Deep Woods Horror Stories | Something Is Living Out There

There's something about the deep woods that pulls people in. Miles from the nearest paved road, the trees get older, the ground gets softer, and the only sounds are the ones you make yourself. It feels untouched. It feels safe. But as the people in tonight's stories discovered, the farther in you go, the less the woods belong to you. Before we begin, if you like scary stories, subscribe or follow for three new episodes every week, and if you like listening on the go or for sleep, check out just creepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the episode, please consider leaving a review or rating. It really helps the show. Thank you. So now let's turn off the lights, get comfortable, and get into these deep woods horror stories. This happened three years ago in the mountains of North Georgia. My son, Nate, was 16 at the time. He's 19 now and still won't go camping. I haven't been back to the property where it happened, even though I'm still the legal owner. The property belonged to my father. It was 26 acres outside a small town in Georgia, most of its steep woods, with a small cabin near the top of a ridge. My father bought the land in the late 80s and built the cabin himself. It wasn't a vacation rental or anything fancy. It had one bedroom, a little kitchen, a wood stove, and a covered porch. Electricity came from a generator in a shed. Water came from a spring farther up the hill. I'd gone there a few times when I was a kid. My father and I fished for trout, cut firewood, and slept in old army cuts on the porch. I don't remember ever being afraid there. The only thing I didn't like was how far the cabin was from everything. Once we turned off the paved road, it took nearly 40 minutes to reach it. The last mile was a narrow logging road with a drop on one side and a dirt bank on the other. There was no place to turn around until you reached the cabin. My parents divorced when I was 12, and after that I stopped going. My father kept the property, but he rarely talked about it. We weren't estranged exactly. We saw each other on holidays and spoke every few weeks. We just weren't close in the way we had been when I was young. He died in January after a short illness. The cabin and the land were the only things he left directly to me. For most of that year, I did nothing with them. I was handling his house, his truck, bank paperwork, and everything else that comes after a parent dies. The cabin stayed near the bottom of the list. Then, in early November, I got a notice from the insurance company saying they needed current pictures of the roof and proof that the place had been winterized. If I couldn't provide either, they were going to drop the policy. I decided I would drive up on a Friday, spend Saturday checking the place, and come home Sunday morning. Nate asked to go with me. He'd only met my father a handful of times, and I think he was curious about the part of the family none of us talked about much. He was also at that age where he spent most weekends in his room, so I was happy he wanted to come. We left our house south of Macon a little after six in the morning. The drive took about four hours with stops. In town, we bought groceries, two bags of ice, gas for the generator, and a cheap plastic tarp in case the roof was leaking. Nate got beef jerky, powdered donuts, and enough energy drinks to last a month. I bought sandwich meat, canned chili, coffee, and a pack of batteries. The last town was already behind us when I realized I hadn't told anyone the exact address. My wife knew the general area, and expected us home by Sunday afternoon. I tried to send her the location, but my phone had already lost service. That didn't worry me. I remembered there being a payphone at a little country store near the paved road, and we were only staying two nights. The logging road was rougher than I remembered. In several places, weeds brushed both sides of the truck. Rain had cut narrow channels through the dirt, and loose rock made the tires slide on the steeper parts. Nate stopped looking at his phone, and started watching the road. "Your dad drove this all the time," he asked. "I told him he did, although I wasn't sure that was true during the last few years of his life. We reached the cabin shortly afternoon. It looked smaller than it did in my memory. The cedar siding had faded almost gray, and one end of the porch had dropped a few inches. Leaves covered the roof and filled the gutters. A dead limb had come down behind the chimney, but it hadn't broken through the metal. There was enough open ground around the cabin for two trucks. The shed stood at the uphill edge of the clearing. Beyond that, the woods started again. Oak, poplar, hemlock, and thick mountain laurel covered the slopes. In the front porch, I could see part of the road we had driven in on. Behind the cabin, the land dropped sharply toward a creek at the bottom of the hollow. The key still worked. Inside the air smelled stale and damp, but the place was in better shape than I expected. There were mouse droppings in the kitchen drawers and a water stain over one window. Other than that, it looked as if my father had walked out a week earlier. His workboots were beside the wood stove. A denim coat hung from a peg near the door. There were canned beans in the cupboard, clean sheets folded on the bed, and a half-used bar of soap beside the sink. Nate started opening windows while I carried in our supplies. That was when he noticed the panels. The three windows facing the hollow had sheets of plywood fitted over them from the inside. They weren't temporary boards nailed to the wall. My father had cut each panel to fit the frame and attached it with metal brackets and wing nuts. The front windows didn't have them. Nate asked if my father was worried about break-ins. I said he probably used them for storms. Even as I said it, I knew that didn't make much sense. The windows facing the road would have been just as likely to break during bad weather. I took the panels down anyway because the bedroom and kitchen were dark without them. The next odd thing was under the kitchen table. A square hatch led into the crawl space. My father had driven six long screws through it, even though it already had a latch. All four foundation vents had heavy wire mesh bolted over them from the outside. He had covered a service opening about 3 feet square below the kitchen with the same material. I didn't spend much time thinking about any of that. My father had done construction work most of his life. He was always adding braces, locks, and extra fasteners, where normal people wouldn't bother. I figured mice or raccoons had gotten under the cabin at some point. We spent the afternoon working. I cleared the gutters while Nate swept and wiped down the kitchen. We got the generator running after I cleaned the spark plug, and the old water pump pushed rusty water through the sink for a few minutes before it ran clear. The roof was sound, and I took the pictures the insurance company needed. The porch needed work, but it wasn't going to collapse that weekend. Around four, Nate and I walked behind the shed to check the spring line. A black plastic pipe came out of the ground near the tree line, and ran uphill to a concrete spring box. The pipe had split near a coupling, so I shut off the pump and marked the spot with orange tape. There was an old trail beside the pipe. It went uphill to the spring, then curved behind a low ridge and disappeared. I remembered following it with my father when I was a kid, but I couldn't remember where it ended. Nate found a length of blue nylon rope tied between two trees near the spring box. It hung about waist high across the trail. The rope was sun bleached and partly covered with dead vines. Someone had tied three small strips of red cloth to it. Was this a property line? He asked. I told him the property continued for at least another quarter mile. I assumed my father had blocked the trail because it was washed out farther along. We stepped over the rope long enough to look at the spring box, then went back to the cabin. By five, the light was beginning to fade. The temperature had dropped enough that I started a fire in the wood stove. Nate carried split logs from the shed, while I opened cans of chili and set a pot on top of the stove. He was coming up the porch steps when we heard the woman, "Please, can somebody help me?" The voice came from the hollow behind the cabin. It wasn't faint or hard to understand. It sounded like a woman was somewhere below us, maybe a few hundred yards away. Nate sat down the wood and looked at me. I went to the edge of the clearing and called back. Where are you? For several seconds there was no response. Then she yelled again. "Please help me. I fell." She sounded frightened and out of breath. I tried calling 911, but there was still no search. service, and the call wouldn't connect. I told Nate to stay at the cabin while I checked the trail. He refused before I finished the sentence. He said if someone was hurt, it made no sense for us to separate. He was right, and I didn't argue. We took two flashlights in our jackets. I put the first aid kit and a coil of rope in a small day pack, then slipped a folding pruning saw into my pocket in case we had to cut someone free from brush. Before leaving, I turned on the outside light and moved the pot of chili onto the stone hearth beside the wood stove. There wasn't a proper trail going downhill from the cabin, but the trees were spaced far enough apart that we could make our way through. The slope was covered in dry leaves, and we had to move slowly to keep from sliding. I called to the woman every 30 seconds or so. At first, she answered from straight below us. I'm down here. Are you bleeding? I called. I hurt my leg. Can you see a light? There was a pause. Please help me. I fell. We continued down. The daylight was disappearing fast under the trees. After about ten minutes, we reached the creek. It was only ten feet wide, but the banks were steep and slick. I shined my light upstream and downstream. There was no one there. "Call out again," I yelled. This time, her answer came from across the creek and farther up the opposite slope. "I'm down here." Nate looked at me and said that didn't sound right. We'd been heading directly toward her, but the voice now seemed farther away than when we started. I told him the shape of the hollow could make it hard to judge direction. I wanted that to be the answer. I also knew that an injured person might be confused about where she was. We crossed on a line of flat rocks. I nearly slipped on the last one and soaked one boot. On the other side, the ground rose into thick laurel. We had to push between branches and keep the rope from catching. The woman called again before I said anything. "Please help me. I fell." Nate stopped. "She's saying it exactly the same way," he said. I asked what he meant. He said the words, the breath between them, and the way her voice cracked on help were identical each time. Not just similar. Identical. I hadn't noticed it until then. Once he pointed it out, I couldn't stop hearing it. I raised my voice and asked her name. Nothing answered. I asked if she was alone. We waited again. "Please help me. I fell." The response came from our right. It was close enough that I expected to see someone when I moved my light through the trees. There was only laurel, trunks, and exposed rock. Nate told me we needed to go back. I agreed, but I couldn't bring myself to leave without trying one more time. I called out that we couldn't locate her and were going to get help. I told her to stay where she was and keep making noise. For almost a minute the woods were quiet. Then the same woman spoke again. She didn't sound hurt this time. Her voice was level and much closer. "No. Come down here." Nate grabbed the sleeve of my jacket. We turned around and started back toward the creek. I kept my light aimed behind us while Nate watched the ground. Nothing followed that I could see. No one called again. Still, I had the strong sense that leaving was exactly what the voice didn't want us to do. The climb to the cabin took longer than the descent. We crossed the creek in the same place, but I had trouble finding the open route through the trees on the other side. For a few minutes, I worried we had angled too far east. Then Nate saw the outside light above us through the branches. We reached the clearing just after six. Full dark had settled over the hollow. Neither of us spoke until we were inside with the door locked. The chili had gone cold. I put it back on the wood stove and we ate it with crackers and sliced cheese. Nate kept asking what I thought we'd heard. I gave him every normal explanation I could think of. Maybe people were camping on the next property. Maybe someone had a speaker. Maybe teenagers from town knew the cabin was empty most of the year and used the woods to mess around. Nate pointed out that no one could have known we were coming. I said they might have seen the truck. He asked how someone could move around us in the laurel without making enough noise for us to locate them. I didn't have an answer for that. At a little after seven, I went outside and moved the truck so it faced the road. I told Nate it would make leaving easier in the morning. The truth was that I wanted the option of leaving that night. The road was dangerous after dark, but I was beginning to think driving it slowly would be better than staying. Before I came back inside, I stood at the rear of the truck and listened. The outside light reached about 30 feet into the clearing. Beyond that, I could only see parts of the closest trees. Nothing moved. The woman didn't call. I locked the cabin again and put the plywood panels back over the three windows facing the hollow. Nate helped tighten the wing nuts. Neither of us mentioned that my father had made it possible to cover those windows in less than two minutes. We kept the front windows uncovered so we could watch the truck and road. I set the keys on the table, packed our food into the cooler, and told Nate to put his bag by the door. We decided we would leave if we heard the voice again. For about an hour nothing happened. We played cards at the kitchen table. Nate played music he had saved on his phone at a low volume. I pretended to pay attention to the game, but I was listening to everything outside. At 823, the woman called from the far end of the road. Can you see a light? Those were the exact words I had yelled to her near the creek. Nate looked up from his cards and went completely still. The voice came again, closer to the cabin. Are you bleeding? That was another one of my questions. I grabbed the truck keys and told Nate we were leaving. We put on our jackets, picked up our bags, and went straight to the truck. I kept the outside light behind us and swept my flashlight across the road. I didn't see anyone. The engine started on the first try. Nate locked his door before I had the truck in gear. We had gone less than a quarter mile when the headlights landed on a tree across the road. It was a large oak, at least two feet thick at the base. The broken base was on the uphill side, and the trunk lay diagonally across the road. Its crown filled the narrow shoulder above the drop. There was no room to drive around it. I stopped about twenty feet away and left the engine running. The tree hadn't been there when we arrived. It could have come down while Nate and I were searching across the creek, but there hadn't been any wind that afternoon, and the ground wasn't soft from rain. From where I sat, I couldn't see the root ball. The trunk appeared to have broken several feet above the ground. Nate told me not to get out. I wasn't going to. Even with a working chainsaw, clearing that tree in the dark would have been dangerous. The old saw and my father's shed hadn't been started in years. I shifted into reverse. The woman spoke from somewhere below the road, directly beside Nate's window. Please don't leave me. Nate yelled, and I hit the accelerator too hard. The rear tires spun before they caught. I backed toward the cabin faster than I should have, steering with one hand and looking over my shoulder. For a second, something moved at the edge of the headlights beside the fallen tree. I only saw the top of it above the weeds. It was dark, low to the ground, and large enough to bend several branches as it passed through them. Then the turn in the road took it out of view. I backed all the way to the clearing. Nate jumped out as soon as I stopped, and we ran inside. I shut off the outside light and the cabin lights. With the generator still running in the shed, the bulbs made it easy for anyone outside to see where we were. I left one battery lantern on the floor between us. Nate asked if I had seen it. I said I'd seen something, but I didn't know what. He asked if it could have been a bear. I told him it could have. Black bears were common in that part of Georgia. A bear also could have broken branches beside the road. Neither of us believed a bear had called to us in a woman's voice. We sat against the wall near the front of the cabin. I kept the truck keys in one hand, and the hatchet from beside the wood stove in the other. The hatchet made me feel a little better, until I considered how close I would have to be to use it. The woman called again at 910. This time, her voice came from behind the cabin. We're going back to the cabin. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin. That still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. I had said that before Nate and I left the creek. I was certain of it. About 20 seconds later, she repeated the sentence from the front porch. The porch boards pressed down one after another beneath something heavy. We could hear the old wood flexing. Whatever had come up the steps stopped outside the front window. I raised the hatchet. Nate moved closer to me. The room was too dark to see through the glass. I could make out a section of the porch railing and nothing beyond it. We waited for a face or a hand to appear. Nothing did. The weight moved off the porch. A branch scraped the siding near the bedroom. Followed by a dull impact against the wall. Then the kitchen wall shook hard enough to rattle the dishes in the cupboard. I thought it might be testing the cabin for a way inside. The next sound came from below us. The wire mesh over the larger service opening bent with a slow grinding noise. The kitchen floor lifted slightly near the sink and settled again. Nate stared at the screwed down hatch under the table. "It's underneath us," he said. "We dragged the table over the hatch and pushed the wood stove's metal ash bucket on top of it. I knew the table wouldn't stop anything strong enough to lift the floor. It was the only thing nearby that we could move quickly." For several minutes, the underside of the cabin remained quiet. Then the woman spoke from directly below the hatch. I'm down here. Her voice was soft but perfectly clear through the floorboards. Nate covered his mouth with both hands. I held the hatchet over my shoulder and watched the table. One corner of the hatch rose less than half an inch. Two of the screws squealed in the wood but held. The corner dropped. A few seconds later, it lifted again with more force. The leg of the table jumped against the floor. I put my weight on the table top. Nate joined me. Something pushed from underneath for several seconds. Then released it so suddenly that we nearly fell forward. The woman said, "Keep talking so I can find you." It was a changed version of what I'd said in the woods. After that, there was no more pressure on the hatch. We stayed over it for a long time. My shoulders began to cramp but I was afraid to move. The generator ran out of fuel sometime near midnight. When it shut off, the cabin became so quiet that we could hear the creek at the bottom of the hollow. Every few minutes, something disturbed the leaves outside. It never stayed in one place for long. The sound would come from near the shed. Then the back wall. Then the edge of the road. We didn't hear the woman again. Just before dawn, I looked through the front window toward the shed. At first, I saw nothing but the gray outline of the clearing. Then, something rose from a crouch beside the wood pile and moved into the trees. It wasn't tall. I would guess its back was four feet from the ground while it moved. Its body was wide through the shoulders and narrower behind. I couldn't see a tail. I couldn't tell whether it had fur or clothing. That was all I saw before it disappeared. Nate and I didn't sleep at all. As soon as there was enough light to see the road, we carried the few things we'd left inside out to the truck. We didn't make breakfast. I drank half a cup of cold coffee left from the day before and Nate ate a powdered donut while standing near the front door. Before we left, I checked the outside of the cabin. The wire mesh over the service opening below the kitchen had been pulled away from the concrete on one side. Two bolts were still in place. The metal had folded around them. There were deep marks in the dirt beneath the opening, but they didn't form tracks I recognized. They could have come from rocks being dragged through the mud. The truck was untouched. We drove back to the fallen oak and looked at it in daylight. It hadn't come up by the roots. The trunk had broken about seven feet above the ground. The wood wasn't rotten and I couldn't find a lightning scar. A healthy section of the tree had been twisted until it split. Long strips of wood hung from the break. Nate stood beside me and stared at it. "Can a bear do that?" he asked. I told him no. The nearest paved road was about six miles away. Walking that distance wouldn't normally have been a problem, but neither of us wanted to leave the truck and travel through the woods on foot. Clearing part of the oak seemed safer, so we backed up to the cabin again. My father kept a chainsaw in the shed. It was old, but the chain was sharp and the engine still had compression. I poured out the fuel that had been sitting in it, cleaned the plug, and filled it with the gas we'd bought for the generator. The starter rope snapped on my third pull. It took more than an hour to take the cover off, shorten the rope, and tie it back onto the handle. Nate stayed beside me the entire time. He kept looking toward the hollow, especially when I tested the saw and the engine didn't start right away. The woman called once while I was working. "Can somebody help me?" Her voice came from far below the spring. We ignored it. "Five minutes later," she said. "I hurt my leg." Nate went inside and shut the door. I followed him as soon as I had the saw back together. We waited for another call, but none came. The chainsaw finally started a little before 10. I let it run long enough to make sure it wasn't going to die, then loaded it into the truck. At the fallen oak, I began by cutting the smaller limbs away from the crown. The trunk itself was too large for the saw's 18-inch bar, but I didn't need to cut through it. If I removed enough of the crown, I could put the passenger side tires on the narrow shoulder and squeeze past without going over the edge. Nate dragged branches down the slope while I cut. We worked fast. Every few minutes, I shut off the saw and listened. Nothing moved near the road. By noon, we had opened a space almost wide enough for the truck. One thick limb still crossed the narrow shoulder, which was our only route around the trunk. My plan was to cut it close to the main trunk, so it would drop toward the edge of the road. I had cut most of the way through the limb when we heard a scream below us. It was louder and more desperate than anything we'd heard the day before. The scream ended in a rough cry, followed by the woman yelling that her leg was pinned beneath a tree. I shut off the chainsaw. Nate said, "It knows what we're doing." I wanted to agree and keep working. Then the woman yelled again. "I can hear your saw. Please, I'm close." That was different. Until then, the voice had only repeated short phrases, or things Nate and I had said. This sounded like a person responding to what was happening. I called down the slope and asked for her name. Rachel, she answered immediately. "My name is Rachel. Please hurry." I asked how she had gotten there. I was walking. The tree came down. Nate shook his head. The answer bothered me, too. There wasn't a marked hiking trail near the cabin, and we hadn't heard a treefall that morning. She began crying, at least it sounded like crying. Then she said there was blood and that she was getting cold. I tried 9-1-1 again, but the call wouldn't go through. I still believe the voice from the previous night had been trying to draw us out. I also knew there was a chance a real woman had become hurt nearby that morning. The thought of driving away while she remained pinned under a tree was something I couldn't accept without checking. I told Nate we would go far enough to see the bottom of the slope, but we wouldn't cross the creek. We would stay together, keep the road in sight as long as possible, and turn around if anything seemed wrong. Nate didn't want to go. I said he could lock himself in the truck, but he said being alone beside the woods would be worse. In the end, we both went. I left the chainsaw near the front tire, fastened the hatchet to my belt, and put on the day pack with the rope and first aid kit. Nate brought one of the flashlights even though it was daylight. We followed the voice down a shallow drainage beside the road. It answered when I called, but it never gave useful directions. Rachel kept saying she was below us or close to the water. We went about 200 yards before the road disappeared above the ridge. I stopped there and told her to keep talking. "I'm right here," she said. Her voice came from beyond a wall of laurel about 50 feet ahead. Nate moved behind me as I pushed through. On the other side, the ground dropped into a narrow rock cut. It looked natural at first, but the straight edges and piles of broken stone told me people had dug there. It might have been a small quarry used when the logging road was built. At the bottom was a flat area covered with wet leaves. A rusted steel cable came out of the ground near one wall. Pieces of rotted lumber lay beneath a rock ledge. There was no fallen tree and no injured woman. I yelled Rachel's name. "I'm right here." The answer came from the ledge. Something was crouched beneath it with its back toward us. My first thought was that it was a black bear. Its shoulders were broad and covered in dark, uneven hair. Its head hung low and both arms rested against the ground. Then it stood. It wasn't much taller than I was. Maybe six and a half feet when it straightened as far as it could. Its legs were short, compared with the rest of it. its knees remained bent. The arms were long enough that its hands still touched the leaves. From the elbows down, there was no hair. The skin was dark brown, thick, and deeply creased. Its head sat low between its shoulders. It had no muzzle and no ears that I could see. The face was flat, with two small eyes at different heights. There were two openings where a nose should have been, and a thin mouth that ran farther across the face than a human mouth would. It looked directly at us. The woman's voice came again. I hurt my leg. The thing's mouth didn't move. Nate made a sound behind me. The thing lowered its body at once. Its arms spread apart, and its fingers pressed into the leaves. The hands were wide, with five thick fingers on each one. I told Nate to run. We pushed back through the laurel. A branch caught my jacket and spun me halfway around. Through the opening behind us, I saw the thing come out from under the ledge on all four limbs. It crossed the flat ground quickly and started up the rock cut. Nate was several yards ahead of me. I yelled at him to keep going and pulled the hatchet from my belt. There was no chance I could stop that thing with it, but I didn't want my hands empty. We reached the shallow drainage and climbed toward the road. Loose leaves slid under our boots. Nate fell once and caught himself on a sharp rock. It cut his palm, but he got back up before I reached him. Behind us, brush broke and rocks rolled down the slope. I didn't look again. I focused on Nate's jacket and the brighter strip of sky above the road. The woman called from somewhere in front of us. Please hurry, I'm getting cold. Nate stopped so suddenly that I ran into him. The thing we had seen was behind us. The voice was now coming from the direction we needed to go. For one second, neither of us moved. I wondered if there were two of them. Then the voice called from our left, still using the same words. It sounded farther away this time. I grabbed Nate's arm and pulled him uphill. We came out on the road about 30 yards below the truck. The chain saw was where I had left it. Nate ran to the driver's side, but I had the keys in my pocket. I threw them to him and told him to start the engine. I picked up the saw and pulled the starter rope. The engine caught, died, and caught again on the next pull. The limb was still attached by a band of wood along its lower edge. I only needed to deepen the cut enough for it to break free. Nate started the engine and climbed across to the passenger seat. I cut into the limb from the upper side. The saw threw damp chips across my pants. I kept expecting something to grab me from the slope behind the tree. The woman began screaming again. Her voice came from the road between the cabin and us. Each scream was closer than the last. The chain on the saw caught in the cut and stopped. I pulled it free, restarted the engine and tried from a different angle. Nate leaned on the horn. I looked back. The thing stood in the middle of the road about 40 yards away. In full daylight, it looked even less like an animal I knew. Its shoulders were too wide for its narrow hips and its arms hung in front of its knees. It kept looking at me. The small eyes were dark and didn't blink. It took several slow steps toward the truck on two legs. The woman said, "Please don't leave me." The mouth still didn't move. I turned back to the limb and forced the saw deeper. The cut opened and the limb broke free. It struck the road and rolled several feet toward the drop. I left the saw where it fell and ran to the driver's door. As I climbed in, the thing lowered onto its hands and moved faster. I locked the door and shifted into drive. The opening was barely wide enough, but it was the only chance we had. I eased the passenger side tires onto the outer shoulder and aimed for the gap. Branches scraped across the hood and passenger side. The truck leaned far enough toward the drop that Nate braced both hands against the roof. I kept moving until all four tires were passed the trunk. Something struck the back of the truck. The impact pushed us sideways. Nate shouted that it was at his window. I didn't look. I pressed the accelerator and felt Branches tear the passenger mirror away. The road curved downhill. I straightened the truck and picked up speed. For the next few hundred yards, the woman's cries followed us through the woods. Sometimes they came from behind. Twice, they came from ahead. The voice kept asking us to stop and saying that she was hurt. At the bottom of the ridge, the road crossed a shallow stream. I slowed just enough to keep control over the rocks. As we reached the other side, the thing came out of the trees on my left. It was upright again. It stepped into the road close enough for me to see the folds in its bare arms and the uneven eyes in its face. I didn't stop. It reached for the front of the truck, then moved aside at the last second. Its hand struck the driver's door. The metal buckled beside my shoulder and five dirty lines appeared across the window. Nate had pulled his knees up against his chest. He kept telling me to drive. I drove faster than that road allowed. The truck hit holes hard enough to throw our bags off the back seat. On the steepest turn, the rear end slid toward the drop. I corrected it and kept going. We didn't hear the woman after the stream. It still took nearly half an hour to reach the county road. I didn't slow down until gravel changed to pavement. Nate turned around and watched through the rear window, but nothing came out of the logging road behind us. We stopped at the country store I remembered. The payphone was gone, but the woman working there let me use the store phone. I called the sheriff's office and told them we might have located an injured woman in the woods. I didn't try to explain everything over the phone. Then I called my wife, told her we were safe, and gave her the address of the store. Two deputies and an ambulance met us at the store. Nate had a cut across one palm and both of us were covered in mud, but neither of us needed medical treatment. One deputy looked at the dent in my door and the marks on the glass. He asked if we had hit a bear. I told him what had happened from the first call for help to the thing we saw near the road. He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he asked Nate to tell the story separately. Their questions took almost an hour. The deputies went to the property with two more officers and a wildlife officer. I gave them the cabin key and drew the road and rock cut on the back of an old receipt. They asked me to ride with them so I could point out the exact location. I told them I would answer every question they had, but I wasn't going back up that road. They returned shortly before dark. They found the fallen oak, the broken limb, the chain saw, and our tracks down the drainage. They also found the old quarry. There was no woman there and no sign that anyone had been trapped beneath the tree. The wildlife officer found disturbed ground under the rock ledge and a long part of the creek. He couldn't identify a clear animal track. He told the deputies that a large bear could account for some of what we saw, but not the damage to the oak and not the shape Nate and I described. No woman named Rachel had been reported missing in the county. There were no occupied homes in the hollow and no registered campsites near the cabin that weekend. One of the deputies drove us to a motel in town. My wife came up the next morning and took Nate home. I had my truck inspected before I drove it again. The body shop found the driver's door had been pushed inward without any paint from another vehicle on it. They couldn't tell me what had made the marks on the glass. Nate and I talked about the creature many times during the first few months afterward. Our descriptions never matched perfectly. He remembers the head being rounder than I do. I remember five fingers on each hand, while he insists there were four. He believes the woman's voice came from somewhere near its chest. I couldn't tell where it came from at all. We agree that it wasn't a bear and it wasn't a person in a costume. We also agree that it was the same dark shape I'd seen beside the shed before dawn. I never found out why my father had built panels for the rear windows, reinforced the crawl space hatch, or blocked the trail above the spring with that rope. There was nothing in his records explaining any of it. As far as I know, he hadn't stayed at the cabin for at least four years before he died. I still own the property. I couldn't sell it to someone without telling them what happened, and I haven't found anyone willing to buy it after hearing the full story. I pay the small tax bill every year, and leave it alone. The roof may have failed by now. The road may be completely overgrown. I don't care enough to check. Nate and I made a promise while we waited for the deputies at that country store. We would never go back to the cabin, and we would never set foot in those woods again. Neither of us has broken it. The letter found me in the last week of October, which was about five weeks after it had been mailed, and about three years after my sister had last spoken to me. It came to the cabinet shop in Longview, and the cabinet shop had been closed since June, so it sat in a box of forwarded mail at the landlord's office until the landlord's daughter got bored enough to drive it out to where I was living, which was the cab of my truck behind the coin laundry on 15th Avenue. She handed it through the window with the rest of it. Two collection notices, a thing from the state about my unemployment running out, and an envelope with Carrie's handwriting on the front, and no return address at all. I read it in the truck with the engine running for the heat. The paper was soft and it smelled damp. It had spent a long time somewhere with no dry corner in it. I noticed that before I noticed anything she had written, and I put it away to think about later. She said she was well. She said she had found a place in people, and that the place was on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula, up a private road off Highway 101 north of Forks, and that there was work and a bed and food, and that nobody there cared what a person had done before. She said the woman who ran it was called Nan, and that Nan had told her I would be welcome. Then she wrote a line that I have read more times than I have read anything else in my life. She wrote, "I need you to come and take my place for a while, Lyle. It is my turn to ask. My turn to ask." That was the part that did it. Because there had been a long stretch in our lives, when I was 19 and she was 11, when I had gone to work in Portland, and left her in a rented house in Kelso with our mother and our mother's drinking, and our mother's boyfriends. And I had told myself for 22 years that I would make that right when I had something to make it right with. I had nothing. I had a truck with 206,000 miles on it, and a duffel bag, and a set of handplains I could not bring myself to sell. So the letter did not feel to me, that night, the way it feels to me now. That night it felt to me that somebody had finally asked me for the thing I owed. I drove up on a Thursday. I remember that because the laundry closed early on Thursdays, and the woman who ran it let me use the sink in the back to shave before I went. I remember the fog on the Columbia, and the long gray stretch of the coast highway, with the clear cuts on both sides going brown under the rain, and the way the light never got past a certain dimness the whole day, even at noon. North of Forks, the trees came in closer to the road. Alder first, then hemlock, then the big dark spruce with moss hanging off the low limbs and sheets. Carrie had drawn the turn on the back of the letter. A gravel road with a green gate, the gate was open. I have thought about that since. It was open before I got there, and I did not ask myself who had opened it. The road went in for 11 miles. I know that because I watched the odometer, because that was the kind of thing I did then to stop my mind from going where it wanted to. Second growth for most of it, cut maybe 40 years before, the trunks all the same width, and standing in rows, planted trees. Then the road bent down toward a creek, and came up the other side, and the trees changed. They got bigger and farther apart and darker, and the ground between them went from brush to a deep green floor of moss and fern that swallowed the sound of the truck. The light went down another notch. My headlights were on by then, and it was three in the afternoon. The clearing was maybe 20 acres. An old homestead somebody had told me later, patented in the 1890s by a family that had cleared it by hand, and then mostly died on it. There were nine or ten buildings, a big gray farmhouse with a metal roof gone orange with rust, a long barn, three or four smaller cabins, a couple of drying sheds, a greenhouse with half its plastic torn loose and flapping, goats in a wire pen, cordwood stacked under tarps along every wall, more cordwood than I had ever seen in one place, smoke going straight up from the farmhouse chimney into the mist because there was no wind at all, and behind it all, on three sides, the trees, not the planted rows, the real ones, trunks wider around than my truck was long, going up into the fog and not coming out of it, so that the whole clearing sat at the bottom of something without a top. Two people came out of the farmhouse before I had the engine off. A big man in his 30s, with a red beard and a wool coat black, with wet at the shoulders, and a small old woman in rubber boots, and a man's flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, who came straight to my window and put her hand flat on the glass, and smiled at me, with the kind of pleasure people show when they have been waiting for something a long time, and it has finally shown up. That was Nan, the man was her son, Teague. She said my name before I had said it, she said, "You'll be lyall," and she opened my door for me, and she took my hand in both of hers, and her hands were rough and hot and dry, which in that place turned out to be the rarest thing there was. I asked for carry, I asked before I had my other foot on the ground. Nan's face did not change. She said carry was up at the crown for a spell and would be down when she was done, and that in the meantime there was hot food and a dry bed, and no need for me to do anything but eat and sleep for a day or two until I had my feet under me. She said the word "crown," with no weight on it at all. Crown, barn, goats. Teague had already taken my duffel bag out of the truck bed and was walking toward the drying sheds with it. I asked what the crown was, she pointed, not at anything, up, into the fog where the trees went and did not come back, and she said, "Up top love, where somebody has to be," and then she took my arm and walked me toward the farmhouse, talking about the goats. I want to describe the wet, because the wet is the first thing and the last thing, and it is under everything else that happened. It was not rain most of the time. Rain would have been better. Rain falls and stops. This was a fog that sat in the trees and dripped, and amissed that hung at head height and got into the fibers of anything you wore, and a ground that gave when you stepped on it and came back up around your boot. The drying shed where they put me had a wood stove and a bunk and a mattress, and the mattress smelled of mushrooms the first night and every night after. My clothes never got dry, not ever. I would hang a shirt over the stove at night, and in the morning it would be warm and still damp, and by the time I had walked to the farmhouse for breakfast it would be cold and damp again. My boots went soft. The skin between my toes went white and then split. Everyone there had the same feet. I saw them at the door when we took our boots off. White feet, split feet, feet with the nails gone soft and yellow. Nobody remarked on it. There were 19 people living there when I came, not counting carry. Nan and Teague, a family called Ostrander, husband and wife and three kids who had been there eight years. A couple in their sixties who had come from Olympia and did not talk much. Nine younger ones, women mostly, who had come the way carry had come, from nothing, and who worked without being told and looked at Nan when they spoke. And an old woman called Bet, who did the cooking, and who was missing the last two fingers on her left hand, and the tips of three on her right, and who I did not look at properly for the first week because I did not want to be caught looking. The work was real. I want to say that plainly. I split theater hundreds of rounds a day until my shoulders locked up at night, and I could not lift my arms above my head. I dug drainage. The whole clearing wanted to go back to swamp, and the only thing stopping it was ditches. So I dug ditches, and I laid split theater in the bottoms of them, and I stood in black water to my knees doing it. I fed the goats. I fixed the greenhouse plastic with Teague, who worked hard and fast and did not say a word to me the whole afternoon, except to hand me things. It was honest work, and I was glad of it. My hands stopped shaking for the first time since June. But there were the other things, and I noticed them one at a time, and not all at once, and I have wondered since whether that was arranged. Nobody talked after the evening meal, not a rule anyone set out loud. The meal ended, and the talk ended with it, and people went to their beds in the dark in the quiet, and if a child spoke up, somebody put a hand on the child's head, and the child stopped. At dusk, every dusk, everyone in the clearing stopped what they were doing, and turned to face the trees on the north side. The big trees. They stood there for the count of maybe a minute, not praying, not doing anything with their hands, just facing that way. Then they went back to what they had been doing. Nan did it. The kids did it. Bet did it standing in the kitchen doorway with her ruined hands in a towel. The first time I saw it, I thought they were listening for something. The second time, I started to do it too, because it is a hard thing not to do when 19 people are doing it around you. And once a day, in the late afternoon from a long way up and a long way off in the fog to the north. There was a bell. A single note. Not a church bell. Something small, brass, handheld. Rung once, and let go quiet. Every day at about the same time. Nobody looked up when it rang. Nobody looked at each other. But I saw Teague's shoulders come down a half inch every time it rang. He had been waiting to hear that something was still all right. There was a line of stumps along the north edge of the clearing. Old gray stumps, six feet tall from where the homesteaders had cut with crosscut saws, standing on springboards. Past the stumps, the moss floor started, and the big trees. I was told kindly on my second day, by the Ostrander woman, that we did not go past the stumps. She said it in the same flat voice she had used to tell me the farmhouse toilet did not flush. And I did not go past the stumps, not for a long time. I asked about carry every day for the first week. I asked Nan at breakfast, and I asked Teague while we worked, and I asked the Ostrander woman once when she brought bread out to the ditch. The answers were the same answer with the edges moved around. She's up at the crown. She'll be down when she's done. It's her spell. You'll see her soon enough. Nan said it with a hand on my arm. Teague said it without looking up. The Ostrander woman said it, and then went back to the house faster than she had come. In the second week, I stopped asking out loud and started looking. The pantry line was the first thing I understood, and I understood it wrong. There was a rope, hemp, old, greenish black, with wet, thicker than my thumb. Two lengths of it came down out of the fog at the north edge of the clearing side by side, from a pulley somewhere up there that I never once saw, and both ran to a heavy iron ring, set into the biggest of the old stumps, where they were tied off with a knot I did not know. Every afternoon, an hour or so before the bell, Bet would come out of the kitchen with a covered galvanized bucket, and Teague would untie the lines, and clip the bucket to the hook on one, and haul on the other. He would haul for a long time. Then he would tie both off again and go back to work, and an hour later the bell would ring from up there, and the next morning he would lower the bucket back down, and Bet would take it into the kitchen and wash it out at the pump behind the house, where the smell of it carried. I told myself it was a cache. Food kept high, away from bears. That was a thing people did. I told myself that for four days, and then on the fifth day, I stood closer than I had before, and saw what came down in the bucket, and it was not food, and it was not bear-proofed anything. It was what a person makes, and there was a rag in it, and the rag had blood on it. Not much. Enough. I asked Teague that afternoon, straight out, while we were carrying cedar. I said, "Who is up there?" He set his end of the round down. He looked at me for a while. Then he said, "You know who's up there?" And he picked up the round again, and we carried it, and that was the whole conversation. I did not sleep that night. The stove ticked, and the mattress breathed its mushroom breath, and the fog dripped off the shed roof onto the metal barrel outside. One drop at a time, all night. And I lay there, and let myself know the thing I had been keeping myself from knowing. Up at the crown for a spell. Somebody has to be up there. The rope, the bucket, the bell. Carrie was in the trees. She had been in the trees since before I got there. She was living up in the canopy of one of those things, in this wet, in this cold, in the dark that never fully lifted, and 19 people were hauling her food, and lowering her waist, and standing at dusk, facing the direction she was in, and not saying her name. And she had written me to come and take her place. I got nan alone the next morning. She was in the greenhouse, in the part with the plastic still on it, pinching back something in a tray. I stood in the doorway until she looked up, and she saw my face, and she put down what she was doing, and wiped her hands on her shirt, and said, "Well, I'll write them. Sit down." There was an upturned crate, and I sat on it. She stood. She was five feet tall at the most, and she stood over me, and I let her. She told it plainly. That was the horror of it, if you want to know. She did not lower her voice. She did not look around. She told it in the same voice she had used for the goats. The family that cleared the land in 1894 had lost four children in three years. Fever, drowning, one taken by a falling limb. The grandmother of that family, who had come from somewhere in the north of Europe, and had her own ideas, told them the place was not willing. That you could not cut a hole in a forest that old, and expect to be let alone in the bottom of it. That somebody had to go up into it and stay, not to pray, just to be there, to be in the crown, above the clearing, a person in the trees, so the trees would have one of ours up among them, and would leave the rest of ours alone. So the grandmother went up. They built her a platform in the big spruce at the north edge, and she lived there, and the children stopped dying. And when she died up there, they left her there, because you did not take back what you had given, and the grandmother's daughter went up in her place. And so on. Nan said and so on. She said the family had held the place for three generations that way, and then the last of them had gone, and the clearing had sat empty for forty years, and gone back halfway to swamp. And then she had come here in 1988, with a husband who was dead now, and had found what was left of the platform still up there, and the bones still on it, and had understood. She and her husband had rebuilt it around the old beams that first summer, and it had been rebuilt in pieces every few years since. I asked her what she had understood. She said that it works love, that it has always worked. We haven't buried a child here in 38 years. I asked her how many people had gone up since she came. She said 11. She said it without counting on her fingers. She said most of them had come down after their spell, and some had not, and the ones who had not were still up there, and that was a kindness to them and to the rest of us both. She said Bet had gone up one December and come down in March, and had lost her fingers to it, and would go up again tomorrow if it was asked of her. She said the Ostrander Man had gone up. She said Teague had gone up twice, and then she said that Keri had gone up on the 23rd of September, and that a spell was meant to be forty days, and that today was the 49th, and that Keri was still up there because Keri had asked to be, because Keri had said she would not come down until her blood came to relieve her, because that was how it was properly done, the old way, the way the grandmother had done it. Kin for kin. You did not hand the crown to a stranger. You handed it down. She said, She wrote you herself. I watched her write it. She wanted you here, Lyle. She wanted you to have this. I said that Keri had not known what she was writing, that she had been three years in this place with these people, and no phone of her own, no vehicle, no way out without their help, and nobody to tell her otherwise, and that whatever she had wanted when she wrote that letter, she had not wanted it with a clear head. Nand did not argue. She let me say it. Then she said, very gently, Go and look at her then. She's only up the line. Go and see whether she strikes you as a woman who doesn't know her own mind. That was when I understood that the stumps had never been the thing keeping me out of the trees. I had been keeping myself out. Nobody there needed a fence. They had never once, in twelve days, told me I could not follow that line into the trees. I went that same night. Nand had invited me to look, not to bring Keri down, and I knew those were two different things, so I waited until the clearing had gone quiet. I did not think it through, and I am glad now that I did not, because if I had thought it through, I would have driven to forks and called the sheriff, and by the time anyone had come up that road with a warrant and a search plan, Keri would have been dead, or I would never have found which tree she was in. As it was, I found her because the rope was tied to a ring on a stump, and I could put my hand on it in the dark. I left the shed at what I thought was about two in the morning. I had a headlamp from my truck, my knife, a pair of leather work gloves, and a coil of rope from the drying shed. 250 feet of it by my guess, that hung on a peg by the door, and that I had never seen anyone use. I did not take a coat, because I knew the coat would be soaked through in ten minutes, and would weigh fifteen pounds, and be no use to me on a rope. I wore two shirts and a wool sweater that was teagues, and that I had taken off a hook by the farmhouse door. The clearing was black, no lights in any window. The fog was down low, and the headlamp lit maybe ten feet of it, and then gave up. I walked to the stumps by memory. The lines went up from the iron ring at about a 60 degree angle. for the first 40 feet, and then steepened. I had thought I would climb one of them. I stood there with my gloves on it for a full minute, and understood I could not. It was wet hemp. My hands slid on it. Nobody climbed that. Somebody went up some other way, and the lines were only for the bucket. So I went past the stumps. I had never been past the stumps. The moss came up over my boots. It was not ground. It was a foot and a half of soaked green stuff over black rot over roots, and every step went down into it and came up slow. The ferns were chest high, and threw water on me. The trees stood apart from each other in the fog. Farther apart than trees have any business standing. Each won alone in its own circle of dim. Each trunk so wide that the headlamp could not light the whole curve of it at once. The bark was furrowed deep enough to put my whole arm into, and it ran with water, and moss grew in every furrow, and things grew in the moss. Small pale fungus in the shape of shelves. Something red and soft. Slugs the length of my hand. I followed the pantry lines with my eyes for as long as I could see them, and then I followed them by the sound of the water dripping off them, and then I could not follow them at all. And I stood in the dark under the biggest living thing I had ever been near, and looked up and saw nothing. Not the lines, not the canopy. Fog, going up into black, and the drip of it coming down onto my face. I walked around the trunk. It took a while. On the far side, the north side, the side away from the clearing, I found the ladder. It was not a ladder in any way you would build a ladder. It was a run of steps cut into the bark itself. Old cuts, the wood healed gray around them. Each won a notch deep enough for the toe of a boot and no deeper, one above the other and slightly offset, going up the trunk and out of the light. And beside them, driven into the wood at intervals, iron spikes with the heads bent into loops. And through the loops, another rope, thinner than the pantry line, tarred, fixed at the bottom to a root, and running up. A hand line. Somebody had put it there before NAN was born. Somebody else had kept it up. I stood at the bottom of it for a long time. I stood there with my hand on the tarred rope, and my headlamp lighting three or four of the notches, and the fog moving in the light, and the whole weight of the tree going up over me into nothing, and I very nearly went back. Not because I was afraid of the climb, though I was, because some part of me had already understood what I was going to find at the top of it, and did not want to. Then I thought about her at eleven years old at the kitchen table in Kelso, watching me pack. I put my boot in the first notch. I do not know how high the platform was. I have tried to work it out since from the size of the tree, and the time the climb took, and I have come up with numbers between 140 and 180 feet, and none of them mean anything to me. What I know is what it was to climb it. The notches were wet, and some of them had moss in them, and my boots slid in two of the first ten. After that, I kicked the moss out of each one before I trusted it. The tarred rope was better than the pantry line, but not by much, and after the first 30 feet, I stopped using it to pull, and only used it to keep my body against the trunk. The bark was cold through the gloves and it wept. There is no other word for that. Water came out of it and ran down over my hands and down my sleeves to my armpits. The fog closed under me at about 40 feet, and the ground was gone, and there was no down anymore. Only the trunk in front of my face, and the next notch above and the drip. My headlamp made a small gray room around me that moved when I moved. Nothing lived in that room but me in the bark, and the things on the bark. I saw a salamander once, orange, sitting in a furrow at the level of my eyes, and it did not move, and I did not move, and then I went on. At some point the trunk began to lean, not much, enough that the climbing got easier on one side and harder on the other, and the water stopped running straight down and started running across, and then there was a limb, the first limb. It came out of the trunk below me on the left, and it was wider than my body, and moss stood on it a foot deep, and ferns grew out of the moss, and I understood that I had climbed past the bottom of the canopy and into it. After that the limbs came more often. The notches went on. The rope went on. The drip got louder because there was more above me for it to come off of. Twice I had to swing around a limb to keep with the notches, and both times I hung there by my hands, and one boot with nothing under me but gray, and told myself it was the same as the first forty feet. It was not the same. Then the notches stopped, and the rope ran up over the edge of something above me, and there was a sound, breathing, slow, wet in the chest, above me into the right. I came up over the edge of the platform on my stomach. They had built it well, and they had kept building it. Three limbs came out of the trunk at nearly the same height, and there were cedar planks laid across the three and pegged, and some of the planks were black with age and soft on top, and some were newer, paler, cut with a saw, and not an axe, and the new ones sat beside the old ones with no pattern to it, except that something had gone soft and been replaced. They held, maybe twelve feet by eight, a rail of poles along the outer edge on the side that faced away from the trunk, a frame of poles at the back against the trunk with a tarp over it, a new tarp, blue, the only thing up there that was not the color of rot, and under the tarp a heap of blankets and wool and canvas, and in the heap, my sister. I knew it was her by her hair. That was all there was to know her by from where I lay. Her hair was still red, and it was the only color in the whole grey room of my light besides the tarp. I said her name. She did not move. I said it again, and crawled to her across the planks, and the planks gave under my knees, and did not break, and I got to the edge of the blankets and pulled them back. She had been a big woman, not fat, big, shoulders and hands. She had been that at twenty-two, the last time I had seen her in person, and she was not that anymore. Her face had gone back to the bone. Her lips were split and had healed and split again. Her eyes were open, and they were looking at the tarp, and they did not come to me when I put my light on them. Her hands were out of the blankets, and they were the color of the bark, grey and dark and swollen, and the fingers on the left one did not lie right. Down at the other end of the heap I could see one foot. It was black to the ankle, not dirty, black. I put my hand on her face and it was cold, and then I put my hand on her chest, and it was moving, slow, wet, the sound I had heard from below. I said, "Carry, it's Lyle. I'm here. For a while nothing." Then her eyes came off the tarp and found the light and shut against it, and I took the light off her face, and she opened them again and looked at me, and I watched her know me. I have thought since that it was the worst thing I saw up there, and I saw the rest of it, and I still think that. I watched her know me, and I watched her understand what my being there meant, and I watched her face do something that in a person with any strength left would have been weeping. She said, "They made me write it. Barely, a breath with words in it. Nan told me every word. I told them no. I didn't ask you to come, Lyle. I didn't. I said I knew. I did not know. I had not known until that moment, but I said it. She said, "Don't sit. Don't you sit. I said I was not going to sit. I said I was going to get her down. And then I lifted my head, because there had been something at the edge of my light the whole time I had been kneeling there, and I had been keeping my eyes off it. The same as I had kept them off bet's hands for a week, and I looked. There were four of them. Out along the limbs, past the rail, in the places where the big limbs forked and made a seat. They had been tied there, rope around the chest and under the arms and around the limb, and the rope had held long after the rest had not needed holding, and so they sat. Moss had come up over them, not on them, through them. I do not know how else to say it. The moss had grown up out of the limb, and into the wool of their clothes, and out through the collars and the cuffs, and ferns grew where their laps had been, and one of them, the nearest, had a small brass bell on a cord around what was left of its neck, and the cord had been cut, and a newer cord ran from the bell, back to the platform, and ended in a loop beside the blankets, where a hand could reach it. Nan had said it with no weight on it at all, and I knelt on that platform, with my sister's chest going up and down under my hand, and I understood. All at once, and all the way down, that there had never been anything in these trees. No presence, no willing or unwilling. Nothing up here but wet and cold and height, and a very old woman's very old idea, and four people who had believed it enough to die of it, and a fifth who was dying of it now. And 19 people at the bottom, who stood at dusk and faced this way, so they would not have to think about it more than once a day. That was what they kept in the trees. That was all it had ever been. I got her down. I am not going to pretend there was anything to it but rope and time, and the fact that she weighed nothing anymore. I made a harness from the rope around her chest and under her arms, and between her legs, and I tied it off in the same knot I had used for 20 years to tie finished cabinets down in the bed of my truck, because it was the only knot I trusted. I took two turns of the rope around the thickest of the three limbs that held the platform, so the limb would carry her weight and not my hands, and I dragged her to the edge and put her over. She did not make a sound going over, then I paid it out, a foot at a time, the rope grinding around the wet bark of the limb, and burning through my gloves anyway, her weight coming and going on it, as she turned in the fog under me where I could not see her. I could not see how far she had gone. I could not see anything. I paid it out until the rope went slack and stayed slack, and I held it slack for a long count to be sure, and then I tied off what was left and went down the notches after her. My hand stopped working properly at about the halfway point. I hooked my forearms over the hand line and took the rest one notch at a time, using my elbows and boots whenever my fingers would not close. I do not remember the last thirty feet. I remember finding her in the moss at the foot of the ladder with her head gone to one side and the fog lighter than it had been, and I remember seeing lantern light at the stumps. Five people stood there, not coming toward me, waiting. Teague was at the front, Nan was beside him with her hands in the pockets of her flannel shirt, the austrander man, two of the younger women. She said anything while I untied my sister and got her over my shoulder, and I do not know how I got her over my shoulder, and started walking. Nan spoke when I was ten feet from her. She said, "That's all right, love. You've brought her down. That's yours to do." And then she said, "Now it's yours to go up." I kept walking, Teague stepped in front of me. I want to describe him honestly because he was not a monster. He had worked beside me for twelve days and handed me things, and never once been unkind. He had been up that tree twice himself. He had come down both times and gone back to splitting wood. He stood in front of me with a lantern in one hand, and his other hand opened at his side, and his face was not angry. It was tired. He said, "Somebody has to be up there, Lyle. It's not empty for long. It can't be. You know that now." I said, "There is nothing up there." He said, "There's four of them up there." I said, "That is what I mean." He reached for Carrie's arm where it hung down my back. Not roughly. He reached for it to help, to take some of the weight. And I understood that this was how it worked, that nobody was going to hit me, that they were going to help me put her down, and help me to the ladder, and hand me a coat, and haul my bucket up every afternoon, and lower it every morning, and stand at dusk, facing my direction, and love me. Nan was not lying about that part. She did love us. She had loved every one of them. I put my sister down in the moss, and I hit Teague in the face with the lantern I had taken out of his hand. I am not proud of the next part, and I am not sorry for it. He went down on one knee, and the lantern glass went into his cheek, and he put his hand up to it, and looked at the blood on his fingers with a kind of surprise. The Ostrander man came at me from the side, and I hit him with the lantern too, and it broke and went out, and then I had a piece of the frame in my hand with wire on it, and I used that. One of the young women screamed. Nan did not move. Nan stood with her hands in her pockets, and watched me the whole time, with an expression I can only call sorrow. I got carry back over my shoulder, and I went past them. Nobody followed. That is the thing I have never made anyone understand when I have told this. They did not chase me. Teague got up off his knee holding his face, and Nan put her hand on his arm, and the five of them stood there in the lantern light at the edge of the trees, and watched me carry my sister across the clearing toward my truck. And the last thing I heard, from Nan, in the same voice she used for everything, was, it won't stay empty, Lyle. You'll see. I got as far as my truck. The keys were in my pocket. I laid her across the seat and turned the key, and nothing happened. Not a click, not a light, and I got out and put the hood up, and the battery was gone. The cables were coiled on the fender. Neatly. I do not know when they did it. I had not looked under that hood in 12 days. I had not needed to. I took the ditch. I had dug 400 yards of it myself. I knew where it ran. It ran out the south side of the clearing, and down through the second growth toward the creek, and I had seen that creek on the drive-in, where it went under Highway 101 through a culvert a couple of miles south of the gate, and carries map on the back of the letter showed it bending back toward the road. It was the only line out of that place that I knew for certain, went somewhere. I walked in the ditch because the bottom was cedar, and would take my weight, and when the cedar ran out, I walked in the water. And when the ditch met the creek, I walked in the creek. It was thigh deep, and it moved, and it was the coldest thing I have ever put my body in. I carried her over my shoulder until I could not, and then I carried her in my arms, until I could not. And then I dragged us onto the bank, and sat there with her across my lap, until the shaking eased enough for me to stand. Then I got up and carried her again. The fog turned gray, and then paler gray. The trees on either side of the creek got smaller and closer together, and stood in rows. It was full light, or what passed for full light in that country, when I heard the engine. A log truck, empty, coming up the highway toward Forks. I came out of the trees onto the shoulder with my sister in my arms, and stood in the road, and the driver stopped with the trailer wheels locked and sliding, and he got out and looked at us and got back in and got on his radio, and he did not ask me a single question the whole way to town. I have always been grateful to him for that. Carey lived. I will say that first, because it is the only part of this that ends the way it should. They flew her from Forks to Seattle that same day. She lost the left foot above the ankle, and the right one at the middle of the arch, and three fingers from her left hand, and she was in the hospital for 11 weeks, and for the first three of them she did not know where she was. She weighed 91 pounds when they brought her in. She had been up in that tree for 49 days, on what came up in a galvanized bucket once a day, in the wet, in the cold. With four dead people for company in a bell to ring, so the people at the bottom would know she had not become the fifth one yet. She does not remember most of it. The doctors said that was a mercy. I think they were right. The sheriff's office went in the next morning. They found the clearing with the stove still warm, and nobody in it. My truck was where I had left it, with the hood still raised in the battery missing. Every other vehicle was gone. The goats were in the pen, the bucket was on the iron ring. A climbing team out of Port Angeles went up the spruce the following week, and brought down the four of them. And it took them two full days to do it, and one of the men who did it would not go back up for the second day, and nobody made him. The county identified two of the four, a man who had gone missing from a shelter in Aberdeen in 2003. A woman whose family in Idaho had stopped hearing from her in 2011. The other two were too far gone, and too far back. Nann was arrested in a motel in Hokeam that December. She did not run from them, and she did not deny any of it, and by every account, she was pleasant to the deputies and asked after Carrie by name. She was 79 years old. She pleaded to two counts of manslaughter, and one of unlawful imprisonment, and she died in the women's facility at Gig Harbor in the third year of her sentence, of pneumonia, in February. The fatigue in the Ostranderman were both charged. The others scattered. Bet was never found. I think about bet more than I think about any of them, and I do not know why. Carrie lives with me now, in long view, in a rented house with a ramp I built myself. I work nights at a distribution warehouse off the interstate. It is dry in there. The lights are on all night, and the ceiling is white steel, and there is nothing above it but more white steel than the sky. She has good days, and she has other days. On the other days, she wants the blinds down, and I put them down, and neither of us says why. I have not been in the woods since. I do not intend to be. I know there is nothing in them. I knew it on that platform, with my hand on her chest, and I know it now more surely than I know anything. There was never anything in those trees but the people who were put there and the people who put them. But I also know what Nan said in that voice, with her hands in her pockets, while I walked away from her carrying my sister. It won't stay empty. And I know that nobody ever found bet. When the Sheriff's Climbing Team made its first descent the following week, the lead climber found the blue tarp folded, neatly, squared off, set on the planks against the trunk beside the blankets, with a stone on it to keep it from the wind. None of the deputies had done it. I had left it stretched over the frame when I lowered carry. The property had gone unobserved for one night. Between my escape and the Sheriff's arrival, somebody had gone up. I know who folded that tarp. There was only ever one of them who would go up without being asked, and she had done it before. One December, and come down in March with her fingers gone. I do not know whether bet stayed or climbed back down before the Sheriff arrived. I only know she went up. Nan said it with no weight on it at all, and bet believed her enough to climb again after we were gone. That is the end of it. I carried my sister out. I put the blinds down when she asks me to, and I go to work under a white steel roof, and I do not stand facing north at dusk, and I never will. [BLANK_AUDIO]