Terrifying Scary Stories From the Middle of Nowhere

For decades, a shadowy organization called the Lemonati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Look around, lemon forward sodas, even lemon forward songs. We ran the tracks, slowed them down, reversed them, and squeezed out the truth. That's lemon propaganda right there. But now, 7up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda. Join the 7 uprising. Flip the sip. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments, it's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9% of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Tonight, we're heading deep into the middle of nowhere. Places where the roads disappear, the trees stretch for miles. And when something begins watching you from the darkness, there may be no one close enough to hear you scream. Our first story begins in March of 2002, when four college friends arrive at a secluded hunting camp in the Louisiana wilderness, and discover that someone has been studying their every move. The second story, a man buys 40 acres at a tax auction for an unbelievable price, only to discover that the property was never truly abandoned. Somebody was already living there, and they have no intention of leaving. And the last story, after drunkenly storming away from a crowded carnival, a young man becomes lost in the woods, just before several voices begin closing in around him, and one of them shouts, "Grab him!" Before we begin, make sure you like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on notifications, so you never miss another terrifying story. And if you like listening on the go or for sleep, follow the Just Creepy Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Now, turn off the lights, put on your headphones, and let's begin. It starts in March of 2002. I was 21 years old, finishing my junior year at Northwestern State in Natchitoches. If you're not from Louisiana, you may know that I grew up in the Natchitoches, and no, I can't explain why. I grew up in Pineville, right outside Alexandria, and I'd been hunting and fishing the Kasatchie National Forest my whole life. My dad took me squirrel hunting out there when I was eight. I knew those woods. That's the part that still gets me, honestly. I knew those woods, and I never once felt unsafe in them until that week. There were four of us. Me. Known since high school. A guy named Kyle, who lived down the hall from us, and had attached himself to our group freshman year and never left. Which was fine, because Kyle was the kind of guy who'd give you his last 20 bucks without thinking about it. And Dustin. Dustin Arsenault. He's the one this story is really about, in a way, even though he'd probably tell you it's about me, since I'm the one who saw the man first. Dustin's uncle owned a camp off a gravel road south of Gorham, in the Kasatchie Ranger District. Maybe a 15-minute drive from the Longleaf Vista overlook if you know the area. When I say camp, I mean camp in the Louisiana sense. A cabin. One room, a wood stove, a screened porch, an outhouse, and a hand pump for water that his uncle swore was potable, and none of us fully trusted. The cabin sat on about 12 acres of private land completely surrounded by national forest. You turned off the parish road onto a dirt track, went through a cattle gate, and drove another half mile through the pines before you even saw the place. No neighbors. No power lines. Nothing. Spring break lined up with the opening of turkey season that year, and Dustin's uncle said we could have the camp for the whole week. We thought we'd won the lottery. Four college guys, a truck bed full of beer, shotguns for the turkeys, fishing rods for Kasatchie Bayou, and seven days with no classes and no girlfriends. I remember the drive in. Beau had a '96 Silverado, and we had the windows down, and it was one of those perfect Louisiana spring days before the humidity turns mean. And I remember thinking this was going to be one of those weeks we talked about for the rest of our lives. I was right about that part, just not the way I meant it. The first two days were exactly what you'd picture. We scouted for turkey sign in the mornings, fished the bayou in the afternoons, and sat around the fire pit at night drinking bush and telling the same stories we'd told each other a hundred times. The cabin had two sets of bunks inside, but the weather was so good that Kyle and I set up tents in the clearing out front, more for the fun of it than anything. The fire pit sat between the tents and the cabin, and past the fire pit was maybe 40 yards of open grass before the tree line started. Longleaf pines, mostly. With palmetto and yaupon thick underneath. During the day, it was beautiful. At night, once the fire was the only light, that tree line went completely black. The first night I saw him was our second night there. It was late. Beau and Dustin had already gone into the cabin. Kyle was passed out in his tent. I'd had, I'll be honest, probably six or seven beers, and a couple pulls off a bottle of Evan Williams that Dustin brought. And I got up from my chair to walk to the edge of the clearing and take a leak. I didn't bring a flashlight. The fire was behind me, and the moon was up, maybe three quarters full, and I could see well enough. I finished, zipped up, and when I raised my head there was a man standing in the tree line. I want to be careful here, because for years people treated this part of the story the way you treat a drunk guy's story. And I understand why, but I need you to understand what I actually saw. He was not deep in the trees. He was standing at the edge of them, just inside the first row of pines, maybe twenty-five feet from me. He was tall, taller than me, and I'm six-one, shaved head or close to it. He was wearing what looked to me at the time to be a dark tank top or a cut-off shirt, and his arms and his neck were covered in tattoos. I couldn't make out what they were. In the moonlight they just read as dark shapes covering his arms running up the side of his throat, and he was standing completely still, facing me with his arms down at his sides. He didn't say anything. He didn't move. He was just watching me. I'd love to tell you I did something brave. What I actually did was make a sound I'm not proud of, somewhere between a shout and a yelp, and stumble backward over a root and land on my tailbone. By the time I scrambled up and looked again, the tree line was empty, just pines and palmetto and dark. I ran back to the cabin yelling and got everybody up. Beau came out with a flashlight, Dustin came out with his shotgun, and Kyle crawled out of his tent asking who was cooking, which tells you what kind of shape Kyle was in. We walked the tree line with flashlights for probably twenty minutes. We didn't find anybody. Beau shined his light on the ground where I said the man had been standing, and said the grass didn't even look pressed down, though I don't know how much you can really tell, about pine straw at midnight with a maglite. And then came the thing that shaped the whole rest of the week. Dustin started laughing, not mean laughing, just relieved laughing, and he said something to the effect of, "Travis, you are hammered, my man." And Beau picked it up, and then Kyle, and within five minutes the tattooed man in the tree line had become a bit, a running joke. By the next morning they were calling him my boyfriend. Hey Travis, your boyfriend come back last night. Leave a plate out for Travis' boyfriend. Here's the thing. I halfway let them talk me into it. That's the part I've had to sit with for twenty-four years, because I had been drinking, and it had been dark, and the human brain does do things at midnight in the woods. I wanted them to be right. It's a lot more comfortable to be the drunk guy who saw a shadow, than the sober guy someone was watching. So I laughed along, and I told myself it was a trick of the moonlight, and for two days I almost believed it. Almost. Because small things started adding up, and I was the only one counting. The third morning, I found a cigarette butt on the dirt track about a hundred yards from the gate, down where we'd parked the second truck. Hand rolled. None of us smoked. I told myself it was old, left by some hunter from deer season, except it didn't look old. It looked white. The fourth day, half a package of hot dogs went missing from the ice chest on the porch. Kyle got blamed for that, and Kyle, to be fair, was a plausible suspect for missing hot dogs, and he took the blame the way he took everything, with a shrug. But I watched him deny it, and Kyle was a terrible liar, and he wasn't lying. And then there was the feeling. that's not evidence, I know how it sounds, but there were two or three times that week, always in the late afternoon when the light started going orange through the pines, when the back of my neck would go tight and I'd turn around and stare at the tree line and see nothing and be absolutely certain, in some old part of my brain, that the nothing was staring back. The second time I saw him was our fifth night. I'd cut way back on the drinking by then, partly because of the jokes and partly because of that feeling. That night I'd had two beers, total, over about five hours, and I want that on the record. I was in my tent, almost asleep, when I heard the cattle gate. The gate was a half mile down the track, but sound carries at night out there, and that gate made a specific sound, a low metal groan when it swung. We'd all commented on it, and at somewhere around one in the morning, I heard it groan, once, slow. And then stop. I lay there for a long time, telling myself it was the wind. Then I heard footsteps on the dirt track, unhurried, even, getting closer, then leaving the track, then quiet on the pine straw. I got my flashlight in my hand, and I didn't turn it on, and I unzipped my tent about four inches as slowly as I have ever done anything in my life, and I looked out. The fire was down to coals, throwing off just enough red light to shape things. I'd been there for a long time, and I couldn't believe it. And standing next to Bo's Silverado, maybe 15 yards from my tent, was the man. Same build, same shaved head. He was crouched slightly at the driver's window with his hands cupped against the glass, looking inside the truck. Then he straightened up, and he turned, and for a second the coal light caught the side of his face and his neck, and I could see the tattoos went all the way up under his jaw. He stood there and looked at the cabin for a while. Then he looked at the tents. He looked at the windows, and he looked at the windows, and he looked at the windows. He looked at my tent. I don't know if he could see the gap in my zipper. I've spent a lot of nights wondering. Then he turned and walked back toward the track, no hurry at all, and he disappeared into the dark, and a few minutes later I heard the gate groan again, and then nothing. I did not sleep. When the sky went gray, I got Bo up and told him everything, and I watched his face do the thing I'd been dreading, that polite, skeptical settling, and he asked me, not unkindly, how much I'd had. Two beers, I told him. He asked if I was sure, and Dustin came out onto the porch in the middle of this, heard the tail end, and grinned, and said the boyfriend was back, and something in me snapped, and I got loud, and then Dustin got loud, and for about ten minutes on that porch, it got genuinely ugly between us, in a way it never had in six years of friendship. The compromise, and I had to fight for even this, was that we checked the truck, there were smudges on the driver's window, could have been hand smudges, could have been anything, and it was Bo's truck, and Bo kept it filthy, so that went nowhere, and we agreed, mostly to shut me up, that we'd lock the guns in the cabin instead of leaving them in the trucks, and keep the cabin latched at night. If we'd left the next morning, this would just be a weird story I told at Crawfish Boils. We didn't leave, we had two days left, and Dustin had been hearing a gobbler every morning across the drainage northwest of the camp, and there was no version of 2002, where four 21-year-old guys packed up early because one of them saw a scary man. So on the morning of our sixth day, our last full day, we went hunting. We split into pairs, which is how you hunt turkeys with four people. Bo and Kyle went east toward the bayou. Dustin and I took the drainage to the northwest, after his gobbler, and I remember being glad it worked out that way, because Dustin and I hadn't fully patched things up from the porch, and two hours sitting against a pine tree together tends to fix that kind of thing between men who don't know how to apologize with words. We set up before first light on the near side of the drainage, backs against two big longleafs about ten feet apart, facing a little natural clearing where Dustin figured the bird would strut. Dustin had his uncle's twelve gauge. I had mine. It was cold for March, low fifties, and the woods did that thing they do where the birds start up one section at a time, and the gobbler answered Dustin's call twice from across the drainage, and for about forty minutes, I forgot completely about tattooed men and cigarette butts, and I was just a guy hunting turkeys with his friend. The first shot took the bark off the pine eight inches above Dustin's head. I need to explain the sound, because the sound is what I still hear. A shotgun going off in the woods is a boom, round and wide. This was not that. This was a flat, vicious crack, a rifle, and it came with this ripping snap in the air that I later learned is what a bullet sounds like passing close to you. And in the same instant, the tree above Dustin just exploded. Bark and splinters rained down on his shoulders, and I want to be honest about the next two or three seconds, because neither of us did anything smart. We just sat there. We both just sat there with our mouths open, because there was no version of reality we understood, in which someone was shooting at us. The second shot fixed our understanding. It hit the dirt about a foot to Dustin's left, and threw dirt across his legs, and Dustin made a sound I'd never heard him make, and rolled sideways behind the pine, and I hit the ground flat, and the third shot cracked over us, and I remember lying there with my face in the pine straw doing the math that would keep me up for the next twenty years. Three shots, all three at Dustin's tree. I was ten feet away, in the open for the first two, and not one round came at me. Somebody was shooting at Dustin, specifically at Dustin. The shots were coming from across the drainage, from the high side, somewhere in the deadfall on the far slope, and we never saw so much as a muzzle flash. What we did was crawl. There was a shallow feeder cut running behind our position, maybe two feet deep, and we slid into it on our bellies and crawled east along it while a fourth shot smacked a tree somewhere above us, and I have a scar on my right forearm from dragging it over a broken root, and I didn't feel it happen and didn't notice until we were back at the trucks, and Bo asked why I was bleeding. The crawl took maybe ten minutes and felt longer than anything I had ever done. When the cut got deep enough, we got up into a crouch and ran, and we came out of the woods into the clearing yelling for Bo and Kyle, who came running from the other direction because they'd heard the shots and thought. At first, we didn't know that we'd fired them. It took thirty seconds of both of us talking over each other before Bo's face changed, and I will say this for Bo. Once his face changed, it never changed back. Nobody made a boyfriend joke. Nobody ever made one again. We threw ourselves into the Silverado, all four of us, left the second truck, left the tents, left everything, and Bo drove that dirt track at a speed that should have killed us independently of any sniper. The Illuminati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7-Up. Flip the sip. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners. There was no cell service out there in 2002. Not that any of us had a cell phone worth mentioning anyway. We drove to the little store up at the Parrish Road Junction, the kind of place that sold live crickets and cold beer, and had a payphone bolted to the outside wall. And I stood at that payphone with my hands shaking and called 911. And I remember the operator asking me to slow down twice. The sheriff's office took it seriously. I'll give them that. And once the word shots fired and National Forest got strung together, it stopped being just them. Within a couple hours, there were parish deputies and agents from wildlife and fisheries. And by the next morning, the Forest Service was involved too. Two deputies followed us back to the camp that first afternoon, and they went in ahead of us with their guns drawn. And watching two grown lawmen move up on our little vacation cabin with their weapons out did something to my understanding of the week that has never fully happened before. The camp had been ransacked, not destroyed. Ransacked is the right word, because whoever did it was shopping, not raging. The cabin door had been pried at the latch. The ice chests were open and gutted, all the meat gone, the bread gone, the peanut butter gone, the beer untouched, which one of the deputies remarked on. My tent was unzipped and my duffel dumped out. And two things were missing that turned the whole scene from a burglary into a message. Dustin's box of.270 rifle shells which had been sitting on the cabin shelf because his uncle kept a deer rifle out there in the fall and Dustin had brought shells to zero it, was gone. And Dustin's sleeping bag off Dustin's bunk gone. Dustin's ammunition. Dustin's sleeping bag. Nobody else's anything, beyond food. My tent had been searched and my sleeping bag was still there, unrolled, gone through, and left. Beau's wallet was sitting in plain view on the porch table with $60 in it, untouched. The deputy taking inventory kept flipping back through his notes with his jaw set and I finally asked him what he was thinking and he was honest with me. He said, son, whoever this is, he's not stealing, he's picking. Then I told them about the man. Both nights, the cigarette butt, the gate, the truck window, all of it. And I braced for the skepticism I'd gotten all week and instead I watched the two deputies trade a look. It was a fast look, but I caught it and it wasn't a look that said drunk college kid. It was a look that said something to each other, something they already knew and weren't saying in front of us. Years later, I found out what it was. There'd been complaints going back at least two years, scattered across that whole district of the Kasachi. Hunter's camps rifled. Deer stands stolen or wrecked. A trapper who swore somebody had been sleeping in his shed. And one report, filed and quietly buried for lack of evidence, from a bow hunter who claimed a shot had been fired over his head near Corral Creek in 2000. They had a ghost out there, and they knew they had a ghost. And we were the first people the ghost had actually tried to hit. The search ran a full week. They brought dogs. One day they had a helicopter out of Alexandria, and they had a dog in Alexandria working the drainages. They pulled in trackers from wildlife and fisheries, guys who'd spent their lives reading that ground. And what those men found is the part of this story that still moves the hair on my arms. He was living out there, had been for a long time. They found three camps. The closest one was inside of a mile from our cabin, tucked into a palmetto thicket on a low rise where, and a deputy told me this directly, a man sitting comfortable could watch our clearing. And I said, I'm not going to let you in. I'm not going to let you in. I'm not clearing through the pines. A lean-to of cut saplings and stripped pine boughs, weathered gray, months old at minimum. A fire pit dug down and ringed and swept. Snare wire in the brush. A latrine trench. Empty cans buried in a neat pit, and some of those cans, the deputy said, had store labels that had been out of circulation for over a year. The second camp was three miles off, older. The third was older still, half reclaimed by the woods, and it had a sleeping platform built up off the ground between two trees, and hanging on it were the rotted remains of a sleeping bag, which is a detail I could have lived my whole life without, because it means the man had a system, and the system had worn out and Dustin's sleeping bag wasn't loot. It was a replacement part. They never found him. Seven days, dogs, a helicopter, men who could track a wounded deer, and a man who could track a wounded deer. across rock, and they never laid eyes on him once. The woods out there run on for tens of thousands of acres, cut with drainages and thickets, and a man who knew them, who'd made himself part of them, could fall back and fall back forever. The camps got photographed and torn out. The case stayed open. And after a week, everybody had to go back to their lives, because that's how it works. The sheriff's office called Dustin's uncle, not us, when they suspended the act. And Dustin's uncle called Dustin, and Dustin called me, and neither of us said much. I keep saying it, but it's the question that's owned me for 24 years, so I'll say it once more. Why Dustin? The deputies asked it. The four of us asked it across a hundred late-night phone calls. Dustin had never been out to that camp before in his life, so it wasn't history. My best theory, and the lead investigator told me before they wound down the search that he'd landed in the same place, is the scouting. On our third day, Dustin had scouted that northwest drainage alone, following his gobbler, and he'd pushed farther up the far slope than any of us went all week. The far slope where the shots came from, inside of a mile from that first camp. I think Dustin walked too close to the man's home. I think he maybe walked through it, or near enough, without ever seeing it, the way you'd never see it unless you knew. And I think the man spent the next three weeks in the camp, and I think he walked through it, or near enough, watching us, learning us, picking Dustin's gear out of our pile. And then, when Dustin came back to that drainage a second time, in camouflage, carrying a gun, the man decided he was being hunted, and he corrected the situation. The trip ended us, as an outdoors group. That part of the synopsis of my own life is just true. Bo sold his tent that summer. Kyle, who'd grown up duck hunting, hasn't held a shotgun since. Dustin finished school and took a job in Houston, and I always believed, though he never said it, that the appeal of Houston was partly that it contained no pine trees worth mentioning. And I stopped. All of it. Hunting. Fishing. Camping. My dad never understood it, and I never explained it. Some doors just close. That was the whole story, and it stayed the whole story. That's the part I have to prepare you for, because I know how these things are supposed to end. Somebody gets arrested. I know how these things are supposed to end. Somebody confesses. A name gets attached to the shape in the tree line, and everybody gets to exhale. I waited for that ending for years. I'm still technically waiting. The case never closed, but it never went anywhere, either. I called the parish sheriff's office every few months that first year, and I always got some version of the same conversation. Still open. Nothing new. We'll call you. The detective who'd worked it, a patient man, named Broussard, who never once talked to me the way you talk to a college kid, retired in 2006, and I actually drove up and had coffee with him about a year after that, because I'd heard retired cops will sometimes tell you the things the badge wouldn't let them say. He didn't have a secret. That's what I learned over that coffee. He had the same hole I had. He told me the casings from the far slope were still in evidence,.270 caliber, and that the file had my description in it, the height, the shaved head, the tattoos up the neck, and that in 31 years of police work, our case was one of two that still followed him around. He said y'all weren't his first. I'd stake my pension on it, and I don't believe y'all were his last. Then he stirred his coffee for a while, and said the thing I think about most. He said, a man who can live out there that long doesn't get caught. He gets old, or he gets tired, or he moves, but he doesn't get caught because getting caught happens in town. There were rumors over the years. There are always rumors. In 2004, a bowhunter over near Corral Creek told a game warden, somebody had been in his camp while he was on stand, food gone, gear gone through, nothing valuable taken, and when I heard that one second hand through Dustin's uncle, I didn't sleep for two nights, because nothing valuable taken is a sentence I understand better than most people alive. In 2009, there was supposedly a shot fired near a camp in the city of San Francisco, and I heard that the man was dead. I didn't sleep for camp in Wynn Parish, eastern side of the forest, never confirmed, never solved, no suspect. Every few years, I'd hear about some drifter arrested somewhere in central Louisiana, and I'd find the booking photo, and I've probably studied 40 of those photos over the years, hunting for tattoos coming up out of a collar, and it's never him. Or I should say, it's never been him yet, because I still look. My wife caught me doing it once, staring at a mugshot on my laptop at one in the morning, and I told her it was work. That's the closest I ever came to telling her. Beau sold his tent that summer. Dustin finished school, and took a job in Houston, and I always believed, though he never said it, that the appeal of Houston was partly that it contained no pine trees worth mentioning. And I stopped. All of it. Hunting. Fishing. Camping. Dustin and I talk maybe twice a year now. Christmas. Birthdays. We don't bring it up much anymore. But a few years back, he called me late, and I could tell he'd been drinking a little, and he asked me the question straight out for the first time in probably a decade. He said, Travis, why me? And I gave him my scouting theory, the one I gave you, because it's the best I have. And he was quiet for a minute. And then he said, you know what gets me? It's not the shooting. The shooting was three seconds. What gets me is he picked my stuff. He stood in that cabin, with all our stuff laid out, and he took my shells and my sleeping bag. He knew which bunk was mine. And I didn't have anything to say to that, because Dustin was right, and there's no theory that makes that part sit down. The shooting was violence. The choosing was something else. Something slower. And the man did the choosing over days, in daylight, while we fished and laughed and made jokes about my boyfriend in the tree line. I've built him a hundred biographies over the years. the years. An escaped convict who went into the forest instead of across a state line. A veteran who came home to central Louisiana and couldn't live under a roof anymore. Some local man everybody assumed had moved away. I've read everything there is to read about people who go feral in the national forests, and there's more of it than you'd want to know, and none of it has ever handed me his face. The tattoos are the detail that should have solved it. You'd think a tall man with tattoos running up his neck to his jaw would be known to somebody, remembered from a gas station, a jail intake, a church parking lot, something. Broussard thought so too. They ran that description through three parishes and got nothing. Either nobody had ever seen him indoors, or the people who had weren't saying. So here's where I have to leave you, and I apologize for it, but I promised you the truth at the start. I don't know who he was. I don't know if the show is over. These shots were meant to kill Dustin, or to run him off. And there are nights when the eight inches of air between that first bullet and my friend's head feel intentional in one direction, and nights when they feel intentional in the other, and both kinds of night are bad. I don't know if he watched us drive out that last day from somewhere in the pines, and I'd bet everything I own that he did. And I don't know where he is now. He'd be old if he's alive. Broussard figured him for late thirties or forties back then, which puts him past sixty now, and maybe he's dead in a thicket somewhere out there with nobody to find him, and the snare wires rusted through, and the whole thing ended years ago without anyone knowing it ended. But the Kasachi is over six hundred thousand acres. I looked that number up once and wished I hadn't. Six hundred thousand acres, and men still go out there every fall and pitch their camps and hang their bags and sleep with the tree line forty yards away. Six hundred thousand acres, and every single one of them believes the dark is empty. The same way I believed it. Right up until the second I raised my head from the edge of that clearing, and it wasn't. That's my ending. It's the only one I ever got. If some old part of your brain tells you the dark is looking back at you, don't let anyone laugh you out of it. Don't let them make it a joke, and don't help them do it, the way I did. Because sometimes the dark is exactly what it looks like. Sometimes it's a man. And sometimes he never gets a name, and he never gets caught, and the last anybody ever knows of him is a groan from a cattle gate, footsteps on pine straw, and a stillness at the edge of the trees, watching, deciding, taking his time. Before I get into this, I want to make one thing clear. I'm not the type to judge. Shadows. I spent 11 years doing overnight maintenance at a bottling plant, alone in a building the size of three football fields. And I never once got spooked. I've hunted since I was eight years old. I've slept in the woods more nights than I can count. Whatever you want to call the feeling that crawls up the back of your neck when something is wrong. I thought I'd trained mine out of me a long time ago. I was wrong about that. What happened to me on those 40 acres in the spring and summer of my life? I'm not of 2011 put that feeling back into me permanently, and I've come to be grateful for it. That feeling saved my life. I'm writing all of this down now because the last person involved passed away recently, and I feel I can finally tell it in full without hurting anybody. Everything you're about to hear is true. I've changed the name of the town and the names of the people, but nothing else. Let me back up and give you the full picture. I grew up in Springfield, Missouri, raised mostly by my grandfather after my folks split. He had a little place out past Ava, maybe 15 acres of ridge and hollow, and every good memory I have from childhood happened on that land. Squirrel hunting in October, running trot lines in the creek, sitting on the porch while he told stories about the war. When he died in 2003, the family sold the place to cover his debts, and I never got over it. From that point forward, I had one goal in life, and that was to own my own piece of ground. Nothing fancy, just trees, water, and quiet, with my name on the deed. The problem was money. I made decent wages at the plant, but land around Springfield had gotten expensive, and I was a single guy with a truck payment. So I started going to tax auctions. If you've never been to one, here's how it works. When somebody stops paying property taxes for long enough, the county eventually seizes the land and sells it off on the courthouse steps to recover what's owed. Most of what comes up is junk. Landlocked slivers, drainage ditches, lots in dead subdivisions. But every so often a real piece of property slips through, usually because the owner died, and the heirs either didn't know about it, or didn't care. I went to auctions for almost two years before my number came up. It was the fourth Monday of August, 2010, at the Ozark County Courthouse. Item 11 on the sheet was described as 40 acres, more or less, unimproved, off County Road 415, southeast of a little town I'll call Brant's Mill. The opening bid was the back taxes, which came to $2,200 and change. I'd done my homework the week before. I pulled the plat map, and the parcel was a clean rectangle with actual road frontage, which is rare at these things. There was a creek marked running through the northeast corner. The aerial photos showed mature timber over most of it, with one old clearing near the middle. The assessor's card said there had been a house on it at one time, but the improvement value had been zeroed out back in the 70s, which usually means the structure burned or fell in. I drove out and looked at it from the road, and all I could see was a rusted gate, a wall of cedar and oak, and a two-track disappearing into the shade. It was beautiful. I figured I'd be bidding against half the county. When the clerk read the item, the whole crowd went quiet. One old boy in the back actually chuckled. I raised my hand at the opening number. The clerk looked around for a long moment, and then he banged his little gavel. Final price with fees came to $3,100, 40 acres. I remember standing on the courthouse steps afterward thinking I'd just pulled off the deal of the century, and wondering why nobody else had wanted it. I want you to hold on to that detail. Nobody else wanted it. In a county where hunting land regularly went for $2,000 an acre, a room full of local men let 40 acres with a creek go to an out-of-town stranger for the price of a used lawnmower. At the time, I told myself they just hadn't done their research. Country people are usually the ones telling city people not to be naive. That day, it went the other direction. There's a redemption period on tax sales in Missouri, so I couldn't fully take possession right away. The previous owner, or his heirs, had a window to pay the taxes and claw the land back. Nobody did. The paperwork finalized in March of 2011. The collector's deed showed up in my mailbox, and on the 9th of April, 2011, I drove down to walk my land as its legal owner for the first time. I'll never forget that first day, though not for the reasons I expected. The gate at the road was the first thing. Like I said, I'd seen it from the county road the previous summer. It was an old tube gate, rusted orange, hanging crooked on a cedar post. Except now there was a chain on it. A new chain. Bright galvanized links, not a spot of rust on them, wrapped three times around the post, and locked with a brass padlock that still had the sheen of the hardware store on it. I stood there in the road holding my own brand new padlock, the one I'd bought that morning to put on my gate, and I tried to come up with an innocent explanation. Maybe the county had locked it during the sale process. Maybe a neighbor had been keeping four-wheelers out as a favor to the dead owner. I got my bolt cutters out of the truck box, cut the chain, and hung my own lock in its place. Then I drove the two-track in. The two-track was another thing. Forty acres that had supposedly sat empty since the taxes stopped in 2004 should have had a driveway you couldn't find without a machete. This one was open. Grass grew up the middle of the road. I didn't know what to do. Sure, but the wheel paths were bare dirt, packed hard, with the brush trimmed back on both sides. Somebody had been driving in and out of my property, and they'd been doing it regularly for years. About a quarter mile in, the trees opened up into the old homestead clearing. The house was long gone, just a limestone foundation full of blackberry canes and a chimney standing by itself. There was a hand-dug well off to one side with a sheet of tin weighted down over it with rocks. A big walnut tree shaded the whole thing. If you'd shown me a photograph of that clearing, I'd have said it was the prettiest building spot in the county. Standing in it was different. I want to be careful here because I know how this sounds, and I promised you at the start that I'm not a jumpy person. But standing in that clearing on a bright April morning, birds going in every direction, I had the strong and specific sense that I had walked into a room where somebody lived, not a wild place, a kept place. The grass in the clearing was shorter than the grass along the two-track. There was a fire ring near the old foundation, made of stacked creek rock, and when I crouched down and put my hand over the ashes, I could smell that they were recent. Days old, not years. Somebody had stacked a supply of split oak against the chimney, maybe a quarter cord, cut clean with a chainsaw. I stood up and turned in a slow circle, and I said loud that this was private property now, and I'd appreciate whoever was using it to come talk to me. Nothing answered but the birds. I told myself it was probably local kids with a party spot, or a squatter deer hunter who'd figured the land was abandoned. Both of those things happen all the time in the Ozarks. You post some signs, word gets around, and the problem solves itself. That's what I believed on the 9th of April. I spent the rest of that first day walking the perimeter with the plat mat. and a roll of orange flagging tape, and by the time the light started to go, I'd found four more things I couldn't explain. The first was the trail to the creek. From the back of the clearing, a footpath ran northeast down the slope toward the water. Not a deer trail. Deer trails wander and braid. This was a human path, worn to bare dirt, 18 inches wide, that went in a straight line to a spot on the creek where the flat rocks made a natural step. The second was the garden. West of the clearing, tucked behind a screen of cedars where you'd never see it unless you pushed through, there was a plot maybe 30 feet on a side. It had been turned that spring. The dirt was worked, raked, and rowed, and there were onion sets already coming up in a dead straight line. There was a fence around it made of woven sticks and salvaged field wire. The dirt was built to keep rabbits out, and a scarecrow made from a flannel shirt stuffed with grass. The shirt was weathered but whole. I stood at the edge of that garden for a long time. The third was the snares. Along the creek bottom I found wire snares set on rabbit runs, six of them, all fresh, all placed by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. One had a rabbit in it, taken maybe that morning, still limber. The fourth thing I didn't understand until much later, and I'll get to it later, but it was a rabbit. It was a rabbit. It was a rabbit. And I'll get to it when we get there. At the far southwest corner of the property, the ground rose into a steep hillside covered in cedar blowdown from the ice storm of 2007. The whole hillside was a tangle of dead trees stacked shoulder high. I noticed, without really registering it, that a person could not walk onto that hillside if they wanted to, except that there was one low gap under the trunks near the base, and the leaves in front of that gap were packed down flat. I noted it. Filed it under nothing, and walked on. That's the detail that still gets me. I stood forty feet from the answer on the very first day, and I turned around and left. That evening, I nailed up posted signs along the road frontage, hung my lock on the gate, and drove the two hours home feeling pretty good about things. Whoever was squatting would see the signs in the fresh lock and move along. That's how it works. That's how it has always worked, everywhere I've ever hunted. I came back two weekends later, the 23rd of April, pulling a little 16-foot camper trailer I'd borrowed from a buddy at the plant. My intention was to camp on the place through the weekend, get a feel for where I wanted to build, and start cleaning up the clearing. I got there around nine in the morning. My lock was gone. Not cut. Gone. In its place hung a brass padlock identical to the one I'd cut off three weeks earlier, chained three times around the post, the same way, in the same direction. For a second, I genuinely wondered whether I'd dreamed cutting the first one. I cut the second lock, drove in, and set up the camper at the edge of the clearing under the walnut. Then I walked the place again. The fire ring had been used since my last visit. The wood pile against the chimney had been restocked. The rabbit snares along the creek had been moved to new runs. And on the flat limestone step of the old foundation, arranged in a neat row, were the pieces of my padlock. Whoever they were, they'd kept the lock I cut off their chain, carried it around for two weeks, and set it out where I would find it, cut into three pieces. I want to walk you through my thinking at that point because I know some of you are yelling at me already. I did consider calling the sheriff that day, but think about what I actually had. Some trespassing, a garden, a cut padlock, no threats, no face, no name. I was the new guy from Springfield, and I'd already gotten a taste of what was going on. I'd already gotten a taste of what was going on. I'd already gotten a taste of how the county felt about outsiders at that auction. I figured a deputy would drive out, shrug, tell me to post signs and leave. Mostly, though, and I'll be honest about this, I was proud. It was my land. The first thing I'd ever really owned. I wasn't going to be run off it in the first month by somebody too much of a coward to talk to me face to face. So I stayed the night. And that was the first night I heard him. It started around 10. I was scared. I was sitting outside the camper by my own fire, and the spring peepers down at the creek went quiet. If you spend time outdoors, you know what I mean. Frogs don't all hush at once for nothing. They hush in a wave in the direction something is moving. I sat still and listened, and I heard footsteps in the leaves on the slope northeast of the clearing. Slow, even, unhurried. A man's weight and a man's rhythm moving along the edge of the trees maybe 80 yards out. From my right to my left, in a half circle around my camp. I stood up and put my light out there. Big four-cell flashlight, throws a beam 150 yards, nothing. Trees. The footsteps had stopped the instant the light came on. I called out that I could hear him, that this was my property, that I just wanted to talk. The woods gave me nothing back. I stood there with my light up until my arms shook. And the moment, the exact moment I clicked it off, one single footstep crunched in the leaves, and then nothing more for an hour. He was letting me know the light didn't scare him. I understand that now. That night I told myself it was a deer. Not a coincidence. Think about it. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new lime-lemon soda. 7-Up. Flip the sip. At some point after midnight, the whistling started. Far off, down toward the creek, somebody was whistling a tune. Three or four notes, rising, falling, over and over, hurried and clear. I'd say it went on for 20 minutes. I sat inside the camper with the door locked and my deer rifle across my knees, listening to a grown man whistle in the dark on land I held the deed to. And I finally admitted to myself that I did not have a kids-with-a-party-spot problem. Morning came the way it always does, and daylight makes you brave and a little embarrassed. I walked the tree line where I'd heard the steps. The leaves were scuffed in a long arc, exactly where I'd placed the sound. On the two-track, halfway between the clearing and the road, I found a message. Somebody had taken a stick and written in the dirt of the wheel path, in letters two feet tall, three words. It said, in block capitals, THIS AIN'T YOURS. I photographed the deed in my head, so to speak, all the paper that said otherwise, and I got mad. Being scared and being mad live close together in a man, and mad won that morning. I scuffed the words out with my boot, drove into Brant's Mill, and started asking questions. Brant's Mill isn't much. A gas station, a co-op feed store, a diner called the Wagon Wheel, two churches, and maybe 300 people in and around it. I started at the co-op because I needed T-posts anyway. The man behind the counter was in his 60s, friendly enough, and when I told him I'd bought the old place off County Road 415, his face did something I've thought about many times since. It didn't get unfriendly. It went still, and it stayed still. He said, the Melner place, not as a question, and then he counted out my change without another word. The Wagon Wheel did better by me. I ordered lunch, sat at the counter, and made conversation with the waitress, a talkative lady around 70 whose name tag said Doris. When I told her which property I'd bought, she stopped wiping the counter, looked at me a moment, and asked whether anybody at that auction had bothered to tell me anything. I said no, and she seemed to take that as a personal failing of the whole county, and sat down across from me. me on our break. Here's the history I got from Doris, from the county recorder's office over the following week, and from two other locals, stitched together into one account. The land had belonged to the Melner family for over a hundred years. The old house in my clearing was built by the grandfather. By the 60s, the property had come down to two brothers, Carl and Aldous Melner. Carl was the older, considered normal enough, worked at the sawmill in town. Aldous, who everybody called Aldi, was the younger by six years, and by every account I could gather, there was something badly wrong in him from childhood. Not slow. People were careful to say that. Wrong. He hurt animals. He watched houses at night. Girls in town had learned not to walk home alone if Aldi Melner was known to be around. He'd done a lot of good for the family. Through the spring, every night I camped, there'd been something. The footsteps, the whistling, once a soft, patient knocking on a hollow tree across the clearing that went on past two in the morning. In July, all of it stopped. Three visits in a row, the woods gave me nothing. The stands where he watched from grew over. The garden went untended, beans hanging heavy and unpicked, and weeds coming up the rows for the first time. To my eye, it read as surrender. He'd seen I wouldn't quit, and he'd finally drifted off to wherever dead men drift. I actually celebrated. I sat by my fire on the night of the 9th of July, drinking a beer, feeling that I'd finally won a long, hard thing. I know now that the quiet meant he'd stopped living out ahead of me where I could read him, and had pulled back to the one place on that property I'd never looked. He wasn't gone. He was waiting to see whether I'd have the bad sense to come find him. And on the morning of the 23rd, that's exactly the bad sense I had. It was a Saturday, forecast to hit 100 degrees, and I decided to spend the cool hours walking the Southwest 12, the one corner of the property I still didn't know well. That's the steep hillside I mentioned at the beginning, the one buried in cedar blowdown from the ice storm. My thought was to figure out whether any of the downed timber was worth salvaging for lumber before it rotted. I left camp at 6 in the morning, with a water jug, a machete, and because habits die hard, my grandfather's old lever-action carbine slung on my back. That rifle habit is one of two reasons I'm alive. The other one is a rabbit. I worked my way along the base of the hillside for an hour, marking cedar trunks with flagging tape. It was slow, sweaty, thorny work, and my mind was fully on lumber when a cottontail broke cover practically under my boot and shot along the base of the slope, without thinking, anything at all. My eyes followed it. The rabbit ran 30 yards and vanished into a low gap under the stacked trunks. The same gap I'd noticed in April, the one with the leaves packed flat in front of it. Except in April, I'd been 40 feet away and incurious. Now I was 10 feet away, and I could see what the gap actually was. The trunks over it weren't windfall, they'd been placed. Notched and stacked. Wilderness masonry, with brush wired on top, and the gap at the base wasn't a gap. It was a doorway, cut square, framed in cedar posts gone gray, and hanging in that doorway, pushed aside just enough for a rabbit, was a door made of rough planks, faced on the outside with bark so that shut, it would disappear into the hillside completely. I stood in front of that door for a long time. Every sensible cell in my body lined up and voted to walk away, drive to town, and hand the whole thing to the sheriff. I have replayed the moment more times than I can count, and in the replay, I always turn around. In life, I told myself the quiet weeks meant it was abandoned, that I was only going to look, that a landowner had a right to know what was on his ground. I put my hand on that bark-faced door, and I pulled it open, and I stepped down into the dark of Aldi Melner's house. The first thing that reached me was the smell. Cold earth, wood smoke, tallow, and under all of it, human smell. The smell of an occupied den. Three steps cut into the clay led down, and then the ceiling opened up and I was standing in a room. I want to describe this carefully, because when the story finally hit the papers, they called it a hole in the ground. And that isn't fair to what the man built. It was a dugout in the old style, the kind the first settlers wintered in, except he'd had four decades to perfect his. The main room was maybe twelve feet by sixteen, shored with cedar posts and oak beams, walls faced with flat creek rock laid dry. The floor was packed clay, swept. There was a stove made from a barrel with its pipe running up through the hillside. And I understood then why nobody ever saw smoke. The pipe elbowed sideways through ten feet of rock and brush before it reached open air, and he only ever burned bone-dry oak. There was a rope bed with wool blankets folded at the foot, military style. Shelves cut into the walls held mason jars by the hundred, beans, tomatoes, rendered fat, smoked meat. There were tools on pegs, every one of them clean and oiled. A shelf of swollen paperback westerns. A kerosene lamp with a polished chimney. And down a short dog-leg passage, there was a second room, and the second room is the one I still see when I close my eyes at night. The second room was his museum. That's the only word I have for it. Shelves floored a ceiling on three sides, and every shelf held belongings. Not his. A rabbit-lined denim jacket folded. A woman's purse, cracked leather, sitting upright with the strap coiled around it. A hard hat with a Power Cooperative sticker on the brim. Eyeglasses, five or six pairs, arranged by size. A child's shoe, single, white gone gray, displayed on a shelf by itself, with a river stone set on either side of it. The same arrangement as the stones in the cow skull's eyes. And I understood that everything in this room was displayed, curated, honored in whatever order that man's mind kept. On the near shelf at eye level, sat a wallet. I opened it. The driver's license inside belonged to a man named Daniel R. Pruitt, born 1984, an address in Mountain Home, Arkansas. The license had expired in 2010. I stood there in a dead man's earth house holding a stranger's face in my hands, and my mind, which had been refusing all morning to accept the obvious, finally accepted it. The surveyor who came out of these woods running had been the lucky one. Others hadn't been. I was standing in the proof, and some of the proof had been down here waiting a very long time, and the newest thing in the room, the thing that hadn't gathered any dust at all, was on the bottom shelf nearest the door. It was my padlock. The first one, the one he'd cut into three pieces and returned to me on the foundation step. I'd left the pieces sitting there in April. He'd taken them back. My lock had been added to the collection, and it took me a second too long to understand what that meant, and I'll tell you what it meant. It meant the collection had already made room for me. Two things happened in the same breath. First, my whole body went cold in a hundred degree July, crowned to boot soles. Second, out through the doorway and up the hill, clear in the morning air, I heard the one sound in the world I least wanted to hear. Down along the creek to the north, steady and unhurried and coming closer, a man was whistling, three or four notes rising and falling, the tune from the dark in April. I've been afraid before that day, and since, but only that once have I felt fear come up through me from the ground itself. Through the soles of my feet, filling me from the bottom up. He was coming home, and I was inside, and there was one door. I made myself move. Up the clay steps, out through the plank door, pull it back to where the rabbit had left it, and I put the stacked hillside between me and the creek, and went straight up the slope through the cedar tangle. It was the worst possible ground to move quietly on, dead branches everywhere, and I climbed at one careful limb at a time, sweat stinging my eyes, while below and behind me the whistling came up out of the creek bottom, crossed the flat, and stopped. It stopped hard, mid-note, and I knew, with total certainty, that some sign I'd left. A scuffed leaf, the door an inch off true, my boot smell hanging in the doorway of his home, had just told Aldi Melner everything. The silence that followed was worse than any sound I've ever heard. I got behind a windfall root wad near the top of the slope, and put my back against it, and got the carbine off my shoulder, and I listened to a quiet so complete I could hear my own pulse in it. He didn't call out. He didn't crash around. For ten minutes the woods gave me nothing at all, and I began, insanely, to hope, and then a crow flushed cursing out of the timber a hundred yards to my west, upslope, above me, between me and the direction of my camp. He hadn't followed my trail. He didn't need to. He'd lived on those forty acres since before I was born, and he'd simply walked around, up the easy face of the hill, to get above me and cut me off from my truck. I was thirty-one years old and strong, and none of that mattered even a little. On that ground, in that timber, I was the visitor, and I was being handled by the owner. What saved me over the next hours, and I want to be straight that it was luck and not craft, was the ice storm. That hillside of stacked, blowed-up trees. That ice-stacked blowdown was the one piece of the property he couldn't move through any faster than I could, and I was already in the middle of it. I went sideways, east, on my belly under the trunks, moving when the wind moved the treetops, and freezing when it died, and it took me the length of the morning to cover what a man walks in ten minutes. Twice in those hours I saw him. Understand, after four months of contest, those were the first times I ever saw him, and I saw him for maybe four seconds total. And that was enough for the rest of my life. He came through a gap in the cedars below me, moving across the slope with the low, sliding, economical gait of a man for whom I loved. walking in timber was the native condition. In every few steps he stopped and held still in a way I've never seen a human being hold still. He was tall and rangy, all cord and joint, gray hair tied back, dressed in earth-colored clothes gone soft with age, and he was carrying, low along his right leg, a long-handled tool that I first took for an axe, and later learned was a brush hook. He passed within forty yards of me, his head never stopped its slow traverse. I lay under a cedar trunk with a round chambered and my heartbeat pounding in my throat, and I did not breathe, in the fullest meaning of those words, until he'd moved on down the slope and out of sight. You'll ask why I didn't shoot. People have asked me that for years, usually people who've never pointed a rifle at a human being. I'll give you the two answers I have. The lawful answer is that a man was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head. I was shot in the head, and I was shot walking on land he doesn't own carrying a farm tool isn't something you get to kill him for. And everything I knew that morning, the wallet, the shoe, the museum, was knowledge, and none of it was proof of anything a prosecutor could hold. The true answer is that I was praying, actually praying, that I would not have to find out whether I could. By early afternoon, I'd worked to the east edge of the blowdown, and there I made my second decision of the day that could have killed me. I was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head, and I was shot in the head, though this one at least had reasons behind it. My truck, my phone, and my keys were at camp, a half mile north across open timber. The county road was a mile and a half south behind me, but the road was empty on Saturdays, and it was eight miles of walking to the nearest occupied house, and I'd seen enough that morning to believe that Aldi Melner could take me on a road as easily as anywhere else, and would now, because he had to. The moment I'd opened that plank door, his dead years and my forty acres had stopped mattering. I knew about the second room. From here on, only one of us was leaving that county with what he knew. So I chose the truck. I waited out the afternoon under the root wad, soaked through with sweat, rationing a jug of warm water, and I watched him hunt me. That's what the balance of the day was. There's no other honest word. Twice more I heard him move a line across the hillside, patient, methodical, working the blowdown in ordered passes, back and forth, leaving no lane unchecked. Once, from a long way off, I heard the whistling again for a minute or two, and I understood it finally. It wasn't for himself, and it had never been a taunt exactly. It was for me. It was the sound a man makes to move deer along, to make the hidden thing lose its nerve and bolt. I chewed on my shirt collar and stayed put. Dark came a little after nine. There was no moon to speak of. I gave it another hour, and then I came out of the blowdown on my hands and knees and started north for camp, and the last long chapter of that day began. A half mile of night timber, moving quietly, takes about two hours. I know because I've timed it since, on friendlier ground, trying to make peace with that night. It took me closer to three, because every third step I stopped and listened, and because twice I heard, or believed I heard, movement pacing me off in the dark, and went to the ground and lay there with my face in the leaf litter for a quarter hour at a stretch. To this day, I can't tell you whether he was actually beside me for those stretches, or whether my mind had begun inventing him. I can tell you that the second time, whatever it was came close enough that I heard it breathe. One long, slow exhale through the nose, ten yards out in the black, and then nothing. Possums don't breathe that big. Deer blow and stamp. Whatever stood there considered me for a moment and withdrew, and I lay in the leaves and thought about the child's shoe with the river stones beside it, and I bit down on my sleeve to keep my breathing quiet, and eventually I crawled on. I came up on the clearing from the south a little after one in the morning, and I lay at the edge of it a long time before I moved. The camper sat pale under the walnut. My truck sat next to it. Everything was exactly where I'd left it, moonless dark, dead still, and every hair on me stood up anyway, because the clearing felt exactly the way the whole property had felt on the very first morning. Occupied, but there was no choice in it. My keys hung inside the camper. I crossed the open grass at a fast walk, feeling watched the whole width of it, eased the camper door open, took the keys off the hook, and left everything else, wallet, phone, cooler, the works. Fifteen seconds later, I was in the driver's seat with the door locked, and I turned the key, and the motor caught, and for one whole breath, I believed I was out of it. The truck rolled six feet and settled, front left corner first, then the rear, that sick, sinking feel every driver knows. I didn't have to look. All four. I found out later he'd opened the valve stems, no slashing, nothing so loud, just quietly let the air out of all four tires sometime during the day, and it told me two things. He'd known since morning that I'd have to come back to this clearing, and he'd wanted me to get in the truck, get the keys turned, get one taste of leaving, before I understood I wasn't going anywhere. The tires were the point. The truck was no longer my way home. It was a trap sitting in the middle of forty acres of his ground, and I'd locked myself inside it. Headlights on a dead truck light the world for one man, and blind the other. I understood that even then, so what I did instead was reach up and turn the dome light switch off, crack the door, and slide out into the grass on the far side from the camper. And it was in that exact second, with one boot on the ground, that the clearing lit up. He had a light. Of course he had a light. A big handheld spotlight, the kind that plugs into a battery, and where a man living in a dugout since the nineties got one is a question the investigators answered later, in a way I'll get to. The beam came from the treeline to the northeast, swung flat across the clearing and hit the truck, and I went down into the grass as the inside of the cab lit up white above me. The light held there. He thought I was in the truck. For as long as he thought that, I had a life, and I used it, crawling on my belly through the high grass at the clearing's edge, south, away from the beam, while behind me I heard him come out of the trees and cross toward the truck at an easy walk. In no hurry whatsoever. And that lack of hurry frightened me more than shouting ever could have. I made the treeline as the light went into the truck windows at close range, and I got up, and I ran. I ran the two-track, because it was the only ground I could cover fast in the dark, and I ran it hearing everything and seeing almost nothing, arms out ahead of my face, and behind me, after maybe thirty seconds, I heard one sound come across that clearing that I will carry to my grave. It wasn't a shout. There were never any words that whole night, that whole summer. It was the whistle, the same three or four notes, but fast now, hard-edged, twice through and done. It didn't sound frightened or angry. It was the whistle a man uses to send a dog. The gate was a quarter mile. My chain and lock were on it, and my keyring was in my fist, and I have relived the half-minute at that gate a thousand times, hands shaking, sorting keys by feel in absolute blackness while the light came bobbing down the two-track behind me, throwing my own huge shadow past me onto the road. I couldn't find the padlock key. I want to be honest about how close it was. The beam found me while I was still at the chain. My shadow jumped onto the gravel road ahead of me, hard and sharp, and I heard his feet coming, that long sliding stride close, and I quit the lock and went over the gate, caught a boot on the top rail, and hit the county road on my shoulder and the side of my head. The next mile does not exist in my memory as a mile. It exists as pieces, gravel under my boots and the sound of my own breath, his light swinging onto the road behind me and then off, and on, and off, as he came over the gate himself, an old man over a locked gate without breaking rhythm, the taste of blood where I'd bitten my cheek in the fall, the absolute knowledge that he was faster than me on this ground. At night, sixty-some years old and faster than me, and that the gap was closing, and that nobody on earth knew where I was. And then the hill, and the headlights. County Road 415 runs a long grade down to a low water crossing about a mile west of my gate, and as I came over the crest of that grade, the bottom of the hill lit up. A pickup was coming through the crossing toward me, headlights up the grade, and I ran down the middle of the road at those headlights, waving my arms and yelling, with what breath I had left. The truck locked its brakes, and behind me, the spotlights simply went out. I've thought a lot about the man in that pickup, because it was four in the morning, and what came down out of the dark at him was a bleeding, raving stranger with a rifle slung on his back, and he did not run me over or reach for anything. He rolled his window a hand's width down, listened to about ten words of what I was yelling, and said, "Get in." He was a poultry farmer named Virgil, headed to his barns for early chores, and he had the county fire department's frequency in a radio in his truck, and by 4:30, he had been out of the truck for about two hours. 4.40 in the morning, I was sitting on the sheriff's own porch, because in a county that size, that's where you get taken, drinking coffee with a blanket on my shoulders in July, telling everything twice. I'll compress the aftermath, though it ran on for years, because you've been patient, and you deserve the ending in a straight line. The sheriff took it seriously. Whatever I'd expected from my springtime visit to the deputy, the name Melner plus the words second room, got me the sheriff himself, dressed and armed before five. At first light, there were 11 of them, deputies, the conservation agent, and the highway patrol, and I walked them to the hillside and stood back while they opened the plank door. The sheriff was underground for six minutes. When he came out, he didn't say anything for a while, and then he sent everybody who wasn't essential back to the road, and made two radio calls, and the sheriff said, By afternoon, my 40 acres had more law enforcement on it than Ozark County had seen in its history. They didn't find him, not that day, and not that month. The dugout was intact, the stove cold, and Aldi Melner was gone, and the second room told the investigators why he'd run, rather than cleaned it out. There was too much of it to carry. I'll tell you what the state eventually established, most of it public record now. The belongings in that room were tied up over the following two years to five people. Daniel Pruitt, the young surveyor's co-worker from the Power Cooperative crew, reported missing in the spring of 2009, his truck found abandoned 11 miles away on a forest road. A woman named Karen O'Dell, a botanist out of Fayetteville, missing since 1998, whose purse sat on that shelf with the strap coiled. A drifter known around the county in the 80s, never formally reported, identified by the denim jacket in the testimony of three older residents, and the child's shoe. I'm not going to write what the investigators concluded about the shoe. It's findable if you need to find it. I've chosen not to carry the details, and I'd suggest you make the same choice. The fifth person the room gave back was Carl Melner, the brother. The heart attack in 2004 had been real enough, the coroner had signed it, but among the belongings underground were Carl's reading glasses, his pocket watch, and his church bible. Things his neighbors testified never left his person, and the working theory to this day is that Carl's heart quit while his dead brother stood in his kitchen in town, having walked 11 miles in the night because the taxes, or the land, or some ledger only Aldi kept, had come up short. There was never any proof. There never was with Aldi. They caught him on the 3rd of October, 2011, 71 days after that night. A cave, one of hundreds of acres of land, was found in the country, four miles southeast of my property line, where he'd wintered before, back in the years when he was learning to be dead. A trapper spotted smoke sign at the entrance, and had the sense to back straight out and call it in. It took nine officers, and he fought them at the end with the brush hook, silent the whole time. They all remarked on that, 68 years old and silent as they took him to the ground. Nobody died doing it, which I consider a miracle. He never spoke a word in custody, not to investigators, not to the psychiatrists, not to the judge. The court found him incompetent to stand trial, and Aldis Melner went back to the state hospital system that had turned him loose in the 60s, and he stayed there under commitment while the missing persons cases were formally closed around him one by one, resolved by evidence rather than confession. He died there of pneumonia in February of 2019, and it was that death, finally, that let the family say things publicly, and that lets me write this now. As for the land, I sold it in 2012 to a cattle operation out of West Plains, for a fair price, at a closing where nobody made small talk. The buyer bulldozed the blowdown hillside, and pushed the dugout in, filled it, and ran fence across it, and I'm told cows graze over it today and don't care. Before the sale closed, I drove down one last time. The state had released the property, the camper and truck were long since recovered, and I stood in the clearing under the walnut in the cold, and made myself stay ten minutes. The grass around the old foundation had grown up shaggy at last. The garden fence had fallen. The place felt, for the first time since the 9th of April, unclaimed. I took two things away from those 40 acres, and I'll leave you with them, because they're the whole reason I wrote this out. The first is practical. If you ever buy land at auction, and the price seems impossible, and a room full of local men lets you have it without a fight, do not congratulate yourself. Buy the coffee, close the mouth, and ask them why. Every person in Brant's Mill knew something that spring, that I paid four months of my life, and thirty years of good sleep to learn. The knowledge was free. It was sitting on a stool at the wagon wheel the whole time. All I had to do was ask, before I bid instead of after. The second one is harder to say. I spent that spring and summer believing I was in a property dispute, because a property dispute was the size of problem my life had prepared me to imagine. The signs were all there from the first morning, the kept grass, the returned lock, the coffin of stakes, and I filed every one of them under smaller headings because the true heading was unthinkable. The middle of nowhere is an empty. That's the mistake in the phrase itself. It's the one place left where something can stay, and keep house, and tend a garden, and grow old with it. It's the only place I've ever been to. I've never been to Brant's Mill. Nothing. Two people catching up at a carnival while I stood there holding a plastic cup. But 23-year-old me, six or seven beers deep, decided it was something. I got loud. I said some things to her, right there by the ring toss, in front of her cousins, in front of strangers, in front of a whole line of families. Someone told me to calm down, and I told him where he could go. Kayla was crying. Her cousin got between us, and I remember shoving my cup into his chest, beer going everywhere, and saying something along the lines of, forget all of you, except that's not the word I used. And then I stormed off, not to the car. That would have required me admitting I needed the car keys which Kayla had. No, I walked the other direction, past the port-a-johns, across the gravel lot, and straight up into the tree line, because in my head I was making some kind of statement. I was going to disappear into the woods and cool off, and everyone was going to feel terrible and come looking for me. Nobody came looking for me. I want to describe what those first 20 minutes were like, because I think about them a lot. I went in angry, crashing through brush, not looking where I was going, muttering to myself. There was still daylight, but it was that late evening kind, maybe 8.30, 8.45, where the light comes in sideways and everything under the trees is already dim. I walked hard for a while, uphill, mostly. I remember stepping over a stone wall at some point, one of those old property walls that run through the woods out there, and thinking, huh, and just continuing. The anger burned off the way it always did, fast and all at once, and left me standing in the middle of the woods feeling stupid. That's when I turned around to walk back, and I couldn't tell which way back was. I know how that sounds. I'd walked maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes. How lost can you get in twenty-five minutes? The answer, if you're drunk and angry and paying zero attention, on a hillside where every direction looks identical, is completely, completely lost. I picked the direction I was pretty sure I'd come from, and walked ten minutes, and hit nothing I recognized. No stone wall. I corrected, angled left, walked another ten. The light went out, and I saw nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It was going. Under the trees, it goes faster than you think. I pulled out my phone. One of the older iPhones. Cracked screen. Seventeen percent battery, because of course it was. No service. Not one bar, not SOS, nothing. That part of the county is a dead zone, even in town, and up on game lands, forget it. I held it over my head like that's ever worked for anyone in human history. Nothing. And here's where I made the decision that honestly wasn't a terrible decision. It might have been the only smart thing I did all night. I thought, the carnival has lights. Big ones. The Ferris wheel alone was lit up with a few hundred bulbs, and there were floodlights over the whole grounds. Once it got fully dark, that glow was going to be visible through the trees, or at least against the sky. All I had to do was sit down, stop wandering, and look at the sky. I was wandering in circles making it worse, wait for full dark, and then walk toward the glow. So that's what I did. I found a spot at the base of a big oak, sat down in the leaves, and waited for the woods to go black around me. If you've never sat alone in the woods while night comes in, I don't recommend it. It doesn't get dark all at once. It gets dark in layers. First you lose the color. Then you lose the ground more than ten feet out. Then the trees stop being trees and become shapes. And then the shapes join up. And then it's just black with a slightly less black sky above it. And the whole time, the sound changes. The birds shut off. The bugs come up. And you start hearing things move. Deer, probably. Raccoons. Whatever. I told myself that. But every snap out in that blackness went straight up my spine. I sobered up fast out there. Fear will do that. By the end, I felt every bit of where I was. And the plan worked. Sort of. I stood up, turned in a slow circle. And there it was. Off to my right and downhill. Through the trees. A dull orange-white stain on the sky. Not lights, exactly. The glow of lights. Way farther off than I expected. I must have wandered a lot more than I thought during my correcting and recorrecting phase. But it was there. And it was unmistakable. And I remember this wave of relief. And I remember this wave of relief so strong my legs almost went. I just had to walk toward it. Downhill. Toward the glow. And eventually I'd pop out at the gravel lot and go find Kayla and start apologizing. I'd gone maybe five minutes toward the glow when I heard the first voice. A man's voice. Off to my left. Uphill. Distant but clear. The way sound carries in the woods at night. He yelled one word. It sounded like there. Or maybe where. One syllable. Sharp. And then quiet. I stopped. And my first reaction, I swear to you, was relief again. Someone's looking for me, I thought. Kayla told her uncles or somebody called the fire company. And they've got guys out here looking for the drunk idiot who walked into the game lands. That made total sense. Those fire company guys would do exactly that. So I almost yelled back. I had the breath in my chest to do it. I was about to shout over here, into the dark. And then a second voice answered the first one. From a totally different direction. From downhill. From between me and the glow. And what the second voice yelled was, Hey you, grab him! I want to be really precise about this because it's the center of the whole thing. It wasn't we've got him or he's over here or anything you'd yell during a search for a missing person. Search parties yell your name. They yell hello and can you hear us? This guy yelled grab him. Grab him. Grab him. Grab him. Grab him. Grab him. With this ugly excited edge on it. And the hey you part hit different too. Because for one horrible second I thought he was yelling it at me. Directly at me. That he could see me. That someone in that blackness had eyes on me. And then I heard laughing. At least, I think it was laughing. Two or three voices. Uphill. Kind of whooping. And then crashing. Fast crashing. Brush breaking. Multiple sets of feet. And it was coming downhill in my direction. Every rational thought I had just left. I ran. I ran downhill toward the glow because that was the only direction that meant anything. And running full speed through woods in total darkness is something I hope none of you ever have to do. I couldn't see my own hands. Branches hit my face. I caught a limb across the forehead that put white sparks across my vision. I went down twice. Hard. Once catching my forearm on a rock. And both times I could hear them behind me. Not close. But not far. Voices calling to each other. At one point one of them let out this long yell. And another one yelled something I couldn't make out. And then, clear as anything, he went down toward the light. They were talking about a he. They were talking about me. I have replayed that sentence probably ten thousand times. He went down toward the light. Which means they knew where I was. Which means at some point, they'd seen me. Or heard me. And they were tracking me toward the carnival glow. And instead of yelling, hey man, are you the guy from the carnival? Everyone's looking for you. They were yelling grab him and whooping like it was a game. The crashing got closer on my left side. That's what made me stop running. I realized one of them had angled ahead of me. That the noise was coming from where I was headed. Not where I'd been. And my body just took over. And I dropped. There was a deadfall right there. A big trunk down with its root ball torn up. And I got behind the root ball and pressed myself into the dirt and put both hands over my mouth. I was breathing so hard. That's the detail I remember most. Trying to slow my own lungs down with my hands clamped over my face. Tasting dirt and blood. Because my lip was split somewhere in the falls. My forearm was hot and wet. And I lay there behind that root ball while a flashlight beam went through the trees maybe 40 feet away. A flashlight. Not a phone light. A real one. Strong. And it swept slow. Left to right, then back. Whoever held it wasn't running anymore. He was walking. And the light was moving across the woods in this patient back and forth pattern. And behind the light I could hear him breathing and stepping through the leaves. He stopped. The light stopped. It was pointed maybe 20 feet to my right, holding still on a patch of trees. And everything went quiet. And this man said, at normal volume, almost conversational, Come out. I didn't move. I don't think I've ever been that still in my life, before or since. My heartbeat was so loud in my own head that I genuinely worried about it. Somewhere farther off, one of the others yelled something. And the man near me yelled back, Hold on. Annoyed. The way you'd answer somebody interrupting you. And then he stood there for what was probably 90 seconds. And what felt like the rest of my life, sweeping that light in slow arcs. And then he stood there for what was probably 90 made this sound, this little tsss through his teeth. Disgusted or amused, I couldn't tell, and the light swung away and I listened to his footsteps move off uphill back toward the others and their voices got fainter and fainter until the bugs filled back in over top of them. I stayed behind that root ball for a long time. I have no idea how long, long enough that my legs cramped and I let them. When I finally moved, I didn't stand up. I crawled. I crawled downhill on my elbows and knees for a while before I trusted myself to crouch, and then I moved from tree to tree, stopping every few steps to listen, and the whole time that orange glow through the branches got stronger and stronger, and then I could see actual points of light instead of glow, actual bulbs, the top arc of the ferris wheel turning above the tree line, and I have never in my life felt anything like what I felt seeing that wheel. I came out of the woods about 200 yards from where I went in, behind a row of campers where the ride operators stayed. I walked into the carnival lights with blood on my face, a soaked sleeve, leaves in my hair, and the first person who saw me was a woman working a lemonade stand, and I watched her take a step back from her own counter. Kayla found me about a minute later. She'd been looking for me for close to three hours. Here's the thing, and this is where it gets worse instead of better. She had told people. She'd told her uncles I stormed off into the tree line, and a couple of the fire company guys had gone up to the edge of the woods and called for me. Called for me, by name, from the edge. Two guys, she said, and they came back after 20 minutes because nobody in their right mind goes deep into game lands at night for a drunk guy who'll probably walk out on his own. Two guys, at the edge, calling my name. Whoever was up on that hillside with me, there were at least three of them. They were deep in the woods. They never once said my name, and they had a flashlight, and time, and a plan to get ahead of me. When I told the fire chief what happened, standing there by the first aid station while a lady cleaned out my forearm, he got quiet in a way I didn't like. He said there'd been trouble on the game lands that summer. He didn't say what kind. He said some guys parked on the side of the road, and he said, on the ridge. There's an old logging cut up there where people go to shoot and drink, and sometimes they mess with people. That's the phrase he used. They mess with people. And then he looked at my face and my arm and said, you should file a report, in a voice that told me he didn't think it was messing around either. I did file a report. A state trooper took it two days later, wrote everything down, asked me twice how much I'd had to drink, and I never heard another word about it. I don't blame him. What was there to find? Voices in the dark on 9,000 acres of public land. So here's where I've landed after six years. And I'll be honest, I land somewhere different depending on the night. Maybe it was a prank. Drunk guys from the ridge who heard somebody thrashing around in the dark and decided to terrify him for fun. Whooping and yelling grab him because scaring a stranger in the woods is hilarious when you're 22 and hammered. That's the worst thing I've ever seen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Maybe they were chasing a buddy of theirs. Some game they were playing up there, and grab him was never about me at all. And the flashlight guy saying come out was him looking for his friend. Except the friend never turned up in that story. Except he went down toward the light fits one person on that hillside, and it wasn't their buddy. And then there's the third version, one that shows up at three in the morning. The version where a lone guy, obviously drunk, obviously lost, stumbles into the dark 200 yards from a crowd of 600 people, and somebody out there sees an opportunity. Where grab him meant exactly what it sounded like. Where the only reason I'm here typing this is a torn up root ball and 90 seconds of not breathing. I never found out. That's the truth of it. There's no reveal coming, no news story I stumbled on later, that explained everything. I looked, believe me. I searched arrest records for that county for a year. Nothing ever surfaced. Whoever they were, they walked off that ridge and back into their lives. And I walked into mine. And the only thing that connects us is that hillside and that one sentence. Kayla and I didn't last. And that was my fault too. Though I'd like to think I'd already started becoming a different guy that night. I quit drinking too. Two years later. Been sober since. When I finally told the whole story in a meeting, a guy came up to me after and said the woods probably saved my life twice. Once from them and once from myself. And I think about that a lot. But here's what I actually carry day to day. I can't be in the woods after dark. I've tried. Friends invited me camping four years ago and I made it until sunset. And then sat in my locked car until morning while everyone slept in I never explained why. It's not the dark itself. I'm fine in a dark house, a dark street. It's specifically trees at night. It's the way sound moves through them. Because every single time, some part of my brain is waiting to hear a voice out in that blackness. A voice with an ugly, excited edge on it, yelling about me in the third person. Hey you, grab him. I walked toward the lights and I got out. And that's the ending. That's the whole ending. But six years later, there are still nights I lie awake and understand, all the way down, that I only know how my part of the story ended. I never found out what theirs was supposed to be. This episode is brought to you by TXU Energy. For the first time ever, Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. 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. 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? 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