I've been a lurker here for years, and I've always read the creepy camping encounter stories with a mix of fascination and skepticism.

You always think, that wouldn't happen to me.

I'm too experienced.

I'd know what to do.

I was wrong.

This happened to me and my girlfriend Sarah, two years ago.

We're married now, and we haven't set foot in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since.

We probably never will.

First, some context.

Sarah and I are not rookie hikers.

We're both gear nerds.

We do multi day Backcountry trips in the Rockies, the Cascades, you name it.

We know how to read a topo map, how to use our gear, and how to handle wildlife.

We carry Agpsa, satellite messenger, bear spray, the whole 9 yards.

The Smokies were practically our backyard.

We've been dozens of times.

This trip was in late October.

The leaf peepers, tourists who come for the fall colors.

We're mostly gone, especially on the weekdays.

We'd planned a three day loop, starting from a less popular trailhead on the North Carolina side.

The weather was perfect, crisp, clear and cold at night.

The first day was incredible, 10 out of 10.

We hiked about 9 miles, saw maybe two other people on the trail, and found a perfect spot to make camp.

The rules in the Smokies are that you're supposed to stay in designated Backcountry sites or shelters.

We weren't.

We were about half a mile off the main trail, down in a small flat hollow next to a Creek.

It was textbook leave No Trace camping.

We were quiet, we had our bear bag, and we felt like we were the only two people on earth.

We made dinner, cleaned up and got a small responsible fire going.

We sat there for an hour just talking and enjoying the absolute perfect silence.

The kind of silence that's so deep it almost has a sound.

Around 8:30 at night, the fire was down to embers.

We were getting cold so we doused it with water from the Creek, making sure it was dead out.

We were crawling into our tent when Sarah paused.

Did you hear that?

She whispered.

I stopped.

I listened.

All I heard was the Creek.

Hear what?

The Creek.

No, listen.

I held my breath and then I heard it snap.

It was a footstep, a single heavy 2 legged snap of a dry twig.

It wasn't a deer, which plinks its way through the woods.

It wasn't a bear, which sounds like a small car crashing through the brush.

This was a person trying to be quiet and failing.

My blood went ice cold.

We were half a mile off trail in the dark, miles from any road.

There is zero reason for anyone to be walking through this hollow.

Who's there?

I yelled.

My voice sounded weak.

Silence.

Then a powerful, painfully bright beam of light blasted our tent, making the nylon glow.

Evening, folks.

A voice called out.

It was a man's voice, deep and friendly.

Didn't mean to startle you.

This is Park Service.

I felt a wave of relief immediately followed by confusion.

A Ranger out here at 9:00 at night.

I unzipped the tent flap and shielded my eyes.

The man was standing right at the edge of our camp, maybe 20 feet away.

He was tall, and his silhouette was all wrong.

He was wearing most of a Ranger uniform.

He had the flat brim hat, but it looked off a lighter, almost tan color, not the standard olive green.

He had the shirt, but it was untucked and looked dark with stains even in the glare of his flashlight.

He clicked the light off his face and pointed it at the ground between us, a friendly gesture.

Now I could see him better.

He was probably in his 50s with a short messy beard.

And his eyes, they were just flat, no expression.

Sorry to bother you, but this is an unauthorized campsite.

He said, his voice still friendly, but in a rehearsed way.

You're in a high activity bear area.

We had a problem bear get aggressive at the designated site up the Ridge, so we're clearing the area.

For your safety, I need you to pack up and relocate with me now.

Every part of this was wrong.

First, a Ranger wouldn't be clearing an area this late at night, they'd close the trail during the day.

Second, they would never lead hikers to a new secret site.

They would escort you back to your car or to a main shelter.

Third, high activity bear area.

That's what all of the Smokies are.

It's a non warning.

Sarah, who is braver than me, spoke up from inside the tent.

Oh, we didn't know.

We'll pack up right now and just head back to our car.

We're sorry.

The Ranger didn't move.

He kept the light on the ground.

That won't be necessary, it's a five mile hike back to your car.

The new site is just a quarter mile through the trees.

It's safer.

You need to come with me.

The way he said need to made every hair on my body stand up.

I got out of the tent, standing in my base layers and camp shoes.

Can I see your badge, Sir?

I asked.

The man's smile was a thin line.

It's on my belt, but we really do need to be going.

I looked at his belt.

His flashlight was huge, a big metal Maglite.

Next to it was nothing.

No radio, no pepper spray, no sidearm.

Just an empty leather loop.

And on his other hip, a massive old looking hunting knife in a worn leather sheath, the kind with a stag antler handle.

You know?

I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

We're fine.

We've got bear spray, we've got our food hung.

We'll take our chances, we'll pack up and leave at first light.

The Ranger took one step closer.

The friendly mask was still there, but it was cracking.

Son, I don't think you understand.

This isn't a request.

This bear, it's a problem.

It's not safe here.

I'm responsible for you.

You have to relocate.

No, Sarah said.

She was out of the tent now, standing next to me.

We're staying or we're leaving, but we're not going with you.

I glanced at Sarah and she gave me the slightest nod.

I knew what she was thinking.

I reached back into the tent and grabbed our canister of bear spray.

Sarah, faster than me, grabbed her hiking axe.

It's a small one, but it's sharp.

The second he saw us arm ourselves, his whole face changed.

It was the single most terrifying thing I have ever seen.

The friendly mask didn't just drop, it disintegrated.

The smile vanished.

His eyes, which had been flat, now looked furious and hungry.

It's the only word I can use.

He stared at us, this rictus of pure silent rage on his face.

He didn't say a word.

He just stood there, his hand resting on the handle of that giant knife.

It felt like an eternity.

The only sound was the Creek.

We were in a standoff.

I had the bear spray aimed at his chest.

You need to leave, I said.

He just stared.

It felt like he was memorizing us.

Then he did the strangest thing.

He smiled again, but it wasn't the friendly smile.

It was a wide, toothy, wrong smile.

He raised his flashlight, shined it directly in our eyes, blinding us.

Suit yourselves, he said.

He clicked off the light.

The world went pitch black.

I mean absolute, total new moon in a forest.

Hollow, black.

We couldn't see a thing.

He's gone, Sarah whispered, her voice shaking.

No, he's not, I said.

He's right there.

He just turned his light off.

We stood there, frozen, staring into the dark where he had been.

We heard nothing.

Not a footstep, not a leaf crunching, not a branch moving.

He hadn't walked away.

He had just vanished.

Mark.

Sarah said, her voice a tiny squeak.

Pack now.

We've never moved so fast in our lives.

We didn't pack.

We threw things.

Sleeping bags were stuffed into packs, pads deflated With a whoosh, we left the tent for last.

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely unclip the poles.

We were making so much noise, fumbling, zipping, clipping.

Quiet.

I hissed.

We both froze, and we heard it.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Footsteps, but not moving away.

They were moving parallel to our camp, about 40 yards up the Ridge in the direction of the main trail.

He was just walking, pacing.

He's watching us, I whispered.

We threw the tent into my pack, half folded.

We have to go, Sarah said.

We can't stay here.

Go where?

Back to the trail.

He's on the trail.

We have to.

We'll follow the Creek down.

It'll be louder.

It'll mask our sound.

It was a good plan, The Creek float away from the trail, but it would eventually hit a larger river that ran near the Park Rd.

It was a longer, much harder hike, but it meant not walking towards him.

I grabbed my headlamp and our GPS unit.

Sarah had hers.

Axe in one hand, spray in the other.

We turned on our headlamps, which felt like setting off flares, and scrambled down the bank into the freezing cold Creek.

We started half walking, half waiting downstream.

It was awful.

The rocks were slick, we were falling, catching ourselves.

The water was soaking our pants.

Our feet were instantly numb.

But Sarah was right, The sound of the rushing water was loud.

We couldn't hear anything else and we hoped neither could he.

We moved like this for maybe 20 minutes.

It felt like hours.

We were bruised, freezing and terrified.

Finally, I stopped to check the GPS.

The Creek is turning, I said.

It's bending back towards the trail.

We have to get out and go cross country.

We climbed up the opposite bank.

It was steep, covered in rhododendron bushes so thick you had to crawl.

We were back in the quiet zone, and the second we stopped to catch our breath, we heard it whistle.

A low, tuneless whistle.

It sounded like someone just whistling to themselves.

It was coming from the Ridge we just left.

Then it stopped.

We ran.

We didn't care about noise.

We crashed through the underbrush, climbing the Ridge, desperate to put distance between us.

We got to the top of the Ridge.

We were on a small wooded plateau.

The main trail was somewhere to our left, maybe a quarter mile.

Our car was 5 miles away.

OK, I panted.

OK, we follow this Ridge.

It should run parallel to the trail.

We, we just have to get to the car.

We started walking fast, headlamps cutting through the total darkness.

Every tree looked like a man, every shadow was him.

And then we heard his voice.

It wasn't a yell.

It was calm, conversational, and it came from ahead of us.

You folks are going the wrong way, we screamed, both of us.

We spun around, shining our lights.

Nothing.

We pointed our lights ahead and there, maybe 100 yards up the path was his flashlight beam pointed at the ground.

Just waiting.

He got ahead of us.

Sarah cried.

How did he get ahead of us?

He knew the woods.

This was his ground.

We were just trespassing back.

I yelled back the way we came.

We turned and ran back down the Ridge and his light clicked off.

Then a new sound, running heavy, pounding footsteps behind us.

He wasn't toying with us anymore, he was chasing us.

I've never been so scared.

It's a primal fear, being hunted.

We ran blind, crashing through branches that whipped our faces.

Sarah tripped and went down hard.

She screamed.

I spun around, bear spray out and shine my light.

She was on the ground, holding her ankle.

I can't, she sobbed.

Mark, I can't.

I twisted it.

The running footsteps behind us stopped.

Silence.

Get up, I yelled, pulling her to her feet.

You have to get up.

I put her arm over my shoulder.

She was trying to put weight on it, but she was hurt.

We were moving at a pathetic limp.

We were done.

He was going to get us.

He's, he's gone, she whispered, listening.

No, I said.

He's waiting.

He's letting us tire ourselves out.

We limped on.

Every few seconds we'd stop and listen.

Nothing, Just our own ragged breathing and Sarah's quiet sobbing.

This went on for what felt like a lifetime.

We were moving so slowly my shoulders ached.

Then we smelled it.

It was a coppery, rotten smell, like old pennies and spoiled meat, and under it, the smell of wet wool.

It was coming from just off to our right.

I stopped.

I shined my light into the trees.

Nothing, just trees.

What?

Sarah asked.

Don't you smell that?

She sniffed the air.

Oh God, Mark.

And then we heard him, A low, gravelly mumble.

He wasn't yelling, he was talking to himself.

Need to relocate high activity area for their safety, Not safe.

Need to need to relocate the subjects.

It was a mantra, a broken record script he was playing out in his head.

He was 30 feet away, just standing in the dark watching us.

I lost it.

Leave us alone.

I screamed and I emptied the entire can of bear spray in his direction.

The orange fog blasted into the trees and we heard a hiss like a gasp and a crash as he stumbled back.

Run, I yelled.

I don't know how she did it.

Adrenaline, I guess.

Sarah ran.

We ran full tilt, ankle be dammed.

We didn't care about the trail, the car, anything.

We just ran downhill.

We fell.

We got up.

We kept running.

We ran until our lungs were on fire and we burst out of the trees onto the pavement.

The Park Rd.

We'd hit the road.

We fell to our knees on the asphalt.

We were alive.

We were out.

We looked back.

The forest was a black silent wall.

He wasn't there.

The car I said it's, it's a mile up the road.

It was the longest mile of my life.

We limped up the road, jumping at every car that passed.

There were only two.

Every time the headlights hit us, I was terrified they would illuminate him standing on the road behind us.

We finally got to the parking lot.

Our car was the only one there.

We got in.

I locked the doors.

Click.

We sat in the dark, in the silence, just breathing.

We made it.

Sarah said she was crying.

We made it.

I put the key in the ignition.

The engine turned over.

I turned on the headlights, and there he was.

He was standing at the edge of the parking lot, right where the trail came out, just standing there, staring at us.

He wasn't angry, he wasn't smiling.

He was just blank.

The headlights lit him up perfectly.

The stained shirt, the wrong hat, the big dark knife on his belt.

I slammed the car into reverse.

I backed out so fast I almost hit a tree.

I threw it in drive and we peeled out of that parking lot, tires squealing.

I looked in the rear view mirror.

He was still standing there.

He watched us go.

He never moved.

We drove until we had cell service and called 911.

We were transferred to the Park Service dispatch.

We told them everything.

They told us to drive to the Sugar Lands Visitor Center on the Gatlinburg side and wait for a Ranger.

We got there at 2O clock in the morning.

A Ranger met us.

A real Ranger.

His uniform was perfect.

He had a radio, he had a sidearm.

He was professional and kind.

We told him the story.

We were a mess.

We were covered in mud and scratches.

Sarah's ankle was swelling.

He listened, He took notes.

His face got tighter and tighter.

When we were done, he just stared at his notepad for a second.

Can you show me on this map?

He said, pulling one out Exactly where you were.

I pinpointed our camp.

I showed him where we'd hit the road.

He went pale.

You were in that hollow, he said.

Yeah, why?

He called his supervisor.

The supervisor drove out to meet us.

We told the whole story again.

The supervisor looked at his partner.

This is the third report this year, he said.

What are you talking about?

Sarah asked.

The supervisor sighed.

We've been getting reports.

A man following us, someone watching our camp, a man in a brown hat.

But they're always vague.

You 2, you're the first to have a direct conversation, and to be honest, you're the first to report it and be here.

What does that mean?

I asked.

6 people, he said have gone missing from that specific five mile radius in the last 10 years.

Two of them just this past spring.

We we find their campsites neatly packed up, food in the bear bags, tents zipped shut, but no people.

We always, we always assumed they got lost or it was a bear.

He looked at us.

You did the right thing.

You didn't go with him.

Who is he?

I asked.

We don't know.

We don't have a Ranger matching that description.

We don't know who he is, but he's out there.

They filed a massive report.

A few weeks later, they officially closed that entire section of the park for aggressive bear management.

It's still closed.

We moved to Ohio.

Six months later, we got married.

We tried to forget we were unpacking our old camping gear last week.

We hadn't touched it since that night.

We'd just thrown it in bins.

Everything was there, the tent, the packs, the sleeping bags, all caked in two year old dried mud.

Wait.

Sarah said, holding up the empty stuff sack for her axe.

Where's my axe?

I'd forgotten, she must have dropped it when she fell right before I used the bear spray.

It was still out there.

Oh well, I said good riddance then.

Two days ago a package arrived, a small square cardboard box.

No return address.

The postmark was from Gatlinburg in Tennessee.

My heart stopped.

Don't open it, Sarah said.

But I had to.

I cut the tape.

Inside was a lot of bubble wrap, and under it was Sarah's hiking axe.

It was perfectly clean.

The blade had been sharpened.

It was gleaming.

Taped to the wooden handle was a small laminated card.

It was an old, faded 1970s era official National Park Service ID.

The photo was of a smiling young man in a Ranger uniform.

But the eyes, the eyes were the same, flat, dead, empty.

The name on the card read Thomas L Vance and taped to the back of the ID was a small folded piece of paper.

It was a note written in a shaky, blocky scrawl.

It said you forgot this, please relocate.

This is a high activity area.

Edit A few people are asking why we didn't use our satellite messenger.

We did.

The second we got to the car we hit the SOS.

The 911 call we made was after the SOS was already pinging.

The Ranger who met us said the 911 call actually came in while he was getting the SOS alert which only made him drive faster.

I need to get this out.

I've held onto it for years and it's eating at me.

My dad and I, we don't talk about it.

We've never talked about it, not really, not since that one conversation in the car on the way home.

But I'm older now, and I'm starting to forget the exact shade of the sky that night, or the specific way the water rippled, and that scares me more than anything.

Forgetting makes it feel like it wasn't real.

I need to remember.

I need someone to know it was real.

My dad and I have been taking a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters BWCA in northern Minnesota every September since I was 13.

It's our thing.

My mom and sister call it their smelly boy trip, and they're not wrong.

We go for 10 days, no showers, paddling and portaging, catching walleye and sleeping under the stars.

My dad is the real deal.

He's a lifelong woodsman, the kind of guy who can start a fire in a downpour and navigate by the stars.

He's calm, competent and quiet.

He taught me everything, how to read a map, how to paddle AJ stroke, how to respect the woods.

The woods are his church, and by extension, they became mine.

This was 2019.

We were deep in about as far as you can get.

We'd taken a hard to get permit for a remote entry point, and for five days we'd paddled and Portage N, heading for a string of lakes near the Canadian border.

This is the real BWCA.

No cell service for 100 miles, no weekend warriors in September.

You're lucky if you see another canoe all day.

We were on Kettlestone Lake.

Not its real name, but that's what I'm calling it.

It was our eighth day.

We'd set up camp on a beautiful site, a rocky point covered in tall Pines.

We'd spent the whole afternoon fishing a reef on the far side of the lake, just me, my dad, and the loons.

The fishing was incredible.

We were catching walleye one after another, that perfect eater size.

You know, the one last cast curse.

It's real.

We stayed out too long.

The sun had dipped behind the black spruce Ridge and the sky was that deep bruised purple that happens just before true dark.

The air was dead calm.

The lake was a sheet of black glass, and the only sound was the drip, drip, drip of our paddles and the buzz of the last mosquitoes of the season.

That's when we smelled it.

It wasn't a waft, it was a wall.

It hit us so fast it was like we'd paddled into a cloud of it.

The smell of rot, but not lake rot, not swamp gas.

This was biological.

It smelled like a deer had been hit by a car, bloated in the sun for a week and then ripped open.

It was so thick and foul it coated the inside of my mouth.

I gagged and my eyes watered.

I looked at my dad.

He had stopped paddling.

His head was up, sniffing the air.

His face in the dim light was made of stone.

Dad, Jesus, what is that?

He didn't answer me.

He just quietly said.

Paddle faster, son.

It wasn't a suggestion, it was a command.

His voice was flat, all the warmth gone.

I'd never heard him sound like that.

The hair on my arms stood up.

I dug my paddle in and we started moving.

The campsite was around a rocky point to our left, maybe half a mile away.

We just had to get around this point.

As we started to round the bend, the smell got worse.

It was so bad I had to pull the neck of my fleece up over my nose.

We were paddling hard now, the canoe cutting quietly through the water there.

I whispered, pointing with my chin.

I see it.

Dad breathed On the shore, right at the water's edge, maybe 70 yards away, was a shape.

It was crouched over something dark and lumpy.

At first my brain said bear.

It's the only thing that makes sense up there.

A big black bear, probably feeding on a moose or deer carcass.

That would explain the smell.

But it was wrong.

Even in the fading light, I could see it wasn't black.

It was pale, a sick grayish white, like a fish belly.

And it was too skinny.

It was emaciated.

It was squatting.

And its arms, God, its arms were so long they were braced on the ground in front of it like a gorilla's.

But they were wrong too.

Too thin.

They looked like sticks wrapped in wet Gray leather.

My paddle froze in the water.

As if it heard the tiny splash, it stopped what it was doing.

It slowly, slowly raised its head.

Then it stood up.

My dad sucked in a breath so sharp it was like a gasp.

It wasn't a bear.

It wasn't 7 feet tall.

It was 8, maybe 9 feet.

It unfolded in sections.

It was all bones and tight Gray skin stretched so thin you could see the knobs of its spine and the cage of its ribs.

It was a skeleton with skin.

And its head.

Oh God, it's head.

It wasn't a head, it was a skull.

It looked like a deer's skull, antlers broken off near the base.

But it wasn't wearing it.

It was its head, the long tapered bone of the muzzle, the empty hollow looking sockets.

It turned and looked right at us.

There were no eyes, just deep black pits.

But I felt it, see us.

I felt it like a physical pressure.

Time stopped.

I could hear my own heart hammering in my ears.

The world shrank to me, my dad and this thing on the shore.

It let out a sound.

It opened its lipless bone toothed maw and a noise came out that wasn't a growl and wasn't a scream, but both.

It was a high pitched tearing shriek that grated on my bones, but underneath it was a low, wet growl.

It was the sound of a rabid animal and a dying woman all at once.

Don't look at it.

My dad's yell shattered the moment.

It was pure panic.

He wasn't a woodsman, he wasn't my dad.

He was just a terrified man.

He dug his paddle into the water with a grunt, and the canoe veered.

Paddle now to the site we paddled.

I've never paddled like that.

My arms burned, my lungs were on fire, but I didn't care.

I just pulled.

The canoe felt like it was stuck in mud, impossibly slow.

The scream followed us.

It echoed off the trees on the other side of the lake, coming back at us from all directions.

We hit the rocky landing of our campsite at full speed.

The front of the canoe slammed into a rock with a thud that sent a jolt up my spine.

Get out.

Get the gear, all of it.

Dad was yelling, already halfway out of the canoe, splashing through the shallow water.

We didn't pack, we threw.

We ripped the tent stakes out of the ground, the tent still attached.

We grabbed the sleeping bags, the food pack, the stove, just grabbing and throwing it all into the bottom of the canoe.

I dropped our water filter.

Leave it, get in.

We were back in the canoe in less than two minutes.

The whole time my skin was crawling.

I felt 1000 unseen eyes on me from the dark woods behind our sight.

The smell was still there, clinging to us.

We paddled out into the lake in the dark, no headlamps.

Where are we going?

I panted away.

Dad said, his voice shaking.

We're not staying on this lake.

We paddled for two hours in the pitch dark.

My dad navigated by the faint silhouette of the tree line against the stars.

It was terrifying.

One wrong move, one submerged rock we didn't see, and we'd be in the water.

The water in September is lethally cold.

You've got minutes.

We didn't talk.

The only sound was our paddles and our breathing.

And one other sound.

About an hour in, from the shore to our right, we heard a whoop.

It was a perfect imitation of a loon call.

Whoop, whoop, whoop.

But it was wrong.

It was too loud, too guttural.

And it was September.

The loons are mostly quiet by then.

My dad's paddle stroke faltered.

Don't stop, he whispered a minute later, from the shore.

Whoop, whoop.

It was closer.

Then we heard it, the sound of something huge moving through the woods.

It wasn't a deer.

It was crashing through the underbrush, snapping branches the size of my arm.

It was pacing us.

We paddled harder.

We found a narrow channel, a side passageway that led to a different, smaller lake.

We poured all our remaining strength into getting down that Channel.

The crashing faded behind us.

We didn't find a campsite.

We found a sheer rock face that had a small 10 foot ledge.

It was exposed, barren and perfect.

We pulled the canoe all the way out of the water, dragging it up onto the rock.

We turned it over and huddled underneath it, still in our wet clothes, our PF DS still on.

My dad got the food pack, which had the camp hatchet tied to it.

He sat with his back to the canoe, the hatchet in his lap, and stared out into the dark.

Try to sleep, he said.

I didn't sleep.

Neither did he.

We sat there all night, shivering, listening to every snap, every ripple.

The wind changed and for a horrible hour I could smell it again, faint on the breeze, like it was quartering the lake, hunting.

The sun has never felt as good as it did when it first hit my face, that cold Gray morning light.

The world looked normal again.

The birds were singing, but it wasn't normal.

We looked at each other.

We were both pale with dark circles under our eyes.

We're going home, Dad said.

That's two days, Dad, We'll do it in one.

We were 5 portages and four lakes from the entry point.

A 2 day paddle.

Easy.

We did it in 10 hours.

We didn't stop, we didn't eat.

We just paddled until our arms were Jelly and then we portaged.

A Portage is the most vulnerable time.

You're on land loud and carrying 50 lbs of gear.

You can't move fast and you can't see.

Every Portage was agony.

My head was on a swivel.

Every dark shadow in the woods was it.

Every rustle of a squirrel was it.

At the third Portage, the longest one we found it.

A drag mark.

Something heavy dragged from the water.

And at the landing where you put the canoe back in a marker, 3 flat rocks stacked on top of each other.

But the top rock wasn't a rock.

It was a deer vertebra bleached white.

Dad saw it and his face went white.

He grabbed my shoulder.

Don't look.

Keep moving.

We made it to the entry point just as the sun was setting.

We threw the gear in the back of the truck.

We strapped the canoe on in record time.

We got in and Dad locked the doors.

He sat there for a long minute, just breathing, his hands shaking on the steering wheel.

We didn't talk.

We drove for an hour back down the gravel logging roads until we hit the paved highway.

We didn't talk until we were back in Ely, the first real town, sitting at a gas station under the buzzing fluorescent lights.

We were in the car and I was drinking the world's best tasting coke.

Dad, I said.

What was that?

He stared out the windshield.

He looked older, beaten.

It's a Wendigo, he said.

His voice was so quiet I could barely hear him.

Like the stories.

The stories are stories, Sam, He said.

They're warnings.

His grandfather, my great grandfather, was a Jibwe.

He used to tell stories, said they were spirits.

The spirit of the hungry woods, the spirit of the long winter.

He said they're born from from men who eat men, from desperation and hunger.

He looked at me.

His eyes were haunted.

He said they're mimics.

They can sound like a loon.

They can sound like a woman crying.

Anything to draw you in.

And they're always hungry.

Always.

They're just empty.

And the hunger makes them rot.

He took a long, shuddering breath.

He said you never, ever look at 1.

He said they're not all the way here.

They're in between.

And if you look at them, if you really look at them, they get a hook in you.

They can follow.

We drove the rest of the way home to the Twin Cities in silence.

We got home.

My mom was all.

How was it?

We just said good, tiring.

We got cold.

My dad put the canoe in the garage.

The next weekend, he sold it.

He told my mom he'd pulled a muscle in his back and couldn't handle the portages anymore.

He, the man who lived for the woods, hasn't been north of Duluth since.

He fishes on the Mississippi now from a bass boat.

It's been five years.

I'm 26.

I still have nightmares.

Not the screaming kind.

The quiet kind where I'm in a canoe on a glass black lake and the smell of rod is rolling in.

I wake up and I can smell it in my room.

I'm writing this all down because I just bought a new canoe, a lightweight Kevlar one.

I've got a permit for a solo trip in three weeks.

Not to that lake, never again to that lake.

But I have to go back.

I have to know if it was real.

I have to know if I can still go, if I can still be in my church, or I have to know if I'm broken like my dad.

And I'm posting this here because if I don't come back, I want someone to know why.

I want someone to have the real story.

So if you're ever up in the BWCA near the border and the sun starts to set and you smell something, don't be a hero.

Don't be curious, just paddle faster and don't ever look at the shore.

I don't know how to format these, so I'll just tell it straight and you can believe me or not, I'm not here for karma.

I'm here because for the first time in my life, I left A tag unfilled and I'm OK with that.

And that means something happened.

I can't square with the kind of guy I've always been.

This was late October mule deer season in the Uinta Basin.

If you don't know the area, picture wide shelves of sage and rabbit brush giving way to broken ridges, fingers of dark timber hanging in the folds like wet hair.

We were on public land, not far from the reservation boundary.

I'm going to keep the drainage name out of this out of respect and because I don't want some curious kid wandering in there with a head full of YouTube lore and a pocket full of cheap calls.

It was me and my cousin, let's call him Dave because that's his name, who I've haunted with since we were old enough to carry 22 caliber rifles of for Jack rabbits.

We grew up under the same roof half our lives, same grandpa, same rules.

Grandpa taught us to glass slow, to treat every Ridge like it's hiding eyes, to pack out what you pack in, to never joke about the things the old folks didn't joke about.

He had a way of whistling a dumb little tune from an old TV show when he was fixing fence or cleaning fish.

You hear 1000 small background sounds growing up and forget most of them, but some lodge in your bones.

That whistle was one of them we'd scouted the weekend before.

We knew a buck was betting on a N facing slope with just enough blow down to give him confidence and just enough gaps to give us a shot if we were patient.

The plan was simple.

Climb to the high spine in the dark, wait for first light, glass the benches and if we saw him, one of us would push a little while the other held the escape route.

Nothing, cowboy.

This wasn't our first season.

We know how fast a bad decision can turn a Ridge into a rescue.

We were in orange radios clipped to the straps, extra batteries in a zip bag.

We've learned that lesson, too.

It had dusted snow a couple days earlier, and the shaded spots held a cold rhyme that made the sage heads crunch like sugar when you brush them.

The wind was lazy but steady, quartering down the draw.

We set a meeting time on the main Ridge, four in the afternoon.

No excuses, no hero moves.

I can hear Grandpa even now.

Hunt hard, but don't hunt dumb.

By mid afternoon I was posted on a knob with a good angle into the valley.

I had the spotting scope on the tripod and my rifle laid in the notch of a juniper.

I'd been picking apart shadow and brush for an hour, taking those slow breaths that turn minutes into molasses.

My watch ticked toward 3:30.

That's when I heard it.

Hey, over here, I need help.

It was my cousin's voice, not just the words, but the way he shoves a little breath on the last syllable when he's excited.

It came from a patch of dark Pines off my left shoulder, down slope, close enough to raise the hair on my forearms.

I lifted my head out of the glass and turned the trees, swallowed whatever made the sound.

Where are you?

I called back without thinking.

Because you don't think when family yells help like that.

You answer like you've been shot yourself right here.

Hurry.

The exact same voice came from the other side of the clearing behind me, upslope and farther away than the first.

I pivoted so fast the tripod legs skittered, and I put my hand out to catch it before it tipped.

I didn't shout again.

You know those tiny moments when your brain pulls the emergency brake and your body coasts a foot forward in silence?

That was me.

There's nothing in the hills that can move its lungs from one pocket of timber to the other in two seconds, not with that kind of distance and that kind of clarity.

My throat went dry so fast it felt like I'd swallowed the crust off a cast iron pan.

I reached for the radio with fingers that didn't feel quite attached.

Dave, where are you?

I said.

I kept my voice calm, or I tried to.

The sound came out thin and high, like it had been filtered through a straw.

Static, then the little pop our radios make before the signal hooks up solid.

And his voice, my cousin's voice, but the real one, with the tiredness I knew would be in it after a day on steep ground.

I'm on the main Ridge where we were supposed to meet.

He said Where are you?

As he was saying, where?

The other voice came again from the trees in front of me, not 30 yards into the shadow line, pitched soft, like a stage whisperer trying to be a secret between friends.

He's lying to you, it said.

I'm Dave, come here.

I didn't yell, I didn't charge in there like an idiot.

I put the scope back in my pack in one motion, slung it over a shoulder that felt like someone else's, shouldered my rifle, and started backing uphill.

Slow.

Don't break the ground with your heels when you're backing out of trouble, Grandpa used to say.

It's how you end up snowballing backward into something worse.

Place your feet, heel to toe, and keep your eyes on the shadow.

So I did.

As soon as I moved, something in the trees moved with me.

Not loud, not crashing, not the way a deer busts or a bear rips.

It tracked me just inside the darkness line, where every twig and dead branch would have shouted a man's clumsiness to the sky.

And it didn't make noise, not really.

The sound it did make was like the suggestion of motion, a hinted weight on rotten sticks, and it was drowned beneath.

A thing I can't make you hear on a screen, a tune being whistled thin and almost right, not quite on key but close enough to snag a memory you didn't know you still had.

Grandpa's tune played a hair too fast, like whoever was making it wanted to sound casual and didn't know how.

There are times you don't realize you're praying under your breath until you catch a word and feel embarrassed, like you just got caught talking to the mirror.

I remember the feel of my tongue touching the roof of my mouth to form the T in don't and the P in please, the way you shape words quietly so they land heavy in your chest instead of hanging in the air where any ear could snatch them.

The sun had slid behind a Bank of clouds and the light went from warm to 10 in seconds.

That's when movement on the Ridge, real movement, human movement, snapped my eye.

A figure stepped out, orange vest bright as a campfire.

He raised an arm and waved with emotion I knew like my own.

That was my cousin.

I don't care what anybody says about caution, there's a physical relief that hits like medicine when you see your partner for real in a place where you thought you might be alone with something else.

I started walking faster, not running, but I felt my calves twitch to do it, and I had to tell them no, like they were dogs that heal.

It followed.

I didn't look at the trees again.

I didn't need to.

The whistling kept pace.

I hate that I can write this next part and hear it at the same time.

Halfway to the Ridge, the whistling shifted like it realized it had the tune slightly wrong and fixed it.

That was worse than any voice it used, and it had used my cousin's voice exactly.

Except for the part where you feel the person inside the voice, this had no inside to it.

It was like someone holding a mask in front of a flashlight.

I topped out on the spine and my cousin was right there and I knew it was him before he spoke because his face was red from the climb and there were two smeared spots of black from where he'd rubbed sweat with dirty gloves.

He doesn't stop to wipe first, just smears it in a rush.

You can't fake that kind of detail.

You hear it.

He said, not wasting any English on hello.

I nodded.

He must have heard my radio call and seen me moving and put it together.

We didn't touch each other, didn't make any big show of reunion.

We just stood shoulder to shoulder, a beat longer than normal, the way we always do when something is out there we can't quite put inside a familiar outline.

The whistling went quiet.

I heard you, he said, down in the timber, asking where I was.

Except you didn't key up.

Except I was answering you on the radio at the same time you were yelling in the trees.

Except he rubbed his mouth with the back of his glove.

Except nothing, I guess.

4:00 me time, I said, because it mattered to say a rule out loud when other things weren't obeying rules.

4:00, he said back.

We didn't stay on the Ridge like we'd planned.

The light was slipping and I was emptied out in some way that made the next half hour of hunting feel like a dumb dare.

We moved together.

Little words, the kind you use when you know making noise is safer than going quiet.

Step, stop, wind, hold.

Nobody said name.

Funny what your mouth knows before your mind catches up.

When we dropped off the spine toward the truck, we took a different finger than the one I'd come up.

The slope was littered with calf bruising, basalt lumps and hides of crusted snow.

In the shadows halfway down, I saw Prince.

Not boot prints, bare feet.

I'm not joking.

No arch, no heel cup.

Just a flattened Oval with toes too long and too evenly spaced, like they'd been arranged by someone carving a print block.

The stride was wrong.

They didn't sink at the toe.

Each step pressed straight down, like the weight wasn't moving forward or like the ground didn't matter.

They crossed the slope at a diagonal nobody uses because it burns your ankles.

They've been laid since morning.

There was a sprinkle of new dust on top of my tracks, and no dust on them.

That's a detail you can feel in your teeth when you say it out loud.

We didn't take pictures.

The idea of trying to capture that on a screen made my stomach roll.

Sometimes you don't bring a thing into your pocket, if that makes sense.

We reached a thin ribbon of two track and followed it toward the truck.

The world had that dry, bright quiet it gets right before the sky gives up the last of its color.

As we turned the last shoulder and the hood came into view, my cousin grabbed my sleeve hard enough to pinch muscle.

Don't say anything, he said.

I looked.

There was something on the hood.

For a second it looked like pine needles, or maybe chaff.

But the shapes resolved and my brain decided on hair.

It had that kink to it, that variegated brown that isn't fur from a pelt, but hair from something that had been lying on the sheet metal.

And there were prints on the Fender.

Not handprints, not paw pads.

The same long toed ovals melted a little where the day's thin sun warmed the metal.

One of them was canted like whatever it was had stood with a knee against the grill and leaned over to realign the rear view mirror.

The mirror was pointed down, catching sage.

I don't know why that detail still needles me.

It's stupid.

You can bump a mirror with a sleeve.

Our doors were locked.

I reached for my keys, slow like a movie cop.

It felt performative and useless, but the body likes rituals.

We got in the cab smelled exactly the way a truck cab should smell after two men have been sweating in the hills all day.

Salt, oil, a ghost of last week's gas spill on a Jerry can, the fake vanilla of the cracked air freshener we keep swearing we'll throw away.

It did not smell like anything else that mattered.

We checked the back seat.

We checked the bed.

We checked the spare behind the wheel well.

We did these things without saying we were doing them.

Then we sat and let the quiet settle.

That wasn't me, my cousin said finally, and that was when I realized he had been as glued to the thought as I had down below.

And it wasn't you?

No, I said, But it knows your voice.

He flinched like I'd thrown cold water.

And it knows Grandpa's whistle, he said.

We didn't start the truck.

That's the part I keep kicking myself for.

We should have turned the key and let the engine put a wall between US and the thinking.

Instead we sat and listened.

At first I thought I was hearing the wind find the broken places in the sage and make that dry hiss it does in the evening.

Then I realized there was repetition in it.

You only catch repetition after you've counted it twice.

The 1st 10 seconds were just noise.

He's lying to you, it said from the slope.

The same phrase, the same cadence.

It didn't bother with our names.

Now it stuck to the line that had made me look over my shoulder in the first place, sanding off everything extra until it was just those 4 words.

The direction of the sound wandered, not in a circle, but like someone testing the echo of the hill, finding the sweet spots where the land throws your voice down into a bowl.

My cousin reached over, flipped the radio volume down to 0, and then with his free hand touched the wooden rosary he keeps hanging off his turn signal stalk.

He isn't the religious one in the family.

That made my throat thickened.

We'd planned to camp on BLM that night, 30 minutes away by Washboard Rd.

We'd plan to hot tint it in the little wall tent, eat elk brats, and go over the plan for the next morning.

I know how this sounds, but the idea of unrolling fabric and creating a temporary house and then closing our eyes inside that thing while something walked around out there felt like stepping off the ledge of a mine shaft and hoping the black meant water instead of air.

Duchess Motel, I said.

Duchenne Motel, he said.

He turned the key.

The engine started with that Ford shutter, and I have never loved a mechanical sound more.

Headlights ate a tunnel into the slope.

For an instant I thought I saw a thin shape stand up from behind a grease wood and walk with a bone light stride into the line of Pines.

And you can say that was nerves, and you can say that was shadow, and I will nod because that's saner than what I'd tell you, which is that it moved like a man who had learned to be a deer, which is wrong in the way 2 correct notes feel wrong when you play them on the wrong instrument.

We drove out not fast, because fast on that road means a tire sidewall torn by a Rock You didn't see, but steady, like the gas pedal was a prayer.

My cousin didn't touch the radio again.

We didn't speak.

Not for a mile, not for five.

And then, around the bend where the red dirt turns to Gray and the willows toss their ragged hair over the two track, something hit the tailgate.

Not a rock kicked by a tire, a weight, a slap with shape.

The truck jolted like a big dog had leapt at it.

The bed camera we use when we're hauling gear is angled poorly for anything behind us, so don't ask.

We both breathed out at the same time, a laugh without humor, the body's simple way of emptying bad air.

We hit pavement and did something I never do.

We went left toward town instead of right, toward where the team would quarter their animals and trade lies by someone's fire.

We checked into the kind of motel where the front desk guy has the TV turned up too loud and his voice is a murmur beneath the game.

Our room smelled like bleach and old cigarettes.

It might as well have been a cathedral.

I didn't sleep.

Neither did he.

We tried, but sleep is a door you have to walk through, and every time I closed my eyes the whistled tune started in the dark of my head.

Just a hair fast, just a hair wrong.

Like it was learning something about me and getting it almost perfect.

At 1:00 in the morning, I got up and ran the shower until the steam made clouds in the bathroom and the mirror smeared with ghost fingerprints.

At three, I found the Gideon Bible in the drawer and read from it without really seeing the words.

At 4:00, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my boots and thought about mourning and how mourning makes liars out of fear.

At six, we were driving back toward the drainage with our plan in our mouths like a hard candy we didn't want to bite.

We were going to pick up camp, check our mark points for sign, and then make an adult decision about staying or pulling stakes.

When we topped out on the Ridge, the world looked exactly like itself.

Gray, blue, light.

The frost turned to lace in the bottoms, crows like punctuation marks along the fence line.

Our truck hood was clean, no hair.

The mirror was where we left it.

My cousin rested a hand on the Fender like he was greeting a horse.

We climbed the spine with the intent of two men who know how to do a job despite their nerves.

When we hit the notch where I'd backed away the day before, we stopped.

Not for any reason I can write without sounding mystical, but because the ground looked wrong.

Not a lot wrong, just a little.

The kind of wrong that happens when deer bed in a spot and you can tell by the lay of the grass and the shape of the crushed sage that there were bodies there earlier.

There were small mounds of debris, neat as promised.

Gifts like something had pulled together offerings for a child.

A blue Jay feather, a ratty chunk of deer hide, A twist of scrub oak leaves braided together by hands or teeth.

The braided thing had a thread in it.

The thread was bright orange, the exact color of the duct tape we use to flag our route in the dark.

We didn't touch any of it.

Let's go, my cousin said, his voice steady, the kind of steady that is made in a workshop and nailed together with focus.

He didn't turn.

He backed away like I had done the day before.

I matched him.

We hadn't gone 20 steps when the radio crackled.

Volume turned low because we've never turned it back up after the truck.

A little burst of static.

Then my own voice clear, as though I were standing behind myself.

Don't be a baby, it said.

Come on.

Hearing my voice say baby made something boil behind my eyes because I don't use that word.

Not out loud.

Not since a night fight in high school when I spit it at a kid I should have left alone.

Words are habits, and my habits don't include that one.

I don't know if that makes sense to anybody, but it mattered to me.

I thumbed my radio to transmit and kept my voice level.

We're leaving, I said.

We're not saying any names.

Follow if you want, but it'll be a long walk.

The radio popped again, the same voice, Mine, except from a little distance, quieter, like I was turning my head away as I talked.

I'll come, it said then, a soft whistle, almost inaudible beneath the wind.

We didn't look back at the truck.

My cousin did something he'd laugh at if you asked him on a normal day.

He pulled the wooden cross off his rear view and put it in his pocket.

He has never done that before, not for a car wash, not for a mechanic.

We drove to the station in town, filled up, bought a roll of electrical tape and two black Sharpies, then sat in the cab like men about to sign a document.

I don't know the right way to do this, he said finally.

But I know we shouldn't go home with our mouths just flapping around these sounds.

We each wrote our first names on a strip of tape and stuck it on the inside lid of our ammo boxes.

Then we each wrote a word we wouldn't use, not even as a joke, if we were in the hills and weren't sure what was listening.

I don't know why that felt like a rule instead of a superstition.

I don't know why rules comfort us when superstition feels like begging.

Maybe rules put you on the hook to act.

Begging puts you on the floor.

And then we went to the tribal police.

I'm not going to name the officer at the desk.

He listened without smiling.

That alone softened something in me.

He asked practical questions, landmarker details, directions, how long, what times.

He didn't let us wander into campfire territory.

When we finished, he stood with us in the doorway and looked at the sky like he was making a decision and finally said, this is border country.

There are things here that copy to draw.

Don't say each other's names out there unless you can touch the man you're naming.

Don't whistle for what you want.

Don't answer the same question twice.

It fit like a key in a lock I didn't know was behind my ribs.

Not because it was mystical.

Because it was a rule.

He said a thing we could do.

He didn't act like we brought him fairy dust and asked him to bless it.

We turned our tags in.

There's no graceful way to write that.

For the hunters reading this.

It burned.

Yes, I worked to save for that tag.

I scouted.

I had a buck patterned.

But there are other seasons in other hills.

And if you'd seen those prints and heard that tune and watched your own words get thrown back at you and a voice without a person in it, you'd have turned them in, too.

The lady at the desk didn't ask why.

She just ran the form and slid the paperback and said, you boys be safe.

Sometimes that's enough.

At home I took my boots out behind the shed and knocked the dirt out with a rubber mallet.

I burned the braided scrap of orange tape I found looped around 1 boot islet, even though I couldn't swear it hadn't been there before.

I hung grandpa's whistle, the actual 1A cheap tin thing we found in his tackle box after he passed on a nail next to the door and told my cousin we don't whistle in the hills anymore.

He agreed.

It's been a year, I'm not going to pretend nothing strange has happened since.

Every once in a while I'll wake in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone in the back lot testing the HASP on the shed door.

Last week my radio crackled in the garage even though the battery was out.

I was soldering a trailer wire and must have brushed the contacts.

It made the same hollow pop our radios make on connection, and for one cold second my mouth formed the start of my cousin's name before I shut it like I had bitten my own tongue.

But here's the part you probably want, the ending that isn't a coy Horror Story winking at you from the dark.

We went back to the mountains for elk in November, but we haunted the other side of the county, the side that drains West and wears a different face.

We stayed together.

We used hand signals Grandpa taught us when we were kids, and your world is small enough to fit two people in it.

We never said each other's names, not once, not even when we were shoulder to shoulder pulling a hind quarter over a deadfall.

We didn't whistle.

We didn't answer the same question twice.

We brought meat home.

We put it in the freezer.

The house smells like iron and spice when we grill.

And my little girl says deer burger even when it's elk.

And I don't correct her because that's a fight for a day that isn't today.

I don't have a picture of a track for you.

I don't have a recording for you.

I don't have proof that would stand in a court that accepts only what can be weighed or measured or sold.

I have my word and I have a set of rules written on the underside of 2 ammo box lids.

And I have a tune I will never whistle again as long as I live.

If you go out there, if you must go like a man who knows names have weight and voices can be hollow and that's something in those dark timber pockets.

Likes to borrow a shape to make you step where it wants you.

If somebody you love calls to you from 2 directions at once, meet him where you can put your hand on his shoulder, and when the Ridge time you agreed on comes, keep it.

That kept us.

We didn't go back to that drainage.

We didn't fill our mule deer tags.

We drove home the long way, stopping at the overlook where the wind Combs the cheat grass into grain and the basin rolls out like old hide.

We watch the light leave.

We put the truck in gear and then we left.