Terrifying Bigfoot Encounters in the Deep Woods

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Rep number 10004. Free Nights and Cool Summer. Tonight, we're heading deep into the northern wilderness for two terrifying Bigfoot encounters. In places where the roads disappear and help is miles away, something massive may be watching from just beyond the trees. For more information, visit www.fema.gov. If you like scary stories, subscribe 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 turn off the lights, get comfortable, and let's get into these scary Bigfoot stories. I worked in county forestry for 24 years, and I can tell you there's a big difference between an animal running through the woods and an animal being pushed. Most people never have a reason to learn that difference. I did, because deer were part of my job. We counted what they ate, measured the damage they did to young trees, and tried to predict whether a stand would grow back after a timber harvest or turn into brush. I'd watched wolves move deer across frozen lakes. I'd watched groups of hunters push them through cedar swamps. I'd even seen a black bear chase a doe and lose interest after about 200 yards. What I saw in Iron County that October wasn't a chase. It was organized work, and the worst part was that one of the animals doing it was still learning. This happened in 2012, and I was about 48 at the time. I was a senior forester for a county in northern Wisconsin. Though I'm going to change the name of the tract and the creek that ran through it. There are enough people who know the actual place, and I don't want curiosity bringing anyone back there. Calling it Black Creek is close enough. County foresters aren't park rangers, and we don't spend our days walking scenic trails. Most of my work involved timber sales, access roads, boundary disputes, storm damage, and the health of young forest after logging. I carried tree markings. I used woodworking paint more often than I carried a chainsaw. In the fall, I spent a lot of time checking regeneration plots. That meant crawling through waist-high growth, counting stems, measuring deer brows, and writing down numbers that would later make somebody angry. Loggers thought we protected too many trees. Hunters thought we blamed too much on deer. People who owned land next to the county thought property lines had a habit of moving whenever a valuable major was needed. moving whenever a valuable maple was involved. I liked the work anyway. It kept me outside, and most problems had a physical answer: a tree was alive or dead, a road drained or it didn't. If something left a track, there was an animal at the other end of it. I wasn't interested in Bigfoot, woodland spirits, or any of the stories people told after three beers at the tavern. We got reports every few years. Almost all of them were bears, people in dark clothing, or somebody trying to get attention. I'd seen bears stand upright. From 50 yards away, in bad light, they could fool anyone for a few seconds. The young man assigned to me that fall was named Nate Haskell. His official title was Seasonal Forestry Technician, but everyone called him my apprentice because he went wherever I went and got whatever job I wanted. He was 22 and finishing school. He grew up near Wausau, hunted with his father, and knew enough about the woods that I didn't have to teach him which end of a compass pointed north. More important, he didn't pretend to know things he hadn't learned yet. Nate was quiet until he had a question. Then he'd keep pulling at it until he understood the answer. Some older foresters found that irritating. I didn't. The dangerous trainees were the ones who were the most likely to be killed. The dangerous trainees were the ones who nodded and then guessed later. Nate also had better eyes than I did. I could read terrain from a map and tell you how water would move through a cut. But he could spot a rubbed sapling or a bit of fresh hair before I saw it. The tract we were checking had been harvested about six years earlier. It sat in a rocky belt south of Hurley, where the ground rose and fell harder than people expect from northern Wisconsin. Most of the stand was young maple, birch and aspen mixed with older hemlock and spruce in the low pockets. An old iron exploration cut ran along the eastern side. It wasn't a mine in the way people picture a mine. There weren't any buildings or rails left, just a narrow ravine where men had dug into the ridge more than a century earlier. Rain, frost and falling trees had widened it over time. In places it was only fifteen feet deep. Farther south, the walls dropped more than forty feet. The county map called it an abandoned prospect. The foresters called it the cut. We stayed away from the rim because the rock broke loose without much warning and wet leaves could hide openings between boulders. Black Creek ran below the west slope, then bent around the southern end of the cut. There was one old skid road between the creek and the ridge, but a washed-out crossing kept full-size vehicles away. We could take a utility vehicle as far as a landing, then walk the last mile. We went in on a Monday near the end of October. The hardwood leaves had passed their best color. Some maples were still red at the edges, but most of the canopy was thin and the ground was covered in wet brown leaves. The tamarack in the low country had turned yellow. It had rained Sunday night and the temperature stayed in the low forties all morning. Our job was simple. The young stand wasn't growing back evenly and deer brows was the likely reason. We needed to check a line of sample plots from the old landing east toward the cut, then decide whether the next timber sale should include a wider opening to encourage thicker regeneration. Nate carried the plot sheets, a diameter tape, and a can of blue marking paint. I had another can clipped to my vest, along with flagging, a first aid pouch, and bear spray. The bear spray wasn't county policy. I'd started carrying it after a sow with a two cubs ran me out of a berry patch several years earlier. We left the county truck at a locked gate a little after 7:30 and drove the utility vehicle three miles down an old forest road. I parked at the landing, which was a flat patch of gravel about the size of a small house lot. From there, we followed the former skid road on foot. The morning was ordinary enough that I can remember complaining about a leaking travel mug. Nate had bought new boots and was trying to pretend they weren't rubbing his heels. I told him anyone who trusted new boots on a field day deserved whatever happened to his feet. The first plot had heavy brows. Nearly every sugar maple stem above knee height had been clipped. That didn't surprise me. Iron County had a lot of deer pressure in those years, and young maple might as well have been salad. The second plot was worse. At the third, we found almost no suitable stems left at all. What bothered me was the ground. Deer don't usually move through young growth in a neat lane unless terrain or people force them to. They wander, feed, double back, and follow several small trails. In that stand, a strip about 6 feet wide had been beaten nearly bare. Wet leaves had been kicked away, exposing dark soil underneath. Dozens of hoof marks ran west to east, and every clear print pointed in the same direction. Nate crouched and looked at the ground. There was nothing in the ground. Nate crouched and put two fingers beside one of the tracks. He said they were recent. The edges hadn't softened in the rain, which meant the deer had passed after the storm ended, probably early that morning. I told him a group might have come out of a bedding area together. "That many?" he asked. I looked farther into the brush. The lane continued uphill, where thick young maple should have scattered them. Instead, broken stems made the root even clearer. Some were snapped low by legs and bodies. Others were bent at chest height. We followed the sign east for about a hundred yards, even though it took us away from the plotline. The tracks spread around a fallen hemlock, then came back together. We found droppings from several animals and two patches of white belly hair caught on brush. Whatever had moved through there had been moving fast. There weren't any paw marks behind them. That didn't rule out wolves because leaf cover can hide a lot, but the soil was soft enough that I expected to find something. We found no boot prints either. Deer drives are more common during the gun season, and that was still weeks away, but I wondered if bow hunters had pushed a bedding area to move deer past someone waiting in a tree. If that was what happened, they were hunting in a dangerous place and doing a poor job of keeping away from an active work tract. I called out twice. Nobody answered. Nate kept looking uphill. About eight feet above the ground, the bark had been scraped from the side of a white birch. The scrape was fresh. Pale wood showed under the loose bark, and the bark was still there. I called out twice. Nobody answered. Nate kept looking up and down, and several short black hairs clung to a rough edge. My first thought was bear. A bear can reach higher than people think, especially if it climbs or stands against a trunk. The hairs were coarse and longer than the guard hairs I usually saw, but I wasn't going to identify an animal from six strands stuck to bark. I pulled one free, rubbed it between my fingers, and let it go. Nate asked why a bear would scrape a tree while following deer. I said the two signs were not related. That answer was reasonable at the time. In fieldwork, the easiest way to invent a mystery is to assume every odd thing happened at once. We returned to the plot line. For the next hour, the ground looked normal. We counted stems, marked two problem pockets, and stopped for lunch on a low rock shelf. Black Creek was somewhere below us, hidden by the slope. The cut lay about half a mile east. While we ate, Nate said he hadn't heard a grouse flush all morning. I told him that was because grouse had excellent judgment and didn't spend cold Mondays following county employees around. He smiled, but he kept looking into the young timber. The next strange thing was a doe. We found her about twenty minutes after lunch, lying on her side below a short rock drop. She'd probably been dead less than a day. Her eyes were still clear, and the blood in her nose hadn't dried completely. Both front legs were broken. One was folded beneath her chest. The other pointed backward at an angle that made Nate turn his head away. There was no bullet hole, arrow wound, or sign that a vehicle had hit her. The rock ledge was only eight or nine feet high, not normally enough to kill a healthy deer. She might have landed badly while running, but deer make that kind of drop all the time. More troubling, nothing had fed on her. The belly was intact. So were the hindquarters. A few clumps of hair had fallen off, and the deer had been killed. The deer had been killed. The deer had been pulled from one side of her neck, and the skin underneath was dark with bruising. I checked the top of the ledge. The same mass of hoof marks crossed it from west to east. One set ended where the doe had fallen. On either side of the deer lane, the ground was disturbed in broad patches about twenty yards apart. There still weren't any clean wolf tracks, but something heavy had pressed leaves into the mud. Nate found the first clear print near a rotted stump. It was longer than my boot and nearly twice as wide at the front. Five rounded marks showed at one end. A broad middle section narrowed slightly, then widened again at the heel. It looked so much like a bare human foot that my mind rejected it before I finished looking. I stepped beside it. I wore a women's size ten boot, and the print extended four or five inches past my toe. The depth was harder to explain. I weighed about one hundred sixty pounds then. My boot sank less than half an inch. That print had gone into the mud almost two inches. Nate said, "That isn't a bear." Bear tracks can overlap and look surprisingly human. I'd given that explanation to other people. Here, there was only one impression, but leaves might have hidden the rest. I knelt and felt the edges. Water had begun seeping into the bottom, so it wasn't old. I told Nate it could be two tracks on top of each other. Five toes in both? Mud lies. He didn't argue, but I could tell he didn't believe me. Truth is, I didn't believe me either. I just didn't have a better explanation I was willing to say out loud. We ended the workday early. That decision had less to do with the print than the dead doe. If someone was pushing deer through an active work area, I wanted the conservation warden to know before Nate and I went back. We marked the plot on our paper map. Returned to the utility vehicle, and drove out without seeing anyone. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJs.com/Mosquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open now. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. It's called Free Nights in Cool Summer. You get free nights every night, all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first of its kind plan, created for how Texans actually use energy. Discover how much more you could save with Free Nights in Cool Summer. TXU Energy, energy for everything. Visit TXU.com for more information, rep number 10004. At the office, I reported the carcass and the possible illegal drive. I didn't mention Bigfoot. I described the large impression as an unclear track, which was accurate. The warden assigned to that part of the county was working a baiting complaint and couldn't reach the tract before Wednesday morning. He said wolves sometimes used slopes and creek bends to funnel deer. If the doe had panicked, the fall could have broken her legs. He also said a hunter might have struck her badly and failed to follow up, though neither Nate nor I had found a wound. Our supervisor wanted the regeneration work finished before a meeting on Wednesday. He suggested we return in the morning, stay west of the cut, and leave if we saw hunters. I agreed. I'd spent my career asking younger employees not to turn ordinary wildlife into legends, refusing to enter a public forest because of one bad print would have made me a hypocrite. That evening, Nate called me at home. He'd drawn the track from memory and looked through an animal guide. I told him to stop feeding his imagination and get some sleep. He asked one question before we hung up. "If wolves pushed those deer, where were the wolf tracks?" I said we hadn't searched every square foot. Afterward, I sat at my kitchen table longer than I want to admit, thinking about the two broad patches on either side of the deer lane. They'd been spaced like people walking a line. We went back Tuesday morning. The temperature had dropped overnight, and a thin skin of ice covered the puddles along the forest road. The sky was clear. With most of the leaves down, morning light reached the ground in long strips, and visibility was better than it had been Monday. Nate wore his older boots. Neither of us joked much on the drive in. I parked in the same place and checked the utility vehicle before we left it. It was a two-seat model with a small cargo bed, a windshield, and a hard roof. We kept a recovery strap, a folding shovel, extra water, and a larger first aid kit under the seat. I took the bear spray and made sure Nate knew where it was on my vest. He had his blue paint and a hatchet we used to clear small limbs from plot lines. Our plan was to finish the western plots first, then work east, only if everything looked normal. For most of the morning, it did. Frost softened under our boots. We counted maple stems, argued over whether one crooked sapling qualified as acceptable regeneration, and found fresh deer brows that had nothing unusual about it. We worked more slowly than usual because both of us kept checking the timber around us, though neither wanted to admit it. By the time we reached the sixth plot, it was a few minutes after noon. At the sixth plot, Nate noticed that every deer trail had emptied toward the south. That's the best way I can explain it. We could see small trails coming out of cover from the north and east, but once they reached a narrow band of older timber, they all turned south. It wasn't a normal junction created by easy walking. Some deer had crossed fallen trees and pushed through brush to join it. The ground held tracks from does, yearlings, and at least two mature bucks. They were mixed together, and all of them were moving in the same direction. We followed at a distance. I told myself we were checking browse patterns, but that wasn't true anymore. We wanted to know where the lane went. It angled toward the cut. About 300 yards from the rim, we found another print. This one was on a damp patch beneath a hemlock where the frost hadn't formed. It was smaller than Monday's impression, but cleaner. Five toes, broad heel, no claw marks. The ball of the foot had pressed deeply, while the heel was light, as if the animal had been leaning forward. Ten feet away was a second print, then a third. The stride between them was longer than Nate could match without jumping. The line ran beside the deer trail, not behind it. Whoever or whatever had made those tracks had been moving parallel to the herd. Nate asked if we should leave. I said yes. That was the first moment when I stopped trying to explain the signs one at a time. We were nearly a mile from the utility vehicle, with rough ground between us and it. The smart choice was to go back, tell the warden exactly what we'd seen, and let someone else decide what it meant. We turned west. We'd gone less than fifty yards when a deer burst through the brush ahead of us. It was a young buck with one side of its rack broken. Foam hung from its mouth, and blood ran down the front of one knee. It didn't veer when it saw us. Nate jumped aside, and the buck passed between us close enough that its shoulder struck my vest. It kept running uphill, even though the slope west was steeper and covered in loose rock. Three does followed, then two yearlings. They came through so tightly bunched that the second doe ran into the first and nearly went down. More deer were moving behind them. We could see pieces of their bodies through the brush, all heading south and west. Something rose on the hillside above them. At first, I thought it was a man standing from a crouch. The shape had shoulders, a head, and two arms. Then it stepped over a fallen trunk without lifting its leg the way a person would. Its knee came almost to its chest. One long hand touched the trunk for balance, and it crossed in a single motion. It was covered in dark, reddish-brown hair except around the face. The skin there looked gray-brown. Its head sat low between thick shoulders, and the neck was hard to see. It wasn't the twelve-foot monster people describe after a bad night in the woods. I'd estimate it at a little over seven feet. What struck me was the width of it. Its upper body was broader than a refrigerator, and its thighs looked thick enough to fill the legs of two men's pants. It didn't look at us. It watched the deer. The animal moved downhill in three quick strides and stopped. That small change in position turned the herd away from the western slope. The buck with the broken rack had already escaped past us, but the deer behind it swung southeast, back toward the cut. Nate gripped my sleeve. He pointed east. There was another one below the deer. This animal was leaner and slightly shorter, with black hair along its arms and lighter brown across its back. It was a little bit of a man, but it was a little bit of a man. It was a little bit of a man. It moved upright until the slope became steep, then put one hand down and crossed a muddy patch with a speed I couldn't follow at first. It came up on the other side, stood, and spread both arms. The deer changed direction again. A third figure waited near the southern end of the lane. It was about the size of an adult man, maybe five and a half feet tall, but built wrong for a person. Its arms reached below its knees. Its body was cut off. It was covered in reddish hair. Dark, leathery skin covered its face and turned slate gray around the mouth. It stepped into view too early. The first three deer saw it and broke north. The largest animal reacted immediately. It swung one arm down and inward. I can't say it was a formal signal, but the smaller one looked toward it and moved back into cover. The lean adult rushed across the lower slope, trying to close the opening. Two deer turned. One didn't. A doe came straight at Nate and me. I yelled and raised both arms. It was instinct. I didn't want 500 pounds of frightened animals running over us. The doe cut west. The yearling behind her followed. Then half the herd poured through the same opening. They crashed through young maple, scattered around us and ran uphill. One struck a sapling hard enough to snap it. Another fell, rolled once, and got up. Within seconds, at least a dozen deer had escaped the lane. The drive came apart. The smaller creature came out of cover again, moving after the nearest yearling. It took four running steps and reached for the deer. Its fingers closed on hair but didn't hold. The yearling kicked free and vanished into the young stand. The largest one finally looked at us. I'd spent years around black bears. Bears usually give you something familiar to read. They sniff, they bite, they sniff, huff, sway, lower their heads, or turn sideways. This animal became completely still. Its face was heavy around the brow, with a broad flat nose and a mouth that looked too small for its jaw. The eyes were dark. I couldn't read anger in them, or surprise, or any other human feeling. It studied Nate and me for perhaps three seconds. Then it looked toward the southern end of the cut. The lean adult was already moving there. I grabbed Nate by the back of his vest and pulled him west. We didn't discuss what we'd seen. We started for the utility vehicle at the fastest pace the ground allowed. Behind us, something gave a short, deep call. It wasn't a scream. It was one hard burst of sound that I felt in my chest. Another answered from lower on the slope. We'd interrupted four of them. At that point, I was still thinking there were three. The direct route to the landing crossed a low saddle between two rocky rises. We'd used it both mornings. It was the easiest ground and the obvious way out, which meant I should have expected one of the animals to reach it before us. We were about 200 yards from the saddle when Nate stopped so suddenly that I ran into him. The lean adult stood in the middle of the route. It was farther away than the first one had been, perhaps 80 yards, but the open hardwoods gave us a clear view. It faced us with its arms hanging at its sides. Its chest moved fast from the run, yet the rest of it stayed still. There was no chance it had wandered there by accident. It had left the downhill side of the deer drive, crossed the slope, and placed itself between us and the landing. Nate said my name under his breath. I told him not to run. My own voice sounded calmer than I felt. The animal took one step toward us. We backed away. It stopped. I moved right. It moved left, staying between us and the saddle. That was when my training worked against me. I understood exactly what it was doing, but I still thought of the problem in human terms. I assumed it was guarding territory or giving the others time to leave. I decided we could circle north, cross the top of the ridge, and reach the landing from above. It'd add distance and put us in thicker growth, but it'd get us away from the cut. We turned north. The lean animal didn't follow. It didn't need to. For the next ten minutes, Nate and I climbed through a band of young aspen and broken rock. We moved quickly but tried not to make enough noise to hide anything approaching. Every few seconds, I looked back. The animal at the saddle was gone. We reached the ridge and found fresh deer tracks running west. I took that as a good sign. Deer had escaped in that direction, which meant the route was clear. We could see the deer tracks running west. The route was open. Then a dead spruce came down across the slope ahead of us. It didn't fall from wind. The day was nearly calm. We heard wood tear, saw the top begin to move, and watched the whole trunk swing downhill. It struck another tree, broke halfway up, and landed across the path we were using. The base had been dead and rotten, but the trunk was still too thick for a person to push over without equipment. For a moment, nothing moved beyond it. The tree was dead, but the trunk was still too thick for a person to push over without equipment. Then the largest creature stepped from behind the broken root mass. It had used both hands. I could see pale wood dust stuck to the hair along one forearm. The animal didn't come over the fallen trunk. It stood on the far side and watched us turn. Nate said, It's moving us. That was the first time either of us said it. We went downhill because uphill was blocked by rock, and the fallen tree closed the easier western line. The slope angled south east, back toward the cut. I tried to correct west twice. The first time, we heard brush break below us and saw the lean adult moving parallel through the trees. The second time, a rock the size of a softball came through the branches and struck the ground six feet in front of Nate. It hit hard enough to bury half of itself in wet soil. We stopped. Nothing else was thrown. The message was clear without being human. Keep going the other way. I pulled the bear spray from my vest while Nate drew the hatchet from its sheath. I told him these animals had driven the deer toward the cut by holding positions on the sides. If we kept reacting to each one, we'd end up exactly where the deer had been headed. Nate asked what we should do. I said we had to break through one side before the line closed. What I didn't say was that I had no idea how. I checked my watch and forced myself to think like an employee. I said, I'm going to break through one side before the line closed. 30. If we missed that time, my supervisor would call. If we didn't answer, someone would eventually come to the gate and find the truck. That might begin before dark, but it'd take much longer for anyone to locate us inside a tract cut by ridges, creek bends, and old skid roads. Waiting for help wasn't an option. The utility vehicle was less than a mile west in a straight line. We had a paper map, water, a first aid pouch, bear spray, the hatchet, and two cans of marking paint. We didn't have a firearm. County policy discouraged employees from carrying one during ordinary field work, and I'd never felt a need to challenge that rule. Even if I'd had a rifle, I don't know that I would have fired at one of those animals. Shooting a black bear and shooting something that stood upright and watched you think are very different decisions. Both our phones showed no service. Which was normal below that ridge. Neither of us checked again after that. We both knew trying again wouldn't change anything. The terrain gave us four choices. North led uphill through dense regrowth. West led across the line the creatures were holding. South brought us toward Black Creek, where steep banks would slow us. East led directly to the cut. The animals had already cut off the west and were narrowing our route north. That left south and east. We had no choice but to go south and east, which told me where they wanted us long before I could see the ravine. The old harvest helped us. Six years of regrowth had turned parts of it into a wall of young stems. A person could force a way through if they protected their face. A seven-foot animal with shoulders three feet across would struggle, especially if it wanted to move without showing itself. I remembered a strip of dense aspen west of the cut, running north toward the ridge. It had been left alone during the day, but I could see it. I could see it. I could see it. I could see it. If we could reach that strip and push through it, we might get beyond the animal holding the saddle. The problem was that the strip began uphill from us. The largest creature had already taken the high side, and the lean adult was somewhere below. I assumed the smaller one was still near the deer. At that point, I didn't know a third adult was waiting at the bottom of the cut. I told Nate we'd continue downhill for another minute, act as if we were letting ourselves be moved, then turn hard uphill and run for the thick growth. The plan depended on the animals believing we were easier to control than the deer. That wasn't much of a plan, but standing still would let them close the distance. We walked southeast with our backs partly turned. I counted thirty slow steps. Nothing came at us. On thirty-one, I touched Nate's arm, and we both ran uphill. The first fifty yards went better than I expected. We crossed a band of open maple and reached the lower edge of the aspen. Thin trunks struck my shoulders and caught on my vest. Nate used the hatchet to knock one dead limb aside, then followed close behind me. We climbed at an angle, trying to gain height and move west at the same time. Something heavy came through the open timber below us. It wasn't hiding anymore. I saw the lean adult between trunks, using its hands to pull itself up the slope. It moved faster uphill than we could move on level ground. Each time it planted one foot, loose rock shot backward. I pushed deeper into the regrowth. The stems grew so tight that I had to turn sideways. Branches dragged my hard hat off, and I left it where it fell. Nate was breathing hard behind me. The noise below stopped. For perhaps twenty seconds, I thought the thick growth had worked. Then the aspen began moving on both sides of us. The animal below hadn't entered. It was traveling along the edge, matching our pace. Another one moved above. We couldn't see either body, but entire groups of stems leaned and sprang back as they passed. The two animals were using the strip as a fence. They didn't have to follow us into it. They only had to keep us inside until it carried us where they wanted. We were able to see the aspen, but we couldn't see the aspen. We couldn't see the aspen. I checked the slope and realized the strip curved east. I'd remembered its northern end correctly, but forgotten the shape of the stand. If we stayed in it, we'd come out less than two hundred yards from the cut. Nate understood at almost the same time. He said we needed to leave the strip before it turned. The upper edge was closer. We forced our way toward it. A dark arm reached through the stems ahead of me. I stopped so hard Nate struck my back. The hand opened about five feet from my face. It was human in general shape, with a palm and five thick fingers, but it was larger than any hand I'd seen. Dark skin showed through short hair. The nails were flat and gray, not claws. The fingers closed around three aspen stems. The animal pulled them together and held them, making a barrier in front of us. It could have reached another few feet and grabbed me. It didn't. I backed away. The hand released the stems. They snapped upright. The largest creature stepped into view beyond them. It looked down through the young growth, waiting for us to turn. That was when fear changed into something worse. Until then, part of me had expected an attack. I thought one would rush, we'd spray it, and whatever happened would happen fast. Instead, the animal had placed its hand within reach and chosen not to attack. I was afraid of the animal's attack. It wanted movement, not a fight. We were behaving exactly as the deer had behaved. We left the aspen on the lower side. The lean adult showed itself fifty yards downhill, forcing us east. Behind it, through the thinner trees, I saw the broken line of the cut. The ground dropped in steps toward the ravine. We tried to hold our elevation, but loose leaves made every side crossing slow. The creatures maintained a wide distance. One stayed above, one below, and one moved somewhere behind us. Each time we angled west, an animal appeared far enough ahead to turn us without charging. We spent close to an hour gaining less than six hundred yards. That sounds impossible until you walk across that kind of ground. A direct line on a map can become three times as long when every rock shelf has to be crossed at one safe point. The animals used that. They never waited for us to come back. We were afraid of the animal's attack. We were afraid of the animal's strength climbing a bad section after us. One would hold a root, while another moved around on easier ground, and by the time we cleared an obstacle, it'd be waiting ahead. Once, we crawled beneath a fallen maple, only to find the lean adult standing beyond the far end. We backed out and lost another ten minutes going around the root mass. They didn't rush us, or let us rest. That steady pressure wore down judgment. Nate began asking whether we should run for the creek, even though we both knew the banks would trap us. I caught myself considering a climb up loose rock that I would have forbidden on any normal workday. The creatures didn't need to frighten us into one large mistake. They were collecting small ones and turning each into a little more distance toward the cut. Nate said we should use the bear spray while we still had room. I told him it wouldn't reach more than thirty feet, and none of them had come that close. They knew exactly how far we were going to go, and they knew exactly how far we were going to go. Whether they understood the can in my hand, or simply understood reach, I couldn't tell. We came to a low rise overlooking the northern half of the cut. From there, I finally saw what had happened to the part of the deer herd that hadn't escaped. Six deer stood packed together on a shelf above the ravine. A mature buck was in front, facing uphill. Two does pressed behind him. The others moved back and forth along the shelf. But every time, every root out was covered. The lean adult held the north side. Another large animal stood south of them near the rim. The smaller creature crouched above, waiting among rocks. The fourth animal was below. It stood at the bottom of the cut beside two deer that had already fallen. One kicked weakly. The other didn't move. This creature wasn't as tall as the largest one on the ridge, but it was heavier through the hips and chest. Its hair was almost black along the back and silver-brown around the shoulders. I think it was an older female, though that's only a guess. Their positions explained how they'd managed the deer and us at the same time. The lean adult on the north side had blocked our route to the landing while keeping the herd from climbing away from the shelf. The largest animal had held the high ground for both groups. The smaller one moved wherever an opening formed, and the older animal waited below for anything to happen. The deer and I were able to see the deer and the deer and the deer and the that fell. Nate and I hadn't drawn them away from the hunt. They'd widened the drive and folded us into it. The buck on the shelf tried to climb. The large animal to the south stepped forward. The buck backed toward the edge. One doe attempted to break north, and the lean adult rushed just far enough to turn her. The smaller creature moved too soon again. It jumped from its hiding place before the deer had reached the narrowest part of the shelf. The buck charged it. For one second, I thought the buck might get through. The smaller animal threw itself aside and caught the buck's rack. with one hand. Its feet slid in the leaves. The buck twisted, broke free, and went uphill through the opening the creature had left. The largest adult made the same downward arm motion I'd seen earlier. The young animal dropped back. The adult below shifted to close the space. There was coordination in every part of it. The younger one made errors. The others corrected them. The remaining deer had nowhere to go. The large animal at the south end advanced three steps. The lean one moved in at the same time. The does crowded backward. One slipped over the rim. She struck the wall once, landed at the bottom, and tried to rise on her front knees. The older animal reached her before she could. It put one hand beneath the does' jaw, the other on the back of her head, and twisted. The movement was quick. The does' stopped kicking. Nate made a sound beside me. Not a word, just breath leaving him. The largest creature on the upper slope turned its head. It saw us watching. The deer were no longer its main concern. It moved toward us at a walk. The other adult above the cut left the shelf and climbed. The young one followed, staying several yards behind. I told Nate to move. We went west along the rise, no longer pretending we could move. The deer ran towards us. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. The deer stopped. Nate slid the hatchet back into the sheath on his belt. The bear spray was in my right hand. With my left, I pulled the blue paint can from my vest and gave it to Nate. I told him if something got close, he should aim for the face and keep spraying. The forestry paint came out in a narrow, heavy stream. It wasn't made for defense, but it contained solvents, and I knew from experience that a small amount in the eyes hurt badly. I coach football. Home of the Save. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. TXU Energy. Rep number 10004. The terrain west of the cut formed three rocky ribs with shallow drainages between them. The direct line to the landing crossed all three. We descended the first drainage and climbed the next rib. Nothing blocked us. At the top, I could see the crown of the dead spruce that had been pushed over earlier. We were making real progress west. Then Nate looked back. The young creature was following in the open. It was about 60 yards away. With its whole body in the open, I could see I'd misjudged its build. It was shorter than the adults, but much thicker than a man of the same height. It moved with its torso leaning forward and its arms held slightly away from its sides. The same slate-gray skin showed around its mouth. The hair on its head was short and lay flat, making the skull look pointed at the back. It stopped when we stopped. No adult was visible with it. Nate said, That's the one that keeps messing up. He was right. It had shown itself too early during both deer drives. Now it had left cover and followed us before the line was closed. For the first time since the saddle, we knew where the weak point was. I told Nate we were going to rush it. He stared at me as if I'd finally lost my mind. I didn't mean we'd attack. Deer break a drive by turning into a gap before the people on the sides can adjust. The young creature stood between us. I couldn't get it to move. It was too far away from us and the route west, but the ground south of it was open. If we ran straight toward it, then cut past, we might cross the line before the adults arrived. I took the paint back and gave Nate the bear spray. The wider cloud would be easier for him to use while moving. I kept the paint because I'd used those cans for years and knew the trigger. We started down the rocky rib toward the animal. It watched us for the first few steps. Then its posture changed. The shoulders rose. It glanced to its right, looking for an adult that wasn't there. We ran faster. The creature stepped backward. Its mouth opened, showing flat front teeth and larger teeth farther back. It made a rough barking sound, high for its size. A deeper call came from the woods, uphill. The young one looked toward that sound. That hesitation gave us another twenty yards. At about thirty feet. Nate raised the bear spray. The creature dropped to one hand and bounded sideways. Nate sprayed as it moved. Most of the orange cloud passed behind it, but the edge caught its shoulder and face. It rolled once, came up and rubbed at its eyes with the back of one wrist. We cut south, passed within fifteen feet of it, and entered the second drainage. I thought we'd done it. The young animal came after us. It was no longer trying to hold a position. It charged on all fours for several strides, then rose as it reached Nate. I saw one arm sweep forward, its hand closed around Nate's left forearm just below the elbow. Nate's body stopped while his feet kept moving. He hit the ground on his back. The bear spray flew from his right hand and disappeared into the wet leaves. The creature pulled him across the ground as easily as I could pull an empty jacket. I turned and sprayed the blue paint. The first stream struck the ground. The second went across its mouth and left eye. Bright blue paint covered the dark skin and soaked into the hair around its face. The creature released Nate and clapped both hands over its eyes. It gave a full scream then, deep at the beginning and sharp at the end. The sound carried through the drainage and seemed to shake the air inside my chest. I grabbed Nate's vest and pulled. He got his knees under him. His left hand was on the ground. His left arm hung straight down, and the middle of his forearm had already begun to swell. The bear spray had rolled several feet downhill. Nate dropped onto his good hand, searched through the leaves, and closed his fingers around the can. The creature swung one hand blindly. One finger hooked beneath the front collar of my vest near my right shoulder. I twisted away, and the fabric tore diagonally across my chest and down toward my waist. Its knuckles struck my collarbone. But the vest gave before it could pull me in. Nate raised the can with his right hand and sprayed at close range. This time the bear spray covered the creature's face and upper chest. It backed away, struck a tree, and went down on one knee. An adult call came from above us. Another answered from the direction of the cut. We ran west. Nate held his injured arm against his stomach. He stumbled twice, but stayed upright. I kept a hand on the back of his vest and pushed him ahead of me through the drainage. Behind us, the young creature continued making broken, choking sounds. The adults were moving fast now. We could hear branches breaking on both sides. The third and final rocky rib was steeper than the first two. Nate tried to climb using one hand and couldn't get traction. I went up ahead, braced my boots against a root, and pulled him by the back of his belt. We reached the top together. From there, I could see a blue boundary mark on an old maple. It was part of the sail line we'd painted years earlier. The utility vehicle landing was less than half a mile west. We also had our first clear path downhill toward Black Creek. Following the creek north would eventually reach the forest road, but it'd add nearly two extra miles. With Nate injured and the adults closing, the landing was our only practical chance. I looked at his arm. There was no open wound, which was the only good thing about it. His forearm bent slightly where it should have been straight. He said his little finger and ring finger were numb. When I asked him to move them, they barely twitched. I wanted to splint it immediately, but we didn't have enough time. I used a triangular bandage from the first aid pouch to secure his arm against his body and told him not to let it swing. The large creature appeared on the ridge behind us. It didn't look toward the young one. It looked at us. Then it dropped down the slope. We left the ridge and entered the thickest part of the old harvest. This time, the regrowth worked in our favor because we were crossing it instead of being kept inside it. The adult had to break through. We heard stems snapping behind us in a straight line. It wasn't trying to hide or direct us anymore. Nate's face had gone pale. He kept asking how far we had left. I told him the truth each time. Four hundred years. Three hundred. A little over two hundred. At two hundred yards, we were almost at the top of the ridge. the lean adult appeared ahead. It stood on a low mound between us and the landing. It had anticipated our route again. The animal's arms were spread slightly, and its head moved from Nate to me. The largest adult was behind us. To our right, a flash of silver-brown shoulder passed through the growth. The older animal from the bottom of the cut had climbed out and joined them. The drive had closed. I looked left. The ground fell toward the creek through a patch of old logging debris. Branches and cut tops lay waist-high in places. It was terrible walking, but the lean adult would face the same problem. More important, the debris angled around the mound and came back toward the landing from the south. I pushed Nate left. The lean creature moved to match us. We kept going. It came down from the mound and entered the debris. I pushed Nate left. We kept going. It came down from the mound and entered the debris on a line meant to cross ours. For ten seconds, the three of us were racing toward the same narrow opening. Nate and I had the shorter distance. The creature was faster. Nate caught his boot beneath a cut limb and fell. He landed on his injured side, made one short cry, and curled around the arm. The lean adult was less than forty feet away. I stepped between them and raised the paint can. The creature knew what it was now. I pulled Nate up by his good arm and forced him through the opening. We could see the utility vehicle. It sat where we'd left it at the far side of the gravel landing, facing west toward the forest road. The key was in a zippered pocket inside my vest. The torn fabric had opened the outer half, and for one sick second I thought the key was gone. Then I felt the zipper beneath the loose end of the key. We reached the gravel. I unlocked the vehicle while Nate climbed into the passenger seat. He couldn't fasten the belt with one hand, so I pulled it across him and latched it. The adults hadn't entered the landing yet, but Brush moved on both sides. The engine turned once and failed to start. I tried again. It caught. The lean creature came out behind us as I shifted into gear. It crossed the gravel in four long strides and grabbed the rear cargo rack. I tried again. It caught. The back of the vehicle dropped under its weight. I pressed the accelerator. The tires spun, threw gravel, and then caught. For perhaps twenty feet the animal ran with us. Its grip bent the rack backward. I could see one dark hand in the small mirror above the windshield. Then the vehicle hit a rut. The rear jumped. The creature lost its hold, and we pulled free. The forest road was narrow but firm. I drove faster than I ever could. I was in the middle of the road, and I never had on it, slowing only for washouts and sharp bends. Nate leaned against the door with his injured arm held to his chest. I kept asking if he felt faint. He said no at first, then admitted he did. Half a mile from the landing, the largest creature crossed the road ahead of us. It came out of the right-hand timber, stood in the center, and faced the vehicle. There wasn't enough room to keep up. The right side dropped toward the creek. I had time to stop. I didn't. I pressed the accelerator and aimed at the middle of its body. The animal held its ground until we were close enough for me to see wet dirt along its chest. At the last instant, it turned sideways. One hand struck the edge of the roof as we passed. The impact cracked the windshield from top to bottom and bent the front roof support toward my head. The vehicle lurched right. I fought the wheel, brought it back from the ditch, and kept driving. The creature didn't come after us on the road. In the mirror, I saw it standing at the bend with one arm held against its side. Then trees blocked the view. We still had nearly three miles to the truck. I expected an animal at every turn. None appeared. Once the road widened and the ground leveled, I drove as fast as the utility vehicle would go. We reached the locked gate a little before five. The county truck was untouched. I parked beside it and shut down the utility vehicle, then listened for movement in the timber. The only sound was the engine cooling and Nate's breathing. I moved him into the truck, splinted his arm with two wooden boundary stakes from the truck bed, and wrapped them with gauze and flagging. His fingers had turned cool. He could feel pressure in his thumb, but almost nothing in the two smallest fingers. The swelling had spread from his wrist to above his elbow. There was cell service on the county road. I called emergency dispatch, gave our location, and started driving south. We met the ambulance near the highway. By then, we'd been outside the forest for more than half an hour. No one rescued us from those animals. We were already out. The emergency crew cut Nate's jacket and shirt from his left side. Both bones in his forearm were broken. One fracture had several pieces, and the muscles had swollen enough that the medic was worried about circulation. Nate was taken to the hospital in Ironwood, then transferred for surgery. I had scratches, bruises, and a strip of skin missing from one shoulder where my vest tore. The doctor wanted to keep me overnight because my blood pressure was high, and I'd begun shaking hard enough that I couldn't hold a cup. I refused until I knew Nate was in surgery, then let them put me in a bed. His first operation lasted more than five hours. The creature's grip had done more than break the radius and ulna. The pressure damaged nerves and crushed muscle along the inner side of his forearm. The surgeons relieved the swelling, repaired what they could, and placed metal plates along both bones. He needed three more operations over the next year. Nate kept the arm, but he never recovered full use of his hand. His last two fingers remain partly numb and curled. His grip is less than half what it was, and cold weather makes the entire arm ache. He finished his degree, but field forestry was no longer realistic for him. He eventually took an office job with a wood products company near Green Bay. He can type and drive, but he can't safely run a saw, climb rough ground with equipment, or hold a paint gun for more than a few minutes. That's what everyone escaped means in this story. We lived. Nate was 22, and something in that forest changed what he could do with the rest of his life. The official response began while we were still at the hospital. My supervisor took our account seriously, because he knew both of us, and because the utility vehicle supported parts of it. The cargo rack had been pulled backwards so hard that two welds broke. The roof support was bent. A hand-shaped smear of mud covered the upper edge of the cracked windshield. It was larger than a catcher's mitt. The conservation warden went into the tract Wednesday morning with my supervisor. He said, Two county employees, and a state wildlife biologist. They didn't go near the cut until full daylight. I gave them a paper map showing our route, the place where we'd first seen the deer, and the location of Nate's attack. They found the doe with the broken legs from Monday. They found the broad tracks beside the deer lane. They found the spruce that had been pushed over, and they agreed the fresh disturbance at its base was on the uphill side, where something had applied force. No machine had been there. There weren't any chain or saw marks. At the place where Nate was grabbed, they found blue paint on leaves, a tree trunk, and several coarse hairs. The creature had left a palm impression in the mud when it fell to one knee. The print measured a little over nine inches from the heel of the hand to the end of the middle finger. The thumb came off the palm lower than a human thumb, though the biologist said the mud might have distorted it. They also found a piece of wood that had been cut off by a tree trunk. They also inspected the cut. There were nine deer in the main basin at the bottom. Three were fresh enough to have fallen during the drive we witnessed. The others had been there from several days to several months. Beneath the leaves and loose bones, the crew found remains from previous years. The number was impossible to determine because scavengers had scattered them, but there were parts of at least twenty deer. Most had broken legs, broken backs, or damage to the neck. None of the fresh animals had bullet or arrow wounds. Meat had been removed from the hindquarters and shoulders of older carcasses. It hadn't been cut with a knife. Large sections had been pulled away, leaving torn muscle and joints separated by force. The warden found another route into the cut farther south. It was narrower than the shelf we had watched, and ended at a twenty-five foot drop. Deer hair covered brush along both sides. Broad tracks were found on both sides, and the tracks ran parallel to it at several points. That evidence should have produced a clear conclusion. Instead, it produced several partial explanations. Wolves had pushed the deer. Bears had fed on the carcasses. Illegal hunters might have used the cut in previous seasons. Weather and falling trees accounted for the damage. The handprint was unclear. The tracks were incomplete. Each statement could be defended by itself. No single explanation could be found. Nothing about the coarse hairs settled the question. Blue paint, Soil and plant material were ground through them, and most had broken ends. The wildlife biologist said he couldn't identify them by appearance alone. They went into evidence with the measurements and field notes, listed only as unknown mammal hair. The tract was closed for the rest of that fall. The public explanation cited unstable rock and an unsafe abandoned excavation, both of which were true. The county later put a stronger gate on the access road and posted warning signs near the cut. We didn't announce that large unknown animals might be driving deer over the edge. I was part of the decision, and I won't pretend it was forced on me. We had no safe way to prove the claim, and telling people would have brought exactly the wrong kind of attention. For months I replayed the day and blamed myself for taking Nate back. He never blamed me. That almost made it worse. I was the expert. I experienced one. I'd seen the tract Monday and returned Tuesday because I didn't want to look foolish. There are choices you can defend with facts and still regret for the rest of your life. Nate and I spoke often while he recovered. We disagreed about one part of what happened. I thought the animals had become aggressive because we ruined the deer drive. Nate believed our interruption had only made them notice us. Once the largest one studied us, he said, they'd decided to continue the same hunt with different animals. The wildlife biologist's field notes eventually settled it for me. He'd marked every usable track on a copy of our map. Three size ranges appeared along the route. The middle range formed two separate lines, which fit the two adults whose feet seemed close in size. The largest prints stayed on the high side. The middle tracks held the lower slope and the ground nearest the cut. The smallest prints crossed between them, sometimes leaving the line and then leaving. At the first place, Nate and I tried to brake west. The smaller tracks were too far south. That was the opening we used to gain the rocky rib. Near the attack site, the same tracks cut straight across our route, with long gaps between them where the young animal had run. The adults hadn't lost control and chased us in anger. They'd kept their positions. The young one had been allowed to close the opening. It failed with the buck. It failed when the deer escaped past Nate and me. It showed itself too soon when it followed us west. Then it caught Nate. There was one more fact the county never released. The search team found two additional freshly killed deer in the southern chute. One was a doe. The other was a yearling. Frost had formed on the surrounding leaves overnight, but their bodies lay on top of it. They'd gone over the edge after the frost settled, and before the team reached the cut Wednesday morning. Tracks showed how it happened. Two large animals held the sides. The smallest set stayed behind the deer until the final bend, then moved across the only route away from the drop. It didn't step out early. It didn't leave a gap. Nate and I escaped because the youngest one made a mistake while the adults were teaching it. According to the ground at the cut the next morning, it didn't make that mistake again. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, 3 cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks, and that's just pre-game. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com/mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for 6 months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. For the first time ever. Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. TXU Energy. I've never sent a story to a podcast before. I'm not really the type. But my wife has been on me to write this down ever since I finally told her the whole thing from start to finish. She says if I don't get it out of my head and onto paper, it's just going to keep sitting there. She's probably right. She usually is. So here it is. Everything that happened to me up at the cabin that fall. I've changed the name of the lake, and I'm keeping the county to myself, because I still own the place, and I don't need people driving up there. Everything else is exactly how it went. I'll tell you right now, up front, so you're not waiting for it. I never got a clear look at it. Not a good one. If you're hoping this ends with me describing some monster standing in a clearing in full daylight, this isn't that story. What I've got is worse, I think. For 11 days I had something out there in the trees. And it never once let me see more than a piece of it. By the end, I was sure it was staying out of sight on purpose. Let me back up. The cabin belonged to my grandfather. He built most of it himself in the sixties. Up on the north end of a lake I'm going to call Ember Lake. Way up in the mountains. The kind of place where the pavement runs out, and then the gravel runs out, and then you're on two ruts through the trees with grass growing up the middle. When he passed, it came to me. My dad never wanted it. Too far from everything, he said. And he was right about that. It's far from everything. That was always the appeal for me. I'd been going up there my whole life, summers as a kid, then on my own once I was old enough to drive. I knew that stretch of woods better than I knew my own neighborhood. I could walk the shoreline trail in the dark. I knew which boards on the dock were loose, I knew the sound the wind made coming down off the ridge back and forth. This long, low rush through the pines that used to put me right to sleep. I wasn't some city guy who'd never been in the woods. I knew that country, and felt more comfortable there than almost anywhere else. That fall, the year this happened, I'd taken the whole season off. I'd had a rough go of it. My grandfather had passed, things at work had been bad, and honestly I was just worn out. My wife, who was my girlfriend then, couldn't get away. But she understood why I needed to. The plan was to go up in early October, and stay until the snow started making the road impassable, usually around the middle or end of November. Six or seven weeks. Just me in the quiet. I'd close the place up properly for winter and try to clear my head. Six weeks alone in the woods sounds like a lot to some people. To me, it sounded like exactly what I needed. I loaded up the truck. Food for six weeks. Move coolers. Propane. A chainsaw. And all the tools I'd need. I brought books and a couple of bottles of decent whiskey. I also brought my grandfather's old Lever Action 3030, because there are bears up there. I hadn't fired a gun in probably three years at that point, though, and I wasn't what you'd call a marksman. The drive up took most of a day. I remember the last hour of it. The light going gold and then grey through the trees, the temperature dropping every time I gained elevation. By the time I got the truck parked and the gear hauled inside, it was full dark and cold enough that I could see my breath in the cabin until I got a fire going. That first night I sat on the porch with a drink and listened to the lake. I could hear water lapping against the shore and a loon somewhere in the distance. Otherwise, it was completely quiet. I remember thinking, "This is it. This is the whole reason." I slept better that night than I did that night. At that point, I was happy and relaxed. I wasn't nervous or expecting to be scared of anything. The first few days were perfect. I got into a rhythm. Up with the sun, coffee on the porch, then work. There's always work at a place like that. I split firewood. I patched a section of the roof that had started to go. I pulled the dock out of the water for the winter, which is a two-day job by yourself. I set up my gutters, checked the crawl space, all the stuff my grandfather used to do, and I'd never really had to learn until it was mine. It was also quiet in a way most people never experience. There's usually traffic, a refrigerator humming, a plane going over, or somebody talking in the next room. You stop noticing those sounds because they never go away. At Ember Lake, when the wind dies, especially in the mornings, you can hear your own heartbeat, and the blood moving in and out of your body. It's almost uncomfortable for the first few days. Then you get used to it, and it becomes peaceful. The other thing is how cut off you are. And I mean genuinely cut off. There's no cell signal up there, not even one bar. The nearest neighbor, if you can call it that, is a hunting camp maybe nine miles south that only gets used a couple of weeks a year, and it was empty that fall. The nearest actual town is over an hour away. Most of it on roads you can't drive fast, there's no landline or internet, I didn't satellite phone or emergency beacon either. I'd been going there my whole life and had never thought I needed one. If something happens to you up there, you're on your own, and nobody will know to send help. I knew that going in, and it had never bothered me. It was part of the appeal. At that point, being cut off was exactly what I wanted. That changed quickly. In the evenings, I'd read or sit and watch the light fade over the water. It gets dark early up there in October. By six, the sun's behind the ridge, and by seven, it's pitch black. There's no glow from a town on the horizon. If the sky is clear, all you can see are the stars, the outline of the ridge, and moonlight on the lake. I used to love the dark up there. I'd sit on the porch with a drink and feel safer than I did almost anywhere else. That whole place was the one spot where I never worried about anything. I loved it. For about a week, I loved every minute of it. The first thing I noticed, I almost didn't notice at all. It was maybe the eighth or ninth day. I was behind the cabin, a little way up the slope where my grandfather had always kept the woodpile, splitting rounds. It was late afternoon, and the daylight was starting to fade. Then I got this feeling. I know how that sounds. Everybody who tells one of these stories says, I got a feeling, and I used to roll my eyes at that. But I don't have a feeling. I don't have a better word for it. The hair on my arms lifted, and the skin on the back of my neck tightened before I knew why. I stopped mid-swing, and I turned around and looked at the tree line. There was nothing there. Just the pines. Dark green going to black in the low light. The trunks close together. The ground underneath thick with fallen needles and deadfall. Nothing moved. No bird. No squirrel. Nothing. I stood there for probably a full minute. The whole time I felt certain that someone or something was looking back at me, even though I couldn't see it. Eventually I laughed at myself. Out loud. The way you do when you're alone and trying to break a mood. I said something like, get it together, and I went back to splitting wood. But I'll tell you, I stacked that wood a lot faster than I'd planned to, and I went inside before it was fully dark, and I locked the door. That's a small thing, but it stuck with me later. I'd never locked that door before. Not once in my whole life. There was no reason to. My grandfather never locked it. I don't think he even had a key until his insurance company required one. But that night I turned the lock, stood there with my hand on it for a second, and tried to ignore how uneasy I felt. I made dinner and tried to read, but I kept glancing at the black window. That was new too. You don't think about windows when you feel safe. That night, all I could think about was how I couldn't see what might be standing outside them. I ended up hanging a towel over the one in the loft before I went to bed and told myself it was to block the moonlight. I didn't sleep as well. I lay in the loft listening, though I couldn't have told you what I was listening for. The wind came down off the ridge a few times, that long, low rush through the pines that I'd loved my whole life, and for the first time, I was able to see what was going on. I was able to see what was going on. But at the same time, it didn't sound peaceful. It sounded like something moving. I knew it was only the wind, but that didn't help me relax. It took a long time to fall asleep. The next day I told myself the whole thing was nothing. Maybe I'd heard a deer in the brush without realizing it. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me after a week alone. That can happen when you've been by yourself too long. So I went about my day, but I noticed I was staying closer to the cabin than I was staying in the cabin. I was staying closer to the cabin than I had been. And I noticed I kept looking at that tree line. It was that night the sound started. The cabin was mostly one room, with my bed in a loft above it. I was up there and had just put my book down and turned off the lantern. It was past midnight and completely quiet. Then, from outside, roughly where the woodpile was, I heard a knock. Not a knock on the door. A knock like wood on wood. Like someone had taken a heavy stick or a branch and struck it. I was against a tree trunk. One single hard crack that carried in the still air. I lay there. My eyes were open in the dark. I was listening so hard my ears were ringing. And then it came again. From a slightly different spot. Crack. Then nothing for a while. Long enough that I started to breathe again. And then, this is the part that got me. A third one. From a completely different direction. Off to the side of the cabin now. Down toward the lake. Crack. Three knocks. Three different places. Spread out over maybe ten minutes. Like something was moving around the cabin in the dark. Stopping. And hitting a tree each time. Now, I know what people say wood knocking means. If you've spent any time reading about this stuff, you know too. But at the time, I wasn't thinking about legends or theories. I was alone in a cabin, listening to something move around outside. And every instinct I had told me it was wrong. I didn't sleep at all that night. I pulled the towel away from the little loft window. Sat with the lantern on and the 30-30 across my lap. And watched the glass until the sky went gray. When the sun finally came up, I felt like an idiot. In the daylight, with the lake sparkling and birds calling in the trees, the whole thing seemed impossible. I went outside and walked around the cabin looking for tracks. The ground near the woodpile is soft and covered in needles, so it doesn't hold clear prints. I found a couple of scuffed places, but nothing definite. I found one thing, though. On the flat top of a tree stump near the woodpile, one I used as a chopping block, there were three small stones, sitting in a little row, right in the center of the stump. I hadn't put them there. I looked at those stones for a long time and tried to explain them. I didn't put them there. Maybe a hunter or some kid had left them there. Maybe I'd done it and forgotten. But I used that stump every day and would have noticed them, and nobody had driven up the road. You can hear a vehicle coming for ten minutes on that gravel. I swept the stones off the stump, found another chore to do, and tried not to think about them. I want to say something here about why I didn't just leave. Because that's the question everybody asks. My wife asked it. Anybody who hears this, asks it. Why didn't you get in your truck and go? And I've thought about it a lot. Part of it was pride, honestly. I was a grown man who knew these woods, and I wasn't going to let a few unexplained noises run me off my own family's property. The other part was that every morning, the fear from the night before seemed ridiculous. By the time darkness came and it felt real again, leaving seemed more dangerous than staying. But if I'm being completely honest, the fear from the night before seemed ridiculous. By the time darkness came and it felt real again, the biggest part was that leaving after dark felt more dangerous than staying. I pictured that long road with trees tight on both sides, and whatever was out there somewhere between me and the highway. The cabin had walls and a door I could lock. Out on the road, I'd have nowhere to go if the truck stopped. I don't know if that instinct was right, but I trusted it. And I stayed. Over the next week, things got worse, but slowly. Whatever was out there seemed to be going away. I didn't know what to do. I didn't to be in no hurry. That bothered me more than if it had simply rushed the cabin. It added one new thing at a time, and waited to see what I'd do. The knocking came most nights. I almost got used to it, which is strange to say, but you can get used to nearly anything if it happens often enough. I'd lie in the loft, hear the crack out in the dark, and tell myself it would knock a few times and stop. It always did, and eventually I'd fall into a nervous sleep. But every night was a little different, and I started thinking it was learning my routine. Some nights it began early. Other nights, the first crack came just as I was drifting off and jolted me awake. I know how paranoid that sounds, but that's how it felt. A day or two after I found the stones, around day eleven, I came out onto the porch with my coffee and saw that something had been there. During the night. My boots, which I'd left by the door, were in the middle of the porch, set neatly side by side and pointing toward the door. A coffee mug I'd left on the railing was gone. I found it later that day sitting upright in the center of the chopping block stump, in the same spot where the stones had been. Something had come right up against the cabin while I slept, moved my boots, and carried the mug forty feet up the slope. I hadn't heard a thing. That's when it started bothering me. During the day, too. Until then, daylight had made it easy to tell myself the noises were in my head. Now I'd be splitting wood or carrying something, and the back of my neck would prickle so badly that I couldn't keep working. I'd turn, scan the trees, see nothing, and try again. Thirty seconds later, the feeling would come back. I started keeping the rifle with me everywhere. I leaned it against the cabin while I split wood, propped it by the door while I cooked, and kept it across my lap on the porch. I stopped going beyond the clearing. the porch, and the woodpile. Most of the time, I stood where I could see the tree line, and I started catching things at the edge of my vision. A shape between two trees that was gone when I looked straight at it. What seemed to be a dark figure up the slope that turned out to be a shadow when I stared. Once, down by the water at dusk, I was sure one of the trees at the edge of the clearing looked thicker than it should, as if something were standing against the trunk. I stared until my eyes watered. Then a cloud moved, the light changed, and all I could see was the tree. I couldn't tell whether anything had been there at all. What bothered me was where it kept happening. Every spot was uphill, downwind, or hidden by the thickest cover. Nothing ever appeared in the open or stayed visible long enough for me to focus on it. I started to believe it knew exactly where to stand, so I'd only catch part of it. That frightened me more than the knocking. A bear or mountain lion might stay hidden, but it doesn't spend days deciding when and where to let you catch a glimpse of it. I couldn't prove this thing was doing that, but I was becoming convinced it was watching my reactions and adjusting its behavior. Then there was the afternoon I heard the jay. I was at the woodpile when a harsh bird call came from the trees up the slope. Jays were common there, but this call was a little too slow and too deep. There was an odd break in the middle of it. A minute later, the same call came from about forty yards to my left. It had the same pitch, the same length, and the same odd break. Then it came a third time from behind me. I never heard wings or branches moving between the calls. I couldn't prove it wasn't a bird, but standing there with the axe in my hand, I didn't believe it was one. I started thinking something was moving around the clearing and making the sound. I couldn't believe it was a bird, but standing there with the axe in my hand, I didn't believe it was one. I started thinking something was moving around the clearing and making the sound to get me to turn toward it. I went inside after that and didn't come back out until the next morning. I sat up for most of that night too. The lack of sleep and constant fear were starting to get to me. I'd catch myself staring at the wall or the door, then look at the clock and realize an hour had passed. I wasn't eating much either. I'd started losing track of the days, which is why I can only give you rough numbers from this point on. Everything had blurred together. It was around day 18. I'd lost track by then, honestly. The days were blurring together, and I wasn't sleeping much. After another mostly sleepless night, I needed to prove to myself it was an animal. Something explainable. The only way I could think to do that was to go up the ridge in daylight and look for sign. Tracks, scat, a bed, a rub, something. If it was a bear, there'd be bear sign. I needed to know. Once it was fully light, I took the rifle and went up the slope behind the cabin and into the woods. It's dark in there even at midday. The old pines grow so close together that little sunlight reaches the ground, and the thick layer of dead needles muffles your footsteps. I moved slowly uphill, scanning the ground and checking the trunks for anything unusual. I kept the rifle ready, with my thumb resting near the hammer. The farther I went, the more uneasy I got. I'd been in those woods a thousand times and had always felt at home there. Now I felt as if I shouldn't be there. I wanted to turn around, but I kept going because I needed a normal explanation. I pushed up the slope, past where I'd usually go, into an area I hadn't walked in years. I found the broken trees first. There's a spot maybe two hundred yards up from the cabin, past a little rise, where the ground levels out into the ground. The ground levels out into a kind of shelf, before the ridge goes up steep behind it. And when I came over that rise, I stopped cold, because something was wrong with the trees. Several young pines, each about as thick as my wrist, had been broken six or seven feet above the ground. The tops were bent down, twisted, and woven together into rough arches. Wind might have snapped one of them, but it couldn't explain several treetops wrapped around one another. It looked intentional. The breaks weren't fresh. Some were gray and weathered, and had clearly been there for a while. Whatever had made them had been using that spot before I arrived, maybe for years, and I'd never known it was there. My stomach tightened as I stood among those broken, twisted trees. And then I smelled it. It smelled like wet animal hide mixed with roadkill. The odor hit me all at once, strong enough to make me breathe through my mouth. whatever was causing it had to be close. I brought the rifle up. I turned in a slow circle. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my throat. Nothing, just trees, shadows, the broken saplings, and that smell hanging in the still air. I couldn't hear a bird or an insect anywhere. And then, from somewhere close, somewhere I couldn't pin down, from up the ridge or off to the side, I heard it breathe. A long, deep exhale, lower and slower than the heavy breath of a horse. It didn't sound startled or hurried. It sounded as though something was standing still just out of sight and wanted me to know it was there. I didn't stick around to look for more sign. I went down the slope faster than I'd ever moved in my life, half running and half falling, with the rifle in my hands. Several times, I heard brush breaking, off to my left. I never saw anything, but the sounds kept pace with me all the way to the clearing. I got inside, slammed the door, and locked it. I stood in the middle of the cabin, shaking. For the first time, I fully accepted that I wasn't alone up there, hadn't been for a long time, and whatever was with me wasn't afraid of me. I should have left then. Everybody who hears this says that, and they're right. I don't have a good excuse except that I was too frightened to think straight. I couldn't make myself walk back outside, cross to the truck, and drive that road. So I locked myself in and told myself I'd leave in the morning, when I could see. But that morning, when it came, I didn't leave. And I need to explain why. Because this is the part I have the hardest time with, the part I'm least proud of. I woke up after finally sleeping for a couple of hours near dawn. The morning was bright, cold, and completely ordinary. There was frost on the grass, mist over the lake, and a jay calling from a tree. In daylight, with coffee brewing and the fire going, it became easy to explain everything away again. I told myself I'd panicked in the woods, that the broken trees were old and probably had some normal explanation, that the smell came from a dead deer, and that the breathing had been an elk. I decided to stay one more day to prove to myself that I was fine. I even went outside and did chores. I stacked the wood I'd left scattered by the block, and kept telling myself it was a normal, beautiful day. I was moving in and out, so I hadn't locked the cabin, but I had pulled the door shut behind me. Around noon, while I was carrying an armload of wood back toward the cabin, I found the pile. It was on the porch steps, right where I'd have to step over it to reach the door. There was a deer's lower leg, with a ragged break above the shin. A dead jay had been laid on top of it, and pine cones had been placed around both. In the middle, sitting upright, was the same coffee mug I'd found on the stump, and kept in the cupboard ever since. It had come back in daylight while I was right there, maybe when I was around the side of the cabin or fifty feet away with my back turned. The door was shut again when I found the pile. The only way to get that mug was to open the cabin door, take it from the cupboard, and close the door on the way out. I dropped the wood. The clatter sounded unusually loud in the quiet. I stared at the pile, knowing I couldn't explain this one away. Whatever was out there could come to my door and enter the cabin in broad daylight while I was nearby. I couldn't tell what the arrangement meant, but it felt like a warning that I wasn't safe at any time of day. I backed away, went to get the rifle I'd propped beside the wood pile, and watched the cabin for several minutes. Then I stepped over the pile, went inside with the rifle raised, and checked the main room and loft before locking the door. I didn't come back out until I ran for the truck. Everything from the pile on the steps to my escape happened in a little under twenty-four hours. That night was the worst of my life, and I've had some bad ones. It started right after dark. The knocking was closer and moved in a slow circle around the cabin. Crack from the wood pile, then quiet. Crack from down by the lake, then quiet. Crack from the roadside. It sounded as though something were walking the perimeter and checking the walls. I sat in the main room with every lantern lit and the rifle across my knees and my back to the wall so I could see both the door and the window. I didn't go up to the loft. I didn't want to be up there, away from the door, cornered. The knocking went on a long time, and then it stopped. And the stopping was worse, because at least when it was knocking, I knew where it was. saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. TXU Energy. Rep number 10004. Ten minutes passed. Then 20. I started to think maybe it had gone. Then something hit the cabin. Not a knock on a tree. The cabin. A rock, I think, thrown. Because it struck the log wall low down with a heavy thud and I heard it drop. From the slope side. Then another. Higher up. Hitting the wall near the window. Hard enough that I flinched back. Then one hit the roof. Up on the slope side. And rolled down the shingles and off the edge. It was thrown. It was thrown. Throwing rocks at the cabin from the trees. They sounded large and were thrown hard enough to hit the walls, the roof, and once the door itself. That impact made the whole door shake. It wasn't random. One rock would hit and I'd turn toward that wall. A minute or two later, another would strike the opposite side. Then a third would come from somewhere else. It kept making me turn and it seemed to be watching how I reacted. About an hour in, the rocks stopped and I heard footsteps. They were slow and heavy, circling the cabin. I heard the frost crunch and each step land flat. Nothing like the sharp hooves of a deer or elk. It sounded like a large foot and I could feel a faint vibration through the floor whenever it came close to the wall. It walked all the way around the cabin, stopping now and then right against the logs. Each time it stopped, I'd hold my breath and wait for it to move again. I sat in the middle of the floor, turning to follow the sound, with the rifle shaking in my hands. Then the rocks started again. After that, something landed on the low side of the roof. I heard the impact and then slow, heavy steps moving across the shingles above me. The roof creaked under the weight and dust sifted down between the boards. I pointed the rifle at the ceiling but didn't fire. I was terrified that wounding it would make it come through the roof or the door. I followed the sound with the barrel until it stopped over the center of the room. It stayed there for several minutes. I could hear the same slow breathing through the boards. I sat beneath it without moving and tried not to make a sound. After a while, it moved back to the edge and dropped to the ground with a heavy impact. The circling footsteps started again, followed by more rocks. At one point, I snapped. I crossed to the window, unlatched it, and shoved it open. Then I thumbed the door, pulled the rifle's hammer back, pushed the barrel outside, and shouted, Stop it! Get out of here! I'll shoot! I fired one round high into the trees on the slope, aiming at nothing. I only wanted to make enough noise to drive it away. The muzzle flash blinded me for a second. I pulled the barrel back inside and slammed the window shut as the shot echoed across the lake and off the far ridge. Then I worked the lever, ejected the spent casing, and chambered another round. And then, from the trees, close, it screamed back. I've heard a lot of sounds in the woods. Elk bugling, which is strange enough. Mountain lions making high, almost human screams. Foxes. Owls. Coyotes all going off at once. I know what the woods sound like. This was none of those. The scream started low, then climbed until it became a howl. At the end, there was a brook, a broken sound that almost resembled a word. It was so loud and close that I stumbled back from the window, dropped to the floor, and put my back against the wall. For several seconds, I couldn't breathe. Whatever the scream meant, the gun hadn't frightened it away. It answered from the same close patch of trees, and a few minutes later, the rocks started again. The rest of that night is a blur. The rocks kept coming, less often now, but always when I started to relax. The knocking moved farther out and continued circling. Very late, when I was slumped against the wall from fear and exhaustion, I heard something directly behind me on the other side of the logs, maybe two feet from my back. Its weight shifted. It took a slow, deep breath. Then it made a soft grunt that rose slightly at the end. It sounded curious, as though it were listening to me through the wall. I didn't move. I barely breathed. I sat with my back against the wall and that thing on the other side, more frightened than I'd ever been in my life. After a while, the weight shifted again, and I heard it move off. Slow. Unhurried. And then nothing. The sky went gray a couple of hours later. I was stiff, freezing, and exhausted. I'd made up my mind. The moment it was light enough to drive, I was leaving, and I was never coming back. Morning came cold, still and gray. Mist rose off the lake, and the year's first hard frost covered the grass. The fire had burned down during the night, and I could see my breath inside the cabin. I made myself wait until it was fully light. I watched the window brighten and heard no knocking, breathing, or movement. I had no idea where it was. When I couldn't stand waiting any longer, I moved fast. I didn't pack. I left the food, tools, books, and almost everything else in the cabin. I grabbed my keys, wallet, and rifle. I didn't care about anything else. I just wanted out. The truck was parked out front, maybe 40 feet from the door, down the little slope toward where the road came in. 40 feet. That's nothing. You walk 40 feet a hundred times a day without thinking about it. That was the longest 40 feet of my life. I stood at the door with my hand on the lock, for a long time before I opened it. To reach the truck, I had to leave the walls and cross open ground. I was certain this was the moment it had been waiting for. But I couldn't spend another night there, so I opened the door. The pile was still on the steps, coated with frost. I stepped over it without looking down and pulled the door shut behind me. But I didn't lock it. The cold hit me first. Then I noticed the silence. No birds were singing. And by then, I'd started to think, I'd started taking that as a warning that it was close. I went out. Some instinct told me not to run and trigger a chase, so I walked quickly toward the truck with the rifle ready, watching the tree line, the slope, and the dark spaces beneath the pines. I got maybe halfway to the truck. Something moved in the trees up the slope. I heard brush breaking, and something large coming downhill fast. Then I caught the only real glimpse I ever got. A dark, upright shadow. Its shape passed between two trunks. It was broad, much taller than a person, and covered in dark hair. I saw one long arm swing as it came down the slope to my right. I didn't stop to look closer. I ran. I ran for the truck without looking back. I yanked the door open, tossed the rifle onto the passenger seat, threw myself inside, and slammed it. My hands were shaking so badly that I dropped the keys on the floor. Through the windshield, I saw trees whipping back and forth at the edge of the clearing. Something large and dark was moving just inside the cover, no more than 30 feet away, but it wouldn't step into the open. I found the keys, got one into the ignition, started the engine, put the truck in gear, and stepped hard on the gas. The tires spun on the frost, then caught. I drove down the little slope and onto the rutted road without slowing. For most of the first mile, I kept catching what looked like a dark shape through the passenger window or in the side mirror whenever the road straightened. It stayed in the trees just behind the truck and seemed to keep pace despite the rough ground. I couldn't tell whether I was really seeing it or only expecting to. Then the road bent and the trees opened up. When I checked the mirror again, there was nothing behind me but the empty road and dust hanging in the cold air. I didn't stop. I drove every mile of that road, at a speed that should have put me in a ditch. When the gravel turned to pavement and I saw the first car I'd seen in nearly three weeks, I started crying. It was just an ordinary person driving the other way, but it meant I was back on the highway, around other people, with those woods behind me. That was two years ago. I never went back. I still own the place. As far as I know, everything except the rifle is still inside. The spoiled car, the books, and the tools. probably starting to rust. I didn't even lock the door when I left. Sometimes I think about the cabin sitting unlocked up there, and whatever I saw, still moving through those trees, and I get cold all over. I've thought about selling, but I can't bring myself to go back or ask an agent to walk into that place for me. I can't send someone else up that road, and I'll never drive it again myself. So the cabin just sits. People ask me what I think it was, and I know what everybody wants me to say. I'm not going to say the word. You can call it whatever you want. I'll just tell you what those 11 days convinced me of. It was real. It was enormous. And it was intelligent enough to stay in cover and change its behavior based on mine. It spent days watching me before it finally rushed me. It wasn't afraid of me or my gun. I believe it. I believe it could have killed me, but it didn't, and I still don't know why. Maybe it was curious. Maybe I was in its territory and it was trying to drive me away. Maybe there was some other reason I'll never understand. I got out without a scratch, but I don't sleep well anymore. I keep a bedside lamp on, and I don't go into the woods. That's been hard because the woods used to be where I felt most comfortable. My wife has been patient with me. It took me two years to get used to it. I've been in the woods for a long time. I've been in the woods for a long two years to tell her everything. Some nights I wake up remembering that scream, or worse, the low grunt on the other side of the wall. For a few seconds, I'm back in that cabin waiting for it to come inside. So that's my submission. I don't know if you'll read it on the show, and I don't really care if anybody believes it. I know what I heard and I know what I felt, and I know what I finally saw in the trees that last morning. If you're ever alone in the deep woods and suddenly feel as though you're being watched, don't ignore it just because you can't see anything. If your body tells you something's wrong, trust it and leave. And if the birds go quiet, and the woods go still, and you smell something wet and rotten on the wind, just go. Audio ads that connect. Display ads that stand out. Run them together on Spotify and unlock incremental reach for your campaign. 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