Old Rag Mountain is not a casual hike.
If you've done it, you know the rock scramble is slow even in
daylight, and people twist ankles every weekend.
Rangers post warnings about late starts because once the sun
drops, those slabs and shoots become a different game.
I knew all of that and still thought I could thread the
needle. My friend Mark and I wanted the
Ridge to ourselves, so we planned a late start, easy pace,
busy near the summit and a morning descent before the
crowds. We parked off Nathers Rd. packed
simple bags, pads, extra layers, headlamps, enough water to get
through the night. The lot was mostly empty.
The evening air had that leaf litter smell in the sky was
already going Gray blue. We signed in at the board and
that's when I noticed it. One name in shaky block letters.
No exit time. I don't know why it stuck with
me. Something about how each letter
sat too far apart, like the hand had started and stopped with
each stroke. We set out trying to make good
time through the lower switchbacks.
The trail there is steep dirt and roots with the occasional
rock step. I kept noticing heavy boot
prints in the soft sections, Not unusual except these cut across
in odd places, rejoining higher up like someone was shaving off
the turns. They were deep toe heavy, like
the person was either carrying weight or came down hard on each
step. I pointed them out and Mark
shrugged. Locals fly up this thing, he
said. We moved on.
The woods felt quiet in a way I couldn't explain.
No voices from ahead, no clink of trekking poles, just the
scrape of our soles and the click of my carabiner against my
hip belt. We'd both done the loop before,
but never this late. Dusk filtered through the
hardwoods, and the understory went dark.
First we passed the occasional trail marker, those blue blazes,
and I checked them more often than usual.
I kept thinking of the single name on the board.
Near the start of the scramble, the trail turns from dirt to big
granite boulders. You use your hands as much as
your feet. The first odd sign was three
fifth size stones stacked on a Flat Rock with one of them
offset like an arrow. It pointed toward a faint user
path that cut away from the blazed root.
I've seen Cairns out West to mark roots, but on Old Rag the
official line is painted and obvious someone had built this
on purpose and not for safety. We ignored it and stayed on the
blazes. A few minutes later we hit a low
branch with a piece of bright survey tape tied around it.
Not park tape. This was neon and clean,
positioned chest high at a junction where another faint
path cut up slope. If you weren't paying attention,
it would draw your eye off the real trail.
When we found the third sign, I stopped talking.
Hanging from a sapling was an iron jaw trap wired open, old
rust flaking. It looked like something pulled
out of a barn. The chain was looped twice and
twisted so it wouldn't bite, but the message was plain.
You don't haul that up here for fun.
We kept moving, sticking exactly to the blazes, talking louder
than we needed to. The granite was cooling fast,
and I could feel it through my palms.
We topped a short slab, and I heard a single dry step behind
us. Not a squirrel, not a branch.
Rubber on stone. I swung my light back.
A headlamp beam flashed across our faces for a fraction of a
second and cut. Then nothing.
I stood listening until my heartbeat was louder than the
insects. The boot prints we've been
following appeared ahead again at the next patch of dust
crossing and then vanishing where rock took over.
Whoever it was knew every shortcut and was choosing where
to show that they knew. We pushed toward the upper slabs
with that wired trap still in my head.
At a small flat spot just off the main line, a faint spur
trail led to a little clearing between boulders.
On the edge of it sat a green tarp pinned by stones mark
pointed shelter. I hesitated.
Curiosity beat out caution by a hair.
We moved closer and lifted a corner.
Underneath was a neat stash, zip tied quart bags of jerky and
instant rice, a few cheap cans, A roll of nylon cord pre tied
into small loops, and a cracked milk crate full of paper maps.
Some edges were singed. Not all were park maps.
I saw a county map folded tight and blackened, as if the corner
had been held in flame and then shaken out.
The air under the tarp had a sour, closed smell.
I put the tarp back. We stepped away from the brush,
close enough that I could hear the swallow between words.
A low voice said, You can take some if you're staying.
I can still hear that line. We didn't run.
We walked straight back to the blazed route and made a choice
without speaking. Down, not up.
Get to the fire Rd. in the hollow where you can put real
distance behind you. We chose the Ridge access
because it was direct and we knew it.
We moved faster than was smart on those rocks, testing holds,
shining our lights into every pocket.
The man didn't try to hide anymore.
We'd move. Then, somewhere off to our left
on an unseen goat path, we'd hear him too, matching pace but
never rushing. The light didn't come back on.
He didn't speak again. At a narrow gap between two
blocks, a black line ran across the tread at shin height.
My pole hit it and I stopped. It was nylon cord, stretched
tight and anchored to a stub of dead branch on one side and a
root on the other. It would have taken me out,
maybe worse on that angle. I cut it with my knife and
pocketed the piece without thinking.
Mark hadn't seen it and nearly went over.
I grabbed the back of his pack and he windmilled and swore.
Our lights swung and made the surrounding rock look carved
into blind mouths. I told him to keep his eyes on
the ground and keep talking. We started narrating every step
like we were teaching a class. Right foot to the dimple, left
hand to the ledge, step down one, don't look up.
He stayed with us the whole time.
Not close enough to touch, not far enough to forget.
Sometimes I'd hear him above, moving on those side routes only
people who've worked the mountain for years know.
Sometimes he was parallel, pace steady.
You could tell by the timing of the stones his foot dislodged
and the stop start rhythm of a careful descent.
He never slid or scraped. Everything sounded, placed.
The Ridge finally bled into the steeper, rough trail that feeds
toward Weekly Hollow Fire Rd. The forest closed in again and
the rocks gave way to dirt and roots.
The air was warmer down there, almost humid, and smelled like
old leaves. When we hit the junction with
the fire Rd. my relief lasted 5 steps.
Just off the side, propped under a hemlock, was a metal game cart
with flat, wide tires and a mesh platform.
The platform had dark stains that had soaked into the pattern
so long ago that they were part of it.
A ripped piece of red and black flannel was jammed in the strap
buckle. I don't jump to dramatic
conclusions, but you don't haul a cart like that up here for
hiking. We didn't touch it.
We didn't take a picture. We didn't stand there and think
it through. We took the fire Rd. toward the
trailhead at a near run. The fire Rd. is wide gravel, a
straight shot, and we stayed in the middle.
Every bend I expected to see his light.
We didn't look back more than twice at the parking lot.
Our car was one of three. The maintenance yard was dark.
I dugout my keys with clumsy fingers and we were inside and
slamming doors while our breath fogged the windows.
I laid on the horn, not a short blast, a long manic hold that
made my handshake. Mark put his head against the
seat and didn't speak. It didn't take long for lights
to show from the direction of the yard.
A Ranger truck rolled in slow with the grill guard throwing
shadows across the lot. Another pulled in behind it.
The first Ranger stepped out with that weary posture they use
when they don't know if they're walking into a lost hiker or a
drunk. I got out with my palms up and
tried to make words. I must have sounded drunk
because I was talking too fast and starting in the middle of
sentences. The Ranger told me to back up,
breathe, and start over from the sign in board.
We told them everything. The single name, the boot prints
that cut, the switchbacks, the stacked stones and tape.
The wire trap, the headlamp flash, the stash under the tarp.
The voice, the cord across the gap, and the piece I had in my
pocket. The game cart.
While we were talking, the 2nd Ranger was already on the radio
and a county deputy pulled in. They asked where the stash was
and made me point on the big map they keep in the truck.
Then asked me to point again using the tapo on my phone.
They didn't roll their eyes at the story.
They didn't say we were imagining it.
They moved like people who have dealt with worse.
They had us stay in the truck while they went up the fire Rd.
with the deputy. We could see their lights Bob
and then vanish. Those were the longest minutes
of my life. My hands shook so hard I had to
hold one wrist with the other. Mark kept rubbing his shin where
the cord would have hit and repeating.
I didn't see it. I didn't see it.
I won't drag this out. They found the camp.
It wasn't far off the drainage. If you didn't know to look,
you'd walk right by. The tarp was bigger than the one
we saw, and it was slung low between a boulder and a blow
down. There was bait, jerky, rice,
some kind of fatty scraps sealed up.
There were snares made from nylon cord and wire, coiled and
ready. The milk crate was there with
the half burned maps we'd seen, plus more.
A rusted rifle wrapped in oilcloth lay across two rocks
like someone was airing it out. The deputy's light flashed
through the trees, and I remember feeling a wave of anger
that didn't make sense. The Rangers didn't let us hike
back in. They escorted someone out under
light. The person kept his head down.
I won't guess at his age or build because I don't trust my
memory in that moment. Back at the lot, the deputy
separated us and asked for our statements again, this time
slower. Line by line, a Ranger cleaned
the small cuts on Mark's shin and my knuckles where I'd
grabbed a rough edge too hard. I handed over the piece of cut
cord and they bagged it. They took our names, numbers,
where we were staying and told us they might call.
The deputy said word for word. You 2 made good choices.
People don't always. Then he looked at our packs and
asked if we could spare a granola bar for his ride back
down the hollow. It broke the tension and we both
laughed harder than the joke deserved.
On the drive home, I kept my high beams on for no reason.
The road was empty and each curve in the dark felt like it
had weight. We didn't talk about what might
have happened because there was no need to.
I know a lot of hikers who pride themselves on self-reliance, and
I'm one of them. But there's a difference between
taking care of yourself on a mountain and pretending you're
in control when someone is waiting for you to slip.
That cord across the gap wasn't clumsy, it was placed where your
eyes were on your next foothold, not the trail.
It was new, tight and exactly the right height.
I don't go over the what ifs often.
I don't have to. My hands knew when I grabbed
Mark's pack. I'm not writing this to scare
anyone away from Old Rag. It's a beautiful hike and most
days the worst thing you'll meet is your own legs giving out.
I'm writing it so you take the timing seriously and pay
attention to the little things that don't fit.
If you see stones stacked where they're not needed, tape that
points off a marked route or gear that looks staged instead
of used. Don't talk yourself into
ignoring it because you want your evening to go a certain
way. Late start sounded smart until
it wasn't. Bivvy near the top sounded
romantic until someone's voice came out of the brush and
offered us food we hadn't asked for.
We've been back to Shenandoah since then, but not to Old Rag.
After Dark. In daylight you can convince
yourself that the slabs are just a puzzle you solve with hands
and feet. At night you're a moving shape
in a small cone of light and anyone who knows the side paths
owns the hill. I still hike with Mark and we
still move fast, but we don't cut corners anymore.
We carry 2 headlamps each. We probe narrow crossings with
poles even if we've done them before.
We sign in at the board and actually read the names instead
of treating it like a formality. The last thing I'll say.
When we got home, I checked the little scrap of flannel we'd
seen jammed into the cart strap. In my mind, it had grown into
some kind of proof of something worse.
Memory does that when it's fed by fear.
It was just cloth. Could have been a towel, a rag,
a shirt from a hunter, anything. What wasn't in my head was the
cord. It was in my pocket and then in
a plastic bag with a case number.
If you're the kind of person who hikes because you believe in
paying attention, that's the detail I want you to hold onto.
A thin line, almost invisible, stretched across a place where
you'd never think to look. We didn't outsmart anyone that
night. We were lucky we were two and
not one, and that luck was helped along by a cheap pole, a
sharp blade, and the habit of talking through our moves out
loud. If you take old rag late, don't.
If you find signs that feel wrong, turn around.
And if someone on the mountain tells you in a voice that sounds
too close and too calm, that you're welcome to stay, don't
answer. Move.
Stay together. Keep your light on the ground
where it can save you. The mountain will be there
tomorrow. That man will be there too.
And I don't care what anyone says, he didn't bring that trap
up there to teach trail etiquette.
We got down because we stuck to the marked route.
We watched each other's feet and when it counted, we chose the
wide road to the lot and the horn over pride.
That's what I want someone to hear if they're packing a late
start and telling themselves it's no big deal, It is.
It always is. I've been hiking alone for more
than 10 years. I plan my trips carefully, keep
my kit simple and stick to habits that have kept me safe.
Check the weather, study the map, tell someone when I expect
to be out. Three years ago I set up a four
day loop along a quiet stretch of the Long Trail in the Green
Mountain National Forest. I aimed for a section between
the Lybrook Wilderness and the ridges north of Glastonbury
Mountain, far enough from the busy shelters to go a full day
without seeing anyone. By the third evening, I felt
that steady calm that comes when the noise in your head is
replaced by moving water and the small work of camp.
I made a clearing beside a shallow stream where sugar
maples and yellow Birch gave me clean ground, and I started the
stove for dinner. The light was dropping behind
the Ridge. The air smelled like wet leaves
and cold rock. It was routine, which is why I
remember every detail of what came next.
I noticed him after I had set the pot on the stove.
He was across the stream, about 40 yards, centered between two
maples with Gray bark. He wore washed out overalls and
a red and black flannel shirt that looked like it had been
mended more than once. The clothes did not belong to a
backpacker, a hunter in season or anyone I expected to meet
that deep in. I saw no pack, no water, no
jacket tied at the waist. A small rusty garden trowel hung
from a loop on the overalls. I raised my hand and called out
the same way I would to anyone, because a friendly greeting
sorts out most Backcountry tension before it starts.
Hey there, nice evening. He did not move.
He did not nod or shift his weight.
He stared straight through the space I occupied, as if that
spot was all he had in mind. I tried to ignore it.
People freeze when surprised. I have done it myself.
I stirred the pot and counted to 20.
When I looked up, he was stepping into the stream.
He moved from one slick rock to the next without looking down.
He kept his eyes on me. The water there is only ankle
deep. In late summer, most hikers
check their feet or use a stick. He did not.
The pace was slow, not cautious. He reached my bank, stepped out
and kept walking in the same line toward my stove, my tent,
my food, and me. I could see his eyes clearly
then. They were open wide and the lids
did not blink. He had the face of a tired man,
but the eyes did not match the face.
I looked for normal signs, a limp, shivering confusion like
hypothermia. I saw none of that.
The trowel tapped against his thigh with each step.
That was the point where every calculation compressed into a
single decision. I did not take time to break
down the stove, pull stakes, or shoulder the pack.
I left everything I ran. I went away from both the stream
and the trail because I knew where a person would expect me
to go and I wanted the thickest cover.
The forest there is a mix of hardwood, leaf, Duff, slick
roots, and blow down. It is hard to run well in it
when you are fresh, and I was not fresh.
I kept my head up just enough to avoid branches.
Behind me I heard the same steady footfalls I had heard
across the stream space like a metronome.
Not fast, not slow. They did not close the distance
and they did not fade. The sound was wrong because it
never changed with the terrain. It stayed even while I climbed,
while I side hilled, while I shoved through hobble Bush and
stepped over a dead fall that should have broken the rhythm of
anyone who was not right on my heels.
When I could not make my legs do more, I slid behind a big rotted
log on the uphill side and lay still.
The light had fallen out of the trees by then, and the forest
settled into its night sounds, high chirps, the dry scrape of a
vole, water against stones. I listened for the pattern of a
human moving wood. It is different from deer or
bear. Deer snap twigs fast and then
stop. Bears push through brush with
heavy, irregular weight. A person crushes leaves and then
drags a toe or places a boot flat with a dull thud.
I heard one boot step and then nothing close enough that my
throat tightened. I do not know how long I lay
with my cheek against the cold wood.
I did not cough, I did not shift my hips when they went numb.
I kept my hands folded into my armpits until my fingers tingled
with pins and needles and then went dull.
Once I thought I heard him breathe, but it might have been
the stream, windless in the trees.
I counted my heartbeat and lost track past 1000.
It was not fear in the movie sense.
It was a narrow tube of attention where the only job is
to keep quiet and keep track of what is near you.
When the first Gray light seeped in, I waited longer.
Morning in the woods makes people sloppy.
It makes you think night rules no longer apply.
I held still until the low birds started working the understory.
When they resumed, I took it as a sign that the immediate threat
had moved off, at least far enough that they felt safe to
chatter. I did not return to the camp.
I had no food, no map, and only 1/2 bottle of water in my
jacket. I knew the sun would give me E&E
would give me a better chance of finding a logging Rd. than
trying to hit the long trail blind.
I moved in short pushes and then listened.
I did not use my whistle because sound travels easily in those
hollows and I did not want to call the wrong thing.
I filtered water through my bandana out of a quiet pool and
kept going. By midday I crossed a faint 2
track with shallow ruts and fresh tire marks.
A white pickup with a forestry company logo came down at 20
minutes later. The driver looked me over the
way people look at a person who is out of place.
He did not make a joke. He unlocked the passenger door
and told me to get in. At the Forest Service office, I
told the Ranger everything I expected to be asked, if I had
been drinking or if I had taken something.
He did not ask. He listened without interrupting
and then folded his hands on the desk.
He said that years earlier a man in his 60s had a mental break,
left his car at a trailhead with a jacket, food and a duffel of
hand tools in the trunk, and disappeared into the same part
of the forest. Searchers found boot prints for
a while, and then nothing for 2 summers after that.
Hikers turned in notes about small neat holes they had found
in odd places, one beside a rock with nothing planted in it,
another at the base of a beach, a line of them along a seep
where no one had any reason to dig.
Nothing else ever turned up. The Ranger said that in his
opinion, the man had died of exposure and the woods had done
what they always do. He did not have an explanation
for what I saw. He asked me to mark the Creek
crossing on the map. As best I could remember, I did.
He made a copy of my statement and told me to get checked for
ticks and to go home and rest. In the weeks after.
Sleep came in short pieces. I would come awake at 3:00 in
the morning with the sound of the trowel tapping on cloth in
my ears. I kept seeing the way the man's
boots cleared the rocks without glancing down.
I tried to assign a diagnosis because naming things can make
them manageable. Psychosis, late stage dementia,
a long untreated mania that burned off everything but
routine naming. It helped until the image of his
eyes returned. They were not wild.
They were flat. They made me think of a person
who has narrowed the world to a single task and will keep at it
until the body fails. In early spring, when the
snowmelt pulls the leaf litter tight and the ground gives up
what it has been holding, I called the Ranger.
I told him I wanted to walk back in with him and a couple of
volunteers from a local tracking group.
He said yes, on the condition that we do it by the book, four
of us total radios, a planned grid, a check in schedule,
flagging tape kept to a minimum, no weapons except bear spray,
and we leave if the river rose with the thaw.
We parked at a lower access and hiked in on a cool undercast
morning when the smell of hemlock and wet soil carries.
We moved slow. The Ranger wanted us to read
ground, not log miles. We found my old camp by
triangulating the bend in the stream against a rock shelf and
a pair of maples with an old blaze scar half healed.
The site was a mess. Animals had knocked over what I
left. The tent was gone, probably
dragged and chewed to rags. The stove was a bent ring under
leaves. I picked up what was mine and
packed out what I could. We set an arc around the
clearing and worked outward in a shallow Swale up the slope.
The first volunteer, a woman who had worked search and rescue in
New Hampshire, stopped and pointed.
The soil was discolored in a circle the size of a dinner
plate. It was not a hoof print or a
blow from falling wood. It was a dug hole that had been
filled back in with the same dirt 30 feet away.
We found another, then another in a curve that suggested
someone moving and making the same action at intervals.
Not quite a line, but not random.
The holes were shallow, barely deeper than a hand length, with
compacted edges that had held their shape through a winter.
In the middle of 1A strip of red and black cloth had rotted into
threads. In another, under an inch of
leaves, my hand hit metal. I pulled up a garden trowel with
a split wooden handle and rust layered thick on the blade.
The Ranger called the state police from a high spot where
the radio would carry. We flagged the area lightly and
waited. When the detectives walked in,
they set about it the way professionals do.
Photographs, measurements, paper bags for anything loose.
No assumptions. They told us to widen the sweep.
We did, near a small Birch with black fungus on one side.
The same volunteer knelt and used a stick to brush back.
Soil fragments came up pale and friable, not whole and not many.
The detective squatted beside her and did not touch them.
He called the medical examiner. The report took weeks.
I heard it second hand from the Ranger and then got a short
summary by mail. The bone fragments were human.
There were not enough for a full identification at the site, but
they were consistent with long exposure and the action of
roots, frost, and scavengers. The cloth threads matched old
flannel. The trowel had soil packed into
the screw channel deep enough that it had likely been used
repeatedly and set aside in the same place.
There were no tool marks on bone that suggested violence from
another person. There was no way to be certain
who the remains belong to without DNA, and there was no
family left to give a sample. The Ranger told me that as far
as the state was concerned, the most likely answer was the
simplest. The missing man had wandered,
dug small holes as a fixed action or because he believed
there was a reason laying down, and died in the woods.
The forest and time did the rest.
It doesn't explain your night, he said.
But it explains the holes. I drove back alone on a mild day
after the black flies eased but before the hardwood canopy had
fully leafed out. I parked lower than before and
walked the stream until the rock shelf and the matched maples
lined up. I carried the trowel back to the
spot where we had found the cloth threads and set it there
with the handle against a stone. I am not a superstitious person,
and I do not hold ceremonies, but it seemed wrong to take that
tool any farther. I found a smooth piece of quartz
in the stream and set it beside the trowel.
I stood awhile and listened to water move around the same
stones the man had stepped across.
Without looking, I tried to picture him when he was healthy,
carrying a tool to turn earth for seedlings or weeds, years
before his mind changed. I tried to picture him standing
where I stood, deciding without any logic I can reach that he
should walk to my camp. On my way out, I kept measuring
my steps out of habit. There is an old logging grade on
that slope, cut a century ago and now so softened by leaf
litter that you only see it if you look from the right angle.
The Civilian Conservation Corps rerouted sections of trail in
this forest during the 1930s. You can still find the old
alignments if you know where to look.
People have been carving lines through these trees for a long
time. People have also been losing
their way here for just as long. Knowing that did not make what I
experienced smaller, but it placed it in context.
The woods are not malevolent. They are indifferent.
They hold what we leave in them until something pulls it back
into view. I sleep better now.
The dream where footsteps pace behind me still shows up once a
month, but it has edges I can hold.
When I wake. I know that the man who walked
up from that stream is not out there closing distance step by
step. He is part of the Ridge and the
water and the shallow circles of soil we uncovered.
I still hike alone. I am more careful about where I
pitched the tent. I pay attention to small things,
fresh dirt in a place that should be settled, a hand tool
where no one should need one. A person without a pack standing
still too long. If you travel that part of
Vermont, learn the terrain, respect your limits, and listen
to what the ground is telling you.
The danger that found me that evening had a human source, and
it ran its course. What remains is a clean warning
and a memory that sits quietly now like a marker stone by a
stream. Simple and enough.
I'm going to tell this straight because that's the only way it
makes sense. My best friend Tom and I have
haunted elk together since we were teenagers.
We grew up on the same St. learned to shoot from the same
uncle, and spent every fall somewhere in the high country
with cold air in our lungs and sore legs from climbing.
We have a routine that's never failed us.
Pre dawn coffee at the truck pack check, a short talk about
wind and ridgelines and a whistle code to keep track of
each other when the terrain breaks our line of sight. 3
short bursts means I'm moving. 1 long means stop, 2 quick means
over here. Last year we went deep into the
winter Wasatch Cache National Forest near the Mirror Lake
basin. We know those bowls and saddles
well, or we thought we did. We'd been on a bull for two
days. He was smart and heavy.
Fresh tracks, a torn up wallow, bark shavings on spruce.
The 3rd morning we eased along a Ridge with a long shallow drop
to our left. The slope below was ugly,
deadfall stacked like pickup sticks, slick boulders, pockets
of shadow where the sun hadn't reached.
Tom pushed higher for a better view.
I skirted lower to stay out of the wind.
We lost sight of each other for 5 minutes.
It happens. I gave 3 short bursts to say I
was moving. He answered back from my right,
exactly where he should have been.
I kept going until the Ridge pinched down to a narrow spine
and the ground fell off fast into a ravine.
That's when I heard the two quick over here call from my
left down in the ravine. Wrong side, wrong direction.
I paused and gave 2 quick bursts.
The reply came immediately from the ravine.
Perfect timing, perfect tone, like Tom had a whistle to his
lips waiting for me. I started down thinking he'd
looped below me without saying so.
Then from my right, above and behind, I heard the same 2 quick
over here, the one I expected from him.
A human voice followed it, tight and urgent in the way I know
from 100 hunts. Ben, don't go down.
I'm up top. I locked up mid step.
You know that feeling when the hair on your arms lifts before
your brain catches up? I called Tom.
Where are you? A voice came from the ravine.
Same cadence, same little catch he gets when he's short of
breath. Over here, Ben, I got him.
Hurry. My stomach turned because it was
almost him, but not right. The pitch was a touch high.
The words were flat, like a recording that missed the small
human bumps inside a sentence. At that same moment, from my
right, the real Tom yelled, full volume and cracking with
adrenaline. Ben, get back to me now.
That is not me. I climbed back to the spine and
ran the Ridge to him. We met up with rifles in our
hands and wide eyes. He said he'd heard me down in
the Creek calling for help, saying I'd snapped a leg.
Neither of us had to say the word.
We reached the same conclusion. We were not staying out there
another minute. We stowed our calls.
We packed our flagging tape. We pulled our knives from our
belts and shoved them deep in the packs so we wouldn't think
about field dressing anything. We turned toward the truck.
The first calls were simple, behind us and a little left.
Ben, wait up. It was my voice, casual, mildly
annoyed. The way I've said it 1000 times.
To Tom, then ahead and to the right.
Tom, I'm over the rise, his voice easy and clipped, the way
he talks when he's saving energy.
We didn't answer. We kept a tight gap between us,
shoulder to shoulder when the trail allowed a single arm's
reach. When it narrowed, the calls
multiplied to the side above, below, like we were in a stadium
where our own voices bounced around.
Only nothing bounced. Each sound came with the strange
weight of a throat that knows the words but not the feeling.
The sentences were right, the beats were right, the edges were
off. When that didn't work, it
changed tactics. Tom, I fell, came in, my voice
sharp and panicked. A second later.
Ben, I think my ankle's broken in his.
It stacked our names into emergencies.
It knew the shape of our fear. We walked faster.
We made it a rule. No talking unless necessary.
No answering voices, no stepping toward any sound that wasn't
attached to a body. You could see we kept our elbows
brushing when the trail twisted, just so we'd know the other man
was still there. Then it used our wives.
My wife Sarah called for me from down a draw.
It wasn't a rough copy. It was her, she said, my name in
the tone she gets when she's trying not to cry.
Ben, I can't find the road, she said.
I felt like someone poured cold water down my back.
I hadn't told anyone where we'd parked.
Tom's wife, Jenny, called from uphill, breathless and afraid.
Tom stopped and swayed like he was drunk.
I grabbed his sleeve. He kept swaying.
His eyes went through me and passed me like he could see her.
He didn't say her name. He didn't have to.
I could see what he wanted to do because I wanted the same thing.
You hear someone you love calling, you go.
That's all there is. Here's a detail that still
bothers me. When it used Sarah's voice, she
said my full childhood nickname. It's dumb and embarrassing and
Tom only heard it once in high school.
I haven't heard Sarah use it since that day.
It rolled out of the trees like it had been invited.
It knew how to pick the lock. It knew our call signs.
Then it reached deeper and grabbed the private things that
make your brain skip. I told myself that if it knows a
nickname, it's because it was close.
I told myself if it was close, then it was listening to more
than just sound. That made me feel sick because
it meant we had been entertaining it all morning
without knowing. We kept moving rock to rock,
root to root, trading the lead at the steep parts so nobody got
sloppy. The ground was rough and the
light under the furs went Gray. We chose to walk through the
night rather than pitch camp. We wanted the truck.
We wanted a door that closed. We rationed headlamp use to
short bursts on the worst sections so we wouldn't paint
ourselves into a bright target. The calls changed again.
They started using little details, like fresh bait.
Ben, you dropped your lighter near the spring.
Tom, there's orange flagging on the next bend.
It was right about the spring. It was right about the flagging.
It had been watching us, or it had doubled back on our trail
and memorized it like our voices.
It added new lines. Ben, your left boot lace is
loose. Tom, your packs unzipped.
It wasn't wrong. It wanted us to talk back and
give it more to use. We came to a narrow saddle with
a steep pull out on both sides. The wind went still.
Up ahead, we heard our own tones arguing in low voices about
which Ridge to take. It was every conversation we've
ever had about a route, and it was all wrong because we were
hearing it while we were having the real one.
The two false voices cut off the instant I raised my rifle in the
edge of my headlamp beam. Just the edge.
Something moved between two spruces, taller than any man I
know, and not tall in a clean way.
It didn't back away like a person does when they get
caught. It didn't charge like a bear.
It shifted position a long step with a shape that looked like it
couldn't decide how it wanted to carry its weight.
The beam slid off bark and needles, and then there was only
dark again. We stood there with our hearts
banging in our chests, counting breaths and watching the tree
line for any second movement. Nothing.
I told Tom we had to find a way to tell each other apart that it
couldn't copy. Not a word, not a sentence, but
something empty of meaning that only we understood.
We had one by accident, a dumb two word answer from middle
school that we used to yell across the street to mean All
good Green ladder. It doesn't mean anything.
No one else ever used it. I said when I speak to you, I'll
say green ladder first. You say it back.
If a voice doesn't say it, don't answer.
He nodded. It was thin as a thread, and it
was all we had. We tried it right away, down in
the trees. My voice cried out for help
again. Tom looked at me, breathing
hard. I said green ladder, Tom.
He said green ladder back. The voice in the trees went
quiet, like a hand had been laid over a mouth. 5 minutes later,
from behind us, Jenny's voice called Tom's name and told him
she was hurt. He flinched so hard he almost
took me down with him. I said our code again.
He said it back through his teeth.
The voice behind us stayed silent for a beat, then tried my
daughter. She called me Daddy and said she
was scared. I didn't even look over my
shoulder. I fixed on the trail and said
the code to Tom. He set it back.
The voice moved from behind to a head and tried again.
We found a patch of ground where something had come through hard.
Not stepping around anything, just muscling straight on.
Game trails don't look like that.
Elk leave clean sign. This was like someone had pushed
a heavy suitcase through brush. In a crook of a low branch,
clamped in a way that made my stomach turn was a little clutch
of light brown hair. Not elk, not human.
It looked like hair a coyote might leave, only longer and not
the right texture. I didn't touch it.
We didn't take any kind of souvenir.
We left the branch alone and moved on.
I kept thinking about how close that meant it had been while we
argued about which way to go. The last miles were downhill on
a long chewed up spur Rd. with loose rock under foot.
We were dehydrated and past the point of feeling hungry.
The calls rose with the grade. It tossed in every voice it had
heard us mention in the last day.
Co workers. A neighbor, Tom's father, who
died two years ago, said his name from the shadow of a
spruce. We didn't answer.
We used green ladder like a hand hold on a Cliff.
Every few minutes one of us said it and the other answered.
We timed our steps so we didn't drift apart when the road
curved. We put our hands on each other's
pack straps and moved like 1 long person under 2 loads.
It tried one last time to split us.
It called my name from down in a dry wash with a copy of Sarah's
Breathing. The kind of tight inhale she
gets when she's trying not to scare our daughter during a
thunderstorm, the voice said. My full name, middle included.
The way she uses it when she's scared and angry.
At once, it said. I needed to hurry.
I stopped dead. I almost went.
Tom's fingers closed on my shoulder, hard enough to bruise.
Green ladder, he said in my ear, and that was the thing that cut
the line. We kept moving.
We reached the truck at first light.
It sat in a pull out off a dirt Rd.
The Forest Service barely keeps graded.
When the truck came into view, the calls got loud and messy,
like someone trying to make noise for the sake of noise.
Then they cut off, just gone. That was almost worse.
We threw our packs in the bed with none of the care we
normally take, got in and shut the doors.
I don't remember the 1st 20 minutes of the drive.
We didn't talk until we were deep on the main gravel and the
sun had hit the tops of the furs.
Tom said. Ranger station.
I nodded. That was it.
We filed a report at the station down near Commas.
The Ranger on duty was calm and professional.
He'd heard strange things before and didn't roll his eyes.
He wrote it down the way we said it, and when I finished, he told
us we weren't the only ones to bring in a story about imitation
calls that season. He didn't say we were crazy.
He didn't say we were right. He took it like a man taking
weather notes. We didn't ask for his opinion.
We weren't there for that. Afterward, neither of us slept
well. I would wake in the middle of
the night with my heart pounding and walk down the hall to my
daughter's room and stand in the doorway to make sure she was
there. Tom told me he kept the hall
light on and drank his coffee on the porch before sunrise like he
was keeping watch. We changed our whistle code.
We told a few friends never to go alone in that basin.
We skipped elk season for the first time in our lives.
Months later, I sat on my front steps with Sarah, watching our
daughter draw on the concrete with chalk.
The neighbor kid shouted something from across the
street. He used a nickname I used to
hate. For a second my skin went cold.
Then I said green ladder under my breath, and the panic slid
down a notch, like a knot loosening.
I picked up the chalk my daughter dropped, handed it back
to her, and went inside to start dinner.
That's the ending I have for you.
We made it out. We learned something small that
mattered. Whatever was up there learned
something about us, and it failed to split us.
We gave it no more than we had to, and it let us go.
If you hunt those ridges above Mirror Lake, don't rely on the
sound of your name. Don't chase a voice into a low
draw, even if that voice sounds like the person you'd run a mile
for. Give yourself a code that means
nothing to an outsider and everything to the person next to
you. And if you hear someone who
sounds exactly like you telling you to turn left when your map
and your guts say right, remember this part.
A voice can learn your words. It can learn your timing.
It can even learn the names that make you move without thinking.
What it can't fake is the promise you make to the man at
your shoulder. Hold on to that and walk out.
Last spring, I was a freshman trying too hard to look like I
knew things I did not know. A group from my dorm planned a
simple hike in Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, NC, the
kind people do on weekends. Before getting burgers in town,
I had been out there a few times and wanted to look like the one
with experience. On the main trail toward Looking
Glass Rock, I pointed at a faint side path leaving the
switchbacks and said I knew a shortcut that would cut off an
hour. My friends Bren, Maya, David,
and Jonah looked unsure. I smiled, said it would be easy,
and stepped into the brush. That choice set up everything
that followed. The first minutes were fine.
The ground was dry under leaves and the trees blocked the sun in
a steady way that felt safe. Then the path thin to a guess.
Branches closed in and brushed our arms.
We had to turn sideways to squeeze past thickets.
I kept saying we would meet the main trail again in a little
while. No one laughed like before.
We tried to keep the same general direction as the Ridge,
but in that kind of forest, small turns change everything.
The sounds of other hikers faded until there was only wind moving
through leaves and the small clicks of sticks under our
shoes. I did not want to admit we were
off route. I tried to read the slope and
the way water must run in rain to pick the right line out like
I had seen people do in videos, but the slope began to angle in
a way that did not match the map in my head.
After 20 minutes, the last sign of a path ended at a tangle of
young trees and deadfall. My friends started to ask harder
questions. Jonah said we should turn back.
David pointed out we had already crossed 2 shallow drainages and
he did not know which one LED back to the switchbacks.
Pride kept my mouth moving. I said it's fine, just a bit
farther. We stopped when the brush moved
in a heavy way a few yards off to our right.
It was not a small animal. The movement hung there, quiet
again for a count. Then came a low huff.
I lifted my hand without thinking, and everyone stilled.
She stepped out. A large black bear, bigger than
any I had seen in photos, came into view.
Her head was broad, her body long and thick, and her fur was
glued down around her mouth with dark, dried blood.
Two small Cubs moved behind her with clumsy steps.
A torn, white tailed deer lay near them, ribs showing.
The air had a hard smell, metallic, sour and warm.
I learned later that black bears in this part of the state were
almost haunted out a long time ago, then came back strong after
hunting rules changed in the late 1970s and 80s.
It does not matter in the moment.
What matters is that a sow with Cubs and food does not want you
there. None of us spoke.
The sow did not bluff or huff. Again, she did not rear up.
She saw a group too close to her Cubs in the carcass and she
focused. I said back away slow, but panic
broke things apart. Everyone ran.
It is easy to judge that from a couch.
Panic in the woods is different. When people move, others move.
I turned to follow and my foot caught a vine hidden under
leaves. I went down hard, my ankle
twisting so sharp I thought something snapped.
Pain took my breath and rushed to my throat.
I tried to stand and my leg failed.
I looked up and saw that the sow had not chased the ones who ran.
She turned her head toward the only one who was still down, me.
I saw the deer, saw the Cubs with their faces stained, and
understood we had walked into her dining room.
I knew I could not run. I remembered the advice to lie
still and cover my neck. It is not a trick, it is a last
option. I rolled onto my stomach, pulled
my hands over the back of my head and tried to breathe in
short, quiet breaths. The sound of her steps through
the leaves came close and stopped beside me.
Her breath hit the side of my neck, hot and thick with the
smell of meat. The weight of 1 foreleg came
down on my back. It was not a push, it was body
weight, as if a loaded pack had been set on my spine.
I felt points through my jacket where each claw met fabric and
skin. The ground pressed the air out
of me. I kept my hands locked and
watched the dirt an inch from my face.
There was no thought beyond holding still.
Time stretched into something strange.
I could hear my pulse click inside my ear.
She sniffed the back of my head in my jacket, then the pressure
lifted. I did not look up.
I counted my breaths to 10, then to 30, then to 60.
I heard a grunt farther away, and the small pads of the Cubs
moving with her through leaves. I waited longer than I needed
to. My hands shook so much I could
barely move them from my neck. When I finally raised my head,
she was gone. The deer was still there, torn
open flies tracing small loops over it.
I sat up and tried to stand and could not put weight on my
ankle. It throbbed in a steady, bright
way. My face was wet and I did not
remember crying. I started to crawl in the
direction we had come, dragging my left leg and pulling with my
forearms. The ground was a mix of leaves
and dry dirt under shallow roots.
My knees and palms scraped raw. Twice.
I stopped because I thought I heard her return, but it was
only a branch settling or a bird.
I kept my head low and moved a few feet at a time, then rested,
then moved again. I do not know how long it took
to reach the line where the brush opened and the slope felt
right again, but it was more than an hour.
I saw the main trail ahead and forced myself up on one leg to
hop the last few yards. I could hear my friends before I
saw them. They had circled back, yelling
my name and arguing with each other.
When they saw me, they ran and helped me to the side of the
trail. Their faces were a mix of relief
and anger and shame. They asked what happened.
I said the bear charged and I fell and hurt my ankle.
I left out the part where she stood on me.
I left out the part where I smelled her breath inches from
my ear and felt her claws through my jacket.
I did not know how to tell them something like that without
making them feel worse than they already did.
They carried my pack and I leaned on Jonah and David for
the slow walk out. The parking area by the road
felt unreal, like a movie set. The air smelled like hot asphalt
and sun on pine straw near the lot edge.
We drove to an urgent care clinic.
An X-ray showed no break, just a bad sprain.
They put me in a walking boot and wrapped my ankle.
The nurse told me to rest, ice and keep it up for a week.
She said I was lucky. I nodded and said I knew.
Back at school, the group did not stay the same.
People were kind in public but cooler in private.
The story that spread was that I showed off, got us lost and got
hurt when a bear popped out. That part was true.
What was not said was the worst part.
At night I woke up with my chest tight and my mouth open like I
was still on the ground. I could smell that warm, rotten
breath again in class, when a slide of a deer or a bear came
up in a lab. I felt my hands gripped the
desk. I started to skip group things.
My friends stopped asking me to come along.
If someone brought up hiking, I changed the subject.
When I tried to picture telling them the truth, the words jammed
up behind my teeth. Weeks passed.
I read more about black bears in western North Carolina because
facts were easier to hold than fear.
I learned that sows teach Cubs to feed.
It kills. I learned they pushed down with
a foreleg to test if a threat is still moving.
I learned that most black bear injuries here are tied to food.
People leave coolers out or hikers move too close to a
carcass without seeing it. I learned that playing dead is
not advice for every bear, but with a sow guarding Cubs,
stillness can lower the risk. Reading those lines did not make
sleep easier, but it kept the memory inside a frame that was
real and not made of guesswork. Finally, I texted Maya and asked
to talk. We sat in a coffee place near
campus in the late afternoon. I told her the full thing.
I kept my eyes on the table and said the words I had not said.
I told her about the pressure on my back, the breath, the claws
through the jacket, and the way I counted to 60 with my face in
the dirt. I told her that I lied by
leaving out the worst part because I was ashamed and
because I had already done enough damage by leading us off
trail. She did not speak for a while.
When she did, she asked why I did not tell them the truth when
they found me. I said I did not want to make
them carry that image. I said I did not want to be the
guy who made a stupid choice and then turned it into a story
about how close he came to dying.
She nodded once, then frowned, then said she needed time.
That was fair. A month later, when my ankle
could take a careful walk, I asked if anyone wanted to go
back for a short, safe hike on the main trail in daylight.
No one had to say yes, but Maya and Jonah did.
We met in Brevard at a grocery store, bought water and a small
first aid kit, and drove to the same lot.
We stayed on the Mark Trail the entire time.
I carried bear spray because it is a simple tool and there is no
pride in not bringing it. We talked about where we left
the trail that day. We did not leave it again.
We did not want to see where the carcass had been, and we did not
try, but when we reached a bend that felt close, we stepped a
few feet off to a small opening on a branch at knee height.
There was a tuft of coarse black hair caught on bark.
On the ground near it was a small piece of pale bone, like a
Shard from a rib. None of us touched either one.
We looked, then stepped back onto the trail.
It was not proof for the world. It was enough for us.
After that, I told the others the full story.
Bren was angry that I had kept it to myself.
David was quiet. Jonah asked a few direct
questions and then put a hand on my shoulder.
The talk did not fix everything at once, but it took the air out
of the worst part, the part where silence turns a bad day
into something that keeps getting larger in the mind.
I apologized for dragging everyone off the trail to start
with. I said I would not put my need
to look cool above someone else's safety.
Again, saying that out loud made a difference.
It set a line for me that was clear.
As the semester went on, the dreams eased.
I could look at photos of the Blue Ridge without my stomach
clenching. I went back to Pisgah twice
more, both times on marked routes and both times in the
middle of the day. We kept good space from any
noise that sounded like feeding. We talked more and showed off
less. I carry the memory still.
It is not drama now. It is a shape inside my head
that has clean edges. A sow with Cubs and a carcass
had every reason to guard her space.
She tested me, found I was not a problem and moved on.
I do not end this with a big lesson about nature or a warning
that sounds like a slogan. This is what happened.
I tried to impress people. I cut a corner and we walked
into a place we had no right to be.
I lay on the ground under a weight I cannot forget.
I lied because I was ashamed. Then I told the truth.
I am lucky to be here to write this.
I am also different when I pass the sign for Looking Glass Rock.
Now I think about that patch of brush and the still air under
the trees. I keep my voice low.
I stay on the trail and when someone asks if I know a
shortcut, I say no, we'll take the long way.
I grew up in Arizona and spent most weekends somewhere along
the Mogulian rim. My cousin and I know the turn
offs by heart. The slow crawl off AZ 260, the
long run of Forest Rd. 300, the white dust that coats your
bumper and tastes like chalk on your teeth if you talk with your
mouth open. Woods Canyon Lake is the easy
choice when you don't want to plan.
It has trout, flat spots for tents, and short trails that hug
the coves. We picked a weekday in late
September because crowds thin out after school starts.
We wanted quiet, a fire we didn't have to talk over, and an
early bedtime so we could fish again at first light.
That was the plan. What happened was not part of
any plan I've ever made. We found a site off the main
loop, close enough to the water that we could see a strip of the
Cove through the trees. We set a small tent, leveled the
camp stove on a Flat Rock, and hit the shoreline with spinning
rods. The afternoon felt normal.
Small rainbows, enough bites to keep us from talking about work.
When the sun slid behind the Ridge, we switched to camp
chores without saying it out loud.
Water on for noodles, a single can of Stew to split.
Fire built in a shallow ring of old fused ash.
That said, a lot of people had done this before us.
The temperature dropped fast, like it does up there.
We let the fire burn down to a steady bed of coals.
I remember thinking we'd nailed the timing.
Not too much wood, not too little light, just enough warmth
to sit through the dusk without getting smoke in our eyes.
I saw the deer first. It stood across the Cove, close
to the waterline where the mud thins to a skin over rock.
It was facing us with its head turned, like it was trying to
line 1 ear toward our voices. I've watched a lot of deer in
Arizona. This one looked wrong, and I can
give a plain reason. The legs didn't match the body.
They were too long for the size of the chest, too straight,
almost like a set of stilts that didn't belong to it.
When it took a step, the water didn't react.
No ripple, no small wave against the gravel.
It moved again, and still nothing changed on the surface.
I blinked, because that's what you do when something doesn't
match what you expect. When I opened my eyes, it wasn't
a deer anymore. There was something upright in
the same space. No sound, no stride between,
just a switch. I didn't say do you see that?
Because I didn't want my cousin to echo me and make it real.
Instead, I said something about the pot lid and to grab the
small spoon from the cooler. He didn't look at me.
He nodded at the spoon and kept his eyes on the opposite shore.
That told me he saw the same thing.
We didn't stare. We kept talking about small camp
tasks, and every time my eyes came back across the water, the
shape wasn't where it had been. First it was near a Gray stump
we joked, looked like a chair. Then it was at a downed log
closer to our side, the one with bark peeled away in long strips.
The distance between those two points should take minutes to
cross. The world on our side stayed
normal. Wind in the needles pop from a
wet coal, the tiny hiss of our pot.
So the changes on the far shore felt like a trick that only
involved our eyes. The smell came next, wet stone
and iron, like old blood on river rock.
It rolled across the Cove in a way I could measure, I could
pick. The second I smelled it over the
fire, it didn't fade like smoke, It cut through it.
I stood, walked to the water with my headlamp off, and looked
for tracks to prove I was picking the wrong fight in my
own head. In the damp sand were fresh
prints. Hooves, then a few feet later,
long flat toes. Human in the worst way.
Press deep and wide like someone had splayed their feet on
purpose. The line of them ended at bare
rock. Nothing after.
No slip, no smear, no grit. Disturbed.
You want tracks to tell you a story?
This read like a sentence cut in half and taped to another
sentence that didn't match. We agreed, without saying it,
that we were done for the night. We moved like people who have
extinguished a fire 100 times. Stove off, pot dumped, food
sealed. Trash tied shut water over the
coals until they hissed and steamed, and the steam smelled
like a wet sidewalk. Headlamps came on because not
having them on felt like a risk we didn't need.
We didn't sweep the beams back and forth.
We kept the light where our feet would go and where our hands
would reach. I heard my cousin zip a pocket.
I checked that my keys were where I'd left them.
We each shouldered our packs, grabbed what would have been
awkward to collect later, and walked.
It followed us from the tree line.
I didn't need to ask. We both felt it.
There's a pressure you get when something moves at the edge of
your light. You can tell when it matches
your pace. It stopped when we stopped, and
we tested that once by accident when my cousin's boot rolled on
a loose rock. We paused, then began again.
And the sound of it. No brush crack exactly, but
wait, kept the same distance. I tried to explain it later and
ran out of good words. The nearest I can give is that
it refused to add up. It never closed the last yards,
but it never let U.S. Open them either.
When my light hit the space between trunks, the outline
looked wrong. Arms too long for where the
shoulder joints should end or knees pointing in a direction.
Knees don't point in people. I have seen injured animals move
in ways that make your stomach tighten.
This wasn't injury. This was like someone had
learned the shapes and then built them backward.
We aimed for the boat ramp because it's one of the few
places with real lighting. The map in my head put it a few
minutes walk from where our side path met the main trail.
There is a short wooden footbridge you have to cross if
you come from our direction. It sits low and it creaks even
under a child's weight. We stepped onto the boards and
the sound rose up like it always does with that kind of lumber.
The light from the sodium lamps by the ramp pushed a pale wash
over the water on the far edge of the bridge.
I looked back. The shape stood within the
shadow on the dirt. It moved left, then right, but
each time it put weight forward, the board closest to it stayed
empty. I don't know if wooden is right
or couldn't, but the result was the same.
It did not put a foot on the wood.
We walked the bridge together. I didn't look down because I
didn't need one more set of variables to manage.
On the other side, the path turns to pavement that slopes
toward the ramp. There was a fisherman there,
late to load up, the kind of guy who stretches a weekday as long
as he can because he has discovered he likes the quiet
more than he likes dinner. On time.
He shut his tackle box, tossed it in the truck bed and slammed
the door. That sound did something to the
night. I won't dress that up.
It was a cheap truck door, thin metal, hollow bang.
But after it hit, the pressure against us dropped.
I looked back again and for a second I had this stupid thought
that I had been wrong about the entire thing, because the shapes
that it seemed to track US had smoothed back into boulders and
brush and trunk. The smell thinned out.
My headlamp hit nothing that wanted to be looked at.
We didn't tell the fisherman anything real.
We nodded, said good evening, and got into our vehicles.
We didn't even debate whether to sleep there.
We caravaned out to Rim Rd. found a gas station with two
bright lights and a clerk who looked at us like we were about
to ask for cigarettes and Lotto tickets.
My cousin's hands shook when he reached for his wallet.
Mine did too. I just kept them in my pockets.
We told the clerk we'd seen a large, aggressive animal across
the lake and that it made us nervous.
He said he hadn't heard of anything like that this week.
He asked if we wanted coffee. We sat with paper cups.
We didn't touch until the heat ran out.
Under those lights, with the hum of the coolers and the stale
sugar smell around the register, I could line up the facts.
We saw a deer that looked wrong, then something upright.
It moved closer without showing how the air smelled like wet
stone and iron. The tracks switched and then cut
off. It matched our pace from the
tree line. It would not step onto the
wooden bridge and the sound of a truck door snapped something I
didn't know how to name. I am not going to claim what we
saw out loud in the way people like to claim things on the
Internet. I will say the word that fits
the shape of the fear Skinwalker.
I understand that this word carries history larger than a
night story. I use it here because I don't
have another word that points to the same box of facts without
pretending it was a regular animal or a shadow with a lucky
sense of timing. I won't argue with anyone who
says we were tired or that dusk plays tricks on depth.
I know what my eyes saw and what my nose smelled and what my feet
did not want to do. When I reached the first board
of that bridge a few weeks later, both of us drove back in
the middle of a Saturday. The lake was busy then, Families
on the shore, kids tossing rocks, a couple cooking hot dogs
on a small grill. We picked a table near the boat
ramp where I could keep the bridge in my peripheral vision.
We ate sandwiches and talked about everything except the
thing we were both watching. We didn't go near the far coves.
The boards out there do not reach the spots where we camped.
We stayed until the shadows started to pull long across the
water, and then we left without trying to pretend we had other
plans. I keep the gear we packed that
night in the same bin. Sometimes when I open it, my
nose picks up the scent of cold ash and damp nylon and nothing
else. That's a relief every time.
Other nights, when I'm tired and my eyes blur lines on a page,
I'll see that deer, the way it stood above the water.
I'll think about how the shoreline felt like it couldn't
hold one more true thing. And what happens when something
tries to cross anyway, if you camp at Woods Canyon Lake, I'm
not here to scare you off. I'm saying that if you set up on
a quiet weekday and the light slips low and the far side seems
still, pay attention to where the boards are.
Keep your routine simple. Don't sweep your light like
you're looking for a show. If you have to move, move
together. If you reach the bridge and
something stops at the shadow's edge, don't test.
Why. Walk the boards, Let the door
slam. Sit under the bright lights
until your hands stop shaking. Then go home.
And when you come back, do it at noon.