I'm not using my real name here or my friends names because I honestly don't want this followed back to us.

I'm only even typing this out because I can't sleep and it's been almost a year and it still feels like something is watching my bedroom window when the house goes quiet.

What happened on that fishing trip?

Rewired how I think about woods, about silence, about voices.

I used to love all of that.

I don't anymore.

There were four of us on that trip.

Me, my younger brother Ben, and our friends Kyle and Mateo.

We're all late 20s, grew up in the same smallish town that's a kind of nowhere between real mountains and flat farmland.

You drive a few hours West and you're in National Forest, real tree choked hills and old logging roads where you can go a whole day without seeing another human if you pick the right direction.

We were that group of friends, fishing buddies once a month, camping a few times every summer, always promising we do a proper long trip and then backing out because of work or girlfriends or someone's truck breaking down.

This time we actually made it happen.

Five days off work, cool stretch of late September weather, and a promise of some ridiculous untouched fishing spot that Kyle swore up and down actually existed.

The spot came from his uncle, who'd worked seasonal logging and fire crews in the 90s.

Old guy, quiet, not a storyteller.

On the few times Kyle got him to talk, he'd mentioned the old pond way back in the hills, a place the loggers had dammed up and then forgotten when the road washed out.

Supposedly you could sit on a rock ledge and pull brook trout out like you were playing a video game on easy.

No pressure, no other anglers, just you and water.

The catch?

There was no current road to it anymore.

Kyle had an old photocopied map his uncle had drawn on a napkin 20 plus years ago.

No GPS pins, no trailhead signs, just a squiggled logging Rd.

a couple of landmarks like a double trunk spruce and a collapsed cabin, and a circle where the pond supposedly sat.

So we're chasing a dead logger's doodle, Ben said.

When Kyle showed us holding the napkin like it was some sacred artifact.

You got a better idea?

Kyle said you want to do the crowded reservoir again and fish between jet skis and beer cans.

It was the itch to do something different that sold us.

That and the way Kyle's uncle had talked about the place.

According to him, he'd only said two weirdly serious things about it.

If you go, you go in and you come out the same way.

Don't wander around, don't cut new paths, and don't stay after dark.

We laughed when Kyle told us that part, but the way he mimicked his uncle's face tight, no smile, just this flat warning stuck with me more than I admitted at the time.

We left on a Sunday.

I drove my Tacoma because it had the best clearance and the least sentimental value if we destroyed the suspension on a washed out Rd.

Ben rode shotgun, Kyle and Mateo took the back seats with the rods.

Packs cooler and way too much gear because none of us know how to pack light when we camp.

It was 3 hours on Hwy., then an hour on a decent gravel Rd.

the kind that rumbled but still felt like civilization.

That last part, maybe the final hour and a half, was where it started to feel like we were driving into a place we weren't supposed to be.

The gravel turned to broken old pavement, like a scar running through the trees.

Then the pavement gave up and became old twin ruts with grass in the middle.

Then the ruts narrowed and the forest started pulling in close like it wanted the truck back.

Aspen and spruce pressed in, branches scraping the paint, shadows overlapping and erasing the sky.

My phone dropped from three bars to 1 and then to nothing.

The others kept checking theirs and calling out the service like we were watching our oxygen meter in a video game.

Hey, last bar, Matteo said, at one point waving his phone.

Say goodbye to Instagram, boys.

It's just our personalities from here on out.

Ben leaned out the window, letting a Birch branch whip past his arm.

Smells good though, he said.

Like actual forest, not campground bathrooms.

He wasn't wrong.

It did smell good.

Cold, dirt, SAP, a little bit of decaying leaves.

It was that kind of high country September where the air already has teeth but the sun is still warm on your arm if you hold it out.

We passed a rusted old gate, half toppled into the ditch.

There used to be a sign on it, but only one twisted metal post remained upright.

I'm suddenly feeling very.

We shouldn't be here, I said.

That's how you know the fishing's good, Kyle said from the back.

If you don't feel like you might get murdered by a hermit, turn around and go home.

We joked about serial killers and Deliverance and every cliche you talk about when you're in the woods with friends and still feeling invincible.

It was easy to laugh, because nothing actually felt wrong yet.

The trees were thick, yeah, and the road was narrow.

But it was just us, our little bubble of truck and the comfort that if we really needed to, we could just reverse until we found a place to turn around.

About 40 minutes after the broken gate, the first weird thing happened.

Not terrifying, not yet.

Just off we came around a slow bend where the road skirted a steep drop on the right and a little gully on the left.

The forest opened up just enough to let light in.

I eased around a rut and then hit the brakes.

There was a deer standing in the road, a whitetail doe, not moving, not frozen in the Oh no, a truck way either, where they stare and then bolt.

She was in the exact center of the track, facing away from us, head slightly turned like she'd been caught listening.

We all went quiet automatically.

It's a habit.

Don't spook the animal.

Get a good look.

The truck idled, gravel ticked under the tires as we rolled to a stop maybe 15 feet behind her.

Whoa, Mateo murmured.

She's just chilling.

Take a picture, Ben said.

She's not going anywhere.

I remember wondering if she was old or sick, the way her ribs showed a little.

Then she turned her head just a little more like half an inch, and I saw her eye.

If you've spent enough time looking at deer, you know they've got that nervous, glassy prey animal stare, always scanning, flicking.

Her eye wasn't like that.

It was wrong in a way I didn't have words for at the time.

Too dark, maybe, too still and focused.

And there was this moment, a half second, where I felt like she was looking at me.

Not at the truck, not at movement, but at me as an individual sitting behind the wheel.

The hair on my neck stood up so fast it hurt.

Then she walked off.

No jerk, no leap.

She just took three careful steps forward up onto the embankment and disappeared into the trees without ever fully turning around, like she was backing away from us.

Nobody said anything until we'd driven another 100 yards.

That was weird, right?

Ben said finally.

Dear or dumb man, Kyle answered.

Maybe she didn't see us until the last second she saw us, I said She definitely saw us.

You're just not used to animals that don't live near roads and people, Mateo said.

Out here, they haven't learned to run from every engine.

We let it go.

I tried to let it go.

I put the truck in low gear to crawl over a washout and focused on not ripping the oil pan off.

But that look, that solid bead of attention from what should have been a skittish animal, sat in the back of my brain like a Pebble in my boot.

An hour later, the road dropped into a small meadowed basin and finally ended in a churned up turn around, shaded by spruce.

This is it, Kyle said, leaning forward between the seats and pointing at the napkin like we were about to dig for treasure.

We hike from here, Uncle said it's another mile and a half downhill to the pond.

I killed the engine.

The sudden silence felt like someone had closed a door behind us.

No distant highway hum, no planes, no farm equipment, nothing.

Just a soft roar of wind and trees and some birds way back in the canopy.

We piled out, stretching and cracking backs.

I walked a slow circle around the truck, more out of habit than anything, and that's when I noticed the second weird thing.

There were tracks in the old road, dust that didn't belong to us or any normal traffic.

They weren't fresh enough to be crisp, but the pattern was clear.

Something with pads had walked up the road from deeper in the basin, paced around the turn around and then gone back the way it came.

Not a deer, not a moose, not a bear.

Almost like a big dog or coyote, except not quite.

The toes were longer, that's what got me.

Dog's toes are rounded beans with claws.

These were longer, more finger like, with nails that dug thin grooves.

And where a dog's pad is kind of triangular or heart-shaped, this was stretched out.

You see something?

Mateo asked, coming around the front of the truck tracks.

I said coyote or something.

Maybe.

He crouched, squinted, then shrugged.

Could be.

Or someone's big mutt.

Either way, they're not fresh.

Chill.

He was right that they weren't fresh.

The edges were softened and dusted over.

I told myself it was just some Hunter's dog from earlier in the month.

Still, I caught myself counting how many there were, how they overlapped, how they circled the exact spot we parked in, like something pacing a fence line.

We unloaded slung packs, grabbed rods.

Kyle took point with the napkin and a cheap compass clipped to his vest like we were in a Boy Scout manual from 1973.

The trail was just a slightly less hostile corridor through the trees where the ground was packed down by old use.

It was obvious this hadn't been a proper maintained path in years.

Fallen logs forced us to detour some places.

We had to duck under branches that left SAP smeared on our hats.

Uncle said it follows the old Skid Rd.

most of the way.

Kyle said over his shoulder.

We stay on the contour and we should hit the pond right where the drainage hooks.

E translation Ben said we just keep going downhill until we see water.

It took longer than a mile and a half.

I know that because my legs were burning.

By the time we started to hear the faint rush of a stream somewhere below us, the forest changed too.

The aspens gave way to thicker spruce and fir trunks closer together, undergrowth thinning into a dark, needled floor.

The light dimmed into that permanent late afternoon look, even though it was just afternoon.

We heard the pond before we saw it.

Not waves or anything, but the quiet hush of Stillwater and insects.

When the trees finally broke, it was like stepping into a photograph.

The pond sat in a shallow bowl of rock and Moss fed by a narrow stream tumbling in at one end and leaving at the other as a trickle through a tangle of Alder.

The far side was a sheer Moss coated rock face, maybe 30 feet high.

The near side where we stood was a sloping shelf of dirt and roots leading down to the water.

Spruce leaned out over the edges like they were craning their necks to drink.

How is this not on every topo map?

Mateo said.

It probably is, I said, but I was already half in love with the place.

The air was colder here still, like the pond had its own microclimate.

Tiny fish dimples touched the surface.

Near the far bank, a dragonfly skimmed past my knee.

We explored the immediate area for a campsite and found a flat patch about 50 yards back from the water, tucked behind a mossy boulder and screened by trees.

Fire ring already made, just a circle of blackened rocks and a few charred stumps of wood.

Someone had camped here before, just not recently.

The first day was normal, perfect even.

We set up the tent, one big four man, because we decided it'd be warmer and easier that way.

Strung a tarp in case it rained, collected deadfall, filtered water.

On that first afternoon, the fishing was exactly as good as advertised.

Brook trout and little cutthroats, aggressive and dumb.

We didn't even have to wade in, we just stood on a partially submerged log, flicked spinners and small flies, and took turns hauling in fish.

We kept a few for dinner and released the rest.

The only odd thing, and I'm saying odd now because I'm laying everything out, even the stuff we laughed off at the time, was how fast the light seemed to drop behind the trees.

It went from bright to that gloomy shade in what felt like 15 minutes.

The sun was probably just hitting the Ridge at the right angle, but it made the forest feel like it was closing in early.

You guys want to go back up to the truck before it's full dark?

Ben asked.

After we'd eaten and we're sitting around the fire bellies, warm with fish and cheap whiskey, we'd park the truck maybe a mile and a half uphill.

The idea of hiking up there just to check on it had sounded stupid when we'd been fresh and excited.

Sitting there now, with stories of car break insurance and bears and weirdos having faded behind the simple exhaustion of the day, it sounded even stupider.

Nah, Kyle said.

We're good.

Who's going to be up here?

But us?

We slept badly that night.

I think that's worth mentioning.

Nobody had nightmares.

There wasn't some big event, but all four of us tossed and turned more than usual.

For a first camping night, the ground felt lumpy.

I woke up twice, convinced I'd heard something walking just outside the tent.

Each time, I held my breath, waited, and heard nothing except wind in the branches and a distant owl.

The second time I woke up, I rolled over and saw Mateo lying on his back, eyes open, just staring at the roof of the tent.

You awake?

I whispered.

Yeah, he whispered back.

Keep sounding like something circling out there.

You heard it too?

He nodded in the dim light from the dying fire outside.

Probably just squirrels or something.

It did not sound like squirrels, but I let it go.

We both went quiet for a long moment.

The only sound was the faint crackle of embers.

Then I heard it.

A soft, deliberate crunch of footsteps in the needles, moving slowly around the tent at a distance.

123 steps, then a pause, then another 2.

It went all the way around us like that.

Not close enough to cast a shadow on the nylon, but close enough that I could feel where it was like a pressure.

Ben snorted in his sleep and rolled over.

Kyle mumbled something about the line being tangled and flicked his hand against his sleeping bag.

The footsteps stopped.

The silence hit harder.

I lay there waiting for a snout to press against the tent wall or claws to rake the fabric.

Nothing happened.

Eventually, I must have drifted off.

In the morning we checked around camp, half joking.

There were no obvious prints in the pine needle mat, no disturbed rocks, no claw marks on trees.

Told you, Kyle said.

You city boys get out here and you think every squirrel is a bear?

For the record, I said, none of us lives in a city town, boys.

Then we laughed, we fished, we explored a little further around the pond.

That was the first time we noticed the bones.

They were scattered along the tree line, past the outlet stream, half covered in Moss.

Not a skeleton laid out in a neat line or anything.

Just pieces.

A femur here, some ribs there, vertebrae stacked like poker chips, all picked clean and weathered.

Deer, Mateo said, nudging one with his boot.

Or elk.

Too small for elk, Ben said.

Maybe a couple deer.

Something probably drags them down to drink and eats them in the trees.

There were skulls too, I remember that distinctly.

At least three.

They all seemed to be staring in the same direction, but that was probably coincidence and me reading into things after the fact.

At that moment it was just gross and kind of cool.

We took pictures, rattled A vertebra chain like a Halloween decoration, and went back to fishing.

The second night is when things started to feel wrong.

Not just huh, that's weird, but wrong.

It started with Kyle not coming back from a quick walk.

We just finished dinner.

More fish wrapped in foil with lemon and salt, and the fire was going nicely.

The air temperature had dropped fast.

I could see my breath.

We were all in hoodies and beanies, sitting close to the flames.

Kyle stood up, stretching.

Gonna go take a leak before it gets too cold, he said.

He grabbed his headlamp, clicked it on, and wandered off into the dark beyond the fire light, heading roughly toward the pond.

We kept talking.

10 minutes past, then 15.

At what point do we assume he fell in?

Ben asked.

Poking at the fire.

Or got kidnapped by deer?

Mateo said.

I checked my watch.

Just under 20 minutes.

I'll go find him, I said.

I grabbed my own headlamp and followed the path toward the water.

The pond was a Black Mirror, the stars faint where they reflected between branches.

My light picked up trunks, roots, the shine of wet rocks.

Kyle, I called quietly.

You fall in and get eaten by a trout.

No answer, only the soft lap of water in a faint breeze.

I walked along the shore a bit, sweeping the beam through the underbrush.

There was no sign of him, no fresh footprints I could distinguish in the dark.

The logical part of my brain said he'd gone behind a tree further down, or looped around to check something out.

The part of my brain that remembered the circling footsteps last night grew a tight knot right under my sternum.

Kyle, dude, quit screwing around.

I said, louder.

No answer.

I was about to turn back and get the others when a light flicked on ahead of me between the trees, a headlamp, white and bright, sweeping up and down as someone walked.

There you are.

I said, more to myself than to him.

I stepped around a big rock and found him about 20 yards away, standing on the shore, looking out over the pond.

He had his back to me, hands in his pockets, headlamp beam pointing out over the water.

Man, you're going to freeze your junk off if you stand out here any longer.

I said, coming up behind him.

He didn't turn right away.

There was a delay, like he'd been underwater and was just now coming up and hearing me.

Then he turned slowly, and the headlamp beam swung across my eyes and blinded me.

Jesus, I said, throwing up a hand.

Don't do that, sorry, he said.

That's what he said, but it's not the word that stuck with me.

It was his voice.

It sounded like Kyle.

Same pitch, same little Midwestern twang, but his cadence was off, like someone doing an impression.

Just that one word had a strange practiced quality to it, like he'd rehearsed how to say sorry and had to deploy it on cue.

I blinked away the spots.

When my eyes adjusted, he was just Kyle again, Slightly crooked nose patched beard, beanie pulled down low.

He shifted his weight from 1 foot to the other, like he always did when he was cold.

You good?

I asked.

Yeah, he said.

Was just listening to what?

He turned his head slightly toward the far trees.

Forest is loud when there's no cars.

That was such a normal Stoner philosophical thing for him to say that I let it go.

We walked back to camp together.

He made some joke about how long his piss had been, and the others gave him crap for making us worry.

It became a story for the night.

I didn't realize until much later that I never saw where he'd come from.

When that headlamp clicked on, he was just there, standing by the water like he'd always been standing by the water.

Things escalated after we went to bed.

I woke up sometime deep in the night to bend, shaking my shoulder.

It was that urgent tight shake people use when they're scared but trying not to show it.

What?

I muttered, peeling my eyes open.

Do you hear that?

He whispered.

It was dark enough in the tent that I could only see outlines.

Kyle was a lump to my left.

Matteo's sleeping bag rustled at my feet.

The fire outside was dead.

There was no orange glow, just cold night.

Seriously, listen, Ben said.

I held my breath.

For a moment.

I heard nothing but the high white noise of wind and needles.

Then I heard it.

Someone was calling my name.

Not loud, not a scream, just a steady, almost conversational call from somewhere out in the trees.

Eli, my name in my mother's voice.

I can't adequately explain what that did to me.

Hearing your mom call you from

the woods at 3:00 in the morning in a place you know she absolutely is not, is like having ice poured directly into your spine.

She said it again the exact same way, Eli.

The cadence was perfect, the little lift on the second syllable, the faint rasp she developed after too many years of menthols.

It was so accurate that for half a second my brain tried to make something logical.

Maybe she'd come up as some surprise.

Maybe I was dreaming.

Ben's hand dug into my arm.

Tell me that sounds like your mom.

He whispered.

It does.

I whispered back, my mouth suddenly dry.

From the other side of the tent, Mateo whispered.

Dude, that sounded like your mom.

His voice was shaking.

The voice came again, closer this time.

Eli, honey, are you out here?

This time it wasn't coming from One Direction, it was coming from several.

Like the trees themselves were saying.

It left, then right, then behind us.

The same sentence, the same tone, the same exact rhythm, but moving around.

Eli, honey, are you out here?

We all lay there frozen.

Nobody said a word.

Then from a little further off we heard a sound I can only describe as a badly edited version of my mom's laugh.

It started normal, then stretched oddly, then cut off mid breath.

My skin crawled so hard I wanted to unzip myself and crawl out.

I've never been more aware of the thinness of nylon than I was in that moment.

One cheap zipper between US and whatever that was.

Maybe it's a like some kind of echo?

Ben whispered, clearly grasping.

Echo of what?

Matteo whispered back of your voicemail.

On my left.

Kyle's sleeping bag rustled.

We should get out of here tomorrow.

He said quietly.

His voice sounded wrong, a little too calm.

Yeah.

I said immediately.

I didn't care that the fishing was good.

I didn't care that it would mean hiking back up in one long push instead of taking our time.

I wanted a locked door between me and that voice.

The calling went on for maybe another minute, circling and fading in and out, then stopped completely.

No retreating footsteps, no breaking branches, just gone.

We didn't sleep much after that.

In the morning, everything looked normal again, like the forest was pretending nothing had happened.

Thin fog clung to the pond.

The air smelled like cold water and wood smoke.

Birds chattered in the canopy.

Ben and I stepped out of the tent together, both of us scanning the tree line before we even realized we were doing it.

Mateo sat by the cold fire ring, hugging his knees, eyes bloodshot.

Kyle was nowhere to be seen.

Where'd he go?

I asked.

Bathroom, Matteo said.

He left like 10 minutes ago.

My heart dropped into my stomach.

That little script of fear from the night before restarted again.

I said, what is with him and nighttime solo walks?

It's morning, Matteo said.

It's barely light.

Maybe he had the runs from all your camp chef skills.

It was a weak attempt at a joke, and I appreciated it, but the knot in my gut tightened.

I scanned the edge of the camp, then the trail to the pond.

No sign of him, no headlamp beam this time.

You think he's OK?

Ben asked quietly.

He's fine.

Matteo said, but his voice wavered.

Kyle came back a few minutes later, emerging from between 2 trees like he'd been hiding in them.

He had his hands jammed in his hoodie pocket and his shoulders hunched against the cold.

You guys sleep?

He asked, stepping into camp.

Not really, I said.

You hear that?

What that voice Ben said sounded like Eli's mom kept calling his name.

Kyle frowned like he was thinking, then shrugged.

I slept like a rock.

That was the first time I really looked at him since last night.

And something was off.

You know how you can look at someone you've known for years, and even if they change their hair or shave or gain weight, they still move like themselves?

There's a continuity.

Kyle didn't quite have that.

The way he held his arms was a little too stiff, The tilt of his head was just slightly wrong.

His eyes stayed on us a beat too long when we spoke, like he was watching our mouths more than listening.

If I'd said something right, then if I'd openly said dude, you seem weird, what's going on?

I don't know if any of the rest would have changed.

Maybe it would have, but I didn't.

I made a joke instead.

Lucky you, I said.

Your brain's broken, he smirked and said Been broken.

The morning passed in a tired haze.

We made coffee, choked down oatmeal and half heartedly argued about whether we should pack up and leave that day instead of staying the full, planned three nights.

I'm not going to lie, Matteo said.

I'm still thinking about that voice.

Yeah, but it's probably just like some coyote or something, Kyle said.

Coyotes don't sound like my mom, I said.

You'd be surprised what animals can do, he said.

Might have been a bird.

A bird, Ben said.

You think a bird learned to say Eli, honey, are you out here?

And then flew around us in circles.

Kyle shrugged.

There's mockingbirds, There's parrots.

Sometimes weird stuff happens with sound up here.

Chill, we can go if you really want to.

But we came all this way.

The thing that kept us there was stupid and simple.

Sunk cost.

We'd taken the time off work, we'd driven in.

The fishing was incredible.

Nobody had gotten hurt.

If we packed up now, it would feel like we chickened out.

So we compromised one more night.

We said we'd fish that day, then hike out in the morning.

That way it felt like we were honoring the trip without outright ignoring how freaked we were.

Before we grabbed our rods, I walked down to the pond alone to clear my head.

The air was still, the surface of the water like glass.

A Heron lifted off from the far shore when it saw me and flapped away, slow and prehistoric.

That's when I saw the Prince.

They were right at the water's edge, where we'd been standing to cast.

At first I thought they were ours, boot treads in the mud, but then I leaned closer.

They weren't boots.

They weren't hooves either.

They look like barefoot human prints, except off.

The heel and ball of the foot were about the right size for an adult, maybe a little longer.

But the toes were wrong.

Too long, spread too far apart, each with a deep nail gouge at the tip.

The big toe especially looked almost like a finger, like it could curl and grip.

There were only three or 4 clear ones before they smeared into the damp mud and rocks, but they pointed One Direction from the water up toward the trees near our campsite.

Guys.

I called, trying to keep my voice level.

You need to see this.

They came down 1 by 1.

Ben was right behind me, then Mateo, then Kyle, lagging a few yards back.

Tell me I'm not crazy.

I said, pointing.

Ben crouched, squinting barefoot.

Mateo grimaced.

Yeah, but it looks like what the hell?

We all looked at Kyle.

He stared down at the Prince for a long second, then shook his head.

Probably some old ones from summer, he said.

Some hippie hikers, maybe.

They had weird toes.

These are fresh.

I said.

Look at the edges.

He didn't.

He just shrugged again, too casually.

Mud holds Prince for a while.

Why are they coming out of the pond?

Mateo asked, not going into it.

Like something walked up out of the water and then went into the trees.

Nobody had an answer for that.

We fished anyway.

I know how that sounds reading it.

You're thinking, why didn't you just leave?

I've thought that too, replaying it in my head 1000 times.

The truth is, fear and rational thought don't always line up.

The sun was up, the sky was blue, the birds were singing, and the line went tight.

As soon as we cast out.

It was easy to shove the Prince into a mental box labeled weird but not immediately dangerous.

We stayed closer together that day, though, no more wandering off alone.

Even Kyle stuck close, which was out of character for him.

Around midday, things went quiet.

I don't mean we stopped talking.

I mean the whole forest seemed to dim, like someone had turned down the volume.

The birds stopped, the insects died down.

Even the breeze paused.

I noticed it because I stopped midcast, my arm halfway back.

The sudden stillness was loud.

You feel that?

Ben asked softly.

Yeah, I said.

It reminded me of the feeling before a thunderstorm, that charged heaviness.

Except there were no clouds.

The sky was clear, sharp blue.

Matteo looked around, shoulders tensed.

Something's watching us, he said.

From where?

Kyle asked.

From everywhere, Matteo said.

The words hit a nerve.

Because I felt the same.

There was this sensation, like eyes from every shadow, every branch.

Not just one pair, multiple.

A ring of attention around the pond.

I turned slowly, scanning the tree line.

Nothing moved.

No obvious figure, no glint off eyes.

Then, across the pond, I saw something standing at the edge of the trees.

It was tall, taller than any of us, maybe 6 1/2 seven feet, too thin.

At first I thought it was a dead tree trunk, just a pale shape among darker bark.

Then it shifted slightly, like someone uncrossing their legs, and I saw the line of its shoulders against the green.

Do you see that?

I whispered.

See what Kyle said over there, I said, pointing with my chin because my hands had gone cold across the water between those two trees.

Ben followed my gaze.

His breath caught audibly.

I see it, he said.

Mateo squinted, then swore under his breath.

I don't know how to describe it without it sounding like every creepy story you've ever read, but that's what it looked like.

A2 tall thing, standing very still.

Its skin, or what I could see under the tangle of ragged clothes or fur or something, was a pale, almost Gray color.

Its arms hung a bit too low.

Its head was cocked just barely like the deers had been.

It was too far to make out facial features, but I knew in the way you know when someone is staring at you from across a room that it was looking directly at us.

Kyle.

I said without taking my eyes off it.

You see it?

There was a long pause.

No, he said.

His answer was too fast, too flat.

The thing stood there for maybe 10 seconds.

Time stretched.

My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Then without a sound, it stepped backward into the shadows and vanished.

Not like it ran, just receded.

1 moment there was a shape, the next it was gone, the trunks all blending into a solid wall of dark green.

We didn't say anything for a few seconds, then Mateo whispered.

We're leaving today, right now.

I second that.

Ben said.

I nodded.

We pack up, we can make it back to the truck before dark if we move.

Come on guys.

Kyle said it was probably just a tree.

You're letting that voice last night get in your heads.

You're the one who said we should leave.

Mateo snapped.

Last night.

Now you want to stay.

He looked at Mateo, blinked slowly, then smiled a small, mismatched smile.

I was just tired.

That smile hit me wrong.

It didn't fit his face.

It was like someone had copied a smile from a photograph and pasted it on.

We're going, I said.

You can stay if you want, but you're not getting a ride out.

For a second I thought he was going to fight us on it, really dig in.

Then his expression blanked, and he nodded once.

OK, if you guys want to go, we'll go.

We hustled back to camp, throwing gear into packs less carefully than we should have.

I kept glancing toward the trees, expecting that tall shape to be closer each time.

It never was.

While I was taking down the tarp, Ben called me over to the fire ring.

Dude, look, he said, pointing.

Hanging above the circle of rocks from a low branch was something that hadn't been there that morning.

It was a tangle of sticks, bound together with strips of what looked like leather or skin.

They'd been woven into a rough, crude human shape.

Head, arms, legs.

Something like a twisted stick figure.

Strips of torn fabric fluttered from it.

One of them was the exact green of Kyle's hoodie.

I stared at it for a long second, my brain cracking down the middle between someone is messing with us and we are way past normal.

Did one of you make this?

I asked.

Nope.

Matteo said.

Been sitting here watching the fire.

Nobody touched that branch.

I was over by the tent.

Ben said.

You saw me.

We all turned to look at Kyle.

He stood a few feet away, pack half slung over one shoulder, watching us.

What?

He said you do this?

I asked, pointing at the figure.

He tilted his head in that same too slow way.

Why would I?

His eyes flicked up to the effigy for just a fraction of a second.

There was no recognition in that glance.

No.

Oh crap, what is that?

Just a kind of careful calculation, as if you were assessing how we were reacting.

I reached up, grabbed the thing and yanked it down.

The leather like ties were cold and slightly greasy under my fingers.

I had a sudden vivid mental image of skin being peeled from something still alive.

I dropped it into the fire.

It caught with a weird stringy crackle.

The smell was awful.

Not just burning wood, but something faintly chemical and sweet, like burnt hair and plastic.

Dude.

Kyle said sharply.

You shouldn't have done that.

The tone was off.

It wasn't Kyle telling me I'd broken something of his.

It was like a teacher scolding a child.

Well, I did, I said, meeting his eyes.

Let's go.

We hit the trail back up to the truck, all of us moving faster than we probably should have with the weight of our packs.

The path seemed steeper than it had on the way down.

The trees grew closer.

I swear the light dimmed faster than it should have.

About halfway up, Ben stopped abruptly and held up a hand.

Do you hear that?

We all went still.

At first I heard nothing but my own breathing.

Then from somewhere off to our right down slope, we heard someone crashing through the undergrowth, like a person trying to move fast but tripping over deadfall.

Hey.

A voice shouted.

Guys, wait up.

It was Kyle's voice.

All of us turned at once, including the Kyle who was standing right next to me.

My stomach flipped so hard I thought I was going to throw up.

The Kyle at my side went very still, too still.

Down the slope between the trees we saw a figure struggling upward, branches whipping back as they pushed through.

A hoodie, a backpack, a face.

I couldn't see clearly, but the shape was familiar.

Jesus, about time that Kyle said I lost the trail.

Why'd you guys bail without me?

He sounded exactly like Kyle.

The way he panted between words, the annoyed half laugh at the end.

It was him.

I took a step away from the Kyle beside me.

Without even meaning to, Ben did the same.

Matteo let out a shaky Nope, Nope, Nope.

The Kyle at my side slowly turned to look at me.

His expression was neutral, blank.

What are you doing?

He asked.

There was something wrong with his eyes now.

They look too dark, like the pupils had eaten the irises, or like there were no eyes at all, just deep holes.

None of us answered.

The Kyle coming up the slope broke through a last screen of branches and stumbled onto the path, brushing needles off his clothes.

His hoodie was torn along one sleeve.

There was a dark stain on the shoulder.

You guys seriously left me to take a dump in peace?

He said, grinning.

Assholes.

He trailed off when he saw the other hymn.

For a second everyone froze.

The only sound was the wind in our breathing.

What?

The real Kyle said, His face went sheet white.

The other one smiled.

It was that same mismatched smile from camp.

This isn't funny, Mateo said.

His voice cracked.

My brain was cycling through options and rejecting them.

Twin brother we didn't know about, Elaborate prank, mass hallucination.

None of it made sense.

OK, I said, my voice coming out weirdly calm, like I borrowed it from somebody else.

OK.

We asked them something.

Only the real Kyle would know.

Both Kyle's looked at me.

There is no real dude, the one beside me said.

I'm me.

The one on the trail frowned.

Same.

What the hell is going on?

My mind latched onto the first thing it could.

A dumb in joke from years back in high school.

I said.

Senior year we skipped study hall and drove out to the quarry.

Your car broke down on the way back.

What stupid thing did Ben do while we waited for the tow truck?

Ben winced.

Why that?

Just answer it.

I snapped, pissed in a Gatorade bottle and tried to sell it to passing cars trail.

Kyle said immediately.

Nothing.

Beside Kyle said, half a second too late, it just broke down.

For a moment, everything in the world narrowed to a single point.

That mismatch, that wrong answer.

The thing standing beside me realized it too.

I felt more than saw its posture change, like a predator that's been pretending to graze and finally decides to pounce.

Mateo swore.

It's that one.

He said, pointing with a trembling hand at the Kyle next to me.

Get away from it.

I didn't think, I just moved.

Stumbling backward, Ben did too, bumping into me.

The thing that had been wearing Kyle's face watched us, that pasted on smile fading into something flat and expressionless.

Then its features began to slip.

I say slip because that's exactly what it looked like.

Like gravity was tugging his skin in directions it wasn't meant to go.

The corners of his mouth dragged downward.

His eyes seem to sink in, their sockets swelling and darkening.

The line of his jaw sharpened, like something pushing from the inside.

He no.

It let out a sound that started as a laugh and pitched up too high, too fast, until it wasn't a human sound at all, but a strangled, shrill cackle that made my vision fuzz at the edges.

Then it moved.

One moment it was upright in human form, the next it folded, bones bending in the wrong directions, hands hitting the ground with those long, too long fingers digging into the dirt.

The hoodie and jeans it wore seemed to hang on it oddly, like fabric over a collapsing tent.

It sprang sideways into the trees with a speed I can't do justice to.

One instant it was on the path, the next it was climbing a trunk 10 feet away, fingers and toes hooking into bark like spikes.

We all screamed, some wordless, choked sound, even real Kyle.

He stumbled backward, fell, scrambled up again.

Run, I heard myself say.

Truck now.

We bolted up the path, all four of us.

Branches whipped our faces.

Roots grabbed our ankles.

My pack slammed against my spine.

Behind us, in the trees, something kept pace.

We could hear it not crashing like a big animal, light rapid impacts like hands slapping bark, like someone crawling through the canopy just out of sight.

Every few seconds a voice would call out from a different angle.

Sometimes it was my mom again.

Sometimes it was Ben.

Once, I swear it was my own voice shouting Guys wait up from behind us.

Even though I was in front, we didn't look back, not properly.

I caught one glimpse over my shoulder when the path straightened, something pale and elongated flashing through the branches high above us, moving like a spider, limbs bending in ways that hurt to watch.

The climb felt endless.

My legs burned.

My lungs felt like they were going to tear.

We were all making these panicked animal sounds, sobbing and gasping.

At some point, the path leveled out and the trees thinned.

I saw the glint of the truck's windshield through the branches and nearly cried.

Then I saw the tree.

It had fallen across the track, right behind the turn around, a big spruce that absolutely had not been there when we'd arrived.

It lay chest high, trunk thick enough that we couldn't just shove it aside.

It blocked the road so completely that there was no way to drive past it.

We skidded to a stop, chests heaving.

You have got to be kidding me.

Ben wheezed.

Chainsaw Mateo gasped.

In the garage at home?

I said.

I didn't exactly think we'd need it.

Oh God, Kyle said, turning in a circle, eyes darting to the tree line.

Oh God, oh God.

I swallowed hard, forced my brain to focus.

We can back up, turn around, try to find another line.

There is no other line, Matteo said.

We're on a shelf, Rd.

Look, he was right.

To our left, the slope went up in a steep bank.

We might be able to scramble, but the truck never could.

To our right, the hillside dropped away into thick timber and a ravine.

Something moved in the trees behind us, just a flicker, a dark shape shifting from 1 trunk to another.

The forest went quiet again.

That loaded silence.

Get in the truck, I said, voice shaking.

Everyone in now we piled in.

I fumble the keys, dropped them, swore, grabbed them again when the engine caught.

The sound was like a life raft.

I threw it in reverse and backed up as far as I dared, feeling the rear wheel's skid near the edge.

Then I cranked the wheel and tried to angle us toward the trunk, thinking maybe we could bounce one tire up and over scrape past.

We hit the log with a heavy thud that rattled teeth.

The frame creaked.

The front tires spun.

No dice, dude, Ben said from the passenger seat, voice tight.

We do not have time to finesse this.

Branches scraped the windows on my side, something darker than the branches press shape against the glass for a second, like a hand with too many fingers, and then was gone.

We leave it, Mateo said from the back.

We leave the truck, we go on foot.

You want to hike out in the dark?

I said.

On that road with that thing, you got a better plan.

An idea hit me a bad one, but the only one we jump it, I said.

We what?

Ben snapped.

We back up as far as we can.

I said.

Then we gun it and try to pop the front end up enough to ride over the trunk.

Even if we scrape, even if we blow something, we've at least got a rolling start.

That's insane.

Matteo said.

He got any other insane ideas?

He didn't.

None of us did.

In the silence that followed, a voice spoke right behind the truck.

Guys.

It said, perfectly imitating my voice.

Let me in.

Every hair on my body stood up.

I didn't turn around.

I couldn't.

Seatbelts, I whispered now.

Hands fumble for straps.

Clicks filled the cab.

My fingers were slick on the shifter.

I reversed slowly until I felt the back wheels hit a rock.

I didn't dare go further.

One wrong move and we'd slide off the edge.

Behind us, something dragged its fingers along the tailgate with a slow metal on metal screech.

Eli, my mom's voice crooned.

Sweetheart, don't leave me out here.

Ben squeezed his eyes shut.

Just go, he said through gritted teeth.

I dropped the truck into drive and floored it.

The Tacoma lurched forward, engine roaring.

The log rushed up at us in the headlights, bark scarred and slick.

The front tires hit it and lifted.

For a second we were angled up, weight shifting.

I thought we were going to flip back or slide sideways.

Then there was a horrible grinding crunch as the skid plate kissed wood and the tires caught enough purchase to pull us over.

The suspension bottomed out.

All four of us were slammed against our seatbelts.

Somewhere under us, something screamed.

It was a high, piercing sound that was almost, but not quite, human.

It had words in it, but they were garbled, like a recording spun at the wrong speed.

Bits of my mom's voice, bits of bends, bits of my own, all layered into one long, furious shriek.

Then we were over.

The truck slammed down on the other side of the log hard enough to make the dash rattle.

I didn't stop.

I didn't even look in the rearview mirror.

I just kept my foot down and let the engine howl.

We tore up that old road faster than was remotely smart.

Branches whipped the windshield.

The ruts caught the tires and jerked us side to side.

My hands locked on the wheel.

Every curve was a guess.

The whole time, something ran along the slope to our right, just at the edge of the trees.

I didn't see it clearly.

I saw glimpses.

Pale limbs, a long bench shape keeping pace on all fours, sometimes on 2, sometimes impossibly clinging to trunks at our height.

It called to us as we drove.

Sometimes it was Kyle's voice begging us to stop.

Sometimes it was a child crying for help.

Once it used my father's voice, which sent a bolt of anger through me, because my father's been dead for five years, and that was so far over any line I had in my head that it stopped being fear and became rage.

Shut up, I hissed, more to myself than to it.

Just shut up.

At one point, as we skidded around a bend, something slammed into the side of the truck, hard enough to dent the rear panel.

The truck lurched.

Mateo screamed.

Keep going, he shouted.

Don't stop, don't stop.

Eventually, after minutes that felt like hours, the trees began to thin.

The road improved slightly.

The oppressive closeness of the forest eased.

The air felt less heavy.

I risked a glance in the rear view mirror.

For a moment I saw nothing but dust and the tunnel of trees.

Then, just as the road curved and the last of the heavy timber fell away, I saw it standing in the middle of the track where we'd just been.

It was tall and wrong, silhouetted against the dark line of the forest.

Its limbs hung loosely, joints not where they should be.

Its head tilted as if curious.

I couldn't see its face, but I knew it was watching us as the road curved and a hill rose between us.

It raised 1 long arm, almost like it was waving.

Then it was gone.

We didn't stop until we hit the main gravel road and then later the highway.

Only when the gas gauge dipped low in a small town's lights appeared did I let myself ease off the accelerator.

We pulled into the first gas station we saw.

I parked by the pump, turned off the engine and sat there with my hand still clamped on the wheel, shaking.

For a long moment, none of us spoke.

The fluorescent lights buzzed, cars hissed by on the wet pavement.

The normal world pressed in around our little cab, full of stale fear and sweat.

Finally, Matteo said very quietly, Is everyone here?

We did a head count like we were teachers on a field trip.

Me, Ben, Mateo, Kyle, four.

We all looked at each other, really looked like we were checking IDs at a border.

You, I said to Kyle.

Tell us something else only you would know.

Humor me.

He swallowed, nodded slowly.

His hands were shaking.

When we were 12, he said, your brother dared me to jump off Miller Bridge into the river.

I cried on the railing for 10 minutes before I did it, and then chipped my tooth on Ben's knee when I came up.

You took the blame because my mom liked you more.

He smiled weakly and tapped the slightly crooked front tooth.

That was real.

The way he said it, the way he winced a little at the memory, that was him.

I looked at Ben.

He nodded once, eyes wide and wet.

Yeah, Ben said.

That's the idiot.

We went inside like zombies, used the bathrooms, bought coffee and snacks.

We barely tasted the bright lights, and country music on the radio felt surreal.

Nobody around us had any idea what had just happened a few miles away, up in the trees.

At one point, while we were standing by the coolers, a little TV bolted to the wall near the ceiling flashed a local news story.

Hiker missing the ticker said SEARCH underway in National Forest region.

I couldn't make myself read more.

I turned away.

We drove home that night mostly in silence.

Every time I saw a deer at the side of the highway, my grip tightened on the wheel.

One of them, a doe, turned her head as we passed and looked right at me through the window.

For a second her eyes looked much too dark.

Then the tail lights swept past and she was gone.

We didn't tell anyone the full story when we got back, not right away.

We told our families some version of we saw a bear.

It spooked us.

We left early.

The part with the voice, the thing in the trees, the two Kyles.

We kept that between us.

We searched the map for the pond, trying to match it to something on satellite images.

We couldn't find it.

The drainage was there, the contours, but no Clearwater.

It was like it had been erased or dried up years ago, and we'd stumbled into something that shouldn't still exist.

A month after we got home, Kyle's uncle died, heart attack in his sleep.

We went to the funeral afterwards, in the kitchen, while everyone stuffed themselves with casserole.

Kyle's aunt cornered us.

You boys were up at that old site, weren't you?

She said quietly.

We froze.

What site?

Kyle asked.

The pond, she said.

He told me you were always asking about it.

Told me if you went, you wouldn't stay past dark.

He said that?

I asked.

She nodded.

Her eyes were tired.

He saw things up there when he was your age.

Men and his crew disappearing tracks that didn't match any animal.

Heard voices that weren't there.

Said it wasn't our place to be on that land after dark.

Not for us, he'd say.

Did he ever see it?

Ben asked.

Her gaze flicked up, like she was checking who might be listening.

Then she nodded once, sharply.

He never said the word, she whispered.

Didn't like to talk about that, said just saying it was an invitation.

None of us said it either.

Not then, not to her.

We went back to our lives, work, bills, birthdays.

On the surface, everything went back to normal, but small things kept happening that dug into me.

I'd be walking home at night and hear my mom's voice Call My Name from an alley, even though I knew she was two states away.

I'd get a phone call from an unknown number and when I answered, hear a crackle, then my own voice saying hello back at me before the line went dead.

Once laid on a run by the river at dusk, I saw a tall pale shape standing under the overpass ahead, just for a second.

When I looked again, it was gone.

I tell myself those are just my nerves, my brain replaying trauma and sticking it on to random noises.

I tell myself that thing is still up there by the pond, pacing around empty campsites, mimicking voices to empty trees.

But here's the part that keeps me up the most.

We never saw what happened to the other one, the not Kyle.

It was there with us all through that second day.

It walked beside me.

It sat by our fire.

It talked, laughed, ate, slept in the same tent.

It wore our friends face well enough that we didn't notice.

It had time to learn us, our voices, our stories.

And when the real Kyle stumbled out of the trees, confused and bleeding, we exposed it.

We made it show itself.

It fled back into the forest because we had numbers in daylight.

And the truck.

If we'd been just a little slower, a little more tired, a little more willing to stay one more night, which one of us would it have taken next?

Some nights when I'm half asleep, I'll think I hear someone in the hallway outside my bedroom.

The soft pad of bare feet.

Then a voice, soft and familiar, saying, Eli, honey, are you out here?

I don't answer, I don't get up.

Because I know, with the same cold certainty I felt on that trail, that once you answer, a voice that does not belong where you are, once you talk back to something that's only pretending to be someone you love, you give it a piece of yourself, something it can use to make the impression better next time.

So I lie there, eyes open in the dark, staring at the ceiling, listening to the footsteps move slowly past my door, and I pray quietly and not to anything in particular, that it never finds another way in.

I'm not posting this because I want to argue with anybody about folklore or religion, and I'm not trying to sell a book or get a podcast deal.

I'm posting this because I still wake up at two or three in the morning with my heart pounding like I'm 20 feet away from that truck again, and the only thing that seems to take the pressure off is putting the details in order.

I've told this story face to face to exactly 3 people.

My younger brother, who keeps telling me to just put it online already, my therapist, and the man who was with me that night.

Out of respect for him and for the culture he grew up in.

I'm going to change names and leave out a few specifics about the location, but the events themselves are as close as I can get to what actually happened.

Back in 2016, I was working for a small wildlife survey company that had a contract with a federal agency and a tribal government in the Four Corners area.

If you've never driven that country, it's hard to explain how empty it really is.

You can go an hour without seeing another car, and if you blow a tire 10 miles down a dirt spur off an already quiet highway, you have to be comfortable with the fact that help might not be coming for a while.

Our job was mostly boring, counting pronghorn tracking mule deer collared with GPS, noting every coyote scat and birdsong along pre planned transects, then going back to a double wide trailer the company rented near a small town to enter data and rinse off the dust in a shower that never seemed to get fully clean.

Half the time the hardest thing we dealt with was sunburn and running out of Gatorade.

The team that summer was small.

My boss, who I'll call R, stayed in the office most days doing paperwork and schmoozing with the agency people out in the field.

It was usually just me and one other tech rotating partners week by week.

Around late June, they brought on a local guy to help as a guide and cultural liaison, someone who knew the back roads and also knew where we weren't supposed to go without permission.

I'll call him Ben.

He was in his mid 30s.

Quiet.

The kind of quiet where you can't tell if someone doesn't like you or if they just don't see any reason to waste words.

He had that slow way of scanning the horizon that you only see in people who have grown up in big empty places.

The first day we worked together, he rode shotgun while I drove a long stretch of washboard road and he pointed out old Hogan's sheep camps and grazing areas.

Like someone showing you family photos.

There was a weight to the way he talked about certain places.

Not dramatic, just careful.

We had a basic rhythm up at 5, coffee and instant oatmeal.

Load up the truck with water, GPS, vinos, radios, a cooler with sandwiches and a beat up first aid kit.

We were always promising to update, then drive anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours out to whatever grid square we were supposed to cover that day.

In the first couple of weeks the weirdest things we saw were a dead horse bloated in a Washington and a pickup that had clearly been stolen, stripped and pushed off a small Arroyo.

The first time I heard the word skinwalker from someone who wasn't a drunk tourist or a YouTube narrator was from an older guy at a gas station near the res boundary.

He saw the agency logo on our truck and asked where we were headed.

When I told him, he nodded, looked over at the low mesas to the South and said you watch out at night.

Some things out there don't want you seeing too much.

Then he made this little clicking sound with his tongue, like he'd said more than he meant to, and decided to cut himself off.

I'd heard the stories in the shallow way a lot of outsiders do.

Online horror threads, late night AM radio, that kind of thing.

Different names, same theme.

A witch or sorcerer who uses bad medicine and can take on animal shapes, usually to harm people.

What I didn't know until that summer was how little those Internet stories resembled the way people out there actually treat the subject.

The first time I asked Ben about it, just casually, he shut me down so fast it caught me off guard.

We were sitting on the tailgate eating our sandwiches, and I mentioned the gas station guy and said something like, So what's your take on all that skinwalker stuff?

Ben didn't look at me.

He just kept chewing, swallowed and said we don't talk about that.

I tried to laugh it off, made a joke about spooky stories and he turned his head and gave me this flat look that made it very clear I needed to drop it.

So I did the thing that set everything in motion.

Didn't seem like much at first.

Around mid-july, cattle started turning up dead on one Ranchers grazing lease, and the tribal program we were working under wanted us to go out, confirm numbers, and see if we could figure out what kind of predator was responsible.

It's the kind of extra assignment that gets tacked onto your workload because you're already out there with binoculars and a truck that can handle bad roads.

R gave me the sheet with the GPS coordinates and handwritten notes about which tanks and which pastures we were supposed to check.

When he saw Ben's name on my schedule for the week, he paused, then told me we were to work closely with him on this one, which was his vague way of saying I should listen to whatever Ben said about where we should or shouldn't go.

That morning started like every other.

It was already warm by 8, one of those days where the light has a white glare to it and the horizon wobbles.

We left paved Rd.

before the sun was fully up and followed twin ruts through sagebrush and red dirt.

After about 40 minutes, the track dropped into a shallow wash and then climbed again toward a line of low sandstone buttes.

The coordinates for the first carcass were at the base of one of those, near a muddy stock tank.

I drove while Ben watched the GPS and the land at the same time, occasionally pointing out a better line to take so we didn't bottom out.

We spotted the first dead cow from a couple 100 yards away, black hide already pulled tight over bone.

We parked up wind.

Even so, the smell hit the second I opened the door.

Rot, iron, and something sweet underneath that always makes my stomach tighten.

Our job in situations like that was straightforward.

Take photos, note sex and approximate age of the animal.

Look for signs of predation versus scavenging.

Mark the location.

I grabbed the camera and notebook from the center console.

Ben grabbed his own small pack and we walked over.

I've seen a lot of dead animals.

You get used to a certain look, a certain pattern to how coyotes or feral dogs work a carcass.

This one was wrong in a way I couldn't articulate at first.

The cow was on its side, legs stiff, eyes gone, But there was almost no tearing around the haunches, no big ragged holes where you'd expect to see them.

Instead, there were these precise cuts around the jaw and tongue, like someone had taken a knife and carved the mouth open just enough to remove certain parts.

The belly was untouched, no bloating relieved by scavengers, just a swollen, unbroken gut in that odd, almost surgical work at the head.

Ben stood a couple of feet back, hand over his nose and mouth, Not because of the smell, I realized, but because he didn't want to speak.

I took the pictures, zooming in on the cuts, the dust, some faint impressions near the hooves.

When I crouched to look closer at the ground, I saw tracks, but they were a mess, a tangle of overlapping impressions made in soft mud that had dried and then been stepped on again.

Some of them were clearly coyote, some look like bare human feet, but the sizes varied and there was this odd staggered pattern, as if someone had walked and crawled in the same place over and over.

I told myself it was just the way the mud had cracked and been broken again, but the back of my neck prickled.

We noted the coordinates, checked the nearby tank, and drove to the next point on the list.

Same story, another dead cow, this one a little fresher, the eyes not fully gone to insects yet.

The same careful work around the mouth and throat, like someone was taking only what they needed and leaving the rest to rot.

This one had more tracks around it, and I took more photos, crouching in the heat, sweating through my shirt.

A couple of the prints looked like a coyote had stepped in something soft and then immediately put a human heel down in the same spot.

That sounds ridiculous, but that was the impression I got kneeling there with flies buzzing around my ears, tracing the edges of the Prince with my eyes.

By the 3rd carcass, about a mile farther along a faint 2 track, the atmosphere in the truck had changed.

Ben was even quieter than usual.

His eyes kept going to the buttes to the north, where the rock formed these shallow amphitheatres and cuts.

When I killed the engine and reached for the door handle, he said my name, and there was a sharpness in his voice that made me freeze.

We don't stay past dark, he said.

It wasn't a suggestion.

I checked my watch.

It was barely 11.

We had hours before sunset.

I told him we'd be back on pavement by late afternoon, and he just said we don't stay past dark again, then got out to check the ground.

The third cow was different.

It was lying partly in the shade of a low juniper, and there was less insect activity than I expected for the temperature and time of day.

It's tongue was gone, same as the others, and they were clean cuts at the genitals.

That's not unheard of in predation cases, but what bothered me was the absence of tearing anywhere else.

The rib cage was untouched, no ribs exposed, no chunks pulled out, just those targeted injuries.

Ben walked a slow circle around the carcass, eyes on the ground, then stepped back over to me and told me we'd seen enough, that we should head back.

I pointed to the list and said we still had two more coordinates to check if we wanted to give the rancher good data.

He didn't argue directly, but his jaw clenched and he said something in his own language under his breath that I didn't recognize at the time but later understood as a kind of prayer.

I should have listened to him fully right then.

Instead, I compromised in my head, like people do when they don't want to admit they're nervous.

I told myself we'd check one more location and then call it.

The fourth point was only another half mile up the track, near a narrow draw that cut between 2 low Ridge lines.

When we pulled up, I knew immediately that this spot was different.

The air felt still, but not in the peaceful way you get sometimes before a storm.

It was more like a held breath.

There were no cows, insight alive or dead, but there were birds circling low over the draw.

Not vultures, smaller like they were interested, but cautious.

I'll be quick.

I said, grabbing the camera again.

Ben didn't move.

He looked at the draw, then at me, and finally stepped out, reluctantly shrugging his pack higher on his shoulders.

As we approached the edge of the little ravine, I noticed the smell again, not just rot this time, but something like wet dog and burned hair under it.

The slopes of the draw were sprinkled with scrub and loose rock, and down in the bottom in the shade, something dark was lying crumpled.

It was about the right size for another cow.

I started to angle down the slope, boots sending little slides of gravel ahead of me, when Ben caught my elbow harder than he needed to and said no from here.

His voice was low but tight.

I pulled away, more out of instinct than real annoyance, and kept going, telling myself I was being ridiculous.

This was my job, we were there to document.

The quicker I got the photos, the sooner we'd be out.

Halfway down, the smell hit hard enough to make me gag.

Whatever was down there wasn't just dead, it had been that way long enough to turn into something else.

Flies rose in a shimmering cloud as I reached the bottom and stepped closer.

At first I thought it was just another cow in a more advanced state of decay.

Then my eyes adjusted to the shade and I realized the limbs weren't right.

I don't know how to describe that body in a way that doesn't sound like I'm trying to scare you.

I'll just list what I saw.

It had the bulk of a cow, but the legs were wrong lengths, like they'd been dislocated and put back on at strange angles.

There was no head that I could see, just a mass of dried flesh and hide that seemed to fold in on itself.

The hide itself looked patchy, like it had been flayed and then draped back haphazardly.

1 back leg ended in something that looked more like a human foot than a hoof, but swollen, distorted toes curled in around it.

On the ground were scraps of other things.

Bone splinters, bits of fur, a piece of what looked like denim twisted and half buried in the dirt.

Flies crawled in the folds, making the whole thing seem like it was shifting.

Breathing.

For a few seconds, my brain simply refused to organize the scene into anything that made sense.

I raised the camera, hands shaking enough that the first couple of shots probably blurred, then forced myself to go through the motions.

Wide shot, medium shot, close up of injuries.

As I stepped around to another angle, my boot came down near what I thought was just another clump of hide.

It crunched.

When I looked down, I saw teeth.

Not a cow's teeth, human, 8 or 9, still embedded in a Shard of jawbone, the rest missing.

My vision tunnelled.

I heard my own heartbeat in my ears.

Somewhere above me on the slope, Ben said my name sharply.

I don't remember climbing back out of the draw.

One second I was staring at that piece of bone and the next I was at the top again, breathing hard, my shirt stuck to my back with sweat, then grabbed my wrist hard enough that it hurt and took the camera from my other hand.

He flipped through the photos fast, then deleted the last several before I could protest.

We go.

He said.

Now back at the truck.

The air felt hotter, heavier.

I fumble the keys twice before getting them into the ignition.

When I turned them there was a click and a half hearted whine, like the starter wanted to catch but couldn't.

The dash lights flickered.

I tried again, same thing.

The battery shouldn't have been dead.

We were careful about not leaving lights on, and it wasn't that old.

I popped the hood, checked cables, wiped dust off contact points with the edge of my shirt.

Everything looked normal.

No obvious fraying, nothing loose.

We had a satellite messenger in the glove box for situations exactly like this.

A bright orange brick, about the size of my hand.

I dug it out, turned it on, waited for the status light to go from red to green.

It blinked, blinked, stayed red.

Ben stood a few feet away, looking not at the truck, but at the low ridgeline and the draw beyond it, his mouth moving soundlessly.

The messenger finally flashed an error icon I hadn't seen before, a little symbol that basically meant no connection.

It should have worked out there.

We'd used it in worse spots.

The realization that we might be stuck overnight didn't hit all at once.

It came in stages.

First annoyance at the truck, then a kind of mundane problem solving mode where I mentally inventoried what we had.

Plenty of water, some food, 1/2 tank of gas if we could get the engine to turn over.

A basic tool kit.

1 rifle in the back because ranchers liked us to carry one in case we ran into an injured animal that needed to be put down.

No cell service.

The nearest paved Rd.

was at least 10 miles back.

The sun was starting its gradual slide, shadows lengthening.

I looked at my watch.

It was a little after three.

We can walk back to the junction, I said, more to fill the air than because I thought it was a good idea.

Ben shook his head immediately.

No walking after dark, he said.

Not here.

We wait.

Maybe someone come by.

The chances of another truck using that track on a weekday afternoon were slim, but he said it with a certainty that made me shut my mouth.

We tried the ignition a few more times.

Same dead clicking.

The sun dipped lower.

The first odd thing that happened after that was small enough that I could have brushed it off.

Around 5:00, as the heat finally started to bleed out of the day, the truck's radio turned on by itself.

It was an old unit with a manual knob that you had to physically push to power on, not a sleek digital interface.

The volume was low, tuned to some AM station that only came in at night, usually static.

A faint voice.

I reached out and turned it off without saying anything.

A few minutes later, it came on again.

This time the voice was clearer.

A preacher from somewhere, talking about wolves in sheep's clothing.

I pulled the knob out, checking behind it like that would explain anything.

Ben watched me, face unreadable.

Probably a short.

I said.

He didn't respond.

After the third time it powered itself on.

He leaned forward from the passenger seat, pressed his fingers to the dash and murmured something in Navajo, then flicked the knob sharply with his nails.

It stayed off after that.

I caught myself waiting for it to start again anyway, an expectation building in my chest like a storm.

As the light thinned, the desert changed.

The color drained out of the dirt and rock, leaving a flat Gray blue landscape that felt more like the surface of the moon than the warm, dusty world we'd driven through that morning.

Sounds sharpened.

A distant bird call carried too far.

The small ticks and pops of cooling metal in the engine block took on a nervous quality.

We decided to sleep in the cab rather than setting up any kind of tent.

The idea of being in a flimsy nylon shelter out on the ground made my skin crawl, and I could tell Ben felt the same way.

We locked the doors, out of habit more than anything.

We rolled the windows up, even though it made the air stuffy.

The sun dropped behind the buttes and the dark came in stages.

First a deepening of the blue, then true blackness, the kind you don't get near cities.

I don't know exactly what time the first sound came.

My watch glowed faintly when I tapped it, but I've been dozing, slipping into those shallow, dissociated dreams you get in uncomfortable places.

The clock said 1043 when I checked it, which means the sound that woke me probably came a few minutes before that.

It was a scratching, very light along the side of the truck, not the kind of heavy scrape a branch makes when you brush past it.

More like fingernails on metal, moving slowly from the tailgate toward the back passenger door.

I froze, breath held, listening.

The scratching paused, then resumed, higher this time, nearer the window.

Ben was awake.

I could tell by the way his breathing changed, the way his shoulders tightened.

I started to whisper his name, but he brought one hand up sharply, palm toward me, without taking his eyes off the dark outside his window.

The scratching stopped.

In the pause that followed, I realized I could hear something else underneath it.

Breathing.

Not ours.

It had a wet quality, a slight whistle on the inhale.

It moved past my side of the truck toward the front.

Every rational explanation I had tried to populate itself in my head at once.

Feral dog, coyote, some drunk ranch hand messing with us.

The problem was that the sound was too high off the ground to be a coyote, and there were no other vehicle lights, no crunch of boots and gravel, just that slow drag of something hard along the paint and that breathing.

The handle of my door rattled just once, a slow testing motion, like someone barely trying it, not really expecting it to open.

My throat went dry.

Instinctively, I reached for the lock, even though I knew it was already engaged, my fingers brushing plastic.

On the other side of Ben out his window, something exhaled, long and wavering, like a person sighing through their teeth.

He started to speak, then, very quietly, in Navajo.

I didn't understand the words, but the rhythm sounded like prayer.

He spoke with his eyes closed, his hands pressed against his thighs, his back straight.

The breathing outside our windows paused.

For a moment there was complete silence, the kind that makes your ears ring.

Then, from just beyond the glass, a voice said my name.

It wasn't quite right.

That's the part I come back to the most.

It was my name, said in English, in a tone that tried to copy the way my Co workers said it, the way R said it when he was calling me into the office.

But something in the pitch was off.

Too flat in places, too rounded in others.

Like someone using a mouth that wasn't built for the sounds.

It stretched certain syllables, clipped others, and the result was that I recognized the intent, but my animal brain recoiled from the sound itself.

The voice said my name twice, then come out.

We need help.

Who we was supposed to be, I don't know.

It sounded like someone trying to remember a script.

I pressed myself back into the seat, as far from the window as possible, every muscle in my body rigid.

Ben kept praying, a little faster now.

The voice moved along the length of the truck, repeating my name, then switching to his.

It got closer to natural when it used his, like it had an easier time with words that had been spoken more often out there, It said.

Ben open up in a cajoling tone that made bile rise in my throat.

The thing outside tested his door handle the same way it had tested mine.

The truck rocked, just slightly.

Not like something huge had thrown itself against it, more like someone leaning their weight against the frame, listening.

The interior smelled like dust and sweat and the faint chemical Tang of the dashboard plastic heating up and cooling down again.

The air felt thin.

My hands had gone numb.

I don't know how long that went on.

Time did something strange.

The voice circled the truck, sometimes right up close, sometimes a few yards away, as if whoever owned it was pacing in tight loops.

It switched languages, occasionally slipping into Navajo words I didn't catch, then back to English.

At one point it tried to mimic Ben's mother, or at least that's what I gathered later from something he said.

It called him Son in a tone that was almost right and somehow infinitely worse because of how close it came.

There was 1 moment that cut through the fog of fear and lodge itself in my memory in a way that's still sharp now.

The voice had moved away toward the back of the truck, and for a few seconds there was only the wind, a faint stirring.

Then something stepped directly into the narrow cone of our headlights.

I hadn't even realized I'd left them on, dimmed but still casting that weak line out into the dark.

The figure stopped there, just at the edge of full illumination, like it knew exactly how far the light reached.

I'm not going to give you some dramatic monster description.

If you want that, there are 1000 other stories online that will feed you glowing eyes and dripping fangs.

What I saw was tall, too tall to be any of the ranchers I'd met, with limbs that seemed slightly too long for its torso, like someone had taken a normal human silhouette and stretched it by 10% in the wrong places.

It was draped in something that might once have been a coyote or wolf skin, but it hung unevenly, as if it had been patched with other hides over time.

The head was covered, the snout of the animal stretched forward, but underneath, where the chest and throat were, the fabric or flesh seemed to move independently, like something breathing under a blanket.

The legs ended in bare feet, pale against the dark ground, toes spread.

For a second, the thing simply stood there, too, still.

Then it bent in a way that made my stomach lurch like joints were reversing, and placed both hands flat on the ground, the long, thin fingers splayed.

It stayed like that for a moment, head tilted, listening to something I couldn't hear.

When it turned its head toward the truck, toward us, I felt a physical pressure in my chest, like my lungs didn't belong to me anymore.

My vision narrowed.

I remember thinking very clearly, If I pass out, I might not wake up.

That thought cut through everything else and gave me something to hold onto.

Breathe in, out.

Don't give it that.

The thing didn't charge the truck didn't howl, didn't slam its body into the doors.

Instead, it rose back up, slow and deliberate, took 1/2 step closer, and tapped the hood lightly with its knuckles.

The sound was absurdly small, like someone knocking politely on a door.

Then it walked out of the headlights and was gone from view.

The voice came back to the windows after that, more agitated, less successful at copying human intonation.

It called our names.

Not just mine and Ben's now, but ours and a couple of the other texts, as if cycling through options, waiting to see what worked.

At some point, without consciously deciding to, I started to pray too, in the only way I knew how, which was clumsy and not in any particular denomination.

I just repeated the same plea in my head over and over, asking to see the sun again, promising that I would respect whatever lines I'd crossed without knowing.

Sometime after midnight, maybe closer to 2, the sounds changed.

Instead of circling the truck, whatever was out there moved farther away, up toward the lip of the draw where we'd found that twisted carcass.

We could hear it moving Rocks, a low grating sound, and once a sharp crack, like bone snapping.

Then the night settled into a deep, oppressive quiet.

I must have drifted into something like sleep, because the next thing I knew, the interior of the cab was lighter.

A thin strip of early dawn was visible along the horizon, a pale, colorless suggestion of morning.

I checked my watch.

It was 4:57 AM.

My whole body ached from the way I'd been tensed for hours, but the immediate electrifying terror had receded enough that I could move.

Ben's eyes were open.

He looked older than he had the day before, like the night had carved new lines into his face.

We go now, he said.

His voice was hoarse.

Try the truck.

I didn't argue.

I turned the key, fully expecting the same dead click.

The engine turned over immediately, smooth as if nothing had ever been wrong.

The radio stayed off.

Every indicator light on the dash behaved exactly as it was supposed to.

The sudden normalcy was almost as unsettling as the earlier malfunction.

I felt like I was in a different truck that just happened to look the same.

We didn't waste time.

No coffee, no breakfast, no last sweeps of the area for data.

We drove.

I kept my hands tight on the wheel and my eyes mostly on the ruts ahead.

Once, when I glanced in the rearview mirror, I thought I saw a figure standing on the Ridge above the draw, silhouetted against the brightening sky, but when I blinked it was just a juniper tree.

About halfway back to the highway, we passed one of the ranchers old windmills, its blades turning lazily in a breeze I couldn't feel through the closed windows.

There were no other vehicles on the road.

The world looked exactly the way it had on every other morning out there.

At the junction with the pavement, we stopped.

Not for long, just for a minute.

Long enough for Ben to get out, walk a few steps off the road, and leave a small bundle wrapped in cloth under a low Bush.

He'd taken it from his pack, and I realized he must have prepared it ahead of time.

Some kind of offering.

He stood there for a moment, head bowed, then came back without looking at me.

We didn't talk on the drive back to the trailer in town.

The ordinary traffic and early morning radio chatter felt like another planet.

At the office, R took one look at us and asked what had happened.

Ben told him in brief stripped down terms about the carcasses, the bone Shard, the truck not starting the night.

He didn't use the word skinwalker.

He didn't need to.

I could see in ARS face that he understood enough to be shaken.

The official story that went into the report was that we'd found 3 confirmed cow carcasses with signs of possible human interference, 1 unidentifiable mass of remains that we recommended law enforcement look at, and experienced mechanical trouble that forced us to spend one night in the field.

We recommended suspending further surveys in that specific sector until the tribal authorities had a chance to review.

That's what we wrote.

That's what went in the file.

A couple of days later, out of respect, R arranged for a meeting with an elder and a medicine man from the community Ben was from.

I was allowed to sit in, which I'm still not sure was appropriate, but Ben wanted me there.

The details of that conversation are not all mine to share.

What I will say is that there was no scoffing, no accusations of hysteria.

They listened, asked careful questions about what we'd seen and heard, and then spoke among themselves for a while in Navajo.

When they switched back to English for my benefit, what they said boiled down to this.

There are things out there that are not for everyone, and sometimes, whether through ignorance or disrespect or just bad luck, you stumble into their path.

When that happens, the best you can do is back out as carefully as you can, and then stay away.

Ben stopped working with our team after that.

Officially, he left for a better paying job closer to his family.

Unofficially, he told me in one of the last conversations we had that he'd pushed his luck out there enough times and that this had been one time too many.

He didn't explain what he meant, and I didn't press him.

I finished out the season, but I never went back to that particular grazing lease.

When the map on the wall in the office showed one of our transects drifting close to that area, I swapped assignments with someone else and didn't explain why life went on.

I moved back to the city, took a different job, got tangled up in rent and commuter traffic and the mild, constant stress of urban living.

For months.

I told myself that what we'd experienced could be explained if you broke it down into small enough pieces.

Sleep deprivation.

The power of suggestion.

A failing starter motor, A trick of light, A trespasser in a costume.

Each of those could account for some part of it.

None of them, singly or together, accounted for the way hearing that warped version of my own name had felt.

Like being seen by something that didn't just want to scare me, but wanted to understand how best to get inside.

I don't talk about it casually, and I don't use the word casually.

I've noticed that people online throw skinwalker at every blurry trail Cam photo and weird noise in the woods, like it's a generic brand name for creepy thing.

I understand the impulse.

It's easier to toss a label on something and move on, then sit with the knowledge that there are gaps in the fence of your reality.

But for the people whose stories these things originally belong to, it's not a meme, it's not Halloween.

It's a quiet, stubborn fact of how the world is structured, and it's wrapped up with language and history and harm in ways that don't translate cleanly into English or into Internet culture.

The part that keeps me up some nights isn't the dead cattle or the twisted body in the draw, or even the figure in the headlights.

It's the fact that months after I left that job, long after I was back in an apartment with neighbors on both sides and a convenience store down the block, I woke up one night at around the same time, just before three, with the heavy certainty that something was standing outside my bedroom window.

The blinds were closed.

The street light outside cast the usual pale strip of glow along the wall.

I couldn't hear anything through the glass.

No breathing, no scratching.

But there was this pressure, this sense of attention, focused on that thin barrier in a way that was horribly familiar.

I lay there, staring at the ceiling, every muscle locked.

Seconds ticked by.

Then, from the alley outside, a cat yowled, sharp and ordinary and annoyed, and the feeling broke, like a held breath finally exhaled.

The heaviness in the room lifted.

My body slowly unclenched.

I didn't get up to look out the window.

I didn't want to know what I might or might not see.

The next morning I checked the alley in daylight.

Just a trash can, some weeds, the usual city litter.

No footprints, no signs of anything.

Maybe that night was nothing more than my brain replaying an old fear in a new setting.

Maybe it was exactly that simple.

I choose to treat it that way because the alternative doesn't leave much room for functioning in the world.

What I know for certain is that when people from that part of the country say there are places you don't go after dark and things you don't talk about lightly, they aren't being superstitious for the sake of tradition.

They're passing on guidelines that have kept them intact for longer than my country has existed.

I still work outdoors sometimes.

Different job now, different landscape.

When I'm out alone and the light starts to go, I pay attention to where I am and what I'm doing.

I don't whistle at night.

I don't call out names into the dark, even as a joke.

And when something feels wrong in a way I can't articulate, I listen to that feeling and I leave.

I don't know exactly what walked around our truck that night, or why it chose to speak the way it did, or why the engine and the radio and the satellite unit decided to behave the way they did.

I just know that for one long stretch of hours in the desert, I was on the edge of something I don't fully understand, and it looked back at me.

That knowledge has a way of staying with you.

It doesn't make every shadow menacing or every coyote call ominous, but it lays a thin film over the world, a reminder that what we map and measure and enter into spreadsheets is not all there is.

When I think about that night now, some part of me is still in the driver's seat, watching the headlights lay pale stripes across the dirt, listening to my own breath and to the low murmur of someone praying beside me, waiting for the sun to rise.

I've stopped trying to explain it away.

I just carry it carefully, like something sharp wrapped in cloth that you keep in your pocket, both as a warning and as proof that you weren't imagining it.