Speaker 1: I've never told this story to anyone. Government men said
they'd place me in a military prison and seize all
my family's property. If I did not wanting to see
my family lose the homestead, I've kept my mouth shut. However,
my doctor recently gave me a pretty sad outlook. Seems
I only have a short time here left on earth.
The family no longer has any interest in the home place,
so I figured it was time. I want to get
this story out for all the world to hear. I
was born in southeast Kentucky in nineteen sixty four to
a newly married young couple. I actually think they married
because Mama got pregnant with me. Not long after that,
my father was drafted and sent off to Vietnam. Mama
and me stayed with papau down at the head of
a holler. Mama passed away while I was still ins
so the arrangement worked out fine with Paul. Paul having
a woman around to take over Malma's housework and cooking
were just the ticket. My days were spent playing with
my cousin Scott, who everyone calls Scooter. My father was
the youngest of seven brothers, and Scooter's Daddy was the oldest,
even so Scooter was a month younger than me. Being
so close in age made us naturally close in all things.
The years passed in a hazy daydream of woods and
streams and rocky hillsides to explore and conquer without a
care in the world. And then, one hot July day,
the year Scooter and I were set to start school,
a couple of soldiers showed up at Paupaul's door in
their dress uniforms. I thought it was my dad. He'd
been gone since before my memories were formed, so I
couldn't have known that these men were not my father,
but the bearers of bad news that my father wasn't
ever coming home. We didn't even get to bury his body,
just an empty pine box meant to represent him. I
guess it was fitting. He'd been absent from my world
and life, and now he was absent in death as well.
School started and it wasn't easy for me. I mourned
never having known my dad more than I mourned his death,
but Scooter was there for me and helped me get
through it. Now I was finally beginning to adjust and
move forward when one day, as we were getting off
the bus. Papa was waiting for us at the stop.
This was something he never did now. I could tell
by the look on his face that he was worried. Boy,
I got some bad news for you, he said, looking
right at me. Your mama has run off. Apparently she'd
gotten daddy's insurance check, packed her suitcase, and drove off
in the old truck. I never saw her again. To
this day, I don't know if she was alive or dead.
I can't even remember what she or Daddy either one
looked like. I guess that was the best thing that
could have happened to me. There's no telling what my
life would have been like with her. Pap Paul could
have sent me to an orphanage, but he didn't. Instead,
Scooter's mom and dad took me and raised me as
their own. I quit calling them Uncle Ruths Shaw and
Aunt Annie, and I started calling them mom and Dad.
They were my parents, and they never treated me as
anything less than a son. Life was tough in those years,
and Dad worked hard, driving a coal truck and sometimes
lumber rigs, but he didn't make much money. Scooter and
me rarely got new clothes. We tended to wear our
uncle's old clothes that were stored away at Pappau's. Our
genes were generally full of holes, almost never the right length,
and always out of fashion. We took some ribbing for that,
but a few bloody noses and black eyes soon taught
the bullies that we were nothing they wanted to mess with.
The next year was the first time that I remember
Dad closing up all the windows and setting bars to
hold them in place. For the next month and a half,
we were not allowed to leave the yard. We had
to use the chamber pot or bucket after dark instead
of going to the outhouse. There was a well at
the edge of the porch, but once everything fell, neither Scooter,
me nor our sisters were ever allowed to be out there.
If we heard the coyotes howling. Even Mom wouldn't go outside,
and Dad brought all the livestock into the lower pasture
next to the house and moved all the chickens to
the coop closest to the house as well. Six weeks
or so later, about the time it got to be Halloween,
the coyotes would quit howling and things would go back
to normal. This was the routine every year. Right after
schools started, Dad would spend a week locking down the
house and moving livestock. All the neighbors did the same,
all because of a pack of coyotes moving through the area.
We would occasionally lose head of livestock or a dog
wouldn't come home. There always seemed to be a tree
limb that fell on the chicken coop that time of year,
with a few hens coming up missing. One early mid
July morning, the year I turned twelve, our oldest sister
Ella came tearing down the road in her ragged old
truck as hard as she could run it. She'd gotten
married the year before, and she and her new husband
lived in a trailer across the haller. She pulled into
the yard and Dad ran out to the truck. Minutes later,
she was headed back down the road and Dad was
coming back up to the porch where me and Scooter
were standing. Back then, Papaul was the only one in
the holler with the phone, so this was the only
means of communication. We had. Boys, get you guns and
meet me at the truck. He told us we'd both
been giving Stevens four tens for our tenth birthdays. It
must have cost a fortune. To get us both guns,
and our birthdays being only a month apart. I can't
imagine how much Mom and Dad did without to make
that happen, but it's a tradition in our family, and
Dad was never one to break with tradition. We listened
as Dad explained to Mom that Ella's husband Bo had
gone squirrel hunting last night and he didn't come home.
It wasn't squirrel season, but back then, hunting seasons were
easy to overlook when one had an empty stomach. Ella
couldn't come to the house last night because her truck
had no headlights and she didn't dare walk it. She
just sat and cried all night. We got our guns
and we headed to Paul Paul's. When we arrived, our
uncles were all there waiting for us, along with as
many of our cousins who still lived in the air
and were old enough to handle guns. All told, there
were probably thirty of us. Everyone was carrying shotguns and
had pistols strapped to their hips. Papa A walked over
to Scooter and me and handed us five forty five
long coat cartridges to use instead of shotgun shells. We
all knew both secret squirrel spot was at the top
of the ridge where the beech nut and red oaks
grew near the big rocks. He was careless to leave
all his cigarette butts and spent shotgun shells laying around
when he was done for the day. He was the
only one in the family who owned a twenty gage.
My dad called it a lady's gun, since there wasn't
a tree or rocking those hills that we didn't know.
Wasn't long before we discovered his spot and started hunting
it as well. Of course, we were all smart enough
to pick up our shells and not leave signs of
anyone having been there. We marched up the mountain like
a small army in Sir of Bow. Thirty minutes later
we were standing in the middle of the rocks. In
a few minutes after that, cousin Leroy found Bow's gun.
The barrels bent all the way back until it was
touching the other end. Then Uncle Barry turned to his
brothers and he urgently ordered them to get the boys
off the mountain. Now he'd found a boot. It was
Bo's boot, and Bo's bloody foot was still in it.
I was still trying to imagine how Bow's foot could
still have been in the boot when I heard the
coyotes howling all around us. They were so loud, but
we couldn't see him. Suddenly we were headed back down
the mountain, but my mind was still on the boot.
Had something biting his leg into had it been twisted off?
How did Bow lose his foot? We got back to
Paul Paul's and someone called the state troopers. They showed
up with bloodhounds and a game warden. Dad and his brothers,
along with some of the other cousins, took the officers
up to the spot where they found the boot. The
troopers turned loose to hounds, but they started whining and
they refused to follow the trail. They ran back down
to the cruisers and sat and waited to be let
back inside. They all came back to Paupov's house, where
the game warden began preaching to all of us about
hunting out of season. He claimed it was a bear
that killed Bow and drug him off. Dad, clearly upset
by the game warden's words, walked him back out to
his car. We could all clearly hear him tell the
game warden that should he ever speak to his family,
that way again, he would be wishing that it was
a bear that had hold of him. He also told
him not to ever come on the property or speak
to his family again, or it would not end well
for him. There might not even be a boot left
of view to find. Dad said, me and my brothers
drag you up on that ridge. Our family wasn't known
for being bad or violent, but we were tough and
we knew what it took to survive. Dad spent that
night sitting on the front porch with a shotgun. There
weren't many deer in that part of Kentucky back then,
so no one felt the need on a rifle. A
shotgun was all we had. The next day, all the
uncles were busy getting the livestock rounded up and closing
up the house. We even parked the tractor against the
cellar door. Once we secured our house, they went to
Papas's to do the same. Then they went to the
next to ken down the road, and so on and
so on. The entire community batten down in just two days.
That year, we buried Bow's foot next to my father's
pine box. Ellen moved in with Paupaul, and she never
once went back to her trailer, not even for her clothes.
She just started wearing Mamaw's clothes. That year, we lost
some cattle we never found them alive or dead, and
our neighbors and cousins lost animals as well. Uncle Barry's
big german shepherd, Goliath, was found dead hanging about twenty
feet up in a tree behind his barn. He was
missing his legs and his head was twisted completely around,
with the spine broken in half. The poor dog's head
was just hanging from the torso by its skin. At night,
our house was pelted with rocks and sticks that kept
us awake in our beds. Dad was so upset that
the coodes had come over a month early that year
and that he had not been prepared for him. Kept
asking himself what signs he had missed. The next year,
he was ready early, but the codies came back at
their normal time. There seemed to be more of them though.
That was when he finally told me in scooter the truth.
It wasn't coyotes we'd been protecting ourselves from. It was well,
I had no idea what a booger was, so Dad
tried its best to explain to us that boogers were
part man and part beast. Every year since our ancestors
came to the valley, the biggers would come through and
kill either livestock or people. Our forefathers were some of
the first settlers to venture through the Cumberland Gap, and
no booger was going to run us off. It was
their house that we had heard at night when the
windows were boarded up. They were the ones who threw
the rocks and sticks at the house. Dad warned us
that they were always watching us and would grab anyone
who wandered off alone or got too close to the woods.
They were the reason we used the chamber pot at
night and never ventured out on the porch for water
after dark. We had a lot of calves born that year,
more than we'd ever had before or since. Dad herded
them into the barn at night with the heifers and
barricaded them them in. One night, we awoke to what
sounded like a train running through the building full of
dry two by fours. The next morning we discovered the
barn doors completely ripped off of the building. Five of
the calves were missing, and one of the heifers lay
dead in the barn. Her intestines were completely gone. The
other cattle were huddled up next to the house or
down at Paul Pau's. That was a rough year. We
lost several more head of cattle before the boogers moved on.
One of Paul Paul's bulls was killed. Its head had
been torn off its body and dropped over one hundred
yards away, right in the middle of the road. It
was a devastating loss, and people brought heifers from all
over to breed with his bull, trading hogs, goats, sheep, chickens,
tools and guns for the right. One time, someone even
traded him five pheasants, which he loved in a big, old, mean,
loud peacock. Over the next few years they came back,
but they were never as mean as they'd been from
nineteen seventy six to seventy eight. Eventually, Scooter and me
graduated school and we went straight to the recruiter's office.
We planned to always be together and to have each
other's back, but somehow we ended up in two different
branches of the service. Scooter ended up in Special Forces
and I became a sniper, although I never had to
use the skill in battle. Man was I good at it. Meanwhile,
Scooter became a regular badass. He got to where he
could creep up on anybody and put them in a
hole that Hulk Hogan couldn't escape. But until then he'd
never bested me at wrestling, and after he honed his skills,
I'd just lie down to save energy and give up. Well.
During our six to eight years of military service, both
Scooter and I sent our money home. We sent he
signed our checks and sent them to Dad. The army
fed us and clothed this and put a roof over
our heads, so we didn't need it for that. We'd
never had spending money growing up, so we wouldn't have
known what to do with it anyway, And unbeknownst to us,
Dad was putting all that money into bank accounts for us.
Scooter was discharged in nineteen eighty nine. He'd fallen in
love while on leave, and he married a woman named Susan.
He brought her back to our little valley to settle,
about five miles from Dad and Paul. Paul's and I
stayed in for a couple more years until I was
involved in an attack during the first weeks of desert
storm and was sent home on a medical I ride
back in Kentucky in October of that year. The boy
was excited when Dad showed me my deposit book. I
had nearly two hundred thousand dollars. I was rich, and
by the end of the week, I'd purchase to brand
new F two fifty and a Yamaha three point fifty
Big Bear. To my surprise, Scooter had the same quad.
We decided right away that we'd hit the deer woods
on opening day back at the family farm. We still
had our stands there from when we were in high school,
and the boogers would have been gone for over a month
by then. That Saturday, two weeks before Thanksgiving felt like
it would never arrive. I had purchased a Browning three
to eight and picked up an Army surplus sniper scope
for it. I must have looked over one hundred of
them before I found one that I liked, and I
had it sighted in within five shots, and I was
ready to go. The day finally arrived and I picked
up Scooter at four thirty am. We hit our quads
in the middle of a big honeysuckle thicket and we're
slipping up the mountain before five, and by five point
fifteen we were seated in our stands. We always set
our stands within sight of each other. He liked a tall, straight,
white oak on the top of the ridge, and I
much preferred an aar looking twisted old tree on the
flat about one hundred and fifty to two hundred yards away.
The morning was so quiet we could hear a nut
drop from a tree one hundred yards away. Nothing was
moving as we waited for the sun to rise. Sometime
between six thirty and seven, the calm was shattered all
at once as a young buck barreled down the trail
right at me at breakneck speed. It ran past my
tree stand without slowing down. Just as night was beginning
to fade in today, I glanced over at a scooter
and saw a couple of doughs moving toward him. They
were acting nervous, and they looked as though they'd been
running for quite a while. They kept looking behind them
as if they were being chased. So I followed their
line of sight down to the flat, where I could
see movement in the shadows of the woods. I couldn't
see him clearly, but I knew it was a troop
of boogers and we were in the middle of their hunt.
I turned to yell to Scooter, let's get out of here.
But before I could get the words out, he shot
and I saw a big dough fall to the ground.
He hadn't even moved yet when I saw something huge
moving in on him from his blind side. This thing
was tall enough to reach up and pull Scooter out
of the stand. That stand was fifteen feet off the ground.
There was no time to yell. I simply pulled the
browning up, put my crosshairs on the creature's neck where
the base of the skulls should be, but there was
no neck. I prided myself on always taking neck shots
and training, I knew that shot would bring down anything
and everything without so much as a twitch. I had
to look for the next kill shot at the temple
right behind the eye. I knew if I went center masts,
I might not take out enough vital organs to keep
the beasts from reaching Scooter before dying. With the mechanical
precision that comes from years of training, I pulled the
trigger and watched as the booger crumbled into a lifeless heat.
Scooter spun around just in time to see the creature
hit the ground. He was trying to get his safety
belt undone so he could get down from the stand.
I never used one because I had a lot of
limbs to bounce off between me and the ground. The
hills and hollers came to life with howls unlike anything
I could ever have imagined. Rocks and sticks were thrown
at us from every direction, and more roarers, even deeper
and louder, answered the first howls. They were moving in fast,
and Scooter hit the ground and ran toward the quads.
All was seconds behind, having jumped down from the tree.
We climbed onto the quads and I saw all two
huge buggers coming at us from just two or three
hundred yards down the trail that we'd come up on.
We had a millisecond to decide stay or fight or run.
I don't think Scooter had any faith in the damage
his little two forty three would do to one of
those things. He started his bike and I followed suit,
and we took off, flying down the trail toward Uncle Berry's.
There was no way that we'd be able to make
it to Paul, Paul's or Dad's without going through the buggers,
and I never dreamed those bikes would come off that
mountain so fast. All the while we could hear what
sounded like a herd of elephants running through the woods
all around us. It was balls to the wall when
we hit the edge of the woods. Richard Petty and A. J. Foyt,
running shine and being chased by revenuers would have had
a hard time catching up with us. Our lives dependent
on how fast we could make those bikes go. Uncle
Barry was already at the fence with his rifle in hand.
He raised his rifle and he shot past us. As
we reached him, he yelled getting the house, and I
noticed that his house was all boarded up and his
livestock were in the corral. That's when I realized the
buggers had come late that year and we hadn't known
about it. Both Scooter and I had lost our weapons
on the way out, so Uncle Barry ushered us inside
and armed us with two of his You boys really
stirred up a hornet's nest this time, he said, I've
been hearing them cruiters yelling like a bunch of angry
demons coming from the pits of hell for the past
couple of minutes. We didn't have time to respond. The
house was under attack. The boggers were pounding on the
sides of the house and testing the window coverings in
the back door. Seemed like they were on every side.
Even on the roof. We could hear the helpless cries
of his cows. His big draft horse was in a
fight for his life. The dogs were now silent as
they were either dead or had run off, and our
sense of security was ripped away with the roof. They
were inside now throwing furniture around upstairs. We knew we
were going to have to make a break for it.
Uncle Barry yelled us to get in his truck. Keys
are in the ignition, He said, no, I'll bring up
the rear. We didn't know Uncle Berry was going to
stand his ground and give us a chance to get away.
We heard five shots from a shotgun, choosing that weapon
over his rifle. Being so close to them. Between the
cursed words he was throwing at them, I could tell
when he threw a shotgun aside and switched to his
forty four mag His last words were run, boys, Run.
We knew in our hearts that Uncle Barry was no more.
His old Chevy was well cared for and ran like
a race cars. We tore down the road and out
of a hull. We pushed that truck as hard as
it would run, and all the while fighting back the
tears that stung our eyes. Scooter was driving, and I
took the duty of gunner watching the rear. Didn't seem
like they were chasing us anymore. I couldn't see him
coming down the road anyway. Scooter pointed down the road
and he said, look up ahead, I see Dad coming
down the road at us. We got within one hundred
feet of each other when a big tree came crashing
down on the cab of my dad's truck. We could
only hope that he'd managed to get down in the
seat far enough to survive the hit. We hadn't even
come to a stop when something hit the side of
our truck, sending it rolling off the side of the
road and down into the creek. The truck came to
a stop on its top, and I had no idea
how many times we'd rolled, but everything was thrown about
in the cab. For the first time in my life,
I'd lost my grip on my rifle. I looked over
to see if Scooter was okay, but he wasn't in
the truck. A sudden, violent slam against the undercarriage, which
was now the top, sent blood rushing down over the
side window next to my face, and Scooter's lifeless body
was thrown twenty feet or more to the other side
of the creek. His head unattached, rolled down the creek
bank in front of the truck, and my heart fell
into my stomach and my brother, my best friend, he
was dead. I felt a hand bigger than anything I'd
ever seen, grabbed my leg and pull let it through
the door that had come open in the crash. I
tried to reach over the seat for my uncle's rifle,
but I couldn't get to it before the hand pulled
my leg again, pulling me away from it. I was
being pulled harder and harder as I held on to
anything I could for dear life, and I saw my
life flash before my eyes and seconds and I made
my peace with God. I knew my life was over.
This devil pulled and pulled at my leg again, just
like I'm pulling your leg. This is not a true story.
It's just for entertainment and fun. And this was written
with no disrespect for anyone who has had an encounter
with one of these creatures or hopes to. I simply
wrote it as a story with a hope that some
people will enjoy a little bit of tomfoolery.