A Terrifying Skinwalker Encounter in the New Mexico Wilderness

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For 22 years, I made my living walking through other people's ruined houses. I was a property claims adjuster for an insurance company in Lubbock, Texas. Whatever had done the damage, the job was the same. Hail, fire, a split pipe under a slab, a tornado that tore the end off a double wide and left the plates stacked neatly in the cabinets. I parked at the curb, pulled on my boots, and went through every room with a clipboard and a moisture meter while the family stood out on the lawn and watched me through the windows. Wrote down what could be saved and what could not. I put a number on it. Then I drove to the next house. By 47, I had stopped feeling much about any of it, and I had stopped feeling much about the rest of my life, too. My wife, Annette, left in the spring of 2018, after 20 years. She told me at our kitchen table that I walked through our house the same way I walked through the burned ones, writing things down, deciding what was worth keeping. But I had no answer for her. Our son, Cody, was in his second year at Texas Tech, 12 minutes from my apartment, and he did not call. In July of 2019, I sat in my truck in a Walmart parking lot on 50th Street for an hour and a half with the engine running, because my hands would not let go of the wheel. The man at the urgent care clinic called it a panic attack and gave me a pamphlet. A few weeks later, waiting to have a tooth looked at, I picked up a bookstore magazine that was two years old. There was a short piece in it about a man named Corbin Vance, who ran a 14-day course in the mountains of northern New Mexico. No tents, no stoves, no phones. Each student carried a knife, a wool blanket, a tin cup, and a tarp. For two weeks, you slept on the ground, made fire with your hands, ate what the group carried in, and what you could catch, and spent three nights completely alone. The course was quoted saying that most people go their whole lives without once finding out what they are. The course cost $2,400. I paid it that night at my kitchen counter with a beer going warm beside the laptop. I had never slept outside in my life except for one Boy Scout campout when I was 11, and all I remembered of that was being cold. I told myself I was paying to be made into somebody different. I think now, I was paying to be somewhere nobody could reach me for two weeks. I got that, and a great deal more. Eight of us walked into those mountains in September. Four of us walked out. We met in Cuba, New Mexico, on the evening of Friday, September 6th, 2019, in the gravel lot behind a motel on the main road through town. Cuba is a string of gas stations, cafes, and a feed store along the highway at the foot of the mountains, and the high country rises behind it to the east, dark with timber, the top of it flat and long against the sky. It was nearly dark when I pulled in. The air smelled of diesel and dry sage and somebody's supper frying. Six of us had paid. Corbin stood us in a half circle under the one light pole in the lot and had us say our names and where we came from and why we were there. Grace Witt went first. She was 63, a retired middle school science teacher from Show Low, Arizona, widowed four years. She was small and wiry, with short white hair and a hickory walking stick worn smooth at the grip, and she said she had come because she was sick of people telling her what she was too old to do. Theo Lindqvist was 19 and from Scottsdale. He was tall and narrow in the shoulders, with a scab on his lower lip he kept touching with his tongue. He said his father had signed him up. Then he looked at the gravel and said nothing else, and nobody pushed him. I found out later that his mother had died that winter, and he had spent most of the spring in his bedroom in his father's house with the blinds shut. Kyle and Don Ferris were in their early thirties and came from Denver. Kyle sold commercial real estate and talked fast and said this was the reset the two of them had needed for a long time. Don stood a step apart from him with her arms crossed over her jacket and said she was there because Kyle was there. Neither of them looked at the other while the other was talking. Shane Doyle was 38 and from Mesa, Arizona, with a shaved head and a thick neck and the logo of a private security company stitched on his cap. He told us inside the first minute that he had done two tours in Iraq with the Army and that he had been sleeping in the dirt while the rest of us were in high school. He said it in a joking way. He did not mean it as a joke. Then it was me. I said my name and Lubbock and insurance when Corbin asked why I had come. I said I didn't know. He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder and left it there and said that was the most honest answer he had heard in a long time. Corbin was close to 60. He was lean and brown with deep lines cut across his forehead and around his eyes and he wore his gray hair and one long braid down the middle of his back. His shirt was deer hide. He had tanned himself pale and soft and dark with grease at the cuffs and collar on his feet. He wore a black coat and a white coat. He had a black coat and a white coat. He had a white coat and a white coat. back of his truck. Kyle had a bag of beef jerky rolled up inside his socks, and Corbin took it out and held it up and smiled and dropped it in the bin, and Kyle laughed and Don did not. Shane had a second knife in his boot. That went in the bin. Theo had brought a pair of rubber sandals for a round camp, and Corbin put a hand on the back of Theo's neck and told him one pair of footwear was the rule, that his feet would learn. The sandals went in the bin. Our phones went into a steel ammunition can with our wallets and keys. Corbin locked the can inside the toolbox on his truck and hung the key on a cord around his neck. The only link to the world we carried after that was a small orange satellite messenger in a leather pouch on Corbin's belt. He showed it to us once. He said it was for a broken leg or a heart attack and nothing less, and that in eleven years he had never pressed the button. I learned later that Corbin had never filed a trip plan with the Forest Service and did not hold an outfitter permit for that wilderness. He told people the government did not own the ground. What it meant in practice was that the only people on earth who knew where we were going were Corbin and Bree. We walked off the end of the trail within the first hour and did not see a trail again for thirteen days. The top of those mountains is a wide high plateau, nearly all of it above ten thousand feet, and the top of those mountains is a wide high plateau, and the top of the parks it is named for are open meadows of tall grass with small creeks winding through them, and the ground in them is soaked. Every step sank. Water came over the tops of my boots before noon and stayed there. Between the meadows stood blocks of spruce and fir so thick the light under them was brown. We crossed elk trails and cattle trails and the deep black holes where cattle had wallowed. My head pounded from the altitude. Theo threw up twice before lunch and walked on with strings of it on his chin. Grace planted her stick and kept going without a word. Corbin led, reading the land by the sun and by shapes on the skyline I could not pick out, and Bree walked at the back of the line behind me, and in eight hours of walking I did not hear her once. We slept the first night at the edge of a meadow under spruce. Corbin made his way to me. He made fire with a hand drill, a straight stalk spun between his palms into a notch in a flat piece of dry wood, and in less than a minute he had a coal, and in less than two he had flame. We each got a cup of rice and lentils boiled with salt. Then it was dark, and the cold came down out of the clear sky, and I learned what the ground is. It was hard everywhere at once. It pressed into my hip bones and my shoulder and the back of my skull, and the cold came up out of it. I went through the tarp and the blanket and settled in my kidneys. I woke what felt like every hour. Sometime in the night, elk bugled out in the meadow, high and screaming and then grunting, and Kyle sat up and asked what that was, and Corbin's voice came out of the dark, quiet and pleased, telling him to listen. In the morning, everything I owned was white with frost. The second day we walked east and the plateau began to tilt. The meadows ended and the timber closed in. We went down through old spruce where the trees had fallen across each other in heaps. Gray trunks stacked four and five deep, and for hours we climbed over and under them, hands black with pitch, shins bleeding through our pants. Nobody talked. The only sounds were breathing and the knock of boots on dead wood, and once in a while Shane swearing. In the middle of the afternoon, the ground under the trees turned to gray rock, and we came out of the timber on the other side of the mountain. We were in the middle of the afternoon, and we were onto the bench. It was a long, flat shelf of ground, three or four hundred yards from end to end, and maybe a hundred deep. Behind it, on the uphill side, rose a rim of gray granite, fifty or sixty feet high, cracked into blocks and columns, with spruce growing out of the cracks along its top. In front of it, on the downhill side, the ground ended. There was a short slope of loose rock and juniper, and then nothing, and from the edge you could look straight at the ground. Straight down into a canyon so steep and so narrow that the bottom of it was already in shadow by the middle of the afternoon. You could hear water running down there. You could not see it. A spring came out from under the foot of the rim and ran into a pool lined with bright green moss, and around the pool and along the whole length of the bench stood a grove of aspen, a couple of hundred trees, their trunks white and smooth, and marked all over with black. Corbin set his pack down and spread his arms and told us we were home. This was his ground. He had brought every course here for four seasons. Ever since the spring he moved down from Oregon and found the spot he had picked in the Yemez closed for a fire. He told us not to go down into the canyon under any circumstances, that the rock on the slope was rotten and would slide out from under a man. Then he walked us through the aspens and showed us the carvings. The black marks on the trunks were names. Spanish sheep herders had run their flocks up into those mountains every summer for a hundred years, and they had cut their names and dates into the soft white bark with their knives while they watched the sheep. The cuts had healed into raised black scars, swollen and spread by the years. J. Martinez, 1938. A cross with a date under it. A woman's face in profile. A horse. Corbin ran his fingers over them and talked about the men who had made them, alone up there for months with their dogs and their sheep. Near the spring, on a separate stand of younger trees, there were newer names. These were Corbin's students. On the last day of every course, he said, each person who finished carved their name and the year on a tree beside the water. It was the only mark anyone was allowed to leave. I walked among them while the others went back to unpack. There were twenty or so names, from two thousand sixteen, two thousand seventeen, and two thousand eighteen. Twenty-two years of reading waterlines on drywall had trained me to read damage without meaning to, and I could not stop doing it. A cut in living bark heals from the edges inward, and the scar darkens and lifts and spreads a little every season. The two thousand sixteen names were wide and black and ridged at the edges. The two thousand eighteen names were thin and brown, and still sharp inside the edges. I could not stop doing it. There was one that said Brianna T. Two thousand sixteen. It was thin and brown and still sharp inside. It looked no older than the two thousand seventeen names, and maybe younger. I noticed it the way I noticed everything. I filed it and went on. That night at the fire, I asked Bree if that was her name on the tree by the spring, and she smiled and said yes, that was her, and Corbin reached over and squeezed the back of her neck and said, she was the best student he had ever had. Theo asked if we would get to carve our names. Corbin said that on day fourteen, those of us who finished would. I woke sometime after midnight with my bladder aching from the cold. The fire was down to a few red coals. I got up with my blanket around me and walked a short way into the aspens, and when I was done, I looked up at the rim. The moon had gone down behind the plateau an hour or so before, and the stars were so many and so bright that I could not see them. I could not see them, and I could not see them. I could not see them. Bree was sitting on top of the rim, at the very edge, sixty feet above the camp. She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, facing away from us, out over the canyon. She did not move. I stood in the aspens with my hands going numb and watched her for what must have been ten minutes, and in that time, she did not shift or scratch or turn her head once. I went back to my blanket and laid down on the ground, and I looked up at the sky. Bree was sitting on top of the rim, and I stood up and laid down, and told myself that people who live outdoors learn to be still. In the morning there was frost on every blanket in camp. Bree's was rolled tight and tied at the bottom of her pack, and it was perfectly dry. The third day was Monday, and it was the day we built our shelters, and the day I began to understand hunger. Two cups a day of rice and lentils is not starving. I know that. People live on less. But we were working at ten thousand feet from first light until dark, cutting spruce poles with our knives, dragging them out of the timber, lashing ridge poles between trees, stretching our tarps, and then thatching them over with boughs, until each shelter was a long, low hump of green. You could crawl into feet first. By noon my hands were shaking. By the middle of the afternoon I was thinking about food every minute and about nothing else, and the thoughts had a terrible, specific quality. I thought about the fried egg sandwiches my mother made when I was nine. I thought about the jerky in the bin in the back of Corbin's truck. I watched Kyle chewing on a spruce tip and hated him for having it. In the evening, Corbin taught us the hand drill. You knelt on a flat board of dry wood and set the end of a long, straight stalk into a notch cut in its edge. And you spun the stalk between your palms, running your hands down it as it turned. And when they reached the bottom, you brought them back up to the ground. I thought about the fried egg sandwiches my mother made up to the top and did it again, fast, without stopping, until the dust in the notch went black and began to smoke and a coal formed in it. Corbin did it without any visible effort. Bree had a coal before the rest of us had our board set. Grace got hers on the fourth try with a grunt of pure triumph, and held the smoking little nest up over her head. I spun until the skin of both palms came away in wet white flaps, and the stalk was slick with blood, and I never got more than smoke. Does checking your bank statements feel like digging through a dusty attic full of forgotten subscriptions and old free trials? Experian can help take the pain out of canceling by handling it for you. Think of it as Operation Get Your Sanity Back. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable, so get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Results will vary, not all subscriptions eligible, savings not guaranteed, paid membership with connected payment account required. See Experian.com for details. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. Okay. At supper. Bree passed her cup of rice to Theo. She did it so smoothly I almost missed it. Theo looked at her and she nodded. And he ate it in about five seconds, crouched over it. When Shane asked her why, she said she fasted during courses. She said it kept her clear. Corbin said it was something he had never been strong enough to do himself and looked at her across the fire with an expression I can only call pride. The cattleman came that afternoon. Before the hand drill lesson, I heard him before I saw him. The clink and scrape of shod hooves on rock somewhere north along the bench. And then a man on a bay horse came out from the spruce at the end of the Aspen grove and stopped. He was in his sixties, heavy through the chest, in a sweat-stained gray felt hat and a canvas coat gone pale at the shoulders. A lever action rifle rode in a scabbard under his right leg. His name was Joe Begay. He lived near Counseling. He was a counselor on the west side of the mountain, and his family had run cattle on a grazing permit up there for three generations. Three of his cows had gone missing from the high meadows the week before, and he had been riding the timber looking for them. What I remember most is the horse. Joe tried to ride it on into the Aspens toward our camp, and it would not go. It stopped at the edge of the trees and set its front feet and threw its head up, and when Joe kicked it, it backed instead. Three, four, five steps, with the whites showing all the way around its eyes and its nostrils open and fluttering. It kept swinging its head toward the spring. I looked where it was looking. Bree was standing beside the pool with an armload of firewood, watching the horse, smiling. Joe looked at her for a long time. Then he got down and tied the horse to a spruce and walked in. Corbin went out to meet him with his hand held out and his voice already going soft and warm. Joe did not take the hand. They talked at the edge of the Aspens for ten minutes or so, and I was splitting kindling close enough to hear some of it. Joe told Corbin he had asked him the summer before, and the summer before that, to take his people somewhere else. He said this place was not good. He said his grandmother would not bring sheep up onto this bench when he was a boy, not for any grass. Corbin answered that he understood. He said he had sat with elders, that he had the deepest respect for the old ways, and he used a word in Navajo that I did not know, and that I gathered from Joe's face he had said wrong. He said the land did not belong to the Forest Service or to any one people, that it belonged to whoever came to it with an open heart. Joe let him finish. Then he asked how many students Corbin had brought this year. Corbin said six. Joe asked how many he took. He took out last year. Corbin said that everyone who chose to finish had finished. Joe looked at him a while longer, and then went back to his horse. I was gathering deadwood along the foot of the rim later, when he came riding back past the north end of the grove. He pulled up when he saw me. He sat looking down at me with his hands crossed on the saddle horn, and the horse stood with its ears flat and its hindquarters turned away from the Aspens, and Joe asked my name. I told him. He said, "Stay together. Don't let anybody go off alone." He said that if I heard somebody I knew calling me out in the trees at night, I should not answer, and I should not go. I asked him what he meant by somebody I knew. He said, "Anybody. Even one of these." He tipped his head toward the camp. Then he asked me how long the girl had been with Corbin. I told him three seasons. He nodded once, a small nod. I had told him something he already knew. He said he would come back in a few days and see how we were doing. Then he turned the horse and rode north into the spruce, and the sound of the hooves went away over the rock. I am not proud of what I thought then. I thought he was an old man with a grazing grudge and a head full of stories, and I felt embarrassed for him and for Corbin both. It was the same embarrassment I had felt a hundred times at claim sites, standing in a yard while two neighbors argued over whose tree had fallen on whose fence. That night at the fire, Corbin talked about Joe in a gentle, sorrowful voice. He said it was a tragedy how far those people had drifted from their own teachings, and that a man like that saw evil in a place because he no longer knew how to see anything else. Shane agreed with him. Grace did not say anything. She was watching Bree, who sat with her back to the fire, looking out at the dark where the horse had stood. "I am not proud of what I thought, but I am proud of what I saw, and I am proud of what I saw." "I am proud of what I saw, and I am proud of what I saw." "I am proud of what I saw." "I am proud of what I saw." "I am proud of what I saw." there. After a while, very softly, a woman began to sing. It was the tune, the little rising tune Theo hummed. A woman's voice, low and warm, with no words, the notes going up and coming down and starting again. I heard Theo's shelter rustle. I heard him say, once, in a voice that cracked in the middle. Mom. I got out of my shelter faster than I have ever moved in my life. Theo was crawling out of his, on his hands and knees, and I caught him by the back of his shirt and hauled him down and held on. He fought me. He was crying, and he said it was her. It was the song she used to sing to him when he was small. She had made it up. Nobody else on earth knew it. Grace was there then, I don't know how, kneeling on his other side, with her hand flat on his chest. The singing went on out in the dark for a few more breaths. Then it stopped in the middle of a note, and the aspen leaves crunched once, and there was nothing. Corbin was sitting up in his shelter by then. He told us it was cow-elk calling, or coyotes. He said the mind fills in what it wants when it is tired and hungry, and that hearing the dead was one of the oldest experiences there is, and that Theo should treat it as a gift. I looked across the dark at Bree's shelter. Her blanket lay inside it in a long, low shape. I couldn't tell if she was under it or not. In the morning we checked the snares. Five of the twelve had caught something. We knew they had caught something because the loops had been closed tight around a body and dragged out along the runs, and there was hair caught in the knots, gray rabbit fur, and the red fur of a squirrel. But every catch was gone. There was no blood. There was no torn cord. Each of the five snares had been opened. Carefully, the loop worked loose and spread wide again and set back across the run exactly where we had placed it. By the spring, on the young aspen with Brianna's name on it, hung the skin of a rabbit. It had been taken off in one piece, rolled down from the neck to the hind feet, and pulled free, and turned inside out so that the wet side faced the world. It was pushed down over a broken stub of branch at the height of a person's face. It was still soft. Flies were already walking on it. Corbin was delighted. He stood in front of that skin with his hands on his hips and told us that something out there was teaching us, and that we should be honored. Shane said somebody was screwing with us, and that the somebody was that cattleman. Kyle said maybe it was a bobcat. Dawn walked away from the tree and sat down on a rock with her back to the ground. Corbin was back to all of us and stayed there. Bri stood next to Corbin with her bare feet in the wet moss at the edge of the pool, and looked at the skin, and did not say anything at all. Around noon, Corbin went to his shelter for the satellite messenger and found the leather pouch on his belt empty. He had hung the belt on a stub inside his shelter every night. He looked through his blanket and his pack and his tarp and the bows on the floor, calmly at first and then less calmly, and then he made all of us empty our packs and put them on the floor. He said, onto the rock in front of him while he watched. It was nowhere. Bri helped him look. She said it might have been a pack rat, that they would carry off anything small, and that she would search the rocks along the rim. Corbin sat back on his heels and was quiet for a while. Then he said that it didn't matter. He said we had not come here to be rescued. Shane said that if that was how it was going to be, he was walking out. Corbin told him nobody was keeping him there. He pointed to Corbin and said, the trailhead was two days that way. Shane looked where he pointed, at miles of spruce going up and away into blowdown and bog, and stood there with his jaw working, and did not go. None of us knew the way back. We had followed Corbin in, and none of us had paid the slightest attention. That afternoon, I heard Kyle and Dawn fighting behind their shelter in low, furious whispers, the kind people use when they have been married long enough to know exactly what will hurt. She wanted to leave. He said they had paid for this, and they were not leaving and she was not going to ruin it, the way she ruined everything. I walked away so I would not hear the rest. Grace found me down by the snare line. She stood beside me with both hands stacked on top of her stick and said she wanted to tell me something and see if I thought she was crazy. She said she had taught thirteen-year-olds for thirty-one years, and she knew when somebody was putting on a show. She said Brie had been there for a long time, and she knew when somebody was putting on a show. She said Brie had been there for a long time, and she knew when somebody was putting on a turned from a pain into a kind of clean, weightless lightness, and that frightened me more than the pain had. I did not light a fire. I could not have lit one if I tried. When the sun went down behind the spruce, the cold came into the park all at once, and I crawled under my tarp and wrapped the blanket around me twice and lay with my knees pulled up and my hands between my thighs. Sometime in the middle of that first night, someone called my name from the bench below the rim. Martin, Martin, you up there? It was Kyle's voice. It was fast and a little breathless, his voice exactly, and it came up through the spruce, from the direction of the south end. I lay still and did not answer. I thought of Joe Begay, sitting on his horse with his hands crossed on the horn. Anybody, even one of these. After a minute it called again, closer to the foot of the rim. Martin, hey, Martin. Then it was quiet for a long time, so long that I began to believe it had been Kyle after all, sneaking off his solo to find company, and that he had given up and gone back. Then Corbin's voice said my name. It said it softly, the warm, close voice he used at the fire, and it came from the top of the rim, from inside the spruce, perhaps fifty years later. Yards away, it said, Martin, it's all right. Come here. I pushed my face into the wool of the blanket and bit down on it. The last voice was mine. I had never heard my own voice from the outside, except on an answering machine years ago, and I did not like it then. It was flat, and a little nasal, and it had the West Texas in it, that I had spent my working life trying to hide from customers. It said, Martin, in the dark, at the end of the night. It said it just once, in the tired tone I used when I walked into a house, and saw the waterline at the top of the baseboards. Then it was quiet, and stayed quiet, and I lay there until the sky over the spruce turned gray. In the morning I stood my stick upright in the ground. Sometime around the middle of the morning I looked up and saw Bree standing at the far edge of the park, on the east side, between two spruce. She was looking at me, or at the stick. I raised a hand to her, and she did not raise one back. She stood there without moving, and I sat on my blanket and looked at her across the gold grass, and I counted to five hundred under my breath, before I made myself look away. When I looked back, she was gone. I had not heard her come, and I did not hear her go. That day was Friday the 13th. I didn't think of it then. By the end of the first week I had stopped thinking in dates at all, only in days. The moon came up over the east rim of the canyon a little after dark, and it was full. I have never seen the moon the way I saw it that night. There was no smoke, and no city for a hundred miles, and the air at ten thousand feet was thin and dry, and when it cleared the trees, it lit the park so brightly that I could see the gold in the grass, and the black water of the river. Every single spruce stretched across the meadow toward me. I sat in the mouth of my shelter with my blanket around my shoulders. I had not eaten in two days, and I was not sleepy at all. My mind was very clear and very quiet, and I remember thinking, with a kind of satisfaction, that I could see everything. So I saw it when it came out of the trees on the far side of the park. It came out on four legs. At first I thought it was an elk calf or a big dog, but it moved wrong for either one. Its front end was low to the ground, and its back end was high, and its legs were too long for its body, the back ones especially, so that it moved with a strange tilting, rocking gait, its head down near the grass. It was gray in the moonlight, and its outline was ragged. Loose material hung off it and swung when it moved. It came to the middle of the up. It unfolded. The back legs straightened and the spine came up through them, joint by joint, and the long front legs came up off the ground and hung down, and they were arms. It was taller standing than any man I have ever seen, seven feet, perhaps more. It was very thin. Its arms hung past its knees. A hide was draped over its shoulders and down its back, a ragged coat of gray and tan fur, and on top of it was a long, long, long leg. It was very thin, and its arms hung down near the ground, and its top of its head, pulled down over its brow, was the head of a coyote, the dried muzzle pointing forward and the ears standing up, so that in the moonlight it had two faces, one above the other, and I could not make out the lower one at all. Where the hide did not cover it, its skin was pale. The moon lay on its ribs and its long thighs, and the skin there was smooth and hairless and almost white. Over its left shoulder it carried a person. The person hung down its back with their arms swinging loose. They were naked. I could see the length of one pale leg and one bare foot bouncing against the thing's side as it walked, and the back of a head with dark hair, and one hand that trailed down almost to the grass and swung with each step and did not ever close or grab or move on its own. The thing walked upright across the park, through the gold grass, past the creek, in front of the house, and in front of the house, and in front of the house, and in front of me. It did not look toward my shelter. It went straight to the east side of the park, to the gap in the spruce, where the ground ended at the lip of the rim. At the edge, it stopped. Then it dropped forward onto all fours again with the body still across its back, and it went over the edge of the rim head first. I heard it on the rock below. A scrape, and then nothing. I did not move until the moon was high over the park, and all the shadows had shortened to nothing. I told myself I had not eaten in two days. I told myself about the effects of altitude and hunger and cold on a 47-year-old mind. And I had a lot of material, because I had read the pamphlet from the urgent care clinic more times than I would admit to anyone. None of it worked. I had seen the bare foot. I had seen the hand that did not close. It did not occur to me until much later to be ashamed that I did not go down. That I did not climb down the crack in the rim in the moonlight, and walk the bench and look in each of the shelters and find out who was missing. I stayed where I was. I told myself it was Joe's rule. It was not Joe's rule. It was that I had seen it stand up. On Saturday morning, I stood my stick up again. Bree did not come that I saw. I sat all day with my back against a spruce, and my knife on my knee, and watched the east side of the park. And nothing came out of the trees, and nothing went into the grass. In the late afternoon, a raven landed in the grass, where the thing had stood up and walked around in a small circle, and flew off again, and that was all. I did not sleep that night. I sat inside my shelter with my blanket around me and my knife in my hand. There was no moon for the first hour after dark, and the park was black, and I listened. It came sometime before the moon rose. I heard nothing walk. I heard nothing at all. I only became aware of the wind. I could hear it. I could smell it. It smelled of old fat gone sour and wet fur, and something under those that I knew from the worst houses I had ever walked, the ones where the power had been out of control. I could smell it. I could smell it. I could smell it. I could smell it. for a week in August. Then Bree's voice said softly, right against the tarp, Martin, your stick is down. I had stood it up that morning and pushed it into the ground with both hands. The edge of the tarp by my head began to lift. I don't remember deciding to do it. I swung the knife at the gap. I felt it hit something, felt the blade drag through something that gave and then caught, and I heard a sound out there in the dark that I had no way to make sense of. It was not a scream. It was a long, low, rattling hiss. The sound of air coming out of something big through a narrow place. The tarp dropped back down. Something moved off fast through the grass on four feet. And then, from far out across the park, in the trees on the east side, I heard a voice start humming. It was the little rising tune with no words. It was Theo's voice, the soft, cracked voice of a 19-year-old boy. I sat with the knife until it got light. When I could see, I looked at the blade. There was a smear of something dark on it, dark brown and nearly dry, tacky between my fingers, and caught in it were three or four coarse hairs, gray and tan, banded with black. The stick lay flat in the grass in front of my tarp. It had not been knocked over. It had been pulled out of the tree. The solo ended at noon. I rolled my blanket and my tarp and climbed down the crack in the rim with my legs shaking under me to find out which one of us was missing. They came in one at a time over the next hour and sat down around the dead fire without saying much. Grace came first. Thinner in the face than she had been three days before, her eyes sunk and bright. Shane came down out of the timber with his jaw set and his hands shaking. Kyle came in from the north end and went straight to Dawn when she came up out of the spruce along the canyon edge and she let him put his arms around her and stood inside them without putting hers around him. She told us later that she had heard Kyle calling her every night of the three from down on the canyon slope below her site, asking her to come down to him because he had hurt his leg. She had not gone. She said she had sat each night with her hands over her ears and said the alphabet backwards out loud. Until it stopped. Corbin was waiting by the fire ring when I got there. He hugged each of us as we came in and held on a long time and told each of us we had done it. Bree sat on her flat rock beside him with her feet tucked under her. Across the inside of her left forearm, from just below the crook of the arm, nearly to the wrist, ran a long fresh cut. It had been closed with spruce pitch, smeared on thick and gone amber, and the skin along both sides of it was puckered and dark. She saw me looking. She said she had slipped coming down off the rim and caught it on the granite. Theo did not come in. When I said his name, Bree answered before Corbin could. She said she had gone by Theo's site on Saturday morning and his stick was down. So she went in. She said he was sitting in his junipers crying and he told her he was finished. He couldn't do it. He wanted to go home. She said she had walked him up to the west end of the bench and pointed him toward the trailhead and told him how to keep the sun on his face in the morning and on his back in the afternoon. She said she had done that before for people who needed it. Corbin nodded slowly. He looked sad and kind. He said, "Every year, one walks out early." He said it was part of the course and always had been. He said the mountain decided who stayed. I sat on the cold ground and listened to him say it, and the hair rose up along my arm. I didn't say anything. Grace and I walked down to Theo's site together after that. Nobody stopped us. He had been put at the very south end of the bench, where the flat ground gave way to the loose slope and the loose slope gave way to air. His tarp was still strung between two junipers. Under it, his blanket lay folded in a neat square with his tin cup set on top of it, and his knife was stuck point-first in a juniper branch at the height of my chest. I thought I was dead. His wool sweater was folded beside the blanket, and at the front edge of the tarp, side by side, with the toes pointed out and the laces tucked inside, stood his boots. Both pairs of his wool socks were rolled into a ball and pushed down into the left one. Grace stood looking at them with her mouth working. Then she said, very quietly, that a boy does not walk out of these mountains barefoot. We both knew the gear list by heart. One pair of footwear, worn on your feet. Corbin had stood over us on that blue tarp at the trailhead and taken Theo's sandals out of his pack and dropped them in the plastic bin, and they were sitting in the back of Corbin's truck two days' walk away. Something else about that sight bothered me, though it took me days to put it into words. In the other years, Corbin told us that night, Bree had helped the Quitters pack their things and carried them off to the west end of the bench. Nobody had packed anything here. Theo's things had only been folded and set out neatly, the way we had all been taught to keep our sights, with the same care it had used to reset our snares. I think it meant to come back and clear the site before the solo ended. I think the reason it never did was the cut I put in it through my tarp on Saturday night. I carried the boots back to camp. I set them down in front of Corbin at the fire ring and told him. Then I told him the rest of it. The voices calling me by name, and Kyle's voice, and his voice, and my own voice. The thing in the moonlight in the park, standing up, carrying a pale naked body over the lip of the rim. The breathing outside my tarp and my stick laid down point first, and Bree's voice through the tarp and the knife. I took the knife out and held the blade toward him so the sun lay on the dark smear and the coarse banded hairs caught in it. Nobody said anything for a while. I was alone for a while. Bree spoke first. She said Theo had been making himself a pair of moccasins, that she had been showing him how. Corbin seized on it at once. He said yes, yes of course, that was it. I asked her out of what. We had no hide. We had nothing but a knife and a blanket and a tarp and fifty feet of cord. Grace said she had sat beside Theo every evening before the solo and he had never made a single thing. Shane leaned over and said, and looked at my knife and said the hair was coyote. He said he had seen plenty of coyotes and that was coyote and that a man could put on a coyote skin and walk around in it and that the only man we had seen in nine days was that cattleman with his rifle who said this place was no good and that he would be back. Kyle said that made sense. Kyle said it with real relief. The relief of a man who has been handed an explanation he can accept. Bree said that Joe had been angry with Corbin for years. Corbin did not say anything. He was looking at Bree's arm. He looked at the long cut sealed with amber pitch for a long time and then he looked at her face and she smiled at him and he got up without a word and walked to his shelter and crawled in and did not come out until dark. Over 200 subscriptions are cancelable. So get started in the Experian app and see how much you could save. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. Football is back and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. On PrizePix, you can make all the picks you want all in the same app. And now PrizePix is available nationwide. Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want? Download the PrizePix app today and use code SPOTIFY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. At the fire that night, I asked him how many had walked out before Theo. He was quiet a long time. Then he told us, one every year on this bench. In 2017, it had been a man from Ohio named Pete Asher in his 40s, a recovering drinker who had told his family he might go off the grid for a while. He quit during his solo. In 2018, it had been a woman named Lisa Moon who lived in her van and moved with the seasons. She quit during her solo. Both times, Bree had found them with their sticks down, helped them pack up their things, and walked them to the west end of the bench and pointed them home. Corbin had mailed each of them a partial refund. Neither check had ever been cashed. He said it without any feeling in his voice at all. And in 2016, he said, it had been Brianna. He told it to us with his voice softening and his eyes on the coals. She had been 22 that year, drifting, living out of an old Corolla, with no family she would talk about. She had quit during her solo. And he had not seen her walk out. And he had grieved her more than any student he had ever lost. And then, a month after the course, a little before Halloween, there had been a knock on the door of his trailer in Cuba in the middle of the night. And he had opened it, and she was standing there barefoot on the step, smiling. She had asked if she could come back. She had been with him ever since. Bree reached over and put her hand on his knee while he told it. He did not put his hand on top of hers. I watched him not do it. I lay awake that night doing what I had done for a living for 22 years. I took the facts I had been given and put them in order and looked at them. Every year a student walked out during the solo. Since Bree came back, the only person who ever saw them go was Bree. None of their names were carved on the trees by the spring, because none of them had finished. And the one name there that should not have been, the one that said 2016, had been cut into the bark a year or more after 2016 ended by someone who had come back. Monday was the tenth day. Corbin did not teach. He sat most of the day on a rock beside the spring with his back to the rim and his hands hanging between his knees, looking at the names in the aspens. Shane spent the day sharpening the end of a seven-foot spruce pole with his knife and hardening the point in the coals and talking about the cattleman. Kyle helped him. Dawn, would not leave the fire. Grace stayed near me. Bree moved around the camp doing small chores, gathering wood, carrying water, and I noticed for the first time that wherever she was, she was always somewhere she could see Corbin. That evening at the fire, Corbin said the course was over. He said it in a flat, worn-out voice, with none of the music in it. At first light he would lead everyone out. Two days to the truck. Nobody argued. I saw Dawn close her eyes and her lips move. Bree sat on her rock with her feet under her, and she smiled at the fire and said nothing. I woke deep in that night to the sound of someone moving through camp. In the moonlight I saw Corbin come out of his shelter with his knife in his hand and walk south along the bench, toward the end where Theo's junipers were and the ground dropped off into the canyon. I said his name in a whisper. He stopped and looked back at me and raised one hand, palm out, and then he turned and went on. I lost sight of him under the aspens. I should have gone after him. I knew it then, and I know it now. Instead, I crawled out of my shelter and went along the camp in the dark to Bree's shelter and lifted the edge of her tarp. Her blanket lay inside in a long shape. I put my hand on it. It was her pack, rolled lengthwise under the wool. There was no one there. I woke Grace. We sat up together in the mouth of her shelter with our blankets, and I looked at her. With our blankets around us and our knives in our laps. Shoulder against shoulder. And we did not speak. A long time later, from somewhere far below the south end of the bench, down in the canyon, a man shouted once. It was Corbin. It was one hoarse word with no meaning in it, cut off in the middle, and it echoed back up off the canyon walls twice, fainter each time. An hour after that, his voice came up out of the dark at the south end of the beach, warm and close and soft. It's all right, it said. Come here. Grace's hand found my wrist and closed on it so hard I had bruises there for a week. We did not go. Bree walked into camp from the north end at sunrise on Tuesday, barefoot, her short hair wet with dew. She said she had not been able to sleep and had walked the top of the rim all night. She asked where Corbin was. We found him an hour or so after sleeping. She said she had not been able to sleep and had walked the top of So after sunrise on the slope below the south end of the bench, a hundred feet below Theo's junipers, the loose rock there runs down at a steep angle for perhaps 200 feet before it ends at the lip of the canyon, and halfway down a single old juniper grows out of the slide, and Corbin was lying against the uphill side of its trunk where he had fallen or been thrown. Shane and I went down to him on our backsides, with the rock sliding out from under us and rattling away over the edge and falling for a long time before it hit. His hideshirt was gone, and his moccasins. His braid had been cut off at the base of his skull. He lay face down across the juniper's roots, and the skin of his back had been taken from the shoulders to the waist in one piece, cut cleanly along both sides and across the top and the bottom, and lifted off. What was underneath was dark and dry, and covered in flies. His face, when we turned him over, was untouched. His eyes were open. His right hand was closed into a fist so tight we had to pry the fingers back one at a time, and inside it was the orange satellite messenger. The screen was smashed in, and the stub of the antenna was snapped off flush with the case. Shane held down the button with his thumb for a full minute while he swore under his breath. Nothing lit. Corbin had gone down into the canyon in the dark, where he had always told us never to go, and he had found it there. Wherever it was kept, it was always there. kept, he had found it. And he had held onto it all the way back up to that juniper. It took all of us most of the morning to get him up the slope to the bench. We laid him in the aspens beside the spring, under the names, and covered him with his blanket and weighed down the edges with stones. When we were done, Bree knelt down beside him and cried. She cried loudly and well, with her shoulders heaving and her face in her hands. And Dawn knelt and put an arm around her. I stood and watched. Under the sobbing, so softly I was not sure I heard it, Bree was talking. She was saying, it's all right, it's all right. She was saying it in his voice. Shane said it was the cattleman. He said he had seen the tracks of a shod horse in the mud at the north end of the bench, and a man who would skin a rabbit and hang it on a tree would skin another man. Bree lifted her wet face from her hands and said that Joe Begay had told Corbin this was his family's ground. Kyle said we needed to get out. Bree said she knew the way, that she had walked it more times than she could count, and that she would lead us out in the morning. Kyle said thank God. Shane said fine, but not before he paid that cattleman a visit. Grace looked at me across Corbin's covered body. I knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it too. Two days behind Bree, single file, through the blowdown and the bog and the brown light under the spruce. That night, Shane went hunting. He took his spruce spear and went north along the bench a little after dark, to the end of the aspens where he had seen the horse tracks in the mud. He said the cattleman had come in that way before, and he would come in that way again, and when he did, Shane would be sitting in the rocks waiting for him. Kyle wanted to go with him. Dawn held on to Kyle's arm with both hands and would not let go, and in the end, Shane told Kyle to stay and look after his wife, and Kyle sat down again by the fire with his face red. Bree watched Shane go. She said she was tired and went to her shelter early. Grace and I built the fire up higher than Corbin had ever let us build it. We dragged in deadfall until we had a pile of it chest high beside the ring, and we fed the fire until the flame was out of the fire. Kyle was still alive, but the flame stood up taller than a man and lit the white trunks of the aspens 30 yards out on every side. I sat facing Bree's shelter. Its mouth was a black hole in the firelight. For a long time I was sure of the shape lying inside it. Then I was less sure. Then, sometime after the moon came up, I got up and walked over and crouched and looked in, and Bree was lying on her side under her blanket with her head on her arm, wide awake, looking straight back at me. She smiled. I went back to the fire and sat down and did not look at her shelter again for a long time. I must have slept sitting up. When I opened my eyes, the moon had moved a long way across the sky, and the fire had burned down, and Grace was asleep against my shoulder. I looked at Bree's shelter. Even from the fire, I could see it was empty. The blanket lay flat on the boughs. From the north end of the bench, Shane shouted. That he had it. He shouted it again and again, raw and high and triumphant, a string of swearing, and then that he had got it. He had it. Then came the sound of something heavy thrashing in the rocks, and the rattling hiss I had heard through my tarp, long and furious, and Shane's voice went up into a scream, high and long, with no words left in it at all. The scream stopped. The thrashing stopped. Grace was awake and on her feet with her stick in her hands. And Dawn was crying out in her shelter, and Kyle was standing at the edge of the firelight staring north. There was no sound at all from the north end. Twenty minutes later, Shane called Kyle's name. He called it from the north end, out past the light. His voice was weak and wet and broken. He said his leg was broken. He said he was down by the chute, by the old deadfall, and he couldn't move, and he was bleeding. And please, Kyle, please, buddy, I can't. Kyle took a burning branch out of the fire. Dawn screamed at him. Grace stood in his way and told him what Joe had told me and what Dawn had heard from the canyon three nights running, and Kyle said he was not going to sit there and let a man bleed out in the dark, and he pushed past her and went. I want to be able to say I thought about it. I didn't. I took a branch out of the fire and went after him, and Grace came behind me with her stick. We found Kyle sixty yards north. Just past the end of the light. His branch was lying on the ground, still burning, and by the flame of it, I could see him on his back in the leaves, and the thing was on top of him. It was crouched over him on all fours with its long legs folded under it, and its head was down at his thigh. The firelight was on it. The ragged coat of hides over its back. The pale, bare skin of its ribs and its long arms. The dried coyote head pulled down over its brow, and under the coyote's jaw, where its own face should have been, was Bree's face. I don't know how else to say it. It was her face. Her short, dark hair. Her brown forehead and her eyes, and her small, straight nose, smooth and calm and whole. It was the right size for Bree. It was too small for the head it was on. Around its edges, where the coyote pelt came down over it, I could see where it ended. A ragged seam. I could see it coming down over it. And under the seam, something gray. And as I came at it with the burning branch, it lifted that face from Kyle's leg and looked at me. and Bree's mouth smiled at me with Kyle's blood all over its chin. I swung the branch into its head with everything I had. It burst into sparks and burning bark. The thing went straight up off Kyle and back, rearing up to its full height, and the hiss came out of it, and I swung again and missed. Grace ran past me and drove the end of her hickory stick into its ribs. It caught the stick in one long hand and tore it out of her grip and threw it away into the dark without looking. Then it turned and went. It went on all fours, fast, through the aspens toward the rim, and the last thing it did before it went out of the light was to say my name, softly, in Bree's voice. Kyle's right thigh was laid open in three long gashes from the hip almost to the knee, deep enough that I could see the white of something inside. We dragged him back to the fire by his arms. Grace cut strips from her wool sweater and from his blanket, and we packed the wounds and bound them as tight as we could get them with the cord from our packs, and he screamed until he passed out. Dawn held his head in her lap. She looked up at me over him with her face white and wet and asked me what that was. I told her I didn't know. It was the truth. Nobody slept. We kept the fire as high as the wood allowed until the sky went gray. Bree walked into camp at sunrise from the north end. Her face and arms were scratched, her shirt was torn at the shoulder, and she was limping a little. She said she had heard Shane shouting and had gone out to find him and searched in the dark for hours. She knelt by Kyle and looked at his leg and said we needed to keep it clean. Then she looked up at me. Grace and I had talked about what we would do in the last gray hour before dawn, in whispers, while dawn dozed over Kyle's head. We had talked about what we would do in the last gray hour before dawn, and we had decided we would do nothing. Kyle could not walk. We did not know the way out. We had no weapons but our knives and Grace's stick, which we had found in the leaves at first light. Dawn had not seen the face. She had been at the fire. If we said what we had seen in front of her and Kyle and Bree, there was nothing anyone could do about it except get killed in the daylight instead of the dark. So when Bree looked up at me, I looked back at her and said nothing. She knew. I watched her know. Her smile did not move at all. We found Shane at mid-morning, in the chute at the north end where the old deadfall had been built. He was sitting with his back against the granite wall at the inside end of it, and his own spear had been driven through the middle of his chest and on through into the ground behind him so that he could not fall over. His cap was still on his head, the fire-hardened point of the spear where it stood out of the ground, and the dark cloud of the dirt behind him was black with something that was not his blood, and caught in it were coarse gray and tan hairs banded with black. Shane had hit it. He had hit it before it took the spear away from him. Joe Begay came back late that morning, Wednesday, the twelfth day. We heard the horse a long way off, coming fast along the rock from the north. And Dawn stood up beside Kyle and screamed for us to get his knife, that it was him, that the murderer was coming back. The bay came out of the spruce at a hard trot with Joe on it, and his rifle across the saddle in front of him. Bree had gone to the spring for water a few minutes before. When I looked for her as the horse came in, she was not at the spring or anywhere. The horse would not come into the aspens, so Joe left it tied where he had tied it before, and walked in carrying the rifle. He looked at Kyle and at the bloody wool binding his leg. He looked at the blanket weighted down with stones under his feet. And he asked who was under it. And I told him. He asked where the young one was. The tall boy. And I told him that too. And then I told him about Shane in the chute. He closed his eyes for a moment. Dawn was standing over Kyle with my knife in both hands, pointing it at Joe and shaking. Grace walked over and gently put her hand on top of Dawn's hands and lowered them. Joe asked where the girl was. I said she had gone to the spring. He looked toward the spring and then up at the rim for a long time. Then he sat down on a rock at the edge of the fire ring with his rifle across his knees and told us. Only 200 subscriptions are cancelable. Results will vary. What you want? PrizePix. Run your game. In the fall of 2016, a week after Corbin's course came out of the mountains, Joe's nephew Wilson had gone down into the canyon below this bench after elk. "It is a terrible place to hunt," Joe said, "steep and broken and full of rotten rock." "And the only reason anybody goes down there is that the elk know nobody does." On the canyon floor below the south end of the bench, in a pile of fallen boulders, Wilson had found a pack. A small one, the kind Corbin's students carried. Inside it were a wool blanket and a tin cup and a knife, and a woman's clothes folded up small with old dark blood dried into them. In the bottom of the pack was a pair of hiking boots with the laces tied together. In the pocket of the jeans was a Colorado driver's license that said "Brianna Tanner." Wilson took it to the sheriff's substation in Cuba. A deputy called Corbin, and Corbin told him the girl had quit during her solo and walked out on her own. They searched the canyon for two days with a dog. The dog would not go down past the boulders. Nobody found anything else. Then, in October, the deputy heard that Brianna Tanner had turned up at Corbin Vance's trailer, alive and well. And he closed it. A grown woman found safe. Her pack must have been stolen, he said. Or she had left it. Joe said that the summer after, at the gas station on the highway in Cuba, he had pulled up to the pump beside Corbin's truck. He had two horses in the trailer behind him. The girl was sitting in the passenger seat of Corbin's truck with her bare feet up on the dash. She turned her head and looked at Joe through the glass. And she smiled at him. Both horses in his trailer started kicking the walls so hard that one of them broke a cannon bone, and he had to have it put down that afternoon. He went to the deputy. The deputy laughed at him. So he went to an older man in his family, a man who knew about such things, and told him all of it. That man told him what she was. He told him she would stay with Corbin as long as Corbin kept bringing people up onto that bench, because people who come back to the same place every year are the easiest people there are to hunt. Joe had told Corbin to take his people somewhere else every summer since. Every summer, Corbin had smiled at him and talked about respect. I asked him what it was. He looked at me a long time. He said, "I don't say that name, not out here, not after dark, not in the day." He said it had been a person once, a long, long time ago, and it had chosen to be something else, and what it was now was a thing that wears what it takes. He said that when it took a person, it wore them, and it could wear them for years. He said that the girl Corbin had been sleeping beside for three summers had been dead in that canyon since the fall of 2016. uncle told him two things. The first was that it can be hurt. My knife had hurt it. Shane's spear had hurt it. When it was wearing a person, the wound stayed on the person. I thought of the long cut on Bree's arm, sealed over with amber pitch. He said the second thing was that hurting it was not enough. It had to be held down in its own shape, not the one it borrowed, and it had to be burned, all of it. And everything it wore burned with it, until there was nothing left but ash. If any of it was left, it would get up again. His uncle had said that it would not be easy to hold, and that the old people who had done it, the few times it had been done, had lost people doing it. Then he said we could not walk out, not with Kyle. Even by his own way, the shortest way off that mountain, it was a full day to his family's cow camp, and we would be strung out single five days a week. We could not walk out, not with Kyle. Even by his own way, the shortest way off Kyle threw the timber and the bog, and if anything slowed us, we would be out there after dark with it following. He said it would take us one at a time and leave the last one for the morning. He had come back because he had seen the ravens over the canyon all week, and could not sleep, and it had watched him ride in, and now it knew he had told us. Tonight it comes for all of us, he said. It has to now. I sat there with my hands hanging between my knees, the way Corbin had sat by the spring, and I thought about a pen of rotten logs in a narrow crack in the granite, and a spruce trunk two feet thick lying in the weeds. Joe chose the chute for the night. One way in, he said, rock on both sides and at the back. I had seen it on the fourth day, with Corbin lecturing at its mouth, and that morning, with Shane in it. That afternoon, I walked the whole length of it. The walls were bare granite, fifteen or twenty feet high, close enough together that I could stand in the middle and touch both sides with my fingertips. For the first twenty feet, the top was open to the sky. Past that, the two walls leaned in toward each other overhead until they nearly met, and the last ten feet were a low rock pocket, dark and dry, and floored with packrat sticks and old needles, ending in a crack no wider than my hand that went back into the mountain. The old deadfall lay rotting in the mouth, the one notched upright still standing on the left side, the big spruce log in the weeds, and a scatter of gray lichen timbers that had once been the walls of a pen. We carried Shane out first. We laid him under the aspens beside Corbin and covered him with his tarp and weighted it with stones. Then we carried Kyle in on his blanket and laid him in the rock pocket at the back. He had come around by then. He was gray in the face and shaking and kept asking for water, and Dawn sat beside him holding the cup to his mouth. Joe tried to bring the horse up close, and it would not come within thirty yards of the chute. In the end, he tied it in the aspens, on a long rope, near the fire we built at the chute's mouth. He said the horse would tell us when it was coming. Grace and I dragged in wood until our hands bled again, all the dead aspen and spruce we could reach before dark. Joe went through his coat pockets and laid his cartridges out on a flat rock. There were twelve. The sun went behind the plateau, and the spruce was still there. The spruce was still there, and the spruce was still there. The sun went behind the plateau, and the cold came down. It began a little after full dark with the singing. Theo's mother's song, the little rising tune, in a woman's low voice, out in the aspens beyond the light. It went on for a long time. It stopped and began again, and stopped and began again, and every time it began, I felt Dawn flinch beside me. Then it was Theo's voice, singing the same tune, cracked and thin. Then it was Corbin's voice, speaking, warm and slow. And what Corbin's voice said was the speech he had given us in the motel parking lot in Cuba, word for word, about the ground being walked by people for ten thousand years, and how it would teach us if we were quiet long enough to hear it. It said all of it, from beginning to end, with every pause in the right place. Then Shane's voice called for Kyle. Kyle's voice answered it. That was the worst for Dawn. Kyle was lying behind her in the dark with his leg bound in wool, and Kyle's voice was out in the trees, calling her name and telling her it was all right now. He was out here, come and see. She put her hands over her ears and started on the alphabet backwards, out loud, and Grace knelt beside her and said it with her. After that it was quiet for a long time. Then Bree's voice spoke from just beyond the firelight, close, at the height of a person standing. It was Bree's ordinary voice, soft and a little flat, the voice I had heard say she fasted during courses, and that she had slipped on the granite. It spoke to me. It said that it had watched me look at the trees by the spring on the second day. It said that I had read the bark. It said it had seen me know, and that I had gone on anyway and eaten my rice, and lain down on my boughs and done nothing, and that it had liked that very much. It said Corbin had done the same thing for three summers. It said most people did. Then it was quiet, and I heard it breathing out there, the slow, deep breath with the catch at the end. The horse screamed. I have never heard a horse make that sound before or since. It reared against the rope and came down and reared again, and the rope snapped, or the branch it was tied to did, and it went away through the aspens in the dark, crashing and screaming, north along the bench, and we listened to it until we could not hear it anymore. Then rocks started coming down. They came from above, from the top of the rim on both sides of the chute, the size of a fist, the size of a man's head. They cracked off the granite walls and dropped into the open part of the chute and burst apart on the ground. One came down into the fire and threw coals across Grace's legs. Joe stood up with the rifle and looked up into the black, above the walls, and could see nothing, and the rocks kept falling, and then they stopped. We had all pulled back toward the rock pocket, away from the open top, crouched along the walls with our arms over our heads. In the quiet after the rocks, something dropped into the chute behind us. It had come over the top where the walls were just beginning to lean in, between us and the back of the pocket. It landed on all fours in the dark at the edge of the light, with Kyle on one side of it, and Dawn on the other. And before any of us understood what was happening, it had dawned by the hair. It was dragging her toward the open part of the chute, toward the wall, and I understood that it meant to go up the wall with her. She was screaming. Her heels were dragging furrows in the pack rat's sticks. I could see its long arm in the firelight, the pale smooth skin of it, the long hand wound into her hair, and over its back the ragged coat of hides, and I could smell it, sour fat, and the August houses. Joe fired. The sound in that rock chute was so loud that I felt it in my skull more than I heard it. Through it, I saw the thing jerk and let go of Dawn, and turn, rising, and Joe worked the lever and fired again, and it hit the wall and went up the wall. It went straight up the granite on its hands and feet, with its body flat against the rock, and over the top, and was gone. Joe stood with the rifle up, breathing hard, looking at the empty black over the wall. Dawn was on her hands and knees on the floor of the chute. A piece of her scalp the size of a playing card was gone from the back of her head, torn away with the hair still on it, and the blood was running down her neck into her collar. Grace bound it. I fed the fire. Joe sat at the mouth of the chute with the rifle across his knees, and ten cartridges on the rock beside him, and his eyes on the door. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. It was dark. There was blood on the granite where the thing had gone up. In the firelight it was so dark a brown it looked black. Nothing else came that night. Near Dawn I heard it, once, far off along the top of the rim. It was humming Theo's tune. Then it stopped, and the sky over the canyon began to turn gray. Thursday, the thirteenth day. We sat in the mouth of the chute in the early light, the five of us, filthy and bloody and shaking, and nobody had to say that we could not do another night like that. Joe had ten cartridges. He had hit it twice, at a range of ten feet, and it had gone up a wall of bare rock with the bullets in it. Kyle's leg had begun to smell. The binding on Dawn's head was soaked through. Grace's shins were blistered from the coals. My hands were in shreds from the hand drill and the firewood, and I had slept perhaps four hours in the last three days, and eaten nothing but a few spoonfuls of rice since the solo began. I said the word deadfall out loud. Joe looked at the rotten timbers in the weeds at our feet, and at the notched upright, and at the big spruce log lying in the grass, and then he looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Then he nodded once. Grace was the one who made it work. She knelt in the dirt in front of the chute with a stick and drew it out for us, talking fast and flat. She had drawn things on a whiteboard for thirty-one years, and it showed. A spruce log, two feet thick and ten feet long, would weigh close to half a ton. We could never lift it straight up. But with a long enough pole across a solid crossbar, the log on the short end, and a man's weight on the long end, we would not have to. And if the long end of that pole was held down by a trigger instead of a man, then anything that set off the trigger would drop the log. She drew cordially. The three notched sticks, and showed us where the cord would run. She said the fulcrum was everything. She said if we got the fulcrum wrong it would come down too slow, and it would get out from under. She said it with her mouth set and her chin up, and she did not once look at the blanket-covered shapes in the aspens. Joe walked north along the bench to find his horse. He was gone two hours, and came back leading it by the broken rope. It was lathered and trembling, and had torn a long gash in its shoulder going through the timber, but it was sound. It would not go near the chute, so Joe tied ropes to the logs where they lay and the horse dragged them. With two Joe at its head talking to it in a low, steady voice, in Navajo, the whole time. We worked from first light to sundown, and I do not remember much of it except in pieces, cutting new uprights out of standing dead spruce with our knives, a few inches at a time, the knives so dull by the end that we were beating the blades through with rocks. Joe and the horse dragging a sound dead spruce out of the blowdown below the rim, because the old log crumbled apart when Joe kicked it. Grace measuring the fulcrum point with a length of cord, three times, four times, the four of us and the horse hauling on Joe's rope to raise the top end of the log, so slowly that my arms shook and my sight went gray at the edges, until the lever took it, and the long end of the pole came down and Joe lashed it to the trigger, and we all stood back and nobody breathed. It held. The log lay along the floor of the chute with its butt end resting on the ground at the mouth, and its top end raised five feet in the air over the pen, held up by one notched stick. Below it and behind it we built the pen. It ran ten feet back into the chute from the mouth, the length of the log, with the granite for its walls on both sides, and at its inside end, we drove a row of sharpened spruce stakes into the ground, close together, from wall to wall, leaning outward. Behind those stakes was where the bait would sit. Anything that wanted the bait would have to come in through the mouth of the chute, under the log, and reach for it over the stakes. If it was reaching over the stakes, its back would be under the log. We lined the pen with everything that would burn. Joe showed us the old stumps along the foot of the rim, where the pitch had soaked into the wood over a hundred years, until it was heavy and orange and smelled sharp enough to make your eyes water. We split them with rocks, and carried the pieces in, and stacked them along both walls of the pen, waist high, and we piled dry aspen on top and dead spruce boughs on top of that. Then we roofed the chute. The thing had come over the top the night before, and the only way the trap would work was if it could not do it again. All afternoon we laid spruce poles across the open part of the chute, from wall top to wall top, side by side, Joe up on the rim lashing them down with every foot of cord we had among us, and the whole of his lariat, and weighting them with the biggest, the last rocks we could carry up. When we were done, the open part of the chute was a dark tunnel, it could still rip its way through. Joe said that it would take time and make noise, and he would be on the other side of the poles with the rifle. That left the bait. I said it would be me. I said it before anybody else could, so that nobody else would have to. That is the truth, but it is not all the truth. The rest of it is that Joe was right, and I knew it before he said it. It had walked past my tarp on the first night of the solo and said my name in my own voice. It had sat outside my tarp on the last night and pulled my stick out of the ground and laid it down pointing at me. It had spoken to me through the dark the night before, and told me it had seen me know. It had been talking to me the whole time. If it would come anywhere for anyone, it would come into that pen for me. Joe said only one more thing about it. He said that when it came, it would not come as itself first. He said it would come to me as somebody I trusted, and that I had to wait anyway. And he said nobody was to speak after dark, not one word, so that any voice I heard would be its voice. I had to wait until it was under the log, all the way under, and not one second before. At sundown, I crawled under the hanging log, through the pen between the stacked walls of pitch wood, over the row of stakes, and sat down with my back against the granite on the far side of them. Behind me, in the rock pocket under the roof of poles, Dawn and Kyle lay against the back wall, and Grace sat beside them with a burning pitch wood torch, ready in each hand, and a pile of them unlit at her knee. Joe was on top of the poles with the rifle and his ten cartridges, and a pot of coals in the tin cup from Corbin's pack. The cord from the trigger ran back along the floor of the pen, under the stakes, to me. I wound it twice around my right hand. The last light went off the top of the rim. The cold came down. I sat in the dark with the cord around my hand, and waited for it. I don't know how long I sat there before anything happened. Hours. The stars came out over the mouth of the chute in the slot between the walls, and moved across it, slowly, from left to right. The cold came up out of the granite, and I sat there, waiting for it. The cold came out of the granite, and I sat there, waiting for it. and I held on to the cord. I did not pull. She watched me not pull it. Her face did not change. The tears stopped running all at once, and her mouth closed, and the crying stopped in the middle of a breath. She looked at me through the stakes with no expression at all for a long moment. Then she reached her small hand through the stakes and laid it on my knee. It was cold all the way through, and then the hand began to get longer. I heard it before I understood what I was seeing. The long, wet, pulling sound, and under it the run of pops and cracks, dozens of them, deep and thick, close enough now that I felt them through the hand on my knee. The fingers on my knee lengthened, and kept lengthening, and the skin on the back of the hand split along the knuckles and slid back, and under it was something gray. The small brown back of the hand was under the log rose up. It rose until it was pressed against the underside of the raised log, the spine coming up through it joint by joint, and the coat of hides came up with it from somewhere, from nowhere, sliding up over the shoulders, gray and tan and ragged, with Corbin's pale hide shirt in it and his gray braid hanging down. The coyote head came up over the top of the stakes, and the dried muzzle pointed at my face. Under the coyote's jaw, Bree's face was still there, stretched now, gone thin and wide over something too large for it. The eyes pulled out of shape, the mouth pulled out of shape, smiling. It was folded into that pen under the log in its own long body, with its back against the wood, and its long arms reaching over the stakes, and its hand closed on my leg. I pulled the cord. I pulled it with my whole body, throwing myself back against the granite, and I felt the trigger go, and I heard the lever whip up off the crossbar in the dark, and the log came down. I felt it come down through the ground. Everything in that chute jumped. There was a sound under the log I will not try to describe except to say that it was wet, and it was a great many things breaking at once. The thing screamed. It screamed with Bree's voice, and Corbin's voice, and Shane's, and Theo's, and Kyle's, and mine, all of them, at once, and with the hiss under all of them. The log had come down across the middle of its back, and driven it flat against the floor of the pen, and its legs were kicking behind it under the wood, gouging the dirt, and its arms were still over the stakes, and its hand was still closed on my leg below the knee. It began to pull. It pulled me into the stakes. The rough-cut wood tore into my thigh and my hip, and I screamed too. It was dragging me toward it through the gap between two of the stakes, into the pen with it, and its grip was so strong I felt the bone of my shin bend. Above me, Joe fired down through the poles. I heard the bullet hit it. Joe fired again, and again. The hand did not open. Then Grace was past me. She came out of the dark at a run with a torch in each hand, a 63-year-old woman with blistered shins, and she did not stop at the stakes. She leaned over them and over me, and drove both torches into the stacked pitchwood along the left wall of the pen. And then she ran back for two more, and drove them into the right wall. The pitch caught with a sound I felt in my teeth. It went up orange and roaring, and the heat came out of that pen and hit my face so hard my eyebrows curled. And in the light of it, I could see everything. I could see it pinned under the log in the fire with the hides on its back beginning to smoke. I could see its long gray arm over the stakes, and its long gray hand around my leg. I got my knife out of my belt with my left hand, and I cut its fingers. I cut them at the second knuckle, one at a time, sawing, with my face turned away from the heat, and they did not bleed the way a man's would. They came apart gray and dry, and on the fourth one the hand opened. Dawn had me by the back of the pen, and into the rock pocket. And I lay on the pack rat sticks at the back of the chute, with my leg throbbing, and watched it burn. Joe tore the poles off the top of the pen with his bare hands, so the roof would not catch and come down on us, and threw them down into the fire. After that, the flames went straight up between the granite walls into the night, twenty and thirty feet high, and the light of them lit the whole top of the rim. All night we fed it. Every scrap of wood we had gathered for two days went into that pen. When the wood ran out, Joe dropped more down from the rim. It was a long time dying. For the first hour it screamed, and the screaming was all of them, all the voices it had taken, over and over, Theo's mother's song and Corbin's speech in the motel parking lot, and Shane calling for Kyle, and Kyle calling for Dawn, and Bree saying please, and my own flat West Texas voice, saying my own name. Then the voices began to drop away, one by one. It stopped being Shane. It stopped being Corbin. It stopped being me. For a while there was only Bree, and then Bree stopped too. The last voice that came out of that fire was one none of us had ever heard. It was an old man's voice, low and dry, speaking slowly in a language I did not know. I don't know what it said. Joe shouted down at us from the rim to cover our ears and not to listen, and we did, all four of us, lying in the back of that rock pocket in the heat and the smoke with our hands over our ears. When I took my hands away, there was nothing to hear but the fire. We kept feeding it until the sky over the canyon turned gray. By then the log had burned through in the middle and broken in two, and the pitchwood was a bed of white and orange coals the length of the pen. Joe came down on the ground and said, and stood at the mouth of the chute with a long spruce pole and stirred the coals for a long time. There were bones in them, black and crumbling, more of them than a person has, and some of them the wrong shapes. They broke when the pole touched them. There was nothing else. No hide, no hair, no coyote head, no face. Joe stood there and said something quietly in Navajo. He did not tell us what it was. He said, and I did not ask. Then he said, in English, that it was done. Friday, September 20th, 2019, was the 14th day. It was the day the course was supposed to end. Nobody carved anything. Grace wrapped my shin in strips of her blanket. It was burned from the knee to the ankle and torn where the hand had held it, and there were three deep gashes in my thigh and hip from the stakes. I could walk on it with a stick and someone's shoulder. We put Kyle up on Joe's horse with his bad leg out straight and lashed to the saddle, and the horse led us, though it shook the whole time we were near the chute. Before we left, I went back to Theo's site, at the south end of the bench, and took his boots. I left the laces tucked inside, the way he had left them, tied the two boots together with a length of cord, and hung them around my neck. Then we left Corbin and Shane under their blanket and tarp in the aspen. We left the two boots together with a length of cord, and hung them around my neck. We left the laces tucked inside, the way he had left them, tied the two boots together with a length of cord, and hung them around my neck. We left the laces tucked inside, the way he had left them, tied the two boots under their blanket and tarp in the aspen. We left the laces tucked inside, the way he had left them, beside the spring, under the names, and walked away from that bench and did not look back at it. Joe led us west all that day, across the bog and through the blowdown and over the high parks, by a way I could not have found again if my life depended on it. It was long after dark, when we came down out of the timber to his family's cow camp on the west side of the mountain, a wire corral and a stock tank and a small plank cabin with a light in the window. His nephew Wilson, who had been told to wait there if Joe was not back by Thursday, came out onto the step with a flashlight. Joe said a few words to him in Navajo and Wilson went straight to his truck. He drove us down to Cuba that night. The deputies at the substation met us in the parking lot, and an ambulance took Kyle to Albuquerque with Dawn riding beside him, and another took me. Before they loaded me in, a deputy let me use the phone at the front desk. I called Cody. I had not called him in four months. When he picked up, I told him I was in Cuba, New Mexico, and that I was hurt, but I was all right, and I asked him if he would come. I did not explain anything. He did not ask me to. He drove five hours through the night, and he was standing beside my bed in Albuquerque when I woke up on Saturday morning, with his car in his hand. The state police and a search and rescue team from Albuquerque went up to the bench the following week, with Joe and Wilson to guide them. They brought out Corbin and Shane. Then a rope team went down into the canyon below the south end of the bench, to the pile of fallen boulders where Wilson had found Breanna Tanner's pack three years before. Under the boulders, there was a crack in the canyon wall that went back into the rock. It was packed with things. There were the skins of three of them. They were the skins of three of them. Three cattle, folded. There were wool blankets, and tin cups and knives. There was an orange nylon jacket that belonged to Pete Asher of Dayton, Ohio, and a silver ring that belonged to Lisa Moon. There was a pair of deer-hide moccasins with soles cut from elk. And behind those, farther back in the crack, were the remains of four people. Dental records identified them over the next two months as Brianna Rose Tanner, 22, of Grand Junction, Colorado, Peter Asher, 44, Lisa Moon, 37, and Theodore Lindquist, 19. The report on all of it, when it was finally done, said what reports say when nothing in them fits together. It said that Corbin Vance and Shane Doyle and Theodore Lindquist had died by homicide at the hands of a person or persons unknown. It said that Kyle Ferris' injuries were consistent with an attack by a large animal. It said that the four survivors had described a woman named Bree who could not be identified, who left no fingerprints on anything in camp, and who had been using the name of a woman whose remains showed she had died in the fall of 2016. It said the ashes and burned bone recovered from the shoot were too badly degraded to identify. Nobody asked me to explain any of it, and I did not try. I had written enough reports myself to know what a report is for. In October, I drove to Scottsdale for Theo's memorial. His father was a tall, quiet man, with Theo's narrow shoulders, and he stood alone at the front of the room the whole time, and I shook every hand. I gave him the boots. The state police had returned them to me when they were done with them. I told him that Theo had been happy for an afternoon, setting snares below the aspens, and that he had hummed while he worked. I hummed the tune for him, the little rising tune with no words. He put both hands over his face and stood there in front of everyone, and I stood there with him until he was done. In December, Grace and I drove up to Grand Junction together for Brianna's burial. Her mother, Carla, was there, and her brother, Eli, in his uniform. Carla had believed for three years that her daughter was alive somewhere, and simply did not want to speak to her. I did not tell her what I had heard in that shoot. I told her that her daughter had been brave enough to go into the mountains alone, and that she had been missed. Both things were true. The next summer, I drove out to Counselor and found Joe Begay at his house. I had brought him a saddle blanket, which he said was too much, and then put on his horse while I watched. He told me his family had done what needed to be done on that bench after the state police left, and that it was finished, and that I should never go back there. I have kept that promise. So has Grace. I talked to her every Sunday. Kyle kept his leg. He and Dawn divorced the following spring, without much fighting, as far as I know. She sent me a card the first Christmas. It said only thank you. I still adjust claims. I still walk through ruined houses with a clipboard, and write down what can be saved and what cannot, and put a number on it. But when I am done now, I go back outside to the lawn where the family is standing, and I stay a while. I ask them what the house was like before. I listen to them tell me. It does not change the number. I do it anyway. Every year, one walks out early. That is what Corbin told us beside the dead fire, with his voice soft and sad. The day Theo did not come back. The year I was there, four of us walked out late, on the fourteenth day, in the dark, and nothing walked out behind us. We'll be right back. She gets there for less. Home of the Save. Open soon. BJs, home of the Save. Lock in for kickoff. Because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want? Results will vary. Observe the North American dad. 50s. Great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. Remarkable. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, Dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling. No hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply. Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you Toy Story 5 is now on Disney+. Woody! It's been too long, cowboy. Woody, Buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? 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