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: A few years ago, I started a little tradition on
Speaker 1: this show. Every holiday, instead of the usual reports and encounters,
Speaker 1: I bring you one long story built for the occasion,
Speaker 1: a campfire tale with the lights down. Some of you
Speaker 1: have been around for all of them, and I know
Speaker 1: because you write me every year asking when the next
Speaker 1: one's coming. Well, it's the fourth of July and this
Speaker 1: is the one I've been sitting on now. I always
Speaker 1: get the same question when these holiday episodes drop, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to answer it up front the same way
Speaker 1: I always do.
Speaker 2: Is it true?
Speaker 1: Here's what I can tell you. Everything in this story
Speaker 1: could happen. The roads are real roads, even if I've
Speaker 1: changed the names. The country is real country, the kind
Speaker 1: I've walked my whole life. The way these animals move,
Speaker 1: the way they sound, the way a whole mountain side
Speaker 1: can come apart when the sky starts exploding. All of
Speaker 1: that lines up with forty years of reports from people
Speaker 1: who had nothing to gain by telling them. And the
Speaker 1: man telling this story sounds an awful lot like a
Speaker 1: hundred witnesses I've sat across from, same voice, same reluctance,
Speaker 1: same detail he can't let go of.
Speaker 2: So is it true?
Speaker 1: Maybe it is, Maybe it isn't. That's the great thing
Speaker 1: about a campfire story. You get to decide. I'm just
Speaker 1: the fellow holding the flashlight. What I will tell you
Speaker 1: is why I wrote it, Because every fourth of July,
Speaker 1: while we're all standing in a field watching the sky
Speaker 1: come apart, there's a whole world out in those dark
Speaker 1: tree lines that never ask for any of it. And
Speaker 1: every once in a while, I catch myself wondering what
Speaker 1: that night sounds like from the other side, what it costs,
Speaker 1: and who's out there same as us, just trying to
Speaker 1: get their family through it.
Speaker 2: This one's about two.
Speaker 1: Berths on one mountain on the loudest night of the year,
Speaker 1: one human, one knot pour something cold, get comfortable. And
Speaker 1: if you're listening to this on a porch somewhere with
Speaker 1: the fireworks still going off down the valley, so much
Speaker 1: the better.
Speaker 2: This is the fourth of July baby.
Speaker 1: My daughter was born at ten till one in the
Speaker 1: morning in the front seat of a Ford pickup in
Speaker 1: the parking lot of a Baptist church, while a volunteer
Speaker 1: paramedic named Dewey held a flashlight in his teeth. Her
Speaker 1: birth certificate says July fifth. Nobody in this family has
Speaker 1: ever once called her anything but our fourth of July baby,
Speaker 1: because the Odum brothers were still shooting when she came
Speaker 1: into the world, and around wix Mill, the fourth isn't
Speaker 1: over till the last shell goes up. That part of
Speaker 1: the story I've told one hundred times. It's a good story.
Speaker 1: People laugh at the flashlight, and they laugh when I
Speaker 1: tell them. The church sign that night said new arrivals welcome,
Speaker 1: which is true, in which nobody ever believes until Katie
Speaker 1: backs me up.
Speaker 2: The rest of it.
Speaker 1: I've never told anybody except Katie, and one time my
Speaker 1: father in law, who listened to the whole thing on
Speaker 1: his back porch, spat off the rail and said, well
Speaker 1: that was it. Well, So Josie turned six this summer
Speaker 1: and she's starting to ask questions about the night she
Speaker 1: was born, and I've been thinking about it more than
Speaker 1: I have in years.
Speaker 2: So here it is all.
Speaker 1: Of it, the parts people laugh at and the parts
Speaker 1: they wouldn't. I want to say upfront that I was
Speaker 1: a skeptic before that weekend, not the loud kind. I
Speaker 1: never argued with anybody about it. I just figured that
Speaker 1: if eight foot animals were walking around the North Georgia Mountains,
Speaker 1: somebody would have hit one with a log truck. By now,
Speaker 1: that was my whole position, a log truck. I'd set
Speaker 1: it out loud at least twice at Deer Camp, and
Speaker 1: both times it got a laugh, and both times I
Speaker 1: felt pretty smart. I don't say it anymore. Katie's family
Speaker 1: has forty acres up Steel House Road, above Dutch Branch,
Speaker 1: maybe nine miles out of a town called Wick's Mill.
Speaker 1: Her granddad bought it after the war for close to
Speaker 1: nothing because you can't farm it and you can barely
Speaker 1: log it. It's steep, it's rocky, and the road in
Speaker 1: crosses the branch twice on culverts. The county quit maintaining
Speaker 1: sometime before I was born. There's an old cabin site
Speaker 1: with a chimney still standing, a flat spot big enough
Speaker 1: for two tents and a fire ring, and about a
Speaker 1: half mile up the drainage there's a rock overhang the
Speaker 1: family calls the cave house, where Katie's granddad used to
Speaker 1: sleep when he was cutting timber.
Speaker 2: Her family is camped.
Speaker 1: Up there over the fourth of July every year since
Speaker 1: the sixties. It's not negotiable. Her mother was up there pregnant.
Speaker 1: Her aunt was up there pregnant. When Katie told me
Speaker 1: we were going, I looked at her belly, and she
Speaker 1: looked at me, and I loaded the truck. Now, before
Speaker 1: anybody decides I'm an idiot, let me lay out the
Speaker 1: facts as we understood them. Katie was thirty six weeks
Speaker 1: first baby. Our midwife, a woman named Carol, who has
Speaker 1: delivered half the county and doesn't sugarcoat anything told us
Speaker 1: first babies take their time, hours and hours, she said,
Speaker 1: sometimes days. The camp is forty minutes from the county
Speaker 1: hospital in Ellison. On normal day, Katie's doctor said, if
Speaker 1: she felt anything start, we'd have all the time in
Speaker 1: the world to drive in. Katie's mother and daddy were
Speaker 1: coming up for the day on the fourth itself. We
Speaker 1: had food, water, a full tank, and a truck that
Speaker 1: had never once let me down. Every single one of
Speaker 1: those facts turned out to be worth exactly nothing. We
Speaker 1: drove up Wednesday, the first of July, hot as a
Speaker 1: skillet down in town, but the camp sits in a
Speaker 1: fold of the mountain where dutch branch comes down, cold
Speaker 1: enough to numb your feet, and by evening it was
Speaker 1: almost pleasant. We set up the wall tent, got the
Speaker 1: cots in strung a tarp, Katie supervised from a camp
Speaker 1: chair with her feet in the creek, and our dog, Banjo,
Speaker 1: a blue healer with a bad attitude and one working ear,
Speaker 1: ran the property line like he was getting paid. That
Speaker 1: first night was quiet, Whipperwills, the creek one barred owl
Speaker 1: way off toward the head of the drainage. Normal mountain quiet,
Speaker 1: which isn't quiet at all, but it's the right noise.
Speaker 1: You learned the right noise for a place pretty fast,
Speaker 1: and Dutch Branch had it that first night. Thursday morning
Speaker 1: is when the right noise started coming apart. I got
Speaker 1: up before Katie to start coffee, and Banjo was sitting
Speaker 1: at the edge of camp, facing up the drainage, not barking,
Speaker 1: not growling, just sitting there with his one good ear
Speaker 1: up dead, still staring at the tree line like it
Speaker 1: owed him money. I said his name, and he didn't come.
Speaker 1: That dog has never once in his life not come
Speaker 1: when I said his name. He'll ignore Katie all day long,
Speaker 1: but not me. I walked over and put my hand
Speaker 1: on his head, and I could feel him shaking, fine
Speaker 1: little shakes all the way through him, like a wet
Speaker 1: dog that isn't wet. I looked where he was looking, trees, rhododendron,
Speaker 1: the creek. Nothing, you're fired, I told him, and went
Speaker 1: back to the coffee. He came and lay down under
Speaker 1: Katie's cot and stayed there most of the morning, which
Speaker 1: was also not like him.
Speaker 2: But dogs have moods, and I.
Speaker 1: Had a pregnant wife who wanted bacon around ten, I
Speaker 1: walked up the drainage to check the spring box her
Speaker 1: granddad built, because that's the chore, that's always the first chore.
Speaker 1: And about two hundred yards up I hit a smell.
Speaker 1: Everybody who tells one of these stories talks about the smell,
Speaker 1: and I used to roll my eyes at that. But
Speaker 1: let me tell you what I walked into. It sat
Speaker 1: in a pocket maybe thirty feet across, near where a
Speaker 1: game trail crosses the branch, and it smelled like a
Speaker 1: wet dog and a boar pin and something rotten underneath,
Speaker 1: all three at once, thick enough that I actually checked
Speaker 1: the bottom of my boots. I did what a reasonable
Speaker 1: man does, which is go looking for the reasonable thing.
Speaker 1: I walked a slow circle, hunting for a dead deer,
Speaker 1: because a carcass would have explained everything. And I found
Speaker 1: no carcass, no buzzards, and no drag marks. Ten steps
Speaker 1: out of that pocket, the smell was simply gone. It
Speaker 1: didn't fade so much as end, the way a smell
Speaker 1: end when you step out of a room and pull
Speaker 1: the door shut behind you. I checked the spring box,
Speaker 1: came back down through the same spot, and by then
Speaker 1: the smell had thinned.
Speaker 2: To almost nothing.
Speaker 1: Whatever made it had been standing there and then it hadn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell Katie. I told myself it was a
Speaker 1: bore because we do have wild hogs in that country
Speaker 1: and they stink. And that answer was good enough to
Speaker 1: carry me through lunch. Thursday night, the knocking started. We
Speaker 1: were at the fire around nine point thirty when a
Speaker 1: single knock came down from the direction of the cave house,
Speaker 1: wood on wood, loud, one clean strike, like somebody swinging
Speaker 1: a baseball bat full strength against a trunk. Katie getsed
Speaker 1: a widow maker a dead limb letting go, and that
Speaker 1: was a fair guess, because limbs fall all the time.
Speaker 1: Then it came again, and then an answer came from
Speaker 1: across the drainage farther off. Two knocks, with a deliberate
Speaker 1: pause between them. Limbs don't answer each other. Banjo got
Speaker 1: under Katie's chair. Katy looked at me across the fire
Speaker 1: and asked if somebody was up there, and I said,
Speaker 1: probably kids from the odein place messing around. And she
Speaker 1: pointed out that the odein place was four miles off
Speaker 1: by road, and I said the kids could have walked it,
Speaker 1: and neither one of us believed a word of it.
Speaker 1: We heard two more exchanges over the next hour, each
Speaker 1: one a little farther up toward the head of the drainage,
Speaker 1: as though whatever was talking was moving away from us
Speaker 1: and taking the conversation with it.
Speaker 2: Then it stopped.
Speaker 1: The whipper wheels came back, and eventually we went to bed,
Speaker 1: where I lay listening to Katie breathe and running the
Speaker 1: math on how fast I could get her into the
Speaker 1: truck if I had to. That's an old habit from
Speaker 1: an old job, and that night it felt like paranoia. Friday,
Speaker 1: the third was the day of the tracks. Katie found them.
Speaker 1: She'd waddled down to the lower crossing to soak her ankles,
Speaker 1: and she called for me in a voice with a
Speaker 1: specific pitch to it. Not scared, exactly, but flat and careful.
Speaker 1: And when your wife is eight months pregnant and calls
Speaker 1: in a flat, careful voice, you cover ground fast. She
Speaker 1: was standing on the culvert, looking down at the sand
Speaker 1: bar on the upstream side, and there were prints in
Speaker 1: the wet sand, five of them clear and a couple
Speaker 1: more smudged where the gravel took over. I've tracked deer
Speaker 1: and hogs and bear my whole life, and bear was
Speaker 1: my first thought before I even got down there, because
Speaker 1: that's the reasonable thing again. And a bear's hind foot
Speaker 1: honestly does resemble a person's.
Speaker 2: But a big boar bear.
Speaker 1: Runs maybe eight inches on the hind pad nine if
Speaker 1: he's a giant, and he shows claws. These prints ran
Speaker 1: seventeen inches. I know that because I laid my boot
Speaker 1: in one, and my boot is a size twelve, and
Speaker 1: there was room left over at the toe and at
Speaker 1: the heel. There were no claws, just five toes splayed
Speaker 1: wide with the big toe pressed in deep like it
Speaker 1: was doing real work, and the stride between them was
Speaker 1: longer than I could manage, even hopping I tried. Katie
Speaker 1: watched me hop up that sandbar like a fool and
Speaker 1: didn't laugh, which tells you everything about the mood. She
Speaker 1: took pictures with her phone, kneeling down with her belly
Speaker 1: nearly in the sand, laying her flip flop next to
Speaker 1: one for scale. She's the practical one. I was still
Speaker 1: standing there, arguing with the ground bear. I said, show
Speaker 1: me the claws, she said, somebody messing with us. Then
Speaker 1: wooden feet people do that. Nine miles up a dead
Speaker 1: end road in the creek, hoping a pregnant woman happens
Speaker 1: to come soak her feet. She stood up and dusted
Speaker 1: the sand off her knees. Sure we stood there a
Speaker 1: minute while the water went on by, And then she
Speaker 1: said the thing I think about all the time now
Speaker 1: because of how easily she said it, the way a
Speaker 1: person comments on the weather. They've always been up here,
Speaker 1: you know. Granddaddy used to leave them the last row
Speaker 1: of the garden. I asked her, the last row of
Speaker 1: what corn?
Speaker 2: He said, it kept the peace. She started back.
Speaker 1: Up toward camp. Mama made him quit telling people about
Speaker 1: it at church. Sh My reaction was more irritation than
Speaker 1: wonder or fear. I'd married into this family. I'd been
Speaker 1: coming up that mountain for nine years, and here was
Speaker 1: a thing everybody apparently knew and nobody had mentioned, like
Speaker 1: the well watered tasting of iron, just.
Speaker 2: A feature of the property. Katie's people are like that.
Speaker 1: Some things get talked about at the fire and never
Speaker 1: in town, and you find out which is which by
Speaker 1: getting it wrong. Once that night, Friday night, nothing knocked
Speaker 1: and nothing screamed. But twice in the small hours I
Speaker 1: woke to the sound of walking deer are dainty, even
Speaker 1: when they're big, picking and pausing and picking again. And
Speaker 1: this was something else entirely two feet heavy and slow
Speaker 1: coming down the slope behind the tent, maybe forty yards
Speaker 1: off footfalls with enough weight behind them that I felt
Speaker 1: them through the cot legs more than heard them. It
Speaker 1: stopped and stood there for what I'd guess was two
Speaker 1: full minutes, long enough that I counted it out. And
Speaker 1: I lay there with my hand on the flashlight and
Speaker 1: never turned it on because Katie was asleep, and if
Speaker 1: I turned it on, I'd have to deal with whatever
Speaker 1: the light landed on. Then it walked back up the slope,
Speaker 1: patient and unhurried, like something that had come down to
Speaker 1: check the doors and found them locked. Banjo never made
Speaker 1: a sound. He was pressed flat against the tent floor
Speaker 1: with his nose under Katie's cot and when I reached
Speaker 1: down and touched him, he was shaking again. I didn't
Speaker 1: sleep much after that. I lay there thinking about the
Speaker 1: tracks and the last row of corn, and somewhere in
Speaker 1: the dark I made a decision that looks half smart
Speaker 1: and half stupid in hindsight, and about equal amounts we'd
Speaker 1: stay through the fourth, like always, watch the fireworks from
Speaker 1: the ridge like always, let her folks come up, like always,
Speaker 1: and then leave the morning of the fifth, one day early,
Speaker 1: with some excuse about the heat.
Speaker 2: One more day.
Speaker 1: That was the whole plant, And it might even have worked,
Speaker 1: except for two things I couldn't have known. The first
Speaker 1: was the that came through Saturday afternoon. The second was
Speaker 1: that the walking and the knocking and the smell had
Speaker 1: never really been about us. Something else was going on
Speaker 1: up at the head of that drainage, something with its
Speaker 1: own clock and its own arithmetic and its own bad timing,
Speaker 1: and we just happened to be camped between it and
Speaker 1: the road. Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. The fourth of July came
Speaker 1: in blue and hot, and by eight in the morning
Speaker 1: you could already hear it coming. Wick's Mill was turning
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty years old that summer, and the
Speaker 1: town had decided the way to honor a century and
Speaker 1: a half of existing was to blow up more sky
Speaker 1: than it ever had before. The paper had been going
Speaker 1: on about it for a month. They'd hired a real
Speaker 1: pyrotechnics outfit from Chattanooga. Instead of letting the fire department
Speaker 1: handle it, they doubled the budget, and people kept talking
Speaker 1: about a shell in the finale as big as a basketball,
Speaker 1: and that was only the official show. On top of it,
Speaker 1: every ridge and hollow in the county had stocked up
Speaker 1: from the fireworks warehouses across the state line because the
Speaker 1: drought had broken in June. The burn band had come off,
Speaker 1: and folks had two dry summers of pent up ordinance
Speaker 1: and money to spend. The Odem brothers, whose chicken houses
Speaker 1: sit on a bench across the valley from Katie's family land,
Speaker 1: maybe two miles as the crow flies, had reportedly gone
Speaker 1: in together on a case of commercial grade mortars, and
Speaker 1: the word at the feed store was that Ricky Odom
Speaker 1: planned to shoot until they ran out or the law came,
Speaker 1: whichever happened second. So even that morning, hours ahead of dark,
Speaker 1: you'd hear a pop from one direction and a thump
Speaker 1: from another, ranging shots and kids with firecrackers and some
Speaker 1: full testing a mortar at ten in the morning, and
Speaker 1: each one rolled around the valley walls and came back
Speaker 1: two or three times. Sound does strange things in that country,
Speaker 1: and a single gunshot can sound like a skirmish. Every thump,
Speaker 1: Banjo flinched, and every thump caught myself looking up the drainage.
Speaker 1: Katie's folks came up around noon. Her daddy Ray backed
Speaker 1: his truck to the fire ring and unloaded like we
Speaker 1: were feeding a church homecoming, ribs and corn and a watermelon,
Speaker 1: riding in a cooler by itself like a passenger. Her
Speaker 1: mama took one look at Katie and started in about
Speaker 1: swollen ankles and whether she'd been drinking enough water. And
Speaker 1: Katie took it the way she takes everything from her mama,
Speaker 1: nodding along and doing exactly what she'd already planned to do.
Speaker 1: It was a good afternoon. We ate too much, Ray
Speaker 1: and I pitched horseshoes. It stakes his own daddy had
Speaker 1: driven fifty years earlier. Katie floated her feet in the
Speaker 1: branch while her mama sat beside her, and the two
Speaker 1: of them laughed at something for a solid five minutes,
Speaker 1: that helpless kind of laughing where you stopped making noise altogether.
Speaker 1: The baby kicked hard all day, and Katie kept grabbing
Speaker 1: my hand and pressing it to her side so I
Speaker 1: could feel a knee or an elbow slide by under
Speaker 1: her skin like a fish passing under a boat. Around three,
Speaker 1: Ray and I walk down to check the lower crossing
Speaker 1: because weather was coming. And he'd looked at the culvert
Speaker 1: on the drive in and hadn't liked what he saw.
Speaker 1: The storm two days earlier had chewed at the downstream lip.
Speaker 1: Fresh raw dirt showed where the fill had slumped, and
Speaker 1: daylight had opened over one corner of the pipe. Ray
Speaker 1: toad at it. This thing's about done. It held us
Speaker 1: up fine coming in. That was three inches of water ago.
Speaker 1: He looked up at the sky where the clouds were
Speaker 1: already stacking over the ridge to the west. You get
Speaker 1: any real rain this afternoon? I'd crossed before it, not after,
Speaker 1: And boy, did we ever get real rain that afternoon.
Speaker 1: It came in about four point thirty, one of those
Speaker 1: July mountain storms that isn't messing around straight down with
Speaker 1: no wind to speak of, just tonnage and Dutch branch
Speaker 1: came up brown. In half an hour. We all crowded
Speaker 1: under the tarp and hollered small talk over the drumming,
Speaker 1: while Ray kept leaning out to look downhill toward the
Speaker 1: crossing with his jaw set by six, and the sun
Speaker 1: came back out with everything steaming. Ray and Katy's mama
Speaker 1: packed up around seven because they wanted to cross while
Speaker 1: there was still light. Ray crossed slow and from up
Speaker 1: the road he leaned out the window and studied the
Speaker 1: culvert for a long moment. Y'all coming down tomorrow. First
Speaker 1: thing I said, cross it slow and stay left. Left
Speaker 1: sides still got filled under it. Then to Katie, call
Speaker 1: your mama when you get signal. And they went on
Speaker 1: the tail lights flickering down through the trees, and that
Speaker 1: turned out to be the last easy moment of the
Speaker 1: whole business. Though you never get to know a thing
Speaker 1: like that at the time. Now about signal, because everyone
Speaker 1: under fifty asks there's no cell service on that property
Speaker 1: at all. You're sitting in a hole between two ridges,
Speaker 1: and the nearest bars are a mile and a half
Speaker 1: back up Steelhouse Road, where the pipeline cut crosses the
Speaker 1: ridge spine, a big mode gash in the forest where
Speaker 1: a man standing dead center can catch one bar sometime
Speaker 1: two off the tower in Ellison. Katie's family calls it
Speaker 1: the phone booth. If you want to text somebody from camp,
Speaker 1: you take a walk. Katie had actually made that walk
Speaker 1: earlier in the day, with her mama's blood pressure in mind,
Speaker 1: texted Carol the midwife a cheerful nothing about the baby
Speaker 1: kicking and Tuesday's appointment, and Carol had texted back a
Speaker 1: thumbs up. Dark came on and the valley lit up.
Speaker 1: We climbed to the little knob above camp where the
Speaker 1: family has watched fireworks for sixty years, where you can
Speaker 1: see over the shoulder of the ridge and down the
Speaker 1: valley to the fair ground glow at Wick's Mill. Katie
Speaker 1: made the climb slow, one hand on my arm and
Speaker 1: one under her belly, stopping twice to breathe and waving
Speaker 1: me off when I fussed. We spread a blanket on
Speaker 1: the rock banjo we'd shut in the tent with his
Speaker 1: thundershirt on, which he hated, but I already knew what
Speaker 1: kind of night it was going to be for him.
Speaker 1: The town show started at nine point thirty, and even
Speaker 1: at nine miles it was serious. See the bloom count
Speaker 1: three or four, and then the boom would arrive and
Speaker 1: roll up the valley, and the ridge behind us would
Speaker 1: send it back. Then the Odin brothers opened up from
Speaker 1: their bench and they were close, and they weren't shooting
Speaker 1: consumer stuff. Those shells cracked flat and hard. The flash
Speaker 1: lit the underside of the leftover clouds, and between the
Speaker 1: town and the Odems and every other Yahoo in the county,
Speaker 1: the report started overlapping until there was no space left
Speaker 1: between them, just a rumble with spikes in it. The
Speaker 1: rock we sat on carried some of it, and the
Speaker 1: big ones you felt in your chest. Katie had her
Speaker 1: hands on her belly. She doesn't like this, she said,
Speaker 1: she's doing somersaults. Takes after your mother.
Speaker 2: Ha ha.
Speaker 1: Then she winced and shifted, and I thought nothing of
Speaker 1: it because she'd been wincing and shifting for a month.
Speaker 1: A woman that pregnant is never comfortable, and you stop
Speaker 1: reading anything into it. That's the truth of it, and
Speaker 1: it's also my excuse. And I've gone back and forth
Speaker 1: worth for six years about which one it mostly is.
Speaker 1: At nine point fifty one, by my watch, the mountain screamed.
Speaker 1: I say the mountain because that's what it sounded like.
Speaker 1: It came from up the drainage, up toward the head
Speaker 1: of Dutch Branch, where the cave house sits, and it
Speaker 1: went through the firework noise as if the fireworks weren't there.
Speaker 1: It started low a moan and climbed into a scream
Speaker 1: and hung there for eight seconds, maybe ten, which is
Speaker 1: too long. And that's the part your body understands immediately
Speaker 1: before your brain gets a vote. Nothing you know of
Speaker 1: has the lungs for that. A coyote pack sounds like
Speaker 1: chaos yips stacked on whales. A bobcat sounds like a
Speaker 1: woman being murdered. Everybody says so, and it's true. But
Speaker 1: it's a small sound, thin and close. A bull elk bugles,
Speaker 1: but there hadn't been an elk in that county in
Speaker 1: one hundred years, and a bugle is almost musical. This
Speaker 1: sound had a chest behind it, a body attached, a
Speaker 1: big one, and the body was angry or terrified or both.
Speaker 1: And it was maybe half a mile from where my
Speaker 1: wife was sitting. Katie's fingernails went into my arm. Then
Speaker 1: the answer started, one from high on the ridge to
Speaker 1: our east, shorter and sharper, and one from across the drainage.
Speaker 1: A series of whoops, fast, almost like a chimp on
Speaker 1: a documentary, but pitched down into a register that carried
Speaker 1: and underneath it all in the gaps between shell bursts
Speaker 1: came the sound of brush breaking, and it was more
Speaker 1: than one animal. Several of them were moving fast, spread
Speaker 1: across the slope above us, and near as I could
Speaker 1: tell in the dark and the noise, they were moving
Speaker 1: away from the head of the drainage. They were scattering
Speaker 1: off the mountain. Something up there was coming apart. The
Speaker 1: pieces were headed in every direction, and one of those
Speaker 1: directions was ours. A rock came down the slope, hit
Speaker 1: and hopped and hit again. Then a whole section of Laurel,
Speaker 1: maybe eighty yards above the knob thrashed like a truck
Speaker 1: backing through it, and whatever was in it blue past
Speaker 1: us in the dark, downhill toward the branch, and I
Speaker 1: heard it hit the water at a dead run, two
Speaker 1: big splashes, and gone down. In the tent, Banjo was
Speaker 1: losing his mind, and you could hear him over everything.
Speaker 1: I had Katie on her feet by then, though I
Speaker 1: don't remember standing up. We were moving down the path
Speaker 1: with my flashlight in one hand and her arm in
Speaker 1: the other, and she was moving better than I'd seen
Speaker 1: her move in two months, because fear will do that.
Speaker 1: And the whole time that Odin brothers kept firing shell
Speaker 1: after shell, and every flash printed the woods around us
Speaker 1: in black and white for half a second, and I
Speaker 1: checked each print like a man flipping through photographs looking
Speaker 1: for a face. On the third or fourth flash, I
Speaker 1: found one. It was below us and to the left,
Speaker 1: standing in the branch itself midstride, with water at its shins,
Speaker 1: upright and black against the lit fog. I saw it
Speaker 1: for the length of the flash, so it was just
Speaker 1: for a few seconds, but I could see that it
Speaker 1: was crossing the creek on two legs. Its arms were
Speaker 1: long held out from its body, and it was carrying something,
Speaker 1: a pale bundle held high against its chest. And it
Speaker 1: was small for what it was, which is the part
Speaker 1: that took me years to make sense of, because everything
Speaker 1: about the outline said adolescent, young and gangly, and all limbs.
Speaker 1: The dark came back, and the next flash showed empty water.
Speaker 1: Katie hadn't seen it. She was watching her feet. We
Speaker 1: got down to camp, I got her into a chair,
Speaker 1: I got Banjo out of the tent before he tore
Speaker 1: through the wall of it, and I stood in the
Speaker 1: middle of our camp with my heart going like a rabbit,
Speaker 1: and the sky still cracking open. Every few seconds, Katie
Speaker 1: stood up out of the chair. She just sat down
Speaker 1: in with a funny inward look like she was listening
Speaker 1: to something. And then she looked down standing water on
Speaker 1: packed dirt looks black in flashlight, and there was a
Speaker 1: black patch spreading between her feet that hadn't been there
Speaker 1: a moment before.
Speaker 2: Wade. She said, my water just broke.
Speaker 1: Here's what I knew standing in that camp a few
Speaker 1: minutes past ten on the loudest night.
Speaker 2: That Valley has ever had.
Speaker 1: The hospital in Ellison was forty minutes away on a
Speaker 1: good day, and Carol, the midwife, lived twenty minutes past it. First,
Speaker 1: babies take their time, hours and hours, sometimes days. Katie
Speaker 1: wasn't having contractions yet, or didn't think so, or couldn't tell,
Speaker 1: because the baby had been swimming laps all evening and
Speaker 1: everything below her ribs was already a committee. Her water
Speaker 1: had broken, which meant the clock was running, but it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be a long clock.
Speaker 2: That's what all the classes said. That's what Carol said.
Speaker 1: When the water breaks, you don't panic, you make your calls,
Speaker 1: and you go in, and most women labor for hours afterward.
Speaker 1: So the picture was this scared, Yes, panicked. No, we
Speaker 1: had a plan, and the plan was simple, load, drive,
Speaker 1: cross the culvert slow and stay left. Like Ray said,
Speaker 1: stop at the pipeline cut. I call Carol in the
Speaker 1: hospital and her mama. Then down the mountain and in
Speaker 1: ninety minutes, door to door tops we were loaded. In
Speaker 1: under ten minutes, I left the tent standing, left the tarp,
Speaker 1: left the horseshoe stakes and half our gear, and took
Speaker 1: Katie the dog the go bag she'd packed weeks earlier.
Speaker 1: Because she's Katie, two jugs of water and the towels.
Speaker 1: Ten o'clock at night, water running down her legs, monsters reel,
Speaker 1: and the sky on fire, and my wife said, get
Speaker 1: the beach towels out of the blue tub. Whatever they
Speaker 1: pay women, it isn't enough. Steelhouse road from camp to
Speaker 1: the lower crossing runs about six hundred yards downhill, two
Speaker 1: ruts and a grass hump, and I drove it at
Speaker 1: a walking pace with the windows down, partly to listen
Speaker 1: for anything above us, and mostly because every hole I
Speaker 1: hit got a.
Speaker 2: Hiss out of Katie.
Speaker 1: Banjo stood on her lap with his feet braced, staring
Speaker 1: out the windshield. My headlights picked up the crossing and
Speaker 1: I stopped the truck and looked at at it, and
Speaker 1: my stomach dropped through the floorboard. The afternoon storm had
Speaker 1: finished what the earlier one started. The downstream lip of
Speaker 1: the culvert fill was simply gone, sloughed off into the creek,
Speaker 1: and the branch, still running high and brown, had opened
Speaker 1: a bite out of the road surface itself.
Speaker 2: On the right side.
Speaker 1: What had been a fifteen foot crossing was now maybe
Speaker 1: eight feet of trustworthy dirt on the left, with the
Speaker 1: culvert pipe showing bare through it like bone, and then
Speaker 1: a raw drop off where the water rooster tailed through
Speaker 1: the gap it had torn. Stay left. Ray had said
Speaker 1: eight feet of road. My truck runs six and a
Speaker 1: half wide.
Speaker 2: At the meres.
Speaker 1: I got out and walked the crossing with a flashlight
Speaker 1: while Katie waited in the cab. The left side of
Speaker 1: the culvert felt solid under my boots. The pipe itself,
Speaker 1: old carrugated steel about as big around as a barrel,
Speaker 1: hadn't shifted. What I had to work with was maybe
Speaker 1: eighteen inches of margin on a downhill grade in the
Speaker 1: dark on wet grass. While I stood there working it out,
Speaker 1: something up the drainage behind me let out a whoop,
Speaker 1: a long, angry one, and something on the ridge answered it,
Speaker 1: and the Odin brothers sent up another shell from their
Speaker 1: chicken house pad across the valley. Katie leaned out the
Speaker 1: window and told me now or not at all. There
Speaker 1: was no real decision to make her water had broken.
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to sit on a mountain until daylight.
Speaker 1: With the woods making the sounds those woods were making,
Speaker 1: I hugged the upstream side as far as I dared,
Speaker 1: brought the truck forward at an idol, and felt the
Speaker 1: front tires crossed the pipe and catch solid ground. For
Speaker 1: about one second it was working. Then the fill under
Speaker 1: the right rear gave out. The back corner of the
Speaker 1: truck settled about a foot and a half, and the
Speaker 1: frame came down on the exposed rim of the culvert
Speaker 1: pipe hard enough that I felt it in my teeth.
Speaker 1: The truck quit moving. I gave it a little gas,
Speaker 1: and the rear tires spun free. The right rear was
Speaker 1: hanging in the wash out with nothing under it. The
Speaker 1: left rear was sitting on wet grass, carrying no weight,
Speaker 1: and the full weight of the truck was resting on
Speaker 1: the frame dead center on that pipe. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: I rocked it between drive and reverse and got nowhere.
Speaker 1: The truck teetered on the pipe and the tires through mud.
Speaker 1: Katie put her hand flat on the dash and told
Speaker 1: me to stop before I buried it worse, and she
Speaker 1: was right, so I did. We sat there with the
Speaker 1: engine idling down the valley. The town's finale was going
Speaker 1: the sky over the ridge, flashing white and gold, and
Speaker 1: the booms kept rolling up the drainage, one on top
Speaker 1: of another. And then Katie made a sound I had
Speaker 1: never heard out of her, a low grunt through her teeth,
Speaker 1: and she grabbed the door handle with one hand and
Speaker 1: her belly with the other, and bent as far forward
Speaker 1: as the belly allowed. I asked if that was a contraction.
Speaker 1: She didn't answer until it turned her loose, which took
Speaker 1: the better part of a minute. Barrel had said we'd
Speaker 1: have hours, she cut me off. It wasn't the first one.
Speaker 1: She'd been having them up on the knob all evening
Speaker 1: and had written them off as the practice kind. They
Speaker 1: were about ten minutes apart. I don't remember what I
Speaker 1: said back. I remember what she said, which was that
Speaker 1: if I told her to breathe, she'd kill me. The situation,
Speaker 1: as I understood it sitting in that dead truck was this.
Speaker 1: The truck was not coming off that pipe without equipment.
Speaker 1: Camp was six hundred yards uphill behind us, with shelter
Speaker 1: and lantern light and the towels from the go bag.
Speaker 1: The one place on that whole mountain where a phone
Speaker 1: caught a bar of signal was the pipeline cut, a
Speaker 1: mile and a half up the road ahead. Call it
Speaker 1: forty minutes for me at a hard walk in the dark,
Speaker 1: and Katie could not make that walk that night. Past
Speaker 1: the cut, there were seven and a half more miles
Speaker 1: of road before the first house, which belonged to the
Speaker 1: Holly Fields, who were both past eighty and mostly death
Speaker 1: contractions ten minutes apart first baby, probably hours yet. And
Speaker 1: through all of it, the mountain kept talking. It had
Speaker 1: been talking since dusk, and I had been shoving it
Speaker 1: to the back of the line. Whoops, knocks. Twice more
Speaker 1: that scream from the head of the drainage, the big
Speaker 1: one with the chest behind it, And every time it
Speaker 1: came it sounded rougher than the time before. A voice
Speaker 1: getting worn down. As I figured it, I had two options.
Speaker 1: Leave Katie at camp with the dog and the lantern
Speaker 1: and the shotgun while I ran for the signal, or
Speaker 1: keep her with me, move at her speed and give
Speaker 1: up any chance of reaching help before the baby came.
Speaker 1: Whatever was up that drainage camp had canvas, walls and light,
Speaker 1: and it was the ground we knew. So the plan
Speaker 1: was get her up there, get her settled, then run
Speaker 1: the road to the pipeline, cut, make three phone calls,
Speaker 1: and run back under ninety minutes.
Speaker 2: For the whole loop. If I pushed, Katie said okay.
Speaker 1: Then she had another contraction, and this one came seven
Speaker 1: minutes behind the last one instead of ten. The six
Speaker 1: hundred yards back up to camp took the better part
Speaker 1: of thirty minutes. We stopped twice for contractions, her hanging
Speaker 1: onto a sapling with both hands while I stood there
Speaker 1: with the flashlight and the shotgun, listening up the mountain.
Speaker 1: It was during the second stop that I heard the
Speaker 1: thing I have never figured out how to say without
Speaker 1: sounding like I've lost my grip. Katie was leaned on
Speaker 1: a little sweet gum, groaning through her teeth, that long,
Speaker 1: low sound labor drags out of a woman, whether she
Speaker 1: agrees to it or not. And in the gap after
Speaker 1: a shell burst, the scream came down from the head
Speaker 1: of the drainage, again, the ragged one they overlapped. My
Speaker 1: wife and that voice on the mountain were crying out
Speaker 1: at the same time, in the same dark. The pitch
Speaker 1: was different and the size was different, but the shape
Speaker 1: of the sound was not. I stood between the two
Speaker 1: of them, holding a shotgun that had stopped feeling like
Speaker 1: much of anything, and the realization hit me, that's the
Speaker 1: same sound we made camp. I got the lantern going,
Speaker 1: got Katie onto the cot with the towels and the
Speaker 1: go bag, and Banjo put himself against her hip, facing
Speaker 1: the door, and stayed there. She rode out one more contraction,
Speaker 1: gripping my hand six minutes now. Then she pushed my
Speaker 1: hand away and told me to go, to run, and
Speaker 1: to come back even if none of the calls went through.
Speaker 1: She made me look at her for that last part.
Speaker 1: I went out of the tent and ran. I was
Speaker 1: thirty one that summer and in decent shape, and I'll
Speaker 1: still tell you that a mile and a half of
Speaker 1: Steelhouse Road at a dead run uphill most of the
Speaker 1: way at eleven at night with nothing but a flashlight
Speaker 1: took more out of me than I knew I had
Speaker 1: to give. I crossed the wash out on foot and
Speaker 1: gave the truck one look going past, and kept climbing
Speaker 1: above the crossing. The road works up through big timber
Speaker 1: in long switchbacks. My light was a tunnel, and everything
Speaker 1: outside the tunnel was a guess. And about ten minutes
Speaker 1: up the guessing started keeping pace with me. It stayed
Speaker 1: above me, off my right showe in the stretches where
Speaker 1: my own boots came down, quiet on grass. I could
Speaker 1: hear it clear footfalls in the leaves, heavy on two legs,
Speaker 1: matching my speed. When I stopped, it stopped about a
Speaker 1: half beat behind me. An echo doesn't snap a stick
Speaker 1: when it shifts its weight. I put the beam up
Speaker 1: the slope and got nothing but trees. The light only
Speaker 1: carried sixty or seventy feet before the slope ran on
Speaker 1: past it into Laurel, and nothing shined back at me.
Speaker 1: I stood there, blowing hard with the sweat going cold,
Speaker 1: and I ran the only numbers I had. Whatever it
Speaker 1: was had been sitting inside rock throwing distance for ten
Speaker 1: minutes and hadn't come down the hill. My wife was
Speaker 1: in a tent below me, with the contraction six minutes apart.
Speaker 1: So I ran, and it came along beside me, and
Speaker 1: the two of us went up that mountain together, me
Speaker 1: on the road and it in the timber. Somewhere in
Speaker 1: the second switchback. I started talking to it out loud
Speaker 1: between breaths, told it I had a baby coming, told
Speaker 1: it to do whatever it wanted, but that I didn't
Speaker 1: have time for it that night. Nothing answered. I couldn't
Speaker 1: tell you the moment the pacing quit, whether it dropped
Speaker 1: back or went quiet or just peeled off. But by
Speaker 1: the time I broke out of the trees into the
Speaker 1: pipeline cut, I was alone. The cut is a strange
Speaker 1: piece of ground, even in daylight, one hundred feet of
Speaker 1: mode grass running straight up and over the ridge. Standing
Speaker 1: in the middle of it, I could see open sky
Speaker 1: and a few stars behind the firework haze, and far
Speaker 1: down the other side the lights of Ellison. I held
Speaker 1: the phone up over my head, one bar, then nothing,
Speaker 1: then one bar again. First call was nine to one one.
Speaker 1: It connected on the second ring, and I got a
Speaker 1: dispatcher whose voice came through in pieces about every third word.
Speaker 1: Making the trip, I gave her the facts and the
Speaker 1: smallest chunks I could build them into. Wife in labor
Speaker 1: thirty six weeks, water broken contractions, six minutes apart, Steelhouse Road,
Speaker 1: nine miles off Highway Too sixty out of Wick's Mill,
Speaker 1: past the old Hollyfield Place camp, a half mile beyond
Speaker 1: the washed out crossing. I told her twice that the
Speaker 1: crossing was gone, that a truck couldn't get across it,
Speaker 1: that they'd have to come the last stretch on foot
Speaker 1: or bring a winch in some planks. She read part
Speaker 1: of it back, and most of what she read was right.
Speaker 1: What I heard clean from her end was that it
Speaker 1: was the busiest night of the year and everything was
Speaker 1: already rolling on a structure, fire at the lake and
Speaker 1: two wrecks, that she'd start somebody my way but couldn't
Speaker 1: say when, and that I should stay with my wife
Speaker 1: and call back if if what I never found out
Speaker 1: because the bar dropped and took her with it. Second
Speaker 1: call was Carol, our midwife, straight to voicemail, because Carol,
Speaker 1: as I found out later, was on the far side
Speaker 1: of the county that same hour delivering somebody else's baby.
Speaker 1: I left a message with everything in it, and my
Speaker 1: own voice came back at me off the phone, sounding
Speaker 1: like a stranger, high and fast. Third call was Katie's father.
Speaker 1: He picked up on the second ring and heard maybe
Speaker 1: half of what I said, and half was enough, because
Speaker 1: the next thing through the static was Ray talking away
Speaker 1: from the phone to Katie's mother, already up and moving,
Speaker 1: and then the sound of keys, then back to me
Speaker 1: in slices, calling Dewey, meet you at the crossing hold
Speaker 1: on Son and the Mountain took the signal for good.
Speaker 1: Dewey Prayeder ran with the County rescue squad as a volunteer,
Speaker 1: fished with Ray most weekends, and lived in Wick's Mill
Speaker 1: behind the Baptist Church. I stood in that mode stripe
Speaker 1: another minute, trying to pull one more bar out of
Speaker 1: the sky, and in that minute the whole valley went quiet,
Speaker 1: because the otems had finally run out of shells or
Speaker 1: run out of beer. And for the first time since
Speaker 1: I'd left camp, I could hear the drainage below me
Speaker 1: with nothing laid over the top of it. The screaming
Speaker 1: down at the head of Dutch Branch hadn't stopped it
Speaker 1: had changed. The fury was gone.
Speaker 2: Out of it.
Speaker 1: It came in rounds now, a long straining cry, then
Speaker 1: a rest, then another one, spaced almost even, and in
Speaker 1: between the big cries there were smaller sounds that barely
Speaker 1: climbed the hill to me, whoops shrunk down to something anxious,
Speaker 1: more than one voice close together, answering each other low.
Speaker 1: I stood in the middle of that cut with my
Speaker 1: chest heaving a mile above my laboring wife, listening to
Speaker 1: that rhythm, and the thought I'd had on the road
Speaker 1: finished itself. There was one of them up there in
Speaker 1: labor too. I couldn't prove it then, and I can't
Speaker 1: prove it now. It also didn't change one thing about
Speaker 1: my night. Whatever was going on at the head of
Speaker 1: that drainage, My business was in a canvas tent six
Speaker 1: hundred yards below the crossing. I turned downhill and ran
Speaker 1: harder than I'd run coming up, And that is how
Speaker 1: about four hundred yards above the crossing. I came around
Speaker 1: to switch back and put my light square on it.
Speaker 1: It was standing at the edge of the road, on
Speaker 1: the road really, with one foot down in the rut,
Speaker 1: up straight, and turned half away from me with its
Speaker 1: head craned back over its shoulder, caught dead to rights,
Speaker 1: the look a man gets crossing a yard he's got
Speaker 1: no business in. I had a good flashlight and seventy
Speaker 1: feet of straight road, and it stood in that beam
Speaker 1: for what I'd call four on a seconds. Four seconds
Speaker 1: is longer than you think. It was covered in dark
Speaker 1: reddish brown hair, longer at the shoulders and down the
Speaker 1: fore arms, and thinner across the face. I stand six
Speaker 1: foot one and it had a good two feet on me,
Speaker 1: and the shoulders were wider than a door frame, with
Speaker 1: no neck to speak of. The head set down so
Speaker 1: far into them that looking back at me meant turning
Speaker 1: part of its upper back. I won't oversail the face
Speaker 1: because seventy feet and four seconds only by you so much.
Speaker 1: It was flat and dark where the skin showed, and
Speaker 1: heavy across the brow. The eyes caught my light and
Speaker 1: threw it back a dull red orange, the same trick
Speaker 1: ader's eyes play in green. And in one hand it
Speaker 1: was carrying two dead rabbits by their hind legs. That
Speaker 1: one detail is why nobody in six years has talked
Speaker 1: me out of this. A bear isn't out at midnight
Speaker 1: hauling rabbits by the hind legs, and a man in
Speaker 1: a suit nine miles up a dead end road on
Speaker 1: the one night of the year when the whole county
Speaker 1: is drunk in a hayfield watching fireworks. Is a taller
Speaker 1: tail than the alternative, and no costume I ever heard
Speaker 1: of comes with an arm that hangs to the knee
Speaker 1: with two rabbits swinging off the fist. Neither one of
Speaker 1: us did a thing that was the whole of it
Speaker 1: start to finish. My light shook because my hand shook.
Speaker 1: Its chest was working big, slow movements, and it came
Speaker 1: to me a good while later that it had been
Speaker 1: running that night too, probably running for hours, and an
Speaker 1: animal that size has a furnace to feed, and rabbits
Speaker 1: were what the night had turned up. Then it took
Speaker 1: one step, and the laurel closed over it. One step,
Speaker 1: and a sound like a wet sheet hauled off a clothesline.
Speaker 1: The road was empty for a few seconds. I could
Speaker 1: track the leaves moving above the roadbed, up and away
Speaker 1: toward the head of the drainage, and the screaming. He
Speaker 1: was headed home with his supper, same as I was
Speaker 1: headed home with the news. Then I ran the rest
Speaker 1: of the way down. When I came up the last
Speaker 1: stretch into camp, the lantern was burning, and I heard
Speaker 1: Katie before I saw the tent, and what I heard
Speaker 1: put a cold finger on the back of my neck,
Speaker 1: because it was the sound i'd heard out of the
Speaker 1: sapling earlier, and the sound coming off the head of
Speaker 1: Dutch branch, the long straining cry, the collapse the rest.
Speaker 1: I looked at my watch, eleven forty. I'd been gone
Speaker 1: fifty minutes, and in those fifty minutes, my wife had
Speaker 1: gone from six minutes apart to three.
Speaker 2: This first baby, the.
Speaker 1: One that was supposed to take us hours and hours,
Speaker 1: had plainly not read the same book we had. Inside
Speaker 1: the tent, Katie was up on her knees on the cot,
Speaker 1: leaning over the back rail of it. She'd gotten herself
Speaker 1: into that position on her own and worked out on
Speaker 1: her own that it was the only one that didn't
Speaker 1: make everything worse. Banjo was flattened against the tent wall,
Speaker 1: watching her like she might go off any second, which
Speaker 1: wasn't a bad read. The first thing out of her
Speaker 1: between contractions was whether I'd gotten through. I told her
Speaker 1: the ambulance was coming, and her daddy was coming and
Speaker 1: bringing Dewey. She asked how long I told her they
Speaker 1: were coming, and we both heard exactly what that answer
Speaker 1: was worth, and she put her forehead down on her
Speaker 1: hands and rode the next one out while I knelt
Speaker 1: there with a hand on her back, counting three minutes,
Speaker 1: the one after that, three minutes, and somewhere in there
Speaker 1: she said the thing that rearranged the rest of the night.
Speaker 2: She felt like pushing on that last one.
Speaker 1: I'd sat through the classes and read the book she
Speaker 1: kept on the toilet tank, and I knew feeling like
Speaker 1: pushing is not a stage you want to hit in
Speaker 1: a tent with the nearest trained hand forty minutes and
Speaker 1: one dead truck away, So I made a call, and
Speaker 1: I'll stand behind it, in front of anybody. Ray and
Speaker 1: Dewey were coming up toward the crossing from below. The
Speaker 1: truck was stuck on the crossing itself. If I could
Speaker 1: get the truck off that pipe, even shove it backward
Speaker 1: onto the campside, I could put Katie in the cab
Speaker 1: and drive her down to the crossing, and she could
Speaker 1: labor forty feet from where the help was going to
Speaker 1: arrive instead of six hundred yards up a rut road
Speaker 1: and if things kept moving the way they were, threatening
Speaker 1: to a truck cab with a dome light beats a
Speaker 1: tent by a country mile. I told her the plant.
Speaker 1: She said go and that she'd holler if anything changed.
Speaker 1: She had her phone next to her on the cot,
Speaker 1: no bars, running the stopwatch, timing her own contractions. Alone
Speaker 1: on a mountain, jogging away from that lantern is the
Speaker 1: most useless I have felt in my whole life, and
Speaker 1: I'm counting everything that came after. At the crossing, I
Speaker 1: dug the bottlejack out from behind the seat and went
Speaker 1: to work. And anybody who's ever fought a high centered
Speaker 1: truck by himself in the dark can write the next
Speaker 1: half hour.
Speaker 2: Without my help.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. I set the jack on a flat
Speaker 1: rock under the frame at the right rear and pumped
Speaker 1: until the rock started to roll and I had to
Speaker 1: hunt a better one. I got maybe four inches of
Speaker 1: lift and packed the hole under the tire with everything
Speaker 1: the mountain would hand me. Busted culvert chunks, a fence
Speaker 1: post out of the weeds, green limbs I cut with
Speaker 1: the hatchet, let the jack down, tires touched, got in,
Speaker 1: eased on the gas. The truck moved half a foot
Speaker 1: ground everything I'd packed down into the mud, and came
Speaker 1: back down on the pipe with the same bang as
Speaker 1: the first time. Now the jack was buried and my
Speaker 1: hands were bleeding, and it was past midnight. I stood
Speaker 1: in the headlight spill with my hands on my knees,
Speaker 1: getting my wind back. The otems had opened back up
Speaker 1: across the valley Lazy, now one shell a minute, each
Speaker 1: flash lighting the fog off the creek. It came to
Speaker 1: me that the drainage above had gone quiet, and that
Speaker 1: I couldn't say when the screaming had stopped somewhere in
Speaker 1: the middle of me fighting the truck, and I'd had
Speaker 1: nothing left over to notice it with. Then the smell
Speaker 1: hit me that bore pin smell, wet dog and something
Speaker 1: underneath the wet dog. And it didn't drift in on
Speaker 1: the air. It was just there all at once, the
Speaker 1: same as it had been at the spring box earlier
Speaker 1: that week. Six hundred yards up the road, Banjo started
Speaker 1: barking his full head off in the tent, and I
Speaker 1: knew the way you know, when somebody has walked into
Speaker 1: the kitchen behind you that I had company At that crossing.
Speaker 1: I turned around slow and kept the flashlight down against
Speaker 1: my leg because some old backshelf part of my brain
Speaker 1: had decided that raising it would come across as a threat.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you where that instinct came from. I'd
Speaker 1: bet the truck it was right. He was standing at
Speaker 1: the tree line on the camp side, upstream, maybe forty
Speaker 1: feet off out at the gray edge of the headlightwash,
Speaker 1: the same one from the road. I was sure of
Speaker 1: it right then, and I'm sure of it now. No
Speaker 1: rabbits this time, hands empty, arms hanging, And he wasn't
Speaker 1: even looking at me. He was looking at the truck
Speaker 1: with his head tipped over a few degrees. He was
Speaker 1: studying it the same way I'd been studying it as
Speaker 1: a problem. What I felt was ordinary fear, the physical kind,
Speaker 1: loose knees and a cold scalp. What I did was
Speaker 1: take two steps back and put the fender between us,
Speaker 1: as if a fender was going to figure into it.
Speaker 1: What he did was nothing. For about half a minute,
Speaker 1: he looked at the truck. Then he looked up the
Speaker 1: road toward camp, where banjo was still going, and where
Speaker 1: faint carried down the road cut Katie was moaning through
Speaker 1: another contraction. Then his eyes went back to the truck.
Speaker 1: Then he came out of the tree line, and every
Speaker 1: alarm of bodies got went off in me at once.
Speaker 1: The shotgun was sitting in the cab, and I never
Speaker 1: moved for it, And I'll be honest, that had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with courage. My legs had quit taking new orders.
Speaker 1: He walked into the full headlights, and everything got small
Speaker 1: around him. The truck got smaller, and the road got smaller,
Speaker 1: and he crossed the washed out gap in three strides
Speaker 1: without once looking down at it. A man stepping over
Speaker 1: a garden hose. He put both hands on the tailgate,
Speaker 1: he bent down. He set his shoulder into the corner
Speaker 1: of the bed, over the buried wheel. Six years on,
Speaker 1: I still can't put what came next into words, so
Speaker 1: I'll just give you the physics of it. The back
Speaker 1: end of a loaded half ton pickup does not come
Speaker 1: up for one man. Two men with a pry bar
Speaker 1: can bounce it a little. This thing planted its feet
Speaker 1: in the mud, and its back came up, and the
Speaker 1: whole rear of my truck came up with it tires
Speaker 1: and awe a foot off the ground, smooth, no jerk
Speaker 1: anywhere in it, the same motion you'd use lifting your
Speaker 1: end of a couch. And it held it there, and
Speaker 1: it turned its head and looked at me, straight at me,
Speaker 1: the eyes picking up the tail like glow and throwing
Speaker 1: it back red. And I stood there a full second
Speaker 1: before it got through my head that I was being
Speaker 1: told what to do. I got in, put it in
Speaker 1: gear and fed it the gas easy, and the front
Speaker 1: tire's bit and the airborne back end swung forward, and
Speaker 1: I felt the second the frame cleared the pipe, and
Speaker 1: he set it down, all four tires onto the good
Speaker 1: dirt of the far side, set down soft enough that
Speaker 1: the coffee mug and my cup holder never spilled, and
Speaker 1: that mug had been sitting cocked at an angle for
Speaker 1: two hours. The truck was across the wash out, pointed downhill,
Speaker 1: pointed at the hospital. I stopped and looked in the mirror,
Speaker 1: and the tail light showed me the crossing and the
Speaker 1: gap and the mashed grass and nothing else. Gone clean
Speaker 1: off the road, and I never heard him go. Something
Speaker 1: that has to run a couple thousand pounds, and I
Speaker 1: never heard a single leaf. I sat there gripping the
Speaker 1: wheel while my heart tried to climb out through my ribs,
Speaker 1: and I can give you my thoughts in the order
Speaker 1: they showed up. First, that nobody was ever going to
Speaker 1: believe this, second, that the truck was now on the
Speaker 1: wrong longside of the crossing from Katie, and third coming
Speaker 1: up slower from underneath the other two. While I stared
Speaker 1: at that empty crossing in the red glow, he heard her.
Speaker 1: He has one up there making the same sound. He
Speaker 1: heard it, he knew exactly what it was, and he
Speaker 1: fixed the one thing on that road he could fix.
Speaker 1: I've spent six years trying on other explanations, and here
Speaker 1: they are.
Speaker 2: He was curious.
Speaker 1: He wanted us off his mountain, and shoving the truck
Speaker 1: along was the quickest way to manage that fine. Either
Speaker 1: one could be true, and a wild animal owes me
Speaker 1: no motive. But he looked up the road when she
Speaker 1: cried out. Before he ever left that tree line, he
Speaker 1: looked up the road, and then he crossed forty feet
Speaker 1: of open ground, passed a standing man into full headlights,
Speaker 1: passed everything an animal that has stayed hidden this long
Speaker 1: is built never to do, and he put his hands
Speaker 1: on a truck. Everybody's welcome to their own version. I'm
Speaker 1: keep in mine. The rest of the night went quick.
Speaker 1: I left the truck running on the far side, went
Speaker 1: back up the road at a run, and brought Katie
Speaker 1: down at half walking and half carrying her, stopping twice
Speaker 1: for contractions that were down to two minutes apart. Now
Speaker 1: she was making the sound with the push in it.
Speaker 1: The gap at the wash out was a real problem
Speaker 1: for a woman that far into labor, and I got
Speaker 1: her over it, mostly by carrying her. And if you'd
Speaker 1: asked me an hour before that whether I could carry
Speaker 1: a nine months pregnant woman across a torn out culvert
Speaker 1: in the pitch dark, i'd have told you no. I've
Speaker 1: wondered since if watching the back of a truck go
Speaker 1: up in the air reset what I thought a body
Speaker 1: could do. I got her stretched across the bench seat,
Speaker 1: Banjo jumped up in the bed, and as I came
Speaker 1: around the hood, two sets of headlights swung up through
Speaker 1: the trees below us. I stood in the middle of
Speaker 1: Steelhouse Road, waving my flashlight like a man flagging a train.
Speaker 1: The first truck was raised. The second was Dewey Prater's
Speaker 1: Bronco with the magnetic rescue light stuck crooked on the roof,
Speaker 1: throwing red into the fog. Twelve twenty in the morning,
Speaker 1: Dewey looked in the cab, once timed one contraction off
Speaker 1: his wristwatch, and came out with the finest sentence anybody
Speaker 1: spoke in that county all year. We ain't waiting on
Speaker 1: no ambulance follow me, and don't you dare lose me.
Speaker 1: Nine miles down Steel House Road behind Dewey's spinning light,
Speaker 1: and I've lost most of it. Katie holds more of
Speaker 1: that drive than I do. She says, I talked the
Speaker 1: whole way down, steady nonsense, gas prices, what we'd have
Speaker 1: named a boy, even though we already knew we were
Speaker 1: having a girl. And she says, she hung onto my
Speaker 1: voice like a rope. I believe her. I couldn't hand
Speaker 1: you back one word of it. What I kept is
Speaker 1: pieces the holly field placed sliding past with its porch
Speaker 1: light burning, raised headlights filling my mirror. Katie's hand on
Speaker 1: the dash, going white at the knuckles, then loose, then
Speaker 1: white again. Banjo with his chin hooked over the seat back,
Speaker 1: dead silent, watching her the best behavior of that dog's
Speaker 1: whole career before or since, and the sky. The closer
Speaker 1: we got to town, the more of it opened up,
Speaker 1: and the Odam brothers were still on their bench, sending
Speaker 1: them up one big commercial bloom a minute in red
Speaker 1: and gold, and closer in toward town, a dozen little
Speaker 1: backyard shows were still popping off families that had held
Speaker 1: a few back for after midnight going on one in
Speaker 1: the morning, and the whole valley was still lit up
Speaker 1: and thumping Katie made a new sound coming into the
Speaker 1: town limits, and Dewey must have been splitting his eyes
Speaker 1: between the road and his mirror, because his brake lights
Speaker 1: came on and he swung into the first parking lot
Speaker 1: in Wick's Mill, which is the Baptist church lot, because
Speaker 1: Dewey lives behind that church and knows it's the first
Speaker 1: flat lit pavement you hit coming down off the mountain,
Speaker 1: big gravel lot, one dusk to dawn light up on
Speaker 1: a pole and out by the road one of those
Speaker 1: letter board church signs, and I promise you I am
Speaker 1: not inventing this. The sign reads welcome because vacation Bible
Speaker 1: School opened the next week. Dewey was at Katie's door
Speaker 1: before I had the truck and park. He delivered two
Speaker 1: babies in his rescue squad years, both in trailers, both
Speaker 1: in winter, and he said afterward ours was the easiest
Speaker 1: of the three, which tells you plenty about the other two.
Speaker 1: He got the seat back flat, got his kit spread
Speaker 1: under her, took one look and announced we were doing
Speaker 1: this right here, in the tone of a man ordering breakfast.
Speaker 1: Katie answered him with a word, I won't say here
Speaker 1: in case you have little ones around. Ray walked to
Speaker 1: the edge of the lot and stood facing the empty
Speaker 1: road like a sentry, which was Rai's way of handling himself.
Speaker 1: And I got in behind Katie's shoulders and held her,
Speaker 1: and Dewey put his little flashlight between his teeth. Josie
Speaker 1: was born at ten minutes to one in the morning,
Speaker 1: fast and loud and furious about the whole arrangement, with
Speaker 1: a full head of black hair, and Dewey caught her
Speaker 1: in a beach towel that had Sea World printed across it,
Speaker 1: and the odem Brothers, two miles off across the valley,
Speaker 1: picked that stretch of the night to burn through everything
Speaker 1: they had left, a full finale for no audience at all,
Speaker 1: and the sky over that church went red and white
Speaker 1: and gold, with the booms stacking down the valley. While
Speaker 1: my daughter screamed her first screams in the front seat
Speaker 1: of a Ford. Ray tells it that the Odems knew
Speaker 1: they didn't. Ricky Odom was out of beer and ready
Speaker 1: for bed. I understand why Ray tails it his way.
Speaker 1: Some coincidences are too good to leave lying in the road.
Speaker 1: The ambulance found us in the church lot twenty minutes later.
Speaker 1: They checked Katie, checked the baby, loaded the two of
Speaker 1: them onto one gurney together and ran them into Ellison
Speaker 1: as a formality. Everybody was fine seven pounds one ounce
Speaker 1: of fine. I followed the ambulance at three in the morning,
Speaker 1: with Banjo asleep on the bench where my daughter had
Speaker 1: just been born, crying at forty five miles an hour
Speaker 1: down highway to sixty, with Ray behind me the whole
Speaker 1: way like a rear guard. That ought to be the
Speaker 1: end of it. It isn't. At the hospital around four
Speaker 1: in the morning, once they had Katie and the baby
Speaker 1: settled in, I went hunting for coffee down the maternity
Speaker 1: hall wired and scraped hollow. At the same time. Behind
Speaker 1: a closed door at the far end, another woman was
Speaker 1: in labor, deep in it, and her sounds carried down
Speaker 1: that quiet hallway, the long, straining cry, the collapse, the
Speaker 1: rest the next one. I stopped in front of the
Speaker 1: coffee machine with my cup half full, because I'd already
Speaker 1: heard that rhythm twice that night, once out of a
Speaker 1: tent and once off the head of Dutch branch in
Speaker 1: the gaps between shellbursts, going more ragged and more worn
Speaker 1: as the night wore on, until it wore itself out
Speaker 1: sometime around midnight, while I was fighting the truck. It
Speaker 1: ends the way it ends, and it ended that same
Speaker 1: way down the hospital hallway. An hour later, when a
Speaker 1: different and much smaller crying started up, and Rus's shoes
Speaker 1: went by me quick and happy. I stood at that
Speaker 1: machine and did the arithmetic. There'd been no room for
Speaker 1: on the mountain. The screaming that started up when the
Speaker 1: fireworks started, the clan we'd heard breaking off the slopes
Speaker 1: in every direction earlier, and the young one down in
Speaker 1: the creek, carrying its pale bundle away from the noise,
Speaker 1: the big male working the whole mountain side. Half the
Speaker 1: night out on the road with Rabbits in his fist,
Speaker 1: moving and moving, while the voice at the head of
Speaker 1: the drainage wore itself down to nothing, and the quiet
Speaker 1: after midnight, which had a finished sound to it. If
Speaker 1: quiet can sound like anything, and up there it can.
Speaker 1: The nurses never asked why I was crying at their
Speaker 1: coffee machine. Maternity wards see plenty of that. We brought
Speaker 1: Josie home on the sixth of July to a kitchen
Speaker 1: full of casse roles because word travels through a small
Speaker 1: county faster than any ambulance, and the baby born in
Speaker 1: the Baptist church lot was already community property. Dewey had
Speaker 1: it told at the huddle house by seven that first morning.
Speaker 1: The church swapped the letter board over to Congratulations Josie,
Speaker 1: which made Katie cry, and the preacher started up with
Speaker 1: his joke about counting her as a member since she
Speaker 1: was technically born on church property. He's run that joke
Speaker 1: six years now and it hasn't worn out on him yet.
Speaker 1: But there was a second story working its way around
Speaker 1: town that same week, and I caught my first piece
Speaker 1: of it in line at the feed store two days
Speaker 1: after Josie was born, a sack of dog food on
Speaker 1: my shoulder. Two boys ahead of me, early twenties. One
Speaker 1: of them, a Tatum, I believe, judging by his face,
Speaker 1: was talking about the screaming up on Steell House all
Speaker 1: night on the fourth, screaming like a woman, like something
Speaker 1: dying coming out of Dutch branch. The Odin brothers had
Speaker 1: heard it between shells, and so had the cousins. They'd
Speaker 1: had over a dozen witnesses all told, and around eleven o'clock,
Speaker 1: Ricky Odom had swung his big spotlight across the valley
Speaker 1: onto the pipeline cut, that one hundred foot mode stripe,
Speaker 1: and every man on that chicken house pad swore up
Speaker 1: and down they'd watched something cross it upright dark. One
Speaker 1: of them said it covered the whole cut in eight steps.
Speaker 1: That was me eleven o'clock on the pipeline cut. That
Speaker 1: was a thirty one year old expectant father in a
Speaker 1: brown car heart shirt, sprinting for the only phone signal
Speaker 1: in the county, lit up by a chicken farmer's spotlight
Speaker 1: from two miles off. I'm the Steelhouse road creature, half
Speaker 1: of it, anyway. I came within one breath of saying
Speaker 1: so right there in the line, and then the Tatum
Speaker 1: boy said the thing that closed my mouth for the
Speaker 1: next six years. Jud was getting a group up for Saturday,
Speaker 1: thermal drone and all they were going to walk Dutch
Speaker 1: Branch clear to the head. Jud Cocher ran a Facebook
Speaker 1: group called North Georgia Squatch Watchers, four hundred members, mostly harmless,
Speaker 1: a page full of blurry trail camera shots that were
Speaker 1: mostly stumps, but a dozen of them carrying rifles behind
Speaker 1: a drone, walking my wife's family land all the way
Speaker 1: to the of that drainage, to the cave house, to
Speaker 1: wherever a mother was denned up with an infant a
Speaker 1: few days old. Quit being harmless in a hurry. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. And it got worse in the same conversation
Speaker 1: because somebody had also called the Sheriff's office about the screaming,
Speaker 1: worried there was a woman in trouble up on that
Speaker 1: mountain and a deputy was supposedly asking around. I drove
Speaker 1: home and gave Katie all of it while she nursed
Speaker 1: Josie in the recliner. She heard me out to the end,
Speaker 1: looked down at our three day old daughter and said, well,
Speaker 1: you know what the screaming was.
Speaker 2: I said some of it.
Speaker 1: She said I knew what all of it was, and
Speaker 1: she moved the baby up onto her shoulder and told
Speaker 1: me to go handle it.
Speaker 2: The deputy was the easy half.
Speaker 1: His name was Alvarez, a young guy, and I caught
Speaker 1: him at the substation on the morning of the ninth.
Speaker 1: I told him the screaming on Steelhouse Road on the
Speaker 1: night of the fourth was my wife in labor on
Speaker 1: the mountain all night, and I laid Josie's paperwork on
Speaker 1: the counter with the time of birth on it ten
Speaker 1: till one in the morning. I told him about the
Speaker 1: washed out crossing and Dewey and the church lot, all
Speaker 1: of which he'd already heard, the same as everybody else
Speaker 1: in the county. And I watched his shoulders come down
Speaker 1: an inch at a time. He said it was the
Speaker 1: best call he'd get to close all year, shook my hand,
Speaker 1: congratulated me, and that afternoon the Sheriff's office told the
Speaker 1: callers the Steelhouse Road screaming was accounted for. Mother and
Speaker 1: baby doing fine. That version ran through town by supper time.
Speaker 1: A woman in labor explains, screaming, it does not explain
Speaker 1: what twelve men watched cross a spot lit pipeline cut
Speaker 1: in eight steps. Jud Cocher needed a different tool, and
Speaker 1: I'm not all the way proud of the tool, and
Speaker 1: I'd pick it up again before you finished asking me
Speaker 1: to defend it. I found Jud at his shop where
Speaker 1: he fixes small engines, and I introduced myself as the
Speaker 1: father of the church lot baby, which by that week
Speaker 1: was about like introducing yourself as the mayor. I let
Speaker 1: him get his congratulating done, then I dropped my voice
Speaker 1: and handed him exactly what he wanted. I'd been up
Speaker 1: on that land all week. I'd heard the Knox Thursday night,
Speaker 1: which was true. I'd smelled it near our spring, also true.
Speaker 1: And on the night of the fourth, with my own
Speaker 1: two eyes, i'd watch something upright cross a spot lit clearing,
Speaker 1: and that was true, right down to the last word
Speaker 1: of it. And Jud's eyes went wide as dinner plates,
Speaker 1: and I set the hook. I told him everything i'd
Speaker 1: heard had answered back from the east, across the highway,
Speaker 1: over on the beachfork side. Whatever came through our place
Speaker 1: was passing through headed east, and I'd tell him something
Speaker 1: else besides. On the morning of the third, I'd glassed
Speaker 1: a sow bear with two cubs on our side of
Speaker 1: Dutch Branch, and she'd been working our camp all week,
Speaker 1: and half of what folks heard was likely her march
Speaker 1: a dozen armed men up Dutch Branch through thick Laurel,
Speaker 1: and somebody was going to step in between that sow
Speaker 1: and her cubs and ride home in a helicopter. Beach
Speaker 1: Fork was where his animal went. Beach Fork was open timber,
Speaker 1: where a thermal drone was actually worth flying. Every lie
Speaker 1: in that speech was doing a job, and I'd sanded
Speaker 1: the edges off all of them beforehand. There was no
Speaker 1: sow with cubs, but there easily could have been, and
Speaker 1: nobody alive can audit a bear. The Knox really had
Speaker 1: answered from across a drainage, just not the drainage I
Speaker 1: sold him.
Speaker 2: And the Beachfork side is.
Speaker 1: National forest, no den, no family, nobody's forty acres miles
Speaker 1: of empty ridge where a dozen men could hike themselves
Speaker 1: happy for a month, and bother nothing but the ticks.
Speaker 2: Jud bought the whole load.
Speaker 1: And he bought it because I was a named witness
Speaker 1: attached to a famous baby, and in his world, a
Speaker 1: witness with a name is hard currency. The squatch watchers
Speaker 1: walked beach Fork that Saturday, and the Saturday after her
Speaker 1: own found too deer and a poacher's tree stand. Judd
Speaker 1: posted a picture of a mark on a hemlock that
Speaker 1: four hundred people argued over for a week. Nobody walked
Speaker 1: up dutch branch, and the head of that drainage stayed
Speaker 1: clear of human beings the rest of the summer. I know,
Speaker 1: because I watched that Facebook group all season, the way
Speaker 1: a farmer watches the weather. Katie asked me that night
Speaker 1: if I felt bad about lying to jud I said
Speaker 1: a little. She said, I told a man a bear
Speaker 1: story to keep him from getting somebody shot and to
Speaker 1: keep a crowd off of mama with a new baby,
Speaker 1: and that she'd have told him worse. She had our
Speaker 1: own new baby up on her shoulder while she said it.
Speaker 1: Her granddaddy used to leave the last row of corn
Speaker 1: standing in that garden flat on the mountain. She was
Speaker 1: raised inside this thing. I married into it and got
Speaker 1: the whole orientation in one night. I went back up
Speaker 1: on a Tuesday, in the middle of July, eleven days
Speaker 1: after to break down the camp we'd walked off and left.
Speaker 1: Ray offered to ride along, and I told him I
Speaker 1: had it, and he held my eye about a second
Speaker 1: longer than the exchange called for, and told me to
Speaker 1: take my time up there.
Speaker 2: To this day, I don't know how.
Speaker 1: Much Ray knows his father in law left out corn,
Speaker 1: and anybody who asks Ray about that gets a fishing
Speaker 1: story for an answer. I crossed at the new entrance
Speaker 1: that Ray and I had cut in with the tractor
Speaker 1: the week before, upstream on solid rock we'd written off
Speaker 1: the old culvert crossing for good. Driving past it, I
Speaker 1: stopped and got out anyway, because I half expected the
Speaker 1: ground to have given the marks back by then. Between
Speaker 1: the rain and the deer and a man's own doubt
Speaker 1: it hadn't baked. Into the dried mud where he'd set
Speaker 1: his feet to lift were two prints driven deeper than
Speaker 1: any of the others we ever found on that place,
Speaker 1: the way your boots print deep when you jump down
Speaker 1: off a tailgate, seventeen inches heeled to toe. I stood
Speaker 1: over them a long while, I never photographed them. The
Speaker 1: one time I've told this out loud. A man asked
Speaker 1: me why not, And the plain answer is that it
Speaker 1: never once crossed my mind that day. The answer underneath
Speaker 1: that one is that it would have felt like photographing
Speaker 1: a man's signature on a favor. Camp sat untouched, the
Speaker 1: tent was still standing, the tarp held a belly of
Speaker 1: rain water. The horse shoes lay right where they'd landed
Speaker 1: on the third of July back in the previous lifetime.
Speaker 1: I packed it all out over the course of the morning,
Speaker 1: and the wood stayed ordinary the whole time, squirrels running
Speaker 1: their mouths, the creek down to its clear summer trickle,
Speaker 1: all the right noise, back in its right place. I
Speaker 1: finished up early in the afternoon, and the right move
Speaker 1: was to drive home, and instead I did the thing
Speaker 1: I'd been circling since I woke up that morning. I
Speaker 1: walked up the drainage, past the spring box, along the
Speaker 1: game trail a half mile up to where you can
Speaker 1: see the cave house, the big rock overhang across the branch.
Speaker 1: I never got inside two hundred yards of that overhang,
Speaker 1: because at two hundred yards a knock stopped me. One
Speaker 1: knock from up above the overhang. Wood on wood, not loud.
Speaker 1: I stopped where it told me to stop, on my
Speaker 1: side of the branch, standing out in the open, where
Speaker 1: I could be plainly seen, because being plainly seen felt
Speaker 1: like the whole point of standing there.
Speaker 2: And I waited.
Speaker 1: About four minutes later they crossed the slope below the overhang,
Speaker 1: moving up and away from me, and they let me
Speaker 1: watch them do it. I believe that was on purpose,
Speaker 1: whatever on purpose means for a thing like that, because
Speaker 1: these are creatures that cross one hundred feet of spot
Speaker 1: lit clearing in eight steps when they'd rather not be seen,
Speaker 1: and this crossing was slow. The big male came first,
Speaker 1: dark reddish brown, walking the slope, and even at two
Speaker 1: hundred yards, his size made the trees around him look
Speaker 1: like a bad drawing. Behind him came a smaller one,
Speaker 1: gray through the shoulders a female, and against her chest,
Speaker 1: held in the crook of one arm, riding her hip
Speaker 1: with its little fists wound up in her hair, was
Speaker 1: an infant, dark faced, the side of a toddler. Against
Speaker 1: all of that mass, eleven days old and bringing up
Speaker 1: the rear, hanging back, turning every few steps to check.
Speaker 1: Behind them, came the gangly one, the juvenile from the creek,
Speaker 1: the one that had run the pale bundle away from
Speaker 1: the fireworks. An older sibling is my best guest, now
Speaker 1: out on watch, learning the trade. They climbed up and
Speaker 1: at the top, at the edge of the laurel, the
Speaker 1: mail stopped and turned and looked back down across the
Speaker 1: drainage at me for three or four seconds. Two hundred
Speaker 1: yards between us in eleven days, and the last time
Speaker 1: we'd stood this close, he'd been holding the back end
Speaker 1: of my truck off the ground. I raised my hand.
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell you what I meant by it, It's
Speaker 1: just what my arm did. And then the laurel took him,
Speaker 1: took all three of them, and the drainage went back
Speaker 1: to being water and rock and birds. I stood there
Speaker 1: a while longer, and then I walked down off the
Speaker 1: mountain and drove home to my wife and my daughter.
Speaker 2: Josie is six.
Speaker 1: Now she has Katie's black hair and my complete inability
Speaker 1: to whisper. And every summer she asks the question every
Speaker 1: child born around the fourth eventually asks, which is whether
Speaker 1: the fireworks are for her. We tell her, yes, of course,
Speaker 1: we tell her yes. We watch them from the porch
Speaker 1: in town. These days far enough out that the booms
Speaker 1: come in soft banjo old now and stone deaf in
Speaker 1: his last good ear sleeps through the whole show at
Speaker 1: her feet. And every year I sit there and think
Speaker 1: about the other one, same age as my daughter, to
Speaker 1: the day or a day either side, born at the
Speaker 1: head of Dutch branch while the sky came apart into
Speaker 1: a family that had scattered off a mountain side in
Speaker 1: pure terror, and then turned right around and gone back
Speaker 1: for each other, because that is what a family does.
Speaker 2: I think about the two babies.
Speaker 1: A lot, but honestly, I mostly think about him on
Speaker 1: the worst night of his year, with his world blowing
Speaker 1: up overhead, his mate crying out at the top of
Speaker 1: the drainage, and his young scattered over two ridges. He
Speaker 1: spent that night working feeding them and gathering them, and
Speaker 1: standing his stretch of road with rabbits in his fist,
Speaker 1: And sometime after midnight he heard a sound coming out
Speaker 1: of a canvas tent that he had every reason on
Speaker 1: earth to know, and he stepped down out of his
Speaker 1: own emergency, and he lifted a truck out of a
Speaker 1: hole for a man who couldn't have stopped him from
Speaker 1: doing anything.
Speaker 2: He pleased.
Speaker 1: I quit hunting for a smarter explanation. Years ago, up
Speaker 1: and down that valley that night, fathers were working. That's
Speaker 1: the explanation. The family still camps up there every fourth
Speaker 1: all of us now, Ray and Katie's mother and Dewey
Speaker 1: comes too, and Josie hunts crawdads in the branch at
Speaker 1: the same spot where her mother once made me measure
Speaker 1: a footprint against my boot. We rebuilt the crossing the
Speaker 1: right way. We don't shoot fireworks up there, not so
Speaker 1: much as a sparkler. And when Josie asks why, Katie
Speaker 1: tells her the woods don't care for the noise, which
Speaker 1: is the truth in its Sunday clothes. And every year,
Speaker 1: on the last night the dishes are done, Katie plants
Speaker 1: sweet corn. We haul up in the truck bed, a
Speaker 1: whole last row of it in the old garden flat
Speaker 1: by the chimney in ground her granddaddy cleared.
Speaker 2: Josie helps. She thinks it's for the deer.
Speaker 1: One of these years, when she's old enough to know,
Speaker 1: when I can trust her not to stand up and
Speaker 1: tell it at church, I'll walk her past the spring
Speaker 1: box and tell her all of it. How she was
Speaker 1: born in a truck in a Baptist church parking lot
Speaker 1: at ten till one in the morning, under the last
Speaker 1: shells of the loudest forth this valley ever threw. And
Speaker 1: how she wasn't the only one born on that mountain
Speaker 1: that night under those same fireworks, to a family doing
Speaker 1: the exact thing her own family was doing, which was
Speaker 1: everything it could. Two babies came into the world that night,
Speaker 1: within a half mile of each other, and only one
Speaker 1: of them got a birth certificate, the corns for the other.
Speaker 3: One, Pat Pat