[Crying]
If you've never been the last man on a timber-cut at dusk, you don't know how the woods can swallow a person up. You think you know quiet, you don't. The quiet on a ridge after chainsaw stop is something very different. It's now full of everything that you couldn't hear when the saws were going. The trees are treelum, swaying in the breeze. Treesap, popping, bugs, chirping and ticking. And the creek that you forgot that was so close, you can finally hear the water trickle.
I learned that lesson in some woods we were cutting in West Virginia several years back. I grew up not far from that particular place, but the woods around there, they can be just a few miles long and wide, and yet still feel like another country. The saws for a very small outfit, just six of us when nobody was sick or locked down in a cab with a busted hydraulic line. Old vents kept the books and the loader. Ricky ran the skitter. Tommy, Clinton, Rob all did a little of everything.
We moved from track to track, thinning here, clearing there, keeping the trucks fed. It wasn't glamorous, but it was honest, and it paid our mortgages. That week we were on a north-facing slope, Oaken Poplar mostly, with a tangle of mountain laurel that would make a preacher curse. It was the kind of laurel that you can't push through without it taking some blood and payment. You go around it if you can. If you can't, it takes you apart, one sleeve at a time.
Folks in Richwood and Quinnwood tell stories about those woods, and that's not special. All small towns have their stories, and they like to tell them. I'd heard enough grown up around there. Whistles in the dark, tree-knocks, a big man made of hair. Rocks thrown into a hollow when the fog piles up. My daddy used to shake his head at that stuff and say, "A bear will throw rocks if you just give him hands."
I laughed along with him, not sure what he meant, but I noticed that he always got quiet crossing certain old roads. He had superstitions. He said he didn't believe, but he respected, and there was a big difference. This one Monday we started the cut-up there. By Wednesday a few things had happened that I couldn't set on a shelf in my head and label them.
First, a stack of brush we'd left on the side of the skid road was scattered out by morning, like someone had tried to make a fence, and then lost interest. It wasn't kicked through. It had been pulled and placed. Second, Tommy had his lunch-pale go missing out from under the loader deck while we were up on the slope. He said maybe a fox stole it.
It could have been, but we found it later with the lid popped off and the balloony out of his sandwich gone, but the chips and his thermos were untouched. Third, there was the smell. You would catch a whiff of something like dead deer every now and then out there. My daddy called it "mystery stink" because you didn't want to go look for the source. Not if you wanted to keep your appetite that day, but this smell had a wet nasty edge to it, and it moved. He would be here, then it would be there.
The wind would turn, and then it was not there at all, and then it came right back even closer. Vince said bad weather was coming on Friday, so we pushed hard on Thursday to get the landing stacked high. The saws and the loaders were going nonstop. That last hour though, the weather, it was already feeling like it changed, and the woods, they got dark sooner, and they were getting a kind of a dark look to them like they went from looking off-friendly to, "Don't try me, mister."
We were one drag short of calling it, when Ricky came on the radio, saying that he'd busted a tire down by the second switchback. He'd lint the skitter off the road, so the trucks could get out in the morning. That meant the last logs we dropped would sit up there overnight. "Leave 'em," Vince said. "We'll grab 'em tomorrow. "We'll be boys start coiling up your lines."
I had a coil of choker cable, and a dull chain in my hand when I remembered, I had left my toolbox up on the second landing spur, just where the laurel narrows into a tight throat. I don't baby my tools exactly. They are working tools, but I'm not leaving a set of files and a good hammer out there to get rained on. The toolbox was old and blue, and then it was tinted and smooth from years of riding in the back of trucks. My name was etched into the paint on the lid.
Vince had already shut down the loader. Ricky was over-talking to the other guys about how much his new tire was going to cost. Everybody was turned toward the trucks. Dusk was settling in into a deep purple on the tree tops. "I gotta run back up and grab my toolbox," I said, "Just so they knew where I went." "You want me to go with you?" Vince asked, his eyes narrow. He said it, like he was letting me know, and I should take somebody with me, but I just didn't catch it then.
"Nah," I said, "because stupid is a thing that a man can be without even trying." My Honda 4 wheeler was sitting at the turn by the oil drums. I kicked it to life and eased into the skid trail. Tires slipping and fresh churn clay. The world shrunk fast. Thirty yards in, and I had trees shouldered up on me on both sides and laryl tickling my elbows. I kept it slow to keep from throwing mud into the radiator. The trail climbed a short pitch, leveled, then swung left where we'd cut a new turn.
I knew every inch of that trail, just by feel from working at that week. It was quiet, except for the engine in that creek that you can't really see. I passed the first spur, which was empty now, except for two brush piles and a stack of oak tops. My toolbox was on the next one, just a minute further. I should have felt decent about that, but something was off. You know, sometimes it's the birds that tells you something's all wrong.
You get used to constant bird noise, and when that shuts up, you know it, without knowing it, that that's what you know. Sometimes it's something else. That evening, it was something else. It was all deep purple shadows up there by then, but I had a feeling I was not alone. I couldn't hear it over my four wheeler, but I knew something was walking in the shadows just out of sight. I can't tell you how I knew. I just did.
I knew I didn't want to stop for a lot of reasons, but my eyes started moving, left, right, ahead, repeat. The thick laurel made tunnels on both sides. Where the laurel broke, there were trunks as big as your thigh. 25 yards out, maybe 30. A black shape matched me, stride for stride in the purple shadows through the hard woods.
I saw it not as a thing at first, but as the absence of shadow that moved along with me, just a bear, I told myself, "I like when an answer is quick and neat, but bears don't usually follow loud four wheelers." And then I got hit with that stink. The stink came right with it. It went right up my nose all the way to my brain, and it stayed there. Even all of this did not worry me. You spend your life in the forest, you will run into all kinds of animals.
I was surprised, though, that it was not put off by the four wheeler's motor. I spun just a little bit on the fresh mud, not a place or time to have a problem, I thought, so I eased the throttle and slowed my pace and climbed a little bit. The moving shadow matched me. I know bears don't do that. My mouth went dry, and my right hand got slick on the grip. The second spur opened out to a little flat, the size of a two-car garage, it was dirt-scraped and pocked with skitter tracks.
My blue toolbox sat right where I had left it, under a poplar stump. All I had to do was grab it, get back down and out of there. I rolled the four wheeler onto the flat. I looked over where I thought that black shape was, but I didn't see it. Well, maybe I'd lost it, or I had lost interest in me. I cut the engine and listened to the sudden absence of it. I really didn't mean to shut it off. It was kind of a reflex.
I should have turned it right back on, but I had the thought that if that was a person over there, maybe they would hop on and take off. Plus, I wanted to hear if anything came at me while I was getting the toolbox. I stepped off the machine and walked over to the stump, with a lot more boldness than I really had. I grabbed my box by the handle and turned around. Across the way, the lural bushes moved.
I don't mean moving like a hog was going through, making them move in quick shivers, where you would see the leaves and branches bounce and then stop. Now this was different. It was a steady swell and movement in the bushes, like something big was pushing it shoulder through, higher up in the bushes. I could hear limbs cracking both high and low, so it was something big. I put the box on the front rack and clicked the bungee's down quickly, and I never took my eyes off that lural.
The heaving and the movement suddenly stopped, but I was sure it was still right there, right on the other side of those tall and thick laurels. Just a bear I said to myself again, even though I knew I was lying. I swung a leg over the seat and thumbed the starter, the Honda Caut, caught, then died. "What?" I thought to myself. I mean that machine has never died on me like that, never, it's like a beast in its own right, stubborn and good.
My thumb hit the starter again, the motor spun, almost caught, and then nothing. I don't know what makes a man choose stupid, pride, habit, maybe a fear of being afraid, but I swung off the seat, reached back, and pulled the saw off my rack. I kept my 20-inch saw with me out of laziness. I thought I might sharpen the chain at home. The saw was heavy and familiar in my hands, and my hand found the choke by memory. I primed it, set the brake and yanked.
The pool rope snatched at my shoulder right on the first pool. "Come on, I thought, come on." The second pool, it sputtered. "Come on," I said. "The third pool, though," she started up. I kept the brake on, and I wanted more sound than cutting. I wanted to tell whatever was over there, listening. I wasn't going to be a piece of easy meat. I didn't know how much damage it would do against a bear, but I would give it all I had with my saw. The laurel shifted again, and this time I saw it.
I don't mean I caught a glimpse of it. I mean, I saw it. It stepped out into the pale dusk light with nothing but pure confidence and a lot of muscles. It clearly owned those woods, not me. I've thought about how to sail of this and not sound crazy, so I'll just say it plain. It walked on two legs. It was bigger than any man I've ever worked beside or seen in my entire life for that matter.
It was taller by a head and a half, shoulders like a tractor-hood, hair not fur, but thick and hanging, matted in places, and it looked braided up by briars and others, and it was wet up to the knees. Arms were long enough, the hands fell below mid-thigh. In the last of the light, its eyes weren't red like a devil, like other people say. It wasn't shining or reflecting like a raccoon's. No, those were deep black holes, catching what little light there still was around it, and they were deep.
The way a colseem looks deep when you hold up a lantern to it, kind of glints just a little bit, but you know it's running deep. All of that and that terrible smell waving around in front of it, I knew what it was. The saw I was holding told a really good lie for me. It said, "Listen here, buster. I'm in charge." I didn't move and it didn't move. We were breathing the same air and waiting to see what the other one would do.
Then I saw it lower its head slightly, like it was trying to see under something behind me. Then it set one foot right out into the open. The foot wasn't flat on the ground yet, when the laurel behind it trembled, as if another one was right behind it. I took a half step back without meaning to the saw in my hand buzz like an angry hornet's nest. The creature, the bigfoot, no other word really fits, rolled a sound up out of its chest.
It started low and got lower, but grew louder at the same time. Loud enough I could hear it over my saw. That growl wasn't for an argument with me. It was telling me something. It was commanding. "All right," I said, though I knew it couldn't hear me over that saw. "All right." I popped the brake and bumped the chain into the dirt for a second, because holding a hot saw steady is harder when you have fear in your wrists.
The blade clattered and bit, and the creature's eyes flick to it, then right back to me. It didn't flinch from the sound like a deer would. It didn't re-rupp like a bear that wants to get big. It stood there, like it had staked its claim and was daring me. I knew this wasn't a fight I was going to win, especially if it wasn't alone, not even with a chainsaw. I held the saw top handle in one hand, and reached over the four wheeler, mumbled a quick prayer, and thumbed the ignition again.
And to my surprise, it fired right up. You know, I'm still not sure of the exact logistics of how I did what I did, but I somehow did it. I kept the saw on one hand running, just in case, and I started turning the head of my four wheeler to the left to turn it around, walking with it, keeping my eyes on the creature the whole time. Now, normally, to turn that four wheeler, I need both hands to do that.
They're not so easy to turn when they have no speed to them, but somehow I did it with one, and I kept my eye on that creature, and it was keeping its eye on me. I quickly cut the saw, put it on the rack right behind my box, and hoped it would stay there. I hopped on that four wheeler, and just as I did, the second one I thought was there proved itself, and stepped out from the laurels.
I didn't think then, I just started rolling, and as I did, and I saw the first creature take two steps towards me, it was striding forward with a purpose. I just looked forward and started to accelerate, and I felt something hit the four wheeler. I looked back, and a sapling had whiplash the back rack, ringing it like a tuning fork. I looked back again, and the second one had a sapling, and it was using it like a sweeping club, sweeping back and forth behind the four wheeler as I went forward.
It had caught just the last of the back rack. I gunned the throttle a little more, and the four wheeler leapt forward. The rear end slid toward the edge. Dirt kicked up. I rited it by reflex. The way hours on a machine kind of becomes part of your bones. I didn't look back anymore. The trail pinched to the left at that new cut, and gave me twenty yards of a lural cord door that was grabbing at my handlebars and my shins all the way. Then I saw and heard it.
The bigger creature, the first one, it was keeping pace just off to my right. For distance, maybe fifty yards more, the other one was on my left. Then I saw it suddenly peel off and disappear. I never did know what its purpose or intent was, but things were coming at me now, and they were coming behind me as well. Things bounced off me and the four wheeler, branches shattered.
I caught a flash of black at my three o'clock, shoulder and hair and a pale slice of palm, a little one, maybe the size of a baby's fist, and it pinged off the front rack. Sounded like someone hit it with a hammer. I laid forward over the bars, elbows in, and put on all the speed I dared. At the first switchback, the trail turned down and to the right. I break swung and almost put the front tires into the soft bank where Ricky had rutted it out earlier.
I was a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined. I had a little bit more rigid than I had imagined.
Switchback pointed more downward toward the creek. The trail there is slick and it's clay over stone, and you learn, you better not fight it. You let the machine slide the way it wants, and you guide the slide. I did that. And through the laurel I saw it again, though not as clear, but clear enough to put the picture in my head for the rest of my life. It was trying to cut the corner. See, pacing me wasn't enough for it now, I guess. It was trying to get the angle on me. Take a shortcut.
Cut me off at the pass, I guess you could say. Recklessly, I put on more speed to try to stay ahead of it. It took three long strides through timber that any other man would have had to weave through about six strides just to get through. I kept looking over at it, trying to figure out where we would vector. I knew, even with my speed, I wasn't going to get ahead of it, but it might put me parallel with it again.
Then suddenly, to my surprise, it began to slow its pace, and it fell back just behind me. Now I think about this a lot because I know it didn't slow down because it couldn't keep up. It slowed down because it was choosing something. I hit the creek crossing all wrong, though. You see, we had placed a line of rocks in the middle that you had to aim for to cross it just right, kind of like lining up your wheels on those tracks in a car wash.
That I missed some of those rocks in my haste, and I dropped my front tire into a hole in the creek that made the whole machine lurch and bark. Water slapped up and soaked my boots. The motor stuttered. I rocked my weight back and fed the throttle in pulses, trying not to flood it, talking to it like it could hear and understand. I was doing what I had to do to keep my panic down. On the bank behind me, I looked back, and I saw all the big creature standing there.
There was just enough dust-light left that I could see its chest heaving. Then a stone, the size of a bowling ball, splashed into water two yards left of me, and sent cold creek all over my leg. It was a warning, so pure, there wasn't any misunderstanding in it. Not a miss, it was a message. But it wasn't thrown by the one standing on the bank. I had my eyes on him. It must have been the second one, though I couldn't see it. It didn't come across the creek.
I had the feeling it was waiting for me to keep going. "I'm going," I shouted at it. I rocked the four wheeler back and forth, and then the tires found some grip, and we clawed our way out of the creek. I kept right around a stump, and bent low for the limb that I always forgot was there. Another rock landed behind me. It was clear to me then, it really wasn't trying to hit me, because I believe it could have if it wanted to. It was pushing me. I got that message clear as can be.
I pointed my four wheeler downhill with more speed than I should have, and I let it buck and slide to where the trail widened at the mouth of the trail. The loader deck sits 300 yards on from there, out of the trees, under the sky, and that open sky felt like home base, a safe place. When the landing opened in front of me, I didn't let up until dirt turned into the flattened paste of a work deck, and my wheels threw mud across the heap of bark.
The loader sat quiet in the twilight, like a dinosaur skeleton. Vince's truck was a rectangle of dull red right nearby. I rolled out into the open, cut the engine, and let silence come back in slowly. For a second, I couldn't move. You don't know how much of your will is in your hands until they stop obeying you. I pride my fingers off the grips and swung a leg over, and almost fell when my boot hit the ground. Then I quickly turned toward the trail that I had just come out of. There it was.
Not out in the open, but at the edge, where the shadows kept it mostly hidden, but I saw it. It stood one step inside the tree line. It was still close enough that I could see it wasn't breathing very hard now. I could see the lift in the fall of its chest, like bellows, being worked real slow. My mind had room again to notice small things. The heronet shoulders were lighter on top, as if they had been some bleached a few shades lighter.
Its hands flexed once, like they were remembering something. It told her its head as it looked at me. Not by much, but enough that I noticed. I took a small step back without planning to. It didn't follow, though. It still did not come out. It lifted one arm, not very high, but it pushed the laurel nearest it, as if to say, "Here, this is the edge. This is my boundary." Then it looked past me, over me, to the trucks, to the deck, to the places where men and the machines make their marks.
It looked in shook its head, and it stepped back into the trees where the woods swallowed it whole. "Boy?" I heard vents say behind me, making me jump right out of my skin. He was walking up to me. He had walked from the far side of the deck without me seeing him. "Boy, you done look like you've seen a ghost?" I turned toward him. My mouth moved before the words found their rightful place. There's somebody, something up there in that laurel. That's all I could manage.
My voice didn't even sound like mine. Then I said, "Been pacing me, it was throwing rocks." Vince's eyes, the same ones that had gone narrow when he asked me if I wanted company earlier, didn't change a bit. He looked down the trail, then up the hill, and then he leaned over and spit into the dirt. "Well, I told you once," he said without a smile. "These woods ain't empty." And he did tell me that. Long ago. Rikki wandered over then, saw my face, and he got real serious real fast.
"Did you see a bear?" he asked, like he wanted that answer to be true. "No," I said. I didn't have another word for it that I was willing to use with these men, not yet anyway. "These were my coworkers and friends," so I just shook my head. Rikki wandered off, and Vince waited a second, and then he asked quietly. "Prinse?" "You see any prince?" I really hadn't looked for any signs. I just shook my head no. I had been busy staying alive. Vince went and fetched a flashlight from his truck.
We have one of those big square ones with the handle on it, and he aimed it at the edge where I said I had seen it standing. We walked over to within a few feet of the tree line, but we did not go in. He played the light low across the leaves, like he was rolling it across the surface of a pond, trying not to break the water. Three feet back from the lip of the deck, in the damp, where the shade sits and keeps things nice and moist, was a shape.
It wasn't crisp. It wasn't a casting clay type of print that you could go put in the Bigfoot Museum. But there was a shape that said "heal, mid, four," and it was wide. Toes not perfectly lined up, not like a man's foot. They were more splayed, like a thing that has never worn a shoe. 12 inches? 13? I can't tell you. I know what size my boots are, and this was way more. We didn't stand there long.
You don't get brave just because you say you can measure something and you think you know what it is. We weren't brave at all. Just before we turned to go, the light caught on a wad of hair snagged on a broken laurel stem about four feet up from the ground. Vince did not touch it. He kept the light on the hair strands, his face saying more than his mouth ever would. "Yeah, we'll talk about this tomorrow," he said.
"And that was Vince being kind." Then he said, "Let's go. Let's not feed this thing tonight." "Come on, boys. Let's get going." We loaded up quietly, no banging. We didn't slam doors, and we drove out slow. Not because we were scared, but we had found some kind of quiet respect for the woods that we were cutting in that night. It's complicated to explain, and I can't swear that's how the other guys felt, but that's how I felt anyway.
I didn't sleep much. My wife asked me why I kept tossing all night. I told her a skitter had a tire-off, and that costs a lot of money, and money does what it does to a man's thoughts late at night. Well, that was true enough that it passed inspection. But in the dark, I remembered the way it looked at me, the way I had looked at it, and the space between those two looks.
It wasn't hate. It wasn't hunting. It was a boundary set by something that knows boundaries better than we do because it has fewer up them. And we had crossed those boundaries. The next morning, the Misslay in those woods, the way it does, when a front is out west, and it's coming in, we parked the trucks and walked out onto the deck. Do made every footprint crisp. There were more of them at the edge, a line that paralleled the trail.
They were perfect prints, and leaves collapse under heavy feet, and they can make shapes that will look like anything if you just want them to. But there were enough that were clear for my stomach to drop a little. Vents didn't actually say bigfoot. Well, none of us said that to each other. We just looked around and said, "Huh, well, and looky there." "And hey, you see this?" We said it in tones that mean we're never going to mention this in town.
At the creek crossing, we found two rocks in the mud that didn't belong where they were. One had a smear of wet clay on top, like it had been touched with a palm, not rolled. On the second spur, where my toolbox had been, a sapling had been shoved across the trail the way you would put a gate. I don't mean that it was cut or broken down by the wind. This was placed. Rookie pushed it aside with the skitter, like it was just some grass.
Well, we got to keep the landing tidy, Vents said to no one in particular. And then to everybody, he said, "And we're not going to stay late unless we got to anymore." Now, you can set yourself up to see a thing that ain't there. You can also set yourself up to quickly not see a thing that is there. After that, our days got busier.
The trucks came and went, the loader clattered. And we ran saws, ate our baloney sandwiches, busted our knuckles on doll chains, laughed at things that really aren't funny, unless you were there. And the woods were mostly silent from then on, mostly. No, there were some knocks that could have been dead limbs twisting. And there were a lot of whistles that maybe were some wind easing through a pile of hollow wood.
And there was a smell one day by the third landing that was in your nose before you knew it. And it stayed there all day, oily and clinging inside your nostrils. You just couldn't clean it out. We watched the tree lines around us, and then we would look down at our work, but we didn't talk about it. Respect isn't silence, but sometimes silence is respect. Two days after that chase down the trail, I found a smooth river stone placed on top of my blue toolbox.
It was the size of my hand, and it was nearly a perfect oval shape, and it was gray with a white stripe like a belt running around it. No tracks around the area, just the stone. And it wasn't a type of stone from that ridge, none that we'd ever seen, and it wasn't from any place we'd ever seen working up there. None of us knew what to make of it. I'm not saying this was a gift. I don't romanticize this whole bigfoot thing.
I didn't bring that rock home, either. I picked it up, looked at the woods and said loudly, "I see you." Then I set it down on the stump, where the toolbox had been. It's probably out there under a pile of leaves now, or it's been washed off in a heavy rain and wandered downhill the way things do when you stop looking at them. The tire came in for the skitter, and the weather came in with it. Hard and short, soaking the deck and making the clay slick and dangerous.
We wrapped the track up by Monday afternoon, a day early on account of wanting to be somewhere else. Trunks full, load her down, last chain coiled. Thence looked at me, like a man looks at his dog before they get in the truck. It was a look that said, "You come in or what?" I nodded at him. We did not drag our feet getting out of there. I've been back through there, working in that area twice since that happened. The work takes you, where the work takes you.
I don't ride alone at dusk anymore. Not on a fresh trail, not out of pride, not out for a forgotten toolbox. If a young hand says he's left something up on the cut, I don't ask him. I tell him leave it, or I will go up there with him. I still don't like saying big-foot, feels like a word from a TV set that doesn't fit the size of the dark woods out there. I like to say whatever is in those woods. And I say it with some respect. Same is my daddy, always crossing certain old roads.
I don't believe, and yet I don't disbelieve. But I do remember. I remember it keeping pace with me in the trees, like it was a shadow that had decided to stick to me now. I remember the rock landing not far off my wheel, like a warning shot. I remember it, standing at the edge of the landing and marking a line with its hand, without needing words. People ask if I felt hunted. I say no. Hurted? Yes, maybe, probably. Pushed out from where I didn't belong?
I think about the way it slowed at the switchback, when it could have cut me off if it wanted, like it had made a choice, not to be the last thing I ever saw. Because if it didn't stop, it would be the last thing I ever saw. I think about how it tried to cut me off there at the pass. I know that if it really wanted to, it could have. And what would have happened? I don't think it would have been good for me. But it held back at the last second. It made that decision.
And I know that something living in those woods didn't want me there. It was just showing me the exit. That is the truth as clean as I can tell it, and it's taken me several days to write this email out, to go back and to fix things. But I want people to know, if you are ever the last man on a ridge, and dusk sits down on the leaves like some purple heavy hand, don't argue with the feeling of the place if it suddenly feels off.
And don't pretend you or your machine is bigger than that dark. Pick up your toolbox before a separate time. Leave when the woods tell you to leave. And if the laurel starts to lean in shake, and something breathes with a heaving chest like a big set of bellows, be grateful for that warning. Not all warnings from the woods are loud. Some of them are just a big, quiet shape that keeps pace with you until you know it's time to go home. [aleigh]