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: If you're coming into this cold, do yourself a favor
Speaker 1: and go back to the beginning. Everything in this series connects.
Speaker 1: The encounters stack on each other in a way that
Speaker 1: only makes sense if you've heard the full progression, and
Speaker 1: what Garrett's about to describe won't carry its real weight
Speaker 1: unless you understand what he'd already been through by the
Speaker 1: time it happened. Here's the short version for context over
Speaker 1: the previous two years Garrett had experienced escalating contact with
Speaker 1: something on his remote mountain property in western North Carolina.
Speaker 1: Wood knocking from the ridge, seventeen inch bipedal tracks, a
Speaker 1: visual sighting at the meadow's edge, the systematic harvesting of
Speaker 1: his garden by a creature that defeated every countermeasure He
Speaker 1: set up, a trail camera image of an enormous hand,
Speaker 1: his brother's voice replicated and used to lure him into
Speaker 1: a ravine, and most recently fresh snow, revealing that something
Speaker 1: had been circling his cabin nightly, pausing at his bedroom window,
Speaker 1: pressing its hands against the walls and watching him sleep.
Speaker 1: Each encounter pushed the boundary a little further. Each one
Speaker 1: revealed something new about what the creature was capable of
Speaker 1: and how closely it had been observing Garrett's life, And
Speaker 1: throughout all of it, there'd been a thread running underneath
Speaker 1: the surface that Garrett hadn't pulled on yet, a thread
Speaker 1: that led back to Earle, the man who'd built the
Speaker 1: cabin and lived on that land for four decades, And
Speaker 1: the things Earle had said that didn't seem to mean
Speaker 1: much at the time, but kept gaining significance with every
Speaker 1: passing month. One of those things was a warning about
Speaker 1: a bluff. Here's what Garrett wrote. I want to go
Speaker 1: back to my first afternoon on the property, the day
Speaker 1: I met Earle, because something he said that day planted
Speaker 1: a seed I didn't recognize as a seed until it
Speaker 1: had already grown roots. We'd been sitting on the porch
Speaker 1: for a couple of hours by that point. He told
Speaker 1: me about building the cabin with Frank. He told me
Speaker 1: about Riba and her zenias, and the bird songs she
Speaker 1: could identify from the kitchen sink. He told me about
Speaker 1: the well and the creek and the spring that never
Speaker 1: dried up. And somewhere in the middle of all that,
Speaker 1: during a pause where he was looking out at the ridge,
Speaker 1: he pointed northeast toward a spot I could barely make
Speaker 1: out through the trees. See that ledge up there where
Speaker 1: the rock sticks out above the timber. I squinted about
Speaker 1: half a mile up the slope, maybe a little more.
Speaker 1: There was a rocky shelf that jutted from the ridge line,
Speaker 1: gray stone, angular, partially covered in lichen. It rose above
Speaker 1: the surrounding canopy by maybe twenty or thirty feet from
Speaker 1: the porch. It looked like a fist pushing up through
Speaker 1: the trees. Frank used to hunt from up there, Earle said,
Speaker 1: fall mornings, he'd climb up before dawn and sit on
Speaker 1: the edge with his rifle across his knees and wait
Speaker 1: for deer. Said, you could see three counties from the top, Burke, McDowell,
Speaker 1: and a sliver of Rutherford. If the haze wasn't too bad,
Speaker 1: good spot. Then his expression changed. It was subtle, tightening
Speaker 1: around the eyes, a slight drop in his jaw, like
Speaker 1: he was about to say something he'd been debating whether
Speaker 1: to say. And in that voice he used for things
Speaker 1: that mattered, the flat, quiet register that stripped away inflection
Speaker 1: and left only the words themselves. He said, don't go
Speaker 1: up there after dark. There's no good reason to be
Speaker 1: on that bluff after sundown. I waited for an explanation.
Speaker 1: None came. He picked up his coffee cup and took
Speaker 1: a slow sip and looked away, and the moment passed.
Speaker 1: We moved on to talking about the property boundaries and
Speaker 1: the price, and I filed his warning in the back
Speaker 1: of my mind alongside the other cryptic things he'd said.
Speaker 1: The mountains got its own rhythm Reba's garden wasn't worth
Speaker 1: the trouble. Don't go to the bluff after dark. I
Speaker 1: didn't think about the bluff much during my first two
Speaker 1: years on the property. I had enough happening at lower
Speaker 1: elevations to keep me occupied. The knocking, the garden, the mimicry,
Speaker 1: the snow tracks. All of it took within the immediate
Speaker 1: vicinity of the cabin, within the first couple hundred yards
Speaker 1: of the meadow and the tree line. The bluff was
Speaker 1: half a mile away and six or seven hundred feet
Speaker 1: higher in elevation up on the ridge line and terrain.
Speaker 1: I rarely visited. It existed at the edge of my awareness,
Speaker 1: the way a locked room exists in a house. You
Speaker 1: know it's there, you know it's probably fine, you just
Speaker 1: don't have a reason to open the door. That changed
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty sixteen. The winter had been long.
Speaker 1: After the snow tracks in January, I'd spent the remaining
Speaker 1: cold months in a state of heightened awareness that was
Speaker 1: exhausting to maintain. I slept light, I checked the perimeter
Speaker 1: of the cabin every morning, walking the full circuit, the
Speaker 1: way I used to check a job site before the
Speaker 1: crew arrived, scanning the ground for evidence, looking at the
Speaker 1: windows for smudges, studying the log walls for new marks.
Speaker 1: I kept the spiral notebook updated with every observation, every sound,
Speaker 1: every feeling of being watched that I couldn't attach to
Speaker 1: a specific stimulus. The knocking had been quiet since the
Speaker 1: night of the strikes that shattered the oak bark, and
Speaker 1: by March it still hadn't resumed. The mountain was silent
Speaker 1: in a way that felt deliberate, like a conversation that
Speaker 1: had been paused mid sentence. But after the snow tracks,
Speaker 1: I understood that silence differently. The creatures hadn't left for
Speaker 1: the winter. They just stopped making noise. The knocking, the
Speaker 1: garden visits, the mimicry, Those were the part of the
Speaker 1: activity that was above the water line, below it invisible
Speaker 1: without the freak recording medium of nine inches of fresh snow,
Speaker 1: The physical visits had continued. They'd been circling my cabin,
Speaker 1: standing at my windows, pressing their hands to my walls,
Speaker 1: and doing it all without a sound. That knowledge sat
Speaker 1: with me through the remaining cold months and into the spring.
Speaker 1: It colored everything, every quiet evening, every uneventful night, every morning.
Speaker 1: When I stepped onto the porch and saw nothing unusual,
Speaker 1: I understood that nothing unusual didn't mean nothing happening. It
Speaker 1: meant the happening was invisible. The absence of evidence wasn't
Speaker 1: evidence of absence, It was evidence of competence. Cliff checked
Speaker 1: in on me weekly. He'd call on Sunday evenings, and
Speaker 1: we'd talked for twenty or thirty minutes, and he'd ask
Speaker 1: the same question every time anything new. Most weeks the
Speaker 1: answer was no. The creature or creatures had pulled back.
Speaker 1: Whether that was seasonal behavior, a response to the snow,
Speaker 1: revealing their routine, or something else entirely, I couldn't tell.
Speaker 1: But the contact had stopped, and the silence that replaced
Speaker 1: it was both a relief and a source of low
Speaker 1: grade anxiety. Relief because I could sleep more than four
Speaker 1: hours a night. Anxiety because I knew from two years
Speaker 1: of experience that silence on this mountain was never permanent.
Speaker 1: It was an intermission, not an ending. April brought warmth
Speaker 1: and grin and the return of the birds. The whipper
Speaker 1: wheels came back. The wood thrushes set up in the
Speaker 1: oaks near Bishop Creek and filled the evenings with that
Speaker 1: fluted song that sounds like someone asking a question they
Speaker 1: already know the answer to. Reba's zenias pushed through the
Speaker 1: soil again, right on schedule, and I let them grow,
Speaker 1: because at this point they felt like roommates I'd inherited
Speaker 1: along with the cabin. The knocking returned in mid April,
Speaker 1: tentative at first, a single strike from the ridge every
Speaker 1: few evenings, always after sunset, always from the northeast, the
Speaker 1: same direction as the bluff. I noted it in the notebook,
Speaker 1: but didn't react beyond that. I'd learned that my reaction
Speaker 1: seemed to influence the behavior, and I wanted to see
Speaker 1: what would happen if I simply listened, without responding, without
Speaker 1: walking toward the sound, without knocking back, without changing my
Speaker 1: routine in any visible way. What happened was escalation. By
Speaker 1: early May, the single strikes had become pears. By late
Speaker 1: the pairs were being answered from the southwest, from down
Speaker 1: near the creek, the same call and response pattern I
Speaker 1: documented during my first summer, and by early June the
Speaker 1: knocking was nightly, again, coming from multiple directions, with an
Speaker 1: energy and frequency that surpassed anything I'd heard before. Something
Speaker 1: had changed, not in me, in them. I started thinking
Speaker 1: about the bluff. The thought crept in gradually, the way
Speaker 1: important thoughts often do, not as a sudden decision, but
Speaker 1: as a slow accumulation of reasons. The knocking was coming
Speaker 1: from the ridge from the northeast, from the direction of
Speaker 1: that rocky shelf Earl had warned me about. The tracks
Speaker 1: in the snow had come from the same general vector.
Speaker 1: The overnight circuit of the cabin had originated from the
Speaker 1: northeast tree line. Every approach, every sound, every piece of
Speaker 1: evidence pointed toward the upper portion of the ridge as
Speaker 1: the thing's primary corridor, its highway, its route between wherever
Speaker 1: it spent in its days and the vicinity of my cabin.
Speaker 1: The bluff sat right in the middle of that corridor.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see it, not from the porch through binoculars,
Speaker 1: which is how I'd been looking at the ridge for
Speaker 1: two years. I wanted to stand on it. I wanted
Speaker 1: to understand the terrain that the creature used. I wanted
Speaker 1: to see my cabin from the perspective of something that
Speaker 1: had been watching it from above. And yes, I wanted
Speaker 1: to go there because Earle told me not to I'm
Speaker 1: not proud of that, but I'd spent two years collecting
Speaker 1: fragments of information from a man who parceled out truth
Speaker 1: the way a miser parcels out coins, one piece at
Speaker 1: a time, always less than the whole, always leaving you
Speaker 1: to guess at what he was holding back. Every oblique
Speaker 1: comment Earl had made, every half warning, every carefully worded
Speaker 1: non answer, had eventually been validated by something I experienced
Speaker 1: on the property RIBA's garden, the mountain's rhythm. The bluff
Speaker 1: warning was the last one I hadn't tested, and there
Speaker 1: in me, the part that had been documenting and measuring
Speaker 1: and photographing for two years, needed to know why he'd
Speaker 1: set it. I decided to go on a Saturday in
Speaker 1: mid June June eighteenth, twenty sixteen. I picked a Saturday
Speaker 1: because I wanted the full day, and I picked mid
Speaker 1: June because the days were long. Sunset wasn't until nearly nine,
Speaker 1: and I'd have maximum daylight for the hike up and back.
Speaker 1: I also picked mid June because the forest would be
Speaker 1: at peak foliage, which meant maximum cover on the slopes,
Speaker 1: which meant anything moving below the ridge line would be
Speaker 1: harder to spot from below that cut both ways, I'd
Speaker 1: be harder to see too. But I didn't go during
Speaker 1: the day. I went in the evening. I need to
Speaker 1: explain that decision because it's the one people are going
Speaker 1: to question the most, and they should earl specifically said
Speaker 1: don't go after dark, and I planned my trip to
Speaker 1: arrive at the bluff right around sunset, which meant I'd
Speaker 1: be up there as the light failed and I'd be
Speaker 1: hiking back down in the dark. Here's my reasoning flawed.
Speaker 1: Is it was the creature was nocturnal, or at least crepuscular,
Speaker 1: most active around dawn and dusk and through the night.
Speaker 1: Every encounter I'd had, every piece of evidence i'd collected,
Speaker 1: pointed to a pattern of activity that began at or
Speaker 1: shortly after sunset. If I wanted to observe what was
Speaker 1: happening on that bluff, I needed to be there when
Speaker 1: the activity started. Going at noon on a Tuesday would
Speaker 1: have shown me a nice view and some rocks and
Speaker 1: nothing else. I also believed, based on two years of contact,
Speaker 1: that the creature wasn't aggressive toward me. It had circled
Speaker 1: my cabin, it had stood at my windows, it had
Speaker 1: called my name in my brother's voice. It had harvested
Speaker 1: my garden and turned off my radio and examined my
Speaker 1: trail camera. In all of that, it had never made
Speaker 1: a threatening move, never charged, never bluff charged, never thrown anything,
Speaker 1: never vocalized in a way that communicated aggression. It was curious, intelligent,
Speaker 1: and invasive, but it wasn't violent. That assessment turned out
Speaker 1: to be mostly correct. But mostly correct and entirely safe
Speaker 1: are very different things, and I learned the distance between
Speaker 1: them on that bluff. I left the cabin at six
Speaker 1: point thirty. Bowie stayed behind. I debated bringing him for
Speaker 1: most of the afternoon, going back and forth on it
Speaker 1: while I packed my daypack and checked the batteries in
Speaker 1: the flashlight. Part of me wanted the comfort of having
Speaker 1: him along. Bowie was my anchor. He'd been at my
Speaker 1: side for every encounter, every sleepless night, every morning perimeter check.
Speaker 1: Having him there made the world feel more navigable. But
Speaker 1: ultimately I decided against it because I didn't know what
Speaker 1: the terrain was like up there, and I didn't want
Speaker 1: him off leash on a cliff edge. Bowie was a
Speaker 1: bold dog. He'd chased a squirrel off a deck without
Speaker 1: looking first. A cliff face wouldn't occur to him as
Speaker 1: a problem until he was already over it. I left
Speaker 1: him in the cabin with food, water, and his blanket
Speaker 1: by the hearth. He watched me leave through the front window,
Speaker 1: standing on his hind legs with his paws on the sell,
Speaker 1: and I could see his ears tracking me. As I
Speaker 1: crossed the meadow and headed into the trees, he barked twice,
Speaker 1: not his alarm, bark is where are you going? Without me? Bark?
Speaker 1: I felt guilty about it for the first hundred yards.
Speaker 1: The hike started on the game trail behind the cabin,
Speaker 1: the same trail where I'd found the first set of
Speaker 1: tracks in the clay after the rainstorm two summers earlier.
Speaker 1: The trail was well worn from deer and other wildlife.
Speaker 1: A narrow path beaten through the leaf litter that switched
Speaker 1: backed up the slope in a series of gentle turns.
Speaker 1: I followed it up slope through the hardwoods, passed the
Speaker 1: property line marked with my faded orange flagging tape, and
Speaker 1: into the National Forest. The transition was invisible on the ground,
Speaker 1: no fence, no signs, just an imaginary line on a
Speaker 1: survey map that the forest paid no attention to. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods big Foot stories will be after
Speaker 1: these messages. The evening was warm and still late June.
Speaker 1: Heat lingered in the hollows, and the air smelled like
Speaker 1: heated earth and the sweet rot of last year's leaves
Speaker 1: composting beneath the fresh canopy. Lightning bugs were starting up
Speaker 1: in the meadow behind me. I could see their yellow
Speaker 1: pulses blinking in the grass as I climbed above the
Speaker 1: tree line and looked back. The cabin was already below me,
Speaker 1: the green roof glinting in the lateral light, and the
Speaker 1: meadow was a bright oval surrounded by dark forest. From
Speaker 1: just a few hundred feet of elevation, the view was
Speaker 1: already better than anything I'd had from ground level. The
Speaker 1: trail thinned as the elevation increased, narrowing from a well
Speaker 1: worn path to a faint track through leaf litter two
Speaker 1: eventually nothing. The deer had their own roots at higher elevation,
Speaker 1: and they didn't align with mine. By the time I'd
Speaker 1: gained three hundred feet, I was navigating by terrain alone,
Speaker 1: picking my way between trees and over rock out crops,
Speaker 1: heading northeast toward the spine of the ridge. I used
Speaker 1: the compass occasionally to confirm my direction, but mostly I
Speaker 1: navigated by the slope itself, keeping the incline on my
Speaker 1: left shoulder and the drainage on my right. The forest
Speaker 1: changed as I climbed. The lower slopes were dominated by oak,
Speaker 1: hickory and tulip poplar, the standard Southern Appalachian hardwood mix
Speaker 1: that covered most of the property below twenty eight hundred feet,
Speaker 1: But as I gained altitude, the composition shifted more chestnut oak,
Speaker 1: with its deeply furrowed bark and leathery leaves, more sour wood,
Speaker 1: thin and elegant, already showing the first hints of the
Speaker 1: crimson it would turn in October, the occasional cluster of
Speaker 1: table mountain pine clinging to the thinner soil on exposed
Speaker 1: rock faces, their needles sharp and dense, their posture crooked
Speaker 1: from decades of wind. The trees were shorter up here,
Speaker 1: gnarled by weather, and the canopy opened in places to
Speaker 1: reveal glimpses of the sky, which was still bright at
Speaker 1: seven o'clock, the sun well above the western ridges. A
Speaker 1: ruffed grouse exploded from the underbrush about ten feet in
Speaker 1: front of me, and nearly stopped my heart. It rocketed
Speaker 1: upward through the canopy in a blur of brown feathers
Speaker 1: and wing beats, and I stood there with my hand
Speaker 1: on my chest, breathing hard, waiting for the adrenaline to settle.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about hiking alone in a forest where
Speaker 1: you know things live. Every startled bird becomes a potential encounter,
Speaker 1: every snap twig becomes a footstep. Your nervous system runs
Speaker 1: hot because it's been trained through two years of experience
Speaker 1: to treat every unexpected sound as significant. It took me
Speaker 1: about forty five minutes to reach the base of the bluff.
Speaker 1: The last two hundred yards were steep, a scramble over
Speaker 1: exposed rock, and through a stand of rhododendron that grew
Speaker 1: thick in the moist shade beneath the cliff face. The
Speaker 1: bluff itself was a shelf of gray granite, maybe sixty
Speaker 1: feet wide and twenty feet deep, thrusting out from the
Speaker 1: ridge line like a diving board. The face below it
Speaker 1: dropped away in a near vertical cliff, perhaps eighty feet
Speaker 1: down to a talus slope of broken rock and scrubby vegetation.
Speaker 1: Beyond the talus, the forest continued downslope in a steep,
Speaker 1: unbroken descent, toward a drainage that fed into Bishop Creek.
Speaker 1: I pulled myself up the last few feet of rock
Speaker 1: and stood on the bluff for the first time. Earl
Speaker 1: wasn't exaggerating. The view was extraordinary. Three counties spread out
Speaker 1: below me in every direction, the ridges folding into each
Speaker 1: other in shades of blue and green that faded toward
Speaker 1: the horizon. I could see the valley where Hendersonville sat,
Speaker 1: a smudge of development in haze. Fifteen or twenty miles
Speaker 1: to the south. I could see the dark line of
Speaker 1: the Blue Ridge Parkway tracing the crest of the mountains
Speaker 1: to the west, and directly below me, maybe half a
Speaker 1: mile away and six hundred feet lower. I could see
Speaker 1: my cabin, the green metal roof the meadow, the workshop,
Speaker 1: the thread of Bishop Creek catching the low sun, my
Speaker 1: truck in the driveway, a dark rectangle on the gravel.
Speaker 1: The cabin looked small from up here, fragile, a single
Speaker 1: structure in an ocean of forest, surrounded on all sides
Speaker 1: by wilderness that didn't know or care. It was there.
Speaker 1: I'd always thought of the cabin as substantial, solid, a
Speaker 1: fortress of hand hewn logs and stone. But from the
Speaker 1: bluff it was a speck, a comma in a paragraph
Speaker 1: that stretched for miles in every direction, and the forest
Speaker 1: around it was vast, unbroken, dense and deep and ancient,
Speaker 1: and full of things I couldn't see. I understood in
Speaker 1: that moment something I hadn't fully grasped from ground level,
Speaker 1: the creature's perspective. From up here, the cabin wasn't a
Speaker 1: barrier or a boundary or a fortification. It was visible, exposed, trackable.
Speaker 1: You could stand on this bluff and watch a person
Speaker 1: and move between the house and the workshop. You could
Speaker 1: see the garden plot or where the garden had been.
Speaker 1: You could see the porch, the driveway, the path to
Speaker 1: the creek. Everything I did on that property, every routine,
Speaker 1: every habit, every daily pattern was readable from this elevation.
Speaker 1: The creature didn't need to be in the tree line
Speaker 1: to observe me. It just needed to be up here,
Speaker 1: And it had been up here. I knew that before
Speaker 1: I found the evidence, because the evidence was everywhere. The
Speaker 1: surface of the bluff was weathered granite too, hard to
Speaker 1: hold footprints, but the margins told the story. Along the
Speaker 1: back edge, where the rock met the slope, there was
Speaker 1: a strip of soil about two feet wide. In that soil,
Speaker 1: compressed and aged, but still visible, were tracks, not one set,
Speaker 1: many overlapping impressions of bare feet, the same general dimensions
Speaker 1: I'd been documenting for two years, pressed into the dirt
Speaker 1: at various depths and angles. Some were fresh enough that
Speaker 1: the ages were still crisp. Others were weathered, softened by
Speaker 1: rain weeks or months old. The soil along the back
Speaker 1: of the bluff was a palimpsest of visits, layer upon layer,
Speaker 1: a record of repeated use that went back further than
Speaker 1: I could determine. The bluff wasn't just on the creature's route.
Speaker 1: The bluff was a destination, a vantage point, a watch tower.
Speaker 1: I found other things. Scattered Along the eastern edge of
Speaker 1: the shelf. There was a collection of stones, not a
Speaker 1: natural scatter, an arrangement twelve or fifteen rocks, varying in
Speaker 1: size from a baseball to a cantelope, stacked and grouped
Speaker 1: in a way that didn't match any geological process I
Speaker 1: was aware of. Some were stacked two or three high,
Speaker 1: balanced with a stability that suggested careful placement. Others were
Speaker 1: lined up in a short row, touching end to end,
Speaker 1: like a fence or a boundary marker. One cluster formed
Speaker 1: a rough semicircle around a flat slab of granite that
Speaker 1: looked like it could serve as a seat or a platform.
Speaker 1: The arrangement wasn't geometric or symmetrical. It was loose, organic.
Speaker 1: The kind of thing that could have been dismissed is
Speaker 1: random if you looked at it for two seconds. But
Speaker 1: I'd spend enough time in the woods to know that
Speaker 1: rocks don't stack themselves, and they don't form semicircles on
Speaker 1: their own. Gravity doesn't stack things in neat rows. Water
Speaker 1: doesn't create balance stacks on a flat ledge with no
Speaker 1: slope to concentrate debris, something had gathered these stones and
Speaker 1: placed them here over time, repeatedly. I'd heard about this
Speaker 1: in the research I'd been doing since finding your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'd come across reports of stone structures associated with sasquatch activity, areas, cairns, stacks,
Speaker 1: arranged piles. They show up and encounter reports from all
Speaker 1: over North America, from the Pacific Northwest to the Ozarks,
Speaker 1: to the appellation chain. Nobody agrees on what they mean.
Speaker 1: Some researchers think their territorial marks. Some think their navigational
Speaker 1: aids like trail signs. Some think their play the way
Speaker 1: a child stacks blocks. Others think we're projecting meaning onto
Speaker 1: debris that the creatures moved for practical reasons we don't understand.
Speaker 1: I didn't know which interpretation was right, But standing on
Speaker 1: that bluff, looking at a semicircle of stones arranged around
Speaker 1: a flat slab with a view of three counties, I
Speaker 1: had the distinct and unshakable feeling that I was standing
Speaker 1: in someone's living room. Dennis at the hardware store had
Speaker 1: mentioned once that old timers in the valley used to
Speaker 1: talk about rock piles on the ridges. He'd brought it
Speaker 1: up in the context of a conversation about property boundaries,
Speaker 1: saying that some of the early settlers used stacked stones
Speaker 1: as corner markers, but that you'd sometimes find stacks in
Speaker 1: places that didn't correspond to any known survey. He shrugged
Speaker 1: it off as random geology. Rocks do weird things on slopes,
Speaker 1: he'd said, But I remembered the way he'd paused before
Speaker 1: saying it. The same to pause, Earl used before delivering
Speaker 1: one of his half truths, and I wondered, now if
Speaker 1: Dennis knew more than he'd let on. There was also
Speaker 1: a local legend I'd picked up from a woman at
Speaker 1: the feed store in Chimney Rock sometime during my second summer.
Speaker 1: She'd overheard me asking about wildlife in the area and
Speaker 1: had volunteered, without prompting a story her grandmother used to
Speaker 1: tell about the ridgewalkers. She said her grandmother had grown
Speaker 1: up on a farm near the base of the mountains
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and that the old
Speaker 1: people in the community used to warn children away from
Speaker 1: the upper ridges after dark. The ridgewalkers, she said, were tall,
Speaker 1: hairy and quiet. They came down from the heights in
Speaker 1: the fall to take food from gardens and root sellers,
Speaker 1: and they went back up in the winter. People didn't
Speaker 1: talk about them in town, they didn't report them to anybody.
Speaker 1: They just knew they were there, the way you know
Speaker 1: the creek floods in spring or the frost comes in October.
Speaker 1: Part of the landscape, part of the calendar. I'd filed
Speaker 1: that conversation away as local color at the time. Mountain
Speaker 1: communities are full of folklore, and not all of it
Speaker 1: maps onto reality. But standing on the bluff, looking at
Speaker 1: the stone arrangements and the track filled margins, and the
Speaker 1: view of my cabin half a mile below, the woman's
Speaker 1: story came back to me with a weight It hadn't
Speaker 1: carried before. Ridgewalkers coming down from the heights, taking food
Speaker 1: from gardens, going back up in winter. It was a
Speaker 1: description of exactly what I'd been experiencing, passed down through
Speaker 1: generations of mountain families who dealt with the same thing
Speaker 1: and developed the same response. Earle had developed silence, acceptance,
Speaker 1: a quiet adjustment of daily life to accommodate something that
Speaker 1: couldn't be explained and wouldn't go away. I sat down
Speaker 1: on the flat slab, which was warm from the afternoon sun,
Speaker 1: and looked out at the view. The sun was dropping
Speaker 1: toward the western ridges. I estimated about ninety minutes of
Speaker 1: daylight left. The shadows were linking in the hollows below,
Speaker 1: and the eastern slopes had already gone dark. The air
Speaker 1: was cooling, that transition from daytime warmth to evening chill
Speaker 1: that happens fast at elevation. I drank some water and
Speaker 1: ate the granola bar i'd brought, and tried to absorb
Speaker 1: what I was seeing. A high point with a commanding
Speaker 1: view of the surrounding terrain, including my cabin, evidence of
Speaker 1: repeated use over an extended period, stone arrangements suggesting habitual occupation,
Speaker 1: tracks in the margin soil indicating multiple visits. This wasn't
Speaker 1: a place the creature passed through on its way somewhere else.
Speaker 1: This was a place it came to sat at, spent
Speaker 1: time on looking down at the same view I was
Speaker 1: looking at, watching the same cabin, watching me. I thought
Speaker 1: about Frank, Earl's brother, the mason who'd built the chimney, Frank,
Speaker 1: who used to hunt from this bluff in the fall,
Speaker 1: sitting on the edge with his rifle across his knees.
Speaker 1: Had Frank seen them up here? Had he encountered evidence
Speaker 1: like what I was finding? Had he told Earle about it?
Speaker 1: And was that the root of Earl's warning, don't go
Speaker 1: up there after dark, not because of the cliff edge
Speaker 1: or the difficult terrain, because of what uses the bluff
Speaker 1: after the sun goes down. I thought about Dennis at
Speaker 1: the hardware store the day i'd asked about Earl's property.
Speaker 1: Dennis had said Earle was particular. He'd said Earl would
Speaker 1: size me up before saying ten words. I'd attributed that
Speaker 1: to the reclusiveness of an elderly man who'd been living
Speaker 1: alone in the mountains. But maybe Earle wasn't sizing me
Speaker 1: up to see if I was a good buyer. Maybe
Speaker 1: he was sizing me up to see if I was
Speaker 1: the kind of person who could handle the truth about
Speaker 1: the property, and had decided I wasn't. Not yet, the
Speaker 1: sun touched the ridge to the west at seven fifty five.
Speaker 1: The light went from gold to amber to a deep
Speaker 1: orange that turned the rock face of the bluff the
Speaker 1: color of rust. I watched my shadow stretch across the
Speaker 1: granite and reach toward the cliff edge, elongating as the
Speaker 1: sun dropped degree by degree. And then I heard it
Speaker 1: below me, down on the talis slope beneath the cliff face,
Speaker 1: a sound I'd never heard before in any of my encounters.
Speaker 1: Stones clacking, not rolling, not falling, clacking, the sharp, deliberate
Speaker 1: collision of one rock being struck against another, two distinct
Speaker 1: impacts spaced about a second apart. The acoustic quality was
Speaker 1: different from wood. Knocking harder, brighter, higher pitched stone on
Speaker 1: stone produces a sound that cuts rather than resonates, and
Speaker 1: these cuts were clean and precise and clearly intentional. I
Speaker 1: crawled to the edge of the bluff on my hands
Speaker 1: and knees and looked over the cliff face dropped away
Speaker 1: beneath me in a near vertical wall of granite, fractured
Speaker 1: and fissured, with small ledges and clumps of vegetation clinging
Speaker 1: to the crevices. Below the cliff, the Talis slope fanned
Speaker 1: out in a broad apron of broken rock and scree
Speaker 1: angling steeply downwards into the tree line. About eighty feet
Speaker 1: below where I lay, the slope was in shadow. The
Speaker 1: sun had dropped behind the ridge, and the eastern face
Speaker 1: of the mountain was darkening fast. I could see the
Speaker 1: rocks clearly enough, gray and angular, scattered across the slope
Speaker 1: in the random pattern of material that had calved from
Speaker 1: the cliff face over centuries of freezing and thawing, but
Speaker 1: the shadows between them were deep, and anything standing on
Speaker 1: that slope below about mid height would have been difficult
Speaker 1: to see. I lay flat on the granite, my chin
Speaker 1: on my hands, and stared down into the gathering dark.
Speaker 1: The stone clacking came again, two strikes, same interval, coming
Speaker 1: from the lower portion of the talus, near where the
Speaker 1: rocks gave way to the first trees, maybe sixty feet
Speaker 1: below me and slightly to the right. I still couldn't
Speaker 1: see anything. Then I heard movement. Not footsteps, not the careful,
Speaker 1: measured approach i'd heard from the tree line during the
Speaker 1: garden observation. This was displacement, heavy displacement, rocks shifting under weight,
Speaker 1: the grinding, scraping sound of stone surfaces moving against each
Speaker 1: other as something large repositioned itself on the slope, the
Speaker 1: kind of sound of boulder makes when it settles after
Speaker 1: being disturbed, Except boulders don't settle repeatedly, and they don't
Speaker 1: settle in rhythm. Something was down there on the talus,
Speaker 1: in the shadow beneath my feet, and it was big
Speaker 1: enough that its movement rearranged the rocks around it. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods big foot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. I'm lying on my stomach on a
Speaker 1: cliff edge, looking down a near vertical face into a
Speaker 1: darkening slope, and something I can't see is below me,
Speaker 1: making noise. I want to describe what that felt like,
Speaker 1: because the physical sensation was as significant as the emotional one.
Speaker 1: My body was pressed against the granite, which was still
Speaker 1: holding warmth from the afternoon sun. My hands were flat
Speaker 1: on the rock, fingers splayed, gripping nothing but wanting to
Speaker 1: grip something. My heart was hammering, and I could feel
Speaker 1: the pulse in my chest where it pressed against the stone.
Speaker 1: Every muscle was engaged, every sense straining downward. My eyes
Speaker 1: were watering from not blinking, and my breathing had gone
Speaker 1: so shallow that I wasn't getting enough oxygen, which I
Speaker 1: only realized when my vision started to sparkle at the
Speaker 1: edges and I had to force myself to take a
Speaker 1: full breath. The stone clacking came a third time, but
Speaker 1: from a different position, further left along the slope, twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty feet from the first location. Two sources, two positions,
Speaker 1: the same sound. My stomach dropped the way it had
Speaker 1: in the ravine when Wade's voice came from two directions,
Speaker 1: because it meant the same thing it had meant, then
Speaker 1: there was more than one. I lay still and listened.
Speaker 1: The mountain was doing that thing. It does when they're close.
Speaker 1: The pressurized silence, the absence of bird song, an insect noise.
Speaker 1: The whipper wheels that had been calling from the hollow
Speaker 1: below had gone quiet. The only sounds were the stone strikes,
Speaker 1: the rock displacement, and my own breathing. Then the displacement
Speaker 1: sound moved, not randomly directionally. Whatever was on the lower
Speaker 1: talus was climbing, coming up the slope toward the base
Speaker 1: of the cliff face, directly below where I lay. I
Speaker 1: should have gotten up and left. I know that every
Speaker 1: rational thought I had was telling me to back away
Speaker 1: from the edge, stand up, and hike down the way
Speaker 1: i'd come while there was still enough light to navigate.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't move. Not because I was paralyzed by fear,
Speaker 1: though fear was certainly part of it. I couldn't move
Speaker 1: because something had appeared on the slope below me, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't look away from it. It stepped out of
Speaker 1: the shadow at the base of a large boulder about
Speaker 1: forty feet below the cliff face, stepped out the way
Speaker 1: a person steps out of a doorway. One moment, the
Speaker 1: shadow behind the boulder was solid and featureless, just another
Speaker 1: dark pocket in the uneven terrain. The next there was
Speaker 1: a shape occupying the space between the boulder and the
Speaker 1: cliff wall. And the shape was upright and massive and alive.
Speaker 1: The light was bad dusk in a shaded eastern exposure,
Speaker 1: with the sun already behind the ridge and the ambient
Speaker 1: glow fading by the minute. But I could see enough,
Speaker 1: more than I'd seen in any previous encounter because the
Speaker 1: angle was different. I was above it, looking down at
Speaker 1: something that had always been at my level or in
Speaker 1: the shadows at the edge of my vision. This time,
Speaker 1: for the first time, I had the vantage. The shape
Speaker 1: was tall, proportionally similar to what I'd seen at the
Speaker 1: meadow and through the workshop window, but harder to judge
Speaker 1: exact height from this angle because I was looking down
Speaker 1: at it rather than a cross at it. What I
Speaker 1: could judge was mass. This thing was built the way
Speaker 1: a gorilla is built, dense through the core, with a
Speaker 1: chest that was disproportionately wide for the height. The shoulders
Speaker 1: were enormous, sloping outward at an angle that suggested muscle
Speaker 1: attachment points on a skeleton built for a different kind
Speaker 1: of strength than hours, not the angular, bony shoulders of
Speaker 1: a lean person. Thick, rounded shoulders that blended into the
Speaker 1: neck and upper arms, and a continuous slope of muscle
Speaker 1: and hair. The head was what stopped me. I could
Speaker 1: see it for the first time, really see it, because
Speaker 1: I was above it, and the angle revealed what ground
Speaker 1: level encounters had hidden in canopy shadow and darkness. The
Speaker 1: head was conical, not pointed, not flat. It rose to
Speaker 1: a slight peak at the crown, like a head that
Speaker 1: carried a sagittal crest running front to back along the
Speaker 1: top of the skull, the same kind of bony ridge
Speaker 1: you see on guerrilla skulls, the anchor point for massive
Speaker 1: jaw muscles. The hair on the head was longer than
Speaker 1: on the body, four or five inches at least, and
Speaker 1: it hung down the sides and back the way uncombed
Speaker 1: hair hangs on a person who hasn't touched it in years.
Speaker 1: It was matted in places and loose in others, and
Speaker 1: it moved slightly in the faint evening breeze that was
Speaker 1: drifting up the cliff face. It was standing on the talus,
Speaker 1: on a slope that I'd had to scramble to climb
Speaker 1: that afternoon, using my hands and my boots and every
Speaker 1: ounce of balance I could muster, standing there as casually
Speaker 1: as i'd stand on a sidewalk. The rocks under its
Speaker 1: feet weren't shifting. It had found stable footing on a
Speaker 1: surface that was essentially a pile of loose rubble, balancing
Speaker 1: four or five hundred pounds on stones that had slid
Speaker 1: under one hundred and ninety, and it was holding that
Speaker 1: position without visible effort, without even the micro adjustments that
Speaker 1: a human makes when standing on uneven ground. It was
Speaker 1: just there, planted, as fixed as the boulders around it,
Speaker 1: and it was looking up at me. I could see
Speaker 1: its face, not clearly, not in the kind of detail
Speaker 1: that would let me draw a portrait, but enough to
Speaker 1: register features. A broad, flat nose, a brow ridge that
Speaker 1: protruded far enough to cast a shadow over the eyes
Speaker 1: even in the low light. A jaw that was wider
Speaker 1: than a human jaw, set forward slightly, giving the face
Speaker 1: a prognathist profile. The mouth was closed. The expression, to
Speaker 1: the extent that I could read an expression on a
Speaker 1: face that wasn't human, was neutral, not aggressive, not afraid,
Speaker 1: not curious, just present, aware the way a person looks
Speaker 1: at you when they've been expecting you, and aren't surprised
Speaker 1: that you showed up. It was looking straight at me,
Speaker 1: straight up eighty feet at the edge of a cliff
Speaker 1: where I was lying on my stomach with my face
Speaker 1: hanging over the void, and its eyes, which I couldn't
Speaker 1: see in detail but could feel the way you feel
Speaker 1: someone staring at you in a dark room, were locked
Speaker 1: on mine. I have never in my life experienced the
Speaker 1: kind of fear I felt in that moment, and I
Speaker 1: want to be specific about why, because it wasn't the
Speaker 1: fear of being attacked or eaten or physically harmed. It
Speaker 1: was the fear of being seen fully completely by something
Speaker 1: that wasn't supposed to exist, something that occupied a category
Speaker 1: my brain didn't have a file for. The creature below
Speaker 1: me was real. It was breathing, It was looking at
Speaker 1: me with eyes that processed my image and transmitted it
Speaker 1: to a brain that understood what it was seeing. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't running, It wasn't hiding. It wasn't flinching or
Speaker 1: retreating or breaking eye contact. It was standing on a
Speaker 1: rock slope in the gathering dark and looking up at
Speaker 1: a human being with an absolute lack of fear. That
Speaker 1: communicated something I'd never felt from another living thing. I
Speaker 1: am not afraid of you, not as a threat, not
Speaker 1: as a dominance, display as a fact. The way a
Speaker 1: mountain isn't afraid of the weather, the way the ocean
Speaker 1: isn't afraid of the shore. The creature below me existed
Speaker 1: on a scale where my presence, my species, my entire
Speaker 1: category of being didn't register as a threat. I was observed,
Speaker 1: I was known, and I was irrelevant to its sense
Speaker 1: of safety. That broke something in me, not permanently, but
Speaker 1: in the moment. It broke the framework I'd been using
Speaker 1: to understand these encounters, every previous incident, the knocking, the garden,
Speaker 1: the mimicry, the snow tracks. I'd been processing through the
Speaker 1: lens of a human observing an animal. I was the researcher.
Speaker 1: It was the subject I documented, it behaved. The power dynamic,
Speaker 1: the framing, the narrative structure, all of it positioned me
Speaker 1: as the active party and the creature as the reactive one.
Speaker 1: Standing on that bluff, looking down into a face that
Speaker 1: looked back at me without the slightest flicker of concern.
Speaker 1: The frame inverted. I wasn't the observer, I was the observed.
Speaker 1: I hadn't hiked up to the bluff to find the
Speaker 1: creature's watchtower. The watchtower had been here all along, and
Speaker 1: the creature had been watching me from it for two years.
Speaker 1: And now I'd finally walked into the surveillance post and
Speaker 1: seen the monitors, and the monitors were pointed at my house.
Speaker 1: Then the stones clacked again, not from the creature below me,
Speaker 1: from the left, further along the cliff base. A second
Speaker 1: set of strikes, sharper and faster than the first, three
Speaker 1: impacts in quick succession, and the creature's head turned toward
Speaker 1: the sound, slowly, without urgency, the way you'd turn your
Speaker 1: head if someone beside you said your name. I followed
Speaker 1: its gaze to the left along the base of the
Speaker 1: cliff and saw the second one. It was further away,
Speaker 1: maybe fifty yards along the cliff face, standing on a
Speaker 1: ledge that jutted from the rock wall about twenty feet
Speaker 1: above the talus, Smaller than the first, not by a lot,
Speaker 1: but noticeably shorter and narrower in the shoulders. It was
Speaker 1: holding something in its right hand, a stone roughly the
Speaker 1: size of a grapefruit, and as I watched it struck
Speaker 1: the stone against the cliff face beside it, a clean,
Speaker 1: hard strike that sent sparks of rock dust into the
Speaker 1: air and produced the sharp clacking sound I'd been hearing
Speaker 1: stone knocking, the same principle as wood knocking, but using
Speaker 1: the cliff face as the striking surface. The smaller one
Speaker 1: was also looking at me, same upward angle, same neutral expression,
Speaker 1: same complete absence of fear or deference. It held the
Speaker 1: stone loosely, arm at its side, and regarded me the
Speaker 1: way you'd regard a bird that had landed on a
Speaker 1: fence post. Interesting, briefly, not important. Then from behind and
Speaker 1: below the second creature a sound, not stone clacking, not
Speaker 1: wood knocking, a vocalization. It started low below what I'd
Speaker 1: call a proper sound, more of a pressure change than
Speaker 1: a noise, a subsonic rumble that I registered first in
Speaker 1: my chest, a vibration in my sternum and rib cage
Speaker 1: before my ears picked up the audible component. Frequency climbed
Speaker 1: from that sub base foundation into a guttural rumbling tone
Speaker 1: that was more vibration than voice, the kind of base
Speaker 1: frequency you feel in your bones before your ears properly
Speaker 1: register it. It climbed in pitch over maybe three seconds,
Speaker 1: rising from a hum to a moan, to something that
Speaker 1: I can only describe as a howl that had been
Speaker 1: stripped of its wildness and replaced with something else purpose structure.
Speaker 1: The sound wasn't frantic, it wasn't agitated. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: startled cry of a disturbed animal or the territorial roar
Speaker 1: of something defending its ground. It was controlled, melodic, almost
Speaker 1: a sustained note that modulated slightly as it rose, shifting
Speaker 1: in tambre the way a human voice shifts when it
Speaker 1: moves between chest register and head register, with a tonal
Speaker 1: quality that suggested a vocal apparatus of enormous complexity and range.
Speaker 1: The note held for five or six seconds. During those seconds,
Speaker 1: I could feel the granite vibrated under my chest. The
Speaker 1: air in the space between the cliff face and the
Speaker 1: talus seemed to thicken, the sound waves bouncing between the
Speaker 1: rock surfaces and amplifying in the natural amphitheater of the terrain.
Speaker 1: Then the note dropped back down the scale in a
Speaker 1: controlled descent, stepped rather than sliding, as if the creature
Speaker 1: was choosing specific pitches on the way down. The last
Speaker 1: audible portion was a low rumble that I felt through
Speaker 1: the granite beneath me. Long after it became inaudible to
Speaker 1: my ears. The subsonic component lingered for another two or
Speaker 1: three seconds after the audible sound had stopped, a phantom
Speaker 1: pressure in my chest that faded slowly, reluctantly, as if
Speaker 1: the rock itself was releasing the vibration one molecule at
Speaker 1: a time, A third voice, a third creature below and
Speaker 1: behind the other two, hidden in the trees at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the talus. I never saw it, but I
Speaker 1: heard it, and in hearing it, I understood something that
Speaker 1: the visual encounters hadn't taught me. These things had language,
Speaker 1: or something close to language. The vocalization I just heard
Speaker 1: wasn't a grunt or a scream or a howl. It
Speaker 1: was a statement with internal structure, a beginning and a
Speaker 1: middle and an end, pitch variation that suggested meaning, and
Speaker 1: a delivery that was deliberately controlled. Whatever the third creature
Speaker 1: was communicating to the other two, it was doing so
Speaker 1: with a vocal instrument that was as far beyond a
Speaker 1: bear's growl or a coyotes howl as a symphony is
Speaker 1: beyond a car alarm, and the two I could see,
Speaker 1: both oriented toward the sound simultaneously, the way people turned
Speaker 1: towards someone entering a room naturally without startle. The big
Speaker 1: one below me rotated its head to the left. The
Speaker 1: smaller one on the ledge turned its body slightly. Both
Speaker 1: movements were calm, attentive, responsive, the way members of a
Speaker 1: family turn when someone speaks at the dinner table. Three
Speaker 1: at minimum, on the slope below the bluff, within one
Speaker 1: hundred yards of where I lay, with my face hanging
Speaker 1: over a cliff edge in fading light, the first creature,
Speaker 1: the big one directly below me, turned its attention back
Speaker 1: to me. It hadn't moved from its position, It hadn't
Speaker 1: shifted its weight or adjusted its stance. It had just
Speaker 1: turned its head toward the vocalization and turned it back.
Speaker 1: And now it was looking at me again with those
Speaker 1: shadow hidden eyes, and I could feel the full weight
Speaker 1: of its attention pressing down on me, the way sunlight
Speaker 1: presses down on a dark surface, not with force, with heat,
Speaker 1: with a quality of presence that left nowhere to hide.
Speaker 1: I lay there for about two minutes. The light was
Speaker 1: going fast, the talus was losing definition. The shadow line
Speaker 1: was climbing the cliff face, and soon the creatures would
Speaker 1: be invisible. Standing in darkness at the base of a
Speaker 1: cliff I was lying on top of, in near total dark,
Speaker 1: I made a decision that was half rational and half animal.
Speaker 1: He tuned for more backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. I pushed myself back from the edge, slowly,
Speaker 1: inch by inch, keeping my body flat and my movement smooth.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to make sudden movements. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to stand up and present my full profile against the sky,
Speaker 1: silhouetted for everything below to see. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: do anything that might change the equation between us, whatever
Speaker 1: that equation was. The granite scraped against my chest and
Speaker 1: belt buckle as I slid backward, my elbows dug into
Speaker 1: the rock. The sound of my own body moving across
Speaker 1: stone seemed impossibly loud in the silence. Once I was
Speaker 1: far enough from the edge that I couldn't see the
Speaker 1: slope below, and more importantly, they couldn't see me. I
Speaker 1: rose to a crouch. Then I stood. My legs were
Speaker 1: trembling so badly that I had to plant my feet
Speaker 1: wide to keep from stumbling. My hands were shaking, my
Speaker 1: mouth was so dry, my tongue stuck to the roof
Speaker 1: of it. The muscles in my neck were rigid from
Speaker 1: the tension of holding my head over the edge for
Speaker 1: so long, and a sharp pain ran down the left
Speaker 1: side of my spine. When I straightened up, the stone
Speaker 1: clacking came one more time from the ledge where the
Speaker 1: smaller one had been. A single strike, casual, almost conversational.
Speaker 1: I didn't look back. I didn't want to see them again,
Speaker 1: not because I was afraid of what they'd do, but
Speaker 1: because I was afraid of what looking back would mean.
Speaker 1: It would mean engagement. It would mean acknowledgment that we
Speaker 1: were sharing this moment, occupying the same space on this
Speaker 1: mountain at the same time, aware of each other in
Speaker 1: a way that couldn't be undone. I wasn't ready for that.
Speaker 1: I was barely ready for what had already happened. I
Speaker 1: crossed the bluff to the back edge, where the rock
Speaker 1: met the slope. The root back was the same root
Speaker 1: i'd come up, but the light was failing, and the
Speaker 1: terrain that had been challenging in daylight was treacherous, and
Speaker 1: dusk shadows pulled in the low spots and made the
Speaker 1: ground look flat where it was Rocks that had been
Speaker 1: obvious footholds on the way up disappeared into the general
Speaker 1: darkening of the forest floor. Branches that I ducked under
Speaker 1: at eye level were now invisible until they snagged my
Speaker 1: pack or raked my face. I moved fast, faster than
Speaker 1: I should have on a steep slope with loose footing,
Speaker 1: but the adrenaline was driving my legs and my lungs,
Speaker 1: and the only thought in my head was down, Get down,
Speaker 1: Get below the ridge line, get into the hardwoods, where
Speaker 1: the trees were familiar and the ground was beaten, and
Speaker 1: the distance between me and the bluff grew with every step.
Speaker 1: I fell once, about halfway down, on a stretch of
Speaker 1: exposed rock that was slicked with moisture from the evening dew.
Speaker 1: My right foot skidded out from under me, and I
Speaker 1: went down hard on my left hip, sliding about four
Speaker 1: feet before a root cluster stopped me. The impact knocked
Speaker 1: the flashlight out of my hand, and it tumbled down
Speaker 1: the slope ahead of me, its beams spinning through the
Speaker 1: trees in a wild arc, before wedging between two rocks
Speaker 1: about ten feet below. I crawled to it, picked it up,
Speaker 1: checked it still working. My hip was screaming. I'd have
Speaker 1: a bruise the size of a dinner plate by morning,
Speaker 1: but nothing was broken, and I could still walk. The
Speaker 1: forest around me was silent, that total, pressurized silence. But
Speaker 1: it was a different silence than the one I'd felt
Speaker 1: on the bluff. This one had movement in it. I
Speaker 1: couldn't hear specific sounds, no footsteps, no branch breaks, no breathing,
Speaker 1: but there was a quality to the dark around me
Speaker 1: that felt occupied, inhabited, as if the trees themselves were
Speaker 1: populated with things that were watching me descend and choosing
Speaker 1: to let me pass. I don't know how to explain
Speaker 1: that feeling to someone who hasn't experienced it. It's not paranoia.
Speaker 1: Paranoia is the unfounded belief that you're being watched. This
Speaker 1: was the founded certainty, the evidence, based years in the making,
Speaker 1: thoroughly documented knowledge that things lived in these trees, that
Speaker 1: could see in the dark and move without sound, and
Speaker 1: had been tracking my movements since the day I moved
Speaker 1: onto the property. I wasn't imagining their presence. I was
Speaker 1: accounting for it the way you account for traffic on
Speaker 1: a highway, the way you account for currents in a river.
Speaker 1: It's there. You can't change it. You adjust. The last
Speaker 1: section through the rhododendron thicket at the base of the
Speaker 1: ridge was a controlled stumble, branches raking my arms and face,
Speaker 1: my boots sliding on the damp leaves underneath. I hit
Speaker 1: the game trail and followed it by feel more than sight,
Speaker 1: my flashlight beam bouncing off the trees ahead of me.
Speaker 1: The trail was blessedly clear and well worn, and my
Speaker 1: feet found the packed surface with the relief of a
Speaker 1: driver hitting pavement after a dirt road. I broke out
Speaker 1: of the tree line and into the meadow at eight
Speaker 1: point forty. The last color was draining from the western sky,
Speaker 1: a thin line of salmon pink along the ridge that
Speaker 1: faded to blue above, and then to the deep purple
Speaker 1: of the coming night. The first the stars were out.
Speaker 1: The cabin was a dark shape ahead of me. The
Speaker 1: porch light I'd left on glowing yellow in the single
Speaker 1: window by the front door, warm light, human light, the
Speaker 1: oldest beacon in the world. I crossed the meadow at
Speaker 1: a jog, climbed the porch steps, unlocked the door, went
Speaker 1: inside and closed it behind me, locked it leaned against
Speaker 1: it stood there with my forehead against the wood and
Speaker 1: my eyes closed and my heart pounding. Bowie was on
Speaker 1: his blanket by the hearth. He lifted his head, wagged
Speaker 1: his tail once, and laid it back down, business as usual.
Speaker 1: The cabin smelled like firewood and coffee and the faint
Speaker 1: lavender of ribas sachet behind the spice rack. It smelled
Speaker 1: like home. And standing in it, breathing it, feeling the
Speaker 1: warmth of the woodstove and the solid floor under my boots,
Speaker 1: I felt something that I can only describe as the
Speaker 1: gratitude of someone who has just come in from a
Speaker 1: world that is bigger and older and more populated than
Speaker 1: they ever imagined, and has found that the small safe
Speaker 1: space they've built is still standing. I sat on the
Speaker 1: couch and shook for about ten minutes, not from cold,
Speaker 1: not from exertion, from the full body discharge of adrenaline
Speaker 1: and cortisol and whatever other chemicals flood your system when
Speaker 1: you spent thirty minutes lying on a rock above three
Speaker 1: things that could have pulled you off the edge without effort,
Speaker 1: and chose not to. When the shaking stopped, I went
Speaker 1: to the kitchen and drank two full glasses of water.
Speaker 1: Then I sat at the table with the spiral notebook
Speaker 1: and tried to write down what had happened. I couldn't
Speaker 1: not that night. The experience was too fresh, too vast,
Speaker 1: too full of implications that I hadn't begun to process.
Speaker 1: I wrote a few lines, the date, the time, the location,
Speaker 1: the number of creatures, the stone clacking, the vocalization from
Speaker 1: the tree line. The face. The face was the thing
Speaker 1: I kept coming back to, that broad, impassive, upward tilted
Speaker 1: face looking at me, without fear, without aggression, without anything
Speaker 1: I could name except awareness. I'd seen the other encounters
Speaker 1: and fragments, a silhouette at the meadow's edge, a shape
Speaker 1: moving through moonlit garden rowse, a voice without a body,
Speaker 1: tracks without a track maker. But on the bluff, I'd
Speaker 1: seen a face features the brow ridge and the jaw,
Speaker 1: and the flat nose, and the conical skull with its
Speaker 1: crest of matted hair. Not a monster's face, not a
Speaker 1: movie creature's face. A face that belonged to something alive
Speaker 1: and ancient and utterly unimpressed by my existence. I've seen
Speaker 1: bare faces at close range. I've seen the flat, alien
Speaker 1: stare of a copperhead at striking distance, I've looked into
Speaker 1: the eyes of feral dogs that were deciding whether to bite.
Speaker 1: Every one of those faces communicated something I could read, hunger, fear, aggression, calculation.
Speaker 1: The face on the Talis slope communicated none of those things.
Speaker 1: It communicated presence, just that I'm here, I see you,
Speaker 1: and I'm not interested in what you think about it.
Speaker 1: I closed the notebook and went to bed. Bowie took
Speaker 1: his position in the hallway. The cabin was dark, the
Speaker 1: mountain was quiet, and for the first time since I'd
Speaker 1: moved on to the property, I dreamed about them. Not
Speaker 1: a nightmare, not a fear dream. I dreamed I was
Speaker 1: standing on the bluff in full daylight, and below me,
Speaker 1: on the Talis slope, there were more of them, not
Speaker 1: three dozens, standing among the rocks, like they'd always been there,
Speaker 1: like the rocks themselves had come to life and taken
Speaker 1: upright form. They were all looking up at me. And
Speaker 1: in the dream, I sat down on the edge of
Speaker 1: the cliff and looked back at them. And the feeling
Speaker 1: wasn't fear. It was recognition, the feeling you get when
Speaker 1: you realize you've been sharing a room with someone for
Speaker 1: a long time, and you've only just now noticed they're there.
Speaker 1: I woke up at dawn feeling something I hadn't felt
Speaker 1: in months. Not peace exactly, but clarity, a settling, as
Speaker 1: if some internal argument I'd been having with myself since
Speaker 1: the first wood knock had finally reached a verdict. The
Speaker 1: argument had been simple. One voice said this can't be real,
Speaker 1: another said it is. They've been going back and forth
Speaker 1: for two years, the skeptic and the witness, trading evidence
Speaker 1: and counter argument, neither one winning the stalemate, draining energy
Speaker 1: from everything else in my life. But the bluff had
Speaker 1: ended it. You can argue with sounds. You can rationalize tracks.
Speaker 1: You can explain away of shape in the dark at
Speaker 1: the edge of a meadow. You cannot argue with a face.
Speaker 1: You cannot rationalize three separate creatures standing on a slope
Speaker 1: below you, communicating with each other, regarding you with the
Speaker 1: calm indifference of something that has been watching you for
Speaker 1: years and has already made up its mind about what
Speaker 1: you are. They're real. There are more than one. They
Speaker 1: live on this mountain. They've been watching me since I arrived,
Speaker 1: and they're not going anywhere. That verdict brought a strange
Speaker 1: kind of calm, not the calm of safety, the calm
Speaker 1: of resolved uncertainty. I didn't have to wonder anymore. I
Speaker 1: didn't have to hedge, or qualify or maintain the fiction
Speaker 1: that there might be a conventional explanation for what was
Speaker 1: happening on my property. The fiction was over. The truth
Speaker 1: was standing on a rock slope at dusk, looking up
Speaker 1: at me with eyes I couldn't see but could feel.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't asking for my permission or my belief,
Speaker 1: It just was. I made coffee, I sat on the porch.
Speaker 1: The morning was cool and clear, the meadow bright with dew,
Speaker 1: the ridge sharp against the sky. Everything looked exactly the
Speaker 1: same as it had every other morning for two years.
Speaker 1: But I saw it differently now. The tree line wasn't
Speaker 1: a boundary, it was a border. The ridge wasn't a backdrop.
Speaker 1: It was an OC occupied territory. And the cabin my cabin,
Speaker 1: Earl's cabin, the thing built to last, was a small,
Speaker 1: warm node in a network of activity that extended up
Speaker 1: the slope, along the ridge, across the bluff, down the talus,
Speaker 1: to the creek, and back again, night after night, season
Speaker 1: after season, year after year. I called Cliff that morning.
Speaker 1: I told him about the bluff, the tracks, the stone arrangements,
Speaker 1: the three creatures on the slope, the face looking up
Speaker 1: at me, the vocalization from the tree line, the stone clacking.
Speaker 1: He was quiet for a long time. Then he said three, yeah,
Speaker 1: at the same time, same time, same slope, communicating with
Speaker 1: each other. I could hear him processing this, adding it
Speaker 1: to the growing weight of evidence that had been accumulating
Speaker 1: since the first phone call I'd made about the knocking. Garrett.
Speaker 1: He said, that's a population. That's not a stray animal.
Speaker 1: That's a group. I know. That changes everything. I know
Speaker 1: that too, And he was right. It did change everything,
Speaker 1: because a single creature, however terrifying, however intelligent, is an anomaly,
Speaker 1: an outlier, something that can be explained away as a
Speaker 1: freak occurrence, a relic, a mistake in classification. But three
Speaker 1: creatures operating in coordination, communicating with acoustic signals, using a
Speaker 1: high point for surveillance, demonstrating family group behavior. That's a species.
Speaker 1: That's a social structure. That's a population occupying a territory
Speaker 1: with intention and organization, and they'd been doing it on
Speaker 1: this mountain above my cabin within half a mile of
Speaker 1: where I slept, for at least as long as I'd
Speaker 1: been there, probably longer, probably much longer. I went back
Speaker 1: to the bluff three more times that summer, always in
Speaker 1: the evening, always alone. Each time I made the climb
Speaker 1: with the same mix of trepidation and compulsion that had
Speaker 1: driven the first visit, And each time the bluff was
Speaker 1: empty when I arrived. No creatures on the talus, no
Speaker 1: vocalizations from the tree line, no stone clacking from the
Speaker 1: ledges below, just the view and the wind and the
Speaker 1: slowly dimming sky. But the evidence of use was always fresh.
Speaker 1: On my second visit in early July, I found new
Speaker 1: tracks in the margin soil along the back edge, at
Speaker 1: least two distinct sizes overlapping pressed into the dirt. Since
Speaker 1: the last rain. The stone arrangements had changed. Rocks I
Speaker 1: remembered from my first visit had been moved to new positions.
Speaker 1: Two that had been stacked near the eastern edge were
Speaker 1: now separated and placed at opposite ends of the slab.
Speaker 1: A new stone, a piece of milky quartz the size
Speaker 1: of a softball, had been added to the semicircle near
Speaker 1: the flat sitting stone. I photographed the changes and compared
Speaker 1: them to the images from June. The rearrangement was unmistakable.
Speaker 1: On my third visit late July, the arrangement had shifted again.
Speaker 1: I was beginning to think of it as a living installation,
Speaker 1: a thing that was constantly being modified by hands. I
Speaker 1: never saw each visit revealed a different configuration, and while
Speaker 1: I couldn't decode any pattern or meaning in the placement,
Speaker 1: the fact that it changed consistently told me the bluff
Speaker 1: was being visited regularly. Between my trips, I was seeing
Speaker 1: snapshots of an ongoing process, like checking a garden once
Speaker 1: a week and seeing the plants in different stages each time.
Speaker 1: I never saw them from the overlook again, though I
Speaker 1: found fresh tracks each time. The bluff changed my relationship
Speaker 1: with the ridge. Before, the ridge line had been an abstraction,
Speaker 1: a dark line above the tree canopy, where sounds came
Speaker 1: from and creatures approached from. After climbing it, standing on it,
Speaker 1: seeing the view, it became a real place, with real geography.
Speaker 1: I could picture the terrain. I could visual the root
Speaker 1: from the ridge down to my cabin. I could imagine,
Speaker 1: with uncomfortable clarity, what it looked like from up there
Speaker 1: on a dark night, the warm glow from the cabin windows,
Speaker 1: the shape of the roof against the meadow, the faint
Speaker 1: thread of smoke from the chimney, a beacon in the
Speaker 1: forest visible for miles to anything with eyes and the
Speaker 1: elevation to use them. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. On my fourth visit
Speaker 1: in August, I found something new on the flat slab
Speaker 1: i'd sat on that first evening, the stone where I'd
Speaker 1: eaten my granola bar and looked out at the view
Speaker 1: and then watched the world tilt on its axis. Someone
Speaker 1: had placed a small, smooth river stone, not the rough
Speaker 1: granite that littered the bluff naturally and had broken from
Speaker 1: the cliff face over centuries of weathering. A water polished stone,
Speaker 1: the kind you'd find in a creek bed after years
Speaker 1: of tumbling oval about the size of an egg with
Speaker 1: a surfa. It is so smooth it felt almost waxy
Speaker 1: under my thumb. It was a warm brown color with
Speaker 1: a single band of lighter mineral running around its circumference.
Speaker 1: It was sitting in the exact center of the slab,
Speaker 1: positioned with the kind of precision that doesn't happen by accident,
Speaker 1: not balanced on an edge, not teetering, placed flat, stable,
Speaker 1: centered intentionally. I looked around. The bluff was empty, the
Speaker 1: talus was quiet, the forest below was still. The evening
Speaker 1: was calm, the air barely moving, and the only sound
Speaker 1: was a distant crow calling from somewhere in the valley.
Speaker 1: I picked up the stone. It was warm from the sun, smooth, dense,
Speaker 1: heavier than it looked, the kind of stone that feels
Speaker 1: good in your hand, the kind you'd skip across a
Speaker 1: pond as a kid, or put in your pocket for
Speaker 1: no reason except that the weight and texture of it
Speaker 1: felt satisfying. It fit my palm perfectly, and when I
Speaker 1: closed my fingers around it, the warmth of the stone
Speaker 1: transferred into my skin like a handshake. I stood there
Speaker 1: holding it for a long time, turning it over, looking
Speaker 1: at the mineral band, feeling the polish. This stone had
Speaker 1: come from a creek. There was no creek on the bluff.
Speaker 1: The nearest water was Bishop Creek, half a mile below
Speaker 1: and six hundred feet lower in elevation. Somebody had carried
Speaker 1: this stone from the creek to the bluff, climbing the
Speaker 1: same slope. I climbed, navigating the same terrain, and placed
Speaker 1: it on the exact spot where I'd been sitting during
Speaker 1: my previous visits. I don't know what it means. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it was left for me specifically, or
Speaker 1: if I'm projecting intention onto the random migration of a
Speaker 1: rock from a creek to a cliff top. Rocks can travel,
Speaker 1: animals move things, Floods carried to breed a strange places.
Speaker 1: There are explanations that don't involve a creature making a
Speaker 1: deliberate offering. But I know the stone wasn't there on
Speaker 1: my second visit, and I know it wasn't there on
Speaker 1: my third, and I know it was there on my fourth,
Speaker 1: and I know it was placed on the exact spot
Speaker 1: where i'd sat, and I know that the creek is
Speaker 1: half a mile away and six hundred vertical feet below.
Speaker 1: I put the stone in my pocket and carried it home.
Speaker 1: It's on my nightstand right now, next to the flashlight
Speaker 1: and the alarm clock. I pick it up sometimes when
Speaker 1: I can't sleep. I hold it in my hand and
Speaker 1: feel the smoothness and the weight and the warmth it
Speaker 1: absorbs from my skin, and I think about someone carrying
Speaker 1: it up a mountain and placing it where they knew
Speaker 1: I'd find it. Earl passed away in September of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: The assisted living facility in Marion called me on a
Speaker 1: Tuesday morning. A nurse named Donna, who'd been taking care
Speaker 1: of him for the past year, said he'd gone in
Speaker 1: his sleep the night before. She said he'd eatn dinner,
Speaker 1: watch some television, and told her good night the way
Speaker 1: he always did, with a nod and a half smile
Speaker 1: that suggested he had more to say but had decided
Speaker 1: against it. Then he'd gone to bed and didn't wake up.
Speaker 1: Eighty four years old, the last of the Jessups on
Speaker 1: that piece of land or off it. The funeral was small.
Speaker 1: I drove to Marion on a gray Thursday morning, the
Speaker 1: kind of overcast day where the clouds sit on the
Speaker 1: ridge lines like hats, and the valleys fill with a soft,
Speaker 1: even light that makes everything look like a painting done
Speaker 1: in muted colors. Dennis from the hardware store was there
Speaker 1: in a suit that was too big for him, standing
Speaker 1: at the back of the chapel with his hands folded.
Speaker 1: A few people from the valley who'd known Earl and Riba,
Speaker 1: a couple I didn't recognize who turned out to be
Speaker 1: Reba's niece and her husband from Morganton, A minister who
Speaker 1: said kind things about a man he'd probably only met
Speaker 1: a handful of times, and who described Earl's life with
Speaker 1: the generic warmth that ministers use when they don't really
Speaker 1: know the deceased but want to honor them anyway. I
Speaker 1: sat in the front pew because nobody else did, and
Speaker 1: because I felt like someone who'd lived in Earl's cabin
Speaker 1: and walked his land and drunk water from his well
Speaker 1: owed him the respect of sitting close. After the service,
Speaker 1: I went back to the cemetery on the property. I
Speaker 1: drove up the gravel road through the gate, passed the cabin,
Speaker 1: and parked near the wrought iron fence on the northeast corner.
Speaker 1: The headstones were there in their familiar arrangement. Riba, Earl's parents, Frank,
Speaker 1: the brother who'd built the chimney and hunted from the
Speaker 1: bluff and died of emphysema in eighty nine, and now
Speaker 1: a fresh mound of earth beside Reba's stone, where Earl
Speaker 1: had been laid that morning by a crew from the
Speaker 1: funeral home. While I was at the service, his headstone
Speaker 1: was already set. He'd ordered it months ago, Donna told me,
Speaker 1: paid for it himself, picked the stone, wrote the inscription.
Speaker 1: It was simple and plain, the same gray granite as RIBA's,
Speaker 1: with his name, his dates, and the words he built
Speaker 1: it to last. I stood at his grave for a
Speaker 1: long time. The mountain was quiet around me. The oaks
Speaker 1: above the cemetery were still green late summer, holding on,
Speaker 1: but a few of the sour woods had started to
Speaker 1: turn their leaves, blushing crimson. At the edges, a breeze
Speaker 1: came through and moved the branches and dropped a single
Speaker 1: acorn onto the wrought iron fence with a ping that
Speaker 1: sounded like a tiny bell. And I talked to him,
Speaker 1: not out loud, in my head. I told him I
Speaker 1: understood now. I told him I knew why Reba's garden
Speaker 1: wasn't worth the trouble. I told him I knew why
Speaker 1: the mountain had its own rhythm, and that I'd been
Speaker 1: listening to that rhythm for two years and was only
Speaker 1: just beginning to learn the language. I told him I
Speaker 1: knew what was on the bluff and why he'd warned
Speaker 1: me not to go there after dark, and I told
Speaker 1: him I wished he'd just said it straight out, clear
Speaker 1: and direct, the way he would have told me the
Speaker 1: well pump was on the fritz, or the porch needed reframing.
Speaker 1: Just looked me in the eye that first afternoon and said,
Speaker 1: there are things on this mountain that aren't in any book.
Speaker 1: They're tall, and they're smart, and they're not afraid of us.
Speaker 1: They used the bluff as a lookout. They walked past
Speaker 1: your cab at night. They'd been here longer than the cabin,
Speaker 1: longer than you, longer than me, and they're not leaving.
Speaker 1: But Earle hadn't said that. He'd said it sideways, in
Speaker 1: half sentences and warnings and careful omissions, because he was
Speaker 1: a man of his generation and his culture, a man
Speaker 1: who'd lived through decades of social pressure to keep quiet
Speaker 1: about things that didn't fit the accepted version of reality
Speaker 1: in rural Appalachia, in the communities where Earle had spent
Speaker 1: his entire life, admitting you'd seen something in the woods
Speaker 1: that couldn't be explained was a fast track to isolation.
Speaker 1: People would smile to your face and whisper behind your back,
Speaker 1: and the whispers would follow you for the rest of
Speaker 1: your days. Earle had protected himself in Riba by keeping
Speaker 1: their mouths shut, and he'd tried to protect me by
Speaker 1: dropping hints. He hoped I'd be smart enough to follow
Speaker 1: without him having to say the words out loud. I
Speaker 1: was smart enough, just slow, two years slow, but I
Speaker 1: was catching up. I put my hand on Earl's headstone.
Speaker 1: The granite was cool under my palm. I left it
Speaker 1: there for a few seconds, the same way he'd put
Speaker 1: his hand on my shoulder the first day. We walked
Speaker 1: the property together, and I said the only thing that
Speaker 1: seemed adequate, thank you. Then I got in my truck
Speaker 1: and drove back to the cabin and fed Bowie and
Speaker 1: sat on the porch and watched the sun go down
Speaker 1: and listen to the mountain breathe. I'll leave it here.
Speaker 1: The next part of my story is about the dogs,
Speaker 1: specifically about the night Bowie and a second dog i'd
Speaker 1: taken in chased something into the woods and didn't come back,
Speaker 1: and what I found when I went looking for them.
Speaker 1: That story takes a turn I wasn't ready for. It
Speaker 1: takes all of this into a place that I still
Speaker 1: have trouble talking about. But I'll tell it because you've
Speaker 1: listened this far and you deserve to hear what happened
Speaker 1: next Garrett. That was story five from Garrett, and I
Speaker 1: have to tell you. Of everything Garrett has shared with
Speaker 1: me across these ten accounts, this is the one I've
Speaker 1: gone back to the most, not because it's the scariest.
Speaker 1: It's not. Not because it's the most dramatic. Story three,
Speaker 1: with the mimicry probably holds that title. I keep going
Speaker 1: back to this one because of what it implies. Three
Speaker 1: creatures on a talus slope below a high point that
Speaker 1: overlooks Garrett's cabin, using stone on stone communication, demonstrating group coordination,
Speaker 1: and displaying a complete absence of fear in the presence
Speaker 1: of a human observer. That last part is what keeps
Speaker 1: me up at night, because in my experience, fear is
Speaker 1: the primary behavioral driver in almost every wildlife encounter. An
Speaker 1: animal sees a human and it runs, or it threatens,
Speaker 1: or it freezes. Even apex predators, bears, mountain lions, they
Speaker 1: register human presence as a variable that changes their behavior.
Speaker 1: We matter to them, We're a factor in their calculations.
Speaker 1: What Garrett described on that bluff is something that doesn't
Speaker 1: treat us as a factor at all, something that looked
Speaker 1: at him the way he might look at a bird
Speaker 1: on a fence post. Briefly, interesting, not important. That's not
Speaker 1: the behavior of an animal that exists at the margins
Speaker 1: of survival, dodging humans and hiding from detection. That's the
Speaker 1: behavior of something that considers itself the dominant presence in
Speaker 1: its territory and regards us as background noise. I've spoken
Speaker 1: with researchers who believe these creatures are rare, isolated, barely
Speaker 1: hanging on at the edges of the wilderness. Garrett's account
Speaker 1: challenges that assumption directly. Three individuals at one location, communicating, coordinating,
Speaker 1: surveilling from a high point. That's not a remnant population.
Speaker 1: That's a thriving one. Next time, story six, the night
Speaker 1: the dogs didn't come back, and based on what Garrett's
Speaker 1: told me, that one's going to be hard to hear.
Speaker 1: Stay safe, stay curious, and I'll talk to you next time.
Speaker 1: Didn't