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: This is part six of a ten part series from Garrett,
Speaker 1: a listener who's been sharing a decade of escalating encounters
Speaker 1: on his remote mountain property in the Southern Appalachians of
Speaker 1: western North Carolina. If you haven't heard the first five parts,
Speaker 1: go back and start from the beginning. This series builds
Speaker 1: on itself, and the emotional weight of what Garrett's about
Speaker 1: to describe depends on your understanding of everything that came
Speaker 1: before it. Here's where we stand. Over two and a
Speaker 1: half years, Garrett has experienced wood knocking from the ridge
Speaker 1: behind his cabin, discovered enormous bipedal tracks, witnessed a massive
Speaker 1: upright creature at the meadow's edge, had his garden systematically
Speaker 1: harvested by something that defeated every countermeasure he set up.
Speaker 1: Heard his brother Wade's voice replicated and used to lure
Speaker 1: him into a ravine. Discovered through fresh snowfall that the
Speaker 1: creatures had been circling his cabin nightly while he slept,
Speaker 1: and climbed to a bluff overlook, where he saw three
Speaker 1: creatures on the slope below him, communicating with stone on
Speaker 1: stone strikes and a sustained vocalization displaying zero fear of
Speaker 1: his presence. Earle, the man who built the cabin and
Speaker 1: sold it to Garrett, passed away in September of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: taking most of his knowledge about the property's other inhabitants
Speaker 1: with him. Throughout all of this, one constant has been Bowie,
Speaker 1: Garrett's red healer mix, the dog who appointed himself night
Speaker 1: sentry and property guardian from the first week on the mountain,
Speaker 1: The dog who slept in the Hallway, who refused to
Speaker 1: cross the northern tree line, whose hackles predicted the knocking
Speaker 1: before it started. Bowie has been the emotional anchor of
Speaker 1: this story from the very beginning. In story six, Bowie
Speaker 1: isn't alone anymore, and what happens to him and his
Speaker 1: companion on a fall evening in twenty seventeen is the
Speaker 1: encounter that Garrett told me was the hardest to relive.
Speaker 1: Here's Garrett's own words. I need to tell you about
Speaker 1: Ruby before I tell you about the night. After Earl
Speaker 1: passed in September of sixteen, I went through a rough stretch.
Speaker 1: Not just because of Earl, though that was part of it.
Speaker 1: Losing him felt like losing the last person who understood
Speaker 1: what this property really was. Cliff knew. He'd seen the
Speaker 1: tracks and measured the hand prints and driven four hours
Speaker 1: on a Sunday to stand in the snow with me.
Speaker 1: But Cliff understood it from the outside, the way a
Speaker 1: doctor understands an illness he's never had. Earl had lived
Speaker 1: it forty three years on this land. He'd known the
Speaker 1: mountains other residents for decades before I showed up, and
Speaker 1: he'd taken that knowledge to his grave. Wrapped in half
Speaker 1: sentences and careful omissions. The winter of sixteen into seventeen
Speaker 1: was hard, not the weather, the loneliness. Bowie was seven
Speaker 1: by then, still sharp, still loyal, still running his morning
Speaker 1: loop and standing watch in the hallway. But seven is
Speaker 1: middle aged for a dog his size, and I'd started
Speaker 1: noticing things. He was slower on the stairs. He'd grunt
Speaker 1: when he lay down on his blanket, a sound that
Speaker 1: had hadn't been there a year earlier. His muzzle was
Speaker 1: graying around the chin and the eyebrows, giving him a
Speaker 1: distinguished look that would have been dignified if it didn't
Speaker 1: remind me every time I noticed it that dogs don't
Speaker 1: last as long as mountains. I'd been thinking about getting
Speaker 1: a second dog for a while, not to replace Bowie,
Speaker 1: nobody replaces a dog like Bowie, but to give him company, and,
Speaker 1: if I'm honest, to give myself another living thing in
Speaker 1: the cabin that breathed and moved and made the space
Speaker 1: feel less empty on the nights when the dark pressed
Speaker 1: in and the mountain went silent, and every creak of
Speaker 1: the cabin sounded like something testing the walls. Ruby showed
Speaker 1: up on a Tuesday in March of twenty seventeen, I
Speaker 1: was at the hardware store and Chimney Rock picking up
Speaker 1: fence staples and a new blade for the circular saw,
Speaker 1: and Dennis mentioned that a dog had been hanging around
Speaker 1: the gas station down the road for about a week.
Speaker 1: Nobody knew where it came from, no collar, no chip,
Speaker 1: as far as anyone could tell. The gas station owner
Speaker 1: had been leaving food out for it, but he couldn't
Speaker 1: keep it because his wife was allergic. Dennis said if
Speaker 1: nobody claimed it by the weekend, animal control would pick
Speaker 1: it up. I drove to the gas station on my
Speaker 1: way home. The dog was lying under the propane exchange
Speaker 1: cage beside the front door. Female, young, maybe two or three,
Speaker 1: some kind of shepherd mix, medium build, black and tan,
Speaker 1: with a white blaze on her chest and one ear
Speaker 1: that stood up while the other folded over at the tip.
Speaker 1: She had that look stray dogs get when they've been
Speaker 1: on their own, just long enough to lose the expectation
Speaker 1: of kindness, but not long enough to go feral, cautious, watchful,
Speaker 1: hopeful in a way she was trying to hide. I
Speaker 1: crouched down about ten feet away and held out the
Speaker 1: back of my hand. She studied me for about thirty seconds.
Speaker 1: Her eyes moved from my hand to my face, to
Speaker 1: my hand again, and I could see her working through something,
Speaker 1: some internal negotiation between the part of her that had
Speaker 1: learned not to trust and the part that still wanted to.
Speaker 1: The gas station hummed behind us. A truck went by
Speaker 1: on the road, and this dog and I held each
Speaker 1: other's gaze in a moment that felt, without any exaggeration,
Speaker 1: like a job interview, where both parties knew the position
Speaker 1: had already been filled. She stood up, walked over and
Speaker 1: pressed her nose into my fingers. Her tail gave one
Speaker 1: tentative sweep, just one, as if she was checking whether
Speaker 1: this was going to work before she committed. Her nose
Speaker 1: was cold and wet, and I could feel her breath
Speaker 1: on my knuckles, quick little exhales that matched the rapid
Speaker 1: beating of the pulse I could see in her throat.
Speaker 1: I said, hey, there, softly, the way you talk to
Speaker 1: anything that's afraid and doesn't know yet that it doesn't
Speaker 1: need to be. She leaned her head into my hand.
Speaker 1: The sweep of her tail widened slightly, not a full wag,
Speaker 1: yet a negotiation. I put her in the truck. She
Speaker 1: jumped up without hesitation, which told me she'd been a
Speaker 1: house dog before. She ended up the gas station. Strays
Speaker 1: that have never been in a vehicle don't jump into
Speaker 1: truck cabs. She sat on the passenger seat and looked
Speaker 1: out the window the whole drive home, her one good
Speaker 1: ear swiveling at every sound, cataloging the new landscape. And
Speaker 1: when we turned onto the gravel road and started climbing
Speaker 1: toward the cabin, she put her paw on my arm,
Speaker 1: not her head. Her paw a deliberate placement, like a
Speaker 1: hand on a shoulder. I don't know what that meant
Speaker 1: in dog language, but in human language it felt like, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's try this. I named her Ruby because of the
Speaker 1: color of her eyes in certain light, not red exactly,
Speaker 1: a warm amber that shifted toward rust when the sun
Speaker 1: hit them from the side. She had the kind of
Speaker 1: eyes that looked like they'd already seen more than they
Speaker 1: should have. Bowie's reaction to Ruby was the closest thing
Speaker 1: to a personality test I've ever seen a dog administer.
Speaker 1: He met her in the driveway when I opened the
Speaker 1: truck door, and instead of the usual bark and sniff routine.
Speaker 1: He just stood there, looked at her, looked at me,
Speaker 1: looked at her again. She dropped low, belly almost to
Speaker 1: the ground, tail wagging in that fast, tight wag that
Speaker 1: means please like me. Bowie walked a slow circle around her,
Speaker 1: sniffed her from head to tail, and then turned and
Speaker 1: walked back to the porch and lay down in his spot.
Speaker 1: That was it. No aggression, no excitement, no territorial display.
Speaker 1: He'd assessed her, determined she wasn't a threat, and returned
Speaker 1: to his post. Over the next few days, the dynamic solidified.
Speaker 1: Bowie was the senior officer, Ruby was the new recruit.
Speaker 1: She deferred to him on everything. She let him eat first.
Speaker 1: She waited for him to choose his sleeping spot before
Speaker 1: she chose hers. She followed his morning root at a
Speaker 1: respectful distance, never passing him, never cutting his line, and
Speaker 1: Bowie slowly, over the course of about two weeks, softened
Speaker 1: toward her. I'd catch them lying on the porch together,
Speaker 1: not touching, but close, both facing the meadow. They're breathing,
Speaker 1: synchronized in that unconscious way that animals match rhythms when
Speaker 1: they've decided they belonged to each other. I'd see him
Speaker 1: sniff her ear when she was sleeping, and then look
Speaker 1: away like he hadn't done it. One afternoon, I came
Speaker 1: around the corner of the workshop and found them both
Speaker 1: chasing the same groundhog across the meadow in a coordinated
Speaker 1: pursuit that suggested they'd been strategizing behind my back. Bowie
Speaker 1: went left, Ruby went right, the groundhog went underground. They
Speaker 1: both stood over the burrow entrance, looking extremely satisfied. Ruby
Speaker 1: also brought something out of Bowie that I hadn't seen
Speaker 1: in a while, playfulness. He'd been a serious dog since
Speaker 1: the encounter started, focused, watchful, always scanning, always processing, But
Speaker 1: with Ruby around, i'd occasionally catch him doing something purely frivolous,
Speaker 1: tossing a stick in the air and catching it, rolling
Speaker 1: on his back in the grass while Ruby ounced around him,
Speaker 1: running a lap of the meadow at full speed for
Speaker 1: no reason other than the joy of running. She reminded
Speaker 1: him that being a dog was allowed, that not every
Speaker 1: moment had to be a vigil For my part, watching
Speaker 1: the two of them together was the best medicine I'd
Speaker 1: had since moving to the mountain. There's a particular kind
Speaker 1: of happiness that comes from watching two animals choose each other.
Speaker 1: It's uncomplicated, no negotiation, no terms, just a gradual, natural
Speaker 1: merging of two lives into a shared routine. They ate together,
Speaker 1: they slept near each other, they patrolled together, and at
Speaker 1: the end of every evening they'd lie on the porch,
Speaker 1: shoulder to shoulder and watched the dark come down over
Speaker 1: the meadow, like two centuries at the end of a shift,
Speaker 1: who trusted each other enough to share the quiet. By
Speaker 1: April they were inseparable, and the cabin felt different, fuller, warmer,
Speaker 1: two sets of breathing instead of one, two tails wagging
Speaker 1: when I opened the front door, pressed against my hand
Speaker 1: at the end of a long day. It was good.
Speaker 1: It was the best thing I'd done since buying the property.
Speaker 1: Ruby adapted to the mountain quickly. She was a natural
Speaker 1: outdoors dog, comfortable in the woods, surefooted on the slopes,
Speaker 1: with a nose that could track a scent trail. A
Speaker 1: day old. She figured out Bishop Creek in about three
Speaker 1: days and made it part of her morning route, wading
Speaker 1: in up to her belly and standing in the current
Speaker 1: with her face pointed upstream, snapping at minnow's She never
Speaker 1: caught She discovered the groundhog den obviously, and took over
Speaker 1: Bowie's year's long campaign of patient staking out with a
Speaker 1: more energetic approach that involved digging, which Bowie watched with
Speaker 1: the resigned expression of a veteran officer whose new partner
Speaker 1: has too much enthusiasm. But she also adapted to the
Speaker 1: other thing, the thing I couldn't explain to her and
Speaker 1: didn't need to. Within a week of arriving, she'd adopted
Speaker 1: Bowie's boundary rules. She wouldn't cross the northern tree line.
Speaker 1: She wouldn't go near the back of the cabin after dark.
Speaker 1: She'd freeze mid stride, sometimes one paw, raised ears, locked
Speaker 1: on something I couldn't hear, and stand like a statue
Speaker 1: for thirty or forty seconds before shaking herself and moving on.
Speaker 1: She picked up a faint scent on her first morning
Speaker 1: patrol of the meadow, stopped dead, worked it with her
Speaker 1: nose for a solid minute, and then backed away from
Speaker 1: the spot, the way you'd back away from something you'd
Speaker 1: identified as dangerous. She'd learned the invisible geography of this
Speaker 1: property in seven days. The lines and zones and no
Speaker 1: go areas that weren't on any map, but were as
Speaker 1: real as the fence around the cemetery plot. I didn't
Speaker 1: teach her those boundaries. Bowie did, or the mountain did,
Speaker 1: or both. I've always suspected that the creatures leave scent
Speaker 1: markers the same way wolves and big cats do, and
Speaker 1: that dogs can read them the way we read signs.
Speaker 1: Bowie had been reading those signs for three years. Ruby
Speaker 1: learned to read them in a week. Whatever the snee said,
Speaker 1: both dogs agreed on the interpretation this far and no further.
Speaker 1: The spring and summer of seventeen were relatively quiet. The
Speaker 1: knocking came and went in its usual pattern, sporadic in spring,
Speaker 1: more frequent by June, nightly by July. I'd stopped logging
Speaker 1: it with the same obsessive detail as the first two years.
Speaker 1: The notebook was still in the kitchen drawer, and I
Speaker 1: still made entries, but they were shorter now, more telegraphic.
Speaker 1: Knocking eight twenty two pm n e Ridge, two strikes.
Speaker 1: I didn't need paragraphs anymore. The phenomenon was part of
Speaker 1: my life. You don't write a paragraph every time it rains.
Speaker 1: I went to the bluff twice that summer. Both times
Speaker 1: the creatures were absent, though the stone arrangements had shifted,
Speaker 1: and the margin soil held fresh tracks. The riverstone I'd
Speaker 1: found on the sitting slab in August of sixteen was
Speaker 1: gone when I visited in June of seventeen. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it was removed or if it simply rolled off,
Speaker 1: but it's absence registered as a message, even though I
Speaker 1: couldn't decode it. Bowie and Ruby developed a routine that
Speaker 1: included a dust patrol. Every evening, Right around sunset, they'd
Speaker 1: leave the porch together and trot the perimeter of the meadow,
Speaker 1: not the full property, just the open ground, staying twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty yards from the tree line on all sides.
Speaker 1: Ruby would range a little wider than Bowie, her shepherd
Speaker 1: instincts pulling her toward the edges, but she always circled
Speaker 1: back to him before going too far. They'd complete the
Speaker 1: loop in about fifteen minutes and return to the porch,
Speaker 1: where they'd lie side by side and watch the dark
Speaker 1: come in. It was a good routine, comfortable, safe. Until
Speaker 1: October fourteenth, I've put off telling this story for the
Speaker 1: entire time I've been writing to you. The other encounters,
Speaker 1: even the mimicry, even the bluff. I could describe them
Speaker 1: with a certain distance. They happened to me. I was scared.
Speaker 1: I processed it. I moved on. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. But
Speaker 1: the night the dogs went into the woods hit a
Speaker 1: different nerve. It hit the part of me that's responsible
Speaker 1: for something other than myself. The part that took in
Speaker 1: astray from a gas station and promised her without words
Speaker 1: that she'd be safe. The part that had watched Bowie
Speaker 1: grow from a four year old shelter dog into the bravest,
Speaker 1: most loyal animal I'd ever known, and had silently sworn
Speaker 1: to protect him from anything that threatened him. That night,
Speaker 1: I couldn't keep that promise, and the guilt of it
Speaker 1: has lived in my chest for seven years. October fourteenth,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, a Saturday, I'd been doing some work on
Speaker 1: the workshop roof, replacing a section of flashing that had
Speaker 1: corroded over the forty plus years since Earl had installed it,
Speaker 1: and i'd knocked off around five when the light started
Speaker 1: going flat. The flashing job was finicky work, bending sheet
Speaker 1: metal around the roof edge and sealing it with roofing
Speaker 1: so meant, and my hands were sore, and my patience
Speaker 1: was thin, and I was looking forward to a beer
Speaker 1: and the porch and the last of the daylight. It
Speaker 1: was one of those October days where the sky looks
Speaker 1: like milk, overcast but not raining, the air cool and damp,
Speaker 1: and still no wind, no bird noise to speak of.
Speaker 1: The whipper wheels had already migrated, and the winter birds
Speaker 1: hadn't fully arrived yet, and the mountain was in that
Speaker 1: acoustic gap between seasons, where the only sounds are the
Speaker 1: ones you make yourself. The trees were shedding, hard leaves
Speaker 1: were ankle deep across the meadow, and the sound they
Speaker 1: made under my boots was that dry papery crunch that
Speaker 1: belongs exclusively to the last two weeks of autumn. The
Speaker 1: ridge was gray against the gray sky, barely distinguishable, and
Speaker 1: the whole landscape had that muted, drained quality that comes
Speaker 1: right before the mountain goes to sleep for the winter.
Speaker 1: I was on the porch cleaning up my tools when
Speaker 1: the dogs started their dust patrol. They hopped off the
Speaker 1: porch together, Zoie leading Ruby a half step behind, and
Speaker 1: trotted toward the meadow. I watched them absently, the way
Speaker 1: you watch your dogs do something they've done one hundred times,
Speaker 1: not really paying attention, just to wear. They made it
Speaker 1: about halfway across the meadow, heading toward the eastern tree
Speaker 1: line in their usual arc, when both of them stopped,
Speaker 1: not slowed, stopped mid stride, simultaneously, as if they'd hit
Speaker 1: a glass wall. Bowie's head came up first, his ears
Speaker 1: rotated forward, his whole body went rigid. That posture I'd
Speaker 1: been seeing for three years, the one that meant something
Speaker 1: was in the trees. Ruby copied him a half second later,
Speaker 1: her body dropping into a crouch, her good ear pointing east,
Speaker 1: her tail going straight and stiff behind her. They held
Speaker 1: that position for maybe five seconds, long enough for me
Speaker 1: to set down the wrench I was holding, and stepped
Speaker 1: to the edge of the porch, long enough for me
Speaker 1: to open my mouth to call them back. I didn't
Speaker 1: get the words out out. Ruby broke first. She bolted
Speaker 1: toward the tree line in a dead sprint, her body low,
Speaker 1: her stride open and flat and fast. Bowie went after
Speaker 1: her a beat later, not sprinting but running hard, his
Speaker 1: mature legs eating ground in that efficient No wasted motion
Speaker 1: gait that healers use when they're herding or chasing. They
Speaker 1: hit the tree line together, side by side, and disappeared
Speaker 1: into the forest. And then I heard the barking ruby first,
Speaker 1: high pitched and rapid, the staccato alarm of a dog
Speaker 1: that's found something and wants the world to know about it.
Speaker 1: Then Bowie a beat later, his bark deeper and more rhythmic,
Speaker 1: the methodical cadence of a healer who's been bred for
Speaker 1: centuries to communicate urgency without losing control. Not alarm barks,
Speaker 1: chase barks, the fast, rhythmic, breathless barking of dogs in
Speaker 1: pursuit of something that's running. The sound echoed back through
Speaker 1: the trees, bouncing off the slope, layering on itself as
Speaker 1: the acoustics of the forest amplified and distorted it. The
Speaker 1: barking was moving, getting fainter, heading up ten seconds twenty thirty.
Speaker 1: The sound receded up the slope behind the cabin, moving
Speaker 1: northeast toward the ridge, the direction that every approach, every sound,
Speaker 1: every piece of evidence for three years had pointed to
Speaker 1: as the primary corridor. My dogs were chasing something up
Speaker 1: the same route the creatures used to walk down to
Speaker 1: my cabin at night, up the highway into the territory.
Speaker 1: I stood on the porch and shouted their names, Bowie Ruby.
Speaker 1: The words tore out of my throat with a force
Speaker 1: that surprised me, raw and ragged, the shout of a
Speaker 1: parent whose child has just run into traffic. Bowie Ruby,
Speaker 1: come here now. The barking didn't slow, didn't turn, didn't
Speaker 1: acknowledge me. They were gone, running full speed up a
Speaker 1: mountain after something I couldn't see, into a forest I
Speaker 1: knew was inhabited by things that outweigh made both of
Speaker 1: them combined by a factor of five or six, Things
Speaker 1: that could peel bark from an oak at eight feet
Speaker 1: and walk through frozen creeks barefoot, and circle a depression
Speaker 1: in the dark with the coordinated precision of a military unit.
Speaker 1: My dogs, my family, the two living things I was
Speaker 1: responsible for, had run into that. I want to describe
Speaker 1: what happened inside my body in the next thirty seconds
Speaker 1: because it's relevant to understanding the decisions I made afterward.
Speaker 1: My vision narrowed, not metaphorically. The peripheral edges of my
Speaker 1: visual field actually dimmed, the way they do when your
Speaker 1: blood pressure spikes and your brain redirects resources to the
Speaker 1: central field. My hand started shaking, not trembling, shaking, the
Speaker 1: kind of involuntary oscillation that makes it hard to pick
Speaker 1: up a key or turn a doorknob. My stomach dropped,
Speaker 1: the way it drops when you miss a step on
Speaker 1: a staircase and your body falls before your brain catches up.
Speaker 1: And a sound started in my ears, a high wine,
Speaker 1: like the tone you hear after a loud noise, except
Speaker 1: there hadn't been a loud noise, just the silence left
Speaker 1: behind by my dog's barking as it faded into the forest.
Speaker 1: The fear wasn't for me. I'd been afraid for myself
Speaker 1: plenty of times over the past three years, and I'd
Speaker 1: learned to manage it. I'd learned to function through it,
Speaker 1: to walk when my legs wanted to lock, to think
Speaker 1: when my brain wanted to shut down. This was different.
Speaker 1: This was fear for someone else, for two someone else's
Speaker 1: who couldn't understand what they were chasing, who didn't know
Speaker 1: what lived on that ridge, who were operating on pure
Speaker 1: instinct in a situation that instinct alone wouldn't get them
Speaker 1: out of. And the worst part The part that made
Speaker 1: the fear feel like it was going to buckle my
Speaker 1: knees was that I'd let it happen. I'd been standing
Speaker 1: on the porch twenty yards away watching them patrol, and
Speaker 1: I'd seen them freeze, and I'd opened my mouth to
Speaker 1: call them back, and I'd been one second too late,
Speaker 1: one second the margin between keeping them safe and losing
Speaker 1: them into the forest, and I'd missed it. I went inside.
Speaker 1: I grabbed the heavy flashlight, the big maglight that doubled
Speaker 1: as a club if you gripped it by the narrow end.
Speaker 1: I grabbed my jacket. I almost grabbed the handheld radio
Speaker 1: Cliff had told me to carry, but it was in
Speaker 1: the daypack on the shelf, and I didn't want to
Speaker 1: waste time digging for it. I should have taken the
Speaker 1: extra ten seconds. Hindsight is full of should halves that
Speaker 1: cost nothing to identify in everything to miss. I was
Speaker 1: off the porch and into the meadow in under a minute.
Speaker 1: The barking had faded to the point where I could
Speaker 1: barely hear it. Intermittent now not the continuous chase bark
Speaker 1: from before, short bursts separated by silence. They'd stopped running.
Speaker 1: Whatever they'd been chasing had either outrun them, or they'd
Speaker 1: cornered it, or they'd lost the trail. I hit the
Speaker 1: tree line and plunged it into the forest. It was
Speaker 1: darker in the trees than I expected. The overcast sky
Speaker 1: had blocked the last of the daylight, and under the
Speaker 1: canopy the world was shades of gray and black, with
Speaker 1: no definition between them. The transition from meadow to forest
Speaker 1: was like walking through a door into a room with
Speaker 1: the lights off. My pupils hadn't adjusted, and for the
Speaker 1: first fifteen or twenty seconds, the maglight beam was the
Speaker 1: only thing keeping me from walking into tree trunks. I
Speaker 1: switched it on and swept it ahead, the white cone
Speaker 1: of light cutting through the dark and throwing hard shadows
Speaker 1: behind every trunk and rock. I followed the slope upward,
Speaker 1: trying to move in the direction the barking had gone northeast,
Speaker 1: toward the ridge, toward the bluff corridor, the same vector
Speaker 1: that every piece of evidence for three years had identified
Speaker 1: as the primary approach route. My dogs had chased something
Speaker 1: straight up the highway. The ground was covered in fresh leaves,
Speaker 1: and they were wet from the damp air, which meant
Speaker 1: They were slippery on the slope and nearly silent underfoot.
Speaker 1: My boots didn't crunch the way they would have on
Speaker 1: a dry day. They whispered everything, whispered, the leaves, my breathing,
Speaker 1: the faint, residual sound of the dog somewhere above me.
Speaker 1: The forest was muffled and close, the damp air absorbing
Speaker 1: sound the way a heavy curtain absorbs echoes, and the
Speaker 1: world had contracted to the radius of my flashlight and
Speaker 1: the ten feet beyond it, where shapes were still discernible
Speaker 1: in the residual glow. I called for them every twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty steps. Bowie, Ruby, come here, the command voice
Speaker 1: that both dogs knew, the one that had never failed
Speaker 1: to bring them running from whatever distraction had caught their attention.
Speaker 1: No response, no barking, no whining, no sound of paws
Speaker 1: on leaves or bodies crashing through brush. Nothing. The silence
Speaker 1: had that quality I'd come to recognize, the sealed, pressurized
Speaker 1: quality that meant I wasn't alone in these trees. Something
Speaker 1: else was here, something besides my dogs, and it was
Speaker 1: close enough to affect the ambient sound the way a
Speaker 1: large object affects the flow of water around it, creating
Speaker 1: a dead zone in its wake. I climbed for about
Speaker 1: ten minutes, gaining maybe one hundred and fifty feet of elevation.
Speaker 1: The slope was getting steeper, and I was using my
Speaker 1: left hand to grab saplings and pull myself up while
Speaker 1: the right held the maglight. My breathing was loud in
Speaker 1: my own ears, ragged from the exertion and the adrenaline
Speaker 1: and the simple physical cost of climbing a mountain in
Speaker 1: the dark while your nervous system is screaming at you
Speaker 1: to turn around. Then I heard something, Not the dogs,
Speaker 1: something else. A single branch snapping off to my left,
Speaker 1: thirty maybe forty yards away, A sharp crack that echoed
Speaker 1: flatly in the damp air and then dissolved. Not a
Speaker 1: branch falling from a tree, A branch breaking underfoot, the
Speaker 1: sound of weight applied to wood that's dry enough to
Speaker 1: fracture under compression. I stopped, swung the flashlight left. The
Speaker 1: beam cut through the trees and caught nothing but bark
Speaker 1: and shadow and the wet gleam of leaves on the
Speaker 1: forest floor. No movement, no eyes, no shape, just forest.
Speaker 1: I stood still and listened. My heart beat was loud,
Speaker 1: in my ears, the blood rush that comes with sustained adrenaline,
Speaker 1: that roaring static that makes it hard to distinguish real
Speaker 1: sound from internal noise. I forced myself to breathe, slowly,
Speaker 1: in through the nose, out through the mouth, letting the
Speaker 1: static settle. Another snap, same direction, same distance, maybe slightly closer.
Speaker 1: The branch that broke this time was thicker, The sound
Speaker 1: was deeper, more substantial. The kind of crack you here
Speaker 1: when you step on a stick, the diameter of your
Speaker 1: thumb instead of a twig, the diameter of a pencil.
Speaker 1: Something was paralleling me, matching my course up the slope,
Speaker 1: but offset to the left, moving when I moved, stopping,
Speaker 1: when I stopped close enough to hear my footsteps, far
Speaker 1: enough to stay outside the flashlight beam. I knew what
Speaker 1: it was. After three years. The question wasn't what. The
Speaker 1: question was why Why was it following me? Why hadn't
Speaker 1: it retreated the way it usually did when I came
Speaker 1: into the forest. Why was it holding a parallel course
Speaker 1: instead of moving away? And where were my dogs? I
Speaker 1: started calling again, louder this time, Bowie Ruby here now
Speaker 1: from somewhere up the slope, maybe two hundred yards above
Speaker 1: and to my right, I heard a single bark bowie,
Speaker 1: just one clipped in, short and hollow, the way his
Speaker 1: bark sounded when he was too scared to commit to
Speaker 1: a full vocalization but couldn't keep the sound inside. A
Speaker 1: bark that was less communication and more involuntary release, like
Speaker 1: a hiccup of fear. I changed direction, angled right toward
Speaker 1: the sound, climbing faster now, the flashlight beam swinging ahead
Speaker 1: of me. The thing to my left stayed with me
Speaker 1: to hear it. Not footsteps exactly, displacement, the soft compression
Speaker 1: of leaves under weight, the occasional scrape of something solid
Speaker 1: against bark as it passed between trees. It was keeping pace,
Speaker 1: adjusting to my new heading, maintaining the same offset distance.
Speaker 1: I tried not to think about it. I focused on
Speaker 1: the slope, on the footing, on the dark ground ahead
Speaker 1: of me, but my body was tracking it. Every hair
Speaker 1: on my arms was standing, My shoulders were hunched involuntarily,
Speaker 1: the way your body hunches when it knows something is
Speaker 1: approaching from the side and it's trying to make itself smaller.
Speaker 1: I climbed for another five minutes and broke into a
Speaker 1: small clearing not a natural clearing, a blowdown. A couple
Speaker 1: of mature oaks had come down sometime in the past year,
Speaker 1: their root balls tipped up like walls, their crowns tangled
Speaker 1: on the ground in a mess of branches and dead leaves.
Speaker 1: The opening they'd left in the canopy let in a
Speaker 1: little more ambient light from the overcast sky, and I
Speaker 1: could see better here than I had in the closed forest.
Speaker 1: Bowie was under one of the fallen trunks. He was
Speaker 1: pressed into a gap between the trunk and the ground,
Speaker 1: a space that had been carved out by the trees fall,
Speaker 1: maybe eighteen inches high and three feet deep. He'd squeezed
Speaker 1: himself into it, with his legs tucked under him, his
Speaker 1: belly flat against the cold dirt, his chin on the ground.
Speaker 1: His body was compressed into the smallest possible configuration, as
Speaker 1: if he was trying to disappear into the earth itself.
Speaker 1: His eyes caught the flashlight beam and reflected green, wide
Speaker 1: and unblinking. The whites were showing around the irises, which
Speaker 1: is something dogs do when they're in extreme distress. His
Speaker 1: ears were plastered against his skull. He was panting in fast,
Speaker 1: shallow cycles. His tongue out his sides, heaving with the
Speaker 1: kind of rapid respiration that comes from sustained fear, not exertion.
Speaker 1: He wasn't winded from running. He was hyperventilating from terror.
Speaker 1: He wasn't injured. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I checked him, quickly,
Speaker 1: running the flashlight over his body, looking for blood, for limping,
Speaker 1: for the guarded posture of a dog that's been hit
Speaker 1: or bitten. Nothing, no wounds, no favoring of any leg.
Speaker 1: He was physically fine. He was just hiding My dog,
Speaker 1: the sentry, the watchdog, the animal who'd stood his ground
Speaker 1: through three years of encounters and stared down the darkness
Speaker 1: from his hallway post night after night after night, who'd
Speaker 1: never once shown the kind of fear I was looking
Speaker 1: at now, was hiding under a log like a puppy
Speaker 1: in a thunderstorm. Something had broken him, temporarily, as it
Speaker 1: turned out, but in that moment, whatever Bowie had encountered
Speaker 1: between the tree line and this blowdown had exceeded the
Speaker 1: limit of what he could handle. He'd been brave for
Speaker 1: three years. He'd used up his supply, and he'd found
Speaker 1: a hole and crawled into it. I crouched beside him
Speaker 1: and put my hand on his head. The fur between
Speaker 1: his ears was damp. Whether from the humidity or from sweat,
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell. His skin was hot underneath. He whimpered,
Speaker 1: a thin, high sound that came from somewhere deep in
Speaker 1: his chest, A sound I'd never heard from him in
Speaker 1: seven years together, not even during the ravine encounter, when
Speaker 1: Wade's voice had come from two directions, not even during
Speaker 1: the cabin visit, when something had breathed against the wall
Speaker 1: three feet from where we stood. Bowie had been scared
Speaker 1: before many times, but he'd always held it together. He'd
Speaker 1: always maintained some version of composure, some posture of defiance,
Speaker 1: or at least dignity, some flicker in his eyes that
Speaker 1: said I'm afraid, but I'm still here. What I was
Speaker 1: looking at now was surrender, complete and total. He'd found
Speaker 1: a hole and crawled into it, and he wasn't coming
Speaker 1: out on his own. It's okay, buddy, I whispered, I'm here.
Speaker 1: I've got you. He pressed his head into my palm
Speaker 1: and closed his eyes. The whimpering stopped, his breathing slowed
Speaker 1: just slightly. The way a child's breathing slows when a
Speaker 1: parent picks them up. Not calm, but less desperate. Then
Speaker 1: I realized Ruby wasn't with him. I straightened up and
Speaker 1: shined the flashlight around the clearing. Ruby wasn't under the log,
Speaker 1: she wasn't behind the root balls, she wasn't in the
Speaker 1: branches of the downed crowns. She was gone. Ruby. I called,
Speaker 1: not shouting. Something told me not to shout, A quiet,
Speaker 1: firm call, pitched just above conversational volume. Ruby, come nothing.
Speaker 1: I listened. The forest was doing the silent thing again,
Speaker 1: that pressurized quiet that I'd come to associate with proximity.
Speaker 1: But whatever it was to my left had stopped making noise.
Speaker 1: Either it had moved away or it had stopped moving.
Speaker 1: Both options were unsettling. Then I heard ruby, not a bark,
Speaker 1: a whine, thin and continuous, and coming from further up
Speaker 1: the slope, maybe fifty or sixty yards beyond the blowdown, northeast,
Speaker 1: always northeast. I looked at Bowie. He looked at me.
Speaker 1: His eyes said, don't go, as clearly as a dog's
Speaker 1: eyes have ever said anything to a human. Bowie said,
Speaker 1: stay here. I couldn't. Ruby was up there alone. I
Speaker 1: stood up, took a deep breath, and started toward the
Speaker 1: sound of her whining, leaving Bowie under the log. It
Speaker 1: was the hardest thing I'd done on that mountain, Harder
Speaker 1: than climbing to the bluff, Harder than lying on the
Speaker 1: cliff edge looking down at three creatures, harder than the ravine,
Speaker 1: because I was leaving a terrified dog behind to go
Speaker 1: find another terrified dog further into a forest that I
Speaker 1: knew with absolute certainty was occupied by things that were
Speaker 1: watching me do it. I followed the winding up the slope.
Speaker 1: The trees closed in again after the clearing, and the
Speaker 1: darkness came back, heavy and close. The maglite beam felt
Speaker 1: like a thread in a cavern, illuminating a narrow cone
Speaker 1: while everything else pressed in from the sides. I was
Speaker 1: scanning constantly left, right, ahead, the beam, sweeping in arcs
Speaker 1: as I climbed, looking for eyes, looking for shape, looking
Speaker 1: for the outline of something upright in a landscape of
Speaker 1: vertical trunks. I found Ruby about forty yards past the blowdown,
Speaker 1: in a spot that stopped me cold. She was in
Speaker 1: a small depression between two mature beaches, about fifteen feet apart.
Speaker 1: The depression was maybe eight feet across, carpeted in leaves
Speaker 1: and ringed on three sides by underbrush that was thick
Speaker 1: enough to create a natural enclosure. The only open approach
Speaker 1: was from the south, the direction I'd come from. Ruby
Speaker 1: was standing in the center of it, not sitting, not
Speaker 1: lying down, standing, all four legs planted, body rigid, head
Speaker 1: held low, and thrust forward like a pointer on a SI,
Speaker 1: except there was nothing fluid about her posture. She was locked,
Speaker 1: frozen mid motion. Her tail was tucked so tight against
Speaker 1: her belly that it was invisible from behind. Her breathing
Speaker 1: was rapid, visible in the flashlight beam as quick jets
Speaker 1: of vapor from her nostrils. She was facing something on
Speaker 1: the far side of the depression, and even with the
Speaker 1: flashlight beam sweeping across her body, she didn't look at me,
Speaker 1: didn't glance, didn't flick an ear in my direction. She
Speaker 1: was staring at something with a focus so complete that
Speaker 1: my arrival hadn't even registered. In seven months of living
Speaker 1: with Ruby, I'd never seen anything hold her attention to
Speaker 1: the exclusion of all else. She was a responsive, socially
Speaker 1: oriented dog. She noticed everything, She reacted to everything, a
Speaker 1: squirrel could pull her focus from a stake bone, but
Speaker 1: whatever she was looking at in that depression had captured
Speaker 1: her so totally that I might as well have been invisible.
Speaker 1: I followed her line of sight and saw the structures.
Speaker 1: There were four of them, arranged in a rough arc
Speaker 1: on the far side of the depression, spaced about three
Speaker 1: feet apart. They were made of sticks, branches, and saplings,
Speaker 1: woven and stacked in a way that was unmistakably deliberate.
Speaker 1: Not brush piles, not windfall tangles, not the random scatter
Speaker 1: of storm debris, or the collapsed remnants of a dead tree.
Speaker 1: Breaking apart. Structures built things, objects that existed because something
Speaker 1: with hands and intention had gathered raw materials from the
Speaker 1: forest floor and assembled them into shapes that the forest
Speaker 1: itself would never produce. The largest was about four feet
Speaker 1: tall and roughly conical, like a teepee, made from branches
Speaker 1: the thickness of a broom handle, leaned together at the
Speaker 1: top and splayed at the base in a circle roughly
Speaker 1: two feet in diameter. The branches were stripped of their
Speaker 1: bark in places, showing pale sap wood underneath that glowed
Speaker 1: faintly in the flashlight beam, and some of them had
Speaker 1: been broken to length rather than cut. The brake points
Speaker 1: were five trus and splintered, with the characteristic frame you
Speaker 1: get when you snap green wood by bending it past
Speaker 1: its breaking point. No saw marks, no hatchet marks, just
Speaker 1: raw force applied to fresh timber. The second structure was lower,
Speaker 1: maybe two feet, and flatter, like a platform or a shelf,
Speaker 1: made of horizontal branches laid across two parallel support logs.
Speaker 1: The branches on top were arranged in a single layer,
Speaker 1: touching edge to edge, like the slats of a palette.
Speaker 1: They were uniform in thickness roughly in inch in diameter
Speaker 1: and uniform in length roughly three feet, which meant they'd
Speaker 1: been selected and broken to specification. You don't find a
Speaker 1: dozen branches of identical size lying together on a forest floor.
Speaker 1: You find them on a shelf that was built by
Speaker 1: something that sorted through the available material and chose the
Speaker 1: pieces that fit. The third structure was a single upright
Speaker 1: sapling about an inch in diameter that had been bent
Speaker 1: at a right angle about three feet off the ground.
Speaker 1: The bend was not cracked, bent green wood that had
Speaker 1: been forced past its natural flex point and held in
Speaker 1: the new position by wedging the upper portion into the
Speaker 1: fork of a beach branch overhead. The sapling was still alive.
Speaker 1: I could see green bark and the faint sheen of
Speaker 1: moisture on the bend point. It had been done recently,
Speaker 1: within days, probably maybe less. The fourth was the most disturbing.
Speaker 1: It was a twist, A cluster of three or four
Speaker 1: young saplings growing close together, maybe four feet from the
Speaker 1: first structure, that had been braided around each other. Their
Speaker 1: trunks spiraled in a tight helix, wound around each other
Speaker 1: like the strands of a rope, held in position by
Speaker 1: strips of bark that had been peeled from a nearby
Speaker 1: tree and tied in knots around the braid at two points.
Speaker 1: The knots were deliberate. I could see the loops, the tucks,
Speaker 1: the tension where the bark had been pulled tight and secured.
Speaker 1: The saplings were alive, growing, The braid was holding, and
Speaker 1: the trees were slowly incorporating the twist into their growth pattern.
Speaker 1: In a few years, if nothing disturbed them, they'd fuse
Speaker 1: together permanently, a living sculpture made by something that understood
Speaker 1: that green wood can be shaped and that living trees
Speaker 1: can be trained. I'd read about these tree structures stick formations.
Speaker 1: They show up in sasquatch activity reports from all over
Speaker 1: North America. Researchers document them in every state where encounters occur.
Speaker 1: Broken trees arranged in patterns, saplings, bent and woven teepee
Speaker 1: structures built from deadfall. The debate about what they mean
Speaker 1: is ongoing and unresolved. Some researchers think their territorial markers,
Speaker 1: some think their navigational aids, some think their shelters for
Speaker 1: something smaller juveniles. Maybe others think their communication messages left
Speaker 1: for other members of the group, the way hikers leave
Speaker 1: cairns on unmarked trails, and some people dismiss them entirely,
Speaker 1: wind damage, snow load, falling trees hitting other trees on
Speaker 1: the way down. What I was looking at wasn't any
Speaker 1: of those dismissals. The braided saplings with bark stripped knots
Speaker 1: ruled out every natural explanation. Living trees don't braid themselves,
Speaker 1: Bark doesn't peel itself from one tree, travel six feet
Speaker 1: through the air, and tie itself in knots around a
Speaker 1: cluster of saplings. Whatever had built these structures had hands
Speaker 1: and grip strength sufficient to bend green wood, and the
Speaker 1: fine motor control to strip, bark and tie knots, and
Speaker 1: the cognitive capacity to conceive of a structure, gather materials,
Speaker 1: and execute the construction in a way that held together
Speaker 1: and persisted in the environment. Ruby was staring at the
Speaker 1: structures with the intensity of a dog that has encountered
Speaker 1: something outside its frame of reference and cannot decide whether
Speaker 1: to flee or fight, or simply stand there and wait
Speaker 1: for the world to start making sense again. She was
Speaker 1: locked in, frozen. Her body was trembling, a fine vibration
Speaker 1: that I could see in the flashlight beam running through
Speaker 1: her legs and her flanks in a continuous ripple. Her
Speaker 1: ears were pinned flat, her lips were pulled back slightly,
Speaker 1: not snarling, but close, as if the muscles of her
Speaker 1: face were responding to a threat. Her brain hadn't fully
Speaker 1: categorized Ruby. I said, softly, come here, girl. She didn't move.
Speaker 1: I took a step toward her, then another. The leaves
Speaker 1: under my boots were thick and damp, and they gave
Speaker 1: under my weight without a sound. I was about five
Speaker 1: feet from Ruby, close enough to reach out and grab
Speaker 1: her collar. When I heard the sound that changed the
Speaker 1: nature of the night behind me, not to the left
Speaker 1: where the paralleling had been, directly behind me, between me
Speaker 1: and the blowdown where Bowie was hiding. A branch snap, loud, close,
Speaker 1: maybe twenty yards back and slightly uphill. Not a twig
Speaker 1: cracking under a careless foot, a substantial piece of wood
Speaker 1: inch thick or more fracturing under concentrated pressure. The sound
Speaker 1: of something heavy standing on something solid and letting it break.
Speaker 1: Then another off to the right of the first, same distance,
Speaker 1: different position, a fifteen foot lateral shift between the first
Speaker 1: snap and the second, which meant either the source had
Speaker 1: moved fifteen feet in less than two seconds, or there
Speaker 1: were two sources, then a third slightly off to one side.
Speaker 1: Not the rhythmic, spaced snapping of something walking a straight line.
Speaker 1: This was scattered, irregular, different positions. Three points of sound
Speaker 1: arranged in an arc behind me, like coordinates on a map,
Speaker 1: each one marking the position of something I couldn't see.
Speaker 1: Something was circling us. I spun around and put the
Speaker 1: flashlight beam on the slope behind me, trees, shadows, leaves,
Speaker 1: nothing visible, but the snapping continued. A crack from the right,
Speaker 1: from the left, a heavy compression of leaf litter from
Speaker 1: straight ahead that sounded like something settling its weight in
Speaker 1: a single spot and holding steel. Each sound was discrete,
Speaker 1: separated from the next by three to five seconds, and
Speaker 1: each one came from a slightly different position, not random rotational.
Speaker 1: The sounds were tracing a perimeter around the depression, moving clockwise,
Speaker 1: tightening with each circuit. I counted the sound sources three
Speaker 1: distinct positions, at least moving independently, surrounding the depression from
Speaker 1: three sides. The fourth side behind the stick structures was open.
Speaker 1: Whether that was intentional, a gap left in the circle
Speaker 1: for us to retreat through, or simply where the fourth
Speaker 1: one hadn't gotten to yet, I couldn't tell, but the
Speaker 1: gap existed. In some part of my brain, the tactical part,
Speaker 1: the survival part, logged it as an exit. Ruby finally
Speaker 1: broke her gaze from the structures. She turned toward me
Speaker 1: and pressed against my legs the bowie had done so
Speaker 1: many times, the way both dogs had done in every
Speaker 1: moment of fear on this mountain. She pressed her whole
Speaker 1: body into me, and I could feel her trembling through
Speaker 1: my jeans, her rib cage vibrating against my calf, her
Speaker 1: heart pounding so fast the individual beats blurred into a
Speaker 1: sustained buzz. I reached down and grabbed her collar. My
Speaker 1: fingers wrapped around the nylon band and held on. The
Speaker 1: circling continued. The branch snaps were getting closer, not rapidly, incrementally,
Speaker 1: one crack a few feet nearer than the last, another
Speaker 1: from a slightly different angle, but at the same reduced distance.
Speaker 1: They were tightening the circle, slowly, patiently, without urgency, the
Speaker 1: way you'd close a net around something you didn't want
Speaker 1: to escape but also didn't want to spook. The pace
Speaker 1: was controlled, deliberate, as if whatever was out there understood
Speaker 1: that rushing would cause panic, and panic would cause running,
Speaker 1: and running would implicate things. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. I stood
Speaker 1: in that depression, with Ruby pressed against my leg and
Speaker 1: the stick structures at my back and the flashlight beam
Speaker 1: shaking in my fist, and I made a series of
Speaker 1: decisions in about ten seconds that I've questioned every day since. First.
Speaker 1: I couldn't stay. The circle was closing. Whatever was out
Speaker 1: there was Getting near and standing still in the center
Speaker 1: of a ring of unseen creatures in a dark forest
Speaker 1: was not a survival strategy. Second, I couldn't go deeper
Speaker 1: into the woods. The open side of the circle, the
Speaker 1: side behind the stick structures, led further up the slope,
Speaker 1: further from the cabin, further from light and safety and
Speaker 1: anything resembling an advantage. Third, I had to go back
Speaker 1: down through the circle, past the blowdown where Bowie was,
Speaker 1: down the slope, through the tree line into the meadow home.
Speaker 1: The problem was that through the circle meant walking toward
Speaker 1: the things that were closing it. I turned south toward
Speaker 1: the blowdown and started walking, not running, walking deliberately with purpose.
Speaker 1: Every cell in my body wanted to sprint. The adrenaline
Speaker 1: was screaming at my legs to fire, to launch, to
Speaker 1: cover ground as fast as physically possible. But I'd been
Speaker 1: in enough encounters on this mountain to know that running
Speaker 1: is a language. Running says prey, running says vulnerable, running
Speaker 1: says chase Me and I didn't know what the rules
Speaker 1: were for whatever was circling us, but I knew I
Speaker 1: didn't want to trigger a pursuit response from three or
Speaker 1: more creatures that could cover ground faster than I could.
Speaker 1: In terrain they knew better than I ever would. So
Speaker 1: I walked, holding Ruby's collar with my left hand. The
Speaker 1: maglight in my right beam aimed ahead, steps deliberate and steady.
Speaker 1: My boots found the ground one at a time, heel toe,
Speaker 1: heel two, the most basic mechanics of locomotion reduced to
Speaker 1: their simplest form because my higher brain functions were occupied
Speaker 1: with listening and scanning and trying not to come apart.
Speaker 1: I made noise. I talked out loud, not words that
Speaker 1: made sense, just sound, my voice filling the space around me,
Speaker 1: the way a campfire fills a dark camp site, pushing
Speaker 1: the dark back by a few feet, creating a perimeter
Speaker 1: of human presence in a forest that was very much
Speaker 1: not human territory. I said Ruby's name, I said Bowie's name.
Speaker 1: I said we're going home, like it was a statement
Speaker 1: of intent, directed at the forest itself, at whatever was
Speaker 1: in the trees around us, at the mountain and everything
Speaker 1: on it. I said it the way you'd say it
Speaker 1: to someone blocking a doorway, firmly, without aggression, but without apology.
Speaker 1: We're going home. Make room. I don't know if any
Speaker 1: of it mattered, But it kept me from screaming, and
Speaker 1: it kept me from running, and those two things together
Speaker 1: might have been the difference between walking out of that
Speaker 1: forest and not walking out. The branch snaps stopped as
Speaker 1: I moved, all of them simultaneously, as if whoever was
Speaker 1: making the sounds had received a signal, a word, or
Speaker 1: a gesture, or some form of communication I couldn't perceive,
Speaker 1: and gone silent. In unison, the forest transitioned from scattered
Speaker 1: cracking to total quiet in the space of a single
Speaker 1: heart beat. One second, there were sounds on three sides
Speaker 1: of me. The next second there was nothing, just my
Speaker 1: footsteps and my voice and the rasp of Ruby's collar
Speaker 1: in my grip and the dark. And the quiet was
Speaker 1: worse than the noise, because the noise, however terrifying, was informational.
Speaker 1: It told me where they were, how many, how close.
Speaker 1: The quiet took all of that away and replaced it
Speaker 1: with the most dangerous thing of all, uncertainty. They could
Speaker 1: have been ten feet away or one hundred. They could
Speaker 1: have moved to new positions or stayed in the old ones.
Speaker 1: They could have been watching me walk toward them, or
Speaker 1: watching me walk away from them. I had no data,
Speaker 1: just the feeling, the pressure, the knowledge that I was
Speaker 1: in their space and they were allowing me to leave,
Speaker 1: and that the allowance could be revoked at any moment
Speaker 1: for reasons I'd never understand. I walked through it thirty
Speaker 1: yards that felt like thirty miles ruby at my hip
Speaker 1: trembling but moving, or paws scrabbling for traction on the
Speaker 1: wet slope. I could feel the presence around us on
Speaker 1: both sides, close, watching, waiting but not advancing, not intercepting,
Speaker 1: letting us pass. The thought crossed my mind, and I
Speaker 1: hate that it crossed my mind because it implies a
Speaker 1: level of coordination and intentionality that I still struggle to accept,
Speaker 1: even after everything I've been through. They were letting us leave.
Speaker 1: The circle had opened, not because we'd broken through it,
Speaker 1: not because I'd scared them off with my flaglight and
Speaker 1: my talking and my determined walking pace, because it had
Speaker 1: been opened for us deliberately, the way a gate is opened,
Speaker 1: the way a door is held. That thought didn't comfort me.
Speaker 1: It terrified me, because if they could open the circle,
Speaker 1: they could close it. And the fact that they'd chosen
Speaker 1: to open it this time, said nothing about what they choose.
Speaker 1: Next time, I hit the blowdown clearing, and Bowie was
Speaker 1: exactly where I'd left him, wedged under the fallen trunk.
Speaker 1: I crouched beside him and said his name. He came out, slowly,
Speaker 1: his belly dragging on the ground, his tail between his legs,
Speaker 1: his eyes still showing white. But he came. He came
Speaker 1: because I was there, and because whatever calculation a dog
Speaker 1: makes about safety versus danger, the equation had shifted when
Speaker 1: I showed up. I was his person, where I was
Speaker 1: safety was That's the contract between a human and a dog,
Speaker 1: and Bowie honored it when every other instinct was telling
Speaker 1: him to stay in his hole. He pressed against my
Speaker 1: right side, and now I had a dog on each leg,
Speaker 1: and the three of us started down the slope together,
Speaker 1: three heart beats, six legs, one flashlight, and the mountain
Speaker 1: all around us, dark and silent and full of things
Speaker 1: I'd spent three years trying to understand, and had never
Speaker 1: felt further from understanding than I did at that moment.
Speaker 1: The descent was the longest walk of my life. It
Speaker 1: took about twenty minutes to cover the ground between the
Speaker 1: blowdown and the meadow, and Every second of those twenty
Speaker 1: minutes was a sustained exercise in controlled panic. The flashlight
Speaker 1: beam swung ahead of us, catching tree trunks and leaf litter,
Speaker 1: and the occasional reflection of moisture on rock. My left
Speaker 1: hand held Ruby's collar, my right held the mag light.
Speaker 1: Bowie walked free at my right hip, close enough that
Speaker 1: his shoulder bumped my leg. With every stride. The dog
Speaker 1: stayed tight, one on each side, matching my pace exactly,
Speaker 1: not pulling ahead, not lagging behind. They were a unit.
Speaker 1: I was the center of it, and somewhere behind us
Speaker 1: at a distance I couldn't measure, and in a number
Speaker 1: I couldn't count. Things were following. I could hear them.
Speaker 1: Not footsteps, not the sharp, identifiable sound of feet on
Speaker 1: ground that I'd heard from the paralleling creature earlier. This
Speaker 1: was subtler, a general background of displacement, the soft, barely
Speaker 1: there sound of weight shifting through leaves, of bodies, passing
Speaker 1: between trees, of space being occupied and released as large
Speaker 1: things moved through the forest at a pace that matched hours.
Speaker 1: It was behind us and slightly to both sides, the
Speaker 1: sound envelope of a group maintaining formation around a moving target, following,
Speaker 1: maintaining distance, escorting. I don't know which word is correct.
Speaker 1: Following implies pursuit, Escorting implies permission. What was happening felt
Speaker 1: like both and neither, like being walked to the door
Speaker 1: of a building by security guards who haven't decided yet
Speaker 1: whether you're a guest or an intruder. I didn't look back,
Speaker 1: I didn't shine the light behind me. I pointed the
Speaker 1: beam forward and walked one foot in front of the other,
Speaker 1: the oldest form of locomotion, the only thing that was
Speaker 1: going to get us home. About ten minutes into the descent,
Speaker 1: roughly halfway between the blowdown and the meadow, something happened
Speaker 1: that I need to describe carefully, because it's the detail
Speaker 1: that convinced me, more than anything else that night, that
Speaker 1: what was in the forest was operating with intention. Ruby stopped,
Speaker 1: not because she was tired, not because she was scared.
Speaker 1: She stopped, turned ninety degrees to face east, and barked
Speaker 1: one sharp, loud bark, aimed directly into the darkness. Not
Speaker 1: her fear bark, her alert bark, the one she used
Speaker 1: when someone pulled into the driveway, the one that meant
Speaker 1: I see you. Then she turned back toward me and
Speaker 1: kept walking, one bark directed at a specific point in
Speaker 1: the forest, acknowledging something she could see or sense that
Speaker 1: I couldn't, and then moving on as if she'd said
Speaker 1: what she needed to say and the response, whatever it was,
Speaker 1: had satisfied her. I don't know what she saw, I
Speaker 1: don't know what she sensed. But from that moment forward,
Speaker 1: the displacement sound behind us stopped. The forest went quiet
Speaker 1: in a different way, not the pressurized silence of proximity,
Speaker 1: the normal quiet of a fall evening, insects, the distant
Speaker 1: murmur of Bishop Creek, a breeze moving through bare branches,
Speaker 1: the mountain exhaling. We broke through the tree line and
Speaker 1: into the meadow at seven forty five. The cabin was ahead,
Speaker 1: porch light on, the yellow glow in the window, the
Speaker 1: green roof barely visible against the overcast sky. I didn't
Speaker 1: jog across the meadow. I ran. The dogs ran with me,
Speaker 1: all three of us, flat out, sprinting across the open grass,
Speaker 1: like something was chasing us. Nothing was, but my body
Speaker 1: had been holding it together for forty five minutes through
Speaker 1: pure willpower, and the willpower gave out the moment I
Speaker 1: saw the cabin. The adrenaline broke. The dam broke. I ran.
Speaker 1: I hit the porch steps, fumbled with the keys, dropped them,
Speaker 1: picked them up with fingers that felt like they belonged
Speaker 1: to someone else. Unlocked the door, held it open. Bowie
Speaker 1: went through first, his nails clicking on the hardwood floor
Speaker 1: as he headed straight for his blanket by the hearth,
Speaker 1: and collapsed onto it with his whole body. Ruby second,
Speaker 1: pressing low through the doorway, her belly brushing the threshold,
Speaker 1: her tail still tucked. I went last, closed the door,
Speaker 1: locked it, leaned against it, stood there with my forehead
Speaker 1: against the wood and my eyes closed and my heart
Speaker 1: pounding and my legs threatening to give way. The cabin
Speaker 1: was dark except for the porch light bleeding through the
Speaker 1: front window. It smelled like firewood and the faint lavender
Speaker 1: from Rebus sachet, and the particular scent of a closed
Speaker 1: space that's been holding warmth while you were gone. It
Speaker 1: smelled like home, like safety, like the inside of something
Speaker 1: the outside couldn't reach. The dogs came to me, both
Speaker 1: of them. They didn't go to their blankets, or their
Speaker 1: water bowls, or their spots or anywhere else in the cabin.
Speaker 1: They pressed against my body from both sides, and I
Speaker 1: slid down the wall and sat on the floor with
Speaker 1: my back against the door and my knees pulled up
Speaker 1: to my chest, and my dogs wedged into the space
Speaker 1: between my arms and my ribs. We sat there on
Speaker 1: the floor in the dark hallway, three animals huddled together,
Speaker 1: breathing hard, shaking alive. I don't know how long we
Speaker 1: stayed like that, twenty minutes, maybe thirty, long enough for
Speaker 1: my heart rate to come down to something approaching normal,
Speaker 1: long enough for the shaking to subside in my hands,
Speaker 1: and then my legs, and then my core, like a
Speaker 1: wave receding from a beach, one layer at a time,
Speaker 1: long enough for Bowie to stop panting and rest his
Speaker 1: chin on my thigh, long enough for Ruby to stop
Speaker 1: trembling and start licking my wrist, which was her version
Speaker 1: of saying it's over, long enough for the cabin to
Speaker 1: stop feeling like a shelter and start feeling like a
Speaker 1: home again. I didn't build a fire, I didn't make coffee,
Speaker 1: I didn't eat. I just sat there with my dogs
Speaker 1: and let the night settle around us, and let the
Speaker 1: adrenaline drain and let the silence of the cabin, the
Speaker 1: good silence, the warm silence, the silence that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: something's watching, wrap around me like one of Reba's quilts.
Speaker 1: Around nine o'clock, I got up. My hip was stiff
Speaker 1: from the fall on the slope and my hands were
Speaker 1: raw from gripping saplings during the climb. I washed up
Speaker 1: at the kitchen sink, drank a glass of water, and
Speaker 1: sat on the couch. Both dogs immediately joined me, one
Speaker 1: on each side, and we sat there while I replayed
Speaker 1: the entire sea quince, the chase, the parallel tracker, the
Speaker 1: branch snapping, Bowie under the log, Ruby at the stick structures,
Speaker 1: the circling, the closing, the opening, the descent, Ruby's single
Speaker 1: bark into the darkness. And I kept coming back to
Speaker 1: two things. The chase. What had the dogs been pursuing.
Speaker 1: They'd bolted toward the tree line after freezing midstride in
Speaker 1: the meadow, which meant they detected something seen it, smelled
Speaker 1: it heard it. Something had been at the edge of
Speaker 1: the forest visible from the meadow, close enough to trigger
Speaker 1: a full chase response in two dogs with very different temperaments.
Speaker 1: Bowie was cautious. He didn't chase blindly, he assessed, but
Speaker 1: whatever was at that tree line had bypassed his caution
Speaker 1: and activated something deeper, something pre rational, the prey drive
Speaker 1: that all dogs carry, regardless of their training or experience.
Speaker 1: He chased it the way he chased a rabbit or
Speaker 1: a squirrel, without calculation, without his usual threat assessment, which
Speaker 1: meant either the thing at the tree line was something
Speaker 1: Bowie didn't recognize as dangerous, or it was something that
Speaker 1: triggered a different response entirely, not prey drive, but something
Speaker 1: adjacent to it, territorial response, maybe the instinct to confront
Speaker 1: an intruder on home ground, regardless of size. Either way,
Speaker 1: they'd chased something up the slope and into the forest,
Speaker 1: and somewhere between the tree line and the blowdown, the
Speaker 1: pursuit had turned. The dogs went from chasing to being chased,
Speaker 1: or more accurately, from chasing to being surrounded. The transition
Speaker 1: from predator to prey had happened in the space of
Speaker 1: a few hundred yards, and it had happened because whatever
Speaker 1: they were pursuing led them into a situation where the
Speaker 1: numbers and the terrain favored the other side. That felt deliberate,
Speaker 1: that felt like a lure, the same way Wade's voice
Speaker 1: in the ravine had been a lure, the same way
Speaker 1: the garden had been a lure drawn the creature closer
Speaker 1: to the cabin. Something had shown itself at the tree line,
Speaker 1: specifically to provoke a chase, and the chase had drawn
Speaker 1: my dogs into an area controlled by multiple creatures, who
Speaker 1: then surrounded them. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. The stick structures. Ruby
Speaker 1: hadn't been at the blowdown with Bowie. She'd continued up
Speaker 1: slope alone and stopped at the structures. She'd been standing
Speaker 1: in front of them when I found her staring, frozen, trembling,
Speaker 1: not fleeing, not hiding, the way Bowie had, standing her
Speaker 1: ground in front of something that terrified her. I've thought
Speaker 1: about this a lot. Ruby was younger than Bowie, more instinctual,
Speaker 1: less experienced. Her response to the structures wasn't the response
Speaker 1: of a dog confronting a predator. It was the response
Speaker 1: of a dog encountering something She couldn't process, something outside
Speaker 1: her existing categories of threat and non threat. The structure
Speaker 1: weren't alive, weren't moving, weren't making sound, but they were wrong.
Speaker 1: They were built things in a place where built things
Speaker 1: didn't belong, and Ruby's brain was stuck in a loop
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what category to put them in.
Speaker 1: I think the structures were the destination. I think whatever
Speaker 1: lured the dogs up the slope lured them to that
Speaker 1: specific spot. And I think Ruby, because she was faster
Speaker 1: and bolder than an aging bowie, got there first and
Speaker 1: found something that her instincts told her was significant, but
Speaker 1: that her experience gave her no framework to understand. Whether
Speaker 1: the intent was to show her those structures or to
Speaker 1: show me by bringing me to where she was, I
Speaker 1: can't say. But the net effect was that I, a human,
Speaker 1: was led by my dog's distress into an area of
Speaker 1: the forest i'd never visited where stick structures had been
Speaker 1: built by something with hands and intention, and where three
Speaker 1: or more creatures then circled us in the dark before
Speaker 1: allowing us to leave. If that was a coincidence, it
Speaker 1: was a daggeringly complex one. I didn't go back to
Speaker 1: that spot, not in October, not in November, not that winter.
Speaker 1: The memory of the circling, the branch snaps closing in
Speaker 1: from three sides, the feeling of being inside a net
Speaker 1: that was tightening around my dogs and me was too
Speaker 1: fresh and too heavy to revisit. I documented everything in
Speaker 1: the notebook that night, the location as best I could
Speaker 1: estimate from the terrain features and the compass bearing i'd
Speaker 1: taken at the blowdown. The stick structures described in detail,
Speaker 1: the braided saplings with their bark strip knots, the teepee,
Speaker 1: the platform, the bent sapling, the sound patterns of the circling,
Speaker 1: the three point formation, the simultaneous cessation the open circle,
Speaker 1: Ruby's single bark into the darkness and the silence that
Speaker 1: followed it, the displacement sounds during the descent, the duration
Speaker 1: roughly forty five minutes from porch to porch, all of it.
Speaker 1: Five pages, both sides, in handwriting that started out legible
Speaker 1: and deteriorated as my hands cramped and the emotional weight
Speaker 1: of what I was recording pressed down harder with each line.
Speaker 1: Then I closed the notebook and put it in the
Speaker 1: drawer and left it there for a long time. I
Speaker 1: didn't read those pages again for months, not because the
Speaker 1: details had faded. They hadn't. They were sharper in my
Speaker 1: memory than almost any other encounter preserved by the adrenaline
Speaker 1: and the fear and the terrible corrosive guilt of having
Speaker 1: let my dogs run into those woods. I didn't read
Speaker 1: them because reading them meant reliving them, and reliving them
Speaker 1: meant feeling all over again, the moment when I stood
Speaker 1: on the porch and watched Bowie and Ruby bolt toward
Speaker 1: the tree line and couldn't stop them, the moment when
Speaker 1: I'd been one second too late with the command that
Speaker 1: would have held them one second. That's what guilt does.
Speaker 1: It finds the margin, the gap between what you did
Speaker 1: and what you should have done, and it lives there
Speaker 1: and it doesn't leave, not when the dogs recover, not
Speaker 1: when the routine normalizes, not when the trees are just
Speaker 1: trees again, and the meadow is just a meadow, and
Speaker 1: the dust patrol ends peacefully at the tree line every evening.
Speaker 1: For weeks and months and years afterward, the guilt stays
Speaker 1: because you know what's up there, and you know what
Speaker 1: could have happened, and you know that the only reason
Speaker 1: it didn't happen is that something in the forest, something
Speaker 1: with the power to do whatever it wanted, chose restraint.
Speaker 1: That's a debt you can't repay. You can only acknowledge
Speaker 1: it and carry it. Bowie and Ruby recovered faster than
Speaker 1: I did. By the next morning, they were on the
Speaker 1: porch doing their usual routine. Bowie was stiff, probably from
Speaker 1: being wedged under that log for however long he'd been there,
Speaker 1: and he moved gingerly on the porch steps for the
Speaker 1: first day or two, favoring his left hip the way
Speaker 1: older dogs do when they've slept in a bad position.
Speaker 1: But he ate his breakfast and drank his water and
Speaker 1: lay in his patch of sun, and by afternoon he
Speaker 1: was doing a slow version of his meadow loop, with
Speaker 1: Ruby trotting beside him. She was subdued for about two days,
Speaker 1: quieter than usual, staying closer to me than normal, shadowing
Speaker 1: my movements around the cabin and the workshop the way
Speaker 1: she'd done during her first week on the property. She'd
Speaker 1: press her nose against my hand every time I sat down,
Speaker 1: as if confirming I was still there. By the third day,
Speaker 1: she was back to herself, chasing squirrels, harassing the ground hog,
Speaker 1: splashing in Bishop Creek. Dogs are resilient in a way
Speaker 1: that humans aren't. They process fear through their bodies, they
Speaker 1: shake it off, They run it out, They sleep it away.
Speaker 1: Whatever nightmare they'd experienced on that slope, their nervous systems
Speaker 1: had metabolized it in forty eight hours. Mine was still
Speaker 1: processing it weeks later, but the dust patrol changed. They
Speaker 1: still did it every evening. The routine was too ingrained
Speaker 1: to abandon. But they stopped at the tree line, now,
Speaker 1: both of them. They'd reach the edge of the meadow
Speaker 1: where the grass met the forest, the boundary that Bowie
Speaker 1: had been observing since his first summer and that Ruby
Speaker 1: had learned in her first week, and they'd stand there,
Speaker 1: side by side, shoulders touching, both facing the trees. They'd
Speaker 1: hold that position for thirty seconds or a minute, sometimes longer,
Speaker 1: not barking, not growling, not showing any of the overt
Speaker 1: signs of stress I'd seen during the encounter, just standing
Speaker 1: looking the way you'd look at the door of a
Speaker 1: room you used to enter freely and have decided never
Speaker 1: to enter again. Then they'd turn around and come back
Speaker 1: every evening without exception. The tree line had become a wall,
Speaker 1: and both dogs, independently but unanimously, had decided that the
Speaker 1: wall was not to be crossed, not in daylight, not
Speaker 1: in dusk, not for a squirrel or a groundhog or
Speaker 1: the most compelling scent trail in the world. The boundary
Speaker 1: that had been observed casually for years was now at
Speaker 1: absolute inviolable. I respected it. I'd always respected Bowie's boundaries
Speaker 1: because his instincts had been ahead of mine from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Now Ruby had the same boundaries, learn not from me
Speaker 1: or from Bowie, but from direct experience from the night
Speaker 1: she'd chased something into the woods and found herself standing
Speaker 1: in front of structures that shouldn't exist, surrounded by things
Speaker 1: that closed a circle around her in the dark. They knew,
Speaker 1: both of them. In whatever language dogs used to encode
Speaker 1: experience into behavior, they knew what was up there, and
Speaker 1: they knew it wasn't safe, and they'd adjusted their lives accordingly,
Speaker 1: the way all creatures adjust when they learned the true
Speaker 1: boundaries of their territory. I wish I'd been as smart
Speaker 1: as my dog's from the start. It would have saved
Speaker 1: me a lot of sleepless nights. The one thing I
Speaker 1: couldn't explain and still can't, is Ruby's bark. That single
Speaker 1: directed bark into the darkness during our descent. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a fear response. It wasn't a challenge, it was acknowledgment.
Speaker 1: I've watched Ruby interact with humans, with other dogs, with
Speaker 1: wildlife for years now. I know her vocalizations the way
Speaker 1: a parent knows their child's cries. I can tell the
Speaker 1: difference between her alert bark, her play bark, her frustration bark,
Speaker 1: her greeting bark, and her fear bark. They're all different
Speaker 1: in pitch, cadence, and intensity, and after living with her
Speaker 1: through hundreds of each I can identify them without looking.
Speaker 1: That bark in the forest was the greeting bark, the
Speaker 1: one she uses when she sees someone she's met before,
Speaker 1: not a stranger, not a threat, a known entity, someone
Speaker 1: who's been to the property, who's come up the driveway,
Speaker 1: who has a sense she's cataloged and filed under familiar
Speaker 1: as if in that moment in the dark forest, surrounded
Speaker 1: by things that had just circled us and terrified both
Speaker 1: dogs to their breaking points, she identified something specific and
Speaker 1: responded to it the way she'd respond to a neighbor
Speaker 1: coming up the dry I don't know what to do
Speaker 1: with that. I don't know what it means that my
Speaker 1: dog barked at something in the woods the way she'd
Speaker 1: bark at the ups driver. I don't know what it
Speaker 1: implies about the relationship between the creatures on this mountain
Speaker 1: and the animals that share their territory. But I know
Speaker 1: what I heard, and I know that after she barked,
Speaker 1: the following stopped, as if the bark was a password
Speaker 1: or a farewell or something in between. I'll stop here.
Speaker 1: The next story is about the woman across the creek,
Speaker 1: a neighbor I didn't know existed until she showed up
Speaker 1: at my property in the spring of twenty eighteen and
Speaker 1: told me things about this mountain that I wasn't ready
Speaker 1: to hear. Things that connected to Earle, things that connected
Speaker 1: to Riba, and things that explained why, despite everything that
Speaker 1: had happened, the creatures on the ridge had never once
Speaker 1: tried to hurt me. That's story seven, and it changes everything. Garrett.
Speaker 1: I've been doing this for a long time, close to
Speaker 1: four decades of collecting accounts, interviewing witnesses, and trying to
Speaker 1: understand what's happening in the forests of this continent. And
Speaker 1: the accounts that get to me, the ones I carry
Speaker 1: home and think about for days, are always the ones
Speaker 1: involving animals, not because animals are more important than people,
Speaker 1: but because animals can't rationalize. They can't talk themselves out
Speaker 1: of what they're experiencing. They can't construct a narrative that
Speaker 1: makes the fear go away. When a dog is terrified,
Speaker 1: it's terrified. There's no spin, no interpretation, no filter between
Speaker 1: the stimulus and the response. Bowie hiding under a log,
Speaker 1: Ruby frozen in front of stick structures. She couldn't categorize
Speaker 1: both dogs refusing to cross the tree line during their
Speaker 1: evening patrol. From that night forward, those are data points, raw, unprocessed,
Speaker 1: uncontaminated by human bias or expectation, and they tell us
Speaker 1: something important about what's out there. Whatever it is, it's
Speaker 1: real enough and present enough to permit alter the behavior
Speaker 1: of two dogs who lived on that property every day.
Speaker 1: The circling is the detail that's going to stay with me.
Speaker 1: Three or more creatures closing a perimeter around Garrett and
Speaker 1: his dogs in a coordinated formation, using branch snaps as
Speaker 1: communication or positioning signals, and then opening the circle to
Speaker 1: allow passage. That's pack behavior, that's coordinated group tactics, and
Speaker 1: the opening the deliberate release suggests something beyond simple territorial defense.
Speaker 1: A territorial animal doesn't close a circle and then open it.
Speaker 1: It closes the circle and escalates. What Garrett described is restraint, calculated,
Speaker 1: intentional restraint from creatures that had every advantage and chose
Speaker 1: not to use it. Next time. Story seven, the woman
Speaker 1: across the creek. Until then, stay safe, stay curious, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you next time. Di to