Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: I've spent a long time around men who saw something
Speaker 1: they couldn't name and went back to work the next morning.
Speaker 1: There was nothing else to do. All three of these
Speaker 1: men cut timber for a living. The country they worked
Speaker 1: has mostly been logged over twice since they walked away
Speaker 1: from it. Two of them are gone now. One still
Speaker 1: answers his phone. It takes him four or five rings,
Speaker 1: like he has to cross a big room to get
Speaker 1: to it. They gave me these accounts over the better
Speaker 1: part of two years, kitchens porches, once the cab of
Speaker 1: a pickup that smelled like bar oil and old coffee.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell you exactly how i came
Speaker 1: to be sitting across from each of them. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter to the stories. What matters is that they weren't
Speaker 1: selling anything. None of them had a book, None of
Speaker 1: them wanted their last names on a word of it.
Speaker 1: I've honored that you'll meet them as Earl, Roy and Hollis.
Speaker 1: The men who worked beside them get first names too.
Speaker 1: If you've listened to me for any length of time,
Speaker 1: you know I was born a skeptic. I'll probably die one.
Speaker 1: For four decades, I've tried to separate whatever is really
Speaker 1: out there from the noise, and I've lost my patience
Speaker 1: more than once with the crowd that wants every snap
Speaker 1: twig to be a message from another dimension. So understand this.
Speaker 1: When I sit with a man like Earl, I'm not
Speaker 1: looking to believe him. I'm looking for the place where
Speaker 1: the story breaks. Most stories break. These three didn't it,
Speaker 1: Or they didn't break the way a made up story breaks,
Speaker 1: which is a different thing. And harder to put into words.
Speaker 1: Five accounts from three men. One gave me a single story,
Speaker 1: two gave me more. I've kept their words close to
Speaker 1: how they said them. I smoothed the line here and there,
Speaker 1: but the places are real, the years are as close
Speaker 1: as memory allows. I'll leave the conclusions to you. Earl
Speaker 1: set chokers on a high led show in the Oregon
Speaker 1: Coast range the summer he turned twenty two. He wanted
Speaker 1: one thing clear before he started. He hadn't been scared
Speaker 1: of anything that summer until the thing by the creek.
Speaker 1: The order of those two facts was the whole point.
Speaker 1: You got to know what a young man is like,
Speaker 1: he said. I waged about a buck seventy. I thought
Speaker 1: a falling tree was something that happened to other men.
Speaker 1: I'd already been on a crew where a fellow got
Speaker 1: cut near in half by a butt rigging that snapped loose.
Speaker 1: Seen it, helped pick up after it, and I went
Speaker 1: back the next morning and ate my eggs. So weigh
Speaker 1: the creek thing against that. I wasn't a boy that
Speaker 1: scared easy. It was a small outfit, a gipo show,
Speaker 1: he called it. That meant an independent contractor cutting on
Speaker 1: a handshake and a thin margin working ground. The big
Speaker 1: companies had passed over because it was too broken to
Speaker 1: be worth their machinery. Nine of them. A bull of
Speaker 1: the woods named Dell ran the side, two fowlers, a
Speaker 1: couple of buckers, the whistle punk, the yarder, engineer, a
Speaker 1: chaser at the landing, and earl on the rigging crew.
Speaker 1: The whistle punk was a kid of about sixteen named Arnie.
Speaker 1: I asked Earl to walk me through the work. Leave
Speaker 1: the workout, and the work is where the story lives.
Speaker 1: He laid it out the way an old hand does,
Speaker 1: slow and in order. A tall spar tree stood rigged
Speaker 1: with a main line and a haulback running off a
Speaker 1: steam donkey. A tree came down and got bucked into logs.
Speaker 1: Then it was Earle's job to climb into the slash,
Speaker 1: wrap a steel choker cable around a log and signal Arnie.
Speaker 1: Arnie blew a pattern of whistles. The pattern told the
Speaker 1: engineer to take up the slack. The log jumped and
Speaker 1: started its drag uphill, and Earle had to be clear
Speaker 1: of it before it moved. A log under tension does
Speaker 1: what it pleases, he said. The rigging crew dies more
Speaker 1: than anybody. You learn to read a log like you
Speaker 1: read weather. You keep your feet under you and your
Speaker 1: eye on the line, not on anything else. So when
Speaker 1: I tell you I was looking off into the brush
Speaker 1: instead of at my work, understand that was already wrong.
Speaker 1: That already shouldn't have happened. The first sign that summer
Speaker 1: was lunches. Everybody loses a lunch, earl said Ravens Camp robbers,
Speaker 1: those gray jay's. You leave a sandwich on a stump
Speaker 1: and turn your back, it's gone. That's nothing. What started
Speaker 1: happening was the buckets. The men kept their food in
Speaker 1: metal pails. They set them in the shade of one
Speaker 1: particular hemlock down by the creek, where it stayed cool
Speaker 1: through the morning. Something started getting into them, not the
Speaker 1: way an animal does it. An animal tears and bolts
Speaker 1: and leaves a mess. This took the lids off clean
Speaker 1: and set them down beside the pails upright the way
Speaker 1: a man would. The food went whole. One bucket would
Speaker 1: have a thermist standing inside it and everything else gone.
Speaker 1: That was the part that got to Dell. A bear
Speaker 1: doesn't stand a thermis back up after it eats your sandwich.
Speaker 1: They blamed a man. There's always a man to blame.
Speaker 1: They settled on a quiet bucker named Cliff, who ate
Speaker 1: enormous amounts and never seemed to have his own food along.
Speaker 1: Dell braced him about it. Cliff got hot. There was
Speaker 1: nearly a fight over by the lane, two men with
Speaker 1: their shirts off in the dirt before the chaser got
Speaker 1: between them. So two of the crew hit up the
Speaker 1: slope one noon to watch the buckets and settle it.
Speaker 1: They didn't see Cliff, Earl said, they didn't see anything.
Speaker 1: But while they're up there watching every man's bucket got
Speaker 1: cleaned out. They were looking right down at that hemlock
Speaker 1: the whole time and couldn't tell you how. One of them,
Speaker 1: fellow named Lewis, said it was like the food just left.
Speaker 1: That's when it stopped being a joke. Lewis quit at
Speaker 1: the end of that week. He gave a reason that
Speaker 1: didn't sound like a lie. And I'd heard a lot
Speaker 1: of men lie about why they were quitting a hard show.
Speaker 1: His was different. After that, the crew kept their food
Speaker 1: up at the landing. The bucket business stopped cold. Earle
Speaker 1: thought that meant something by itself. It wasn't a bear
Speaker 1: or a coon. He said, it moved its operation when
Speaker 1: we moved ours. It watched what we did and changed
Speaker 1: what it did. Try and tell me a bear does that.
Speaker 1: He'd started noticing other things by then, and a man
Speaker 1: who starts noticing can't stop. Some mornings, the dogs wouldn't
Speaker 1: go down to the bottom. The outfit kept too, a
Speaker 1: black mongrel named Tar that belonged to nobody in particular,
Speaker 1: and an old blue heeler the chaser owned. Those dogs
Speaker 1: ran the woods all day. They slept under the idling
Speaker 1: yard or with the whole rig shaking over them. But
Speaker 1: some mornings they'd get to one spot on the skid road,
Speaker 1: right where the ground tip down toward the creek, and stop.
Speaker 1: You couldn't make them go further. Tar would stand with
Speaker 1: his hackles up, his weight back on his haunches, and
Speaker 1: make a low sound, almost a moan. Earl hadn't heard
Speaker 1: a dog make it before. The heeler would slink back
Speaker 1: up the road and have to ride in the truck
Speaker 1: the rest of the day, or it'd just go home.
Speaker 1: You could whip Tar and he wouldn't go, Earle said.
Speaker 1: And Tar was a dog that'd take a whipping and
Speaker 1: forgive you and follow you anyway, but not down there,
Speaker 1: not those mornings. And here's the thing. The mornings the
Speaker 1: dogs balked were the mornings there was sign. The sign
Speaker 1: was tracks. They showed up in the soft ground by
Speaker 1: the creek where the men crossed on a downed log.
Speaker 1: Earl got careful here. He knew what I'd ask. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to hand you a measurement I made up
Speaker 1: forty years after he said, I didn't measure. I was
Speaker 1: a kid with work to do, and Dale didn't want
Speaker 1: to standing around looking at mud, said it slowed the show.
Speaker 1: But I put my own boot down inside one once
Speaker 1: stood my foot in the heel of it. I wore
Speaker 1: a size eleven. My whole boot sat in the heel
Speaker 1: of that track, with room left at the front for
Speaker 1: another half a foot of foot. That's not off a ruler.
Speaker 1: That's my own boot, and I remember it because of
Speaker 1: what it did to my stomach. It was the toes
Speaker 1: that stayed with him, not the size he'd seen big
Speaker 1: bear track. A bear's hind foot can look human to
Speaker 1: a man who wants it to. But these had toes
Speaker 1: that gripped where the thing pushed off going up the bank.
Speaker 1: The toes dug in and dragged the mud. Five of
Speaker 1: them splayed with an arch behind a bear's flat footed
Speaker 1: Earl said, Bella told me later the words plantigrade. This
Speaker 1: had an arch in it, like you and me. It
Speaker 1: walked the way we walk. Heel, then roll, then push
Speaker 1: off the toes. I've stepped in enough mud in my
Speaker 1: life to read a footprint that wasn't an animal's gait.
Speaker 1: It came to a head on a hot still day
Speaker 1: in August. Earl set a choker on a big fur
Speaker 1: down in the draw and signaled Arnie. The kid blew
Speaker 1: the line of whistles. The log came alive and started
Speaker 1: grinding uphill. Earle stepped back into the brush to be
Speaker 1: clear of it, into a wall of head high salal,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't alone in there. Earle turned his coffee
Speaker 1: cup on the table. A while I didn't see a face.
Speaker 1: I saw a back and a shoulder in an arm
Speaker 1: maybe twenty feet off downhill of me, bent over in
Speaker 1: the salal. It was crouched dark. The hair on it
Speaker 1: didn't lay like a bear's coat. A bear's coat lay slick.
Speaker 1: This hung longer, and it hung off the arm and
Speaker 1: the shoulder, and the shoulder was wrong, too wide, set
Speaker 1: too high, and the arm coming down off it was
Speaker 1: too long. The whole of it bent over like that
Speaker 1: was still bigger than it had any right to be.
Speaker 1: If it had stood up straight, I don't know what
Speaker 1: i'd have done. I think about that it never stood up.
Speaker 1: I think that's part of why I'm sitting here talking
Speaker 1: to you. The log ground uphill behind him, Earle stood
Speaker 1: caught between the noise of the machine and the thing
Speaker 1: in the brush. His body would only do one thing,
Speaker 1: which was go still. The thing wasn't looking at it.
Speaker 1: Its head was turned downhill toward the creek. Earle had
Speaker 1: the sense it hadn't marked him, because the yard aer
Speaker 1: covered the sound of him. The machine was the only
Speaker 1: reason he was still a secret. Then it moved. It
Speaker 1: went downhill, and it didn't crash off the way a
Speaker 1: startled animal crashes. It went through that salal almost without
Speaker 1: a sound, Earle said, head high, brush thick, and it
Speaker 1: went through it in three or four long moves. The
Speaker 1: brush closed up behind it, and then there was nothing.
Speaker 1: A second later. The only proof I had that I'd
Speaker 1: seen anything was my own legs. They'd gone to water.
Speaker 1: I sat down on a stump and put my head
Speaker 1: between my knees. Up at the landing, the chasers cussing
Speaker 1: me over the whistle for not setting the next choker,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't have set one right then to save
Speaker 1: the company. He didn't tell anybody for two days. When
Speaker 1: he finally told Dell, Dale didn't laugh and didn't call
Speaker 1: him a liar. Deal had set chokers on a show
Speaker 1: up in Washington back in the thirties. He said, the
Speaker 1: same kind of thing had run them off a side once.
Speaker 1: The old hands there had a name for it. The
Speaker 1: name wasn't Bigfoot. Nobody said Bigfoot in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: The name was just the big fellow. You said it low,
Speaker 1: the way you'd say a thing about a man whose
Speaker 1: attention you didn't want to draw. Dale told me to
Speaker 1: keep setting chokers and keep my mouth shut. Earle said, said,
Speaker 1: as long as it kept it its distance, we'd keep cutting.
Speaker 1: If it didn't keep its distance, we talk about it. Then.
Speaker 1: Earl smiled a little. The only time in the whole telling.
Speaker 1: That was the entire company policy on it. Keep cutting
Speaker 1: unless it gets closer. We finished the show in September.
Speaker 1: It kept its distance. The dogs balked some mornings and
Speaker 1: not others. The tracks came and went with the dogs.
Speaker 1: No man on that crew ever stood up in a
Speaker 1: tavern and told it. Far as I know, he didn't
Speaker 1: tell it himself for the better part of three decades.
Speaker 1: Then a grandchild asked him why he wouldn't go camping
Speaker 1: of all things, and the whole of it came out
Speaker 1: at a kitchen table. The kid was ten and probably
Speaker 1: a little too young to hear what his granddad told him.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the part I chew on, Earl said
Speaker 1: near the end. It wasn't looking at me. It was
Speaker 1: looking downhill, at the creek, at the men crossing on
Speaker 1: the log down there, four or five of them. I
Speaker 1: could see from where I stood. It was watching the
Speaker 1: men work. I've won ever since. How many mornings it
Speaker 1: stood in that brush at the edge of our show
Speaker 1: and watched us cut down its country before the one
Speaker 1: day the machine got loud enough that I backed up
Speaker 1: into it. Three years later, Earl gave me a second story.
Speaker 1: By nineteen sixty one, Earl had moved to a bigger outfit.
Speaker 1: He was running a chainsaw himself, now a mall saw
Speaker 1: he hated, and then a McCulloch he came to love.
Speaker 1: They sent him up with a small crew to fall
Speaker 1: and bucket unit on the far side of a long
Speaker 1: lake in the Cascades. It was easier to reach by
Speaker 1: water than by road. Four of them lived in at
Speaker 1: a spike camp on the lake shore for the better
Speaker 1: part of two weeks. They had a wall tent, a
Speaker 1: sheet metal cook stove, and a battered aluminum boat. They
Speaker 1: used to cross to the unit each morning and back
Speaker 1: each night. The four were Earl, a faller named Walt,
Speaker 1: a young bucker named Dean, and the man who ran
Speaker 1: the boat and did the cooking. Walt was twenty years
Speaker 1: older and had falled timber since before the war. Dean
Speaker 1: never shut up. The cook Earl called Pop, and he
Speaker 1: never learned his right name. There was a dog too,
Speaker 1: Walt's dog, a wiry brown shepherd looking thing called Be,
Speaker 1: short for something. Walt never said. Be slept in the
Speaker 1: tent with the men and had opinions about everything. Be
Speaker 1: had a thing she did at the flap of the tent.
Speaker 1: At night. Earle said she'd put her nose out and
Speaker 1: read the air. Most nights she'd snort, turn around and
Speaker 1: flop down by Walt Like that settled it. After about
Speaker 1: the fourth night up there, she quit flopping down. She'd
Speaker 1: read the air and then back up, walk backward into
Speaker 1: the tent, never turned her tail to the door. She'd
Speaker 1: get herself between Walt's bed roll and the canvas wall
Speaker 1: and stay there shaking. Once be started that, she did
Speaker 1: it every night till we left. The unit ran down
Speaker 1: a slope to the water on the far shore. The
Speaker 1: work was ordinary at first, falling bucking, decking logs by
Speaker 1: the water to be rafted out later, But Earle started
Speaker 1: noticing things over there in the daylight before the camp
Speaker 1: ever got bad at night. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The first
Speaker 1: was a stretch of young hemlock and vine maple at
Speaker 1: the edge of the cut. The tops were twisted, not broke,
Speaker 1: he said, twisted saplings about as big around as your wrist,
Speaker 1: bent over the tops, wound around each other and tucked
Speaker 1: six seven foot off the ground, more than a man
Speaker 1: could reach without something to stand on, and there wasn't
Speaker 1: anything to stand on. Walt looked at that a long
Speaker 1: time and didn't say what he thought. I didn't ask.
Speaker 1: I'd seen Walt's face go like that before, and I'd
Speaker 1: learned the hard way to leave him be. The second
Speaker 1: daytime thing was a fish. Dean kept a stringer of
Speaker 1: trout in the lake, off the log raft for the cook.
Speaker 1: One morning, the stringer came up with the fish gone,
Speaker 1: but the stringer still tied off, still looped through where
Speaker 1: the fish had been, neat, not chewed, snapped like a
Speaker 1: man had slid them off one at a time. An
Speaker 1: otter doesn't do that. A bear takes the stringer in all.
Speaker 1: Pop blamed an otter anyway, loud about it. Earl had
Speaker 1: noticed Pop blaming things loud that summer, louder when he
Speaker 1: didn't believe himself. Dean went the other way. The kid
Speaker 1: who never shut up started eating his supper fast and
Speaker 1: turning in early, and one evening Earle found him down
Speaker 1: at the boat, checking the gas can and the oars,
Speaker 1: not saying why, just making sure they'd start and pull
Speaker 1: if it came to that. I pressed Earl on Walt.
Speaker 1: Walt was the one man on that crew who never
Speaker 1: reached for a comfortable answer, and Earl said Walt had
Speaker 1: a reason. Walt told him about it the second week
Speaker 1: after it was over, when they were back at the
Speaker 1: main camp, passing a bottle, he'd had a night like
Speaker 1: it once before. Up the Skagt nineteen thirty eight, a
Speaker 1: whole crew got gear thrown at them out of the dark.
Speaker 1: One man, by his own account, was picked up off
Speaker 1: the ground and said down again a few feet over.
Speaker 1: Not hurt, just moved like somebody had shifted a chair
Speaker 1: out of the path. Walt said. The man who got
Speaker 1: moved never worked timber again. Earle told me went to
Speaker 1: the coast and dug clams the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: Walt said he'd believe that man's story. The first hard
Speaker 1: night came with rocks they'd eaten and turned in the
Speaker 1: stove ticked as it cooled. Somewhere past full dark, a
Speaker 1: rock came out of the trees and hit the lake.
Speaker 1: Earl knew the sound a stone hitting deep water, that
Speaker 1: round hollow plunk, Then another, then one off the boat,
Speaker 1: a clang off the aluminum hull where it was pulled
Speaker 1: up on the gravel, loud as a struck bell in
Speaker 1: all that quiet, pop says kids, Earle said, and laughed
Speaker 1: at himself for it. Picture where we were a full
Speaker 1: day's travel by water from the nearest road end, no
Speaker 1: road end at all, no earthly reason for a living
Speaker 1: soul to be on that shore in the dark. CoP's
Speaker 1: first word is kids, because that's what the mind reaches for.
Speaker 1: Anything but the real thing. The mind will hand you kids,
Speaker 1: an otter, a falling branch, anything with the name you
Speaker 1: already own. Walt didn't say kids. Walt sat up and
Speaker 1: went still and told the others to quit talking. The
Speaker 1: rocks kept coming, not a barrage, one, then a weight,
Speaker 1: then another, from different points along the tree line. The
Speaker 1: spacing was the worst of it. A rock slide doesn't
Speaker 1: pace itself, a rolling stone doesn't change its address. Something
Speaker 1: was throwing, and it was moving between throws in no hurry,
Speaker 1: walking the tree line and lobbing stones at the camp
Speaker 1: like a man skipping rocks to pass an evening. Dean
Speaker 1: wanted to go out with the lantern and look. Walt
Speaker 1: told him to sit down. They argued. Dean said they
Speaker 1: couldn't just lay there and take it. Walt said that
Speaker 1: was exactly what they were going to do. What ended
Speaker 1: the argument was b She'd been pressed against the back
Speaker 1: wall the whole time. She broke into a steady, low growl,
Speaker 1: aimed at the lakeside wall of the tent, every hair
Speaker 1: standing by then. It wasn't in the tree line. It
Speaker 1: was between the trees and the tent. They could hear it,
Speaker 1: not footsteps, exactly, but the gravel of the shore shifting
Speaker 1: under a slow, great weight and a breathing Earl swore
Speaker 1: was too low and too big, with a catch in it,
Speaker 1: like a deep chested man breathing through his mouth. You
Speaker 1: want to know what we did, Earle said, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you straight nothing. Four grown men in a rifle, and
Speaker 1: we did nothing. Walt had a thirty thirty in the tent.
Speaker 1: It was across his lap and he never raised it. Afterward.
Speaker 1: I asked him why. He said, you don't shoot at
Speaker 1: a sound in the dark when you can't see the
Speaker 1: size of it. All you'll do is make it mad
Speaker 1: and tell it just where you are. He was right,
Speaker 1: truth was, none of us could have lifted our arms.
Speaker 1: Scared took the strength right out of us. I'd never
Speaker 1: had at it before that night, twenty five years old.
Speaker 1: Never wanted it again. I got it twice more in
Speaker 1: my life, and both times I knew it right off
Speaker 1: the weight moved along the lake side of the tent
Speaker 1: end to end slow. Once something brushed the canvas high up,
Speaker 1: higher than a man would reach. A slow drag along
Speaker 1: the slope of the wall tents roof. The whole tent
Speaker 1: shivered with it became undone. Then it left, the same
Speaker 1: slow weight, going back across the gravel toward the trees, unhurried,
Speaker 1: the breathing fading off. A long while later, far up
Speaker 1: the slope came a single sound none of them could name,
Speaker 1: not a howl, not a scream, something between. It rose
Speaker 1: and fell the once and quit. Nobody slept. When the
Speaker 1: gray finally came up over the lake, the four of
Speaker 1: them went out together, all four, nobody willing to be
Speaker 1: alone on that shore. Even in the light. They read
Speaker 1: the ground revel won't take a track, good, Earle said,
Speaker 1: But there was a soft strip up where the gravel
Speaker 1: met the doff needles and dirt. There were prints in it,
Speaker 1: same as I'd seen by the creek three years before,
Speaker 1: only bigger. And here's the thing I'll carry to the grave.
Speaker 1: They came down out of the trees and walked to
Speaker 1: the back of the tent, and at one spot right
Speaker 1: behind where Walt and I had laid with about a
Speaker 1: quarter inch of canvas between us and it. There were
Speaker 1: two of them set side by side deep where it
Speaker 1: had stood still. It stopped behind us and stood there
Speaker 1: how long I can't tell you. Then it walked on.
Speaker 1: Walt looked at those two deep prints a good while.
Speaker 1: Then he went and got his gear and started carrying
Speaker 1: it down to the boat. The rest of us did
Speaker 1: the same. Nobody called a voat. Walt started carrying gear
Speaker 1: to the boat, and the rest of us followed. They
Speaker 1: loaded the boat and left the unit half cut. They
Speaker 1: ran the length of that lake in the early light,
Speaker 1: with the motor wide open. Pop had argued kids the
Speaker 1: night before. Now he ran the boat of ground hard
Speaker 1: at the far landing, because he wouldn't throttle down till
Speaker 1: the bough hit gravel and he could step out onto
Speaker 1: solid ground. We left tools up there, Earle said, good saws.
Speaker 1: Walt left a saw. A faller doesn't leave a saw.
Speaker 1: You'd as soon leave your right hand. We didn't go
Speaker 1: back for them. The company sent two other men up
Speaker 1: about a week later, after the story got laughed down
Speaker 1: to nothing around the shop. Those two came back the
Speaker 1: same day. Both of them tools in hand and a
Speaker 1: look on them. One transferred to the mill and never
Speaker 1: went in the timber again. The other I drank with
Speaker 1: for years. The only thing he'd ever say was that
Speaker 1: we'd been right to run. Said he hadn't even gone
Speaker 1: up the bank to where the camp had been, grabbed
Speaker 1: the saws off the deck by the water, put back out,
Speaker 1: and never set a foot in the trees. I asked
Speaker 1: Earl whether it had been trying to get at them
Speaker 1: or only looking them over. He gave me an answer
Speaker 1: he'd plainly worn smooth over forty years. If it had
Speaker 1: wanted in that tent, it would have come in that tent,
Speaker 1: he said. We were canvas and a scared dog. It
Speaker 1: stood behind us, close enough to lay its hand on
Speaker 1: the wall, and it chose not to. I decided I'm grateful,
Speaker 1: and I decided I'm not going to think too hard
Speaker 1: about a thing that big doing any choosing. That road
Speaker 1: don't lead anywhere a man wants to sleep at night.
Speaker 1: That's as far as I take it, and I've had
Speaker 1: a lot of years to take it further. If I
Speaker 1: was gonna. Roy was a faller in the redwoods of
Speaker 1: northern California. He was the hardest of the three to
Speaker 1: get anything out of. He didn't like to talk and
Speaker 1: didn't like the subject. He gave me his account because
Speaker 1: a man we both knew vouched for me. He'd followed
Speaker 1: the big trees for an outfit, cutting old growth coast
Speaker 1: redwood in the early sixties before the parks took the
Speaker 1: last of the best of it. He started with the
Speaker 1: scale of the place. Without that, he said, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: understand what he saw. You ever stand under one? He said,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a question, a real one. Not the second
Speaker 1: growth they got. Now. Now a tree that's been standing
Speaker 1: since before there was a roam. You can't see the
Speaker 1: top of it from the base. The limbs start higher
Speaker 1: than most trees ever get. We cut a face in
Speaker 1: the bottom of one, big enough to lay a man
Speaker 1: down flat. Inside the cut, we cut stumps you could
Speaker 1: have parked a car on. I'm telling you this so
Speaker 1: when I say the thing I saw was tall, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm setting it against. I'm not a man
Speaker 1: who's impressed by tall. I cut tall for a living
Speaker 1: forty years. It never once impressed me. That thing impressed me.
Speaker 1: Roy worked with a partner named Lawn first on the
Speaker 1: misery whip. The two man crosscut saw, then on the
Speaker 1: chainsaws when the saws came in heavy. The two of
Speaker 1: them had a routine. Falling a tree will kill both
Speaker 1: men if either one quits paying attention for a breath.
Speaker 1: He told me about the work. First, a faller reads
Speaker 1: the lean of a tree, the wind, the ground it
Speaker 1: has to land on. He cuts a face on the
Speaker 1: side he wants it to go, and makes the back cut,
Speaker 1: leaving a hinge of wood to steer it down. The
Speaker 1: danger in a big redwood is the barber chair. The
Speaker 1: trunk split straight up as it falls and kicks the
Speaker 1: butt back over the faller. A man who barber chairs
Speaker 1: an old redwood usually doesn't get a second mistake. There'd
Speaker 1: been signed before the day at the gallery, Roy said,
Speaker 1: though he thought nothing of it. Then the donkey engine
Speaker 1: that powered their yarding sat down by the landing. The
Speaker 1: donkey puncher kept a dog tied near it, and that
Speaker 1: dog took to barking itself raw up the hill at
Speaker 1: nothing two three evenings running. Then the puncher pulled a
Speaker 1: knot of long dark hair off the bark of a
Speaker 1: stump up where the dog kept facing it wasn't deer,
Speaker 1: it wasn't bare, it wasn't any color a man's hair
Speaker 1: comes in. He brought it down to the crummy the
Speaker 1: crew truck and showed it around and got laughed at
Speaker 1: and threw it in the fire. I wish to God
Speaker 1: we'd kept that hair, Roy said, But you don't think
Speaker 1: you're young most and tired. A fella's got hair off
Speaker 1: a stump, and it's a thing to rib him about,
Speaker 1: not a thing to save. We burned it, laughing. There'd
Speaker 1: been a stink too some mornings hanging in the low
Speaker 1: ground by the creek before the sun got into the
Speaker 1: canyon and moved the air. The men blamed it on
Speaker 1: a dead something washed up the creek and never went
Speaker 1: to find. I asked about Lawn. Eleven years is a
Speaker 1: long time to fall timber with one man, Roy said.
Speaker 1: The two of them started as boys on the misery whip.
Speaker 1: Lawn once pulled Roy clear of a widow maker, a
Speaker 1: dead limb that came down out of a tree they
Speaker 1: were falling and would have caved Roy's skull. Lawn got
Speaker 1: a fist in his collar and yanked him a yard sideways.
Speaker 1: Said nothing about it then or after years later, when
Speaker 1: Roy walked down off that hill to Lawn and they
Speaker 1: traded six words and quit for the day. That was
Speaker 1: the whole record. Two men who'd already saved each other
Speaker 1: once did not waste breath dressing up fear. We were
Speaker 1: on a steep side hill, Roy said, cutting down toward
Speaker 1: a creek. I'd walked off a little way alone to
Speaker 1: look at a leaner, a big one with a heavy
Speaker 1: lean that was going to have to be cut careful,
Speaker 1: or it did a chair on us. I'm stood there
Speaker 1: figuring the lean, reading what little wind there was down
Speaker 1: in that hole, and I look up the hill through
Speaker 1: the trees. The stand opens out into a kind of
Speaker 1: gallery up there, big trees spaced wide, not much brush
Speaker 1: under them because the big ones shade everything out. And
Speaker 1: there's something standing up there against one of the trunks.
Speaker 1: At first Roy thought it was lawn leaning against a tree,
Speaker 1: waiting on him, because it stood the way a man stands.
Speaker 1: Roy said, upright, easy, one shoulder near the bark. I
Speaker 1: damn near called out, Lawn, you ready, before I caught myself.
Speaker 1: Lin wasn't up there. Lin was below me. I could
Speaker 1: hear his saw cooling and him hawking and spitting the
Speaker 1: way he did so, if lin's below me, who's up
Speaker 1: there leaning on my tree? The thing against the trunk
Speaker 1: was too big to be lawn, too big to be
Speaker 1: any man. Roy stood there, measuring it against the tree,
Speaker 1: then against lawn, then against every man he had ever
Speaker 1: worked beside. I judge height for a living. He said,
Speaker 1: have to you misjudge the height of a tree. You
Speaker 1: misjudge where the top lands you kill somebody. That trunk
Speaker 1: itt was stood against. I'd already looked that tree over.
Speaker 1: It was on my list. I knew about where the
Speaker 1: first big limb came off it, and I knew that height.
Speaker 1: This thing's head stood flat on the ground, came up
Speaker 1: past where a tall man's head would be by half
Speaker 1: a man. Again, I put it near eight foot. I've
Speaker 1: heard fellas say ten twelve, and I think they're scared
Speaker 1: into it or lying. I'll say near eight, and I'll
Speaker 1: stand on it in front of God. I had a
Speaker 1: known tree to set it against. That's more than most
Speaker 1: men who've seen one ever get to say. It was
Speaker 1: dark in color, dark and uneven, lighter across the shoulders
Speaker 1: and upper back, where the gray light came down through
Speaker 1: the canopy darker below, and it was watching the two
Speaker 1: of them work. Its head turned to follow ln saw
Speaker 1: down below, then turned slow to take in Roy. When
Speaker 1: Roy stopped and stood square and looked straight up at it,
Speaker 1: the quality of its stillness changed. He'd seen deer do
Speaker 1: that still one second, locked on the next. Then it
Speaker 1: did the thing I never told but two living people
Speaker 1: before you, Roy said. It reached up with the one
Speaker 1: arm slow, no hurry in It laid its hand flat
Speaker 1: against the trunk way up past where I could ever reach,
Speaker 1: standing on a stump, and it knocked two raps with
Speaker 1: the flat of its hand on the wood that would
Speaker 1: crack the sound across the whole hillside loud. You don't
Speaker 1: think of a knock carrying like that, but this did.
Speaker 1: Then it held still and waited down below me. Laan
Speaker 1: saw had quit, lawn had gone dead quiet, and from
Speaker 1: off across the canyon a long way off, two raps
Speaker 1: came back. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. He thought about those two
Speaker 1: answering raps for forty years. Those raps ruined the woods
Speaker 1: for him more than the size of it, more than
Speaker 1: the smell he caught a few seconds later, when a
Speaker 1: little draft came up the hill, that wet, rank weight
Speaker 1: of a smell. It told me there was two of them,
Speaker 1: he said, at the least the one I could see,
Speaker 1: and the one across the canyon answering it. And for
Speaker 1: all I'll ever know, a third and a fourth stood
Speaker 1: in that gallery. I couldn't pick out dark on dark.
Speaker 1: The one I could see had just said something to
Speaker 1: the others, and I didn't know what it said. I'm
Speaker 1: stood there alone, one hundred feet up the hill from
Speaker 1: my partner with the saw. I'd have to bend down
Speaker 1: and pull start before it'd do me a lick of
Speaker 1: good against anything. That's the moment of my life. I'll
Speaker 1: answer for if I'm asked to answer for any of it.
Speaker 1: He didn't run, He told me that plane, and a
Speaker 1: little proud of it. He picked his saw up off
Speaker 1: the ground and walked downhill to lawn, backward, watching the
Speaker 1: thing the whole way down. It watched him. It didn't
Speaker 1: come down off the bench. When he got to lawn,
Speaker 1: Lon's face had gone the color of a fish belly.
Speaker 1: Lawn had watched the whole of it from below the
Speaker 1: reach the knock the answer from across the canyon, LN
Speaker 1: says to me, real quiet, you see that, I says,
Speaker 1: I saw it. LN says we're done here today. I
Speaker 1: says we are. That was the whole conversation. They picked
Speaker 1: up their saws and walked off the hill. The two
Speaker 1: of them walked off that side hill and didn't follow
Speaker 1: the leaner. They told the bullbuck they'd found heart rot
Speaker 1: in the stand and needed to move the show. It
Speaker 1: was a lie. The bullbuck either believed them or chose
Speaker 1: to Roy and Lawn weren't men who came in with stories.
Speaker 1: The show moved to a different draw the next day.
Speaker 1: Roy never went back to that gallery of big trees.
Speaker 1: The leaner with the heavy lean was far as he
Speaker 1: ever knew, still standing on that sidehill when the company
Speaker 1: finished the unit and pulled out one old redwood left
Speaker 1: uncut for a reason that went in the books as rot.
Speaker 1: I've thought about that tree being out there still, he said.
Speaker 1: If the loggers sense didn't get it, and the park
Speaker 1: took that ground, it could be stood there. Yet, the
Speaker 1: only tree on the hill I ever walked away from,
Speaker 1: and the thing that made me walk away from it,
Speaker 1: Standing on the ground at its foot, like it owned
Speaker 1: the place. After a while, I figured it did. It
Speaker 1: owned that place a good long while before we showed
Speaker 1: up to cut it down. I asked Roy whether he
Speaker 1: believed in bigfoot. I don't believe in it, he said,
Speaker 1: I saw one. Belief's got nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: Belief is for things you didn't see. A man who
Speaker 1: believes gets to wonder, maybe even enjoy the wondering. A
Speaker 1: man who saw has to live with it. No one
Speaker 1: gave him no comfort. I'd rather have not seen it.
Speaker 1: I'd rather be one of the believers wondering. Lawn felt
Speaker 1: the same. We never spoke of again after that day.
Speaker 1: Eleven more years working side by side, and not one word.
Speaker 1: When Lawn was dying, he had me come sit with him,
Speaker 1: and the only thing he wanted to talk about was
Speaker 1: that hillside. What it might have said with those two knocks,
Speaker 1: whether the other one across the canyon was its mate
Speaker 1: or its young or what two old men? And that's
Speaker 1: the thing. Lawn spent some of his last good afternoons on,
Speaker 1: So you tell me what we saw. I quit trying to.
Speaker 1: Hollis cut timber in the Idaho Panhandle and over into
Speaker 1: western Montana for better than thirty years. He was a
Speaker 1: different kind of man than the other two. Earl had
Speaker 1: been rattled by what he saw all his life. Roy
Speaker 1: had been soured on the woods by it. Hollis told
Speaker 1: his too, like a man talking about a flat tire.
Speaker 1: He once changed dry, unbothered, like it was just a
Speaker 1: thing that happened in a long life full of things
Speaker 1: that happened. I thought about why it don't sit on
Speaker 1: me the way it sits on some Holis said, it's
Speaker 1: because I was raised on it. My dad, my uncle's
Speaker 1: they all knew about it, had a name for it
Speaker 1: in our family before I was ever born. They called
Speaker 1: it the woods Boss. That was a joke. The woods
Speaker 1: Boss was the man who ran the logging show. The
Speaker 1: family joke ran that there was a bigger woods boss
Speaker 1: out there than him, and you didn't want to cross
Speaker 1: either one. But you for sure didn't want to cross
Speaker 1: the big one. So it never cracked my world open
Speaker 1: the way it did for some men. In my world,
Speaker 1: it was always there meeting It was like running into
Speaker 1: a fellow at the feed store after hearing his name.
Speaker 1: Your whole life before he gave me the road, he
Speaker 1: gave me the sign he grew up with. He wanted
Speaker 1: me to understand he hadn't gone into the woods green.
Speaker 1: There were tracks his uncle showed him as a boy
Speaker 1: in a snow melt mud bank. His uncle made no
Speaker 1: fuss over them, just pointed with his chin and said,
Speaker 1: there's the woods. Boss been through and walked on. There
Speaker 1: was a deer once, a whole mule deer dough that
Speaker 1: Hollis found wedged up in the fork of a tree
Speaker 1: higher than he could reach, Dead and stiff, and put
Speaker 1: there on purpose. His dad told him to leave it
Speaker 1: bea and not go back to that draw for a while.
Speaker 1: And they didn't A cattle cash a kill, Hollis said,
Speaker 1: But a cat caches it on the ground underbrush, and
Speaker 1: a cat eats on it. Nothing had eaten on this dough.
Speaker 1: It was just put up there, stored or showed off.
Speaker 1: I never decided which, and left it at that that
Speaker 1: particular fall, the fall of nineteen seventy one, his ground
Speaker 1: had been giving him sign all season. The crew kept
Speaker 1: finding their flagging tape, moved orange ribbon they hung to
Speaker 1: mark the units, and the property lines pulled down off
Speaker 1: the limbs where they'd tied it, and dropped on the ground,
Speaker 1: or worse, retied looser by something that had watched them
Speaker 1: tie it and made a poor copy of the knot.
Speaker 1: There was a spring up in the cut where the
Speaker 1: men filled their water jugs. One morning. There were tracks
Speaker 1: all around the mud of it, the long, flat footed kind,
Speaker 1: with these that spread like the thing had stood and drunk.
Speaker 1: There in the night, a flat rock the size of
Speaker 1: a truck hood lay turned over beside it. Hollis knew
Speaker 1: for a fact it had been the other way up
Speaker 1: the week before, because he'd eaten his lunch sitting on it.
Speaker 1: Took two of us to roll it back, just to see,
Speaker 1: Hollis said, heavy, and it had been flipped like a
Speaker 1: man flips a flapjack. They'll turn rocks over for the
Speaker 1: grubs and the bugs under them, same as a bear.
Speaker 1: Only a bear can't turn a rock that needs two
Speaker 1: men to flip it. I quit eating my lunch on
Speaker 1: that rock. The first time he met the big One
Speaker 1: face to face, near as a man meets a thing
Speaker 1: in the dark, was on a logging road at night.
Speaker 1: Hollis was driving out alone. He'd stayed late to fix
Speaker 1: a hydraulic line on a piece of equipment so the
Speaker 1: crew wouldn't lose the morning to it. He was coming
Speaker 1: down a long grade on a one lane dirt road,
Speaker 1: the kind with a cutbank rising on one side and
Speaker 1: a drop falling off the other, going slow because the
Speaker 1: road was bad, and his head lights were the only
Speaker 1: lights for fifteen miles in any direction. There's a stretch
Speaker 1: where the road runs flat aways along a bench before
Speaker 1: it drops off again. Alis said, I come around onto
Speaker 1: that flat and my lights catch eyes up the bank
Speaker 1: off to the right, two of them and high. Now
Speaker 1: I've put a lot of eyes in my head lights
Speaker 1: over the years, deer, elk, cats, bear owls on a snag, coons.
Speaker 1: You read the height off the ground, the spread between them,
Speaker 1: the color of the shine. Most times you know what
Speaker 1: you're looking at before you say it to yourself. These
Speaker 1: were too high for anything on four legs short of
Speaker 1: a moose. They weren't a moose's eyes weren't set wide
Speaker 1: like a moose. And there wasn't any moose under them,
Speaker 1: no long head, no rack, nothing. There was something stood
Speaker 1: up on two legs up that bank, and its eyes
Speaker 1: were about even with the top of my truck cab.
Speaker 1: It was up on a bank above the road to
Speaker 1: start with, stood flat on the road next to me,
Speaker 1: looked me in the chest. At the least he stopped
Speaker 1: the truck. Any man would. Any man who tells you
Speaker 1: he'd have driven on through has never had it happen.
Speaker 1: He sat there with it pinned in his lights, except
Speaker 1: the lights didn't really reach it, only the eyes. The
Speaker 1: bank rose above the throw of the beams, so what
Speaker 1: he had was two eyes the color of a reflector,
Speaker 1: hung in the black above his head lights, dead still
Speaker 1: looking down at him. I did a thing. I still
Speaker 1: can't tell you why I did, Hollis said. I rolled
Speaker 1: my window down. I think I wanted to hear it.
Speaker 1: Once that window was down, I could hear it breathing
Speaker 1: slow and deep, and I could smell it. That's the part.
Speaker 1: Folks don't expect the smell. The eyes you can talk
Speaker 1: yourself out of. But the smell comes in the window
Speaker 1: on the cold night air, and there's no arguing with
Speaker 1: your own nose. People say it's like a wet dog
Speaker 1: and a skunk and an outhouse all run together. That's
Speaker 1: about the size of it. But it's stronger than you
Speaker 1: believe a smell could be. There's a weight to it.
Speaker 1: Once you've had it in your nose, you carry it,
Speaker 1: and you know it the next time before you see
Speaker 1: anything at all. He sat there with the window down.
Speaker 1: The thing stood up the bank for a while, neither
Speaker 1: of them did one thing. Then it moved. Hollis tracked
Speaker 1: it by the eyes, the two shining points, sliding along
Speaker 1: the top of the bank, pacing the truck, staying up
Speaker 1: above him while he sat front of the truck, to
Speaker 1: the back of it, and then forward again, looking down
Speaker 1: on him. Sitting there, Hollis watched it pace the truck
Speaker 1: and saw no hurry in it, no flinch from the headlights,
Speaker 1: no move to get away. Hollis was the one boxed
Speaker 1: in in a tin box on a one lane road,
Speaker 1: a long way from anywhere, no room to turn around.
Speaker 1: So I rolled my window back up and drove on,
Speaker 1: Hollis said slow. I didn't want to look like I
Speaker 1: was running, didn't want to give it a reason to follow.
Speaker 1: And in my mirror after I never saw it cross
Speaker 1: the road behind me or do anything you put in
Speaker 1: a picture. It stayed up on its bank and let
Speaker 1: me go. I drove on out and went home and
Speaker 1: had my supper late next morning I told my wife.
Speaker 1: She says, well, you always knew they were up there.
Speaker 1: About the most Idaho thing a woman ever said to
Speaker 1: a man over eggs. I went back to work. The
Speaker 1: crew never knew there'd been anything but a hydraulic line.
Speaker 1: I asked whether he'd been afraid. He turned the question
Speaker 1: over like it was a fair one. Nobody had put
Speaker 1: to him quite that way. Not the way you mean it,
Speaker 1: he said. I had a healthy respect, which is a
Speaker 1: different animal than fear. I'll tell you what I was
Speaker 1: more than scared. I was outmatched, and I knew it
Speaker 1: dead certain. There's a strange peace comes with knowing your
Speaker 1: flat out matched. It takes all the decisions off you.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a thing in this world I could have
Speaker 1: done about that animal if it had decided to do
Speaker 1: something about me. Not a thing, So there wasn't any
Speaker 1: use spending energy on being scared. I just wanted to
Speaker 1: be somewhere else, politely, no sudden moves. It let me leave.
Speaker 1: That was the whole night. He did go back to
Speaker 1: that road many times over the years. It was the
Speaker 1: only way into a big piece of ground he worked.
Speaker 1: He saw the eyes on that same bench twice more,
Speaker 1: both times in the fall, both times after dark. After
Speaker 1: the first time, it almost became routine, same bench, same season,
Speaker 1: same bad stretch of road where he eased off the
Speaker 1: gas and looked up the bank. I got to thinking,
Speaker 1: it's the same one, Alis said, living on that mountain,
Speaker 1: working that bench in the fall, the way I worked
Speaker 1: my ground. I'd come down through there in the dark
Speaker 1: and roll my window down a crack, just a crack.
Speaker 1: I never spoke to it. I'm not a crazy old man,
Speaker 1: but I'd let it know. I knew it was there,
Speaker 1: that I wasn't sneaking it. Let me buy that was
Speaker 1: how Hollis handled that road. Twenty some years, I drove
Speaker 1: that road, and I had an arrangement with something I
Speaker 1: never once got a clean look at in the daylight.
Speaker 1: Closest I came was the second time, when it stepped
Speaker 1: and I saw the shape of it move against the
Speaker 1: stars at the top of the bank, the bulk of
Speaker 1: the shoulders, the way the head sat down low between them,
Speaker 1: without much neck to it. You can think that's a
Speaker 1: crazy thing for an old man to sit and tell you.
Speaker 1: I've thought it myself plenty. Doesn't make it not true.
Speaker 1: The third time was the shortest and the one that
Speaker 1: stayed with him. He had a young faller named Dale
Speaker 1: riding shotgun, a kid green enough to still be scared
Speaker 1: of the right things. The eyes were on the bench.
Speaker 1: Hollis slowed the way he always did, and rolled his
Speaker 1: window down a crack. The kid started saying, what is that.
Speaker 1: Hollis put a hand on the kid's arm, but didn't
Speaker 1: say a word. The kid shut up. They idled, passed
Speaker 1: down the grate and around the bend. The kid threw
Speaker 1: the door open and was sick over the side of
Speaker 1: it into the dark. He never said a word to
Speaker 1: the crew. Hollis said, ask me the next morning had
Speaker 1: that been real? And I said it had. Never brought
Speaker 1: it up again. Dale quit at the end of that
Speaker 1: season and went to driving a truck. That road never
Speaker 1: gave me trouble in thirty years of driving it in
Speaker 1: the dark, which is more than I can say for
Speaker 1: some of the men I worked it with. The second
Speaker 1: story Hollis gave me was the one he saved for last.
Speaker 1: He held it back until the end. It's the only
Speaker 1: one of the five where a man got hurt, though
Speaker 1: not by the thing, and Hollis was careful about that line,
Speaker 1: so am I. In the late fall of nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: Hollis was on a crew cutting a unit on a
Speaker 1: steep face above a river on the Montana side of
Speaker 1: the country he worked. They were behind, the weather had
Speaker 1: been against them. The Bull of the woods had them
Speaker 1: living in at a camp up the river road, rather
Speaker 1: than driving the long way out each night. It saved
Speaker 1: an hour each way and might get the unit closed
Speaker 1: before the snow came in and shut the road for
Speaker 1: the season. Six men in camp Hollis a faller named
Speaker 1: Pete who was his regular partner, two on the rigging,
Speaker 1: the cat operator who ran the equipment, and a cook.
Speaker 1: They had two trailers hauled up the river road and
Speaker 1: set on a flat by the water. They'd been in
Speaker 1: there about a week when it started. Pete noticed it first.
Speaker 1: Pete had been in this country his whole life, same
Speaker 1: as me, Hollis said, But Pete had a sense for trouble.
Speaker 1: Before trouble showed itself, he'd have made a scout in
Speaker 1: the old days. About the third night in, Pete goes
Speaker 1: quiet at supper, which for Pete was an event. After
Speaker 1: out by the trailers, having a smoke, he says to me,
Speaker 1: there's one around. I says, how do you figure? He says,
Speaker 1: I can feel it on the back of my neck,
Speaker 1: same as I can feel the weather coming. I'd long
Speaker 1: since quit laughing at Pete about that. He'd been right
Speaker 1: too many times for me to keep count on weather,
Speaker 1: on game on men, so I started paying attention, and
Speaker 1: unfortunately Pete was right again. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. It came
Speaker 1: to the edge of camp at night, never into the light,
Speaker 1: just to the ragged edge of it, where the lantern
Speaker 1: glow off, the trailers gave out and the dark started.
Speaker 1: It would stand there. The men knew it had come
Speaker 1: because the night noise quit. The river covered a lot
Speaker 1: of sound, but under the river there were the small,
Speaker 1: live sounds of a forest at night. Those cut off
Speaker 1: all at once on one side of camp, a circle
Speaker 1: of dead quiet pushing in from the dark in the
Speaker 1: middle of it. If you stood still by a trailer
Speaker 1: and listened hard past the river, you could hear it breathing.
Speaker 1: We'd shine a light out there, Hollis said, and there'd
Speaker 1: be nothing. It was too smart to be standing where
Speaker 1: the light would find it. Learned the reach of our
Speaker 1: lanterns the first night, and stood just past it after that,
Speaker 1: but we'd find the sign come morning. It walked the
Speaker 1: river bar past our camp in the night. Both ways,
Speaker 1: the wet sand down by the water took a track
Speaker 1: like it was made to big coming down river and
Speaker 1: going back up. It was using that river road the
Speaker 1: same as we were, only in the dark, and our
Speaker 1: two trailers were sitting square in the middle of its road,
Speaker 1: on the only flat in miles of canyon for several nights.
Speaker 1: That was the whole of it. The men joked about
Speaker 1: it in the daylight. Once the sun left the canyon wall,
Speaker 1: nobody joked. The cat operator, a young fellow named Sammy,
Speaker 1: did most of the joking. There was a daytime thing too.
Speaker 1: That week, the cook kept a few fish on a
Speaker 1: stringer in the cold edge of the river, tied off
Speaker 1: to a root, same as Dean had done on Earl's
Speaker 1: Lake twenty years before, and one hundred miles away, two
Speaker 1: men who never met tying off fish the same old way.
Speaker 1: One morning the stringer came up with the fish slid off.
Speaker 1: It not torn, not chewed, just gone slid off clean,
Speaker 1: the cook stood there, holding an empty stringer and not
Speaker 1: joking for once. Sammy found the tracks on the bar
Speaker 1: that same morning. It had the most fun with it
Speaker 1: all week. He came up from the water, white around
Speaker 1: the mouth and quiet, and walked Hollis down to look.
Speaker 1: The princes came up out of the river, crossed the
Speaker 1: bar to the root where the stringer was tied, turned
Speaker 1: and went back to the water. The stride of them.
Speaker 1: The space from one print to the next was past
Speaker 1: anything Sammy could match. He took a running jump at
Speaker 1: it to try. He was a long legged kid, and
Speaker 1: he couldn't cover it. Sammy quit joking that morning. Hollis
Speaker 1: said he had seen enough. I've thought since that. Sammy's
Speaker 1: mind was already half running. Later his feet followed. Then
Speaker 1: came the night of the scream. That's why Hollis kept
Speaker 1: this one for last. I've heard every sound this country makes,
Speaker 1: Hollis said. Mountain lion, which will lift the hair clean
Speaker 1: off you the first time. Sounds for all the world
Speaker 1: like a woman being murdered out in the dark. Elk bugle,
Speaker 1: strange enough close up in the timber. Owls that don't
Speaker 1: sound a thing like owls are supposed to coyotes getting
Speaker 1: wound into a racket. That sounds like fifty when it's four.
Speaker 1: I know all of it. I've heard all of it
Speaker 1: a thousand nights. This was none of it. It come
Speaker 1: down off the slope above the camp, out of the
Speaker 1: full black. It started low, lower than i'd have told
Speaker 1: you a throat could go, and it climbed, kept on
Speaker 1: climbing past where it had any business stopping up into
Speaker 1: a kind of scream with a roar set down inside it.
Speaker 1: It had a volume nothing with lungs ought to have
Speaker 1: it filled. The whole canyon come off the far wall
Speaker 1: and back at us, doubled When it quit, the quitting
Speaker 1: was as bad as the sound. Everything went dead, Even
Speaker 1: the river seemed to hush. Six grown men stood in
Speaker 1: two trailers, and not one of us made a noise
Speaker 1: for a long count. Pete broke it, Pete, who'd felt
Speaker 1: it coming for a week. Pete said flat, that's it,
Speaker 1: telling us to clear out, and started rolling his gear.
Speaker 1: The bull of the woods was a man named Cap,
Speaker 1: and Cap didn't want to break camp. They were two
Speaker 1: days from closing the unit. The snow was coming. There'd
Speaker 1: be no coming back till spring. Cap stood in the
Speaker 1: door of the trailer and argued it was a cat,
Speaker 1: or an elk, or a trick of the canyon walls
Speaker 1: doubling some ordinary sound. He argued it the same way
Speaker 1: Pop had argued kids on Earl's Lake. Then the thing
Speaker 1: answered CAP's argument for him. While Cap stood in the door,
Speaker 1: telling the crew it was a cat, it screamed again, closer,
Speaker 1: this time down off the slope, near enough that the
Speaker 1: trailer seemed to shudder with it, though Hollis allowed the
Speaker 1: shutter might have been in his own chest. Cap stopped
Speaker 1: talking midword, stepped back inside, pulled the door shut. Nobody
Speaker 1: argued after that, here's where the man got hurt. We
Speaker 1: all agreed that we'd pull out at first light, in
Speaker 1: the dark of the early morning, before there was light
Speaker 1: enough to see your own feet. Loading the trucks in
Speaker 1: a hurry to be gone, Sammy slipped on the wet
Speaker 1: bank carrying a load of gear down to the truck,
Speaker 1: went down hard and broke his ankle, broke it on
Speaker 1: a rock in the dark. The thing never touched him,
Speaker 1: never came near. I've wondered every year since whether Sammy
Speaker 1: would have hurried like that on a normal morning, or
Speaker 1: whether the thing up on that slope put the hurry
Speaker 1: in his feet. It never laid a hand on him,
Speaker 1: but it was the reason every one of us was
Speaker 1: moving in the black before we could see, so it
Speaker 1: had a hand in it. I guess. They splendid Sammy's
Speaker 1: ankle with a chunk of shake and a bootlace, got
Speaker 1: him and the gear into the trucks, and pulled out
Speaker 1: up the river road, leaving the two trailers behind. The
Speaker 1: plan was to come back for them after the snow cleared.
Speaker 1: Hollis was in the last truck up the grade, climbing
Speaker 1: out of the canyon. He looked back down at the
Speaker 1: flat where the camp had been. He saw it. It
Speaker 1: come down to the camp the minute we'd cleared it.
Speaker 1: Hollis said, I watched it from up the road, a
Speaker 1: long way off, made small by the distance, but I
Speaker 1: watched it walk down out of the timber onto our
Speaker 1: flat and stand right in the middle of where we'd been,
Speaker 1: between where the two tree trailers sat, looked the place over,
Speaker 1: turning its head, taking stock. I had my window down
Speaker 1: and I could just barely hear faint on the cold
Speaker 1: air coming up the canyon. It made a sound, not
Speaker 1: the scream, a lower thing, almost like it was muttering
Speaker 1: to itself, working something over. Then it walked on down
Speaker 1: to the river and followed the bar up river, going
Speaker 1: on about its night. Now that we'd finally cleared out
Speaker 1: of its road, that was the last I ever saw
Speaker 1: of it. It wasn't running us off out of any meanness.
Speaker 1: We were camped in its hallway, plain and simple. It
Speaker 1: had spent a week giving us chances to move. We
Speaker 1: were behind on the cut and too stubborn to take them.
Speaker 1: So it raised its voice. I asked, hollis the same
Speaker 1: thing I'd ask the other two whether after all of it,
Speaker 1: he'd come to be afraid of the woods. He gave
Speaker 1: me the answer I've turned over more than any other
Speaker 1: answer the three of them gave me. No, He said,
Speaker 1: I'm not afraid of the woods. The woods is where
Speaker 1: it lives. It had every chance at all of us,
Speaker 1: more times than I could count, and it never took one.
Speaker 1: A man's killed more men than that animal ever will.
Speaker 1: I worked alongside a few men I trusted, a site
Speaker 1: less than I'd trusted thirty years in the woods taught
Speaker 1: me this. We were never out there alone, not one
Speaker 1: single day. That lonesome feeling deep in the timber is
Speaker 1: your ears lying to you. Something's nearly always stood off
Speaker 1: somewhere watching him work. Most every time, it just lets
Speaker 1: him be and goes on about its business. There's a
Speaker 1: lot worse things a man could learn off a life
Speaker 1: in the woods than that one. I told you at
Speaker 1: the start that most stories break, and that these three didn't.
Speaker 1: I've sat a long while now with that. Three men,
Speaker 1: different decades, different country, hundreds of miles and a lot
Speaker 1: of separate living between them. They never met. No chance
Speaker 1: to compare notes, no shared book to crib from, no
Speaker 1: campfire where details could rub off one onto the next,
Speaker 1: and the same small, specific things turn up, and all
Speaker 1: of it unasked. The dog that won't go forward and
Speaker 1: walks backward into the tent. The smell that arrives a
Speaker 1: beat ahead of the site on cold air through an
Speaker 1: open window. The thing watching men work and choosing over
Speaker 1: and over to let them walk away. Hole the knox
Speaker 1: answered across a canyon. The food slid clean off a stringer.
Speaker 1: None of these men knew the others would hand me
Speaker 1: a version of the same details, and not one of
Speaker 1: them reached for the things you'd reach for if you
Speaker 1: were making it up to thrill a stranger. No chase,
Speaker 1: no attack, no monster, face pressed to a window. They
Speaker 1: talked about quiet, about being watched, about the small deals
Speaker 1: a man makes when he knows he can't win. I
Speaker 1: don't know what these men ran into. I'm not pretending
Speaker 1: I've decided, but I'll tell you this much, Earl slept
Speaker 1: with a light on into his eighties. Roy left one
Speaker 1: old redwood standing on a side hill rather than walk
Speaker 1: back up the hill to it, and Hollis the only
Speaker 1: one of the three still answering his phone, still keeps
Speaker 1: an arrangement in his head with something he met three
Speaker 1: times on a bench above a logging road and never
Speaker 1: once saw clearly in the light of day. Five stories,
Speaker 1: Three men who had no reason to lie and every
Speaker 1: reason to keep their mouths shut. Late in life, they
Speaker 1: told me, and now I've told you did