Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: If you've been with this series from the beginning through
Speaker 1: all ten parts, I want to thank you. Garrett's story
Speaker 1: has been one of the most extraordinary accounts I've ever
Speaker 1: had the privilege of sharing, and the fact that so
Speaker 1: many of you stayed with it episode after episode means
Speaker 1: more to me than I can say. If you're coming
Speaker 1: in late, i'd strongly encourage you to go back and
Speaker 1: start at part one. This finale draws on every thread
Speaker 1: from every story that came before it, and it won't
Speaker 1: carry its full weight without that foundation. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to recap the full series here. You've either heard it
Speaker 1: or you haven't. What I will say is this, Over
Speaker 1: the course of nine stories, Garrett has taken us from
Speaker 1: the first wood knock on a summer evening in twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen to a night on the ridge in twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: that ended a thirty year friendship's ability to function on
Speaker 1: the same mountain after dark. He's described tracks, sightings, vocal mimicry,
Speaker 1: garden raids, snow circuit its stick structures, a bluff overlooked
Speaker 1: with three creatures on the slope below, two dogs who
Speaker 1: chased something into the forest and came back changed, an
Speaker 1: elderly neighbor who delivered fifty years of documentation from across
Speaker 1: the creek, and an ill advised experiment that proved the
Speaker 1: creatures could coordinate a tactical response faster than two men
Speaker 1: could figure out how to leave. Through all of it,
Speaker 1: one question has hovered over every encounter. Why haven't they
Speaker 1: hurt anybody? In ten years of contact across dozens of incidents,
Speaker 1: The creatures on the Bishop Creek corridor have never once
Speaker 1: harmed Garrett, his dogs, or any human who's lived on
Speaker 1: the corridor in the fifty five years of recorded observation.
Speaker 1: Opel gave him a partial answer, the generational credit, the
Speaker 1: silence agreement, the idea that Earl's decades of quiet restraint
Speaker 1: had purchased a grace period that Garrett inherited. But Garrett
Speaker 1: always felt there was more to it than that. Something
Speaker 1: Earle hadn't said, something Opal either didn't know or chose
Speaker 1: not to share. There was a deeper layer beneath the arrangement,
Speaker 1: and it explained not just the restraint, but the attention.
Speaker 1: Think about the full picture here. The nightly visits, the
Speaker 1: window observations, the garden harvesting, the mimicry tests, the escort behavior.
Speaker 1: All of it pointed to a relationship that went beyond tolerance,
Speaker 1: something closer to investment, as if the creatures weren't just
Speaker 1: allowing Garrett to live on their corridor, but were watching
Speaker 1: him the way you'd watch someone you were deciding about
Speaker 1: evaluating over years. In story ten, Garrett finds out what
Speaker 1: Earl buried, and what he buried changes everything. Here's Garrett
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty twenty one, seven years after
Speaker 1: I'd bought the property and nearly five years after Earl passed,
Speaker 1: I decided to renovate the root seller. Now let me
Speaker 1: set the scene on this, because the cellar matters. It
Speaker 1: was accessed through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor, a
Speaker 1: heavy plank door with a recessed iron ring pull that
Speaker 1: Earl had installed when he built the cabin in seventy one.
Speaker 1: The cellar itself was about eight feet by ten feet,
Speaker 1: dug into the hillside beneath the cabin's foundation with stone
Speaker 1: walls that Earl and Frank had laid by hand. It
Speaker 1: stayed fifty five degrees year round, ideal for storing canned
Speaker 1: goods and root vegetables. RIBA's canning jars were still down there,
Speaker 1: lined up on poplar shelves, some of them dating back
Speaker 1: to twenty twelve. I'd never moved them. They felt like
Speaker 1: they belonged. The renovation was minor. One of the stone
Speaker 1: walls had started to wheep moisture after a wet winter,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to repoint the mortar and add a
Speaker 1: French drain along the base. Standard basement work a day
Speaker 1: of labor two at most, I hauled the canning jars upstairs,
Speaker 1: moved the shelving units out of the way, and started
Speaker 1: chipping out the old mortar on the south wall with
Speaker 1: a cold chisel and a hammer. The stones were filled stone,
Speaker 1: roughly shaped, fitted together with a lime based mortar that
Speaker 1: had held up remarkably well for fifty years. That was
Speaker 1: Frank's work. Earl had told me his brother had helped
Speaker 1: delay the foundation and the cellar walls, and Frank had
Speaker 1: been a stone mason by trade, the kind of craftsman
Speaker 1: who'd been trained by his father and whose work would
Speaker 1: outlast two generations of the men who came after him.
Speaker 1: The weeping was coming from a single point about three
Speaker 1: feet off the floor, where the mortar had cracked and
Speaker 1: the stone behind it had shifted, opening a gap that
Speaker 1: was letting ground water seep through. I worked the chisel
Speaker 1: around the shifted stone, loosening the mortar on all four sides,
Speaker 1: intending to pull the stone out, reset it with fresh mortar,
Speaker 1: and seal the gap. Like I said, standard work. The
Speaker 1: stone came free, easier than I expected, way too easy.
Speaker 1: When I pulled it out and set it on the
Speaker 1: cellar floor, I saw why the stone behind it wasn't there.
Speaker 1: There was a cavity in the wall. And I need
Speaker 1: to be specific about what I mean, because this wasn't
Speaker 1: a natural gap between field stones. It wasn't a pocket
Speaker 1: where the mortar had failed. It wasn't the kind of
Speaker 1: void you sometimes find an old rubble construction where a
Speaker 1: stone cracked and the pieces fell away. This was a space,
Speaker 1: intentional neat about eighteen inches wide, twelve inches tall, and
Speaker 1: maybe ten inches deep. The sides were smooth, the bottom
Speaker 1: was flat. The mortar around the edges was finished the
Speaker 1: way you'd finish a window frame. Someone had removed several
Speaker 1: stones from the interior of the wall and created a compartment,
Speaker 1: then covered it with a single fitted stone on the
Speaker 1: cellar face, a stone that matched every other stone in
Speaker 1: the wall, a stone you'd never pull unless you had
Speaker 1: a reason to open that particular section. Here's what hit me.
Speaker 1: Earle had built a hiding spot inside his own foundation,
Speaker 1: probably during the original construction in seventy one, when the
Speaker 1: cellar walls were going up, and nobody would have questioned
Speaker 1: why one section of interior stone work looked different from
Speaker 1: the rest. He'd planned this before he'd even moved in,
Speaker 1: before the knocking before the garden raids, before any of it,
Speaker 1: he'd built a place to put something that he knew
Speaker 1: even then he was going to need to hide. Inside
Speaker 1: the cavity, Wrapped in a plastic garbage bag that had
Speaker 1: been folded tight and sealed with packing tape, was a bundle.
Speaker 1: I pulled it out, carefully heavy for its size, maybe
Speaker 1: three or four pounds. The plastic was dusty but intact.
Speaker 1: The tape had yellowed with age, but still held Whatever
Speaker 1: was inside had been waiting there for a very long time.
Speaker 1: I brought it upstairs and set it on the kitchen table.
Speaker 1: The cellar was cold, and the plastic felt cold in
Speaker 1: my hands. Condensation was forming on the outside of the bag,
Speaker 1: where two different air temperatures met on the same surface.
Speaker 1: Bowie lifted his head from his blanket and watched me
Speaker 1: with the mild interest of a dog who seen his
Speaker 1: owner bring many strange things into the house and has
Speaker 1: learned not to get ect until one of them turns
Speaker 1: out to be food. Ruby was outside on the porch,
Speaker 1: lying in a bar of afternoon sun that came through
Speaker 1: the railing slats. I cut the tape with a utility
Speaker 1: knife and peeled back the layers of plastic, three layers.
Speaker 1: Earl had triple wrapped whatever was inside, folding each layer
Speaker 1: separately and taping each one three waterproof seals, and those
Speaker 1: seals had kept the contents dry for what I was
Speaker 1: about to learn had been nearly fifty years. Inside were
Speaker 1: three items, a leather bound journal about six by nine inches,
Speaker 1: the cover cracked and worn, a folded piece of paper
Speaker 1: that turned out to be a hand drawn map, and
Speaker 1: a sealed envelope with a single word written on the
Speaker 1: front in Earl's handwriting. Garrett my name on an envelope
Speaker 1: that had been sealed inside a wall that Earl had
Speaker 1: built in nineteen seventy one, in a cabin he'd sold
Speaker 1: to me in twenty fourteen, hidden behind a stone that
Speaker 1: only someone renovating the cellar would ever have reason to move.
Speaker 1: He'd known I'd find it, not when, not under what circumstances.
Speaker 1: But he'd known that a man who made his living
Speaker 1: with his hands, a contractor who'd told Earl on that
Speaker 1: first afternoon that he'd take care of whatever he'd built,
Speaker 1: would eventually open those walls, and he'd left something there
Speaker 1: for me, addressed to me by name. I sat at
Speaker 1: the kitchen table for a long time before I opened anything.
Speaker 1: The afternoon passed, the light shifted, Bowie fell asleep, Ruby
Speaker 1: came inside and lay at my feet, and I just
Speaker 1: sat there, looking at my name in Earl's handwriting, written
Speaker 1: by a hand that had been dead for nearly five years,
Speaker 1: on an envelope that had been waiting inside a stone.
Speaker 1: I opened the envelope, first single page, written in pencil,
Speaker 1: Earl's careful, slanting script. The pencil had been sharp when
Speaker 1: he started, and the letters were precise and uniform, the
Speaker 1: handwriting of a man who'd been taught in a one
Speaker 1: room schoolhouse to form his characters correct and had never
Speaker 1: lost the discipline. No date at the top, no greeting,
Speaker 1: no dear Garrett, just the words beginning at the top
Speaker 1: of the page and running to the bottom in a single,
Speaker 1: unbroken block. He said, if I was reading this, I'd
Speaker 1: probably been on the property long enough to have heard
Speaker 1: the knocking. He hoped I'd been paying attention, because what
Speaker 1: he was about to share only made sense if I
Speaker 1: already knew what lived on the ridge. He said he'd
Speaker 1: wanted to tell me all of this face to face.
Speaker 1: Sitting on the porch looking at the mountain while he
Speaker 1: talked the way two men ought to share something important,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't do it that way. And the reason
Speaker 1: is something I think about all the time. He believed
Speaker 1: they listened. He believed that speaking about them out loud,
Speaker 1: within earshot of the forest, within range of whatever attention
Speaker 1: they maintained on the cabins and the porches and the
Speaker 1: open spaces of the corridor, would violate something he'd spend
Speaker 1: his life honoring, something that didn't have a name, but
Speaker 1: that he felt the weight of every he'd lived on
Speaker 1: that property. Writing it down was different, though, writing it
Speaker 1: down and sealing it in stone. The stone was between
Speaker 1: the words and the air. The forest couldn't hear what
Speaker 1: was buried in a foundation wall, Or at least that's
Speaker 1: what he'd chosen to believe, and by the time he
Speaker 1: was writing the letter, he'd lived with that belief long
Speaker 1: enough that it had become a kind of faith. He
Speaker 1: told me about the journal. It was his. He'd started
Speaker 1: it in nineteen seventy two, the year after he'd moved
Speaker 1: on to the property, and he'd kept it for about
Speaker 1: ten years before the entry slowed and eventually stopped, not
Speaker 1: because the activity stopped. It never stopped because writing about
Speaker 1: it had become redundant. Same cycle every year, the knocking
Speaker 1: returning in spring, the garden visited in summer, the tracks
Speaker 1: thickening and fall, the nightly circuits in winter. After a decade,
Speaker 1: documenting the pattern felt like writing down that the sun rose.
Speaker 1: You know it's going to happen. You don't need a
Speaker 1: ernal to tell you. But the early entries were the
Speaker 1: important ones, the first years, when the fear was still
Speaker 1: sharp and the observations hadn't been dulled by familiarity. Those
Speaker 1: entries contained details he'd never shared with Vernon or Opal
Speaker 1: or Riba or anyone. Details about a specific location on
Speaker 1: the property, a ravine, and what he'd found there. He
Speaker 1: told me about the map. It showed the route from
Speaker 1: the cabin to the ravine, marked with landmarks I'd recognize
Speaker 1: if I walked the property regularly. The ravine was about
Speaker 1: a quarter mile northeast of the cabin, in the national forest,
Speaker 1: off any established trail, in a section of terrain so
Speaker 1: thick with rhododendron and so steep with exposed rock that
Speaker 1: you'd never stumble on it by accident. He'd found it
Speaker 1: in the fall of seventy two, following a track line
Speaker 1: that led from the creek up through the forest and
Speaker 1: dead ended at the mouth of a slot canyon. He
Speaker 1: had it known existed, And then he said the thing
Speaker 1: that stopped my breathing. He said the ravine was where
Speaker 1: they lived, not all the time, not exclusively, but seasonally.
Speaker 1: In the coldest months, when the high ridges were scoured
Speaker 1: by wind and the temperatures dropped below anything a warm
Speaker 1: blooded creature would want to endure on an exposed slope,
Speaker 1: they came down to the ravine. It was protected, sheltered
Speaker 1: on three sides by rock walls south facing which men
Speaker 1: had caught winter sun deep enough that the temperature at
Speaker 1: the bottom stayed above freezing, even when the ridge above
Speaker 1: was locked in ice. Earl had been to the ravine twice,
Speaker 1: once in seventy two when he'd followed the tracks and
Speaker 1: found it by accident, and once in seventy three, when
Speaker 1: he'd gone back on purpose to confirm what he'd seen
Speaker 1: the first time. He never went a third time. What
Speaker 1: he'd seen on that second visit convinced him that going
Speaker 1: back would be a mistake. He described what he'd found
Speaker 1: in the journal. He told me to read it, and
Speaker 1: he told me to make my own decision about whether
Speaker 1: to go. The last line of the letter said this,
Speaker 1: if you go, oh, go and winter, they'll be there
Speaker 1: and they'll know you're coming long before you arrive. Don't
Speaker 1: be afraid of that. They've known about everyone who's walked
Speaker 1: this corridor for the past fifty years. The ones they
Speaker 1: don't want there they've turned away. The ones they've let in,
Speaker 1: they've let in for a reason. If they let you
Speaker 1: reach the ravine, it's because they've decided you belong. I
Speaker 1: set the letter down and opened the journal. The handwriting
Speaker 1: in the journal was different from the letter, Younger Sharper,
Speaker 1: the handwriting of a man in his late thirties who
Speaker 1: pressed the pen hard enough to leave grooves in the paper.
Speaker 1: The journal covered nineteen seventy two through nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: with entries becoming less frequent after seventy five. The early
Speaker 1: entries were detailed, sometimes running two or three pages for
Speaker 1: a single night's observation. The later ones were a sentence
Speaker 1: or two confirmation of patterns that had already been established.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to read you every entry, but I'll
Speaker 1: share the ones that matter. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: big Foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The
Speaker 1: first entry was dated September fourteenth, nineteen seventy two. Earle
Speaker 1: wrote that he'd been hearing the knocking since the previous
Speaker 1: summer and had been trying to identify the source without success.
Speaker 1: He'd walked the ridge on multiple occasions during daylight and
Speaker 1: found nothing, no logging activity, no hunting camps, no other explanation.
Speaker 1: On September fourteenth, he decided to follow the sound at dusk,
Speaker 1: walking northeast from the cabin toward the ridge. He made
Speaker 1: it about two hundred yards past the property line when
Speaker 1: the knocking shifted. Instead of coming from above from the ridge,
Speaker 1: it came from below, from a drainage he hadn't explored.
Speaker 1: He followed the sound downslope through heavy rhododendron into a
Speaker 1: narrow ravine that cut into the mountain side at a
Speaker 1: steep angle. Rock walls maybe thirty feet high on both sides,
Speaker 1: thick moss and leaf litter on the floor, a trickle
Speaker 1: of water running along the bottom, feeding into a drainage
Speaker 1: that eventually reached Bishop Creek. At the mouth of the ravine,
Speaker 1: he found tracks fresh multiple sets different sizes pressed into
Speaker 1: the damp ground along the watercourse, overlapping, headed both in
Speaker 1: and out. He didn't describe the tracks in detail, just
Speaker 1: said they were the same as what he'd been finding
Speaker 1: near the cabin. Big, bare feet with five toes. He
Speaker 1: followed the tracks in for about one hundred yards. The
Speaker 1: walls closed in the rhododendron canopy thickened overhead until the
Speaker 1: twilight was nearly gone. He could hear water dripping from
Speaker 1: the rock walls and the faint gurgling of the stream,
Speaker 1: and there was a smell. He described it as heavy
Speaker 1: and organic, wet animal hide mixed with something sour. The
Speaker 1: deeper he went, the stronger it got. He stopped when
Speaker 1: he found the beds flattened areas in the moss and
Speaker 1: leaf litter, roughly oval about six feet long and three
Speaker 1: feet wide, Three of them spaced about ten feet apart
Speaker 1: along the ravine floor near the base of the south
Speaker 1: facing rock wall, where the afternoon sun would hit during
Speaker 1: the short winter days. The moss in each depression was
Speaker 1: compressed and discolored, worn down to bare dirt in the center,
Speaker 1: with a rim of undisturbed growth around the edges. And
Speaker 1: this is the key detail. These weren't temporary resting spots.
Speaker 1: They were worn, used repeatedly over a long period. Beside
Speaker 1: one of the beds, he found a pile of bones,
Speaker 1: small animal bones, deer, raccoon, possum, gnawed clean, cracked for marrow.
Speaker 1: And here's what got me. They were stacked neatly beside
Speaker 1: the depression, organized the way you'd stack dishes beside a sink,
Speaker 1: not scattered, sorted. Earl didn't go any deeper into the
Speaker 1: ravine that night. He turned around, walked back to the
Speaker 1: cabin and sat on the porch until full dark. He
Speaker 1: wrote that his hands were shaking too badly to hold
Speaker 1: a coffee cup. Riba asked him what was wrong, and
Speaker 1: he told her he'd seen a copperhead on the trail
Speaker 1: and it had spooked him, the first lie of many.
Speaker 1: The second visit was in January of seventy three. Earle
Speaker 1: went back on a cold, clear morning, fresh snow on
Speaker 1: the ground about four inches. He followed his own trail
Speaker 1: from the previous fall and entered the ravine. The beds
Speaker 1: were occupied, not by the creatures themselves. They weren't there,
Speaker 1: but the evidence of recent use was impossible to miss.
Speaker 1: The snow in the beds had been melted by body heat,
Speaker 1: leaving oval patches of bare, warm ground in the otherwise
Speaker 1: white landscape. The moss was damp and pressed flat. Hair
Speaker 1: was caught on the rock walls where something large had
Speaker 1: brushed against the stone, dark brown hair several inches long,
Speaker 1: course identical to what I'd seen on the figure at
Speaker 1: the meadows Edge in twenty fourteen. The bone pile had
Speaker 1: grown since the fall, more small animal remains, a few
Speaker 1: larger bones that Earle thought might be from a young deer,
Speaker 1: all gnawed and cracked, all stacked, and there was something
Speaker 1: new against the south wall of the ravine. About fifty
Speaker 1: yards past the beds, Earl found a shallow overhang where
Speaker 1: the rock face had eroded to create a natural shelf
Speaker 1: about three feet deep and six feet wide. Under that shelf,
Speaker 1: protected from rain and snow, someone had placed objects stones,
Speaker 1: river stones, smooth and polished, the kind that come from
Speaker 1: creek beds after years of water action. About two dozen
Speaker 1: of them arranged in a line along the back of
Speaker 1: the shelf, different sizes from marbles to fists, each one distinct,
Speaker 1: each one placed deliberately with space between them, the way
Speaker 1: you'd arrange items on a mantle. Beside the stones, there
Speaker 1: were sticks, short pieces of wood six to eight inches long,
Speaker 1: stripped of bark, the ends rounded smooth. Earl counted fourteen
Speaker 1: of them. They were bundled together with a strip of
Speaker 1: bark and leaned against the rock wall behind the stone
Speaker 1: line and at the far end of the shelf, separated
Speaker 1: from the stones and sticks by about two feet of
Speaker 1: empty space, there was a single item that Earle spent
Speaker 1: most of a journal page describing. A piece of quartz,
Speaker 1: not river quartz, a crystal point clear, about four inches long,
Speaker 1: naturally faceted with a slight milky cast at the base,
Speaker 1: the kind of mineral specimen that geology students get excited about.
Speaker 1: It was standing upright, balanced on its base, positioned at
Speaker 1: the exact center of the shelf's far end. I want
Speaker 1: you to think about what Earl was looking at. A collection,
Speaker 1: an arrangement of found objects, curated and displayed in a
Speaker 1: protected space, maintained over time. The kind of thing you'd
Speaker 1: find in a child's room, on a naturalist's window sill,
Speaker 1: in the cabin of someone who walks creek beds for
Speaker 1: pleasure and brings home. The things that catch their eyes.
Speaker 1: Earle wrote that his first reaction was disbelief, because what
Speaker 1: he was looking at couldn't be what it appeared to be.
Speaker 1: His second reaction was something he didn't have a word for,
Speaker 1: not fear, not wonder, something between the two that had
Speaker 1: no name in his vocabulary. He described it as the
Speaker 1: feeling of looking at evidence that the thing you've been
Speaker 1: sharing a mountain with isn't just smart, it's something else.
Speaker 1: Something that picks up stones because they're beautiful and keeps
Speaker 1: them because they mean something, something that arranges objects for
Speaker 1: the satisfaction of seeing them arranged, something that has an
Speaker 1: interior life. Earle left the ravine that morning without touching anything.
Speaker 1: He went back to the cabin and wrote everything down,
Speaker 1: and then he made a decision that shaped the next
Speaker 1: forty years of his life on the mountain. He decided
Speaker 1: not to tell anyone, not Vernon, not Riba, nobody. He
Speaker 1: sealed the journal and the map in plastic, fitted them
Speaker 1: into the cavity he'd built into the cellar wall, and
Speaker 1: covered it with a single fitted stone that looked like
Speaker 1: every other stone in the wall. He buried the ravine,
Speaker 1: and he lived with the knowledge of it alone for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. The journal entries after the
Speaker 1: ravine visits were sparse. A few lines here and there
Speaker 1: over the following eight years. Notes about knocking patterns, notes
Speaker 1: about garden activity, a brief mention of the mimicry incident
Speaker 1: in seventy one, which matched what Vernon had documented and
Speaker 1: Opal had shared with me. Nothing more about the ravine,
Speaker 1: nothing about the shelf, or the stones or the crystal.
Speaker 1: He'd made his decision. The ravine was off limits. Finding
Speaker 1: their beds and their collection and their resting place was
Speaker 1: the deepest possible intrusion into their private world, and the
Speaker 1: only ethical response was to walk away and never come back.
Speaker 1: He'd held to that for forty three years. But he'd
Speaker 1: left the journal in the wall, addressed the envelope to me,
Speaker 1: written the letter that said, if you go, go and winter.
Speaker 1: Earl wanted some and to know. He just couldn't be
Speaker 1: the one to tell them. I sat with the journal
Speaker 1: and the letter and the map for three days before
Speaker 1: I made a decision. Three days of walking around the
Speaker 1: cabin with Earl's words in my head and his handwriting
Speaker 1: on the kitchen table. I couldn't sleep. The first night
Speaker 1: I lay in bed with Bowie snoring beside me and
Speaker 1: Ruby on the floor, and the knocking coming from the
Speaker 1: ridge the way it always did, and I listened to
Speaker 1: it differently than I'd ever listened before, because now I
Speaker 1: knew where the knockers went when they were done knocking.
Speaker 1: I knew where they slept. I knew they collected stones
Speaker 1: and arranged them on a shelf and kept a quartz
Speaker 1: crystal standing upright like a centerpiece. That knowledge changed the sound.
Speaker 1: The knocking wasn't mysterious anymore. It was domestic routine, the
Speaker 1: sound of neighbors going about their evening. I read the
Speaker 1: journal twice through, slowly, the way you'd read a letter
Speaker 1: from someone who died before they finished saying what they
Speaker 1: needed to say. Every page, every entry, the handwriting changing
Speaker 1: over the decade, from sharp and young to looser and
Speaker 1: more patient, the way it does when the hand holding,
Speaker 1: the pen is aging and the urgency of the early
Speaker 1: entries has given way to something steadier. I studied the map,
Speaker 1: hand drawn on a piece of line notebook paper, precise
Speaker 1: in the way that only someone who'd walked the route
Speaker 1: many times could manage, not to scale, not professionally drafted,
Speaker 1: but every landmark was placed correctly, and the route was
Speaker 1: marked with small arrows and verbal notes in the margins.
Speaker 1: The double trunk, red oak, the granite shelf, the game
Speaker 1: trail split. I recognized all of them from my own walks.
Speaker 1: The ravine itself was marked with a small X about
Speaker 1: a quarter mile northeast of the cabin in the National Forest,
Speaker 1: in an area I'd skirted during boundary walks but never
Speaker 1: entered because the terrain was too thick and too steep
Speaker 1: to seem worth the effort. And then something hit me
Speaker 1: that went through my whole body. That area, the one
Speaker 1: Earl had marked with the X. It was. It's the
Speaker 1: same area that Vernon had marked on his topo map
Speaker 1: with a yellow circle and a question mark den area.
Speaker 1: Vernon had suspected something was there. He'd narrowed the general
Speaker 1: vicinity from track patterns and seasonal movement data, the way
Speaker 1: a detective narrows a suspect pool from circumstantial evidence. But
Speaker 1: he'd never found the ravine itself. The rhododendron was too thick,
Speaker 1: the drainage too steep, the approach too well hidden by
Speaker 1: the terrain. Earl had found it by accident, following tracks
Speaker 1: in seventy two, and he'd carried the knowledge alone for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. Two men, two properties, fifty
Speaker 1: years of shared observation, dozens of conversations on the very
Speaker 1: porch where I was sitting, and the most significant discovery
Speaker 1: either of them ever made was the one Earl sealed
Speaker 1: in a wall and never spoke aloud. I thought about
Speaker 1: the loneliness of that forty three years, knowing where they slept,
Speaker 1: knowing about the shelf and the creek stones and the
Speaker 1: quartz crystal, knowing the most intimate detail about the creatures
Speaker 1: he'd shared a mountain with since nineteen seventy one, and
Speaker 1: choosing every single day for over fifteen thousand days not
Speaker 1: to tell Vernon, Vernon who would have understood, Not to
Speaker 1: tell Reba, who would have accepted it, not to tell anyone,
Speaker 1: because Earle believed the ravine was the one piece of
Speaker 1: information that absolutely could not exist in open air. Knowing
Speaker 1: where they lived was the deepest possible intrusion, and the
Speaker 1: only moral response was to walk away and keep walking
Speaker 1: for the rest of your life. And yet the journal,
Speaker 1: the map, the letter with my name sealed in stone,
Speaker 1: waiting for the right set of hands to open the
Speaker 1: right wall. He'd wanted someone to know, he just couldn't
Speaker 1: be the one to say it. I called Cliff on
Speaker 1: Sunday night, our regular call. I didn't tell him what
Speaker 1: I'd found. He'd stopped coming to the mountain after the
Speaker 1: ridge night, and our calls had settled into a comfortable path.
Speaker 1: He'd ask if anything was new. I'd say, not really.
Speaker 1: We'd both understand that anything new was code for anything terrifying,
Speaker 1: and not really was code for nothing. I'm going to
Speaker 1: burden you with. That was a kindness I extended to him.
Speaker 1: He'd earned it by standing on a dark ridge and
Speaker 1: letting the mountain teach him what it had spent five
Speaker 1: years teaching me. But I almost told him. I came
Speaker 1: close enough that I could feel the words forming behind
Speaker 1: my teeth, But telling him would have meant putting the
Speaker 1: weight back on the shoulders. He'd driven two hundred miles
Speaker 1: to Lighten, and I wasn't willing to do that. Cliff
Speaker 1: had paid his dues, the ridge was his price. I
Speaker 1: wasn't going to charge him twice. I decided to go
Speaker 1: alone in winter, the way Earle said. I spent the
Speaker 1: night before the trip sitting on the porch in the cold,
Speaker 1: which is something I'd stopped doing after dark years earlier.
Speaker 1: But that night I needed to be outside. I needed
Speaker 1: to sit where Earle had sat for forty years and
Speaker 1: look at the same ridge and feel the same weight
Speaker 1: of knowing what was up there. The knocking came around
Speaker 1: eight thirty, the way it usually did, two strikes, a pause,
Speaker 1: three strikes, the same pattern I'd been hearing for seven years,
Speaker 1: echoing off the rid shoulder and rolling down through the
Speaker 1: hard woods into the meadow. I sat there and listened
Speaker 1: and thought about the fact that the thing making those
Speaker 1: sounds had a bed in a ravine, and a shelf
Speaker 1: of creak stones and a quartz crystal. It kept standing
Speaker 1: on its base. I thought about that, and the knocking
Speaker 1: didn't sound like a warning anymore. It sounded like someone
Speaker 1: checking in, making sure the arrangement still held. January fifteenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, a Thursday, cold and dry for a week,
Speaker 1: Temperatures in the low twenties during the day, single digits
Speaker 1: at night. About three inches of old snow on the ground,
Speaker 1: crusted hard with a thin dusting of fresh powder from
Speaker 1: a flurry two days earlier, the kind of snow that
Speaker 1: records everything in bunches, like broken glass under your boots.
Speaker 1: I left the dogs at the cabin. I brought the flashlight,
Speaker 1: the compass, a water bottle, my phone, an Earl's map.
Speaker 1: I also brought the spiral notebook in a pen, because
Speaker 1: whatever I found, I was going to write it down
Speaker 1: the way Vernon would have wanted measurement observation data. I
Speaker 1: owed that to the record. I owed it to the
Speaker 1: man who'd spent thirty years building a body of documentation
Speaker 1: that deserved to be continued by whoever came next. And
Speaker 1: whether I liked it or not, Earl had decided I
Speaker 1: was next. I left the cabin at ten in the morning,
Speaker 1: full daylight, clear sky. The ridge was sharp and bright
Speaker 1: against the blue, the bare trees standing black against the snow.
Speaker 1: January simplifies everything up there. You can see the bones
Speaker 1: of the land, the rock outcrops that summer hides, the
Speaker 1: old fence lines that the undergrowth swallows, the ridge line itself,
Speaker 1: which in summer is just a green mass but in
Speaker 1: winter resolves into individual trees and saddles, and the granite
Speaker 1: knobs that the creatures use as knock zones. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: I could see the bluff from the meadow that morning,
Speaker 1: a pale scar of exposed rock near the top of
Speaker 1: the ridge, and I just stood there looking at it
Speaker 1: for a moment, thinking about the three dark shapes I'd
Speaker 1: seen on the Talis slope below it five years earlier,
Speaker 1: three of them looking up at me. That felt like
Speaker 1: a lifetime ago. It also felt like yesterday. Bowie was
Speaker 1: watching me from the front window, standing on the couch
Speaker 1: with his paws on the sill, the way he'd done
Speaker 1: since he was a puppy. He was twelve now his
Speaker 1: muzzle was completely white. The arthritis had gotten worse over
Speaker 1: the winter, and some mornings he couldn't make it off
Speaker 1: his blanket without help. I'd started carrying him down the
Speaker 1: porch steps when the cold was at its worst, holding
Speaker 1: his forty pound frame against my chest like a child,
Speaker 1: his dignity offended, but his hips grateful. Ruby was beside
Speaker 1: him at the window, one ear up, one folded, watching
Speaker 1: me the way she watched everything, total attention, no judgment.
Speaker 1: I told them I'd be back. Whether they understood the
Speaker 1: words or just the tone, I don't know. But Bowie's
Speaker 1: tail moved once, and Ruby pressed her nose against the glass,
Speaker 1: and I turned toward the tree line. The roote Earl
Speaker 1: had mapped followed the game trail behind the cabin for
Speaker 1: about one hundred yards, the same trail I'd hiked to
Speaker 1: the bluff and to the rid shoulder with Cliff. Familiar ground,
Speaker 1: but at a point I'd always passed without noticing, about
Speaker 1: where a split trunk sour wood leaned over the trail
Speaker 1: from the uphill side. Earl's map showed a branch to
Speaker 1: the left, not a trail exactly, more of a suggestion,
Speaker 1: a slight depression in the ground where feet or something
Speaker 1: heavier than feet had pressed. The leaf littered down enough
Speaker 1: times to create a ghost of a path leading away
Speaker 1: from the main trail and dropping into a shallow drainage
Speaker 1: to the northeast. Here's the thing. I'd walked past this
Speaker 1: spot dozens of times over seven years and never noticed it,
Speaker 1: which was probably the point. The path was invisible if
Speaker 1: you weren't looking for it, hidden by the sour woods
Speaker 1: lean and the thick rhododendron that crowded both sides. You'd
Speaker 1: have to know it was there or be following something
Speaker 1: that used it. The drainage was narrow and got narrower
Speaker 1: as I descended. The rhododendron closed in from both sides,
Speaker 1: the branches interlocking overhead in a canopy so dense that
Speaker 1: the snow barely reached the ground underneath. I was walking
Speaker 1: through a green tunnel in a white landscape. Above me,
Speaker 1: bright winter sun, Around me, deep shade, and dead still
Speaker 1: air that was ten degrees colder than the open forest.
Speaker 1: The only sound was my breathing, and the crunch of
Speaker 1: my boots on the thin crust of snow that had
Speaker 1: managed to filter through the ground was telling me things.
Speaker 1: Even under the snow, I could read the trail, compressed
Speaker 1: earth where the leaf litter had been repeatedly tramped, stones
Speaker 1: turned on their edges, and pushed into the soil by weight.
Speaker 1: From above, rhododendron branches broken cleanly at shoulder height five
Speaker 1: feet six feet seven feet up. The brakes were old
Speaker 1: and healed over with bark, but they weren't natural. Something
Speaker 1: tall and heavy had been walking this drainage for years,
Speaker 1: pushing through the rhododendron the way you'd push through a
Speaker 1: beaded curtain, breaking the branches that were too rigid to bend.
Speaker 1: The terrain got steep. I was bracing my boots sideways
Speaker 1: against the slope and using rhododendron trunks as hand holds.
Speaker 1: Somewhere below, I could hear water, the faint trickle of
Speaker 1: a stream still running beneath the ice. At about a
Speaker 1: quarter mile from the cabin, the drainage narrowed to a slot.
Speaker 1: Rock walls rose on both sides, mossy and wet, maybe
Speaker 1: twenty feet high. The stream along the bottom was partially frozen,
Speaker 1: a ribbon of clear ice with water still trickling underneath.
Speaker 1: And the air smelled different, colder, damper, and underneath the
Speaker 1: cold something else that thick organic scent Earl had described,
Speaker 1: heavy musky, not rancid, just present, the smell of something
Speaker 1: large and alive that had been in this confined area
Speaker 1: recently and often enough that its scent had soaked into
Speaker 1: the rock I was in the ravine. I stopped for
Speaker 1: about a minute, just breathing, letting my eyes adjust to
Speaker 1: the dimmer light, letting my ears calibrate to the quiet,
Speaker 1: which was different from open air quiet. The rock walls
Speaker 1: contained everything, made it close intimate, The drip of water
Speaker 1: on stone, the faint creak of a rhododendron branch under
Speaker 1: a clump of snow. My own heart beat, which was fast,
Speaker 1: but not panicked, not yet. The beds were about one
Speaker 1: hundred yards in I saw them from thirty feet away
Speaker 1: and stopped exactly as Earl had described oval depressions in
Speaker 1: the moss and leaf litter along the base of the
Speaker 1: south facing rock wall. Three of them spaced about ten
Speaker 1: feet apart. The snow had melted in each one, leaving
Speaker 1: patches of bare, dark ground surrounded by thin white crust.
Speaker 1: The edges were crisp, clean lines between snow and bare ground,
Speaker 1: and that melting had it been caused by sunlight. The
Speaker 1: ravine was too narrow and too deep for direct sun
Speaker 1: to reach the floor at this time of year. The
Speaker 1: melting was from body heat, recent body heat within the
Speaker 1: last day or two. Something had been lying in these beds,
Speaker 1: recently enough that the residual warmth was still thawing the snow.
Speaker 1: I crouched beside the nearest bed. The moss was compressed
Speaker 1: to bare dirt in the center, worn smooth by years
Speaker 1: of use. Around the edges, the moss was matted and
Speaker 1: darker than the surrounding growth. Stained hair was caught in
Speaker 1: the rough surface of the rock wall beside the bed,
Speaker 1: long dark brown strands, coarse, some of them six or
Speaker 1: seven inches, snagged on the stone at about three to
Speaker 1: four feet off the ground, roughly the height. Something that
Speaker 1: size would brush the wall if it rolled over in
Speaker 1: its sleep. I pulled a strand from the rock and
Speaker 1: held it in my fingers, thick, much thicker than human hair,
Speaker 1: more like horse hair. Slight wave to it, dark at
Speaker 1: the root, lightning to a reddish brown at the tip.
Speaker 1: I put it in a zip lock bag i'd brought,
Speaker 1: and sealed it. The bone pile was there, too, near
Speaker 1: the second bed, smaller than what Earl had described, which
Speaker 1: suggested it was periodically cleared or relocated. A dozen or
Speaker 1: so small animal bones, gnawed clean, split from arrow, A
Speaker 1: couple of pieces that looked like they might be from
Speaker 1: a turkey, All of it stacked neatly beside the depression,
Speaker 1: organized by size, the way you'd sort things, if sorting
Speaker 1: them mattered to you. I moved deep, carefully, every step placed, deliberately,
Speaker 1: testing the ground before committing my weight. The stream trickled
Speaker 1: beside me. The rock walls narrowed. The musk smell got thicker.
Speaker 1: About fifty yards past the beds, I found the shelf.
Speaker 1: The overhang was just as Earl had described it, a
Speaker 1: natural erosion feature in the south wall, about three feet
Speaker 1: deep and six feet wide, sheltered by a lip of
Speaker 1: rock that projected outward, dry, underneath, protected, and along the
Speaker 1: back of the shelf. Arranged with a care and precision
Speaker 1: that made my throat tighten. Was the collection stones more
Speaker 1: than Earl had counted. I estimated thirty or forty, ranging
Speaker 1: from pebble size to about the size of a baseball.
Speaker 1: All smooth, all water polished creak stones carried from Bishop
Speaker 1: Creek or one of its tributaries, up the drainage, through
Speaker 1: the rhododendron tunnel into the ravine, and placed here on
Speaker 1: this shelf a line that ran from one end to
Speaker 1: the other, Each stone separated from its neighbors by a
Speaker 1: consistent gap of about an inch and a half. The
Speaker 1: line wasn't straight, It curved gently following the contour of
Speaker 1: the back wall, and the stones were arranged by size,
Speaker 1: smallest on the left, largest on the right, a gradient
Speaker 1: that was too uniform to be accidental. The sticks were
Speaker 1: still there, more than fourteen now maybe twenty, bundled with
Speaker 1: bark strips leaned against the wall behind the stone line,
Speaker 1: each one roughly the same length stripped of bark, the
Speaker 1: ends rounded smooth by what I could only assume was
Speaker 1: handling manipulation, someone picking them up and rubbing them and
Speaker 1: wearing down the edges over time. And the crystal. The
Speaker 1: quartz point Earle had described was still there, still standing
Speaker 1: upright on its base at the far end of the shelf,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't alone anymore. Beside it, arranged in a
Speaker 1: small cluster, were three other mineral specimens, a piece of
Speaker 1: smoky quartz about two inches long, a chunk of mica
Speaker 1: that caught the dim light and threw it back in
Speaker 1: silver flashes, and a dark stone I didn't recognize, smooth
Speaker 1: and heavy that might have been magnetite or hematite. The
Speaker 1: collection had grown since Earl's visit in seventy three. Think
Speaker 1: about what that means. Almost fifty years of additions, fifty
Speaker 1: years of creek stones carried up the drainage and placed
Speaker 1: in a line, fifty years of stick stripped and bundled,
Speaker 1: fifty years of mineral specimens found somewhere on the mountain
Speaker 1: and brought to this shelf and arranged alongside the others,
Speaker 1: a curated display in a hidden gallery, maintained by something
Speaker 1: that valued the objects enough to keep them organized and protected,
Speaker 1: and added to across a span of time longer than
Speaker 1: most human hobbies. Last, I stood in front of that
Speaker 1: shelf and felt the same thing Earle had described in
Speaker 1: his journal, the nameless thing between fear and wonder, the
Speaker 1: recognition that what I was looking at wasn't the behaveavior
Speaker 1: of an animal collecting shiny objects the way a crow
Speaker 1: collects tinfoil. This was different. This implied esthetic sense preference,
Speaker 1: the capacity to look at a stone in a creek
Speaker 1: bed and choose it over the stones beside it, and
Speaker 1: carry it home and put it with the others, because
Speaker 1: it belonged there, because the line needed that stone, because
Speaker 1: the collection was incomplete without it. I thought about the
Speaker 1: riverstone I'd found on the bluff sitting slab in twenty sixteen, smooth, polished,
Speaker 1: egg shaped. It had appeared between visits, placed on the
Speaker 1: exact spot where I liked to sit. I'd taken it
Speaker 1: home and put it on my nightstand. I'd held it
Speaker 1: sometimes when I couldn't sleep, running my thumb across its surface,
Speaker 1: feeling the warmth it absorbed from my hand, wondering what
Speaker 1: it meant, why it was there, who'd left it, whether
Speaker 1: it was a warning or a boundary marker, or something
Speaker 1: I didn't have a category for. Standing in the ravine,
Speaker 1: looking at thirty or forty of its siblings line up
Speaker 1: on that shelf, I understood it was a gift, chosen
Speaker 1: from a collection that had been growing for half a century,
Speaker 1: selected from the line, carried from the ravine up through
Speaker 1: the drainage, through the rhododendron tunnel, across the forest floor,
Speaker 1: up the slope to the bluff, and placed on the
Speaker 1: sitting slab where the new humans spent his afternoons. The
Speaker 1: stone hadn't been a warning. It hadn't been a marker.
Speaker 1: It was an offering, the same gesture as Reba's sweet
Speaker 1: potatoes on the tree stump reversed. A creature that collected
Speaker 1: beautiful things had decided to share one of them with me.
Speaker 1: I'd been holding the answer in my hand for six years,
Speaker 1: turning it over on sleepless nights, carrying it in my
Speaker 1: pocket when I walked the property, putting it back on
Speaker 1: the nightstand every evening, beside the lamp, beside the flashlight,
Speaker 1: beside the glass of water, A smooth stone from a
Speaker 1: creek bed, polished by water and time, chosen by something
Speaker 1: that value beauty, and given to someone it had been
Speaker 1: watching long enough to know where he liked to sit.
Speaker 1: If that's not communication, I don't know what is. If
Speaker 1: that's not intention, I don't know what qualifies. And if
Speaker 1: that's not something close to kindness, then I don't know
Speaker 1: what kindness looks like between two species that can't exchange
Speaker 1: a single word. I don't know how long. I stood
Speaker 1: in front of the shelf, long enough that my feet
Speaker 1: went numb, long enough that the light shifted as the
Speaker 1: sun moved, and the shadows on the rock walls changed angle,
Speaker 1: long enough that my eyes started to water. And I'm
Speaker 1: not going to pretend it was just the cold. I
Speaker 1: took photographs. I measured the shelf dimensions, I counted the
Speaker 1: stones and the sticks and the mineral specimens. I documented
Speaker 1: everything in the notebook the way Vernon would have measurements, descriptions,
Speaker 1: compass bearings, The detached professionalism of a man who is
Speaker 1: definitely not crying in a ravine because a creature left
Speaker 1: him a rock. Then I closed the notebook, put it
Speaker 1: in my pack, turned around to leave, and one of
Speaker 1: them was standing at the mouth of the ravine. I
Speaker 1: need to take a moment here, because this is the
Speaker 1: part I've been building toward for ten stories. It's the
Speaker 1: part that wakes me up at three in the morning
Speaker 1: in my apartment in Ashville and sends me to the
Speaker 1: kitchen for water. It's the part I'll carry for whatever
Speaker 1: years I've got left, and I want to get it right.
Speaker 1: Not dramatic, not embellished. Right. The ravine entrance was about
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty yards behind me, back the way
Speaker 1: i'd come from where I stood near the shelf, looking
Speaker 1: back toward the mouth. The ravine was a narrow corridor
Speaker 1: of rock and green rhododendron and the thin white line
Speaker 1: of the frozen stream on the floor. The light was
Speaker 1: brighter at the entrance, where the canopy opened slightly and
Speaker 1: the winter sun reached the ground, creating a pale rectangle
Speaker 1: of illumination. At the far end of what was essentially
Speaker 1: a stone hallway. Against that light, framed by the rock
Speaker 1: walls on both sides, was a figure standing upright filling
Speaker 1: most of the width of the ravine at its narrowest
Speaker 1: point near the entrance. Not moving, not leaning, not in
Speaker 1: the process of arriving or departing, just standing, the way
Speaker 1: a person stands in a doorway when they've been there
Speaker 1: a while and aren't in a hurry, The way you'd
Speaker 1: stand if you knew someone was in your house and
Speaker 1: you were content to wait for them to notice you
Speaker 1: on their way out. I don't know how long it
Speaker 1: had been there. I hadn't heard it arrive, no footsteps
Speaker 1: on the frozen ground, no branch snaps, nothing. It was
Speaker 1: just there. And here's the thing about these creatures that's
Speaker 1: impossible to convey unless you've experienced it. Their stillness doesn't
Speaker 1: read as hiding. It reads as belonging. The eye almost
Speaker 1: passes over them, the way it passes over a boulder
Speaker 1: or a standing dead tree. Except this wasn't a boulder
Speaker 1: or a dead tree. This was something alive, watching me
Speaker 1: from one hundred and fifty yards, and I suspect it
Speaker 1: had been watching me since long before I'd reached the shell,
Speaker 1: maybe since I i'd entered the ravine, maybe since I'd
Speaker 1: left the cabin. Stay tuned for more backwoods big foot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. It was facing me
Speaker 1: at that distance. In the dim light, I couldn't make
Speaker 1: out features, but the shape was unmistakable. Shoulders wider than
Speaker 1: any humans by a significant margin, tapered torso arms that
Speaker 1: hung past where a human's arms would stop, and the
Speaker 1: height the figure's head cleared the rhododendron branches at the
Speaker 1: ravine mouth. I later measured those branches at roughly seven
Speaker 1: and a half feet. Its head cleared them by at
Speaker 1: least a foot, maybe more. The skull was conical, slightly
Speaker 1: crested at the crown. The hair on the head hung
Speaker 1: to the shoulders in a single dark mass. It was
Speaker 1: watching me the way it had watched me from the
Speaker 1: Talis slope four years earlier, with that same absolute stillness,
Speaker 1: that same unhurried total attention, no aggression, no tension, no
Speaker 1: readiness to charge or flee, just presence, the calm, patient
Speaker 1: presence of something that had already gathered all the information
Speaker 1: it needed and was simply there, existing in the same
Speaker 1: space as me. Acknowledging the fact of me without reacting
Speaker 1: to it. I stood still, pack on my back with
Speaker 1: the notebook inside it. Flashlight in my left hand, turned off, boots,
Speaker 1: planted shoulder with on the ravine floor, frozen stream an
Speaker 1: inch from my right soul and between me and the
Speaker 1: only way out of this narrow slot canyon was something
Speaker 1: that outweighed me by two hundred and fifty pounds at minimum,
Speaker 1: something that could move through forest and total silence, something
Speaker 1: that had been watching humans come and go on this
Speaker 1: corridor since before I was born. The fear came. It
Speaker 1: always comes, heart rate climbing, breathing going shallow and fast,
Speaker 1: Adrenaline doing its work, tightening my shoulders, sharpening my peripheral vision,
Speaker 1: preparing my legs for a sprint that had absolutely nowhere
Speaker 1: to go. The ravine was a dead end behind me.
Speaker 1: The walls were too steep to climb. The rock face
Speaker 1: above was twenty feet of mossy wet stone with no
Speaker 1: hand holds. The only exit was the entrance, and the
Speaker 1: entrance was occupied. But the fear didn't take over, not
Speaker 1: this time, not the way it had when Wade's voice
Speaker 1: came from two directions in twenty fifteen, Not the way
Speaker 1: it had on the ridge with Cliff when the tree
Speaker 1: strike came from the south. This fear was older, quieter.
Speaker 1: It carried with it the weight of everything I'd learned
Speaker 1: in eight years, and from fifty five years of documentation
Speaker 1: by three other people who'd walked this corridor before me.
Speaker 1: The knocking that had never led to harm, the garden
Speaker 1: raids that took but never destroyed, the snow tracks that
Speaker 1: circled the cabin every night for an entire winter without
Speaker 1: once trying the door. The mimicry that tested without trapping,
Speaker 1: the escort off, the ridge that herded without herding, circle around,
Speaker 1: the dogs that closed and then opened. Every encounter, every
Speaker 1: piece of evidence, every entry in Vernon's notes and Earl's journal,
Speaker 1: all of it pointed at the same conclusion, the one
Speaker 1: Vernon had written with a dying man's clarity. They are
Speaker 1: capable of harm and choose not to inflict it. I
Speaker 1: was standing in their home, in their bedroom, in front
Speaker 1: of their collection of creak stones and quartz crystals, and
Speaker 1: one of them was at the door, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: blocking the door, it was standing beside it. I started
Speaker 1: walking toward it, toward the entrance, toward the light. My
Speaker 1: boots crunched on the frozen stream bed. Each step sounded
Speaker 1: like a gunshot. In the confined space, the sound bouncing
Speaker 1: off the rock walls. The musk smell got stronger. As
Speaker 1: I passed the beds. I could feel the residual warmth
Speaker 1: from the depressions reaching me as a faint pulse of
Speaker 1: heated air rising from the bare ground. I could smell them,
Speaker 1: the creatures that slept here. Their scent was in the moss,
Speaker 1: in the rock, in the air itself, and it registered
Speaker 1: as simultaneously repellent and familiar, the way you'd recognize the
Speaker 1: smell of your own house from outside if someone pointed
Speaker 1: it out to you. This was their house. It smelled
Speaker 1: like them. I kept my eyes forward on the figure,
Speaker 1: on the light behind it. I walked at a steady pace,
Speaker 1: not hurrying, not dawdling, the pace of someone who's been
Speaker 1: invited somewhere and is leaving at a natural hour, not fleeing,
Speaker 1: not lingering, just going. At about fifty yards, I could
Speaker 1: see more detail. The hair was the dark walnut brown
Speaker 1: i'd observed in every previous encounter, but in the better
Speaker 1: light near the ravine entrance, I noticed things I hadn't before.
Speaker 1: The hair wasn't uniform, The chest was covered in shorter,
Speaker 1: thinner growth that moved slightly in the faint breeze drifting
Speaker 1: through the ravine mouth. The arms had longer hair, several
Speaker 1: inches hanging from the fore arms the way fringe hangs
Speaker 1: from a leather jacket, and the shoulders were broader up
Speaker 1: close than they'd appeared from a distance. The muscles beneath
Speaker 1: the hair were visible as shapes, as contours, the way
Speaker 1: you can see the architecture of a horse's body through
Speaker 1: its coat. The hands hung at its sides, relaxed, fingers
Speaker 1: slightly curled, not fisted, not open and ready, just resting
Speaker 1: the posture of something that isn't preparing to do anything.
Speaker 1: At about thirty yards, I could see the face, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to describe it as carefully as I can.
Speaker 1: The brow ridge was heavy and continuous, running from temple
Speaker 1: to temple, in a single pronounced bar of bone that
Speaker 1: cast a shadow over the eye sockets. The nose was
Speaker 1: broad and flat, more like a gorillas than a human's,
Speaker 1: pressed against the plane of the face rather than projecting
Speaker 1: from it. The mouth was closed. The lips were thin,
Speaker 1: darker than the surrounding skin, set in a line that
Speaker 1: didn't suggest expression, not smiling, not frowning, just closed. The
Speaker 1: jaw was massive, set forward, giving the lower face a
Speaker 1: prognathus profile that dominated the silhouette. The skin on the
Speaker 1: face was dark, not brown like the body, hair, a
Speaker 1: deep weathered gray, the color of old bark, and the
Speaker 1: eyes were dark, nearly black, sat deep under the brow ridge,
Speaker 1: looking at me with the same sustained, unblinking regard that
Speaker 1: Vernon had described in his encounter at the Creek Pool
Speaker 1: nearly fifty years earlier. No scanning, no darting, no checking exits,
Speaker 1: just looking, taking in every detail of the human walking
Speaker 1: toward it. At twenty yards, I stopped, not because the
Speaker 1: fear stopped me. The fear was still there, running like
Speaker 1: a motor in the background, but it wasn't driving. Something
Speaker 1: else had taken the wheel. A feeling I'd never had
Speaker 1: before in any encounter, a feeling of enough. I'd come
Speaker 1: into their home, I'd found their beds and their bones,
Speaker 1: and their shelf of collected things. I'd photographed it and
Speaker 1: measured it and written it down. And now one of
Speaker 1: them was standing at the entrance, calm and unhurried, letting
Speaker 1: me know that the visit had reached its natural end,
Speaker 1: not demanding it, not rushing it, giving me the space
Speaker 1: to arrive at the decision on my own, the way
Speaker 1: a good host doesn't hand you your coat. They just
Speaker 1: stand near the door and trust you to take the hint.
Speaker 1: I stood at twenty yards and looked at it. It
Speaker 1: looked at me. The ravine was quiet, The stream trickled
Speaker 1: under its lid of ice. A single drop of water
Speaker 1: released from the rock wall to my left and hit
Speaker 1: a stone with a sound like a bell, struck once
Speaker 1: and allowed to ring into silence. I could see the
Speaker 1: condensation of its breath, slow, steady plumes of white vapor
Speaker 1: rising from the nostrils and dissolving in the cold air,
Speaker 1: deep respirations from a chest the size of a barrel.
Speaker 1: The breathing of something that is completely calm, that is
Speaker 1: not alarmed, that is looking at something it's been expecting.
Speaker 1: And then it moved, not toward me, to the side.
Speaker 1: It shifted its weight, turned its body about thirty degrees,
Speaker 1: and stepped to the right, slowly, deliberately, the way a
Speaker 1: large animal moves when it wants you to see that
Speaker 1: it's moving, rather than startling you. It placed its right
Speaker 1: shoulder against the rock wall and stood there clearing the passage,
Speaker 1: opening the exit, making room for me to walk past,
Speaker 1: the way you'd step aside in a hallway for someone
Speaker 1: you know. That gesture broke something in me that had
Speaker 1: been holding together through sheer stubbornness for eight years. I'd
Speaker 1: told myself over and over, through every encounter that I
Speaker 1: was an observer, a documenter, a man with a notebook
Speaker 1: and a good memory trying to build a record. I'd
Speaker 1: kept the emotion at arm's length. I'd cataloged fear and
Speaker 1: wonder and dread and awe the same way Vernon had
Speaker 1: catalog tracks and knock counts as data points. But you
Speaker 1: can't maintain that distance when something eight feet tall and
Speaker 1: four hundred pounds steps out of your way, when it
Speaker 1: presses its shoulder against a rock wall in a gesture
Speaker 1: so human, so recognizably courteous, that your brain can't process
Speaker 1: it as animal behavior, because it isn't. Animals don't step aside,
Speaker 1: Animals don't clear hallways. Animals don't stand at doors and
Speaker 1: wait for guests to leave on their own schedule. That's
Speaker 1: what people do. That's what beings with social awareness and
Speaker 1: empathy and an understanding of shared space do, and whatever
Speaker 1: was standing four feet to my right was doing it
Speaker 1: with a fluency that went beyond instinct. I walked through
Speaker 1: the gap twenty yards fifteen ten five, the closest I'd
Speaker 1: ever been to one of them, close enough that I
Speaker 1: had to look up to see the bottom of the jaw,
Speaker 1: close enough to see the texture of the skin on
Speaker 1: the face, rough and lined like old leather, poured with
Speaker 1: a grain that looked like weathered wood, close enough to
Speaker 1: smell the musk coming off its body in a warm
Speaker 1: wave that filled the space between us, close enough to
Speaker 1: hear it breathing, low, steady, deep, the breathing of something
Speaker 1: at rest, unstressed, not threatened by the human walking past
Speaker 1: at arm's length. I passed it at about four feet.
Speaker 1: My shoulder was roughly level with its hip, and I
Speaker 1: don't have adequate language for the scale of it from
Speaker 1: that proximity. I'm five eleven. I've stood beside tall men
Speaker 1: my whole life. I've worked to construction sites with guys
Speaker 1: who were six four six', five guys who had to
Speaker 1: duck through standard door. Frames none of them prepared me
Speaker 1: for what eight and a half feet of upright mass
Speaker 1: looks like from four feet. Away its arm hanging at
Speaker 1: its side was at my eye. Level the hand at
Speaker 1: the end of that arm was bigger than my. Head
Speaker 1: the fingers were, thick the knuckles, pronounced the nails dark and.
Speaker 1: Blunt the, palm WHICH i could see because the hand
Speaker 1: was slightly rotated, outward was a lighter color than the surrounding.
Speaker 1: Skin gray pink calloused the hand of something that gripped
Speaker 1: things that used its. Hands it didn't move AS i,
Speaker 1: passed didn't, turn didn't shift its, weight didn't follow me
Speaker 1: with its, eyes at least not THAT i could, see
Speaker 1: because by the TIME i was beside, IT i was
Speaker 1: looking straight, ahead walking toward the light at the ravine,
Speaker 1: mouth my legs operating on the autopilot that kicks in
Speaker 1: when your conscious mind has stepped away from the. CONTROLS
Speaker 1: i walked out of the ravine and into the open.
Speaker 1: Forest the winter sun hit my face and the brightness was.
Speaker 1: Disorienting after the, DIMNESS i blinked hard and kept walking
Speaker 1: through the, rhododendron up the, drainage back to the game,
Speaker 1: trail past the split trunk sour. WOOD i stopped there
Speaker 1: at the sour. WOOD i put my hand on the
Speaker 1: trunk and stood still and tried to make my legs stop.
Speaker 1: Shaking they'd been steady in the, ravine they'd been steady
Speaker 1: water walking past the creature at four, feet but now
Speaker 1: in the open, air in the safety of familiar, trail
Speaker 1: my body was cashing every check my brain had been
Speaker 1: writing for the last forty. Minutes the adrenaline dump hit
Speaker 1: all at. Once my hands were, trembling my jaw was
Speaker 1: clenched so tight my teeth. ACHED i leaned against the
Speaker 1: sour wood and breathed until the shaking slowed down AND
Speaker 1: i could trust my legs on the. Slope THEN i
Speaker 1: kept walking across the property, line down the, slope through
Speaker 1: the bare hard woods into the. Meadow the snow was
Speaker 1: blinding in the open the sun reflecting off the, crust
Speaker 1: and my eyes were, watering maybe from the, brightness maybe.
Speaker 1: NOT i didn't stop to figure out which across the,
Speaker 1: grass up the porch, steps through the, door lock turning behind,
Speaker 1: me the dead bolt thudding home with a Sound i'd
Speaker 1: heard ten thousand times, before and that had never sounded
Speaker 1: like the most important sound in the. World bowie was
Speaker 1: on his. Blanket he lifted his head and looked at
Speaker 1: me with those cloudy brown eyes that didn't see as
Speaker 1: well as they used, to but never missed anything that.
Speaker 1: Mattered ruby was at my feet before i'd taken two,
Speaker 1: steps pressing against my, shins her nose working my genes
Speaker 1: from the cuff, up reading every molecule of Information i'd
Speaker 1: brought back from that, ravine the, slope the, rhododendron the,
Speaker 1: moss the. Musk she, knew she'd smell exactly Where i'd
Speaker 1: been and what had been near. Me and she didn't,
Speaker 1: bark she didn't. Whine she just leaned against me and,
Speaker 1: breathed and let me stand there in my own, kitchen
Speaker 1: with my hand on her head and my eyes On earl's,
Speaker 1: journal lying open on the table Where i'd left it that.
Speaker 1: MORNING i sat down AND i, cried not from, fear
Speaker 1: not from, relief from the accumulated weight of eight years
Speaker 1: of living alongside something, impossible and finally, understanding down in the,
Speaker 1: marrow in the part of yourself that knows things before
Speaker 1: your brain is caught, up what it. Was they weren't,
Speaker 1: monsters they weren't. Animals they weren't mysteries to be, solved
Speaker 1: or threats to be, managed or phenomena to be. Documented
Speaker 1: they were, people not human, people but, people beings with
Speaker 1: homes and beds and collections of beautiful. Things beings that
Speaker 1: slept in the same spots every winter and organized their
Speaker 1: food scraps and picked up creak stones because the stones
Speaker 1: were worth picking. Up beings that had watched four families
Speaker 1: come and go on their corridor over fifty, years and
Speaker 1: had assessed each one and, decided based on whatever criteria
Speaker 1: mattered to, them to share the mountain rather than claim.
Speaker 1: It earl had understood, that he'd understood it since nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: three and the understanding had been so large and so
Speaker 1: fragile that he'd sealed it in a wall rather than
Speaker 1: risk it on the open. AIR i understand it. NOW
Speaker 1: i sold the cabin in twenty twenty. Three it took
Speaker 1: me a year after the ravine to make the. Decision
Speaker 1: And i'll be honest about. Why it wasn't. Fear it
Speaker 1: wasn't the encounter driving me. Away if, anything the ravine
Speaker 1: had resolved something that the fear had kept unresolved for eight.
Speaker 1: YEARS i understood them, now not, completely not, scientifically but
Speaker 1: in the way that matters in the, gut stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more backwoods bigfoot. Stories we'll be back after these.
Speaker 1: Messages in the part of you that knows things your
Speaker 1: brain hasn't caught up to. Yet the creatures On Bishop
Speaker 1: creek were not a threat to, me and never had.
Speaker 1: Been they'd assessed me over, years through the knocking and
Speaker 1: the tracks and the, mimicry and the garden raids and
Speaker 1: the window visits and the escort off the, ridge and
Speaker 1: they DECIDED i was acceptable that the corridor could hold
Speaker 1: one more. Human what drove me off the mountain was
Speaker 1: simpler and sadder than. Fear bowie died in the fall
Speaker 1: of twenty. Two he was. Thirteen the arthritis had been
Speaker 1: getting worse all, year and By september he couldn't get
Speaker 1: up on his own. Anymore i'd been carrying him outside
Speaker 1: three four times a, day holding his back end while
Speaker 1: his front legs did the. Work he'd look up at
Speaker 1: me with those cloudy eyes that used to be sharp
Speaker 1: and brown and full of, opinions AND i could see him.
Speaker 1: Apologizing dogs do. That they apologize for getting, old as
Speaker 1: if it's something they, chose as if they're letting you
Speaker 1: down by not being the dog they were at, four at,
Speaker 1: seven at. Ten i'll tell you WHAT i haven't told
Speaker 1: anyone in those last. Weeks on the nights When bowie
Speaker 1: couldn't get comfortable And i'd sit on the floor beside
Speaker 1: his blanket with my hand on his, ribs the knocking
Speaker 1: would come from the, ridge and he'd lift his ears just,
Speaker 1: barely just enough to show me that the old instinct
Speaker 1: was still in there under the pane and the. Fog
Speaker 1: he couldn't get to the window. Anymore he couldn't growl
Speaker 1: the way he used, to but he still heard. Them
Speaker 1: he still knew what was out. There AND i, think
Speaker 1: in whatever way a dog processes these, things he was
Speaker 1: worried about what would have happened to me when he
Speaker 1: wasn't around to hear it. First the vet In hendersonville
Speaker 1: told me it was. TIME i knew it was. Time
Speaker 1: i'd known for. Weeks but knowing and doing are different.
Speaker 1: Things the way believing and knowing are. Different the Way
Speaker 1: cliff had said on the night of the, RIDGE i
Speaker 1: Carried bowie to the truck on A tuesday morning In,
Speaker 1: October ruby rode in the cab with. US i drove
Speaker 1: to the vets office and held him while it. Happened
Speaker 1: he licked my hand once at the. End then he was,
Speaker 1: gone and a piece of the mountain went with, him
Speaker 1: the piece that had been my alarm system and my
Speaker 1: companion and my courage on one hundred dark. Nights the
Speaker 1: peace that had growled at the window when something leaned
Speaker 1: against the, wall the peace that had refused to cross
Speaker 1: the tree line because he knew BEFORE i did where
Speaker 1: the boundary. WAS i buried him near the cemetery, plot
Speaker 1: under the red, oak in the spot where the afternoon
Speaker 1: sun hits the ground and the grass grows thick in,
Speaker 1: summer beside the stones that Marked earl And riba And
Speaker 1: frank And earl's. PARENTS a dog among the, Dead bowie
Speaker 1: would have liked the. Company he always. Did after, that
Speaker 1: the cabin felt, different not because of the. Creatures they
Speaker 1: were the. Same the knocking came every, night the tracks
Speaker 1: appeared every morning after wet. Weather the arrangement, Held but
Speaker 1: the cabin Without bowie was a cabin without its. Heartbeat
Speaker 1: ruby was still, there still, patrolling still pressing against my
Speaker 1: legs at. Night But ruby had always been my. Dog
Speaker 1: bowie had been the property's. Dog he'd Been earl's, dog
Speaker 1: and spirit that kind of, steady, watchful stubborn presence that
Speaker 1: matched the mountain's. Temperament without, him the cabin was just a,
Speaker 1: BUILDING a good, building a building That earle had built to,
Speaker 1: last but a. BUILDING i put the property up for
Speaker 1: sale in the spring of twenty, three didn't list it,
Speaker 1: publicly Told dennis at the hardware store And Chimney rock
Speaker 1: THAT i was looking for the right. Buyer got around
Speaker 1: the way it does in mountain. Towns gas station, conversations church,
Speaker 1: suppers the counter at the diner where the morning guys drink.
Speaker 1: Coffee the couple From boone found me through a friend
Speaker 1: of a. Friend they were, young early. Thirties he worked
Speaker 1: remotely for a tech. Company she. Painted they wanted a
Speaker 1: quiet place in the mountains where they could live simply
Speaker 1: and cheaply and raise the baby they were expecting In.
Speaker 1: November they reminded me of me eight years, earlier full of,
Speaker 1: plans full of, energy no. IDEA i walked them through
Speaker 1: the property on A saturday In. May showed them the,
Speaker 1: cabin the, workshop the, creek the. Meadow when we got
Speaker 1: to the tree line at the northern edge of the,
Speaker 1: property the wife stopped and looked up at the ridge
Speaker 1: and said Something i'll never. Forget she said it felt
Speaker 1: like someone was. Watching she laughed when she said. It
Speaker 1: her husband. LAUGHED i. DIDN'T i just said the mountain
Speaker 1: has that, quality AND i moved us back toward the
Speaker 1: cabin before the conversation could go anywhere. Else BUT i
Speaker 1: watched her face when she said. It she wasn't. Joking
Speaker 1: she'd felt something the same Thing i'd felt on my first,
Speaker 1: afternoon the same Thing earl must have felt in seventy
Speaker 1: one whatever signal the corridor sends to new. Arrivals she'd
Speaker 1: picked it up in the first twenty. MINUTES i sold
Speaker 1: it to them for What i'd paid for, it seventy
Speaker 1: eight thousand Dollars earl's. PRICE i could have gotten. More
Speaker 1: the market in Western North carolina had gone insane SINCE
Speaker 1: i bought, it and forty seven acres with a cabin
Speaker 1: and a creek and a workshop would have brought three
Speaker 1: or four times that amount from the right. Buyer BUT
Speaker 1: i didn't want the right buyer in the financial. SENSE
Speaker 1: i wanted the right buyer in earls, sense someone who
Speaker 1: take care of the, place someone who'd noticed the knocking
Speaker 1: and wonder about, it and maybe eventually open the cellar
Speaker 1: wall and find the cavity and the empty space where
Speaker 1: the journal had, been and understand that the cabin had
Speaker 1: secrets that went deeper than its foundation. STONES i didn't
Speaker 1: tell them about the. CREATURES i Couldn't earl's, philosophy the,
Speaker 1: silence the belief that speaking the words within range of
Speaker 1: the forest changed the. Arrangement i'd spent eight years thinking
Speaker 1: that was. Superstition but standing in the, ravine four feet
Speaker 1: from something that had allowed me into its home because
Speaker 1: it had DECIDED i was worth, ALLOWING i understood That
Speaker 1: earl's silence wasn't. Superstition it was the deepest form of
Speaker 1: Respect i'd ever, encountered the kind that SAYS i know
Speaker 1: what you, are AND i will honor your existence by
Speaker 1: not reducing it to a story told over coffee or
Speaker 1: a warning whispered on a. Porch But i'm telling it
Speaker 1: now to, you to everyone who's, listening Because opel was
Speaker 1: right about something. Too the knowledge can't stay fragile. Forever
Speaker 1: it can't live in a few heads on one, ridge
Speaker 1: in one, county in one corner of the Southern. Appalachians
Speaker 1: the creatures On Bishop creek deserve witnesses and witnesses eventually
Speaker 1: have a responsibility to, speak even when the speaking costs.
Speaker 1: SOMETHING i moved To asheville in the summer of twenty.
Speaker 1: Three ruby came with. Me she's seven, now good, dog
Speaker 1: best company a man could ask. For she sleeps on
Speaker 1: the floor beside my bed in the, apartment and some,
Speaker 1: nights around two or three in the, morning she'll lift
Speaker 1: her head and point her ears toward the window and
Speaker 1: hold still for ten or fifteen, seconds listening to SOMETHING
Speaker 1: i can't. Hear then she'll put her head back down
Speaker 1: and close her. EYES i don't know what she. HEARS
Speaker 1: i don't know if the apartment is close enough to
Speaker 1: any corridor for the sound to reach. Us But ruby hears,
Speaker 1: something and she's never been wrong about what she. Hears
Speaker 1: this is my testimony ten years one mountain and the, ongoing, unresolved, terrifying,
Speaker 1: beautiful impossible fact that we share these forests with something
Speaker 1: we don't have a name. For something that collects stones
Speaker 1: because they're beautiful and keeps them because they mean, Something
Speaker 1: something that builds shelters and tests its neighbors and remembers
Speaker 1: who was kind and watches year after year with a
Speaker 1: patience that makes human patience look like in, patience something
Speaker 1: that watched me walk through its home and WHEN i was,
Speaker 1: done stepped aside to let me. LEAVE i don't know
Speaker 1: what they. ARE i don't know where they came, from
Speaker 1: or how many corridors Like Bishop creek exist in these
Speaker 1: mountains or across this. CONTINENT i don't know if the
Speaker 1: young couple in the cabin has heard the knocking, yet
Speaker 1: or found tracks in the, garden or notice That ruby's
Speaker 1: successor whatever dog they eventually, get won't cross the northern tree.
Speaker 1: Line BUT i know they're, there and now you do, Too.
Speaker 1: Garrett i'm going to keep this short Because garrett's words
Speaker 1: don't need a lot of help from me at this.
Speaker 1: Point in nearly four decades of working in this, Field
Speaker 1: i've collected hundreds of, accounts long ones and short, ones
Speaker 1: detailed ones and vague. Ones some from People i'd trust
Speaker 1: with my, life some from People i'm not sure. About
Speaker 1: that's the nature of the. Work you gather what you,
Speaker 1: can and you hold it up to the, light and
Speaker 1: you make your. Judgment garrett's account is the most, comprehensive internally,
Speaker 1: consistent and emotionally honest long term witness Narrative i've ever
Speaker 1: encountered ten stories across ten, years corroborated by a second
Speaker 1: independent observer on the same, corridor supported by physical, evidence
Speaker 1: and backed by a body of documentation that spans half a.
Speaker 1: Century the depth of, this the patience of, it the
Speaker 1: way each encounter built on the, last until the whole
Speaker 1: arc moved from fear to understanding without ever losing its
Speaker 1: footing in honest human. Doubt that's what Sets garrett apart
Speaker 1: from most Accounts i've. Heard he never claimed to have
Speaker 1: all the. Answers he never built a grand theory or
Speaker 1: turned his experience into a. Brand he lived on a,
Speaker 1: Mountain he paid, Attention he wrote things. Down he lost
Speaker 1: a dog and gained a, friend and made a bad
Speaker 1: decision on a, ridge and found a dead man's journal
Speaker 1: in a cellar, wall and walked into a ravine where
Speaker 1: something stepped aside to let him. Pass and when he
Speaker 1: was done he sat down and told somebody about. It
Speaker 1: i'm grateful he chose. Me i'm grateful he chose. You
Speaker 1: the knocking is still coming from the ridge above that,
Speaker 1: Cabin i'm certain of, It and somewhere in a ravine
Speaker 1: that doesn't appear on any. MAP a line of creekstone
Speaker 1: sits on a shelf under a rock, overhang growing longer
Speaker 1: by one stone every, Season curated by hands that have
Speaker 1: never held a pen or turned a, page or spoken
Speaker 1: a word any human ear can. Translate but they collect beautiful.
Speaker 1: Things they sleep in the same beds their parents slept,
Speaker 1: In they know the people who live on their, land
Speaker 1: and they step aside in. Hallways for, NOW i guess that's.
Speaker 1: Enough thank you for, Listening stay, safe stay, curious and
Speaker 1: if you hear the, knocking sit with it for a.
Speaker 1: While it's been going on a lot longer than any of,
Speaker 1: us and it'll keep going long after we're. Done Good,
Speaker 1: Night di