I grew up on a forty acre sand in rock farm in Oklahoma. I'm
seventy four years old now, but back when I was twelve, I got
a job driving a tractor during the hay harvest at twenty five cents an hour.
Now. That may not sound like much now, but my allowance was
twenty five cents a week, so it was a windfall for me. Plus,
riding in a tractor all day was far less work than the chores I
had to do at the farm. I would cut, rake and bail for
ten or twelve hours at a time. Well, that added up to three
dollars on most days. To me, that was a fortune. My boss
offered lunch to his workers, but he charged a quarter for a jam sandwich.
Now, jam sandwich was a piece of be loaning jammed between two pieces
of bread, and we were lucky he didn't charge for the water. The
season was coming to an end, with wet weather on the horizon and a
quarter of the field still on the ground. My boss wanted it cut and
raked and baled and in the barn before the rain hit the next morning,
so he asked me if i'd stay until the job was finished. I was
tired to the toenails, but it meant more money, so I said yes.
By midnight, everyone else was headed home. My boss usually picked me
up each morning and dropped me off at the day's end, but he was
overly tired, and I suspected that he may have tipped a few throughout the
day. He asked if I could walk home that night. It's just a
couple of miles, he said, keep the moon over your shoulder and you'll
be fine. Neither of us remembered the river and the marsh that lay between
me and the house, And besides, I was young and it didn't seem
like a big problem to me. The moon was full and bright as I
entered the woods. The storm was still in the distance, but occasional bolts
of lightning flickered on the horizon and to remind me that it was getting close.
It had been two hours and I was beginning to cuss my boss and
the swamp and my life in general. I'd kept the moon over my shoulder,
like my boss had said to do, but I was lost. Mostly
I thought about my grandmother. I knew she would be sitting on the front
porch waiting for me, and worried to death. My granny was a little
old lady who never used rough words and rarely raised her voice unless she was
provoked. When that happened, she was a force to be reckoned with.
Once I not so accidentally shot her in the backside with my baby gun.
That was not a good day for either of us. The wind was picking
up and singing in the treetops with the approaching storm. I was working my
way out of a deeper pool that I'd stumbled into when I heard something that
sounded like more than just a wind. Steering into the dark abyss that was
the swamp, I saw what I thought must be a mountain lion sitting on
a large stump. In those days of ignorant, indestructible youth, I reacted
to fear with anger, and I knelt down and searched out for a stout
stick, ignoring whatever slick scale creature slithered away from under my fingertips. I
found one and I raised it over my head. Come on you, some
of bitch, I screamed in defiance. On knocky dang head off. When
I looked again, the cat was gone. The wind rose up and how
some more, and I kept moving when it died down again, and I
heard that sound that wasn't wind. Ahead of me, in a small moonlit
clearing, I could see a shadow darker than the other, standing tall and
bulky. Its eyes glowed in the moonlight. My grandmother's warnings of haints and
buggers rang in my ears. I'd never paid much heed to those warnings before.
I knew haints were ghosts, but she'd never described a book to me.
I had assumed it was all the overactive superstition of an old lady anyway,
But now I wasn't so sure. Thinking it was better to be safe
than sorry, I started toward where I thought home was. I'd like to
say that I was too smart to run, but that would be a lie.
I was too tired. All I could muster was a fast mosey.
I didn't know if that thing was behind me, if it was even following
me, and if it was catching up with me, or what it would
do to me if it did catch me. I only knew I wanted to
get home. I swam the river and staggered up onto the opposite bank,
and, feeling the exhaustion in my legs were like lead weights. There was
no stopping, though, and I didn't know where that thing was that I
pushed on. A while later, I found myself on the highway a couple
of miles from home, too exhausted now to take another step, and I
stood there stalls in the direction I wanted to be, listing for that strange
sound that wasn't the wind, and looking like something that had been dragged out
of the swamp. When a farm row pulled up in his old truck.
You need a ride, boy, he asked. I was too dirty to
ride in the front with him, but he let me climb in the back
and drop me off on the road. In front of our mailbox. My
grandmother was in her chair on the front porch, with a cup of coffee
in her hand and a fair sized switch leaning against the wall. And with
my last bit of energy, I opened the side gate and made my way
to the porch as she called, where you been, boy? I explained
about the last of the hay and the approaching storm. I told her how
my boss had said if I kept the moon over my shoulder, I'd find
my way home. I told her how I got lost anyway. She sent
me out to the pumphouse to clean up while she made biscuits and gravy.
I guess I didn't do too good of a job cleaning up, because after
we ate, she sent me to the screened inside porch to sleep in a
guest bed. A few hours later, I woke to the sound of a
ruckus in the drive and picking out. I saw my grandmother shaking her finger
under the boss man's nose as she read him the Riot Act. You durn
the idiot a grown man, and you don't realize the moon. Don't hang
steal in the sky. You ain't so big or so old that I won't
wear out a switch on you. My boss kept his eyes on his boots.
It was a good thing to stare at when Granny was on a rant.
In the winter of nineteen ninety nine, I was in a relationship and
living with my girlfriend near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. She was
half chip Awhile on her mother's side, and she wanted to spend the winter
close to her mother. If it weren't for the excellent fishing and the best
snow mobil ride trails, I would have broken up with her to move back
to Texas. I'd been living about fifteen minutes south of Bellcourt the Turtle Mountain
Reservation for about six months, so I only had a handful of buddies,
one of which lived about thirty five miles in Duncyth. Duncith is about twenty
miles west of Belcourt, so some nights I would ride my snowmobile through bell
Court to get there. I would either ride around those areas or heading nor
to another hick town in Canada where some of the bar still honored the drinking
laws that allowed for eighteen year olds to be served. One day, when
it was still light out but getting dark around five pm, I was headed
to Duncyth to meet up with my buddy on my snowmobile. We just gotten
a fresh powder after a blizzard. My machine didn't have a res tag,
so I was bypassing Bellcourt to avoid being harassed by the reservation cops. That
whole area was dotted with lakes that in the winter became salt flats for snowmobiles.
I had a Skidoo Formula triple six hundred with every modification and upgrade available.
It was like a ninja in the snow. On this particular day,
I was following a summer four by four trail that circled the lake. It
was a wide trail in summer, but in the winter, especially after a
blizzard, there was barely room enough for one snowmobile to get through. The
trail curved to the right and followed the lake cove and dropped in elevation.
I was flying down the path when I saw that it was going to intersect
with another one about five hundred yards away at the lake bank. I had
every intention of really opening up once I hit that frozen lake. I could
also see what I thought were a couple of moose on the trail ahead.
I hit the gas, thinking it would push them onto the lake. There
been times when I've gotten really close to deer that way. As I reached
the point where the two trails met the lake, I couldn't see the moose
anymore, and I thought they must have climbed up the side of the trail.
I blasted past that point and got hit by an avalanche. I felt
my machine suspension bought them out. If I hadn't been wearing a helmet that
kept my head from being crushed against my tank, I think I would have
been hurt pretty bad. I've been doing about thirty five miles an hour at
that point of impact, and I almost flipped the machine, and as it
was, I managed to come to a stop about thirty yards onto the lake.
I was overcome with a stench that smelled like heavy of urine. Looking
back, I expected to see a moose, but that wasn't what was standing
there. It stood up and screamed long, loud sounds that was almost like
a dog's yell. It was reddish brown, like Chewbacca from Star Wars,
and covered in hair that was six to ten inches long, and it was
really skinny. It reminded me of a teenager whose head hands in height were
still way ahead of his build, or how a puppy looks real lanky.
I could even see ice balls on its hair, like snow dogs get.
Its face was black, but his eyes were blacker and sort of beady looking.
It was seven feet tall, but it definitely didn't look fully grown.
It looked emaciated. The smell was horrible. I worked maintenance in an apartment
complex a few years ago and there was a dirty hoarder whose apartment smelled almost
the same. It made me get oh God, I see those horder shows,
and I think I would hate to go in that place. But anyway,
here we go. Let's keep going with the story. The scream it
made wasn't like a roar most people say they hear. It was a scream
of shock and fear. He got his point across, and it was like
he was saying, what the hell just happened, and maybe wanted to laugh
because he thought it was funny. I was kind of in shock and trying
to keep my machine running, but it stalled out. We stared at each
other for another twenty or thirty seconds until I remembered I had a revolver in
the front pocket of my backpack. I carried it in case I broke down
and had to deal with wolves or drunken reservation boys who wanted to harass an
outsider. I was trying to reach that gun when I remembered he wasn't the
only one i'd seen. I felt a bad vibe coming from the trees behind
him and thought it must be his family group. It was like they knew
I was reaching for a gun. I felt dread in fear like I had
never felt before. I got my machine going and I got out of there
as fast as I could. When I got to my buddy's house, he
was outside waiting for me. He must have heard me coming down his drive
doing seventy or eighty miles an hour and sliding into a snowpile next to his
driveway. He looked at my sled and saw the damage to the hood,
and I explain what had happened, and he laughed, saying, you're lucky
they didn't kill you, and each you. We decided to armor ourselves,
being careful to put the weapons where they'd be easier to reach if we needed
them, and we went back to the point of that impact. There was
a lot of hair and urine and some really big tracks, but they were
gone. I wasn't about to follow their tracks into the woods that night,
so I grabbed my plastic windshield that had fallen off the hood and we went
back to my buddy's house. Later, I found a bunch of hair stuck
in the cracked hood as well, and I saved it. But my girlfriend's
mother told me it was a dog man that i'd hit and it was just
bad juju to keep it, so I burned it. I don't believe I
hit a dog man, though I think this was a bigfoot, a teenage
bigfoot. Also, don't think it meant me any harm. It just fell
off the bank as it was scrambling to get away before I passed by.
I also think they can read your mind. It did mine. If you
see one, please don't shoot it. If these things have feelings and personalities,
then they're just trying to survive just like us. They are real and
one day someone is going to prove it