2 Terrifying Skinwalker Encounters Deep in the Woods

Hi, I'm Karen Slaughter. If you love untangling mysteries and uncovering the truth behind what really happened, I think you'll love The Good Daughter. Charlie, go! Sam! Now my best-selling novel is finally coming to life, and I got to write every episode. You should have died in them woods. Your father should have been a better shot. Starring Rose Byrne, Megan Fahey, and Brendan Gleeson. From page to screen, don't miss The Good Daughter, now streaming only on Peacock. I'm here, Charlie, and I'm not going away. Have you ever wondered how movements start? I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. This season, we're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. People like Marley Diaz, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. Kyle Mesteth, a native skateboarder building a movement for kids nationwide. Joy Aladakun, whose music moves from protests to daily commute. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves. And listen wherever you get your podcasts. I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels gets you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, a squad, or even. Bring your mom. Book direct at choicehotels.com. For most of my life, my uncle could let himself into our house without knocking. He had a key, and he usually brought something that needed to go in the freezer. My wife would hear his truck, put another mug beside the coffee pot, and tell him to wipe his boots. Now we meet him on the porch. He understands. He's the one who asked us to start doing it. I'm going to call him "Dean". My brother will be "Nick". Everything else happened the way I'm writing it, including the parts that sound like we should have known better. The first thing that bothered me was a padlock. Later that afternoon, I was trying to decide whether the thing wearing Dean's coat could see me through a knot in the floorboards. I've been calling it a skinwalker. I don't have a better word for something that could climb out of an animal's shape and speak in my brother's voice. Before that weekend, I would have thought somebody was trying to scare me with a story they found online. This was in late October, in the high country of Northern Arizona. People hear "Arizona" and picture "open desert", but our uncle's place sat in thick pine forest, with firs in the colder hollows, and stands of aspen along a creek. You could walk a hundred yards behind his cabin and lose sight of the roof. After dark, you could lose sight of another person, while standing close enough to hear them breathe. Dean had bought a small piece of private land back there in the 90s. He'd worked excavation jobs his whole life, and acquired the kind of equipment most people would never have a use for. There was a cabin, a shed down in a second clearing, a compact track loader, and several attachments he insisted he was going to sell. He'd finally agreed to get rid of the property. His knees were going, the road needed work every spring, and his wife, was tired of him going out there alone. Nick and I had volunteered to help bring home the smaller equipment before the weather closed in. Nick managed a warehouse. I maintained trucks and equipment for a utility contractor. Neither of us was some wilderness expert, but we'd been going to that cabin for nearly twenty years. We knew the road. We knew which windows stuck, where Dean hid the equipment keys, and how much water to bring because the old hand pump tasted like pennies. He drove up on Thursday to get things organized. We followed Friday afternoon in Nick's pickup. Before we lost service, our aunt called. Dean hadn't sent his morning message from the satellite device he kept at the cabin. She wasn't panicking. Sometimes he forgot to charge it, or left it inside where it couldn't connect. She wanted us to remind him that the device didn't work by sitting in a drawer. Nick told her we'd be there in about forty minutes. The first strange thing was the gate. It was a galvanized ranch gate at the start of Dean's access road. He kept a short chain around the post and a brass padlock through the links. When I got out to open it, the lock fell off in my hand. The shackle was open. Somebody had threaded it through the chain without snapping it shut. That bothered me because Dean would have made a whole speech if one of us had done it. He didn't care if somebody walked across his land, but he'd had people drive in and dump trash. He was particular about the gate. I carried the lock to Nick's window. Nick said Dean had probably left it open for us. I put it on the dash and got back in. The cabin was another mile and a half up the spur. We passed the lower turnoff to the equipment shed, then climbed through a narrow cut, where the trees grew right against the road. At the final bend, a mule deer stood in the timber above us. It was a doe, maybe thirty yards away. Her hindquarters were hidden by a fallen tree. Her head was turned toward the pickup. Nick slowed because he thought she might jump down into the road. She didn't move. I remember her ears lying out to the sides and something dark caught along her lower jaw. A strip of bark, I thought. Then we came around the bend and couldn't see her anymore. Dean's old truck was parked beside the cabin. His wheelbarrow stood near the porch with two coils of hose in it. A pair of work gloves rested on the railing. Palms up, as if he'd just taken them off. The front door was closed. Nick honked twice. Nothing happened. We got out and started unloading. Dean sometimes walked the upper fence, and the cabin door wasn't locked. So neither of us was particularly worried yet. I carried in a cooler. Nick brought the groceries. There was a pan on the stove with two eggs cooked hard against the bottom. The burner was off. A chair lay on its side beside the table. I stood with the cooler handles still in my hands. Dean was a cluttered person, but he didn't leave food in a pan all day. And he didn't leave furniture tipped over. Nick went through the little bedroom. The bed was made. Dean's duffel sat on it, still zipped. His phone was plugged into the wall, although the generator wasn't running and the outlet had no power. We checked the outhouse, the wood rack, and his truck. His rifle wasn't behind the seat where he usually carried it. The truck keys weren't in the ignition. All of that suggested he was out walking. The chair and the eggs suggested something else. Nick called his name from the porch. The wind had picked up enough to move the tops of the pines, but down around the cabin it was still. An answer came from the trees beyond the wood rack. Down here, it sounded exactly like Dean. Nick lifted a hand in that direction. The way you do when someone can't quite see you. I put down the cooler and went outside. A man stood just inside the timber, about seventy yards from the cabin. He had Dean's brown canvas coat on. His red cap was pulled low. The lower half of him was hidden behind young firs. At that distance, with branches across his face, I had no reason to think he was anybody else. Nick asked if he needed help. The man raised one arm. "Down here." Same tone. Same volume. A little breath before the first word. I started walking toward him. I got as far as the wood rack before I smelled something that reminded me of a wet dog shut in a hot car. It was faint, and I assumed there was a dead animal nearby. The man had lowered his hand. He was standing behind a tree now, with only his shoulder and the side of his cap showing. I asked what he was doing. Two short coughs came from behind the tree. Dean had those coughs. He'd quit smoking years before, but he still cleared his chest that way, especially in cold weather. Hearing them made me less worried. I almost laughed at myself for getting worked up over the chair. Then Nick called me back. He was kneeling beside the porch steps, holding up Dean's glasses. One arm had been folded backward. Both lenses were scratched, and a little hair was caught in the hinge. Dean wore those glasses all the time. Without them, he held his phone practically against his nose. I looked back toward the trees. The red cap was gone. I called out that we'd found his glasses. There was no answer. Nick didn't look frightened yet. He looked irritated, which was how he usually looked when he was starting to get frightened. He told me to stay by the cabin while he checked behind the wood rack. "We're checking together," I told him. We walked up through the trees to where the man had been standing. There was no trail there, just pine needles and patches of bare dirt. We could see between the trunks for maybe fifty yards. No coat, no cap, nobody walking away. At the base of the tree, something had pressed a long, wet streak against the bark. I touched it with a stick. A few coarse gray hairs came away. Nick pointed at the ground. There were deer tracks in the soft dirt. Several clear hoof prints led toward the cabin. Beside them were marks that looked like bare heels except they were too long and had no defined toes. I thought somebody might have been wearing damaged boots. Nick called Dean's name again. Somewhere downhill, a branch broke. We both turned toward it. Down here. The voice was farther away now. I told Nick to stop. There was no big revelation in that moment. I didn't suddenly think Skinwalker. I thought somebody was playing a joke, or Dean was hurt and confused, or we'd mistaken a stranger for him. None of those possibilities made me want to follow a voice away from the cabin. We backed out of the trees. Inside, Nick found the satellite messenger on a shelf. The battery was completely dead. Its charging cable was plugged into the same useless outlet as Dean's phone. We had power banks in the pickup. I took the device outside and connected one. Nick searched the cabin more carefully, including the sleeping loft above the front room. There was a gap under the eaves where Dean had removed a damaged screen. Nick climbed far enough up the ladder to shine a light across the plywood floor, then came down, saying he'd found nothing except a mouse nest and an old sleeping bag. He also found Dean's rifle standing behind the bedroom door, in its soft case. We'd seen the man in the coat without a rifle. At the time, that felt like another reason it really had been Dean. The messenger took a while to wake up. While it charged, I went around back to the generator shelter. The generator had fuel. Its switch had been turned off. There was no damage, no obvious reason it couldn't run. I pulled the starter cord and got it going on the second try. As I straightened up, something tapped the cabin wall above my head. Three light knocks. I looked up at the eaves. A scrap of old screen hung from the opening. The roof cast a dark strip across the upper wall, and I couldn't see inside. I thought Nick had gone back up to the loft. Then he came around the corner at ground level, carrying the rifle case. I asked if he'd just been knocking on something. He said no. We stood there, listening to the generator. It made too much noise to hear anything else. I shut it off. From the woods behind us, Dean coughed twice. This time, the sound was close enough that I could hear saliva moving in his throat. Nick opened the rifle case and loaded it. We didn't call out again. We went around the cabin together, collected the messenger and the power bank, and got in the pickup. Nick drove. I kept the rifle across my knees with the muzzle down, and my finger nowhere near the trigger. Neither of us had said what we thought was happening. We agreed we'd drive to the top of the public road, get a call out, and come back with help. We hadn't found Dean. Leaving felt wrong. Staying there and wandering around looking for him felt worse. We made it less than half a mile. A dead pine lay across the road, where there hadn't been one when we'd driven in. The trunk was thicker than my waist. Its top disappeared into the trees below the road, and its broken base stood on the uphill bank. Nick stopped well short of it. There'd been wind. There were dead trees all over those woods. I kept repeating those facts to myself while I looked at the thing blocking our way out. We had a chainsaw in the bed, but neither of us liked the idea of getting out. Nick tried his phone. No service. The messenger was on, but it was still searching for a connection under the trees. Then a hand appeared on top of the fallen trunk. It came from the far side, palm down. Long fingers spread over the bark. The nails were dark, and the skin looked pale gray in the afternoon light. A second hand came up beside it. Nick locked the doors. The head that rose between those hands belonged to the deer we'd seen on the way in. I recognized the strip hanging from the jaw. Up close, it looked less like bark and more like a loose fold of hide. The animal's mouth hung open. Its ears didn't twitch. One eye was dark. The other had a cloudy white patch across it. Below the head was Dean's coat. There was no neck where the coat collar should have met it. The deer's head hung too low, almost against the chest, and something narrow moved behind it, flexing under the fabric. The thing lifted itself farther over the log. Its elbows bent. The sleeves slid back. I saw a human forearm with hair growing along it in patches, then a wrist so narrow I could have closed my hand around it. Dean's voice came from behind the open deer mouth. "Down here!" Nick slammed the pickup into reverse. I got thrown against the dash. The rifle slid across my legs, and I caught it by the stalk while the truck bounced backward over the ruts. Nick was watching the mirrors. I was watching the log. The thing came over it on all fours. For a second, the coat caught on a branch and pulled tight across its shoulders. It stopped, reached behind itself with one hand, and worked the fabric loose. That small, careful movement scared me more than the head. An animal would have pulled until the coat tore. This thing knew what had caught. It knew how to fix it. Then it ran. The front limbs reached out farther than the hind ones. Its back rose and fell under the coat. The deer head bounced against the collar as if it wasn't properly attached. Nick got us around the first bend. A rear tire dropped off the road. He corrected, too sharply, and backed the rear axle into the ditch at an angle. The rear bumper wedged against a stump as the front of the pickup swung toward a pine at the inside of the bend. The driver's door struck the trunk. Nick tried driving forward. Gravel sprayed against the underside. We moved maybe a foot, then settled back. The thing came around the bend running upright. It wasn't wearing the deer head anymore. I didn't see where it had gone. There was something long and pale above the coat, with a flat face and a mouth that seemed too low. It held its head tipped to one side. That cloudy patch was still in the left eye. Nick was trying to get the truck to rock free. He kept saying, "Come on," under his breath. I raised the rifle. It was Dean's bolt action hunting rifle, the one Nick had loaded beside the generator. I had to turn sideways in the seat to aim toward the passenger window. The thing dropped, but it didn't hit me. The thing dropped below my line of sight. Something hit the rear of the truck hard enough to make the seat belt lock against my chest. Nick stopped working the pedals. We heard it climb into the bed. One foot landed on the toolbox. Another came down on the roof. The metal buckled above the rear seats with a soft, heavy pop. I could see Nick looking up without moving his head. Two coughs sounded directly above us. Then a hand curled over the top of my window. The fingers reached down the outside of the glass. The thumb found the upper edge of the door. It pulled, and the rubber seal began to separate from the frame. I tried to turn the rifle, but the stock caught between my chest and the seat belt. Above me, metal creaked. The top corner of the door bent outward, and a crack ran down the window. The hand forced its way through the gap. It was so fast that I felt the nails catch my jacket before I got the rifle free. I shoved the barrel against the forearm and fired. The blast inside the truck wiped out every other sound. I saw the hand leave the window. Something struck the toolbox behind us, rocking the truck. Nick was shouting. I couldn't hear the words. He pointed at the rear window. There was a hole in the middle of it. A pale hand had punched through from the bed and was pulling loose pieces of safety glass out of the frame. I worked the bolt and swung around, but Nick already had my sleeve in his fist. His door was pinned against the pine. Mine was our way out. We scrambled onto the road through the passenger side. I nearly fell because the seat belt had caught around my boot. Nick pulled me free, and we ran uphill toward the cabin. I heard the glass finish breaking behind us. We didn't look back until we reached the clearing. The cabin door stood open where we'd left it. I got inside first and turned with the rifle while Nick came through. He slammed the door and dropped the wooden bar into its brackets. Nothing followed us out of the trees. For several seconds, I couldn't get enough air. My ears rang. Nick had his mouth open, breathing in little jerks, and there was blood running down his palm from the broken truck window. I remember wanting my wife. That was the entire thought. I wanted to be in our kitchen with her, and I couldn't understand how a place I knew so well had become somewhere I might die. Nick dragged the table against the door. Something knocked underneath us. We both froze. It came again. Three dull blows from beneath the kitchen floor. I pointed the rifle down without thinking. Nick caught the barrel and pushed it aside. The cabin had a little storage cellar. Dean kept canned food and empty water containers down there. The hatch was under a piece of carpet beside the kitchen table, with a sliding bolt on top of it. I couldn't keep it from rattling when you walked over it. We hadn't opened it while searching. There was no outside entrance, and it hadn't occurred to either of us that a man might be down there with the bolt pushed across above him. Nick pulled the door open. pulled the carpet aside. Something scraped under the hatch. A sound followed, barely a voice. It was the rough, exhausted noise somebody makes when they've been trying to yell for a long time. Nick reached for the bolt. I grabbed his wrist. We had just watched something in Dean's coat put a hand through a truck window. I couldn't let him open another thing simply because it sounded like somebody needed help. He stared at me. Then he pointed at the bolt. It had been slid shut from our side. I moved the cooler out of the way. Nick pushed back the bolt and raised the hatch a few inches. I shone my light into the gap. Dean was at the bottom of the steps. He wasn't wearing his coat or his cap. He had his blue work shirt on, with a boot on one foot and only a sock on the other. There was a dark band of bruising around the front of his neck. His mouth moved without producing words. When he saw us, he started crying. I don't mean his eyes watered. His whole face changed, and he reached up with both hands, opening and closing them like he couldn't make us come closer fast enough. I set the rifle on the counter within reach, and we got him up the steps. He weighed more than I remembered, or maybe my arms were already weak. We sat him on the floor behind the kitchen counter, and Nick held a cup while he took little sips of water. Dean tried to talk. Nothing came out except a scrape and a cough. Not his usual cough. This one bent him over and made him clamp both hands around his throat. I got the messenger out of my jacket. I'd taken it from the truck's cup holder as we climbed out, with the power bank still attached. It was on now, with enough charge to work. I pressed the emergency button, then set it on the sill of the rear window, where it had a view of the sky. Dean saw what I was doing and nodded so hard it hurt to watch. I typed that three adults needed help, that Dean could barely speak and Nick had cut his hand, and that something had attacked us and disabled our truck. I didn't use the word skinwalker. I didn't know what word to use. While the message waited to send, Nick wrapped his hand in a dish towel. Dean took a pencil from the counter and wrote on the back of a grocery receipt. Stay together. Then he underlined it. He wrote that the thing had come Thursday after dark. It had stood outside the bedroom window making a sound like a hurt dog. He'd gone onto the porch with a flashlight. That was when it had rushed him. Some of what happened next, I learned later. In the cabin, all we got were short, cramped sentences, written by a man whose hand wouldn't stop shaking. It had caught him by the throat and driven him backward into the cabin. His glasses, cap, and flashlight had fallen near the steps. He'd struck the table, knocking over the chair, and started kicking at it. When its grip shifted to his coat collar, he managed to pull one arm out of the unfastened coat. One boot came off as he kicked. The thing reached for it, and Dean slipped the rest of the way out of his coat and crawled through the open cellar hatch. He left it holding the coat and the boot. He'd been getting canned beans for dinner when he heard the noise outside. That was why the hatch was open. That ordinary, stupid detail had saved him. He'd pulled it shut over his head. A moment later, he'd heard the bolt slide. He'd spent most of the night kicking the hatch. By late morning, he'd exhausted himself and fallen asleep on the steps. He hadn't heard us arrive. The shot at the truck had brought him awake, and he'd started pounding again when he heard us moving furniture upstairs. Nick read the receipt, then looked at the hatch. Dean wrote another sentence. It kept coming back to listen. I asked about his truck keys, Dean reached for the coat he wasn't wearing, then wrote coat pocket. The only spare was at his house with our aunt. His truck was right outside, but we couldn't start it. The messenger chirped. An emergency coordinator wanted to know what had attacked us and whether we could stay sheltered. I wrote back that it looked like a person wearing animal skin, that it had broken a truck window, and that we were inside a cabin. I described where the truck had gone into the ditch and warned that a tree blocked the road above the ditch. The reply said help was being arranged. We were to stay inside if it was safe and report any change in location. Then we heard Dean's two familiar coughs outside the front door. Nick lifted the rifle off the counter. The real Dean clutched my arm. A heavy footstep crossed the porch. The loose board by the steps squeaked under it. Nick? Dean's voice, casual, slightly out of breath. Nick stared at the door. The thing said his name again, closer to the little window beside it. Dean tried to pull us toward the cellar. I resisted at first. I didn't want to go into a hole that something could lock from above. But the curtains on the front windows were thin, and he was making frantic gestures at the light falling behind us. From the porch, it would be able to see our outlines. We climbed down just far enough to get below floor level. I held the hatch open an inch. Nick stayed on the top step, with the rifle across his knees. Dean sat below him. There was an old knot missing from a floorboard near the front wall. Through it, I could see a narrow patch of gray light. As the thing moved past the window, that light disappeared. I shifted backward. Dean started trying to whisper. I put my hand over his mouth. I hated doing it. He didn't resist. He reached up and held my wrist there. He said, outside, his voice said, come on. I recognized the tired, irritated way the words were spoken. They weren't Dean's words. They were what Nick had said while trying to drive the pickup out of the ditch. The thing said them again, this time in Nick's voice. The knob turned above us. The door pushed against the bar. Wood creaked. The table shifted an inch across the floor. I could hear it door. Not ramming it. Feeling around it. Working the knob. Testing the gap underneath. Pushing at different heights. At one point, its fingertips slid through the space under the threshold. Through the gap beneath the hatch, I could see their shadows stretch across the floor. Then the porch boards creaked away toward the side of the cabin. For a moment, everything was quiet. Dean pulled my hand gently off his mouth. He pointed upward, something heavy settled onto the roof. I looked at Nick. He was already looking up, toward the loft he'd checked earlier. We'd both seen that missing screen. Neither of us had done anything about it. The footsteps moved along the roof slowly. A little dust fell through the boards above the front room. Then we heard a scraping noise near the eaves, followed by a hollow thump inside the cabin. Nick climbed out of the cellar first. He kept the rifle pointed at the loft, but he couldn't see anything. The cabin had one rear window big enough for a person. It was above the kitchen counter, facing the slope behind the building. I shoved the messenger and the power bank into my jacket, unlatched the window and lifted it. It stuck halfway. I'd opened that window a hundred times. The frame always swelled in wet weather. Usually you hit the lower corner with the heel of your hand and gave it another shove. This time, I couldn't get it to move. Above the front room, something dragged across the plywood. There was a heavy breath, then a pause, as if it was listening to us work. Dean pushed me aside. He braced one hand on the counter and drove his shoulder against the frame. The window went up with a squeal. Nick took a step backward. A hand had appeared over the lip of the loft. It lay flat on the edge, with the fingers curled underneath. There was a dark hole across the forearm where I'd shot it. I couldn't see anything. Nothing about that arm should have still been working. The other hand reached down and found the ladder. I got Dean onto the counter. He'd lost one boot in the struggle the night before. He'd grabbed a rubber chore boot beside the stove while we got out of the cellar. It was too big, and he couldn't get his foot over the sill. I pulled it through for him. Something began to descend the ladder behind us. I looked around because Nick made a sound I'd head first. Both hands were on the ladder, but its elbows bent away from the rungs. Its torso remained on the loft floor while its head hung below its hands, turned upright so it could look across the room at us. Its face resembled Dean's now. The jaw was broader. There were folds at the sides of the mouth, like the ones Dean had developed in his sixties, but the features didn't quite stay where they belonged. When its weight shifted, the left cheek stretched downward. The cloudy eye remained fixed on me while the other moved toward Nick. The coat hung open. Under it, I could see coarse hair and pale skin, and a dark strip running from one armpit across the chest. It opened its mouth. Come on. Nick fired. The shot caught the upper part of its already wounded arm. The thing snapped backward, losing its grip on the ladder. And its shoulder struck the wall. Nick worked the bolt while I climbed onto the counter. I fell out the window more than climbed through it. caught my jacket, and we both went down in the needles behind the cabin. Nick came through after us, feet first, still holding the rifle. He pulled the window down as far as it would go. Inside, something hit the kitchen table. We moved into the trees. Dean couldn't run. He could barely take a full breath. Nick went ahead with the rifle while I held Dean's arm, and we climbed the slope behind the cabin until the roof disappeared below us. We didn't go toward the road. It knew the road. It had waited there once already. And somewhere along it sat a truck we couldn't move, with a broken rear window and a doorframe bent out of shape. Dean kept pointing west. I knew what was over there. The equipment shed sat in the lower clearing, down a short side road that branched off below the fallen tree. If we could get to it through the woods, we could start the track. It had an enclosed cab, heavy mesh over the side windows, and a thick protective front window fitted for brushwork. The grapple attachment could lift the log blocking our way out. The key lived in an old coffee can on the tool bench. Dean had shown me because he was always forgetting which pocket he'd put things in. With the loader, I could move the pine and pull Nick's truck out of the ditch. Even if the pickup wouldn't run afterward, Dean could drive the loader down the road while Nick and I followed. He'd be inside the protected cab, and we'd have the machine between us and the trees. It was the first plan we'd had that involved doing something besides trying to keep a door shut. The direct route through the woods was only a little over half a mile. It crossed an old fence and a shallow creek, then dropped to the shed from behind. Dean knew it. We'd all walked it before. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken 20 minutes. We stopped in a cluster of firs while I sent another message. The first attempt failed under the branches. I moved the device into a gap between the trees and held it above my head until it connected. I told the coordinator we had been forced out of the cabin and were heading to the equipment shed. I sent its approximate location and said we'd fired at the attacker. The response came a few minutes later. County deputies were coming in from the public road. They wanted us to stay together, leave the messenger on the road, and go to the shelter and send a new location when we reached shelter. The message was so ordinary that I read it twice. There were people outside those woods. They were driving toward us. Eventually, headlights would come up the road. I needed to keep remembering that. By then, the sun was low enough that the hollow below us had gone gray. We had one headlamp and two small flashlights. We kept them off while there was still enough light to see the ground. Dean pointed to the camera and said, I couldn't tell whether he was saying it couldn't be killed or warning me that I'd need a better shot. Nick replaced the cartridges he'd fired, taking the spares from the elastic holder on the stock, while I checked Dean's throat. The bruises were shaped like fingers. They continued around the back of his neck farther than any ordinary hand could have reached. He held up the receipt again and wrote one more thing beneath his earlier notes. I never cooked for you. I never cooked for those eggs. I looked at him. He'd heard it in the kitchen after daylight. Opening cupboards, moving the pan, turning the little propane burner on. He mimed the motion of lifting a fork to his mouth, then tapped his ear. It had sat at the table above him and eaten breakfast. For some reason, that was when I started shaking badly enough that I couldn't hold the receipt still. I could understand a predator waiting outside a door. I could understand an attack. I couldn't make room in my head for the thing we'd seen on the ladder sitting at Dean's table, eating his food while he listened from underneath it. Nick touched my shoulder. We needed to move. We worked our way along the slope, with Nick ahead, Dean between us, and me watching behind. Every so often, we stopped and listened. We heard wind in the high branches and the dry rasp of our own clothes. Once, I heard something moving downhill, but the sound of the wind was faded before I could place it. We reached the old fence at dusk. The wire had come loose from several posts. We stepped over it one at a time, then followed it toward the creek. Dean caught his oversized boot on a strand and nearly fell. I held him until he got his balance. Ahead of us, Nick stopped. Someone was walking on the other side of the creek. We couldn't see them through the young trees. We could hear footfalls, though, steady and unhurried, coming toward the little crossing we intended to use. Then a flashlight switched on. The beam pointed at the ground. It swept across the trunks, then settled on the water. I almost called out. The light was warm yellow. Dean had an old flashlight with a yellowish bulb, usually carried in his coat pocket. The one we'd seen in the kitchen was mine. Nick's was white. That beam across the creek looked like Dean's light. Nick lowered himself behind him and said, and pulled Dean down with him. I knelt beside them. The footsteps stopped. From behind the beam, a man said my brother's name. This time, it wasn't Dean's voice. It was mine. Nick turned his head toward me very slowly. The voice said, We're checking together. Now my best-selling novel is finally coming to life, and I got to write every episode starring Rose Byrne, Megan Fahey, and Brendan Gleeson. I'm Ashley C. Ford, host of Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice. Joy Aladakun, whose music moves from protests to daily commutes. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves, and listen wherever you get your podcast. Those were the words I'd used beside the cabin when Nick wanted to go behind the wood rack alone. The flashlight came up. It passed over the fallen trunk we were hiding behind, stopped, then moved back. A hand held it at chest height. A perfectly ordinary human hand, but the arm was far too long. Its elbow hung below the hem of Dean's coat. The other arm, the injured one, dangled with its fingertips touching the water. I could see its knees below the beam. They were bent forward against the wet stones, while the rest of it faced us. It had reached the crossing ahead of us, instead of rushing, it had stopped to make itself look like someone we might approach. The beam moved onto the ground beside Nick's boot. Dean pressed down on my shoulder with both hands. Nick didn't raise the rifle. At that angle, he would have had to lift himself above the log, and the light was pointing straight at us. The thing stood there for long enough that my calf began to cramp. Then it turned the flashlight off. I could still see the afterimage of that circle. Everything beyond it seemed darker than it had before. We heard water move under a foot. Then another foot. It was crossing toward us without the light. I couldn't see it. I could hear each foot touch stone, then lift with a faint sucking sound. The creek was only a few yards wide. There wasn't enough water to drown anyone standing up. In daylight, we would have stepped across without thinking about it. From behind that log, it sounded enormous. Nick eased the rifle upward. I put one hand under Dean's elbow, ready to move him. The fingers on his other hand were locked around my jacket. The footsteps stopped at our bank. A little gravel slid down into the water. Then I heard something sniff. It was just beyond the log. I could smell it now. That stale, wet animal odor, stronger than before, with something sour underneath. Dean pressed his face into my shoulder. For a few seconds, nobody moved. The thing's fingers appeared on top of the trunk. They gripped the bark so close to Nick's head that he could have reached up and touched them. A pale forehead rose behind them. I saw the cloudy eye first. Then the other one. They stopped just above the wood. It looked down at us. There was no surprise in its face. No hesitation. It had known exactly where we were. The slow approach had been for our benefit. Nick raised the muzzle. The thing dropped below the top of the log just as he fired. The muzzle flash lit the trees behind it. Bark burst from the upper edge of the trunk, and something struck the water on the other side. I hadn't seen the bullet hit it. We got up and moved downstream along our side of the creek. Dean stumbled almost immediately. I caught him, but his weight pulled both of us off balance. A hand came out from underneath the fallen trunk and closed around his ankle. Bark burst from the upper edge of the trunk and closed around his ankle. held that empty rubber boot out of the darkness, turning it toward itself as though it didn't understand what had happened. Then it threw the boot at us. It hit Dean between the shoulders hard enough to knock the air out of him. Nick stepped between us and the log. I heard the bolt work, then his flashlight flared against the trunk. He shouted something I couldn't make out, and I got Dean down the bank and into the creek. The water came halfway up my shins. Cold went through my jeans so sharply it felt like I'd stepped into broken glass. I shoved Dean onto the opposite bank and turned back for Nick. He wasn't where I'd left him. His flashlight shone from the ground near the log, lighting a strip of bark and the bottom of a fir. Something moved through that light, low and fast. I started back across. Dean grabbed the back of my jacket and held on. I tried to pull away. Nick was on the other side. I could hear him breathing, or something. And I wasn't leaving him there. The flashlight lifted off the ground. It rose slowly. Beam pointed toward us. Behind it, my brother's voice said, Come on. Dean hauled me backwards so hard I fell onto the bank beside him. The beam stayed on the water where I'd been standing. Then, farther upstream, a second light flashed once. Nick had switched on the headlamp he wore around his neck. I saw him crouched at the water's edge, holding his rifle in his right hand, his bandaged left hand braced against a rock. He didn't call to us. He stepped into the creek and kept the lamp on his own chest so we could watch him come across. He'd dropped his flashlight when the thing came around the end of the log. Instead of following him, it had picked up the light. It had tried to bring me back with it. Nick reached us, turned off the headlamp, and grabbed Dean's other arm. We went downhill through the trees as fast as we could manage. Behind us, the flashlight beam began moving through the branches. Sometimes it stayed low, close to the creek. Sometimes it rose higher than a person should have been able to hold it. I saw it cross the same patch of trees twice, then go out. I kept expecting a hand to close around my neck. We went well below the direct path to the shed. The ground leveled into a wet hollow, and we had to work around a tangle of fallen trees. Dean couldn't keep his socked foot off the rocks. Nick and I half-carried him whenever the ground got rough. At the largest fallen pine, I shone my flashlight under the raised roots, looking for a way through. A boot was wedged beneath a root inside the hollow. It was Dean's missing work boot. I recognized the duct tape around the toe. He'd been wearing that pair for years. Behind it were other shoes. I couldn't count them. There were too many, so I pushed into the dry space beneath the roots. Hiking boots. A white running shoe stained brown along one side. A rubber sandal with the strap broken. They were full adult sizes, some so weathered they'd started coming apart. Something that looked like a fur coat lay flattened across a bed of pine needles. Beside it was a pair of binoculars with a faded strap, and several lengths of clothing wound around sticks. The smell came out of the hollow as soon as I put my face near it. Dean reached for his boot, but the heel was pinned under the root. As he tried to pull it free, a branch snapped higher on the slope. Nick caught his arm and pulled him away. We kept moving. I know how that sounds. We found something that might have explained what was happening, and we left it behind. But by then, I didn't care what it was, or how long it had been there. I wanted Dean's arm over my shoulder and Nick where I could see him. I wanted a road. We climbed out of the hollow on the far side. Nick used the map on his phone, already downloaded for the property, while I checked the messenger. We were below the shed and a little east of it. There was a fresh message saying the deputies were on the forest road and asking if we were still moving. I sent our position. Then I put the device away. My hands were getting clumsy. So were Nick's. Dean's wet foot had gone numb, and he was dragging it instead of lifting it over the wall. I was able to see him, but I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. I couldn't see him. The final climb took forever. We'd go ten yards, stop, listen, then go ten more. Above us, the trees were black against a little remaining light in the sky. I could hear a vehicle somewhere far away, or thought I could. The sound came and went with the wind. Then I saw a straight edge through the branches. The back wall of the equipment shed. It was corrugated metal over a timber frame, with a sliding front door big enough for the loader. The little walk-in door was around the right side. Dean kept it locked with the same kind of brass padlock as the road gate. He reached toward his shirt pocket, then stopped. His keys were in the coat. We looked at one another. The thing still had his coat. Nick crouched beside Dean behind a stack of old fence posts. I went around the side of the shed alone, keeping one hand on the wall so I wouldn't trip. The padlock was hanging through the chain. I took it in my hand. Exactly like the gate. I stood there with the cold lock against my palm. Whatever had been through this door had left it exactly the way we'd found the gate. I couldn't tell whether it hadn't known how to close the locks, or had deliberately left them that way. Either way, it had been here before us. I eased the side door open. The shed smelled of hydraulic oil, old dust, and wet fur. I didn't go in right away. From somewhere inside, metal ticked against concrete. I pulled the door almost shut and went back to Nick. There wasn't anywhere else to hide Dean. The fence posts were in open ground. Beyond them, the woods came right up to the shed, and we had already seen how easily the thing moved through them. I told Nick about the lock and the sound. He looked toward the side door, then at the rifle. His hand had soaked through the towel. He tightened the wrapping with his hand. He said, and handed me his headlamp. We got Dean to the doorway. Nick stood beside him with the rifle pointed inside, while I swept the room with the lamp. The loader sat facing the big sliding door. There was enough space to walk down either side of it. Shelves lined the left wall. Dean's bench ran along the right, cluttered with tools and coffee cans. A work light hung from a nail beside the bench, its cord trailing to a generator in the corner. The machine was running, but I couldn't see it. The machine had been parked with the grapple flat on the ground. To get into the cab, you stepped over the attachment, climbed onto the front foothold, and opened the glass door. I could do that in a few seconds. The keys were maybe six feet inside. I went to the bench, took the lid off the coffee can, and found the loader key under a handful of rusty bolts. Something ticked again. I turned my head. A length of chain hung down beside the loader, its last link touched the floor. I moved the lamp up along it. The chain went over a roof beam. Dean used it with a small hoist when he was working on attachments. The hoist was empty. Above it, resting on the beam, was a bare foot. The toes had folded around the timber. I followed the leg upward with the light, and saw Dean's coat hanging between the rafters. The thing was lying along a beam over the machine, its injured arm dangled on the other side. Its good hand held the chain, lowering it a link at a time. The face above the collar turned toward me. It had pulled its mouth into something like a smile. I ran for the cab. Nick shouted. The beam creaked, and the chain hit the floor behind me with a crash. I stepped on the grapple, slipped, and struck my knee against the steel. I didn't feel it until later. I caught the grab handle, hauled myself up, and yanked the cab door open. Something landed on the rear of the loader. The machine rocked under the weight. I fell into the seat and dragged the door shut. A hand slapped against the glass before the latch caught. For a second, the door stayed an inch open, with the fingers curled through the gap. I pulled on the handle with both hands. The arm stretched. I could see the skin draw tight across the wrist. The fingers searched for my forearm. Nick came around the front of the machine and struck them with the rifle stock. They withdrew. I slammed the door and heard the latch catch. Nick was already backing away. The thing went over the roof of the cab after him, one leg appearing in front of my windshield before it dropped out of sight. I reached for the ignition. I knew this machine. I'd serviced it that spring. I'd replaced a leaking hose and spent an afternoon spreading gravel with it. But my hand still shook so badly that I missed the key to the machine. I tried to get it out of the car, but it didn't work. everything he had left. The coat on the thing's shoulders had torn open. In the lights, I could see that the dark strip across its chest wasn't a wound. It was an edge. A gray, hair-covered hide lay against a longer body underneath, held tight along one side and hanging loose along the other. It looked as if someone had tried to put an animal back together around a person without remembering how the legs worked. The thing turned toward the lights. Both eyes narrowed. The cloudy one caught the beam and flashed white. I raised the attachment a few inches and opened the grapple's upper jaws. The steel scraped, and it let go of Nick. Nick fell against Dean. They both scrambled toward the side wall. I moved the loader forward. I couldn't go fast in that space. I couldn't turn the machine without risking one of them. The thing seemed to understand that. It stayed near them, keeping its body between the machine and the wall. Dean reached the big sliding door. He lifted the bottom latch and shoved. The door rolled open a foot, caught on something, then rolled farther when Nick put his shoulder against it. Cold air came into the shed. The thing moved toward the gap. For an instant, I thought it was leaving. Then I saw it lower itself, keeping one hand on the concrete, ready to spring at which ever man went through first. Nick saw it too. He let go of the door and looked at me through the windshield. We didn't make a plan. There wasn't time for one. But he looked down at the open grapple, then back at my face, and I understood what he was thinking. I shook my head. He moved anyway. He stepped away from the door and into the space in front of the loader, bent low, with his empty hands spread. The thing turned with him. Back toward the opposite wall. It followed, passing directly across the open jaws of the grapple. I pushed the loader forward. The attachment caught the loose side of Dean's coat. I closed the grapple. For half a second, I had nothing but fabric. The coat stretched, then tore. The thing lunged toward Nick, almost clear of the steel. Dean grabbed Nick around the waist and pulled him sideways. I drove forward another foot and opened the grapple again. The edge caught the thing behind the knees. It went backward across the attachment, throwing one arm toward the cab. Its face hit the windshield. I was close enough to see grit pressed into the folds beside its mouth. Close enough to see that Dean's face had mostly come apart, the cheeks hanging slack around a narrower set of features underneath. It stared at me through the glass. In my own voice, it said, we're checking together. The upper jaws came down across its shoulders and chest. It twisted so hard the whole attachment shook. One leg kicked free. A heel struck the windshield and left a white mark in the glass. The injured arm reached through the bars, fingers opening and closing inches from the door. I lowered the attachment until it rested on the concrete. The thing tried to pull itself through the space between the steel jaws. Its body lengthened. The loose hide dragged over the floor. For one sickening moment, I thought it was going to slide out of itself and leave the part I had trapped behind. Then the grapple caught bone, or something solid enough that it couldn't compress any farther. The loader strained. I held the control. Nick picked up the rifle. He stayed clear of the moving arm and came around the side of the attachment. From there, he could aim across the open doorway, away from my cab. He waited until the head stopped. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. I pulled the handle. The thing saw him. Dean's two short coughs came from its mouth. Nick fired. The body jerked once against the steel. The hand beside my door opened. Then it lay still. I kept the grapple closed. I kept the engine running. Nick stayed where he was, rifle raised, while Dean slid down against the wall and held both hands over his face. None of us spoke. I watched the chest. I watched the fingers. I watched the cloudy eye, which was still pointed in my direction. Nothing moved. After several minutes, Nick touched Dean's shoulder and pointed outside. A light was moving between the trees down the access road. Not a flashlight. Headlights. I pointed at the rifle, then at the approaching lights. Nick laid it on the concrete and stepped well away with his hands raised. He called out to let them know where we were. The deputies came up the drive on foot from where they'd parked. They could reach the shed from below the fallen pine. One stayed with Nick and Dean. The other came to my door, looked at what was trapped under the grapple, and told me to keep my hands where he could see them. I did. He looked down at the body again. Then he called the other deputy over. They checked it themselves. It was dead. It didn't become a deer or disappear or turn into someone we recognized. Beneath the torn hide and Dean's ruined coat was a long, pale body with human hands and a face that had stopped resembling anybody. That was what they photographed. That was what they took away. We told them about the hollow under the roots and the cellar. The property was closed off. Dean never spent another night there, and neither did we. Six weeks later, he came to my house for dinner. His voice was still weak, but he could speak in short sentences. Nick had brought the food. I was setting out plates when Dean's truck pulled up. My wife started toward the door. I told her I'd get it. I went outside and watched him walk from his truck to the porch. He gave me a small nod, handed me a bag of bread, and let me help him up the step. We went in together. I turned the lock until it clicked. If you love untangling mysteries and uncovering the truth behind what really happened, I think you'll love the good news. I'm Karen Slaughter, and I'll see you next time on The Good Daughter. I'm Ashley C. This season, we're talking about the good news. We're talking to unexpected progressive heroes who found purpose in unexpected places. Find out how they started something bigger than themselves, and listen wherever you get your podcasts. I made this account to post this. My brother knows I'm writing it, and he said, "Go ahead. Just don't use our last name." So I won't. I'm Cody. He's Wes. This happened the last weekend of October 2019 in the Zuni Mountains in Western New Mexico, which most people have never heard of, which is kind of the point of them. I'm not a writer. I fix trucks. I work at a diesel shop off Interstate 40 in Grants, and I've been under semis since I was 19. Wes is five years older than me, and he runs a haul truck at the mine north of town. He's got a wife named Amy and two kids. We're not outdoor influencer types. We grew up going into the Zunis with our dad, because that's what he did on his weekends. And that's the only reason we know those mountains at all. Dad died that August. Heart attack at 61, sitting in his recliner with the isotopes game on. Nothing anyone could have done. He wanted his ashes put at a spring he used to take us to when we were kids. He called it the pipe spring because somebody, a long time ago, drove a length of iron pipe into a crack in the rock and the water still ran out of it, cold, year round. It's not on any map I've ever seen. There's no trail to it. You drive the forest road south out of Thoreau until the road washes out at a dry creek, and then you walk a little under eight miles up a ridge and down the other side into a side canyon, and it's at the head of that canyon. Under a stand of big ponderosas. We picked the last weekend of October because we could both get the time off, and I wanted to get it done before snow. Wes had a cow elk tag for December and wanted to look for sign while we were back there. We weren't hunting that weekend. He brought dad's rifle anyway. He'd carried it on every trip since he was old enough, and I think leaving it home would have felt wrong. We left Grant's Thursday morning, the 24th. It was cold, and we were in the middle of the night. We were in the middle of the night, and we were cold and clear. The kind of fall day where the aspens are already bare on the ridges, and the oak brush has gone brown. Wes drove his truck. We parked where the road washed out, locked it, and shouldered the packs around nine in the morning. I had the tent, the stove, the food, and a coffee can with dad in it. The can had a plastic box inside it with the ashes, and the box was in a bread bag because I didn't trust the lid. We'd told Amy to expect us home Sunday evening. We'd told her that we were going to be home by Sunday, and we were going to be home by Sunday evening. She knew the road where we'd park, but neither of us had ever shown her the spring. Wes had the tent, the stove, and the coffee can with dad in it. We'd told her that we the rifle, a.30-06 that used to be Dad's, one box of 20 shells, the water filter, a bright hand-held flashlight, a small pair of binoculars, and most of the heavy stuff because he's bigger than me, and he insisted. We each had a headlamp. Neither of us had a satellite messenger. We'd never needed one on Dad's old route, which was the whole amount of thinking we'd done about it. The walk-in took us most of the day. We're both in okay shape from work, but eight miles with 60 pounds up a ridge and down the other side is a long day no matter what you do for a living. We talked about Dad some, mostly we didn't talk. The woods back there are thick, mostly ponderosa, and some fur up high, with oak brush choking the draws so bad you have to go around. Lots of blowdown. No trails except game trails. We followed Dad's old route from memory, which is ridge to saddle to the big burned snag with the lightning scar, then down. We got to the spring around four in the afternoon. Dad had one rule about that spring. Every time we went there as kids, Dad made us camp a good half-mile back up the slope on a flat bench of rock above the canyon. Never at the spring. We'd hike down in the evening to fill water and hike back up to sleep. Every trip. Even when we were little and whining about it. Wes asked him once why we couldn't just camp. We'd camp by the water like normal people. And Dad said an old man from Ramah who first showed him that spring told him not to, and that was good enough for him. Dad wasn't superstitious about anything else in his life. He didn't go to church. He didn't believe in ghosts. But he followed that one rule every single time. And he didn't explain it beyond that. We spread him at the spring. I'm not going to write much about that part. It took about ten minutes. Wes said a few words and I couldn't say anything. We put the ashes in the pool below the pipe and some on the ground under the biggest tree and that was it. He was where he wanted to be. Then we started up the slope to the bench to make camp before dark because we're our father's sons and we found the elk. It was in a little grassy pocket about 200 yards up the slope from the spring where the trees opened up. A cow elk, a big one, lying with her legs folded beneath her in the grass. At first I thought she was just dead, which is strange enough to come across but not unheard of. Then we got closer and I saw there was no hide on her. She'd been skinned, not butchered, skinned. The hide was gone, including the skin around the head, but the head itself was still attached to the body. I've helped Wes dress elk and deer my whole life and I'd never seen one left like that. Whoever had done it hadn't taken any meat. There was no sign of the work around her. No cut brush, no discarded gloves, no game bags. The body looked dry and when Wes nudged the shoulder with his boot, it didn't give. There wasn't a blood trail coming in or a clear set of boot prints leading away. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Somebody had done a lot of work here, then left without taking the part a hunter would have come for. Wes walked around the whole thing twice with the rifle in his hands. He didn't have a gun. He didn't say anything. Then he looked at the ground around the elk for a long time and I knew what he was looking for because I was looking for it too. There were no tracks at all. Not boot tracks, not elk tracks coming in, nothing. The grass was flat where she lay and that was all. The legs were what bothered me most and I didn't say it out loud. It wasn't just that her legs were bent, they were folded almost symmetrically, the front ones were folded up. The back ones were tucked and her head was laid down flat along her forelegs. It looked arranged. Somebody had folded her up and laid her head down flat along her front legs and left her sitting there in the grass. "Bear," Wes said finally. It wasn't a question and he didn't believe it. Bears don't skin things. Mountain lion drags into brush, doesn't leave it out here. Nothing out here does that and leaves all the meat, Wes. He stood there a while longer. Then he said we were losing light and we went up to the bench. The bench is a shelf of bare sandstone about forty yards long with a few scrubby pines growing out of the cracks. It sits above the canyon with the slope falling away toward the spring and the ridge rising behind it. The route down winds around rock bands so the spring is much closer in a straight line than the half-mile walking route suggests. From the edge you can see it. You can see across the canyon and into the grassy pocket where the elk was, although trees hide the spring. The way we'd come up was open enough that Dad liked being able to watch it. The back of the bench had a jumble of boulders where you could get out of sight of anything below. We set up the tent on the flattest part, same spot we'd always used, with its door facing downhill toward the fire ring. I got the stove going while Wes gathered wood Dad built that ring out of flat rocks probably thirty years ago. We had a good fire by dark. It was cold, down in the twenties already, and there was no moon above the ridge to help us see. Once the sun went, everything beyond the fire was black. We ate and sat up a while, neither of us brought up the elk. I think we'd both decided it was one of those things you see in the woods that you don't have an answer for, and the answer would show up later or it wouldn't. We'd both come across animals killed by predators. We'd both been in the woods for a long time, but we didn't know if we'd be able to get out of it. I tried to put it in that category, something unpleasant that had nothing to do with us. We turned in around nine. Wes had the rifle in the tent with him, which he always does. I was asleep in about two minutes. Eight miles with a pack will do that. I woke up at some point in the night because of the zipper. Our tent has a single door, a big D-shaped zipper on the front, and it makes a very particular sound. Anybody who's slept in a tent knows the sound. It's a slow ripping noise, and it changes pitch when it goes around the curve of the D. I woke up to that sound, and I lay there for a second thinking Wes was getting up to take a leak, and then I heard Wes breathing right next to me. Neither of us was touching the door. The zipper was moving from the other side. The zipper went about eight inches. Slow. Then it stopped. I didn't move. I'm not going to pretend I was brave. I lay there with my eyes open looking at the ceiling of the tent, which I couldn't see, and I listened. There was nothing. No breathing from outside. No footsteps. No brush moving. Just that little opening in the door and the cold coming in through it. Then it went back up. Same slow speed. All the way to the top. Closed. I lay there probably ten minutes before I reached over and shook Wes. I whispered to him that something had tried the door. He didn't argue with me and he didn't say I was dreaming. He sat up and got the rifle and he opened the zipper himself and stuck the light out and looked around. There was nothing out there. The fire was down to coals. He got out and threw wood on it and stood by it with the rifle for a while and I got up and stood with him. When the fire came up I looked at the door of the tent and there was nothing on it. No mud, no claw marks. The zipper pull was where it always is. I want to tell you I saw something, but I didn't. That's the honest answer. Wes said it was probably a ringtail or a raccoon. They'll mess with anything shiny and the zipper pull is metal. I said sure. We both knew a raccoon doesn't pull a zipper down eight inches in a straight line and then pull it back up. We stayed up by the fire after that. It was around two in the morning. Wes sat facing downhill toward the canyon with the rifle across his knees, and I sat facing the ridge with the hatchet, which was stupid, but it was what I had. We didn't talk much. The fire was loud. You hear every pop and think it's something. Around three, maybe a little after, Wes put his hand on my arm. He was looking down the slope, past the fire, toward the grassy pocket. I looked where he was looking, and at first, I couldn't see anything because of the fire glare. Then I picked up Wes's flashlight and swept the slope. The beam caught it. There was an elk standing at the edge of the trees below us. A cow. It was maybe 80 yards off, at the far edge of the flashlight beam, and it was standing broadside, head up, looking at us. At first I thought the light had caught an ordinary elk coming through. Then I saw the way it stood. Its neck was stretched almost straight up, with the head tipped down toward us. Its front legs were too close together and its back end was low. It was below us on the slope, but the head was high enough to look nearly level with the edge of the bench. Wes raised the rifle and put the scope on it. I heard him breathe in and hold it. Then he let the breath out and lowered the rifle a few inches and whispered, it's got no hair. I said what? He said it again. It's got no hair, Cody. The light's shining off it. I looked harder and he was right. There was no fur breaking up the light. The story of the night. surface looked bare and slick, with a hard shine along the shoulder. I couldn't understand what I was looking at. It stood there for a long time, long enough that my eyes started to water. It didn't move its head. It didn't shift its weight. Then it took a step, and I will tell you exactly what the step looked like, because it's the thing that stayed with me most. It lifted one front leg and one back leg on the same side and set them down together, and then the other side, both legs together. I'd never seen an elk move with that stiff sideways rocking motion. It took four of those steps along the edge of the trees, back toward the direction of the dead one in the grass, and then it was in the trees and gone. Wes never fired. I asked him later why not, and he said because it was 80 yards, and standing still, and he had the crosshairs right on its shoulder, and he didn't shoot, because something in him said that if he did, it would turn around and come up the hill, and he didn't want to find out what it would do when it got there. I kept the flashlight on the trees, until my hand started shaking too badly to hold it steady. We didn't sleep. We kept the fire built up high, until the sky went gray in the east, and when it was light enough to see, we walked down to the grassy pocket together with the rifle. The elk was still there, skinned, lying the way it had been lying. As far as we could tell, it hadn't moved. I couldn't explain how it could be there after what we'd watched. Our boot marks were still the only obvious disturbance, their edges crusted with fresh frost. But there was something new. On the ground about 10 feet from the carcass, laid out flat in the grass with the hair side up and the legs spread, was the hide. Hole. Head. Ears. Legs. All of it, in one piece. It was dry and stiff, and the frost was on it the same as the grass, which meant it had been lying there a while. It hadn't been there the night before. I'd stood on that exact spot. Wes knelt down and looked at it close without touching it. Then he stood up and said, "Somebody put that back." That was the morning of Friday the 25th, if we'd started walking right then, this would be a short post about a weird thing we saw in the woods. We did start, we just made one stop first. We did decide to leave. I'll say that much for us. Standing over that hide, Wes said we'd pack up and walk out and forget about looking for elk sign, and I agreed with him. The only reason we didn't start right then was water. It's eight miles out with a ridge in the middle, and we had maybe a liter between us, and the spring was right there, 200 yards downhill. So we walked down to fill everything, before returning to pack. Wes carried the rifle and filter. I had the bottles. Our packs and bedding were still at camp. The spring sits in a notch of gray rock at the head of the canyon, and the pipe comes out of the rock about chest high, and the water falls into a pool the size of a kitchen table. I'm Ashley C. People like Marlee Dias, making sure every kid sees themselves in books. And then runs off down the canyon in a trickle. Everything around that pool is wet rock, and that morning it was wet rock with frost on it, in the shade, at about 25 degrees. Wes went first with the filter to catch water. The water directly from the pipe. I was behind him with the bottles. He stepped down onto the flat rock beside the pool, the same rock we've stepped onto a hundred times, and his boot went out from under him. He didn't fall far, maybe three feet, but his left leg went down into the gap between two boulders, and the rest of him kept going sideways, and I heard it break. I was six feet away, and I heard it. It was a dry crack, loud, and it came from inside him. He didn't scream. He made a noise I'd never heard him make, a kind of grunt that went up at the end, and then he was lying on his back in the rocks, with his leg still down in the gap, and his face gone white. I got down to him and got his leg out of the hole, which was the worst thing I've ever had to do to another person, and I'll leave it at that. The break was in the shin, about halfway between the knee and the ankle. The bone wasn't through the skin, but you could see where it was wrong. His foot pointed a direction it shouldn't have. He kept saying he was fine, he was fine, just give him a minute, and then he threw up. I left him with the rifle and my coat, while I went back for my pack, the hatchet, and my foam sleeping pad. He kept telling me to hurry. By the time I got back, he'd managed to loosen his boot, but I had to cut the laces to get it off. I used strips of the pad to cushion his leg between two fur limbs, and tied it as steadily as I could. There were bandages and ibuprofen in the little first aid pouch in my pack. None of it looked like enough. Then I sat beside him on the wet rock, and looked up toward the camp half a mile above us. I couldn't carry him eight miles. Wes is 6'2 and 220 pounds, and I'm 5'10 and 170. I could maybe carry him on my back on flat ground for a few hundred yards at a time. There's no flat ground between the spring and the truck. There's a ridge. There's blowdown you have to climb over. There's oak brush you have to force through. With a broken leg hanging off my back, in and out of that brush, he'd have passed out from the pain before we got to the saddle. And then, I'd be carrying dead weight uphill. The other choice was obvious, and neither of us wanted to say it. I could walk out and get help. Eight miles to the truck, maybe four hours without a big pack, then roughly an hour along the forest roads and into Thoreau. After that, I didn't know how long it would take to get people together and bring them back. They'd have the same ridge and brush to get through that we did. It might be that night. It might be the next day. Both phones showed no service at the spring, and the emergency call I tried wouldn't connect. Which meant leaving Wes alone through the afternoon, and possibly the night, with a broken leg, below the place where we'd watched something shaped like that dead elk moving through the trees. Wes said it first. He said go. He said he had the rifle and he'd manage, and the longer I sat there the longer it would take. I said I wasn't leaving him on wet rock without a fire. We argued about it for a while. He's my older brother, and he's used to me doing what he says, but he was also flat on his back with his foot pointing the wrong way, so it wasn't a fair fight. It was past ten. I still had enough daylight to reach the truck if I left. That wasn't the problem, no matter how many other reasons I came up with. I couldn't make myself stand up and walk away while he was lying there. What we finally agreed on was this: I'd get him up to the bench, where there was wood, and a fire ring, and the tent. Once he was warm and had water, we'd decide whether I could still leave that afternoon. I thought getting him up there would take an hour. That was the estimate we made everything else around. Getting him up that half-mile took most of the day. I'm not exaggerating. We started a little before eleven, and I got him onto the bench a little after three. The slope between the spring and the bench is steep and loose, and it's broken up with rock bands you have to go around, and it's covered in oak brush. I'd get under his arm on the bad side, and he'd hop on the good leg. Three hops. Four. And then we'd stop, and he'd lean on a tree and breathe through his teeth. Where it was too steep to hop, I'd get him sitting and he'd scoot backward on his hands while I lifted his legs. Where there were rocks, I carried him. Once near the first rock band, he went limp against me for a few seconds. I held him there until he answered me. Then we sat for a long time before trying again. Early in that climb, we passed the grassy pocket with the elk in it. I'd routed us wide around it on purpose, and I didn't look. Wes did. He told me later that the hide was gone from the grass. The carcass was still there in the grass, folded up, but the hide that had been laid out ten feet from it that morning wasn't there anymore. He didn't tell me at the time because he didn't want me to stop. I got him into the tent and onto his sleeping bag, with his leg propped on both packs. I went back down for the water, by myself, with the hatchet in my belt, because we still didn't have any, and I filtered water straight from the pipe into every bottle we had with my back to the rock. I was able to see the rock, and my eyes on the trees, and I came back up that slope faster than I've ever moved in my life. The whole time I was at the spring, I had the feeling you get when you're being looked at. I didn't see anything. It was close to five when I got back. the light was going gold and flat, and the canyon was quiet. No birds. I noticed that. There hadn't been a bird all day, not a jay, not a raven, nothing, and that canyon is usually loud with them. By the time I had the fire going, Wes was in bad shape. His leg had swollen so much I had to loosen the splint. His face was gray. He was cold, and I had him in his bag, and mine, and he was still cold. I made him eat. I made him drink. Around six, with the canyon already in shadow, he grabbed my wrist and said, Cody, if you have to go, you go. Don't be stupid about me. I said I'd go in the morning. I'd tried both phones again from the edge of the bench and got nothing. I knew waiting was another gamble, but going over that ridge exhausted in the dark felt like a way to leave him without even reaching the truck. He said, I know. I'm saying if you have to go before that. I didn't know what he meant by it, and I didn't ask, and I've wondered since if he already understood something about what was down there that I didn't. He'd been the one looking at it through the scope. Friday night I sat up by the fire with the rifle and the hatchet, and Wes slept in the tent with the door tied open so I could see him. I'd pulled every piece of wood I could find on that bench into a pile, and I'd built the fire up so big it hurt to sit near it. I didn't care. I wanted light. The cold came down hard after dark. No wind. You could hear the fire, and you could hear Wes breathing, and that was everything. No bugs that late in the year. No owls. I kept thinking about the birds, how there hadn't been any all day, and I made myself stop thinking about it. It started a little after midnight. I heard somebody say my name, from down the slope. Not loud. Just a normal speaking voice at a normal volume. Cody. It was Wes's voice. I turned around and looked at the tent. Wes was in it. His boots were set beside the doorway. I could see his head near the entrance, and the shape of him in the two sleeping bags, and I could hear him breathing, slow and heavy. The way he breathes when the pain lets him go under. He hadn't moved. Cody, come down here. It was coming from the dark below the bench, somewhere between us and the grassy pocket. It was Wes. I don't mean it sounded like Wes. I mean it was his voice. The exact pitch of it. The little flat way he says my name. The way he's said it my whole life. I know my brother's voice better than I know my own. I didn't answer. I sat there with the rifle pointed at the dark, and I didn't move. Cody, I found something. Come down here. Then, after a while, in the same voice but with a different tone, a tone I'd heard that morning at the spring. I'm fine. I'm fine. Just give me a minute. Word for word. The same words Wes said lying in the rocks with his leg in the hole. The same rhythm. It even had the grunt at the end, the one that went up. I'd like to say I understood right then what was happening, but all I understood was that I was going to be sick. I looked over and spit into the dirt, and when I straightened up it said, from closer, maybe forty yards, don't be stupid about me. That was from six that evening. Those were the words Wes had said to me by the fire with his hand on my wrist. There was nobody else on that mountain when he said it. I'd been looking right at him. It had been close enough to hear that. Somewhere near the bench while there was still light. Close enough to hear us speaking normally. I stood up. I don't know why. I had the rifle up and I was pointing it at the voice and I said, as loud as I could, get out of here. It didn't say anything for a long time. Then it said, Cody, again. And this time it was wrong. It was my name in Wes's voice, but the voice was too even. It said it flat, with nothing behind it. It said it again and again, maybe ten times, the same way. Each time it was a little bit off from the last one. Higher, then lower, then too slow. Until it didn't sound like Wes at all. It was working through every way there was to say the word. Wes woke up on about the fifth one. I heard him move in the tent, and I heard him say, what is that? In a voice that was all the way awake. I told him to stay there. He didn't. He got himself up on his elbows and dragged himself to the door of the tent, dragging that leg. And he held his hand out for the rifle, and I gave it to him, because he's the shot, and I'm not. He lay on his belly in the tent door with the rifle braced on my pack, and the scope on the dark below us, and he said, build it up. I threw an armload onto the fire, then picked up the flashlight. The flames lit the near slope. The beam went farther, between the trunks, and caught a shape maybe sixty yards below us. It was standing in the beam, it was standing up, on two legs. It was wearing the hide. I can tell you exactly what it looked like because I held the light on it. It was tall, taller than Wes, and thin, and it was standing with its arms hanging straight down at its sides, and the cow elk's hide was over it. The hide fit it. The legs of the hide were pulled down over its arms and legs, and hung empty past its hands and feet, with the hooves on the ends of them just touching the ground. The elk's head was on top of its head and pulled back, so the empty face of the elk hung down behind its shoulders, and the ears stuck up on either side. And through a split in the hide across its chest, below the folded back neck, there was a face. It wasn't a face I can describe well. It was the color of the inside of a cheek. It had eyes, and they were too far apart and too high up, and it had a mouth that was a straight line, and it didn't have anything else. No nose that I could see. It was looking at us. It was standing there in the flashlight beam in that hide looking at us, with its arms down, and it was so completely still that the hide didn't move at all. Even the ears. Wes shot it. He put one in the center of the chest from sixty yards, lying on his belly, and I saw it hit. I saw the hide jump. The thing went over backward and down into the brush, and I heard it land. Wes worked the bolt, and we waited. I was yelling. I don't remember what. Wes was quiet. Then he said, Very low. Cody, it's getting up. It came up out of the brush without reaching for anything, its arms still at its sides, and stood in the same spot. Then its upper body turned toward the trees, while its feet stayed facing us. The feet followed a moment later. It lowered onto all fours and went into the trees with the same rocking gait as the night before. Both limbs on one side advancing together, then the other side. The empty hooves swung beside its hands. Wes fired twice more as it went, working the bolt between shots, and I saw the hide jump both times and it never changed speed. That was the last we saw of it that night. The voice didn't come back. We stayed awake. Wes lay in the tent door with the rifle until the sky got light. At one point he said his foot was going numb. We loosened the wrapping, and he could feel me touch his toes again, but he kept asking me to check. I kept the fire going. Around four, I had to go to the pines behind the bench for more dead limbs. I took the hatchet and my headlamp. Wes watched the slope while I worked, and nothing touched me. At first light I walked down to the edge of the trees where it had stood, with the rifle, while Wes watched the slope. There was hair on the ground. Tan elk hair and torn scraps of hide, one with a ragged hole through it. No blood that I could see. In a patch of dirt were long bare footprints with the toes spread apart. Close by them were deep marks where fingers had pressed into the ground. Beyond that, pine needles covered the slope, and I couldn't follow the prints any farther. I went back up to the bench, gave Wes the rifle, and told him I was leaving. He said yes. He refilled the magazine from the box while I got ready. I left a little after seven Saturday morning with a water bottle, some food, the hatchet, and the lighter. I had my phone, a headlamp, the truck keys, and Wes's little binoculars in my jacket. Everything else stayed with him. He had the rifle and the seventeen cartridges left from the original twenty, the stove, the food, the fire, and the matches. I told him I'd get people there as quickly as I could, and I told him I'd do it as fast as I could. If it took until Sunday, I'd keep coming. Then I shook his hand. I don't know why. We'd never shaken hands in our lives. The route out climbs the slope behind the bench to the ridge, follows the ridge north to the saddle, and then it's over the top and down the far side for six miles to the truck. The climb to the ridge is steep and I did it in forty minutes, which is about twice as fast as I'd done it with a pack. From there, I still had nearly an hour along the ridge before the saddle. I kept checking the phone, even up there I couldn't get a call through. I was moving. I had a good reason to move. The saddle is the one place on the whole route where you can turn around and see back the way you came. The ridge drops away, and you can look back down across the top of the canyon to the bench, which is a little gray shelf about a half mile off and a few hundred feet below you, with the pines sticking out of it. You can see the tent. You can see the smoke. The route curls around the head of the canyon, so it's nearly two miles back on foot, even though the camp looks close. I'm Ashley C. Joy Aladakun, whose music, moves from protests to daily commutes. It was about nine when I stopped there to drink water, and I turned around to look at the camp one more time, and I saw a man walking up the slope toward it. I put the binoculars on him. He was above the grassy pocket, on the last open part of the slope below camp. He was coming up out of the trees below the bench on the exact line I'd taken with Wes the day before, and he was walking at an easy pace, not hurrying, with his hands in his jacket pockets. He had on a green canvas jacket and a tan ball cap. I was wearing a green canvas jacket and a tan ball cap. I stood on the saddle and watched myself walk up to my brother. Even through the binoculars, I couldn't make out his face. His clothes and the way he moved were enough. I know how I walk. Amy makes fun of it. I walk with my toes out, and my shoulders out. I walk with my shoulders rolled forward, and when I go uphill, I take short steps and lean. This was that. Every bit of it. He stopped about halfway up, below the bench, and pulled one hand out of his pocket and raised it over his head and waved, and I felt that wave go down my arm. It was my wave. Big and slow. Arm all the way up, palm open. I've done it 10,000 times. Across the shop, across a parking lot, to Wes from the truck. I've done it ten thousand times. Then he put his hand back in his pocket and kept walking up. I don't remember deciding to go back. I remember I was running, and I remember the ridge, and I remember going down the slope to the bench at a speed where every step was a fall I caught at the last second. Even hurrying, with one slip leaving my knee scraped through my jeans, it took an hour and ten minutes to get back there. I know, because I looked at my watch when I started, and I looked at it when I came out onto the rock. The fire was burning. The tent was open. Wes wasn't in it. I yelled his name, and nothing answered, and I went through the tent and the packs were there and the rifle was gone, and I turned around in a circle on that bench yelling for him with my throat going raw, and then I heard him say, "Stop!" from behind me, from up in the rocks at the back of the bench where the pines are. He'd dragged himself up there, sixty feet across bare rock on his elbows and one knee with that leg behind him, and he'd gotten himself wedged into a crack between two boulders with his back to the stone, and he had the rifle up and the scope on me. I could see the end of the barrel moving a little, because his hands were shaking. I put my hands up. He said, "What's Amy's middle name?" I said, "Louise. Wes. It's me." He said, "What did I break at Grandma's when I was nine?" I said, "The window in the back bedroom, with the softball. You blamed me and I took it." He lowered the rifle about an inch and then he started crying, which I'd seen him do exactly once before, at Dad's funeral, and I went up the rocks to him and got in the crack with him. This is what he told me, and I'm going to put it down as close to his words as I can. Nearly two hours after I left, he heard somebody coming up the slope. He was in the tent door with the rifle, and he put the scope on the trees, and I walked out of them. Me. Jacket. Hat. My face. He said he nearly shot me anyway on principle, and then he thought I'd forgotten something or turned back because of the blowdown. And he lowered the rifle, and I stopped below the bench and waved at him, and he waved back, and I came on up. I sat down by the fire. He said I sat down on the far side of it from him, where I hadn't sat since he got hurt, and I put my hands out to it, and he noticed that I was holding my hands wrong, palms toward my own chest instead of toward the fire. He said he thought that was strange, but he didn't think anything else about it, because I was looking at him and I was smiling, and he said it was my smile. Then I said, "Where does it hurt?" He'd have expected me to ask how the leg was. He said I set it flat, with no feeling in it at all, and he said that when I set it, my mouth moved, but it didn't move right. It opened and shut on the words, but the lips didn't shape them. The sound just came out of the hole. He told me he'd been in the tent all morning with the rifle in his hands and that leg, and that he'd been thinking the whole time about the thing in the hide and how it had walked away from three rounds, and that when I sat down wrong by the fire, something in him just went cold and clear. He said he didn't let it show. He said, "It hurts in my leg, Cody." And he kept his face still, and he watched me. I asked him if he could stand up. He said no. I asked him if the leg was broken all the way through. He said he thought so. I asked him how long it would take me to come back with people, and he told me what I'd told him, as soon as I could, maybe not until Sunday, and he said I nodded and smiled and said, "That's a long time." Then I reached down and picked up the water bottle off the ground by the fire to hand it to him, and I picked it up with my right hand. I'm left-handed. I do everything with my left hand. I eat. I write. I throw. I pick things up. Wes has watched me do it for 26 years. He said that was when the other wrong details finally added up, and that he had the rifle across his lap pointed off to the side, and he started to bring it around, and I saw him do it. He said my face didn't change. I just set the water bottle down and stood up and said, "I'll go get help," in my voice, friendly, and turned around to walk off the bench, and when I turned, he saw the back of my head. There wasn't one. He said my hat was there, and my hair was there around the edges, and inside that, where the back of a skull goes, there was nothing. It was the same color as the face of the thing in the hide, raw and pink and smooth, with no hair on it, and it curved in instead of out, and it went down into my collar. He said I walked off the bench and down the slope, into the trees, in my jacket, with my walk. He didn't shoot. He said he had the shot, and he didn't take it, because it was my back, and he couldn't make his hands do it. Then he dragged himself up to the rocks, because he figured the thing would come back wearing me again, and next time, it would try harder, and he wanted stone behind him when it did. So that was the situation at 11 o'clock Saturday morning. I couldn't leave him, because the second I was out of sight, it would walk up onto the bench wearing me, and next time it wouldn't pick up the water bottle with the wrong hand. And I couldn't carry him out. And there was no third thing. I tried anyway. I cut two dead pine poles about ten feet long with the hatchet, and I lashed the rainfly between them with paracord and made a drag, the kind you see in old pictures, and I got Wes onto it, and tied him down and put the ends of the poles over my shoulders, and started up the slope behind the bench toward the ridge. We made about 300 yards in two hours. It was the worst two hours of my life up to that point, and I include the morning at the spring. The poles kept catching on rock and brush. Every time they caught, the drag jerked, and every time it jerked, Wes made that noise. Halfway up the first pitch, the splint shifted and he went limp. I stopped and held his leg still until he could answer me. He told me to keep going. Forty yards later, the poles hung up again, and he grabbed my wrist so hard I couldn't move. We sat there until he let go. During one of those stops, I looked back down the slope, and it was standing there watching us. In the daylight. A hundred and fifty yards below, among the trees on the lower part of the slope, where I could see it plain. It stood with its arms down, and that face in the hole in the split across the chest, and the head hung down its back with the ears up, and it didn't move. It didn't care that I could see it. It had followed us up off the bench, and it had stopped where it could watch, and it was waiting to see how far I'd get. I turned the drag and got Wes back down to the bench. Going down was faster, but it still took close to an hour. The thing stayed below us until we were about 60 yards away, then stepped aside into the trees. It didn't hurry. When I got Wes into the tent and looked downhill, I saw it below the front edge of the bench. It stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes it moved a few yards one way or the other, but it kept roughly 100 yards between itself and the camp. Wes was in rough shape. His leg had swollen again and his foot was tingling. He was sweating in air cold enough to see his breath. I eased the binding that had pulled tight and supported the leg on the packs. I got food into him, and I got water into him, and I built the fire back up, and then I sat down next to him in the tent door with the rifle, and we talked it out. We had to. It was a very difficult time for us, but it was a very difficult time for us. It was close to three, with only a few hours of daylight left, and I'd stopped believing we'd both see the next morning if we did nothing. We tried to work out what we'd actually seen. Wes did most of the talking, lying there with his jaw clenched. We were guessing, but we needed something to work with. It was patient. It had been around us since the first night, close enough to hear him tell me not to be stupid, and it had never once rushed anything. It had tested the tent while the fire was down, and we were both asleep. That was the first night, the zipper, when the fire had burned down to coals. The second night, with me awake beside the fire, it had stayed down the slope and talked. Yet it had sat beside the fire, wearing my face that morning. The flames alone weren't keeping it away. We thought it wanted one of us alone, and unable to resist. It had tried the tent door once, and it hadn't come inside. Wes thought it had been checking whether the door would open. It did open. It knew that now. It copied us, but the copy wasn't complete. Wes had seen my face and jacket, then something impossible where the back of my head should have been. The wrong hand had been another mistake. We couldn't know what it had watched or how much it understood. It had heard things we'd said quietly and repeated them hours later. Neither of us wanted to count on it making the same mistakes twice. We couldn't know what it had seen. The first shot had knocked it down, or made it drop, and the other two had done nothing we could see beyond jerking the hide. It had still chosen to leave. Wes thought the rifle might buy us a few seconds if it came close. That was all he was willing to promise. And it kept going back to the hide. Without it, the thing wearing my face had looked unfinished at the back. With it, something much larger filled the skin and moved inside it. Wes wondered whether the hide was doing more than disguising it. I asked Wyatt had left the hide in the grass Friday morning. He said he didn't know. We didn't know Wyatt did any of this. We just knew that the hide was something we could see and touch. Then he said the part I'd been trying not to think since the spring. He said, "It skinned that elk and sat it down in the grass and didn't take a bite of it. It didn't want the elk. It wanted what the elk was wearing. And now it's got an elk suit for the woods. And it's standing down there looking at a man with a leg he can't run on." I said it could have taken him that morning. He said, "Maybe it wants me asleep. Maybe it wants something it can wear. I don't know, Cody. I know it keeps checking whether I can stand up." I didn't have anything to say to that. We went through what we had. The rifle and 17 rounds. The hatchet. My knife. The lighter and half a box of matches. The tent. The stove and the fuel bottle, still partly full. We'd only been using the stove for meals and coffee. Wes kept looking at that bottle. When he told me what he was thinking, I said no before he finished. We'd be burning the only shelter we had. If I got caught inside it, he couldn't get me out. He waited until I stopped talking, then looked down the slope again. The thing was still there. We didn't know that fire would hurt it. We knew the hide was there. We knew the hide could catch, and that was more than we knew about anything underneath. I thought of the way it had stood up after the first shot. I kept thinking of that while we worked out where each of us would have to be. The plan was to let the fire die late that night and make the camp look asleep. Wes's empty boots would stay beside the tent door, where they'd been since I'd taken them off. I'd be inside his usual spot, in my sleeping bag, with spare clothes underneath to fill it out around my legs. It had already tried the zipper. If it did that again, I'd have to wait until it came through the opening. Thinking about that part made my mouth go dry. Wes would be in the rocks at the back of the bench with the rifle, in the crack where I'd found him. He could watch the tent and the fire from there, but anything below the front edge of the bench wouldn't see him. We'd get him settled before dark. He'd have his own sleeping bag, his uncut foam pad, and the rainfly wrapped around him against the cold. He said he could stay there all night if he had to. I cut an opening in the tent's right-hand wall, close to where my shoulder would be when I lay with my head toward the door. I overlapped the edges and held them with two spare tent stakes. From the front, it looked closed. From inside, I could pull the stakes and roll through without crossing the doorway. I asked him what happened if it didn't come to the tent. If it came to the rocks instead, for him. He said he'd keep the rifle on. If it came toward him, I was to get out of the tent while it was looking the other way. That wasn't much of an answer. It was the only one we had. I asked him what happened if I caught fire. He said, "Then you roll through the slit and you roll on the rock and I'll come put you out." I asked him how he was going to come put me out with one leg, and he said he'd figure it out. We moved him into the rocks at 4, while the thing was still down the slope. I cut the rainfly loose from the drawer. He put it on the drag poles and wrapped it around his sleeping bag, with his foam pad underneath. He had the rifle on the rock in front of him and the hatchet beside him. I carried up the packs, the water, the food, and the stove so we'd still have them if the tent burned. Then I helped him ease forward far enough to see around the boulder. We checked where I'd come out of the tent and where he could point the rifle without having me behind the thing. I told him I'd see him in the morning. He said, "Yeah." Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. That's what I told my dad. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Comfort Inn. It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book direct at sourcevilletales.com. Still wearing those old cargo shorts? If your wardrobe's due for an upgrade, but you don't know where to start, You need Stitch Fix. Your stylist learns your size, your style, and your budget, then sends a box pick just for you. They always nail the fit. No store, no hassle, no subscription required. Get started today at stitchfix.com. That's stitchfix.com. Then I went back down to the fire and built it up and sat by it with the fuel bottle in my coat, and I waited for it to get dark. By half past six it was dark. I kept the fire high until about ten, and I made a show of it. I talked to the tent. I said things to Wes who wasn't in it, about the leg, about the morning, about how I'd leave at first light again, and this time, I wouldn't come back until I had people. I said it loud. I don't know if it understood words or just sounds, but it had learned to say Cody by listening, so I figured it listened. Around 10, I stopped feeding the fire. I sat by it for another hour while it went down, and I let my head drop a few times and jerked it back up, putting on a show of fighting sleep. And then at 11, I stood up and stretched and went into the tent and zipped the door shut behind me. Inside, I lay in my sleeping bag, with my head toward the door and my boots still on. The bag was unzipped along my right side, so I could roll clear of it. Wes's empty boots stood just outside the entrance. The slit in the right wall was beside my shoulder, with the ends of the stakes where I could reach them. I kept the fuel bottle capped and upright beside me. The lighter was in my right hand. I'd rehearsed reaching for everything in daylight. Now I had to find it by feel. Then I lay there and breathed slow and loud through my nose and waited. The waiting was most of the night, and it was the worst part. The fire went from flames to embers under a crust of ash. At first they put a little orange on the tent door. That faded until I could barely make out the curve of the zipper. The cold worked through my sleeping bag. I could hear my own heart. I could hear Wes, once in a while, shift in the rocks 60 feet away. A tiny scrape, and every time he did it, I thought it was the thing. Midnight went by. One o'clock. I kept my watch under the edge of the sleeping bag, and pressed its light where the glow wouldn't show through the tent. 1.30. 2. At 2.15 a stick broke down the slope. Then nothing for ten minutes. Then another one, closer. Then nothing. It was coming the way it had walked away, slow, with those long pauses, and I had plenty of time to think about every way this was going to go wrong, and I thought about all of them. At 2.40 I heard it step up onto the rock of the bench. There's a sound bare feet make on sandstone that boots don't. A soft slap. I heard that. One. Then a long time. Then another. It was crossing the bench toward the tent at the pace of maybe one step a minute, and each step I could hear the hide. The dry hide. It creaked when it moved. The stiff legs of it dragged on the rock a little, and the hooves on the ends of the sleeves clicked. It stopped outside the door. I could feel that it had stopped. I don't know how else to say that. The air in the tent changed, and then the smell came through the nylon. I hadn't smelled it before. Until then, I'd only seen it at a distance. Wes had been the one close to it that morning. It smelled of the carcass in the grass. Old dried meat, and under that something sweet and rotten. And under that, the thing I'll never get out of my head. It smelled of the inside of Wes's truck. Coffee and diesel and his chew. It had the smell of my brother on it. The zipper started. Same as the first night. Slow. That long ripping sound and the change in pitch around the curve. While it moved, I took the cap off the bottle. Then I held still. The zipper kept going, all the way to the floor. The door fell open and the cold came in and it was there. The last coals put just enough light through the open door for me to see its outline. It bent to enter. The empty elk face had fallen forward over its head, with the ears standing out on either side. Under that, through the split in the hide, the other face came close to mine. I could make out the pale shape of it. Then I could hear its mouth opening. It said, Wes, in my voice. It reached in with one arm and the empty elk leg hung off the end of it. And the hoof touched my chest. And under the hoof, I felt the hand. Four fingers and a thumb. Long, cold, and dry. Feeling along the sleeping bag toward my throat. Slow. Finding its way. I brought the bottle up and threw its contents toward the hide above the reaching arm. Most of it struck the hanging elk face and the shoulder. The thing didn't jerk back. It stayed bent in the doorway, its hand searching along the bag. I struck the lighter and pushed it away from my body toward the wet hide. I don't remember the next part in order. I remember a light so bright and so sudden that I couldn't see, and heat on my face, and my eyebrows going. I remember the sound the hide made, which was a crackle and then a roar. And I remember that the hair went first, all at once, a sheet of flame spreading across the wet shoulder and hanging on the head. I remember the sound the hide made, hanging head. I remember it screaming. It screamed in my voice, and in Wes's voice, and in a voice I'd never heard, and then in an elk's voice, that high whistle a cow makes, and they were all coming out of it at once. I pulled the stakes beside my shoulder and rolled through the slit. I don't remember doing that either. I remember being on the rock on my hands and knees outside the tent with my hair burning on one side and slapping at it, and I remember rolling, and I remember the whole tent going up behind me in about three seconds, nylon and my sleeping bag, and the clothes inside, flames folding over the poles. It was inside the fire. It was standing up in the middle of the burning tent, with the tent poles bent around it, and the hide on fire from top to bottom, and it wasn't trying to get out. It was pulling at the hide. It had both hands up at the neck of it, where the face came through, and it was pulling, and the hide wouldn't come off. Whatever held the hide to it wasn't letting go. It pulled until its shoulders twisted, and the burning skin stayed in place. Then it came out of the fire toward me. It came through the side of the tent, and the burning nylon stuck to it and came with it, and it walked at me across the rock, burning, with its arms out and the elk legs flaming off the ends of them. The face was gone. There was no face anymore, just the fire. I was on my back on the rock, and I couldn't get up, and it was ten feet away, and then six. Wes shot it. The rifle cracked from the rocks off to my left. Wes had moved to get a shot from the side, clear of me. The thing's head snapped sideways. I heard the bolt, then another shot, and it went down on one knee. He worked the shot. I was on my back on the rock, burning, with its arms still reaching, and I crawled backward away from it until I hit stone. It got up. It got up on fire and stood there with its arms down, and I thought it was going to come again. And instead, its upper body twisted toward the slope. Its feet followed, and it went over the sloping edge of the bench. It went down on all fours. Even burning, it had that rocking gait, both limbs on one side moving together. It was faster now, stumbling through the breaks in the rock toward the grassy pocket. Bits of burning hide fell behind it. A few dead leaves flared where they landed, then went dark against the frost-wet ground. It got there. I could see the light stop. The burning shape rose in the pocket where the elk was. It stayed upright for a few seconds, then folded down to the ground. It was still burning down there, low and orange in the grass, when I finally got my legs under me. I went up to Wes in the rocks. He'd dragged himself out onto the open rock on his elbows to get the angle for the last shots, and he was lying on his face with the rifle in his hands, and the bolt open, and his hands shaking so hard the gun rattled on the stone. He looked at me and he said, Your hair. I said I knew. He said, Is it dead? And I said, I thought it was. He still had his sleeping bag. I pulled my spare coat from the pack and sat against the boulder beside him, watching the slope until the sky got gray. The first thing I heard Sunday morning was a jay. A pinion jay, down in the canyon, making that racket they make, and then another one answering it, and then a raven going over. The birds were back. I sat on the rock next to Wes listening to them, and that's when I believed it. I went down at first light with the rifle. The tent was a black ring of melted nylon with the poles sticking up out of it. The things I'd carried to the rocks were untouched. There was a scorch mark across the bare stone, and a little melted fabric stuck near the fire ring. I stopped there long enough to make sure nothing was still burning. On the slope below were charred scraps of hide and small black marks among the wet leaves. None of the brush was burning. It was in the grassy pocket, about six feet from the carcass. The hide had burned down to a black crust with the four legs spread. The empty skin of the elk's face lay collapsed at one end. The actual head was still on the carcass a few feet away. Inside the burned hide was something much smaller than the thing we'd watched come up the slope. Folded up, it was barely three feet long. Its knees were drawn against its chest and its arms were locked around them. Everything was blackened. The feet were long and narrow with the toes spread. The same feet I'd seen prints of. Its hands looked too large for the body. The head curved inward at the back. There was no recognizable face left on the front. It wasn't breathing. I stood there with the rifle on it for a long time to be sure. Then I nudged it with a long branch while keeping the rifle ready. It was stiff. Dried. Stiff. The same as the elk. I didn't touch it with my hands. I went back up to the bench. Then I left. For real this time. First I gave Wes back the rifle, with fourteen cartridges remaining, and got a fire going where he could reach the wood. He had his sleeping bag, water, food, and the matches. I kept the lighter, my phone, and the truck keys. It was after eight by then. I told him I'd bring people as soon as I could. He said he knew. At the saddle I looked back once. Nobody was on the slope below the bench. I reached the truck around noon and got a signal in Thoreau a little after one. I called 911 and gave them the forest road number, the washout, and the location I'd marked on my phone at camp. Then I called Amy. I told her Wes was alive and help was being arranged. A deputy met me in town, and I drove back to the washout to meet the rescue team. Six of them were there before four, with a litter, medical gear, and headlamps. I walked them in. It was after eight and fully dark when we reached the bench. Wes was sitting by the old fire ring with the rifle across his lap. He was alive. He'd dragged himself down out of the rocks after I left and kept a fire going with what I'd left him. He said the birds had been going all day. When he heard us coming, he called my name but kept the rifle across his lap until he saw the rescuer's lights and heard them answer. While they stabilized his leg, I told the team leader about the burned thing below us. He took another rescuer down to the pocket. They were gone, close to half an hour. When they came back, neither one tried to tell me it was an elk. The leader said it was dead and marked the spot for the sheriff's deputies. Then they finished securing Wes in the litter. We carried him out through the night, taking turns along the narrow stretches and passing the litter over the rock bands. I stayed where Wes could see me whenever the ground allowed it. We reached the trucks early Monday morning. He's home now. He walks with a hitch, but he walks. We haven't been back to the spring. Dad's where he wanted to be. 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