The Ozarks were supposed to feel familiar.
Same limestone ridges I'd hiked as a kid, same cedar scented
humidity. But stepping onto Wolf Creek
Trail with sage that Monday afternoon had the weight of
crossing a border. Behind us the Rangers Gravel Rd.
hissed shut and ahead the forest gathered itself in a rough
circle of trunks as if checking our passports before it let us
in. I shifted the dry bag of
acoustic loggers on my back, caught Sage's grin and we
started down the leaf choked path toward base camp.
We worked in easy silence until sunset.
My thesis depended on capturing the Ozarks sub audible life.
The moaning limestone owl wing beats bats so high pitched they
sounded like camera flashes every kilometer.
We strapped a recorder to a trunk, synced the clocks and
marked GPS. Sage hummed to herself while she
tightened straps, her ponytail flicking black against the
orange evening glare. She was better at field work
than most professors I knew. Steady, precise, quick to laugh
even when mosquitoes clouded our faces.
We pitched camp beside a shallow bend of Wolf Creek just after 9.
The cedar needles under the tent smelled like pencil shavings.
Sage rigged the bear hang. I logged the metadata.
Normal, rhythmic, safe. At 9:57 PM, the forest was still
chirping. Katydids, bullfrogs, one distant
coyote at 959. The sound bed thinned, the way a
crowded cafeteria drops to a hush when a teacher steps in.
And on the exact stroke of 10, the world punched us in the
chest. I didn't hear the boom so much
as feel it. The air turned solid, my ribs
buzzing like struck tuning forks.
The tent poles flexed. My enamel clicked one low,
perfect note that must have sat down in the 40 Hertz basement,
too deep for earbuds, too big for explanation.
Then it vanished. The Creek kept sliding past
rocks, but everything else fell mute.
The insects, the frogs, even the breeze in the tops of walnuts
simply paused. Sage met my stare through the
half zipped mesh. Did you get that time stamp?
She whispered. I nodded, throat too tight to
answer. Morning brought sunlight, and
sunlight apologized for everything.
Birds chatted over the Creek. Sage cued the recorder's
waveform. One massive spike, then a flat
line, as if the boom had scared the data itself.
Maybe an old quarry blast, she said, though neither of us could
name a quarry this deep in the hardwoods.
At midday we met a bow hunter stomping downhill with a dressed
doe. Sweat darkened his camo.
His eyes looked older than his face.
He asked what 2 grad students were doing so far from trail
heads. When Sage explained his jaw
muscles twitched. Woods cough it dark.
He muttered. If you value your tongue, stay
zipped. I laughed before I meant to.
He didn't. My brother didn't listen.
He added, adjusting his grip on the dough.
All they found was a pile of teeth the size of Dimes.
He walked on, leaving the smell of iron and sage.
That night the boom returned, 10 sharp.
Same visceral quake. Same dead silence afterward, but
I lay awake cataloguing differences.
The whip, poor Wills cut off mid note, and somewhere a squirrel
kitched once and was slapped quiet like a microphone being
yanked at 1012. The sounds trickled back.
Nervous and out of sync, I slept with one boot on.
We repeated the ritual Tuesday and Wednesday.
Anchor a new string of loggers, Eat ramen, count mosquitoes.
Wait. Each day was ordinary, each
night unfathomable. On Wednesday we noticed SAP
bleeding down a cluster of short leaf Pines, fresh amber threads
strung across the bark. I touched one.
It smelled like hamburger left in July sun.
Trees are sick, Sage murmured. We hiked another half kilometer
and found deer tracks outside the second recorder, deep facing
camp. Beside them, identical tracks
pointed the opposite way, as if the deer had walked backward
without turning. By Thursday dusk, my notepad
read like folklore. 3 nights, 3 booms, 3 perfect time stamps.
We were arguing whether to hike out and show the park
Superintendent or to gather 2 more data points first.
The science in me itched for a pattern.
The mammal in me begged to quit. We boiled rice noodles early,
zipped the tent and waited. At 9:45, wind combed through the
Cedars. At 955, even the Creek hushed
like it feared an exam question. 10:00 came, and nothing.
My watch ticked past the minute. Sage exhaled, maybe in relief,
maybe in disappointment. The second hand hit 22 seconds.
Something exhaled behind the tarp.
It wasn't the violent pressure of the boom.
It was gentler, moist, the way a draft sneaks in when a freezer
door cracks. Nylon billowed inward, cold
breath against my knee. Sage's silhouette froze.
She lifted the knife we use to open freeze dried meals, it's
blades suddenly pathetic. I heard joints creak outside a
long stretch of wood or bone, followed by the experts.
Silence. Predators wear like cloaks.
My heartbeat thudded too loud, far too loud.
The forest had learned to hold its breath.
Only our bodies hadn't caught the lesson.
I counted to 30 in the dark, praying my pulse wouldn't betray
us. Praying the bow hunters warning
was folklore. Praying the thing outside cared
less about tongues than it did about coward scientists who
lacked one. The nylon fluttered once more
like a sigh of disgust. Then nothing.
Still nothing. We stayed motionless until dawn
turned the mesh pale grey, and thrushes dared to sing again.
When we crawled out, the muddy soil behind the tent showed no
paw prints or hooves, yet the resin stinking SAP had
thickened, painting bruises across the pine trunks.
Sage looked at me, eyes rimmed red.
One more night, she said, voice raw.
Then we find out what's breathing at us.
I nodded, though every nerve begged to run.
Above us, the Cedars clicked, shedding a single cone that
shattered on rock like an unspoken promise.
Sage woke me with a shove at first light.
She had already loaded her GPS data into the tablet and
overlaid last night's waveform spikes.
The three biggest signals fanned outward from camp like spokes.
They meet on the Ridge, she whispered, eyes too bright for
someone who hadn't slept. I drank instant coffee that
tasted of cedar dust and dread, then helped break camp.
Every pot clink, every zipper rasp sounded obscene in the
hush. We followed the cord in its
uphill Wolf Creek narrowed to a thread, its banks stitched with
ice plant and Poison Ivy. Halfway up, my phone buzzed a
lost signal chime, even though I'd set it to airplane mode
hours ago. Sage's compass spun twice,
reoriented N then froze. We both pretended that was
normal. By noon we breasted a saddle
thick with cedar, old enough to have quilted bark.
The air changed cooler, densely still, like the atmosphere in a
sealed library. Where Moss and liverwort should
have carpeted the ground, there was only naked rock and a
sprinkling of pale wood shavings, as if someone whittled
invisibly between the trees. Even the gnats had abandoned the
place. The glade center lay under a
ragged tarp camouflaged in leaf litter.
Kneeling beside it, sage peeled back layers. 1st a net of
chicken wire, then damp burlap that smelled of urine and burnt
hair. Underneath crouched 3 pressure
plates fashioned from truck leaf springs.
Thick wires ran to a plywood coffin sunk flush with the soil.
Someone had welded a sub base speaker inside a steel drum,
pointing its mouth straight at the sky.
I reached to disconnect a lead, but my hand stopped of its own
accord. A ring of bones encircled the
pit. 7 deer sprawled like compass points, each neck
snapped backwards so hard the vertebrae poked through hide.
Their tongues were gone, roots scooped clean.
Black flies orbited above the bodies, yet none dared land on
the flesh. The smell wasn't rot, it was
ammonia, copper and SAP, hot as asphalt.
Sage gagged but kept filming. Someone's using the boom to mask
butchery, she rasped. Probably hauls meth gear in
after each blast. I wanted to believe her, but no
cartel arranged carcasses like ritual signage.
I pulled the data cards from the seismic plates.
They were warm, as if the circuits had hearts.
At 2152, just 8 minutes early, the buried resonator discharged
an unprogrammed pulse, a concussive bottom of the ocean
growl that rippled up through bone and treetop alike.
The cedar canopy shivered, shed handfuls of brown needles.
And then the world exhaled. Everything living, no insects,
no birds. Even our breath sounded like
cannon fire in the vacuum. Sage's eyes went wide,
reflecting nothing but me. And then something moved beyond
her shoulder. It stepped between trunks as
though bones hinged backward. 8, maybe 9 feet tall.
Shoulders narrow but too high, limbs dangling to mid shin.
Velvetless antlers swept the branches, gouging crescents into
the bark. The torso seemed stretched, ribs
pressing against hide in a faint, sickle white glow.
It had no face, only a sunken Oval where features should be,
as if skin had melted and held the shape of an absent skull.
The creature paused, inhaled, and the air rushed toward it
like water down a drain. I felt pressure tug at my teeth.
Sage's boots scraped slate. The thing turned, tracking the
sound as though vision were irrelevant.
Its jawline split, revealing a grin of teeth too small and too
many, like someone had glued a necklace of infant incisors to
its gums. Sage bolted, and the creature
followed the noise, gliding more than walking.
I tore after her, smashing through brush, but every broken
twig I left behind served as a flare.
Twice the monster veered toward me, only to veer off when Sage
snapped another branch ahead. We reached Wolf Creek and leapt
in water, numbing calves Even in June heat sound changed in the
current dulling footfalls, and for a moment the forest behind
stayed empty. Then hoof prints appeared on the
muddy bank, deep twin slots splayed and impossibly long.
As I watched, the rear edge of each track softened, widened and
spread into 5 human like fingers that pressed into the mud, nails
first. The Prince followed us
downstream, always just closing the gap.
Sage spotted a downed Cottonwood bridging the water and scrambled
onto it. I followed the log, slick
beneath my palms. Halfway across the boom
retriggered, this time right beside us, a physical punch that
rattled bark loose and sent Sage's recorder tumbling into
the Creek. She shrieked.
The antlers reared on the near shore, head cocked, nostrils
flaring, as though sent alone could paint us.
I screamed back, pure reflex ripping the silence apart.
The creature vaulted onto the Cottonwood, bark, exploding
under clawed grip. But the log shifted, rolled, and
the giant plunged into the torrent with a hiss, like steam
hitting iron. Water erupted black around it,
and for once it's silhouette made noise, thrashing,
thrumming. We sprinted, drenched and
shaking, until we collapsed behind a sandstone ledge.
Twilight bled through the canopy.
Fireflies dared to spark. Our clothes dripped, echoing
like hammers in the returning quiet.
We listened, counting each breath double time.
But the Creek now babbled over its own voice, masking
everything. By pure luck, we found a flat
patch above the floodline. Sage set up the tent.
With trembling hands, I looped the spare recorders mic outside,
hoping data might explain nightmare.
Darkness fell thick as ink. The night chorus resumed by
inches. 1 cricket, then two, then a chorus that almost
sounded brave. We waited for 10:00, but the
boom never came. At 11:30, while Sage dozed, a
wet rhythmic crunch drifted through the nylon, soft like
someone chewing unripe fruit. My recorders, red LED, blinked
with each sound wave. Closer, closer.
I lay flat, holding my tongue against my teeth so it couldn't
rattle. The chewing paused.
A breath hovered at the mesh, deep, satisfied, savouring the
dark it owned. The recorder captured it all
until the batteries died at midnight.
The recorder quit just after midnight, but the memory card
held 38 minutes of terror. Chewing that slipped into wet
slurps, a breath so close it vibrated the diaphragm, and one
soft click of teeth, the way someone might tap a counter bell
to announce they were ready to be served.
By dawn. Sage and I had listened to the
file twice, shoulders touching as if proximity alone could mute
the dread. That's when we heard the
pattern. Each time one of us whispered,
the creature paused, as though deciding whether the tiny sound
was worth the effort. It haunted the loudest thing in
reach. While the cicadas warmed in the
sun, we rewired our last working recorder.
I loaded its memory with owl hoots, coyote choruses, even the
sub bass boom itself. The speaker was puny next to the
buried resonator, but it might by seconds.
We packed light batteries, thermos, a single seismic plate
pried loose from the pit and wired with a manual trigger.
If everything failed, the plate would drop hard enough to
unleash a real boom, maybe stun the monster, maybe break the
Ridge above us, maybe both. At 9:30 we left the Creek and
took the service grade that twisted N toward the trailhead.
Sky showed a coin of new moon, pale as bone dust.
Every step felt amplified, drum loud in the hush, so we timed
our footfalls with the recorder's playback.
Sage carried the speaker against her chest.
I gripped the seismic plate like a shield. 20 minutes later, the
woods inhaled, swallowing its own chorus.
A spike of silence so sudden my ears rang in that gap.
A branch cracked behind us, farther uphill than any deer
would tread, and the smell of freezer burned blood drifted on
wind that had no temperature. Sage thumbed the play button.
Screeching owls lashed the treetops.
The Wendigo erupted from the dark antlers, cleaving air, but
it twisted toward the counterfeit racket instead of
us. We ran.
The speaker's batteries bled fast.
Each new call dulled pitch warping like a tape chewed in
hungry gears. The creature adjusted every time
the volume dipped, locking on to the real noise of our boots.
I felt it close, air thinning, tongue tasting copper, and I
yanked Sage off the two track into a shoot of blackjack oaks.
She jacked the volume to Max, flooded the brush with distorted
bobcat screams. Something huge barreled past the
opening we just exited, shaking acorns loose.
We broke from the trees onto the limestone shelf above Wolf Creek
Gorge, only half a mile to Ranger Country.
But the recorder stuttered, went silent.
Batteries bled dry. The night snapped shut around us
like a camera shutter behind, dry leaves rustled in cadence.
Step, drag, inhale, step, drag, inhale.
I grabbed Sage's wrist and sprinted along the rim.
The Wendigo followed without haste, letting the gravel under
our souls do its work. I could hear its fingers, or
were they hooves, now testing the path for better purchase.
It had all eternity. We had lungs already tearing
lights winked through the trees, headlamps bobbing along the
service road. 2 Rangers and a pickup.
Hope flared, and with it the unmistakable crunch of my boot
against a fallen limb. The creature surged, limbs
unfolding, closing the distance in three soundless strides.
Antlers brushed the overstory. Bark rained like sleet.
Instinct overruled terror. I slammed the seismic plate flat
on a slab of limestone and hammered it with the recorder's
dead body. Steel met stone with a hollow
clang. A heartbeat later, the hidden
spring cut loose, punching the ground with a pressure wave so
deep my vision swam. The bluff spat dust.
Oaks quivered and the Wendigo recoiled, antlers flaring as if
caught in wind shear. It loosed A breathy snarl, the
first true sound we'd ever heard it make, and staggered sideways
into Cedars that cracked like gunfire around its weight.
We tore for the headlights. The truck fishtailed to a halt,
and Ranger Darren Kincaid vaulted out, shotgun half
raised. He shouted something about
permits, about night closures, but the words died when the sub
base echo rolled over us and the trees beyond the bluff bent in a
ripple, as if something enormous brushed them aside.
Kincaid hustled us into the cab. He wanted explanations, but Sage
could only pant, and I kept glancing through the rear glass,
waiting for antlers to silhouette in the red glow of
brake lights. None did. 300 yards down the
grade, the truck rocked over a rut.
Something wet slapped the bed liner.
Kincaid stopped and swung his flashlight, a fresh deer tongue,
glossy and twitching like it wasn't sure about death yet.
He swallowed hard, then locked the doors.
Dawn painted the Ranger station windows pink.
We filled out reports that read like fever dreams.
Kincaid rang up enforcement brass.
But when they hiked to the Ridge, they found no seismic
gear, no deer corpses, no prints.
Only cedar stumps oozing SAP that smelled of uncooked meat.
A culvert had caved where the bluff stood, he said, fresh
chalk dusting the Creek bed. Geological coincidence, they
called it. That afternoon, Kincaid let us
borrow 2 sticks of Park Service thermite and drove us to an
abandoned lime quarry. We dumped the one seismic plate
we'd kept and the recorders shattered husk into the pit.
When the thermite torch bit, it flared white as a welding sun.
The boom that followed was purely earthly, sharp, finite,
lacking the depth of midnight miracles.
Birds flushed, then settled again, singing louder than
before. Back on campus, my thesis became
a compromise. Spectrograms of impossible
frequencies, timestamp charts, and a final audio clip the
Ethics Committee sealed under confidential notation.
It ends with my own breathing, sages muffled Saab, and one
prolonged exhale that doesn't belong to either of us.
Like a hunter tasting the air for prey it now knows by heart,
I titled the project When Silence Hunts.
On the last page in pen, I added a warning no peer reviewer will
ever see. If the woods go quiet at 10, do
not listen. Run before the dark remembers
your name. I never planned on meeting
another soul out there. Just four days of dripping
silence along the Skyline Primitive Trail before the
winter gates closed the first morning rain freckles ticked
against my hood like a metronome and the ho rainforest smelled of
cedar soaked loam and cold iron. By late afternoon I had covered
a good 15 plus miles far past any side spur tourist might
wander. The only sound was the steady
suck of my boots lifting from mossy Duff and the hush of
drizzle sliding through the canopy.
I chose a small granite rimmed Meadow for camp, ringed by Sitka
spruce so tall they vanished into low clouds.
After pitching my single wall tent on a raised Knoll, I tied
my bear bag cord and heaved 5 days of food into a high limb 50
feet up, maybe more, the yellow stuffed sacks swaying like a
tired Lantern. I tapped an all clear ping on my
satellite messenger, one of those comfort texts that vanish
into orbit and settled in to boil water.
Twilight here is abrupt. The forest goes from jade to
Obsidian in a single exhale. That was when the flare tore
open the sky. A hiss, then a blood red bloom
arched above the canopy, painting the mist Crimson.
My first thought was search and rescue someone down with a
broken leg, Maybe hypothermia? I did not hesitate.
I grabbed A headlamp, a spare battery, my small first aid kit,
and sprinted up slope. Wet Fern slapped my ankles,
which hair lichen snagged my pack straps.
The flare guttered out behind a Ridge, leaving me with the vague
memory of its origin. I kept moving, breath steaming.
I smelled the camp before I saw it, the copper Tang of torn
nylon and something like wet dog left too long in a truck bed.
A2 person backpacking tent lay in ribbons, poles snapped clean
as broomsticks. One sleeping bag was split from
foot box to hood down, feathers clinging to the wet ground like
snow. An ultralight stove still
clicked, trying to ignite against the drizzle.
The warmth meant whoever slept here had been driven off
minutes, maybe seconds ago. I knelt beside a muddy
impression the size of a skillet. 5 thick toes fanned
wider than my hand. No sign of tread or heel wedge,
just raw padded flesh pressed 3 inches deep.
A second print overlapped the first, canted outward as if the
owner pivoted mid step 8 feet up the nearest spruce trunk.
Fist sized clumps of coarse black hair dangled in SAP lines.
Parallel gouges scored the bark so fresh the wood gleamed pale
beneath the rain. My headlamp flicked to low
power, 30%. I thumbed the spare battery from
my hip pocket, but my hands were shaking.
The satellite communicator lay in the trampled vestibule,
screen cracked and unsent, SOS blinking amber.
I pictured the owner pounding the message, fingers slippery
with rain. Then something tearing through
the fabric, something big enough to shred aluminum poles like wet
spaghetti. The forest shuddered.
A single hollow knock echoed through the timber.
Wood on wood, deeper than any axe blow.
Another answered, farther off, then a third closer, the rhythm
unnervingly deliberate. My rational mind whispered.
Cougar windfall, distant hunters practicing calls.
Yet none of those required a three-point cadence.
I forced myself to breathe evenly and scan the ground.
No blood, no obvious trail of supplies.
Whoever had camped here was simply gone.
Darkness thickened. The trail back to my Meadow
seemed twice as long, every switch back unfamiliar by
lamplight. Branches flexed beyond the beam
like slow arms. Midway down the slope, something
paced me just inside the tree line.
I could not see it. I felt it.
Heavy footsteps that sunk the earth, then stopped when I
stopped, resumed when I moved. Once I swung the light wide and
caught twin discs of green reflection 10 feet off the
ground. Too high for deer, too low for
an owl. The eyes vanished without a
sound. When I reached my camp, the
spruce trunk that held my food bag was scarred by fresh claw
marks. 4 deep furrows ran parallel, stopping directly
beneath the pulley branch. The yellow stuff sacks still
swung, but the rope creaked as if it had been tugged hard.
Maybe testing. Wait.
The rain had paused. The silence was near perfect,
broken only by my pulse in my ears.
Inside the tent, I zipped into my bag fully clothed, bear spray
clutched like a Talisman. The night stretched elastic,
each minute a separate terror. Windless branches click together
overhead, 3 taps, pause, 3 taps again.
Once, a low moaning whistle drifted through the valley,
starting high like an elk bugle, then dipping into something too
guttural, ending in a wet cough. I tried to picture elk, tried to
catalog known calls, but every rationalization slipped like wet
bark. close to midnight, the Silnilon wall bowed inward, as
though a giant palm pressed against it.
The fabric dimmed beneath a broad shadow, and a smell
flooded the vestibule. Sour berries, damp fur, and a
sulfur note that burned the throat.
I froze, breathing through parted lips, barely daring to
fog the air. The pressure lingered, then
migrated, smearing a greasy film across the yellow fabric before
the shape lifted away. Footfalls receded 123 then the
forest swallowed the sound. I lay awake until a weak pewter
dawn seeped through the tent. The smear on the fly sheet
glistened black, green beads of rain strung across it like
mercury. My hands trembled so badly I
could not work the stove for coffee.
Somewhere up slope, a Raven croaked once.
Then silence reclaimed the trail.
Vast rain washed and waiting, and in that hush I understood I
was being asked a question by something older than words.
I had no answer, only a single thought.
Get out before nightfall returned.
Morning crept in on a bruised Gray sky, the kind that never
truly brightens but limps along in perpetual twilight.
I crawled from the tent, expecting ordinary damp chaos,
Muddy boots, drizzle, maybe a snail on the fly.
Instead, I stepped into a tableau that felt staged for my
arrival. A ring of stones, each the size
of a clenched fist, encircled last night's dead fire pit.
They were evenly spaced, 12 of them, the gaps measured as if by
ruler. 1 stone had been dragged from the riverbed 1/4 mile away.
Algae still glistened on its flanks.
On the tent fly, a greasy handprint, massive, smudged.
The fingers splain wider than my spread palm, glimmered black
beneath the overcast. I swallowed hard.
Whoever or whatever had paced outside my shelter had not left
in haste. It had paused to leave a
signature. Tracks paralleled mine beyond
camp, veering off only when I had stopped to catch breath.
The night before. Every depression still held
rainwater proof they were fresh. I no longer wondered where the
missing backpackers had gone. I only wondered why I was being
shepherded instead of snatched. I packed in grim silence.
Each nylon crinkle sounded like a flare shot.
When I hoisted my pack. My phone finally blinked alive,
the satellite link flickering. 1 bar just enough to send a curt
message. Bailing early.
Bad weather heading South. Spur.
The wheel spun, then froze. Message unsent.
Of course. The shortcut beneath Divide Peak
was nothing more than a slash of washed out tread where ancient
CCC blazes hid under Moss. Still, it shaved half a day off
the exit and kept me below the ridgeline out of sight.
In theory, I forced a rhythm crunch, hiss of breath crunch,
but 40 minutes in, the forest lit blood red again.
A second flare bloomed farther up slope, lingering longer,
brighter, as if whoever launched it wanted to make sure I saw.
I planted my poles and refused the bait.
The moment the flare died, the knocks began. 1 to my left, two
ahead, then three behind, the cadence corralling me like
cattle dogs on a single U. Each strike echoed off basalt
walls, tightening a noose of sound until I reached a narrow
draw choked with salal. Halfway down, a newly fallen
cedar blocked the switch back. The trunk hadn't been sawn or
split by wind. It had been twisted.
Fibers spiraled like taffy around a stress point thicker
than my torso. Embedded in the fresh splinters
was a Shard of Obsidian crudely napped to a cutting edge.
I yanked it free on instinct, light, glassy, wickedly sharp,
and tucked it into my belt loop like a Talisman against
folklore. That was when the forest began
to speak in mimicry. A stone clattered across the
Creek behind me, exactly replicating the one I'd kicked
loose minutes earlier upstream. Another splash, same timing,
same weight. It was as though my passage were
being rehearsed by something unseen, each sound thrown back
at me with perfect mocking precision.
The stink hit next. Fermented berries, wet hide, and
something coppery like blood left to sour in a steel bucket.
My stomach flipped. Birds had long since gone
silent. Even the rain seemed subdued,
absorbed by miles of Moss before it could patter.
By dusk, the storm arrived in earnest.
Wind whipped through snags, turning dead limbs into giant
wind chimes. Wet shale sent me skidding.
Pain knifed up my ankle. I cursed.
Tested weight. Sprained, maybe worse, but
walkable. Limping now, I haunted for
shelter and found a nurse log the size of a subway car, it's
hollow, belly dry enough to Crouch under.
The space smelled of rot and crushed fur needles, but it was
cover. I wedged myself against the back
wall, forced down to energy chews, and listened.
Footfalls, slow, deliberate, circled the hollow.
I killed my headlamp. But moonless darkness is not
true dark in the ho. Every Moss strand glows faintly,
a bioluminescent ghost green veil.
Through that shimmer I glimpsed bulk beyond the log, a
silhouette brought as a refrigerator, shoulders hunched,
head nearly brushing the underside of a leaning hemlock.
Breath rasped. A deep nasal draw followed by a
rumbling exhale. Not quite human, not quite
beast, but unmistakably sentient.
Hours bled together. Rain hammered the log roof,
drips charting constellations on my sleeves.
Sometimes the presents retreated.
Sometimes it returned closer, testing.
Once a hand or paw slid across the opening, fingers probing the
air. I held my own breath until my
vision pinwheeled. Near midnight Thunder boomed so
close it rattled the earth, but the roar that followed came from
ground level. Something hoisted a bowling ball
sized rock and slammed it against the nurse logs mouth.
The impact Jarred my teeth, drove a shockwave through my
spine and sealed the entrance with splintered bark.
Total dark rain outside, my heartbeat inside, and a guttural
whistle bleeding through the seams.
High at first, almost avian, then descending to a register.
Felt more than heard, a sub base moan that made the log vibrate
like a tuning fork. It held the note for an
eternity, then snapped it off with a pop of lips P as if
satisfied with the resonance. Silence again, save for the soft
rasp of something massive. Dragging fingertips across the
wood, tracing the prison it had made for me, I clutched the
Obsidian Chard, useless as a child's toy, and waited for
claws or teeth or worse. Instead, the footsteps receded
into the storm. Slow, unhurried, confident, I
had nowhere to go. Only when the first smear of
dawn crept through gaps in the debris did I start prying loose
the rock, inch by agonizing inch, ankle throbbing like a
second heart. The rain had stopped.
The forest lay blanketed in mist, every Fern frond weighed
down by silver beads. My hands were coated in SAP and
splinters. Outside, the trail showed no
prints, but a line of broken cedar fronds pointed downhill
like arrows. I understood the message
perfectly this way. Little tourist run for home, and
with a limp that jolted pain up to my jaw, I obeyed, because
night would come again, and next time the cage might not have an
exit. Light seeped through the cedar
fronds like smoke. Thin, uncertain, but it was
enough. I shoved the splintered rock
aside, clawed free of the nurse log, and limped down slope.
Every step stabbed my ankle, yet the drive to put distance
between me and last night's jailer trumped pain.
The air hung thick with mist, muffling sound.
Turning fallen limbs into crouched figures, I choked down
the urge to run. Running invited noise, and noise
brought attention. For six hours I followed the
crude arrows of broken foliage. They marked the easiest grade,
ironically the same line I'd hoped to find, and they never
doubled back. It felt intentional, like being
ushered out of an exclusive club whose bouncers had finally grown
bored. Around noon, the trees thinned
into old burn scar, their charcoal skeletons stark against
pewter sky. Through a gap I glimpsed the
Moss eaten roof of an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps
shelter 1/4 mile ahead. I nearly cried.
The shelter listed at a drunken angle but still offered three
walls and a dry hearth. Inside.
Needles crusted the floor, thick as a mattress, and rodents had
nested in the rafters, but I collapsed against a log bunk,
safe enough. Only when the spin behind my
eyes steadied did I notice the footprint at the doorway. 20
inches heel to toe, 5 deep gouges for toes, edges crisp.
Beside it lay a strip of black hair, courses, baling twine
caught on a nail head. I slid the hair into an empty
film canister and shot shaky video of the print, my boot for
scale evidence or tombstone. Time would decide.
I forced down a protein bar that tasted of iron, then rewrapped
my ankle. 12 miles remained to the Ranger station, maybe 10 as
the crow flies. If I left now and kept moving, I
could reach the service Rd. before dusk.
The thought of another night inside this empire of shadows
curdled my stomach. I shouldered my pack.
That was when the third flare screamed skyward.
It detonated above the Ridge in a burst of white hot magnesium,
bathing the forest in strobing daylight.
In that frozen slice of time I saw them.
Two colossal shapes on opposite slopes, like Sentinels cast from
midnight iron. They stood upright, shoulders
rounded with muscle and weather matted fur that gleamed wet
silver in the flare light. Arms long enough to brush.
Knees rose in tandem, each gripping a trunk thicker than my
thigh. The flare guttered crack.
The double blow rolled through the valley, splinter sharp and
bone deep, vibrating inside my ribs.
Another flare. No tree knocks delivered
simultaneously, synchronized like a priest's benediction and
a judge's gavel. When the after echo faded, the
forest held its breath. I did not fight, or flight
became pure flight. I lurched downhill, poles
clacking, ankle howling. Behind me, branches exploded.
Not random dead falls, but deliberate missiles hurled
through the canopy. 1 trunk thick limb speared the trail a
heartbeat after I passed, its shattered end reeking of fresh
SAP. Stones followed, thudding into
ferns, rolling across shale. None struck me.
Every projectile landed just behind, just beside, steering,
not smashing. They wanted me moving, and I
obliged. Rain returned in needles,
turning the path to grease. Twice I slipped and nearly
pitched off switchbacks saved only by scrub hemlock handholds.
Somewhere above, something paced the slope, keeping parallel
despite my desperate scramble. Each time my pace faltered, a
single tree knock sounded. Command, metronome, threat.
Hours vanished. Then, on a final bentonite rise,
the forest noise died so abruptly I stumbled.
No footfalls, no knocks, not even wind.
Only my ragged breath. I pushed through Salal onto a
gravel maintenance Rd. slick with puddles. 50 yards ahead.
The access gate waited, battered, painted Forest Service
green. Beyond its cell, bars flickered
on my phone. I limped the final stretch,
praying no engine noise would draw me back.
None did. The Ranger station squatted
beneath sodium floods, windows yellow with evening.
I dragged myself inside, mud spattered and wild eyed, and
tried to explain the duty Ranger name tag.
Kessler listened without interruption, face carved from
granite. When I set the hair sample and
the Obsidian Shard on the counter, his brow twitched,
tiny, involuntary. They photographed the print
impressions caked on my boots, logged my video, sealed the hair
canister, the official report read.
Unverified wildlife encounter, subject unharmed.
Off the record. Kessler handed me coffee and
leaned close. Three other solos bailed this
month after red flare sightings, he murmured.
Whatever's out there, it's drawing people in, not driving
them off. You got the hint, Be grateful I
left before dawn. Ankle bound, nerves jangling
like unsecured gear. A week later an e-mail arrived
from a university genetics lab. The Park Service contracts
sample inconclusive. Partial mitochondrial match to
Ponjani family remainder unknown.
Please advise if additional tissue available.
Current specimen degrading at accelerated rate.
I read it twice, then closed the lid on my laptop and went to the
closet. My pack still reeked of Berry
rot and cedar. I shoved it deep behind winter
coats. Occasionally, on sleepless
nights, I open the window and listen.
When the wind is right, I fancy I hear it.
A distant, deliberate knock, answered by another, farther W,
an invitation I'll never accept, echoing across the dark
cathedral of the woods. The road that claws its way up
Panther Creek isn't really a road, more a bruised ribbon of
ruts and broken shale that punishes every shock in an old
truck. By the time we jolted past the
abandoned Lucky Strike stamp mill, the sky had shrugged on a
thin overcast, and the aspens on the slopes above us glowed like
backlit coins. Luke rode shotgun, rolling a
loose latex glove between his fingers the way some folks worry
a rosary. Mason, wedged between rifles and
the propane tank, said nothing but kept tapping his boot heel
in a nervous three beat I'd never noticed on other hunts.
The higher we climbed, the quieter the world became.
No Ravens tail riding thermals, no distant chainsaw from other
camps. Only the engine, the cough of
gravel and a far off mudder that might have been Thunder.
At 7500 feet, the spur petered out in a clearing scarred by
decades dead mining tracks. That's where we stopped.
I killed the ignition and felt silence surge in like cold
water. What bothered me first was the
game pole someone had lashed between 2 lodge poles beside the
clearing. Strips of alki dangled from it
in perfect bow knots, fluttering just enough to click together
like soft wind chimes. Hunters don't waste hide, and
nobody I know ties bow knots in raw flesh.
Luke peered up at them, lips parted, then shrugged as if
cataloguing oddities for later dissection.
We set camp fast. Muscle memory from seasons past.
Two canvas wall tents facing each other across a fire pit,
collapsible wood stove screwed together, meat pole in the
shade, and four trail cams arranged like the points of a
compass. Snow still hidden N facing
recesses, but the air smelled weeks away from a real storm.
I told myself. The forecast looked clean, even
though the shape of the clouds didn't feel friendly.
By dusk we had water boiling and the fire snapping.
Mason finally relaxed enough to joke about first steak off the
grill tomorrow, though none of us had seen so much as a fresh
track on the drive in. When we turned in, the sky had
gone moonless black and the temperature slid just below
freezing, The kind of cold that makes a sleeping bag crinkle
when you shift. Something woke me before dawn.
It wasn't sound. It was the absence of it.
Camps usually breathe, canvas popping, stove ticking, the
occasional camp robber scolding the dark.
But this silence pressed hard, like a hand over my ears.
Beneath it, a faint sweetness I couldn't place drifted through
the tent. Canvas part ozone, part rot.
I unzipped the flap and stepped into a world washed silver by
frost. Breath feathered out and
vanished. At my feet sat a pyramid of
bones, Bleached jaw bones, seven of them stacked with impossible
precision. Each hinge faced outward as if
smiling up at me. Guys.
I called, voice too loud in the still air.
Luke answered first, half dressed, pistol in one hand.
Mason followed, shotgun uncased. Both froze when they saw the
little monument outside their own doors.
Identical piles, same count, same awful neatness.
Luke crouched, pulled on his glove, and lifted the topmost
jaw. Elk calf, he murmured.
He ran a finger along the cut edge, where flesh should have
clung. This isn't natural.
Tendon sliced clean, no serrations, cartilage polished.
You'd need a scalpel or hell, a laser.
His breath puffed white over the bone like incense.
Nobody laughed at the laser joke.
We kicked the jawbones into the dead fire pit, doused them with
what little coffee remained in the pot, and agreed, without
saying it out loud, to pretend we believed poachers were
messing with us. Hunters do all kinds of stupid
pranks. The explanation tasted thin, but
it was something to hang on to while we boiled new coffee.
The first flakes drifted down fine and dry, catching on
eyebrows. 30 miles South, the forecast had promised Bluebird
skies, yet a Gray shelf now sagged over the Lost River,
peaks bruising darker by the minute.
Storms early, Mason muttered. Fronts not due till Wednesday, I
said, aiming confidence at both of them.
The words fell flat. We hiked after breakfast, rifles
over shoulders, packs. Light.
Tracks were everywhere, scuffed trails where elk had moved
overnight. But every pile of droppings felt
days old, every print a shade too soft around the edges.
Up the Ridge we found Aspen trunks peeled 9 feet high,
ribbons of fresh bark curling like wet bandages.
Luke poked the exposed wood. Saps still wept.
Yet something had bored narrow cavities straight into the
cambium and sucked it hollow. No claw marks, no tooth chisel.
It looked vacuumed. My GPS glitched, flickering
between coordinates as though we were drifting.
Mason's compass refused to settle, needle wobbling 6°
either side of north. Snow began to sift down harder,
the dry kind that whispers against nylon.
When a distant elk bugle finally cut.
The hush relief washed over me until the note kept sliding
lower, bending beyond any throats range and ended in a
long whistle so deep my ribs tingled.
The forest swallowed the echo like it feared to carry it.
We glass the basin until twilight bruised the sky in
layers of purple and smoke. Not a single elk answered.
We returned to camp empty handed, lungs aching from cold
and a nameless pressure that made conversation brittle.
The sun dropped, and with it the temperature.
We stoked the stove until it roared hot enough to rattle the
pipe. Yet as we settled in, a gustless
calm settled outside, and the pipe kept rattling.
A metallic clank echoed down it, polite, as if something tapped
from above. Then that sweet rot scent rolled
in. Ozone laced with carrion are 4
trail camps fired in rapid fire bursts, strobes of white
punching through the tent walls, followed by silence.
No rustle, no crunch of snow, only the slow clicks of cameras
stopping and the soft spin of developing darkness.
I unzipped the flap and swept my headlamp across camp.
Frost crystals flashed back, dazzling between the two tents.
A shape lingered, tall as a moose on hind legs, limbs thin
as spruce poles, joints wrong. The light hit its square.
It didn't flinch. It absorbed the beam.
Skin or hide or something, dulling it to pewter.
Antler tines branched from its skull like withered roots,
trying to climb out of its head. Reflex overrode shock.
I shouldered my rifle, thumbed the safety The thing folded,
bone joints bending the opposite of how knees should, and slipped
backward into shadow faster than eyesight could track.
No crunch of snow, no snapping branch, just absence.
My headlamp beam painted frost white emptiness where it had
stood. We converged at the spot, Luke
Mason me lamplight crossing like swords.
The snow beneath us was unbroken except for one deep set of
prints, 4 elongated toes ending in teardrop indents, no heel
pad, each depression a foot deep, as if something far
heavier than any elk had stood there and then lifted straight
into the air. Mason whispered a prayer he
learned from his grandmother, Spanish words fragile enough to
shatter if spoken louder. Luke just stared at the tracks,
glove fingertips touching the edge of one as if afraid to
complete the contact. The stove pipe stopped rattling.
The smell faded, night resumed its ordinary stillness, the
modest familiar fear of wilderness we could understand.
But something remained, lodged behind my breastbone, a cold
Shard of knowing I couldn't swallow.
Whatever left those gifts, whatever wore the antlers like a
crown, it had measured us tonight and decided we were
worth returning for. I lay awake until the 1st hint
of grey peeled back the stars, listening for a whistle that
never came, telling myself dawn would bring wind or birds or any
sign that the valley still belonged to living things.
Dawn came silent. Snow cupped the froze canvas,
and outside, the jawbones we burned were back, stacked
higher, cleaner, grinning wider. The fire pit was empty except
for ash arranged into 3 perfect circles, and above us a storm
we've been promised days away began to drop its payload in
earnest, erasing the road, the tracks, and any easy way out.
The wind sharpened its teeth on our tents all night, but when I
unzipped the flap the next morning, the air had fallen
perfectly still. The snow had deepened to mid
calf, erasing the road and most of yesterday's tracks.
What it had not erased were the gifts.
Three towers of jaw bones, mine a little taller than the others,
now waited precisely where we had stepped on them the night
before. Each mandible buffed, bone white
laid hinge out like open smiles. In the silence they seemed to
hum. Luke broke it first, crouching
beside the piles with the same grave focus he used when
removing birdshot from a mules leg.
He lifted the top jaw, sniffed and scraped A thumbnail along
the cut edge. Still bleeding, he said, and
showed me the faint rim of pink thawing out of the frost crusted
socket. They were set here less than an
hour ago. No tracks let in or out.
Mason and I dragged the coolers into the open to inventory our
food. The metal latches gaped like
broken knuckles inside. Every steak, every sleeve of
venison jerky, every stick of butter we had hauled up the
mountain still sat in neat stacks, but they were slick with
a film of ice. Loops and spirals laced the
frost, the markings of a broad, deliberate tongue.
I wiped a finger through 1 arc. It left a shallow groove, almost
decorative. Coyotes don't lick patterns,
Mason muttered. Luke snapped fresh batteries
into his trail Cam and cycled through last night's captures.
Static covered nearly every frame.
Only one image rendered clearly, a figure half turned away from
the lens, thin as a fence post. Skin stretched tight over bone
or bark. Antlers inverted like roots
sprouting down from its skull. Though the flash had fired, the
shadows around its head were deeper than the timber behind
it, as if the night clung tighter to that spot.
He tried to zoom. The screen crackled, then went
black. We decided if the thing wanted
to play guide, we'd follow. Rifles chambered, we marched
upslope in single file. The fresh snow should have been
blinding, yet the sky had taken on a pewter complexion that bled
glare from the world, leaving only dull white and darker
white. Mason, out front, found the
first marker, a jawbone stuck upright in the snow, teeth
pointed at camp like an arrow 20 paces ahead, another.
Each jaw was warmer than its surroundings, A faint steam
Slytherin from the hollow where a tongue had once rooted.
About 1/4 mile in the elk sign, shifted from occasional prints
to a corridor of destruction. Young Aspen stood peeled 9 feet
high, the ribbons of bark fluttering in a breeze.
I couldn't feel where SAP should have pooled.
The wood was sucked dry, leaving concave pits.
Luke leaned into one and breathed.
Smells like a freezer burn. 100 yards farther, Mason cursed
softly and picked something from the bark, a human molar Pearl
white wedge, tip first into the fresh wound and sealed by a Halo
of crusting SAP. I tasted acid, climbed my
throat. Drop it, I said.
Mason pocketed it instead. The jawbones LED us to the base
of a limestone bluff where a grotto opened like a cracked
lip. Antlers, hundreds of them, fused
together into a lattice arched over the entrance.
Some were bleached, some still wearing shreds of hide.
A few drip, glazed with fresh blood that pattered onto the
snow and slow intervals. Not going in, Mason said.
Luke disagreed. If this thing nests here, we
need to know. He knelt, braced his phone
against the rifle stock, and switched to video.
I offered to hold his belt while he leaned into the dark.
The flashlight beam cut a cone through suspended moats of dust.
No, not dust. Tiny spirals of scraped marrow
floated, glittering like fine sawdust.
The Cave dropped steeply after 10 feet, into a shaft lined with
more antlers. At the bottom, maybe 30 feet
down, lay a slurry of bones. Elk, femurs, wolf skulls,
something too smooth and rounded to be animal.
Luke steadied the light on the pit.
A sound trickled up, a slow, rhythmic click, like fingernails
on glass. Bone knocking bone.
The phone's microphone peaked and whined.
Luke jerked back. In that instant his flashlight
washed across the far wall, revealing a series of
pictographs etched in browned fat 3 human figures.
Their heads burst into branching lines that might have been
antlers or flame. My skin went tight as drumhead
leather. Enough, Mason said, and none of
us argued. Snow thickened into a wall as we
retreated. It was silent snow, the kind
that eats footfalls and flattens every distant sound.
Luke's GPS died all together, the screen cycling rainbow
static. My compass needle spun slowly,
never committing. We navigated by memory, half
stumbling through knee high drifts until camp appeared as a
dark smudge in the swirling Gray.
Something was wrong with the geometry.
Both tents listed inward, their Ridge lines curved like sagging
spines. As we closed the last yards, the
damage resolved. The stovepipe was packed with
snow from the top down, plugged like a cork, the tents hung
shredded, every slice a ruler straight incision that spared.
Seems as though a surgeon had planned the ventilation.
Inside, our sleeping bags lay unzipped open, flat on the cot
frames. Someone or something had combed
the synthetic insulation into neat rows, each strand laid
parallel. The same sweet rot scent from
dawn gathered thick enough to taste ozone.
Awful. We had one place left to
barricade the Power Wagon. Snow banked up the doors, but
the tires sat clear, as if invisible hands had swept them
clean. Teeth bared against the cold.
We crawled into the cab, slamming doors, locking them,
starting the engine. Warm air blasted, bringing a
moment's illusion of safety outside.
Nothing moved. Then the whistle began, softer
than before, yet close enough to vibrate the side mirrors.
It rose from one side of the clearing, paused, answered
itself from the other side in a slightly lower key, then a third
time behind us, completing the triangle.
With each cycle it aligned more perfectly with the chug of the
idling engine until the two rhythms blended, indistinct.
The steering wheel quivered under my hands.
For several heartbeats I could not tell whether the truck or
the throat of that thing fueled the sound.
Headlights off, we could see only the soft glow of the dash.
Mason switched them on. The beams met a curtain of
falling snow, no deeper than arm's length, as though the
world ended there. Shapes hovered just beyond
something tall, something jagged, all dissolving if we
stared straight at them. A tap, gentle as a finger on a
door frame, ticked against the windshield.
Then another. Snowflakes.
No, another tap. Deliberate, I flicked on the
high beams. The glass illuminated, a single
tooth stuck between the wipers. A molar.
Mason's molar scrubbed clean, bloodless, aligned perfectly
with the growing crack at the corner of the glass.
My lungs bottomed out. Mason gagged.
Luke reached for the shifter. Dr. he said, voice raw as
gravel. I punched the throttle.
The whistle cut off like a wire snipped.
Snow exploded from the tires. The truck lurched forward onto
the buried Spur Rd. engine, howling our exit, guided only by
the faint memory of trees that no longer look the same.
Behind us, the darkness swallowed the circle of ruined
tents. Something tall stood at the edge
of the fading headlights, antlers banking outward like
shattered roots. It watched until the snow
curtain claimed it, leaving just the whistle once more, threading
through the storm, growing fainter, yet somehow following,
always following, matching the rise and fall of our revving
hearts as we fled downhill into a night suddenly too long for
any map to measure. The spur felt twice as long on
the way out as it had the day we rumbled in.
Snow hammered the windshield so hard the wipers skittered like
frightened animals, and every 100 yards the rear axle
fishtailed toward the drop off that vanished beyond the
headlights. The whistle followed us, not
steady now, but snatching at the truck in ragged bursts that rose
above the engine roar, then fell away, then surged closer again,
as if something enormous was pacing us just inside the tree
line. Luke leaned forward in the
passenger seat, fists white on the grab handle.
Keep it at 20, he kept saying. Don't outrun the lights.
Mason hunched in the back, shotgun across his knees, eyes
locked on the rear glass that had spider webbed from the
molars impact. We'd stuffed a sleeping pad
against the hole. The pad pulsed with every gust,
breathing frigid air into the cab that smelled of penny metal
and wet fur. I rounded the last sharp bend
before Panther Creek Rd. and almost drove straight into a
barricade of orange triangles. A Forest Service pickup idled
sideways across the track, bed brimming with chainsaws and Rd.
flare canisters. 2 more trucks flanked it, their roof mounted
floodlights boiling the snow into swirling Halos.
I stomped the brakes. The Power Wagon slewed until the
bumper kissed adrift. A man in the green and khaki of
wildland fire crews stepped into the beams.
His parka hood was down despite the cold.
Silver mustache rhymed with ice. He raised a gloved hand, palm
calm and unhurried, and I realized he wore no ear
protection against the whistle that still needled around us.
He didn't seem to hear it, or he'd heard it before and learned
not to flinch. I cracked the window.
Roads blocked, I yelled. Something's Corbett, he said,
tapping his chest badge. Pull forward.
Leave the engine running. The voice carried A rockslide
authority that made obedience feel like reflex.
Bring what followed you. The phrase jolted me.
Luke shot me a look that asked whether we'd slipped into
someone else's nightmare, but we rolled ahead until we sat boxed
between the trucks. Two younger Rangers waded
through the knee deep powder and began unloading our bed without
asking permission. Coolers, tarps, the jaw bones we
hadn't realized stuck to our tailgate like barnacles.
Everything went into a shallow pit.
Someone had scraped down to the frozen soil. 1 Ranger splashed
diesel over the pile. The other struck A flare.
Flames left blue-green where the diesel met the bones.
Corbett opened my door. Out, he said.
Snow hissed on the headers. The whistle throbbed once,
closer than ever, then cut off as if a switch had flipped.
Luke held up his ruined trail Cam.
You know what this is? Evidence, Corbett answered.
He took the camera, snapped the card out and pitched it into the
fire. Plastic popped, releasing an
acrid stench. The fewer eyes that thing owns,
the better. Mason finally found his voice.
What thing we saw, he trailed off, unable to name it.
Corbett knelt, scooped a fistful of snow and mixed it with red
powder from a pouch. He smeared the paste on the
tailgate in a crude circle, then repeated the mark on each of our
foreheads. Watico, he said, though old
timers up here called it the cold.
Hunger rides the first killing frost, looking for the warmest
fires, the fullest bellies, marks camps with bones so it can
return. When men grow thin, what does
that make us? I asked.
Not thin enough, he said. Yet the woods behind the trucks
exhaled, a sound halfway between an elk bugle and a human scream,
muted by distance. Floodlights flickered.
Snow at the tree line erupted, not downward but up, as though
something massive had ripped free of the ground.
Antlers emerged first, raking the air, followed by a head too
tall for any elk socket. Voids drinking the light without
reflection, skin or hide or expose tendon quivered over a
rib cage so narrow it seemed impossible the creature could
stand. It took one step and the snow
under it sank a foot, as if its weight multiplied the longer it
walked. Corbett's crew yanked flare guns
from holsters and fired. Burning magnesium arced across
the dark, splattering the watika with sizzling globes that stuck
and flared hotter. The thing recoiled, steam
peeling off its shoulders, an inhuman howl rolling through the
valley like Thunder caught in a culvert where the burning bits
touched it. Flesh blistered, then sloughed
away in ribbons that hit the snow and hissed to vapor.
For one stunned heartbeat it seemed to shrink, antlers
wilting, limbs folding inward as if stripped of SAP.
Luke grabbed a Rd. flare, popped the cap, and hurled it
underhand. The flare bounced once, rolled
beneath the creature, and burst into a column of white flame
that backlit the way Tico and terrible silhouette.
It reared, struck the air with clawed fingers longer than
butcher knives, then whirled and plowed into the timber, smashing
saplings like brittle reeds. Corbett didn't cheer.
He turned to his crew. Now he barked.
They heaved the last of our gear, sleeping bags, tents, even
Mason's rifle onto the blaze. Synthetic fibers wailed, Metal
pinged, but the fire climbed higher, a beacon punching
through the storm. Corbett fished a small cedar
branch from his vest, dipped it in a tin of oil, and trace
sigils and smoke around the truck, chanting words that
tasted older than English. Luke stared at the inferno,
swallowing his kit. Insurance going to cover that.
Corbett's ice blue eyes met his. Insurance won't matter if it
follows you. Clean burn, clean break.
He tapped the hood. When we wave you through, stay
on the throttle till pavement. Don't stop for anything that
whistles. The whistle returned, distant
but rising, weaving through the trees like a searching hound.
One of the younger Rangers spun A flare toward the sound.
It exploded in emerald sparks, lighting a brief glimpse of
shadows bulging between trunks. Too many joints, too many limbs.
Go. Corbett shouted.
I dropped the truck into gear. Snow rooster tailed behind us as
we shot past the blockade. In the side mirror, I saw the
Rangers forming a Crescent of flames, flares Spearing outward
like a fiery fence. Then the road curved, white
walls closing out everything but the dwindling glow.
For miles the whistle paralleled us, sometimes ahead, sometimes
behind, never letting the engine note dominate.
Every time, I feared the road would vanish under a drift, the
snow fin just enough to show gravel, as if some unseen hand
cleared a lane at the last second.
At mile marker 18, the whistle faded, replaced by the ordinary
whoop of the wipers and the rattle of rifles clinking in
their mouths. Asphalt appeared, a ribbon of
plowed black leading toward the glow of Salmon's valley lights.
Only then did Mason start to sob, low and private shoulders
trembling while he tried to hide it beneath his parka hood.
They kept us at the hospital until sunrise, checking for
hypothermia and, bizarrely, malnutrition.
Luke surrendered a scrap of scorched tissue he'd peeled from
his glove before the drive. The lab techs filed it under
unknown mammal, and the sample vanished from the freezer
overnight. Mason sold his long guns to a
pawn shop the next afternoon and booked a one way to Yuma,
swearing desert heat felt safer than snow ever would again.
I stayed behind long enough to file a wildlife incident report.
The district office stamped it, filed it, and locked it in a
cabinet so deep even the clerks couldn't find it.
Two weeks later, Corbett's name never appeared on the witness
line. The Power Wagon survived except
for one thing. The cracked windshield kept
leaking antifreeze, smelling air even after I replaced the glass.
On cold mornings, the vent whistles.
Not every day, but often enough that I check the mirror, half
expecting to see antlers ghosting the fog.
Winter will come early again soon, I know.
The road back to Panther Creek is already drifted shut.
Yet sometimes, just before sleep claims me, I picture a tall
figure prowling the ridges, sniffing the star cold wind for
the scent of those who escaped. And though I'm safe for now, the
memory stands watch at the door of my mind like a tower of
grinning jaw bones, silently promising that hunger is patient
and snow always returns.