Deep Woods Horror Stories About Things That Shouldn’t Exist

- Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. - What are you waiting for? Hop on. - The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. - This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. - I like this kid. - Always wear your seatbelt. - Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13. - - I've been listening to "Just Creepy" for about six years now, mostly in the cab of a plow truck at three in the morning, and I never figured I'd have a story of my own to send in. My wife is the one who finally talked me into it. She says I need to tell this to somebody besides her. You're welcome to read it on the show. I only ask that you don't try to figure out where it happened. I've thought about how to write this for a year, and your listeners are the only people I could think of who might hear the whole thing without stopping halfway through to tell me it was a bear. It was not a bear. Some background. I'm 41. I run a grader and a plow truck for a county highway department in Northern Wisconsin. In summer, I fix gravel roads. In winter, I sleep about four hours a night. I'm not going to name the county. The family land is still up there, and so is my uncle, and he would never forgive me if strangers started driving out to look at it. My uncle's name is Walt. He's my dad's older brother. My dad died 11 years ago, a heart attack in his driveway while he was shoveling snow. He was 54. After the funeral, Walt started calling me every Sunday night. He never said why. He'd ask about the roads and the weather and my kids, and then he'd say, "Well," and hang up. He also made sure I kept coming up north every October, the same as when Dad was alive. The land is 40 acres that my great-grandfather Emil bought in 1931, after the timber companies had cut the whole region down to stumps, and were selling the cut-over ground for almost nothing. Most of the land around ours went to the federal government in the '50s and became part of the National Forest. So our 40 is a square of private ground with about 100,000 acres of public woods on every side of it. Emil built a camp on it the year he bought it. Three of the walls were logs set on a fieldstone foundation. The fourth wall, the north one, he laid up out of fieldstone all the way to the roof, to the north side faces a big spruce swamp, and that's where the winter wind comes from. There was a stone chimney on the west end, and one window in the north wall. The camp burned in the spring of 1984. Nobody was up there. The Forest Service said lightning. What's left is the foundation, the chimney, and part of that north wall. The wall is broken down at both ends, but in the middle it still stands about seven feet high, and right in the middle of it is the window. It's a square hole in the stone, about two feet across, with a slab of granite for a sill. There's no frame in it anymore, no glass, nothing. You can stand on one side of it and look straight through into the woods. Since the fire, the family has camped on the old foundation in a canvas wall tent. Walt and my dad did it for 20 years before I was old enough to come along every fall, and I've slept in that tent 22 Octobers now. We go the first week of the summer, and then we go the second week of the fall. It's the first week of the month, after the bugs die and before the gun deer crowd shows up. We hunt grouse, we scout for bucks, we play cribbage on a cooler lid by lantern light, and Walt tells the same eight stories in the same order, and I let him. There are two rules about that tent, and Walt has never once let them slide. The first is that you never pitch it facing the north window. The door of the tent faces south, always, toward the creek. The second is that you never look through that window after dark, not on your way to the latrine, not for a second, never. When I was about 10, I asked my dad why. He said Grandpa Emil had been a superstitious old Swede, and it was easier to go along with it than to argue with Walt. Walt was sitting right there. He didn't say anything. I remember he got up and went off to Split Wood, even though there was already plenty. Last October was the last time we went up the old wood. That week there were five of us in that block of woods, if you count the dead. Three of us walked out. The other two never did, and one of those two was not a man. We drove up on the first Saturday of October. Walt is 68 and has a bad left knee from a fall off a hay wagon in his 20s, so I do the driving now. We took my truck. His old Ford sits in his pole shed and only comes out for trips to the dump. It's about three hours. It's about three hours from my place. The last 40 minutes are on county roads with letters instead of numbers. And the last town before the forest is a bar with two gas pumps out front and a hand-painted sign that says, "Bait, Cheese Curds, Ice." We always stop there. The woman who runs it is named Bev. She's been behind that counter since before I was born. She knows every camp in a 30-mile circle, who owns it, and who's fighting with who about it. On Saturday the bar was mostly empty. Two guys in canvas jackets were watching the Badgers pregame on the TV in the corner. Bev poured Walt a coffee and me a Coke, and she asked if we'd heard about the Pruitt boy. We hadn't. She told it plain and in order, without any hurry. A young man named Cody Pruitt, 24, had come up alone the first week of November the year before. He was grouse hunting and scouting for gun season. He called his mother from the top of the fire. She told her he'd seen a big buck cross the Flowidge Road, and he'd be home Sunday night. On Monday, a Forest Service truck found his pickup parked at the east gate of the Flowidge Road, with the doors locked and the cab cold. They searched for nine days. Forty-some volunteers, two dog teams, a state plane. They found his shotgun a mile north of the Flowidge, leaning against a hemlock with the action open. The shells had been taken out and set on a log next to it in a straight row. They never found anything else. Not his coat. Not his boots. Not his blaze orange vest. One of the dog handlers had come in for a drink when it was over. He told Bev his dog took the trail from the truck to the edge of the Flowidge and then sat down in the mud and started shaking, and he ended up carrying her out, all sixty pounds of her. Cody's uncle, Gary, still came up with the plan. He parked at the east gate and slept in his truck and walked the woods all day. Bev said Gary had come in back in August, white in the face, and told her he'd seen somebody standing out in the cattails on the far side of the Flowidge at dusk, wearing a blaze orange vest. He'd yelled Cody's name. The person turned and looked at him and then walked off into the trees. Gary told Bev it walked wrong. Too smooth. The top half of it never went up or down, even going through cattails higher than a man's waist. When he finally got around the Flowidge to that spot, he found tracks in the mud. Bare feet. The sheriff told him some kid was messing with him. "He's up this week, I think," Bev said. "His truck went by Thursday. If you see him, be nice to him." Walt said we would. I noticed he left a five dollar tip on a dollar fifty coffee, which is not something Walt does. From the bar, it's eleven miles of county blacktop, and then nine more of Forest Road. The Forest Road is gravel and washboard, and it runs through second-growth maple and popple and birch, with big black swamps of spruce and tamarack on the low ground. That time of year, it's about the prettiest country I know. The maples had gone red and orange, the popple leaves were bright yellow, and coming down every time the wind moved. And the road was covered in them. The tamaracks out in the swamps were turning gold. It was about forty-five degrees under a gray sky, and the air coming through my cracked window smelled of wet leaves and somebody's wood smoke. The road ends at a gravel rise where the old logging railroad grade starts. We park there and walk the last mile and a half on the grade, pulling our gear in a two-wheeled deer cart. Tent. Poles. Cots. Cove. Cooler. Guns. It takes about forty minutes when Walt's knee is good. That day it took an hour. The woods were quiet on the walk in. The woods in October are always quiet, but usually there are things in them. Blue jays yelling. Red squirrels chattering at you from every other tree. That afternoon, I don't think I heard one squirrel the whole way. I mentioned it to Walt. He said maybe the hawks had been busy. The old camp sits on a little rise above a creek with big white pines around it that Emil left standing when he cleared the spot. When you come up to the top of the hill, you can see a tree that looks like a hill. the trail, the first thing you see is the chimney, a gray stone column about 20 feet tall, standing up out of the ferns by itself. Then you see the foundation, a rectangle of fieldstone about knee high, 16 feet by 20. Then you see the north wall standing at the back of it, and that square hole in the middle. We keep the heavy gear in a steel job box, chained to the base of the chimney so we don't have to haul it all in every year. The padlock was still on it, and still locked, but the lid was standing open. The hinge pins had been pushed out of their knuckles and were lying in the leaves. Inside, the folded tent had been pulled half out and spread open in the box, and something had slept in it. There was a hollow pressed into the canvas, curled, too short for a grown man lying flat, and too long for a dog. There was long gray hair in it, coarse and stiff, some pieces of hair in it, and some pieces of hair in it. We don't have to haul it all in every year. The smell coming off it was sour and heavy and wet, rotten fat and raw hide, and something under those that I didn't have a word for. The coffee can we keep bacon grease in was lying on its side in the box, and the inside of it was cleaned down to bright tin. I said what I figured anybody would say. It was a drifter. Some guy living rough had found the box, got it open, and slept in it out of the wind. Walt said, maybe. He pulled the tent out and carried it down to the creek, and for almost an hour he scrubbed it in the cold water with a bar of laundry soap, one panel at a time, while I set up the frame. Then he hung it over the frame to dry in the wind. It still smelled when we went to bed. It smelled all week. The tent is ten feet by twelve, heavy white canvas on a frame of steel poles, with a little sheepherder stove inside, and the stovepipe going out through a fireproof patch in the roof. Two cots, a cooler, a lantern on a hook. People who've never slept in one think canvas is thick. It isn't. When the wind blows, the walls breathe in and out. When it rains, you can hear every drop. When the moon is up, the whole tent glows, and you can see the shapes of the pine boughs moving on the outside of the walls. There's no door. There are two canvas flaps that tie shut from the inside, with six cloth ties. We pitched it the way we always do, on the dirt floor inside the old foundation, with the door facing south toward the creek, and the back wall about eight feet from the north wall. Walt walked all the way around it when we were done, and checked the angle against the chimney with his eye. Then he did it again. While he did that, I walked over to the north wall. I don't know why. I had stood in front of that window in daylight a hundred times. That day I noticed the sill. The granite slab at the bottom of the window was polished. Not by weather. It had a dark, greasy shine to it, worn smooth in two places about a hand's width apart. The shine was on the outside half of the sill, the wood side. Something had been coming to that window from the swamp, and resting its hands on that stone. Not once. For years. Long enough to wear the granite. Walt came up beside me and looked at it. He didn't touch it, he looked at it for a long time. And then he went and started a fire in the stove. And that was all. We did what we always do the first night, because I think both of us wanted it to be a normal night. I cooked venison chili on the little stove. We ate sitting on our cots with the flaps tied back while the light went orange and then blue in the pines. And after supper Walt got the cribbage board out and we played three games on the cooler lid. He won two. He always wins two. Somewhere in the third game he started telling a story I'd never heard. That surprised me. I'd have told you I knew every one of Walt's stories. This one was about my dad. When Walt was twelve and dad was nine, they spent Christmas break up here with their grandpa Emil, back when the camp was still standing. One afternoon the two of them went out on the big flowage east of here to check Emil's muskrat traps. Dad walked too close to a beaver lodge, where the ice is always thin, and went through. Walt lay down flat on the ice and got him by the collar and dragged him out. Then he carried him back to camp. Two miles. Dad's wet clothes froze stiff on him the whole way, and the whole way he kept saying the same thing into the back of Walt's neck. Waltie, I'm cold. Waltie, I'm cold. Over and over for two miles. Walt said he heard it in his sleep for a year afterward. He said dad never called him Waltie again, not once, for the rest of his life. He figured dad was embarrassed. Walt laughed a little when he said that, and he pegged out, and that was the whole story. I asked him why he'd never told it before. He said he'd been thinking about Jim a lot lately. He didn't say why. We tied the flaps shut around ten and turned the lantern off. My cot is along the west wall. Walt's is along the east. The stove ticked between us. There was a moon about two days from full, and once it got up over the pines, the whole tent filled with a soft gray light, and I could see the shapes of the pine boughs moving across the canvas overhead. I fell asleep watching them. I woke up because of a sound I didn't know. The stove had burned down to nothing. My watch said ten after one. The moon had moved around to the west, and the west wall beside my cot was bright with it, the canvas glowing white about a foot from my face. The sound was right on the other side of that canvas. It was breathing. Heavy, wet breathing. Slow, with a catch at the bottom of every breath. The sound of air going in and out through something thick. It was low, down near the ground, level with my cot. If the canvas hadn't been there, I could have reached out and touched whatever was making it. I didn't move. I lay there with my eyes open and my hand on the rifle on the floor beside the cot, and I listened to it breathe. Then the light on the canvas changed. A hand came up into the moonlight on the other side of the wall. I could see it in black against the white canvas, sharp and clear. A narrow palm. Four fingers and a thumb. The fingers were long, much too long, each one longer than my whole hand, thin, with too many knuckles in them. They spread out flat and pressed against the canvas, and I could see the canvas dented inward toward my face. Then the hand started to move. It dragged slowly along the wall toward the foot of my cot, with the fingertips pressed into the fabric. I could hear the nails on the canvas. A dry, scraping hiss. It went the whole length of the west wall that way, slow, and the canvas dented in and sprang back behind it as it passed. At the corner, the hand went out of the moonlight, and I could see the canvas. I could see the canvas. I could still hear the nails, though, going along the back wall, the north wall, behind our heads. It took me a minute to understand that Walt was awake. He was sitting up on the edge of his cot in the dark, with his twelve-gauge across his knees. I hadn't heard him load it. He was looking at the back wall of the tent. I opened my mouth. He lifted one hand off the gun a few inches, flat, and I shut it again. The scraping stopped. The breathing went away from the tent, back toward the north wall of the old camp, and then, from the direction of the window, a voice. Waltie. It was a little boy's voice, high and thin and shaking hard. Waltie, I'm cold. I didn't know the voice. Walt did. Even in that gray light, I watched his face change, and he said very quietly, That's Jimmy. That was my voice. My dad. My dad, at nine years old, soaked through and freezing, being carried home across the flowage in 1969. Whatever was standing outside that window had heard him say it. It had been out there in the trees more than fifty years ago, listening to a nine-year-old boy cry into his brother's neck, and it had kept that. Waltie, I'm cold. I think I started to get up. I think I was going to untie the flaps and go around the tent and put my light through that window and see what was there. I don't really know what I was going to do, but Walt's hand closed around my wrist, hard enough to hurt, and he put his face close to mine. You don't look through that window, he said. You hear me? You don't look. So I didn't. We sat there side by side on his cot with the guns, and we didn't make a sound, and the little boy kept saying it out there in the dark for a long time. Then he stopped. Nothing came back to the tent. After a while the moon went down behind the pines, the walls went dark, and I didn't sleep again. There was frost in the morning, the first hard one of the year. The ferns around the foundation were white with it, which meant I could see the tracks. They were bare feet, long and narrow, longer than my size 12 boot by a good three inches. The heel barely touched the ground. Almost all the weight had been on the front of the foot, there were five toes, but they were long, much longer than any man's, and spread wide apart, and the second toe was the longest. The stride was long, too. I put my boot in one print and stepped toward the next, and I couldn't reach it without a hop. They went around the tent three times, close to the canvas. Then they went around the end of the north wall and out to the swamp side of it, and they stopped in front of the window. Two oval patches of melted frost, side by side, right under the sill. It had stood there for a long time, with the stone wall between us. Looking in through that square hole at our tent, the granite sill had a fresh smear of grease across it. There was one long gray hair stuck in the grease. I stood there in the cold with my coffee and looked at that. Then I told Walt we were leaving. Walt said we were, but not yet. He said there was a man alone in his truck at the east gate who'd lost his nephew to whatever this was, and nobody had told him what we knew. He said we'd walk over to the flowage, find Gary, tell him to get out, and then we'd pack up and get out too. He said it in the voice he uses when he's finished with a subject. He's sixty-eight, and it's his land, and I'm forty-one, and I still do what he says up there. So I got my vest. The quickest way to the east gate is along a ridge above the creek, through a stand of big hemlock and white birch. Walt took the shotgun. I took the lever-action thirty-thirty I always carry on the walk in and out. It's done. I'm not going to darken those hemlocks even at midday. They close out the sky, and the ground is all moss and needles, and you can walk without making a sound. That's where we found the doe. I smelled her before I saw her. Not rot. She was too fresh for that. It was a raw, coppery smell, strong in the still air. Then I came around a big hemlock, and there she was, hanging in a white birch about thirty feet off the trail. She was wedged by the neck in the fork of the trail, and I could see her trunk, about seven feet up, with her body hanging straight down. Her hooves were a foot or two above the moss, and she had no hide. None. The whole hide was gone, from the tip of her nose to her hooves. Her face was gone. Her ears were gone. What was left was red and white and blue-gray, all the muscle and the thin, clear skin that covers it, still whole and still shining a little in the poor light. I've skinned a lot of deer, and I've seen a lot of deer. I've seen a lot of deer, and I've seen a lot of deer. Every deer I've ever skinned ended up with knife marks. You cut around the legs, you cut down the belly, you cut around the neck, and you nick the meat in a dozen places no matter how careful you are. Walt walked all the way around her twice. Then he put his face close to her and looked for a long time. There wasn't one cut. The thin membrane over the meat wasn't broken anywhere. The hide had come off her in one piece, without a knife, starting at the head and working down. Even the hooves were bare. The skin had been peeled down over them and off the ends. Walt said a man can't do that. He said he'd watched hunters skin deer for sixty years, and he'd never seen it, and a man can't do it. The meat wasn't touched. Not one bite. Whatever did this hadn't wanted to eat her. It had wanted the hide. On the trunk of the birch, a couple of feet above the fork, a tuft of hair was caught in a curl of the paper bark. Long. Gray. Coarse. I didn't touch it. Walt sat down on a fallen log with his shotgun across his legs, and his hands flat on his knees. He sat there for a minute. Then he told me about Grandpa Emil. Emil came over from Sweden as a boy and worked the logging camps in this part of the state from the time he was sixteen. By the 1920s, he was the cook at a camp a mile north of the Big Flowage. Walt said there used to be a bunkhouse, a cook shanty, a horse barn, a blacksmith shop, and a root cellar dug into the hill behind the cook shanty, where Emil kept his potatoes and salt pork. He said the cellar was still there. He'd seen it once when he was a boy. The door was grown over even then. One winter, a young sawyer at that camp went out on a Sunday in January to check a line of rabbit snares, and he didn't come back. The men looked for him for three days in deep snow and gave up. He walked back into camp in the middle of March. He came out of the trees at dusk, wearing his own clothes and stood at the edge of the clearing, and he wouldn't come any closer. The men went out to him. Emil said he was thin and gray, and he smelled bad, and he wouldn't look anybody in the face. When the men asked where he'd been, he only said it back. Where have you been? When one of them asked if he was hungry, he said, Are you hungry? And he said it in the voice of the man who'd asked. Not his own voice. That man's voice. The camp boss figured the cold had driven him simple. The sawyer stood at the bunkhouse door and said, Can I come in? It's cold. The boss said, Sure, come in. In the morning, two men were gone from their bunks. Their blankets were thrown back. Their boots were on the floor under their bunks, side by side. The sawyer was gone, too. The men found the root cellar door open. Inside were the two men's clothes and boots, and the sawyer's clothes, folded, and hides. Deer and rabbit and fox and a horse that had gone missing from the barn in February. They never found the men. The company shut the camp down that spring and never cut that country again. Ten years later, Emil bought our forty. Walt said Emil loved this country more than anything, and he was the stubbornest man who ever lived. And he figured he knew the rules well enough to live beside it. The second October he slept in the new camp. He woke up in the middle of the night and saw a face at the north window, looking in at him. He never told anybody what the face looked like. In the morning he nailed boards over the window from the inside, and he kept them there until the day he died. Walt learned the rules sitting at the camp table when he was about eight, from Emil himself, with my dad beside him on the bench. He said them to me there on the log. Slow, one at a time, and I'm putting them down here the way he said them. It goes where nobody is. Empty camps. Empty sheds. Empty clothes. It takes the skins off things that are finished with them. It says what it's heard, in the voice it heard it in. It can't come through a door with a living man behind it, unless that man tells it to come in. So you never tell it to come in. And you never answer it, not one word, because once you start answering, you're half way to yes. Then Walt told me the last part, the part that was his and not Emil's. When the camp burned in 1984, the boards burned with it, and the window was open again for the first time in fifty years. Emil had told him once that the window was where it watched from, that it would stand out there in the swamp and look in at a sleeping man for hours, learning him. So when Walt and my dad started camping in the tent, Walt made the two rules. The tent never faces that window, and nobody looks through it after dark, because if you can see it, it can see you, and Walt didn't want it learning any more of us than it already had. I thought about the canvas. I thought about those six cloth ties on the flaps. I said, "We don't have a door." Walt said, "No, we don't." He looked back toward the flowage for a while. He said he figured it was Cody that changed things. He figured that last November it had found out what a person was worth to it, and now it wanted another one. We got moving again. A half-mile past the dough, crossing a big blowdown, Walt's bad knee folded on him. He went down hard between two logs, and the shotgun went clattering off into the ferns, and he shouted, "Nate! Hold up! I'm hurt! It's my knee!" I got him up. Nothing was broken. He sat on the log with his face gray and swore for a while, and then he wrapped the knee with the elastic bandage from my pack and limped on. I remember that shout because of what happened later. At the time, it was just Walt hurting his knee, the same as he does about once a year. We came out at the east gate of the flowage road a little before noon. Gary's truck was there, a gray Chevy with a cap on the back. The driver's door was standing wide open. The dome light was dead, and when I leaned in and turned the key, nothing happened. The battery had run down with the door open. Everything that had been inside the cab was out on the gravel. A sleeping bag, dragged a few yards and torn open down one side. A cooler, lit off, empty. A thermos, crushed flat. And the windows. Every window on that truck was covered in handprints, the same long narrow hands, smeared in dark grease. They were on the outside of the glass. Then I looked closer, and they were on the inside too. Inside of the windshield. On the inside of the back window. It had climbed into the empty cab, and put its hands all over the glass from in there. Gary hadn't been in the truck when it came. In the soft dirt of the ditch beside the truck, there were boot prints heading north. A man's boots, with the edges of the prints already crumbling. They were at least a day old. And over the top of them, stepping in them, wiping them out in places, were the Long, bare tracks, heading north too. following him. Walt looked at those tracks for a long time. Then he looked north along the edge of the flowage, toward the old logging camp. He's still out there, Walt said, or he isn't. Either way, we go look. I'm not going to pretend I wanted to, but Gary had walked north alone with that thing behind him, and nobody else in the world knew it. So we followed the tracks. The tracks ran north along the edge of the flowage, through the cattails and the standing dead trees, and then turned into the woods. About a half mile in, Gary's boot prints got farther apart. He'd started running. The bear prints behind him got farther apart, too. They led us straight to the old logging camp. It's mostly popple saplings and raspberry canes now, on the south side of a low hill. You can still see the long rectangle of foundation stones where the bunkers are. The bunkhouse stood, and rusted barrel hoops, and pieces of an old cookstove in the brush. At the far edge of the clearing, there's a huge white pine, the biggest tree for a mile, and chained to the trunk of that pine, there's an old ladder stand, rusted angle iron, a ladder of welded rungs, a little platform with a seat about twenty feet up. Somebody built it in the seventies, probably, and nobody had used it in a long time. The ground around the base of that pine was trampled flat. Not a path, a circle. The leaves had been ground down to bare black dirt in a ring all the way around the trunk, about ten feet across, and the ring was nothing but those long bear prints, thousands of them, on top of each other. The bark of the pine was torn off in long strips up to about nine feet. The bottom two rungs of the ladder had been ripped off their welds, and were lying in the dirt, bent. Gary's deer rifle was lying in the leaves outside the trunk of the pine. I looked up. He was on the platform. He was sitting hunched on that little seat with both arms around the trunk, and his face pressed against the bark. No hat. His coat was zipped to his chin. He wasn't moving. Walt called his name. Gary flinched hard and pressed himself closer against the tree. Stay back, he said. His voice was a croak. I know what you are. Stay back. Walt told him who we were. Walt and Nate, from the old camp on the west side, where the chimney is. He told him Bev at the bar had told us to be nice to him. Gary didn't move, he said. It talked all night. It never said one new thing, not one. It said a thousand things, and every one of them was something Cody really said to me once. I asked it what we had for supper the last night he was at my house. It just said Uncle Gary again. He took a breath. So say something new. Something nobody ever said out here. Walt thought for a second. Then he said, There's a thermos of coffee in my pack. Half of it's brandy. You're going to come down here and drink every drop of it. Gary said, Say it different. Walt said, Get down out of that tree and drink my brandy before I drink it myself, you stubborn old fool. Gary made a sound I didn't recognize at first. It was a laugh. Then it turned into crying, and he cried up to me. for a while with his arms around that tree, and then he started to climb down. His legs barely worked. I climbed up the broken bottom of the ladder and took his weight on my shoulders for the last few rungs, and Walt caught him at the bottom. He wasn't hurt, not a scratch on him, but his lips were split and dry, his hands were blue, and he was shaking so hard he couldn't hold the thermos cup, so Walt held it for him. He drank all of it, and two bottles of water, and ate a candy bar out of my pack in four bites. Then he told us. He'd walked north from his truck Saturday morning, the day we drove up. Around noon he came into this clearing, and Cody was standing in the popples at the far side. Blaze orange vest, hands in his pockets, the way Cody always stood, and it called to him. Uncle Gary. Cody's voice. Exactly. It started toward him. That was when Gary saw how it walked. Smooth and level, the top half never moving, the knees bending wrong. He raised his rifle, and he couldn't make himself pull the trigger, because it was Cody's voice. Then it got close enough that he could see its face. He didn't describe the face, he just said he ran. He got to the big pine and went up that ladder faster than he'd climbed anything in his life, and he dropped his rifle doing it. It came to the bottom of the tree and took hold of the ladder and pulled. The bottom two rungs tore off. It tried to come up the trunk and fell back. Then it stopped trying, and then it walked around the tree. All afternoon, all night. Around and around, in that ring, never stopping. And the whole time it talked to him in Cody's voice. Uncle Gary, come down. Uncle Gary, I'm cold. Uncle Gary, it's me. Come on down. All the things Cody had ever said to him in the woods. On deer stands and grouse walks for twenty years. Every one of them. Sometime in the middle of the night it went away. For a few hours. He didn't know where. Then it came back before dawn and walked the ring again until the sun came up over the hill. Then it was just gone. He'd sat up there all morning, sure it was waiting in the brush for him to climb down. I asked him what time it left in the night. He said he didn't know exactly. Maybe one night. I asked him what time it left in the one. I looked at Walt. Walt looked at me. Neither of us said it. Walt knew where the root cellar was. Behind where the cook shanty stood, at the bottom of the hill. I went. Walt stayed with Gary in the clearing, the two of them sitting on a foundation stone with their guns across their knees. If you didn't know to look, you'd have walked past it. Gary had, a dozen times. A wall of fieldstone was set into the ground. It was a wall of fieldstone. It was a wall of hillside, about four feet high and grown over with moss, and in the middle of the wall was a low, dark opening. A sheet of old rusted roofing tin leaned across half of it. Raspberry canes grew thick all around, except right in front of the opening, where they were broken and trampled down into a path. The smell came out of that opening into the cold air. It was the smell from the job box, a hundred times stronger. I turned on my headlamp, held the rifle in front of me, and ducked inside. It was a room about ten feet by twelve, with a ceiling of old logs and dirt walls, held back by rotten planks. Roots hung down between the logs. The floor was covered in hides, layered deep enough that I sank into them up to my ankles. Mostly deer. Raccoons. A coyote. A fox. A beagle with a red collar and a brass tag on it. Some of the hides were fresh, but I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them. Some were fresh and wet, some were dried stiff, and some were so old they had rotted down to hair and leather. On top of the hides there were clothes, a pair of insulated coveralls, a pair of rubber boots, flannel shirts, folded. In the back corner was Cody. I'm not going to describe what was there. I'll say that I saw a pair of jeans and one hunting boot, and a gray sweatshirt from the college in Stevens Point. I'll say that he had been there for a long time, and that his clothes had been put back on him afterward, and that the buttons on the flannel shirt over the sweatshirt were done up wrong. I came back out into the light. Gary was standing at the edge of the raspberry canes, watching my face. Is he in there? He said. I nodded. Gary sat down in the raspberry canes. He sat there a long time. Walt stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder and didn't say anything. Then Walt told us what Emil used to say. The cellar was its home. It always came back to the cellar. Every hide it ever took, every empty coat, it carried back here and laid down and slept on. It had been sleeping in that hole for a hundred years. Gary looked up at me. Burn it, he said. All of it. Him too. I don't want him lying in there with that thing one more night. Gary's daypack was still hanging on a hook at the top of the stand. There was a quart bottle of white gas in it. For the little backpacking stove he carried. I climbed up and got it. I always carry two road flares in my hunting pack, out of habit from work. I poured the white gas through the opening onto the hides and splashed the last of it up onto the old log ceiling. Walt and I dragged dead popple and armloads of dry raspberry canes against the mouth. Then I struck a flare, let it get going, and threw it in. There was a deep, soft whomp I felt in my chest. Orange light came out of the opening, and then smoke. Black smoke, thick and greasy, rolling out of the mouth and up the hill. The canes caught. The popple caught. Within a few minutes the old log roof was burning, and smoke was coming up out of the ground above it, out of the moss and the dirt of the hillside. We stood there and watched it. Gary didn't look away once. It was about half past four. The sun was low and orange in the tops of the popples. That's when it screamed. It came from somewhere often, the north, deep in the woods, a long way off. But it was loud enough to stop all three of us where we stood. It wasn't one voice. It was every voice it had, all at once. Cody, Gary, Walt, my dad, the little boy. Men's voices I didn't know, shouting words that weren't English, and I understood those were men from the logging camp, a hundred years ago, and mine. My own voice, in there with the rest of them, screaming. It went on for a long time. Then it stopped. Nobody said anything. The cellar roared and crackled behind us. Then Walt said, now it knows. I ran through it in my head, because nobody wanted to say it out loud. Gary's truck was a mile south with a dead battery. Our tent was two miles away. Our tent was two miles southwest, and our tent was a sheet of canvas with six cloth ties. Our truck was three miles away, at the end of the forest road, on the far side of the railroad grade. Gary could barely walk. Walt's knee was wrapped in an elastic bandage. The sun would be down in two hours, and under the trees it would be black before that. The tent's no good, Walt said. The truck's the only door we've got. So we walked. Walt set the order before we left. Before we left the clearing, I went first, with the big flashlight and the rifle. Gary went in the middle with his own rifle slung on his back, and he held on to the back of my coat with one fist. Walt went last, with the shotgun and a headlamp, and he held on to the back of Gary's coat. Walt said nobody let go. Not for anything. Whatever we heard, we didn't answer it, and we didn't step off the line. If one of us stopped, all three of us stopped. We went south along the edge of the road. The sun went down behind the dead trees on the far side, and turned the water orange, and then gray, and then black. By the time we reached the dam at the south end, I had the flashlight on. That was when I heard it the first time. Off to our right, in the thick popple between the marsh and the ridge, a branch broke. A big one. A dead limb snapping under weight. Then nothing. We kept walking. A minute later, we heard a voice. Later, another branch. Even with us. When we stopped, it stopped. When we started again, I heard the brush move, and a dry stick crack, keeping pace with us thirty or forty yards off in the dark. At the dam, we turned west onto the railroad grade. The grade is a raised bed of gravel and cinders about ten feet wide, with brush and trees pressing in close on both sides. In daylight, it's an easy walk. At night, with one flashlight, it's a tunnel. My beam went out maybe fifty yards ahead of us, and lit up the gravel and the yellow popple leaves, and the gray trunks on both sides. And past the edges of that light, there was nothing at all. Black. The kind of dark you only get under trees, with no moon up yet. It walked beside us in that dark the whole way. I never saw it clearly on the grade. I saw pieces. Once, when I swung the light to the right, two small eyes threw it back yellow, low to the ground between two popple trunks. And then, they weren't there. Once, I caught a flash of blaze orange moving behind a screen of hazel brush. Mostly, I just heard it. Heavy steps in the leaves, branches breaking. And under that, when the wind died, the breathing. That same wet, thick breathing I'd heard through the canvas. Then it started talking. The first one came from the left, out in the swamp, maybe sixty yards off. "Nate! Hold up! I'm hurt! It's my knee!" Walt's voice. The same shout. Word for word. He'd let out that morning when he went down in the blow down. Loud and sharp and full of pain. It went straight into me. I stopped walking, and I swear my whole body turned left toward that voice before my head caught up. My feet wanted to go. Then I felt the pull on my coat. Gary's fist. And behind Gary. Walt. "I'm right here," Walt said quietly from the back of the line. "I'm right here, Nate. Keep walking." I kept walking. Out in the swamp, Walt's voice shouted it again. And again. "Nate, hold up. I'm hurt." Each time it came from a little farther off, a little more to the left, drawing away from the grade. Trying to pull me after it. Then it went quiet for a while. And then, from the right. Close. In the brush beside the grade, somebody started crying. It was Cody. Not words. Just crying. The hard, hiccuping kind a little kid does after he's hurt himself. Behind me, Gary whispered, "That's him at six. The day he fell off his bike in my driveway and split his chin." Gary's hand let go of my coat. I felt it go. I turned around with the light. And Gary had already taken two steps off the edge of the grade. Down toward the brush. Toward that crying. Walt still had him by the back of the coat. Walt planted his good leg and hauled him back. And Gary fought him. He fought hard. He got one arm loose and swung it back at Walt and kept pulling toward the trees. And Walt just held on with both hands and said his name. Over and over. Low. Gary. Gary. Gary. I got hold of him too. Between the two of us, we dragged him back up onto the gravel. He stopped fighting all at once. He stood there shaking, with his face in his hands. And the crying went on in the brush. And he said, "I know. I know. I know it's not him." He took hold of my coat again. He held on so tight I could feel his knuckles through the canvas. We kept walking. The voices didn't stop after that. They came from every side. And it moved on. It moved on. It moved on. It moved fast between them. Walt's shout from the swamp on the left. Then Cody crying from the right. Then Walt again from up ahead of us. Out past the end of my light. Where the grade curved. Gary's voice from behind us. Calling Cody's name across the flowage. My own voice. From the dark beside me saying, "We don't have a door." It never said anything new. Every word of it was something one of us had said out loud in those woods. At some time. And it had been there listening. About an hour in, we came past our old camp. The grade runs within a hundred yards of the foundation. My light found the chimney first. A gray stone column standing up out of the black. Then the pale shape of our tent, sitting there empty inside the foundation with its flaps tied shut. Then the north wall behind it and that square hole in the middle of it. From the window a little boy said, "Walty, I'm cold." I felt Gary flinch through the coat. I heard Walt behind us take one long breath in through his nose. "Don't look," Walt said. "Keep your light on the grade. Don't look at it." I kept my light on the grade. I kept my eyes on the gravel in the beam. The little boy said it again and again. From that window. While we walked past. And none of us turned our heads. It was the longest hundred yards of my life. The voice stopped when we were past. And then it stopped talking altogether. That was worse. For the first few minutes there was nothing at all. No voices. No branches. Nothing but our boots on the gravel and our own breathing and the creek off to the south. Then I heard it behind us. Not beside us anymore. Behind. On the grade. Heavy steps on the gravel. Not hurrying. Just keeping up. Every time I listened, they were a little closer. Then they left the gravel and went into the brush along the edge. And I heard branches snapping. Big ones. Close enough now that I could hear the leaves shaking down after each one. "Faster," Walt said. We went faster. We didn't run. Gary couldn't run. And Walt couldn't run. And if one of us went down on that gravel in the dark, we were done. So we walked as fast as three men can walk, holding onto each other's coats. My light swung all over the grade with every step. My lungs burned. Behind me, Gary was breathing in short little sobs. The branches kept snapping. Closer. Closer. I could hear the breathing again. Wet and thick. Back there, just past the edge of Walt's headlamp. Walt's bad knee gave out about a half-mile from the truck. I heard him go down on the gravel behind us and swear, and the line jerked hard and stopped. I turned the light around. Walt was on one knee on the grade. And past him, at the very end of the beam, maybe twenty yards back, something tall was standing in the middle of the railroad grade. I only saw it for a second. Gray. Thin. Very tall. A smear of blaze orange across its chest. Then Walt twisted around on his knee, put the shotgun to his shoulder, and fired down the grade. The flash lit up everything for an instant. And in that instant, it wasn't there. The scream came out of the brush on the left side of the grade. Close. Its own scream. high and raw with no words in it at all. Gary and I got Walt up between us, one of his arms over each of our shoulders, and we went. The beaver pond opened up on our left, flat and black, with the stars showing in it now. Something was in the water. I could hear it, keeping pace with us out there, the slow, heavy slosh of something big wading through the shallows along the edge. Then the sloshing stopped, and the branches started snapping again on the right side of the grade, right beside us, right behind us. Then my light caught something red at the end of the grade, two little red circles, low down, side by side, the taillight reflectors on my truck. We came out of the trees and onto the gravel rise at a run, the three of us, Walt hopping on one leg between Gary and me, and the woods closed in behind us, and something in them broke a branch so deep that it broke a branch. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. I could not breathe. behind my back that I heard the bark split. I don't remember getting the keys out. I remember Gary pulling the back door open and shoving Walt in across the seat and climbing in on top of him, and me throwing myself behind the wheel and all four door locks going down with one thunk. Then the engine was running, and the three of us were sitting there in the dark cab breathing, with the heater blowing cold air on our feet. The truck was parked nose to the woods, the way I always leave it. I put it in reverse to swing it around, and the headlights came on and swept across the tree line at the end of the grade. It was standing there, right at the edge of the trees, where the grade comes out onto the gravel, maybe 40 feet from my front bumper. It wasn't hiding. It was just standing there in the full white glare of the headlights, and for the first time I saw all of it. It was tall, taller than any man, even stooped the way it was, with its head pushed forward and down. Its arms hung past its knees. Its body was thin, so thin I could count the ribs and see the points of its hips under the skin. The skin was gray, bare in patches, and in other patches covered in long, coarse gray hair that hung from its shoulders and its head in greasy strings. It was wearing Cody's blaze orange vest. The vest was black with dirt and torn open at both sides, pulled on over that narrow chest with the zipper broken. Its face was long. and flat. The eyes were small and set close together, and they were wet, and they caught the headlights and shone yellow. It had almost no nose, only two slits. The mouth went nearly from one side of its jaw to the other, and it had no lips. It didn't move toward us. It didn't move at all. It just stood there at the edge of the light and looked at me through the windshield. Then it spoke. Its mouth never moved. The voice just came out of it. Clear across forty feet of gravel, through the glass, into the cab. Hey, buddy, open up. It's freezing out here. It was my dad. My grown-up dad, with the rasp at the bottom of his voice from forty years of cigarettes. I hadn't heard that voice in eleven years. I knew it from the first word, and I knew the words, too. My dad said that every night of every October I ever spent with him up there, he'd come back from the latrine in the dark, and Walt would already have the flaps tied shut, and he'd stand outside the canvas and say it, and I'd get up and pull the ties and let him in, and he'd stamp his boots and shake the cold off his coat. I must have heard him say it a hundred times, and every one of those times, it had been out there in the dark, listening. Hey, buddy, open up. From the back seat, Walt said, Drive. I drove. I backed around and put it in gear and spun the tires on the gravel, and in the mirror I watched it standing at the edge of the trees, getting smaller in the red of my taillights, until the road curved and the woods closed in and it was gone. It never moved. It just stood there and watched us go. I drove the nine miles of forest road faster than I've ever driven a gravel road in my life, and nobody in the truck said one word the whole way. Bev was closing up when we pulled in. I used the phone behind her bar. She heard what I said in her ear, and I said, I'm going to drive. I'm going to drive. I'm going to drive. I'm going to into it. She came around the counter and put her arms around me, and she didn't ask me one thing. The sheriff's department came, and an ambulance for Gary, and a conservation warden named Lisa Brandt, who'd been on the Pruitt search the year before. They went in the next morning with a side by side and four deputies with rifles. They didn't find anything on the grade, but our tracks and the long bare ones beside them. They jumped Gary's truck and drove it out. They took down our tent. The old cellar was still burning. It burned for three more days. Under that hill there was a hundred years of dry roots and old timbers and rotten hides, and the fire got down into all of it and smoldered, and smoke kept coming up out of the ground. The fourth day it finally went cold, and the warden and the deputies opened it up. They found Cody, what was left, and the dental records matched three weeks later. Gary buried him in November. In a cemetery outside Wausau, beside Cody's grandparents. Walt and I went. Walt stood the whole time on his bad knee and wouldn't take a chair. They found two more people in there, deeper down, under the floor. Bones, very old, with buttons and boot nails from a long time ago. Lisa Brandt said the state would probably never put names on them. Walt and I already had a pretty good idea who they were. And they found it. It was lying right in the middle of the cellar floor, on top of everything, curled up in the ashes where the hides had been. Sometime after it watched us drive away, it had gone home. It had walked back three miles through the dark to the only place it had ever had, and it had crawled in through the coals and the smoke, and lain down where it always lay down, and sometime in those three days, the burning hillside had come down on top of it. It always goes back to the cellar, Walt said when I told him. Emil said so. Where else was it going to go? Lisa Brandt came to Walt's house the week before Christmas, in her own truck, out of uniform. She sat at his kitchen table and drank his coffee. She said she'd been a warden for 22 years. She'd handled bears and wolves and cougar reports and one moose that wandered down from Canada. She said what they took out of that hill was long, and burned black, and the arm bones were longer than her own legs. She said the skull had a jaw. That opened wider than any skull she'd ever held. She said the state had it now, and the report would say unidentified animal remains, and she didn't much care what the report said. It's dead, she told us. I saw it dead. That's what I drove out here to tell you. Nobody has lost so much as a dish towel from a camp up there since. Bev keeps track. She'd know. Gary calls me most Sunday nights now. He asks about the roads and weather and my kids. And then he says, well, and hangs up. It took me a few months to notice where I'd heard that before. Walt and I went back up this year. We went the last week of September, a week earlier than usual, because Walt said he didn't want to wait. His knee is worse. He walks the grade slower than ever, and he misses more grouse than ever, and he blames his glasses. The first morning, we walked north to the old logging camp. The hill had fallen in where the cellar was, and the ground was black, and fireweed was coming up through it. Red squirrels chattered at us from the popples the whole way there and the whole way back. Walt stood at the edge of the black ground for a long time. He didn't say anything, and neither did I. That afternoon, we pitched the tent on the old foundation. When I went to set the frame up the way we always do, with the door facing south toward the creek, Walt stopped me. Turn it around, he said. I said, well, I don't So I did. For the first time since 1984, the door of that tent faced the north wall. That night, I untied the flaps and went out in the cold and walked up to the window. The moon was nearly full again. I stood in front of that square hole in the stone and looked straight through it. There was the swamp, silver with frost. There were the black spruce and the gold tamaracks and the moon hanging over them. That was the end of the night. I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But that was all. Nothing looked back at me. I went back in and tied the flaps, and we played cribbage on the cooler lid with the lantern turned up high and the door of the tent facing that window. Nothing came to the canvas. Nothing called anybody's name. The only sounds were the stove and the creek and Walt counting his hand out loud. He won two. He always wins two. the last weekend at deer camp my brother tells people he broke his ankle carrying a stove out of our dad's camp that's what he told his boss our relatives and most of his friends if you've ever moved one of those old cast iron stoves it's a pretty believable explanation i usually let him finish before i change the subject the problem is that i was there and sometimes i need to talk about what actually happened he doesn't we've had that conversation enough times that i've stopped bringing it up he knows knows I'm posting this. His only request was that I leave out his last name and anything that would let people find the property. The camp belongs to somebody else now and we both agree that sending strangers up there would be a terrible thing to do. This happened in October of 2019 in the woods outside Marianville, Pennsylvania. I was 32. My brother Grant was 37. We'd spent a lot of weekends at that camp and although neither of us was the kind of outdoorsman our dad thought he was, we knew the property. I want to make that clear because there's a point in this where our decisions probably won't make sense unless you understand that we thought we knew what we were dealing with. Our dad had died that spring. By October, we'd sorted through his house and agreed to sell the camp. Grant lived almost four hours away. I worked most Saturdays and neither of us wanted another roof to pay for. There wasn't a bigger family argument behind it. Dad had loved the place. We liked visiting it. Those aren't the same thing when you're the one getting the bills. We went up that weekend to empty the cabin and meet a man who wanted the wood splitter. He was supposed to come around 10 on Sunday morning. The plan was to load what we wanted into Grant's four-door pickup, spend one last night there, hand over the splitter, and lock up. A neighboring landowner had already agreed to buy the property once we had our things out. I mention all that because we weren't going up there looking for anything. We had contractor bags, cleaning supplies, and the wrong size socket for a bed frame. Most of our conversation on the drive was about which of us had to tell our mother that nobody wanted the enormous couch dad had somehow gotten through the cabin door. The camp sat on a wooded hillside at the end of a private dirt road. There was one other hunting property near the turnoff. But you couldn't see it from ours. Once you got past that turn, you had several miles of timber between you and the paved road. We never got phone service at the cabin. On previous visits, that had been part of the appeal. The road ended on a flat bench above the camp. That was where everybody parked. From there, you followed a narrow path downhill about 80 yards to the cabin. Halfway down, the path passed an old equipment shed. The slope got steeper and steeper, below the shed, and dad had installed a crooked set of wooden steps for the last stretch. You couldn't get a vehicle down to the front door. There were too many trees and too much exposed rock, even if you were willing to tear up the yard. Behind the cabin, the ground dropped again toward a small creek. There was a kitchen window on that side, but getting out through it meant climbing down onto a ledge beside the foundation. The front door was the only sensible entrance. I hadn't thought of that as a problem before that weekend. I was so scared. I was so We arrived a little after 10 on Saturday. It had rained overnight, and wet leaves were stuck to the windshield when we stopped. The maples were mostly yellow, the oaks were still holding a lot of their leaves, and everything on the ground had that damp smell you get toward the end of fall. It was cold enough that I wanted gloves while carrying the first load down. Grant parked with the truck facing out. He always did that, even at the grocery store. We left our overnight bags in the cab and brought down a cooler, the cleaning supplies, and a plastic tote for dishes. The first thing I noticed was the shed door. It was hanging open about a foot. Dad had used a loop of chain and a padlock to keep it shut, mostly to stop the wind from getting it. The chain was still attached to the door. The metal staple it had been locked in was still there. The metal staple it had been locked through was lying on the ground with a piece of split wood caught around it. Grant had been up in August to meet the prospective buyer. He said the door had been closed then. We stood there for a minute looking at it, annoyed more than anything. There wasn't much in the shed worth taking. It had an old workbench, a lawnmower that hadn't run in years, a pile of fence posts, and a shallow service pit Dad had used when he could still get his little tractor down that far. The tractor was still there. The tractor was gone. The pit was covered with thick boards, and a thin plywood patch still covered an opening behind the workbench. The shed had become a place to put things nobody wanted in the cabin. I pulled the door open. The smell inside was strong enough that I turned my face away. Grant asked if something had died in there. I said probably. There was a lot more material on the floor than I remembered. Dry grass, dead fern stems, strips of bark. It had been a long, long time since I'd seen it. It had been pushed against the rear wall in a mound. An old moving blanket lay across the top, folded over on itself and dark with moisture. The shed roof had several leaks, but the pile was underneath a section Dad had patched with sheet metal. I thought somebody had been sleeping there. That's where my mind went first. Someone had broken the lock and made a bed. We were remote, but we weren't in untouched wilderness. People hunted, cut timber, rode four-wheelers. And occasionally used somebody else's property without asking. Grant noticed the mower before I did. It had been moved off its wheels and stood upright against the workbench, with the handle twisted underneath it. That made the space beside the pile wider. There was no reason for us to move it that way, and I couldn't picture Dad doing it. The thing was heavy enough that carrying it out had been on our list of jobs for two people. We called out. Just a normal hello. Followed by Grant saying that we owned the place. Nobody answered. I didn't walk all the way in. I could see most of the interior from the door, and I didn't have much interest in finding out what was wet on that blanket. We decided to check the cabin before doing anything else. The cabin was locked, its windows were intact, and there was no sign anyone had been inside. That calmed us down more than it should have. If somebody was living on the property, you'd expect them to pick the building up. We decided to leave the building with beds and a stove. We said that to each other several times while we carried our first load in. Inside, it smelled exactly the way it always had. Old wood, cold ashes, and the peppermint oil Dad used to discourage mice. There were two bunks against one wall, a kitchen area at the back, and a couch that took up most of the remaining room. The place wasn't much bigger than a two-car garage. Grant put a fire in the stove. I opened a window while we swept into the kitchen. Grant checked the batteries in the two lanterns Dad kept above the sink. We found mouse damage in a bag of paper plates, argued about whether a saucepan was worth keeping, and spent 20 minutes trying to remove a shelf without taking half the wall with it. For a while, the shed barely came up. The second thing we noticed was underneath the porch. I found it while looking for a bucket. The ground fell away beside one end of the front porch, leaving enough room underneath that corner to stand bent over. Dad kept buckets, empty planting tubs, and spare lengths of stovepipe there. Most of that stuff had been moved out from against the foundation. It was scattered toward the slope. The dirt next to the cabin had been dug out. It wasn't a huge hole. It was a low, broad hollow beneath the front corner of the cabin, just behind the porch. The cabin stood on stone piers, and a cramped space continued under the floor, from there to the kitchen at the back. The ground up there was a lot of dirt. The ground underneath the camp was rocky, and somebody had worked a surprising amount of it loose. Stones were mixed with fresh dirt near the edge. A length of insulation hung down from the floor above. I crouched to look farther in, and the same smell from the shed came out of that space. This time, I backed away immediately. Grant came down with a flashlight. He looked underneath for maybe five seconds, then stood up and told me to get away from the porch. There was coarse brown hair caught on a torn piece of wood. He said, "You're not going to get away from the porch, are you?" I said, "No, I'm not going to get away from the porch." He said, "You're not going to get away from the porch." I said, "No, I'm not going to get away from the porch." He said, "No, I'm not going to get away from the porch." I said, "No, I'm not going to get away from the porch." inside a fold. One hand held the blanket steady, while the other picked at it. Grant lowered the tote until it rested on his thighs. The thing lifted its head. I've spent a lot of time trying to decide how to describe the face without giving people the wrong idea. It didn't have a bear's snout. Its mouth sat below a wide, flattened nose, and there was bear skin around both. The skin was dark gray, with lighter patches along the lower lip. Hair covered its cheeks and forehead. Its head was narrow at the top, and much wider through the jaw. One eye was cloudy. There was a pale, rough strip of skin above it that continued down the same cheek. The other eye was dark and clear, and it went straight to Grant. That was when it stood up. The shed doorway was a little over six feet high. The thing had to bend its head forward to look through it. Its shoulders nearly filled the opening. It was covered in long, uneven hair, thinner across its stomach, and so dense around the upper arms that I couldn't tell where the body stopped. Bits of dried vegetation were caught along its sides. Its chest moved fast, much faster than I would have expected from something that had just been sitting still. I remember seeing a knee. That probably sounds strange. There was a bear patch on the inside of its right knee, and when it bent, it was as if it was on the ground. It was as if it was on the ground. It bent. I saw how the joint worked. Until then, some part of me was still trying to make the whole animal fit an explanation I already had. It took one step out of the shed and stopped with a hand on the doorframe. Grant said my name, quietly, in his normal voice. He told me to go back to the cabin. Neither of us ran at first. We started moving backward down the path. I was trying to keep my eyes on the thing and feel for the ground behind me. The trash bags caught against my legs. I dropped them. The thing came another few feet out of the shed. Its arms hung low, with a slight bend at the elbows. I could see the palms now. They were lighter than the backs of the hands and heavily creased. It wasn't carrying anything. There were no clothes, no straps, nothing I could mistake for a costume once it was fully outside. At the top of the steps, Grant put the tote down beside the path. Later, he told me he thought leaving what we were carrying might make it stop. I don't know whether that was a good idea. It went past the tote without looking at it. The top of the wooden steps was just behind me. I turned enough to find it, put a foot on the first tread, and heard Grant fall. He'd caught his heel on an exposed root while backing toward the steps. His foot went off the side of the path and he came down on the slope with his right leg underneath him. I saw the position of his boot before he tried to move. His foot was pointing farther outward than it should have been. He made a noise I had never heard from him before. The animal changed immediately. It had been following at about our speed. When Grant cried out, it dropped forward, put one hand against the ground, and came down the path fast enough that I barely had time to grab his jacket. I pulled him toward the steps. He helped with his good leg, pushing so hard that his boot tore through the ground. I pulled him toward the stairs. He came down the last few feet together. I hit my shoulder against the porch post and he landed across my knees. The thing stopped at the top of the steps. It was looking at Grant's right leg. That detail has stayed with me more clearly than its height or its face. He was trying to drag the leg underneath himself, and its head moved each time the boot moved. It had noticed something change. There was no uncertainty about that. The front door was still open from when we'd carried the toad out. I got both hands under Grant's arms and pulled. He slid over the threshold. I fell backward with him, kicked the door shut, and reached up to turn the deadbolt. It had taken less than a minute to get from the shed to the cabin. I was so out of breath that I couldn't speak. Grant was on the floor, gripping his thigh above the injured ankle. His mouth was open, but he wasn't making any noise now. I asked if he'd been bitten or grabbed. He shook his head. Through the little front window, I could see the upper half of the steps. The animal was still there. It had crouched down beside the toad, and for a second I thought it was finally going to look at what we'd left. Instead, it leaned sideways to get a view of the cabin door. I pulled the curtain across. We tried our phones first. Grant tried his, I tried mine, and then I tried an emergency call from the back window. Nothing connected. We knew a place on the ridge, where Dad used to get a weak signal, but reaching it meant going uphill beyond the truck and continuing into the trees. I couldn't leave Grant on the floor while I tried that. At that point, I wasn't sure I could even reach the truck. His ankle was swelling inside the boot. We cut the laces and opened it as far as we could. Getting it off hurt him badly, even with Grant holding his lower leg still while I worked. I cut away the sock afterward. I didn't try to straighten his ankle. I knew enough to be afraid of doing that, and not enough to know what else to do. We got his leg supported on an old sleeping bag from the bunk and moved him until his back rested against the couch. There wasn't much in the first aid box. Gauze, old bandages, a roll of tape, and painkillers that I hoped still worked. I found two short pieces of wood among the scraps beside the stove. Grant held them in place while I wrapped them alongside his lower leg with strips cut from a towel. We kept his toes uncovered so we could check them. He apologized while I was doing it. That bothered me. He was usually the person telling everybody else to calm down, including people who were already calm. Hearing him apologize for falling made the whole situation feel worse. I told him it didn't matter. We had a truck less than a hundred yards away. We only had to get to it. The animal stayed near the steps for another ten minutes. I know that because I kept checking through a narrow opening in the curtain. Sometimes I could see a shoulder. Once I saw the side of its head against the trunk of a tree. It didn't wander around the clearing or go through our trash. It stayed where it could see the front of the cabin. Eventually, it moved uphill out of sight. We waited another twenty minutes before talking about leaving. There was a can of bear spray in a cupboard above the sink. Dad had bought it years earlier. Neither of us had ever used it. I checked that the safety clip would come off, then put it in my jacket pocket. We also had the hatchet from beside the stove and a long steel pry bar we'd brought for taking shelves down. There was no gun in the cabin. Dad never stored his rifles there, and we hadn't brought one to clean. I know somebody will ask, so there's the answer. Grant thought he could get uphill with my help. The truck was an automatic. I could drive, and even if I couldn't, he said his left foot still worked. His keys were in the front pocket of his jeans. We checked that before we did anything else. I folded a towel beneath the splinted leg and looped my belt under it so I could help support its weight. We left everything except the phones, keys, and spray. I unlocked the door and stood there listening. There was wind in the leaves, and somewhere above us a branch rubbed against a branch. Normal sounds. I looked through the front window, then through the little side window by the bunks. I couldn't see anything moving. Getting Grant up was slow. Getting him through the door was worse. He put an arm over my shoulders and tried to keep his weight on his left leg. Every time his injured foot brushed the floor, he stopped breathing for a few seconds. We made it across the porch. At the steps, I turned so he could sit down on a tread and push himself down the stairs. I turned so he could sit down on a tread and push himself down the stairs. He pushed himself backward to the next one. It was the only way I could think to get him up without dropping him. I stood below, lifting his injured leg while he pushed with both arms and his good heel. We'd managed three steps when he stopped. He was looking over my shoulder. The animal was underneath the porch. It had come around the low side of the cabin while we'd been watching the path. I could see its head and one shoulder between the support posts. It was bent low, almost kneeling, with its good eye pointed toward us. The cloudy one was on the other side of its face. I couldn't get past Grant without leaving him between us. I couldn't carry him fast enough to reach the door. For a moment, all I did was support his splinted leg and stare. Then it brought one arm out from under the porch. The hand settled on the bottom step. The fingers spread across the wood, and the end of the tread was hidden underneath them. I lowered Grant's leg onto the step, took the spray out, and pulled the clip. I don't remember aiming. I remember pressing the top and seeing an orange cloud strike the animal across the nose and good eye. It jerked back, hit its head on a beam, and swung an arm against the porch hard enough that I felt the movement through the steps. Some of the spray came back at us. My eyes closed, and I started coughing. Grant was trying to get down, but his leg wouldn't move where he needed it. I grabbed the front of his jacket and stepped onto the porch. It was an awful thing to do to someone with a broken ankle. He yelled, and I kept pulling. We got inside. side. I shut the door and leaned against it until I could see enough to find the lock. Outside, the animal was coughing too. There was nothing strange or human about the sound. It was a big animal struggling to clear its throat. For some reason, that made me feel better. The spray had done something. Whatever this was, it could be hurt, and it could be made to back away. Grant was curled on his side beside the couch. I knelt next to him and asked whether I'd made his leg worse. He took a long time to answer. Then he said, it was waiting down there. We didn't try the steps again. For the next hour, I stayed near the windows while Grant sat with his leg raised. The swelling had gotten worse, but his toes were warm and he could move them. He drank some water. I tried to eat a sandwich and couldn't get more than a few bites down. The spray can was still partly full. I couldn't tell how much was left by shaking it, and I didn't want to waste any finding out. I put it beside the hatchet on the table. We talked through the layout of the property. There was an old tractor track that curved off the parking area and ended beside the shed. Saplings had grown into the edges, but it was wide enough for the pickup. If one of us could get to the truck, we could bring it 40 yards closer. That still left Grant with the worst section of the slope to climb. I offered to make a run for it while he stayed inside. He asked what I would do if the animal came after me halfway up. I said I'd spray it again. He asked what I would do if it stayed behind and got into the cabin while I was gone. I didn't have an answer to that one. The door was solid wood with a good deadbolt, but the windows were old. There were heavy shutters on the outside, and we hadn't closed them because we'd arrived expecting to clean, not secure the place. Reaching them now would mean standing on the porch. He said I'd spray it again. or balancing along the side of the foundation. It was possible that we could have left during that hour. I need to be honest about that. We weren't watching every part of the property at once. Maybe the animal had gone far enough away. Maybe I could have made the truck before it noticed, but we'd just tried leaving and almost been caught, and Grant couldn't move without help. The rear window would get us outside, but it wouldn't get him up the slope. Using it meant separating, and while the front door still seemed solid, we weren't willing to do that. Around four, I saw it again. It came down the slope to the right of the steps, using the trees for support. The fur across its face was wet. It kept its good eye narrowed, and every few seconds it rubbed that side of its head against its shoulder. In its other hand, it held the moving blanket. Something heavy was wrapped inside. It dragged along the ground, and it was still there. It was still there. It was still there. It was still there. It was still there. It was still there. It was still there. It was still there. It was still there. Catching in the leaves. The animal pulled it free with small jerks that barely seemed to take any effort. It stopped near the woodpile and shook the blanket open. There was part of a deer inside. The head and one front leg were still attached to a section of the body. One antler had caught in the fabric, and the animal worked it loose with the same picking movement we'd seen in the shed. I let the curtain fall back into place. Grant asked what it was doing. I told him. Neither of us said anything for a while after that. We'd been thinking about an animal that wanted us away from its bed. Bringing food down to the cabin made it harder to believe that all it wanted was for us to leave. It had access to the shed again. We weren't between it and anything up there. It had chosen to stay beside us. The afternoon light faded early under the trees. I built the fire up and put a kettle on. Grant used one of Dad's empty coffee cans because there was no chance of getting him to the outhouse. Those were the things we focused on. Water. Warmth. Keeping his leg supported. Small jobs were easier than looking at the clock and thinking about how many hours remained until morning. He asked me to take the wallet out of his back pocket. Sitting on it was hurting him. I put it beside mine on the table, and for some light of them together nearly made me cry. Two wallets, a roll of tape, and the can of spray. Nothing in that room was meant for what we were dealing with. I think Grant noticed, because he started talking about the buyer coming for the splitter. He'd confirmed the time on Friday. Ten in the morning. The man knew to drive all the way to the parking area. If our truck was there and nobody answered, he'd probably come down to the cabin. We had someone coming. We repeated that to each other. By dark, the animal had moved out of the little area we could see from the front window. I didn't know whether it was still below the porch. We switched on one of the battery lanterns and kept it low. The curtains stayed shut except when I moved an edge to look outside. The first time the floor moved, I thought Grant had dropped something. I was standing by the stove. He was sitting on the couch, with both hands around his mug. He looked down at the same time I did. Near the sink, a square section of flooring had lifted slightly at one corner. There was an access hatch there. Dad had put it in when he'd replaced the kitchen floor, so he could reach the shutoff and the pipe connections underneath. It was made from the same plywood and flooring as everything around it. You wouldn't notice it unless you knew it was there. I'd forgotten about it completely. The raised corner settled. A few seconds passed. Then it rose again, higher this time, and something picked up. I didn't know what it was. The pale appeared in the gap. Fingers. They came through curled upward, feeling along the inside edge. There was dirt packed into the creases, and a broken nail on one finger exposed a pink strip underneath. I grabbed the kettle off the stove. It had been hot enough to make tea a few minutes before. I poured it into the opening. The hand pulled away so quickly that the hatch dropped shut before I'd emptied the kettle. Under the floor, something hit a joist. Dust fell from the edge of the counter. I stood on the hatch and shouted at Grant to give me the screws from our toolbox. He couldn't get up, so I had to step off it and get them myself. That was maybe the worst three seconds of the night. Turning my back on that loose square of floor felt impossible. We had a cordless drill and a box of long screws from taking down the shelves. I drove them through all four sides of the hatch into the supports beneath it, then emptied a small freestanding cupboard beside the sink and dragged it over the top. Grant pulled the couch closer so he could help brace it with his good leg if it moved again. The floor stayed still. Afterward, I noticed that the animal hadn't torn its way through at random. It had found the one section that lifted out. It could have discovered that by pushing around underneath, the same way any curious animal might. I understand that now. At the time, all I could think was that it had known about a way into the cabin that I'd forgotten. We moved Grant away from the windows. I shut the interior door to the little storage room, even though there was nothing in there except blankets and paint. I wanted fewer openings around us. It didn't make much practical difference, but I did it anyway. Then we sat on the floor beside the stove and waited. There's a lot of that night I can't put in a useful order. I checked the windows, checked Grant's toes, added wood, and checked the windows. And tried my phone again. Sometimes 20 minutes passed without anything happening. Sometimes I looked at the time and couldn't believe only two minutes had gone by. We didn't hear it constantly. That was part of the problem. When it was quiet outside, I couldn't tell whether we'd been given an opportunity or whether it had settled somewhere close to the door again. Around 11, it pulled one of the porch boards loose. The board was at the outer corner of the front porch. The ground dropped away beneath it. I saw it lift through the bottom of the front window. A long nail came out with a dry squeal. The animal lowered the board out of sight, then pushed upward on the one beside it. It wasn't trying to reach the door. It was opening the area directly in front of the threshold. Grant thought it was making room to get underneath more easily. I thought it was taking away the surface we'd need to cross if we tried leaving. I still don't know which of us was right. Neither possibility helped us. I hit the inside of the door with the pry bar and yelled until my throat hurt. The work stopped. For about half a minute, nothing happened. Then the door pushed inward against the frame. The deadbolt held, but the wood around the strike plate made a short cracking sound. I backed up. The door relaxed, then moved again, and this time, I saw the gap widen near the top. I saw the gap widen near the top, and this time, I saw the gap widen near the top. I slid the table against it and wedged the pry bar between the table leg and a floor joint. The animal pressed once more. The whole table shifted an inch. Then it stopped. I didn't believe a kitchen table would keep it out. I think the noise and resistance made it cautious. It had been sprayed in the face and burned under the floor. It could probably have broken into the cabin if it had kept trying, but it didn't seem willing to force its whole body through a place where we'd heard it before. That was what we had going for us. A hesitation. I spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to use it. time after midnight, Grant told me that if I saw a clear chance to get to the truck, I needed to take it. I told him I already knew that. He said I wasn't understanding him. If I got away, I could bring people back. If we both stayed and the door came apart, nobody would know until morning. He was being practical. I knew he was. But our dad had spent his last week in a hospital near my apartment, and I'd been the one there most of the time. Grant had come when he could. He had a job, a wife, obligations that didn't disappear because dad was sick. I'd understood that and still resented him for it. We hadn't really talked about it. We'd spent six months discussing furniture and bank accounts instead. Sitting there, I realized he thought I was refusing to leave because I didn't trust him to survive on his own. There was probably some truth to that, but it wasn't the whole reason. I couldn't stand the idea of getting to the road and having to wonder what to do. I couldn't do another version of waiting beside a phone for news about somebody I loved. I told him I wasn't going anywhere without him. He didn't make a speech about it. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. After a minute, he asked me to loosen the strip of towel nearest his ankle. Toward morning, the temperature dropped. We could see frost on the outside corner of the kitchen window. The wood inside was nearly gone. There was plenty more outside, but I wasn't opening the door for it. The animal had stopped testing the front entrance. I could hear it breathing somewhere near the broken porch. It sounded congested, probably from the spray. Every so often it drew in a much louder breath, followed by a wet cough. I was looking through the side window when it moved into view. It crossed beneath the window so close that I saw individual strands of hair along its upper back. It turned its head toward the cabin, and the clear eye caught the light from inside. Its mouth was slightly open. I could see teeth, broad at the front, with one lower tooth missing. I ducked down. By the time I looked again, it was moving toward the porch. There was no anger in its face that I could recognize. No grin or expression that meant anything to me. It was looking for a way to get to us. That was all I could say with any certainty, and it was enough. We waited until there was enough light to see between the trees. By then the buyer was still several hours away. The front door had a split running down beside the lock, the porch was partly open, and Grant had begun shaking even with a blanket around his shoulders. We couldn't keep assuming the next attempt would stop where the previous one had. We made a plan that depended on the rear window. The ground behind the cabin was steep, but a narrow ledge ran along the foundation. From there, Grant could work around the uphill side of the building and climb through the trees toward the parking area. He'd be out of sight from the porch for the first part. I would go around the other side and get the animal's attention. Once it followed me, Grant would keep moving. He had a stout length of wood for support, and we wrapped extra padding around his good knee so he could crawl when he had to. We put a loose wool sock over his injured foot and padded the outside of down the tractor track and stopped beside the shed with the front of the truck pointing uphill. The shed was where I would try to stay alive until he got there. The plywood patch I'd seen when we arrived covered a gap in the rear wall behind the workbench. Dad had removed part of the siding to get a piece of equipment out years earlier, then covered the opening with that sheet, held on by two bent nails. Grant and I had used that opening in our twenties, when we'd lost the shed key. I could fit through it. The animal's shoulders were too wide. We didn't expect the plywood to stop it. We needed it to go around the building while I went through. It was a small advantage, and the service pit would be in my way. It was still more than we had on the porch. Getting Grant through the window took longer than we'd expected. I put a folded blanket over the sill and helped him turn until his legs were outside. He lowered himself, both arms, while I held the back of his jacket. When his good foot reached the ledge, I let go gradually, waiting for him to tell me he had his weight under him. I pulled the pry bar out of the table brace, set it and the spray on the windowsill, and climbed out after him. Once I was on the ledge, I took them with me. The cold felt much worse outside. Our breath was visible, and the ledge was slippery with wet leaves. I stayed between Grant and the drop while he moved along the wall. At the uphill corner, he got down on his hands and good knee. We'd agreed that I would give him as much of a start as I could. Most of his route ran through a stand of young hemlocks behind the shed, screened from the porch. The last thirty yards below the parking area were more open. We needed the animal looking at me before he reached that stretch. I watched him pull himself into the trees. He looked back once. I raised my hand, and he kept going. Then I went the other way around the cabin. The animal was beside the porch, sitting in the hollow we'd found the previous afternoon. Its back was against the foundation. The remains of the deer lay near one of its feet. Both hands were tucked against its stomach. I could see the damaged side of its face. Its left eye was the cloudy one. The clear eye was turned toward the front door. For a few seconds I thought it was asleep. Then the good eye moved. Following a falling leaf across the clearing, and I knew it was awake. I stayed against the rear corner of the cabin for close to ten minutes. I checked my watch, waited, and checked again. Grant needed time to work through the hemlocks. Eventually I heard a brief disturbance in the leaves farther uphill, near the open stretch below the parking area, and I pressed myself harder against the wall. The animal raised its head. I stepped out before it could turn uphill, I said, "Hey." It looked straight at me. There was no slow build-up after that. It unfolded itself from the hollow and came around the porch post. I raised the spray. It stopped just beyond the end of the broken porch, with its head lowered and its good eye narrowed. It remembered the can. That gave me enough time to move sideways toward the bottom of the path. I kept the spray in front of me and the pry bar in my other hand. I was shaking so hard that I couldn't keep the nozzle level. The animal moved with me, staying out of reach. When I edged uphill, it moved uphill. When I stopped, it stopped. I wanted it looking at me. Now that it was, I couldn't figure out how to turn my back on it. I backed around the woodpile. It went the other way, shortening the distance between us. I pressed the spray, sent a brief cloud across its face, and ran. I didn't reach the shed cleanly. My boot slipped on the path, and I went down on one knee near the tote of dishes. The lid had come off when Grant put it down, and several plates had spilled. One broke under my hand. I pushed up without feeling the cut and kept going. The shed door was open. I went through it, stepped onto the boards above the service pit, and felt one roll under my boot. My right leg went through the gap. I struck the edge with my hip and dropped into the pit. For one second I couldn't breathe. I was on my side in dirty water, with the pry bar underneath me and the spray still in my hand. The pit was about four feet deep. Above me, I could see daylight through the doorway. The animal filled it before I could stand. I crawled toward the rear of the pit, underneath the boards that remained in place. The workbench stood across that edge. I could see its legs through a narrow opening overhead. A hand came down into the pit. It reached almost to the bottom. The fingers closed on the back of my jacket and pulled me halfway upright. My shoulder hit a board. I felt the collar tighten against my throat. I got one arm out of the sleeve. The other was trapped beneath me. For a moment, I was hanging at an angle, kicking against the concrete wall while the animal pulled. Then the seam at the shoulder tore. I dropped out of the jacket and hit the bottom again. Above me, the animal shook the empty fabric. The spray can had fallen somewhere near my feet. I couldn't find it without looking away from the opening. I still had the pry bar. The hand came down again. This time I drove the straight end upward into the palm with everything I had. It pulled back. Blood fell onto the boards, then into the water beside my leg. The animal made a deep, strained sound and hit the edge of the pit. A board split. Another slid toward me. I pushed myself farther underneath the workbench until my back met the end wall. I could smell the bedding above me. Up close, it was worse than it had been at the doorway. There were small bones in the bottom of the pit, caught in old oil and dirt. I put my hand on one while trying to get upright and nearly lost my grip. The boards overhead started moving. It wasn't reaching blindly anymore. It was clearing them away. raised the pry bar, and waited for a hand to come through. My cut palm kept sliding down the metal. I changed my grip and planted both feet against the bottom of the pit. That was when the truck started. The animal stopped moving the boards. I heard the engine rise, settle, then rise again. Grant was trying to move it with his left foot. I knew that was what the uneven sound meant, and I had never been so glad to hear someone drive badly. The animal turned toward the shed door. It moved to the opening and leaned out, trying to locate the engine. I stayed underneath the workbench while the sound grew louder. Branches scraped along the truck, and then Grant was close enough that I could hear him braking. I left the pry bar at the bottom so I could use both hands. With the animal still facing the truck, I found an opening beside the workbench lid. I tried to open it, but it didn't open. I held my leg and hauled myself out of the pit. My shirt caught on a nail. I tore it loose and fell against the rear wall. The plywood panel was still there. I hit it with my shoulder. One nail pulled free. The panel swung outward, caught against a root, and left a gap I could get through on my side. The animal turned back as I squeezed through. A hand caught the heel of my boot. I grabbed the root outside the opening and pulled. The leather tore around two of the upper lace hooks, and my foot slipped out. I landed outside in one sock. Grant had backed the truck down the old tractor track. The passenger side was nearest the shed, exactly where I needed it. I could see him leaning across the seat to push the door open. I ran along the back of the building and around the corner. The animal came out of the shed's front door at the same time. I got one knee onto the passenger seat. Grant grabbed my shirt and pulled. I tried to bring my shirt back, but it didn't work. I pulled my other leg inside and shut the door, but the animal caught the top edge before I could close it. The glass broke. I don't know whether its hand broke it, or the door twisted enough to do it. Small pieces went across the seat and into my face. Grant put the truck in drive. I pulled my other leg inside and dragged the door toward me. It slammed against the frame, but the animal still had an arm through the broken window. The animal hooked one hand over the window frame and caught my foot. It slammed against the frame, but the animal still had an arm through the broken window frame and caught my foot. It slammed against the frame, but the animal still had an arm through the broken window frame. Thank you.