfortable pace,
breathing easy. My plan was simple.
Lower Lake by late morning snack, check the time, see what
the sky looked like, and decide if I would go farther.
I always tell myself I don't have anything to prove, but I
also don't like turning around when I still feel strong.
By 10:30, I hit the outlet of Lower Palisades Lake.
The water was low enough to show a collar of Gray rock all the
way around, a little wind rippling from West to east.
Two tents were tucked in the trees near a flat Meadow, and I
could smell someone's coffee. A guy in a faded ball cap and a
woman in a puffy jacket were packing up.
We traded a hello. He said they'd heard something
circling the camp the previous night.
Probably a deer, maybe a black bear.
Didn't see anything, just footsteps in the brush.
He grinned when he said it, but he kept glancing at the timber
like the joke didn't sit right with him.
I laughed it off, wish them a good hike out, and walked along
the North Shore on a narrower path that stayed above the
waterline past the far end. You pick up the main tread again
as it funnels into the upper Canyon.
There were bits of orange flagging tied to willows along
the way. Not Forest Service standard,
just loose knots on thin branches.
Outfitters do that sometimes. Volunteers do it when the brush
gets bad. The tape looked fresh, edges
still crisp, not frayed by wind. I noticed it in that way.
You notice something that may matter later, but doesn't mean
anything yet. The trail steepened after a
tributary and a stretch of slick, angled rock where the
Creek crowding the trail forced me to step carefully on wet
Blackstone. When that ended, the Canyon
relaxed again and the trees got taller, the shade heavier.
I didn't see anyone else after the couple at the lake.
No birdsong for a long stretch either, which isn't strange in
the middle of the day, but felt noticeable because the Creek
noise softened there and left a quiet that made every shuffle of
my shoes sound too loud. Just before noon, I reached a
fork that isn't on the printed map I brought.
The main trail went straight, climbing into timber.
The other was narrower, dropping left toward a shallow side
drainage before curling up again.
Someone had tied newer looking blue flagging on that smaller
trail, a single ribbon that snapped in the breeze in the
hard dirt at the junction. I could see the round Prince of
horses. They came from the way I'd come
and turned up the smaller trail, fresh enough that the edges of
the Prince hadn't rounded off yet.
I crouched and touched one out of habit, feeling the soft
crumble pack strings go to the upper basin late season.
I figured there might be a faster line that cut some
switchbacks. I took the left without
thinking, very hard because it looked travelled and my legs
felt good. The cut off walked clean and
then after 5 or 6 minutes thinned to softer tread through
tall grass. More blue tape, but now it was
tied low at knee height, as if someone had been walking and
fastening it without pausing. A single strand here, another
there, little flashes of color in green shadow.
It was the kind you can buy at a hardware store.
No writing on it, no bent staples, no printed FS.
The upper Canyon opened into a shallow bench with Meadow grass
and old stumps where trees had fallen years before.
The tape led me across at a slight diagonal, and then into a
patch of younger furs where the ground turned to needles.
That's where I stopped, not because I was tired, but because
I felt all at once aware of every inch of skin on my back,
the way you do when someone steps into a room behind you and
doesn't talk. I turned slowly, nothing, grass
bending in the breeze to my right, the edge of the Meadow
behind me, shadows in the trees ahead.
The quiet pressed hard enough that I found myself holding my
breath to listen. The Creek was distant now, a
muffled hiss like a road heard through a window.
I told myself I was being jumpy. I looked down to make sure the
last ribbon was still in view. It was tied to a sapling, 2
twists and a knot. I moved forward.
The trees closed a little, another ribbon on the left, then
one low on the right, almost hidden.
My calves prickled again, and I told my legs to keep going
because stopping was worse. What I heard first were running
steps in the brush somewhere behind and uphill.
Not heavy, not deer. Two or three quick footfalls,
then nothing. I stood still again, longer this
time, turning until I had a full circle of stillness around me,
doing the slow scan hunters do, looking for a curve that
shouldn't be there or a straight line in all the chaos.
Nothing. When I started walking again, I
did it as quietly as I could, rolling my feet instead of
slapping the ground, trying not to let a branch flick back and
make noise. It's hard to move that way with
a pack, even a small one. It throws your balance a little.
30 feet later I heard the footsteps again.
Same cadence, same distance, as if whatever was moving had
matched my pace, and only broke silence when I did.
There's a point where you drop the polite explanations.
You go from probably a deer to. Something is following me.
I didn't call out. I didn't want to tell it
anything about me, even the sound of my voice.
I pushed on, cutting between two furs and stepping over an old
log, gone to red sponge inside. When my foot pressed into it,
the wood gave way and the smell of rot and cold SAP came up,
sweet and sharp. I watched my feet again.
The ground ahead was churned and soft hoof Prints, yes, but wrong
somehow. Broad and round like they should
be, but the spacing was off too tight for a horse.
The prints doubled back on themselves in tight loops, maybe
stocktied here in pacing. I kept moving, and the blue tape
led me past the worn place and deeper into the trees.
The next ribbon was different. The tail of it had an extra
twist, like someone had tied it and then changed their mind
about where to put the knot and fumble a second time.
It hung too low, brushing my thigh as I passed, and I
flinched harder than that small touch deserved.
The feeling of eyes on the back of my neck had turned to a
weight I couldn't shake the sense that if I looked at the
exact right spot, at the exact right second, I would catch
something standing too still. I stopped again and listened for
my breathing to quiet. The steps came again.
Three quick touches through brush and then silence.
Closer. I didn't think.
I spun and blew bear spray in a hard orange fan into the trees.
The propellant boomed in the still air and the mist hung and
drifted in droplets that caught tiny flashes of light.
What answered was a sound I have not heard before or since and
have no good word for. It was like hearing an animal
cough and a person clear their throat at the same time.
Except the person part was wrong, like someone trying to
make the shape of a human sound without knowing how.
The brush shuddered. I saw nothing move except the
fog of spray thinning between trunks.
SAP dripped from a wounded spot on a nearby tree where something
had raked bark off in parallel grooves, long and neat.
I backed away from it and almost stepped off a small ledge
because the ground dropped where an old root had lifted and left
a shallow trench. I caught myself and cursed out
loud a short, ugly word that made the silence heavier.
The way dropping a rock into a still pond shows you how still
it was. I wanted out of the trees and
into open where I could see the blue tape pointed left toward
more timber, but a line of light showed through the right hand
side. I pushed through and came into a
wet flat place fed by a trickle from a spring.
The mud took my shoe 1/2 inch deep and held it.
A dozen hoof prints pooled with water here.
More loops and figure eights and stops and starts, as if an
animal had circled the same patch for a long time with no
destination in mind. In the center of those prints
was a single bar of a footprint that did not belong there, and I
still see it when I close my eyes.
It wasn't a full print. It was the impression of a pad
and the suggestion of toes. But the length was wrong for any
bare human foot, and the angle was wrong too, set as if
whatever put it there had leaned heavily on the outside edge.
I knew then I had taken a line I shouldn't have.
I looked back into the trees, and there, for one second only,
I saw something pale where pale didn't belong.
Not white like bone or the inside of bark.
Not animal, not clothing. A face, or the idea of one at
torso height, behind a screen of young branches, half turned and
low, as if it had been crouching and lifting at the same time.
The mouth, if that's what it was, didn't move.
The branches whispered as the light shifted.
When I blinked, it was gone. I didn't spray again.
I stepped backward, out of the wet spot, careful not to slide.
Every hair on my arms was standing.
My body had decided for me. I was going back the way I came.
I turned, found the last ribbon, and headed toward it at a pace
that was too fast to be quiet and too slow to call a run.
The ribbons that had led me in didn't lead me out.
I don't know if I missed one or if there wasn't one to miss.
I hit a pocket of trees where I expected to see a tail of blue
and found nothing. I turned twice, three times, and
nothing looked exactly like it had, though.
That's what heavy timber does when you're rattled.
Every tree is a copy of the last.
I took a line that felt right, following the slight downhill
that should aim me toward the Creek.
The steps in the brush to my right kept pace, showing up
every 30 or 40 feet like a presence in a mirror You won't
look at. The spell broke when a voice
called my name from somewhere ahead.
Caleb. It was my name, and it came
through the trees with the soft edges you get under canopy.
Not loud, but clear enough that it reached me clean.
I've been on this earth long enough to know how my own name
sounds when someone says it. I heard it, and every part of me
braced because whoever said it shouldn't have known it.
I hadn't seen anyone since the couple at the lake, and I hadn't
told them who I was. I hadn't called anything out.
I'd written C Martin in the register and left a plate
number, but those were back at the trailhead.
There is a reasonable line of thought where you say a hunter
could have seen me and read the name stitched above the chest
pocket of a shirt and used it. But my shirt didn't have a name,
and whoever said it said it like they didn't understand the shape
of the word, like their tongue was too big.
Like someone pronouncing letters they'd only seen on a page.
I took a step backward. The voice came again, closer,
the exact same tone and rhythm, the exact same length between
syllables, like a recording. Every instinct I have told me to
get into open ground. I turned toward the downhill
again and pushed hard until I found the edge of the bench and
the slope broke and I could see a Gray slide of talus with the
dark stripe of the Creek in trees below.
It wasn't near a long way down, through brush and broken ground
and rock and the kind of blow down that eats an hour 100 yards
at a time. I didn't have a choice.
I didn't want to stay in that timber with a voice that could
say my name the same wrong way twice.
I started down and learned fast that the slope hid little
shelves and drops. I tried to pick the cleanest
line. The thing in the brush came too
Slower when I was slow, faster when I was fast.
I slipped once and caught myself on a young Aspen that bent and
slapped back and hit me in the face as it righted, popping me
across the lip hard enough to taste iron.
I spit and kept moving. The trees thinned a little and I
could see the Creek better now, slick and slate and fast through
boulders that looked like wet backs.
The light had gone Gray without a cloud in the sky.
That happens in canyons when your angle to the sun changes
and the walls steal the light. I checked my watch for no good
reason. 158 I wanted to know where the sun would be at six,
at 7. I didn't like those numbers.
Halfway down, the slope broke clean into a jumble of charred
logs laid like Jack straws. There must have been a lightning
strike here years ago. Thick black bowls fall in every
which way. The bark bubbled and cracked and
frozen mid blister. I had to go over, around under,
picking a route where an awkward misstep could break an ankle and
keep me there overnight. That's when I heard the voice
again. Only it wasn't my name.
It was my voice. And it said, hold up from 10
feet to my right, where a black stump went to cinders.
I don't talk to myself when I'm alone.
I don't announce what I'm doing. I don't narrate my day.
I heard my voice say those two words, and I didn't look.
I pushed between two logs that pinched the pack hard enough to
wedge me, and I ripped free like an animal in a snare, hearing
fabric tear. And I took the slope in the
clumsy, fast way you do when speed is the only thing you have
going for you. Behind me, something climbed
over the same logs I had just gone through.
The cadence of steps rose into a short run, and then stopped
again when I did. Like it didn't want to be heard,
except when it chose to be. I hit the Creek lower down than
I'd aimed for. It wasn't a lazy braid here.
It was a boulder garden with slick cobbles between.
The water, even in September, was cold enough to knife my
shin's numb the second I stepped in.
I picked a line across because the opposite bank looked flatter
and more open. It's stupid to trust open ground
in a Canyon like that, but the trees on my side pressed hard
against the slope and I wanted space halfway across with water
swirling at my knees. My pole jammed between 2 stones
and my wrist strap held me to it and I had to wrench hard to pull
free and I almost sat down in the current.
When I reached the far side, not thinking, I stepped out onto a
slick rock and went to one knee and my hand landed in something
that wasn't mud. I looked down and saw my palm
had pressed into a smear that looked like rust.
A handprint laid there before me, the stain thin and even and
somehow not dried. I pulled my hand away fast and
wiped it on the grass. The smell that came up wasn't
rot or iron. It smelled like wet dog and hot
hair. Ahead in the open, the blue tape
hung on a Willow. There was no reason for it to be
there. I had broken off the cut off,
gotten lost, dropped to the Creek, crossed where there was
no trail, and here was another ribbon with the same fresh
square edges and the same knot. It moved in the minor breeze
that always runs along water and pointed upstream like a finger.
I stood still and watched it and counted my breaths out of some
need to make the moment into a fixed object. 1234 Somewhere
behind me and across the Creek, a twig popped once, and then the
same pop sounded behind my left shoulder.
Without the footsteps to carry it there.
I didn't follow the tape. I found the most obvious line of
human foot tread and stayed with that instead, even when it
peeled away from the Creek and cut back toward thicker trees.
The light degraded in the Canyon faster than it should have for
the hour, and when I checked time again it was 339 and the
sky above the walls had gone the color of a bruise.
There's a subtle point in a day hike where I'm making good time
becomes I have to keep this up to be OK.
I made myself eat then, even though my throat had gone dry,
because calories change how you think.
Chewed slowly, drank, swallowed, drank again.
A guy alone in timber crossing through hours where he doesn't
want to be anymore is a different kind of animal than
the guy who walked in. That's just a fact.
The human trail I found was human in the sense that people
had passed there, but it wasn't good.
Deadfall had piled where Winters had laid trees across the path,
and no one had cut them out. Game slide marks showed where
things smaller than me had gone under a stretch of old switch.
Back had slumped where the hill had let go, like a bad tooth at
a flattening. I came across a pile of stones
built up about knee high, five of them stacked carefully in a
column. A paddle of bleached bone laid
on top. The bone was too flat and broad
for a deer. It was from a cow or an elk.
It had a notch worked into the narrow end.
Not a break, but a tidy little cut and black hair hung from the
notch like someone had threaded it through and tied it off.
I didn't touch it. I stepped around, giving it more
space than it needed. The steps in the brush returned.
Not close, but always where the sound took advantage of the
wind, sometimes upwind, so I caught scent with it.
Wet hair, dirt, the sour Tang of something that had slept in the
same patches of grass until the grass took the smell.
Once on a short rise, I heard a branch creak in a tree and the
sound of weight shifting and a soft rasp on bark, as if
something was hanging where it didn't belong and making small
adjustments it couldn't help but make.
I let the bear spray hang in my hand and walked with it in front
of me like a bad Talisman. Sunset came early because the
Canyon took it. The trees flattened the light
until my eyes wanted to make shapes out of every shadow.
I stopped and pulled out my headlamp, checked battery,
clicked it off. I didn't want to shine it yet.
A light draws attention, and I already had enough of that.
At the next bend, the trail started a steady climb.
I recognized none of it. The map folded in my pocket was
a useless sketch for the level of detail I wanted.
My phone had no service. The little compass on my sternum
strap told me West was behind my right shoulder, which fit the
shape of the Canyon. But the way the trail switch
backed and the way the Creek meandered made direction into a
joke. The only numbers that mattered
were the ones on my watch, 458-520-7549 When the dark fully
set, it was like putting a lid on a pot.
Heat left the air, and I felt the switch on my skin.
I clicked my headlamp on low, and the beam made a tight tunnel
ahead. The world outside that tunnel
was murk and suggestion, and things just beyond its edge
looked like they were moving even when they weren't.
Bugs came to the light. My breath became a white line
that curved away on the exhale and folded away out of the beam.
I stayed on the footing I could feel through my shoes as much as
see. The footsteps in the brush
stopped. In their place came the soft
tearing sound of something moving through grass behind and
above. And then exactly in front of me,
half revealed in my light, a man stepped onto the path from the
right and raised his hand in a lazy wave.
That is what my eyes told me before the rest caught up.
The shape had the size and the outline of a man.
It wore a brown jacket that could have been canvas or hide
and hung wrong on the frame beneath.
The wave was slow and late, like a signal arriving through a long
wire. The face was facing me, but it
wasn't looking at me. The alignment was off, as if it
hadn't solved where eyes should land.
The headlamp painted its front flat.
I did not think. I put my thumb down on the bear
spray before my brain could say the word spray, and the orange
cone blew across its chest and face and beyond, filling the
space between us with a fog I could smell as it drifted back
toward me. The thing made no human sound at
first. It simply went down in a folding
way, like joints had been put together for a different
purpose, and then asked to do this.
It hit the ground on a hand and the back of 1 elbow pushed and
slid back and away across needles so quickly and so
fluidly that the distance between us doubled in a breath.
Without the normal steps that belong in a movement like that.
The jacket had no zipper and no buttons.
It was a single piece. As it moved, it turned into
brush and then Into Darkness, and the only sound it made then
was the new noise of something breathing with the wrong rhythm.
I never truly ran before that night.
I jogged and sprinted and done all the normal human speeds.
Because of sports or the fun of it.
Running in the dark on a narrow path with a pack on while you
don't know where your next foot is going is not like those
things. It's a controlled fall, a series
of fractions of an inch where luck holds you up.
I did it because standing there and thinking about what I'd seen
was not an option. The trail pitched up, then down,
then into a shallow saddle that held cold air like a bowl and a
smell of water nearby. Somewhere in that black timber I
heard it call out again with my voice a single hey, followed by
another that sounded like a man trying to speak while his mouth
was full of cotton. The second one went wrong at the
end and made a click. I felt more than heard.
I blew through a stand of Aspen where the trunks stood white and
clean and the bark took the headlamp in a way that made them
look like cut poles. On the far side.
The soil turned sandy and then soft, and I sank ankle deep into
a cold marsh. Winter dark grass hid the water.
I stepped and pulled and stepped and pulled and made myself not
look back because I didn't want to see it standing there at the
edge, watching me shoulder through the slow part.
When I hit firmer ground again, I stumbled into an opening where
a ruined cabin lay collapsed in a low heap. 3 walls sunk to knee
height, 1 still upright and holding the shape of a.
Window Everything was Gray. The window opening showed a
strip of stars and a wedge of hill.
Inside the remaining wall someone had built a circle of
stones and burned a fire recently, enough that when I put
my hand above where coals would have been, the air captured
there by rock was warmer than the rest.
Beside the circle someone had arranged 3 pieces of wood
leaning against each other into a tidy little tripod, and a
string of black hair was wrapped around one leg of it.
The knot was clean like the one in the bone groove.
Beyond the far wall of the ruin. I heard the sound of something
stepping around a rock and then stepping around it again.
I put my back to the upright wall and brought the spray up
and I held it there until my arm.
Shook from the effort of not letting it fall.
I don't know how long I stood like that.
The watch said 6/22 when I checked, then 711 the next time.
Between those numbers, the air thinned and thickened in my ears
with my pulse, and at one point a coyote called on the Ridge
above, and three second later the same call came from 50 feet
to my left. Without the kind of echo a
Canyon makes, I kept telling myself to move, but feet root
when they want to. I finally made myself leave when
a small stone trotted across the packed dirt just inside the wall
and came to rest against my boot.
I hadn't heard it fall. I hadn't seen it come in.
It had been thrown or rolled with purpose.
I took one step, then another, and when I reached the edge of
the ruin I saw movement inside the square of the window.
Two hands gripped the sill from the outside, fingers splayed,
nails dark, wrists thin. They held there a long 2nd, and
then released and slid down the outside wall with a dry whisper.
I went north because N was downhill there, and downhill
meant water, and water meant the Creek, and the Creek meant the
main trail somewhere. The path I was on, if it was a
path, thin to game runs and disappeared into small flats
where the ground did what ground does in mountains.
It looked promising and then tricked you into thinking.
Lines that weren't there continued.
The headlamp was too bright and too narrow all at once, picking
out details and lying about context.
I kept it on low and covered it with my hand when I could,
letting light leak through my fingers so I could see where to
put my feet but not advertise. The trees pressed in.
The sound of the Creek grew louder and then disappeared when
a stand of fir blocked the line of noise and then came back
again closer. I stopped twice to listen and
found listening. Worse than moving, because the
moment I held still, the sounds crept in.
I came to the water by accident. The ground simply ended and the
beam hit the slick slope of a boulder.
And beyond that black and moving, was the Creek.
I didn't want to cross again in the dark.
I didn't want to stay on that side either.
I looked downstream and saw a log spanning A narrow place,
thin and worn and Gray with stripped bark and the look of
something that had been there too long.
I didn't trust it. I put my foot up anyway, because
standing there felt like waiting.
The log dipped under my weight and the Creek through foam
sideways where it struck a rock. I shuffled 1 foot and then the
other, the way you do when you know the worst thing you can do
is rush three steps in. The log twitched as if something
touched it from below. My stomach went cold and tight.
I went to a knee, grabbed with my left hand for balance, and
something on the downstream bank laughed once, short and perfect
in my own laugh, and then the sound dragged like a tape.
I got off that log any way I could and went downstream on my
side, scraping knees and shins and cutting the side of my hand
on stone. When I slipped again 10 yards
later, I found a set of rocks I could hop between and did it
badly, almost sitting down in the water again, cursing out
loud like a man who thinks volume equals control.
On the far bank the ground rose in a slope of small trash rocks
and then settled into larger ones that held the slope in
place. I climbed into the trees and the
hill eased, and there, like a stupid miracle, was a piece of
cut log with the end chopped square laid across a muddy
patch, the center worn from boots human maintained by
somebody. I followed the wear until it
showed me a path that had been walked enough times to keep
brush from closing it. The first sign I was truly back
on a real trail was a sawn cut in a downed.
Tree where someone had bucked a section out and rolled it down
slope. I put my hand on that bright saw
wood and felt how smooth it was and told myself I was going the
right way. The second sign was a little
blaze scar on a tree, the rectangle of old cut and new
growth framing it. The third sign was a smell I
didn't know I'd been missing until it hit me.
The faint sour of animal that isn't wild, the mix of leather
and salt and horse so light I thought I'd imagined it, until
the trail cut onto a small shelf and I saw hoof prints stamped
deep in the dust, wet at the bottom like they'd been made
recently enough that water from the animal still fell in after
it pulled away. I rounded a bend and headlamps
hit me in the face, two bright circles at chest height and a
voice said woe there, real and wrong in the way all voices were
wrong by then, too human to trust.
I stopped and lifted my free hand and dropped the bear spray
hand to my thigh. 2 riders sat there on calm big hipped horses,
mules behind them on short leads, pack swaying.
The front horse stamped once and shook a family off.
Steel Shank and leather rigging, jingling, You're out late, the
lead rider said. He was an older man with a
brimmed hat pulled low and a face that didn't give much away.
Beside him, the other rider, Younger, kept his light on me,
like he was trying to decide if I'd scare his animals.
I got turned around, I said. My voice sounded like it
belonged to somebody else. You on the Palisades trail?
Yes. Headed out, Yes.
He looked past me, over my shoulder, into the dark I had
come from, and I turned to spite myself.
Nothing moved there, nothing sounded.
The younger rider cleared his throat and the sound of it was
ordinary and miraculous in a way that felt stupid to think we
heard something dogging us up higher.
He said. Figured it was a cat at first.
Didn't commit. Stayed in the dark timber, been
a quiet night for talking. He said the last part like he
regretted saying it out loud. The older man clicked his tongue
and moved his horse forward and off to the side so I could slide
past. You can walk behind me, he said.
You can talk if you want, or you don't have to.
We're headed down. We walked like that for a long
time, the horses feet placing carefully, the mules stepping
where the horses stepped, the sound of their breath steady and
calming in a way that almost put me to sleep as I walked.
The men didn't ask questions, and I didn't tell them anything.
Once above us, on a slanted face of broken rock, something
dislodged a stone and it skittered until it hit and
bounced and skipped again, and every animal in the line paused
and lifted their heads and stared, ears forward, and we all
waited while dust drifted down and the sound bellied into the
dark and died. Keep moving, the older man said
to the string. And we did, lower, near where
the Canyon widens and the Creek splits around islands of gravel
you can walk on. In July, we passed a sign I
recognized, and then a turn I knew, and things I had seen in
daylight came back in the beam and turned into landmarks I
could trust. The air warmed.
The smell of cold rock went away.
At a bend far ahead I saw the glow a parking area makes when
someone pulls in with headlights and then turns them off, and the
interior lights stay on as they dig for something.
The men told me their names then, too fast and soft for me
to hold, and I told them mine, and they tipped their chins like
they'd known it already and it didn't mean much to them.
I thanked them once and then felt like I should do it again.
And the older man said you're out, that's what matters.
Without turning at the trailhead, the vault toilet and
the bear board and the fee post all stood in their right places,
like actors at ease. A truck idled.
A woman sat on the open tailgate eating something wrapped in
foil, her headlamp on red and her hands moving carefully.
She looked at me and then looked away in a way that meant she'd
learned to give strangers space in the night and held to the
rule. I walked to my car and put my
palm against the hood for no good reason and felt that it was
cold metal and not a living thing.
My windshield wiper still held the scrap of paper with my plate
written on it. I could see my name in the trail
register under a piece of plexiglass, my scribble crooked
where I'd leaned the pen wrong. Before I open the door, the
coyote called again. This time it came from down
Canyon, not up. The notes were right at first, 3
rising, 2 falling. The same clean sound the Ridge
dogs make at dusk. And then it broke and stumbled,
and somebody who had never made the noise tried to fix it on the
fly and got it wrong. It turned into the beginning of
a laugh and stopped short like a person who'd been told to be
quiet. At the last second.
I got in the car and shut the door, and the thunk of it
closing took the air out of my chest and gave it back.
I turned the key and the engine caught on the second try, and I
pulled the seat belt across my shoulder like an old habit.
In the rear view I saw two Points of Light moving down the
trail, the rider's headlamps as they brought the string in, and
for a second I imagined one more light following them, lower than
it should be, steady as breathing.
The fear that lifted the hair on my arms then was the same as the
fear that started in the timber when the blue ribbon brushed my
leg. It was not any bigger.
It was the same animal math. I put the car in gear and rolled
out slow over potholes, tires finding the shallow places, the
Creek still loud even here at the highway.
I didn't look left toward the reservoir.
I looked right toward home, and I turned that way, and I drove
until the Canyon fell behind and the road straightened and the
lights of Swan Valley laid out, simple and human under their own
small sky. I won't go back up that trail.
We went out to the swell because it was the shoulder season and
because I said we could squeeze one more trip in before the
nights locked up. Everyone else we knew was
already talking skis and Thanksgiving travel, but the
forecast for the San Rafael was still showing highs in the 50s
and lows just below freezing. And the cottonwoods along the
washes would be yellow. I had a root in mind that wasn't
technical. Temple Mountain Rd. to a spur,
then a few miles on foot along a shallow drainage West of Tomsic
Butte, where the slick rock lifts into benches and the
juniper gets stunted and twisted by the wind.
The plan was simple. Four days, four nights, a loop
that would keep us within a day of the truck at all times.
It was me, my cousin Nate, and his friend Mara, who had only
camped in Utah once before but was fit and game and had
borrowed a good bag and pad. We left Green River early with
10 gallons of water distributed between the bed and the cab, a
stack of wood for the first night, and enough calories to be
bored of tortillas by the 2nd. No permit issues out there, just
BLM land and the usual common sense.
Don't crush the crypto pack out your trash.
Keep your fire small and in an existing ring.
We stopped at the Goblin Valley turn off to air down the tires a
little and drove until the washboard fizzed in the steering
wheel. Cell service died before the
reef rose to the West and that wrinkled line it always makes
you feel small against. Our first camp wasn't far from
the truck, by design. We pulled off on a faint 2 track
that paralleled a sandy wash and walked our gear in 200 yards to
a patch of hard pan already scarred by old tent prints and a
blackened ring. There were the usual signs
people leave foil torn from a freeze dried pouch flattened
under a boot print, a bit of cord somebody had snipped and
thrown down a rubber band. Nothing fresh, the air smelled
like sun warmed stone and juniper pitch, and the breeze
had a dry edge like it was coming off snow somewhere high.
We set the tents with the doors facing east so the sun would hit
them in the morning, rolled the little boulders we could find
into a decent fire ring, and made a first dinner that always
tastes better than it should just because you're out there.
Coyotes kicked off about the time the sky lost its color.
Their sound has a way of carrying across the flats so you
can't tell how far they are, and a pack can sound like they're in
every direction at once. We sat around our small fire and
traded the first night. Stories that people always tell.
Nate talked about a cougar he thought he saw in Capitol Reef 1
Winter that turned out to be a German Shepherd.
I told the one about a falling star over the Henry's that
burned green and broke into three pieces.
Mara had a story about getting turned around in Foggy Bottom in
DC and ending up on the wrong Metro platform.
For an hour. No one said anything heavy.
It was just the first night and the sound of the coyotes
threaded under everything until we zipped the tents.
Some nights in the desert feel empty and clean and you sleep
like you shut a door on the world.
That first one wasn't like that. I woke around what felt like 2
to a sound I know too well out there.
Small rocks ticking against other rocks like something has
stepped where people have piled the flat pieces into little
Cairns. It's not uncommon, Rabbits do
it, foxes do it, but it had a rhythm that felt like a footfall
instead of a skitter. I listen to it come up out of
the wash and then stop short of camp maybe 15 yards off the
juniper shadows were black holes between the paler, slick rock
shoulders. I was on my side with my bag
zipped almost all the way up, and I stared at the tent ceiling
where my breath had left a faint frost.
When I sat up, the lycra of the sleeping pad cover squeaked and
the sound outside cut off like somebody had turned down a
radio. Then something exhaled once,
just one slow breath, and I could hear coyotes again, way
off to the South. I thought about unzipping,
shining my headlamp, saying something, but I stayed quiet,
counting out 200 beats and then another 200 until I slept again.
In the morning we found Prince, not paw prints.
On the damp sand At the wash edge we saw our three boot
patterns. My left Vibram lugs wider at the
heel, Nate's narrower and deeper where he stomps and Mara's new
soles still showing. The manufacturer's little XS
cutting across them were flat ovals that didn't belong to us,
toe impression so shallow we couldn't name them, and a heel
that was just a smooth dent. Barefoot, the stride wasn't big,
mid calf to knee height between steps, and the line of them
drifted in and out of the sandy parts and then ghosted over
slick rock where we lost them completely.
You can convince yourself of a lot with partial prints.
We poked around, backtracked half the camp's perimeter, and
found two more impressions in a patch of dust behind a juniper,
like someone had stood there a long time and shifted their
weight once. I didn't like it.
Coyotes leave delicate paws. People leave flat planes and
wait. We didn't say what we were all
thinking, just that someone must have walked through recently.
The air had a metallic taste. When the wind swung N we decided
to move camp up the drainage. It was the plan anyway, and we
didn't talk about moving because of the prints.
We broke down, smothered and stirred the coals until they
were cold, and brushed out what trace we had made the best we
could without trampling the crust.
On the way toward the head of the drainage.
We passed the stub of a mine at it cut into the slope like
somebody took a bite out of the hill decades ago.
There were old Timbers and rusted cable and a piece of
sheet metal half buried that might have been an oil pan.
The junipers grew stockier there, guarding pockets of shade
where the ground stayed cool enough that the soil never
completely dried. We stayed on slick rock benches
as much as possible. By midday it warmed to the point
where I took off my fleece and tied it to the top of my pack
and the wind slid down off the reef like a hand on the back of
your neck. We kept seeing old sign boot
prints that the wind had softened and rounded the rim,
print from a 5 gallon bucket that had made a perfect circle
in a place where somebody must have siphoned water from a
pothole. No more bare feet.
Second Camp sat on a shelf above a bend in the wash where a
Cottonwood grew and made its own season with its color.
It was bright and loud against the sandstone in the pale sky.
We found a rock alcove that would block wind, and we set our
tents under its lip like teeth. I gathered dead juniper, the
good kind that breaks with that dry snap and burns hot, and
stacked it in a cradle of larger sticks to get a coal bed.
We ate early so we wouldn't burn headlamps making dinner.
The coyotes did their thing right on time and then went
quiet. Mara pulled her beanie down over
her ears and said sometimes she forgets the desert isn't the
beach, that everything is sharp and louder than you expect at
night and even the silence shows up with weight.
We sat a little closer to the fire that night because the cold
settled faster and there was a feeling of attention around us,
which is the only way I can say it.
The wash curve made a natural Amphitheatre, and sound came
back to us off the walls in a way that made you second guess
the direction. After we had checked the
guidelines and crawled into the tents, I lay there and watched
my breath again until it thinned out in the wash.
A voice said my name. It said it wrong.
It was my name, flattened and pitched like somebody had heard
me say it once a single time from too far away, and then
tried it out of the dark. Evan, it said, but the E was
crushed, so it sounded like avan, and it came from down in
the wash, not up the slope where our fire had been.
I pushed my face to the mesh and saw nothing but the pallor of
the rock. If I had been alone, I might
have curled into my bag until morning and told myself it was
just the weird way sound carries.
But Mara's zipper slid halfway down and stopped, and she hissed
a question without using our names.
Then from the other side, the voice that had tried mine, tried
Nate's, and got it even worse, broke it into two clean
syllables, like a student reading off a roll sheet.
Nah T The wash amplified it. I didn't say anything.
I reached for my headlamp, thumbed it without clicking it
on, and lifted the zipper 2 teeth at a time.
When the flap cracked open just enough, I took the light in my
palm and did a low sweep. You can see 20 yards like that
without wrecking your night vision.
The beam hit the Cottonwood trunk, a dark stripe like a
river in the bark where the SAP had run, and in the next sweep
it caught 2 points that reflected and then dropped some
animals eyes throwback silver. What I saw was duller, more
yellow and weak and set too far apart for anything I could name.
I lifted the lamp again and whatever had been there had
moved, not away but lower, like it had folded down a rock.
Skipped once in the wash, then twice.
After that nothing spoke. We lay there listening to all
the small sounds we had decided not to hear and slept in fits
again. In the morning, the prints were
closer. We found them coming up out of
the wash on a diagonal that would have taken the Walker
straight past our tents if we hadn't been where we were.
The line bent just shy of where our shadows spread from the
alcove and skirted the edge, then dropped back down into the
sand. We paste it out.
The stride hadn't changed. The feet were still bare.
In one place a heel had pushed deep and brought up wet sand
like the water table was surprised by weight.
And then this bothered me more than I can explain.
We found an extra mark next to one of the prints that looked
like the edge of a hand where someone had set it down flat to
steady themselves. It didn't show all the fingers,
just the heel of the palm and something that could have been a
little finger and ring finger blurred together.
For a second I told myself it could have been a Raven wing
tip. It wasn't.
We stood there and ran out of ordinary explanations in a quiet
way, and no one said the word that sits at the edge of Utah
stories out there, the one people laugh at until they
don't. We hiked a loop that day to move
and to make daylight do some work for us.
The sky stayed a high, thin blue and the breeze never quit.
The swell bends light in a way that makes distances slippery,
and it's easy to think a promontory as a 10 minute walk
when it lives an hour away. We climbed to a saddle where the
slick rock tilted up and broke, and from there we could see N
toward the reef like a scaly back, and the Henry's farther
snow set into their gullies like chalk lines on a patch of clay
that hadn't fully dried since the last storm.
Something had pressed in a knuckle line that made no sense
if you were looking for hooves or paws.
It was wrong as soon as I saw it.
We walked more quietly after that.
In a shallow alcove we found a dead rabbit hung through the
tendons of its back legs on a little fork of juniper.
That happens. People trap and tie off their
catches. Coyotes stash things.
But the cut was a Jag of stone, not a blade, and the trail of
blood below it went three feet and stopped, like somebody had
been careful on the way back. We stayed on the high benches
and watched our own camp from a rise for a while before we went
down to it, because I didn't want to walk into anything I
didn't have to. That night we did a fire.
Not for warmth, though it helped, but for the way fire
gives you something to look at so you're not staring out into
the negative spaces waiting for them to fill.
We agreed to a watch without making it official.
I said I'd take first, then Mara.
Nate said he'd go last because he claimed he could fall asleep
anywhere and wake up fast. The wind dropped sometime after
midnight, and the silence went hard.
I could hear my pulse in my ears.
Coyote sparked up again, far away, and then shut down, and
that's when something clicked its teeth behind the alcove
wall. Not a chitter, not a scrape.
Teeth. It went once, twice, like a dog
giving the barest warning, and I got up as quietly as I could and
walked to the edge of the alcove and stepped around it with the
headlamp off. The stars were strong enough
that the slick rock showed pale. When I thumbed the light.
The beam washed over a patch of ground that looked like it had
been brushed with something damp.
I scanned in the near distance between two squat junipers.
I saw the silhouette of somebody standing with their shoulders
hunched up high and their head pushed forward.
You know how a person's posture tells you they're cold or hurt
or about to move? This posture told me nothing,
except that it wasn't right. The light hit the plane of its
chest and slid off because something dark covered it that
drank the light. A hide, I thought without
wanting to think it. The head, if it was a human
head, was covered too, bearing long strings that could have
been hair or strips. It didn't flinch or throw up a
hand. It didn't turn.
It just dipped slowly, like whatever was inside that shape
was deciding whether it could fold itself to the ground
without breaking. I took one step back, which made
a scrape, and the figure smoothed down out of sight, like
a person lying into a bed. Very carefully, I held the light
there until my hand shook and there was nothing left to show
but pale rock and two black juniper trunks and a smear of
shadow that wouldn't resolve. I went back to the fire and woke
Mara with a hand on her shoulder.
I told her to listen. We didn't say the word.
We just used our eyes until we could see the perimeter as a
line we were willing to defend without drawing anything to us
by name. We made the decision to move
early on day three. We didn't pack immediately
because running doesn't make sense if you can't outrun the
ground, and out there the ground goes on.
But we loaded bare cans and stoves and anything that clinked
into our packs and rolled the tents and we shouldered
everything and went southeast toward a spur that would bring
us down near an old mining track.
It wasn't the direction we had planned.
It was the direction that put us nearer to the truck, and at that
point the plan wasn't worth much because the situation had
changed from a nice loop to not wanting to be where we were
after dark. Our path traced to Slots upper
lip for a while, and the drop on our right kept my eyes honest.
On a flat between two shallow domes of slick rock, we found a
structure that I have no better word for than arranged broken
twigs of black brush laid in a shape you could talk yourself
into seeing as a body. 2 branches for legs, 2 for arms,
and a shorter piece for the head.
People do that, kids do that. But the ends of the branches
were singed like they've been passed through a flame, and
there was no ash stationed anywhere nearby to explain it.
Nate kicked the shape apart hard, made a mess of it like he
was stamping out a nest of ants, and I was glad he did because it
broke the spell of seeing it. We didn't take a long break or
sit for snacks. We ate walking and didn't talk
about anything other than water and distance and whether that
cloud bank building over the reef meant the forecast had been
wrong. We dropped into the next
drainage slower than we needed to because of the way the
bentonite clay looked. When it's dry, it's just dirt.
When it's damp, it turns into grease that will laugh at your
boots and send you down on your hips so fast you won't know you
fell at the bottom. The cottonwoods grew thicker and
we found a series of prints we all agreed were from a person in
trail runners, not boots. They were older than ours,
shallow and wind sanded. I wanted them to make sense of
the other prints and erase them. They didn't.
The bare feet we had seen before weren't there.
What was there instead were scuffed spots at the base of
cottonwoods where something had knelt and then stood and then
knelt again, near where a bit of matted hair had snagged on a
twig. The hair was not ours.
It had a smell like wet iron. An old dog.
I didn't want to touch it. I didn't.
Mara was quiet in a way I couldn't argue with, and when we
climbed the far side and looked back, the lines our bodies made
in the October light felt too sharp and obvious on the stone.
I kept thinking about our names pulled wrong in the dark, and
how sound had come from the place where water flows when it
exists and not from the hard wall where it would carry
better. Little things like that put a
hook in you. Our third camp because we had to
stop somewhere and there wasn't enough day left to reach the
truck unless we wanted a night walk along A2 track with light
obvious from a mile away. Sat in a cup of sandstone with a
Big Sky above it and good angles of fire light to make shadows
stay where they belonged. We built the fire early and big
enough to matter, then kicked it down to coals and fed it
steadily instead of letting it flare and die.
We set a real watch this time and set it like orders so the
words would make us follow through.
I took first again. I didn't sit.
I stood and walked slow circles for an hour and a half.
Coyotes barked once and then we're gone.
The wind ran a hand across the tent flies and took it away
again. My lamp stayed off because I
wanted my eyes full dark. When the hour turned, I shook
Nate's boot and he rolled and sat up and took my place.
I went into the tent and lay on my side again and listened.
I must have slept because I woke to the sound of someone easing
my tent zipper down tooth by tooth as if they were counting.
I lifted myself on an elbow and put two fingers against the
zipper track without making it obvious, and the pressure on the
other side stilled, like the person doing it was listening
for me too. It reversed then, tooth by
tooth, patient, precise, and when it closed, it clicked the
metal pull against the stop softly, like a person done doing
something. Well.
My mouth filled with a sour taste.
I did not say anything. I didn't switch on the lamp.
When the world outside moved again, it moved to Nate's tent.
I heard his hand find the handle first, heard the thump as he
grabbed the zipper pull and jerked it up fast, and then I
heard the sound of something scrambling in sand without
claws. He came out with the lamp on and
did a full sweep like a lighthouse, hard and bright and
unafraid. And I hate that beam because you
can only see what it shows. But I loved it then because it
took whatever was close and pushed it back.
In the near distance, the light caught something hunched behind
a juniper that uncoiled up and up until it was taller than it
should have been, and then it dropped to all fours and went
sideways in a way no deer goes and no dog does either.
It had a strip of something over its shoulders that shivered as
it moved. Nate said a word I won't put
here because it makes me feel like I'm dragging something back
to us. And he threw a rock with his off
hand like a bad idea. It hit a trunk and bounced and
caught a wine from whatever was there that wasn't an animal and
wasn't not one. After that it kept its distance,
and by morning there were tracks around our tents in a deliberate
double circle, like someone had paced off a perimeter we hadn't
set. At dawn.
We made coffee like it mattered, because it did.
The sun came on, slow and pale, and the ice we had made in our
bottles melted away from the plastic and curls we found on
top of one of our bear cans, something that made me sit down
on the nearest rock. Someone had braided 3 pieces of
Yucca fiber together badly, unevenly, and pushed a single
long human hair through the braid.
The hair was lighter than ours and longer than Mara's, and the
end had a slick to it, like it had been covered in something,
then dried. A joke is a thing with a
direction and a goal, and even a malicious one has a kind of grin
on it. This wasn't a joke.
It was an object made by hands in the dark that wanted us to
know the hands could do it. I took it and put it under a
rock and then changed my mind and burned it in the last of the
coals and stirred the ash like I was burying something that could
still breathe. No one had slept.
We didn't need to say that out loud.
I said what we all wanted to say, without using the exact
word for it, that somebody out there had a problem with us
being where we were and that we needed to be done.
We're out, I said. We're going straight for the
road and we're not stopping to take pretty pictures.
The day we left did not make itself easy.
The sky kept getting brighter and then not, like the sun was
rubbing its eyes behind high thin clouds.
We stayed on hard stone in the spines of ridges, because the
sand sucks you down and the clay will take your legs out if the
wind brings you any damp at all. We made time.
We lost time in one place. The wash cut down suddenly and
offered a choice between a sketchy slab and a slide into a
cold pool. We slithered and then made jokes
with voices that sounded like we were reading lines.
The strange thing was how often we'd come to a place where our
own tracks from 2 days ago appeared like a message we had
left ourselves. They were not alone.
The barefooted Prince had stepped inside the edges of ours
in two long runs where the sand held shape, heel over heel, toe
over toe, the weight set deliberately on top of our
weight, as if to show how completely we were inside.
Whatever game this was, I tried to imagine a person doing that
at night, without leaving extra marks, without a headlamp,
without a stumble. I failed, and I have a good
imagination for ordinary things. At a bend in the wash where the
sand was clean and windswept, something had written an arc of
parallel lines with the tip of a stick.
The lines were in clusters, 2 lines, then 3, then five, then
three again. I wanted it to be nothing.
I wanted it to be wind. It wasn't.
The stick lay at the end of the lines with its tip dark.
We walked around it wide. We saw the truck's track before
we saw the truck. The faint 2 track had been our
guide in and when the drainage we followed intersected it at a
shallow angle, I felt relief in my shoulders like I had been
wearing somebody else's pack the whole time.
We climbed the last little rise and the Tacoma showed its tan
shell and its black tires with a dust crust that I knew like a
friend. I have never liked the way
trucks look in wild places, like a wrong colored animal that
wandered in, but I loved it then like a house on fire loves a
door. The driver's door was closed.
The bed was as we left it. The gas can had a new scuff near
the handle that I couldn't swear wasn't there before I hit the
fob and the lights blinked. We started tossing packs into
the bed without any of the usual order.
I went to grab the last water jug from the shade of a boulder
where we'd cashed it and found the cap off and set beside it on
the rock, like someone had poured and then remembered to
replace the cap but put it down instead.
A little circle of dark damp had dried around the mouth.
I don't know why that detail made me angrier than any of the
rest. Maybe because it meant hands,
and hands mean a person and that made me want to understand.
And understanding was the one thing that wasn't going to help.
We decided to camp the last night near the truck and leave
in the morning light. It was the wrong decision and I
own it. It was late afternoon and the
road out has washouts in a couple of spots where you want a
little light to place a tire. We told ourselves we were being
smart and safe and not rattled. We picked a flat 15 yards from
the truck on ground that had been used 100 times and built a
fire in a ring made by people who had done the same thing we
were doing and had not had whatever we had for company.
The sky cleared completely and the temperature dropped hard,
the way it does in October when the heat just leaves the air
like it found a door. We ate quickly and didn't
pretend to be hungry. We did our watch again and I
took first and for a little while I believed we were going
to win just by staying put and not giving it anything to push
against. The desert can be like that.
You can outlast it by recognizing you are small and
making that work for you. Then the wind.
Shifted, and the smell came. I've smelled dead things in the
desert. You come across a cow sometimes,
or a deer, and there is a sweetness that rides above the
rot, like sugar dissolved in bad water.
This wasn't that. This had the iron of blood and
the Musk of a dog that hasn't been washed and something earthy
like a wet hide pulled out of storage.
It came up slope against the wind, which is not how smell
should work, and it arrived with a silence that felt like the
world had been turned down a notch so that whatever wanted to
make a sound could be the only thing we heard.
The coyotes did not sing that night.
They left the stage like they were making room.
I stood up with my lamp in my hand, but didn't switch it on.
I didn't want to give that beam away until I had to.
The smell thickened until I could taste it.
And then the voice came again, from the wrong angle, from the
place where the truck sat, with its tired plastic smell and its
scuffed floor mats and the metal that felt like safety.
Avon, it said, getting closer to my name.
Na Tay. There was a new sound in it, not
quite a laugh, not quite anything human, Ma RA, it said,
and got that one wrong too, pressing the R like it was
testing how it felt in a throat. I lit the lamp and swept it hard
at the truck. The beam caught the rear quarter
panel and lit dust, and then it slid across the tailgate and
struck a shape crouched under it that unfolded fast and smooth
until it was standing as high as the bed rail and then a little
higher. The hide over its head was tight
against the skull underneath, whether that was a skull I
recognized or not, and the face under it looked back and didn't
shine with eyes but with a wetness like cartilage.
Its limbs were lean and long, and its hands stayed low with
the fingers crooked in a way that made them look like they
were waiting to touch something without leaving a print.
Evan. It said again, better, closer,
and I realized with a shock I felt in my spine that it had
heard my name the way Mara said it when she was worried, and it
was using her tone and I hated that more than anything.
Nate came out of the tent already moving, not running at
it, but moving toward the truck, like he knew the truck was the
one thing that could add certainty to this.
Mara was behind him with the keys in her hand.
The figure stepped sideways, 1 foot crossing in front of the
other in a pass that was to practice to be an accident, and
then it moved with a speed that did not show in any of the
motions we had seen before. It went from under the tailgate
to 10 feet away from us in a smooth line, and then turned and
dropped and ran on all fours without planting the heel of its
hands. And if that sounds like I'm
making it dramatic, I'm not. That is what it did.
I did the thing you do when you have nothing else.
I yelled loud and flat to take the human back from it.
I yelled Nate's last name like a coach.
I yelled truck. I yelled.
Now it was enough to get us into motion that we owned.
Nate hit the fob and the lights flashed and the horn gave that
thin chirp and the thing did not flinch.
It pulled its head to the side in interest like a coyote
hearing a new squeak. I love and hate that.
I noticed that we ran the 10 yards that felt like 100.
The keys didn't fumble, the doors unlocked.
We got in. When the interior lights came up
that soft yellow, I almost cried with relief.
That felt stupid. The second it washed through me.
The thing came up to the driver's side window and put a
hand on the glass. It didn't slap or scratch.
It set the heel of its palm there, like a person about to
knock wood if they were being polite.
The glass made a sound, a little croak that windows make when
they're pushed but not cracked. I started the engine and the
truck came to life with the sound I have heard every day for
years. And that sound felt like a line
thrown to me. I put it in drive and rolled and
the figure moved alongside with two steps and then three, and
then kept pace for four. Like it wanted to see how the
game would play if it didn't end yet.
Then it peeled off and let us go.
And I don't know why, except that sometimes a thing that has
had you long enough wants to feel it could still take you if
it chose. The two track back to Temple
Mountain Rd. is simple in daylight.
At night it's a ribbon with two pale rails and a dark ditch on
either side that will take you if you look at the wrong thing
for too long. I kept my hands light and my
eyes up, and I didn't say anything.
No one did. We hit the first washout and
took it slow, then the second, then the shallow Ridge where the
wind had draped a little tongue of sand that grabbed the front
tires before they found the firmer ground.
The truck fishtailed and corrected and then went calm
again. In the rear view, in the wash of
our own dust, something long and low crossed behind us and then
stopped and stood taller, and the brake lights threw it red,
and for a second I saw the hide that had been on its head from
the inside light diffusing through the thin places.
I accelerated like a coward or like a person who wants his
people alive, whichever you want to call it, and the truck made
the small complaining sounds a Tacoma makes when you ask it to
do more than you said you would. We hit Temple Mountain Rd. and
the surface made a new noise under the tires, more regular,
less personal, and the desert opened out in front of us in a
way that made me feel like we had stepped out of a room that
had no corners and finally found a square to stand in.
We drove to UT 24 without turning our heads.
When we hit pavement, the noise of the tires turned to that
steady hiss and it felt like a hand on your shoulder that
doesn't belong to anything but physics.
We didn't stop at the turnouts where we had stopped on the way
in to look for Bighorn on the Cliff bands.
We didn't stop in Hanksville for gas, even though we should have.
We took the road north like it would take care of us, and
eventually the cell phones woke up and made their little noises,
and none of those noises meant anything to what we had left
behind. We kept checking the mirrors
without thinking about it. The first time I looked and
didn't see dust or shape or anything.
Not us. My chest hurt because I had been
holding my breath at some level I couldn't name.
The Henry's stood black without detail ahead of the sunset and
the world that has lines painted on it accepted us back without
comment. We did not file a report with
anyone because there is no report for what we would have
said if we had tried. We would have pulled out the
wrong words and made them do work.
They can't. We did the things we could do.
We washed the truck even though it was just dust.
We put the tents up in a backyard for a night and left
the zippers open and closed them and opened them again until that
sound felt like ours. We threw away a water jug we
didn't have to throw away because the cap had been off.
We did not keep the Yucca braid because we burned it.
We told the same story to each other twice and then stopped
telling it because it didn't change and we didn't want it to.
I went on a map app and trace the line of the drainage we had
followed and put a finger down where I thought the camps had
been and then I deleted the pins because I didn't want them to
exist. I've heard that people use the
word skinwalker for a thing in these parts without knowing what
they're saying or who it belongs to.
I don't know what word fits what followed us for four nights,
learning our names and stepping where we stepped and standing
where we slept. I only know we went there as
three people with a simple plan to stretch a little more, fall
out of the year. And we came out because the road
existed. And that's the only reason we
don't go back to that bend in that wash West of Tomsic Butte.
We don't camp under that alcove again.
We don't use the little two track that leaves Temple
Mountain Rd. and fades past the Cottonwood with the dark stripe
where the SAP ran. There are 1000 square miles of
desert you can love without being greedy.
And we can do that now without going to the one spot that let
us leave because it chose to. If anyone asks why we changed
our fall plan, I say the weather turned on us early and the
nights were rough, and that's the truth.
I'll put on it. The rest is ours.
And the three of us agree, without needing to say it, that
there is a place there that knows us by name, and we owe it
the courtesy of never hearing ours again.