transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:22] I work at a body shop in Dalton, Georgia. Mako, the one on Walnut Avenue near the bypass. I've been there seven years. Before that, I did two years at a caliber collision in Chattanooga, and before that, I was pumping gas and doing oil changes at a Jiffy Lube while I figured out what came next. I'm 32. I never went to college, never wanted to. I'm good with my hands and I like fixing things. And the pay at the shop is decent enough that I can afford a small house on the east side of Dalton, and a truck that runs, and a hobby that doesn't cost much, which is trout fishing. I've fished the streams in North Georgia and Southeast Tennessee since I was a kid. My grandfather taught me. He grew up in Elejay and fished the Cahuta wilderness his whole life, back when there were still brook trout in every creek and you could walk for eight hours without seeing another person. He taught me how to read water, how to roll cast a five-weight in tight quarters, how to find the seams in the pockets where the fish hold in fast current. He died when I was 17, and every time I walk into the backcountry with a fly rod, I'm walking with him. The Jacks River is my water. It runs through the heart of the Cahuta wilderness, which straddles the Georgia Tennessee line in the southern Appalachians, about 45 minutes east of Dalton. The Cahuta is one of the biggest wilderness areas east of the Mississippi, over 36,000 acres of unbroken hardwood forest with no roads, no buildings, no cell service, and no maintained bridges across the river. The Jacks River Trail follows the river for about 15 miles from the Alakulsi Valley trailhead on the south end to Dally Gap on the north end. And in those 15 miles, you cross the river more than 40 times. No bridges. You wade. Every crossing. In March and April, when the water is up from spring rain, some of those crossings are waist deep and fast enough to knock you down if you're not careful. I fish the Jacks River every spring, usually two trips, sometimes three, always alone. I hike in from the south end, camp for two or three nights at a spot I've used for years. A flat bench above the river, about six miles in, sheltered by hemlocks, with a good fire ring and a flat spot for my tent. And I fish upstream and downstream from camp during the day. The wild rainbow and brown trout in the Jacks River are not big. Ten inches is a good fish, twelve is exceptional, but they're wild and they fight hard and the water they live in is the most beautiful water I've ever seen. The river runs over a bed of polished quartzite and sandstone, and in the pools the water is so clear you can see every rock and every fish and every crawdad on the bottom at six feet deep. The current is steady and cold, even in summer. In spring, it's cold enough to numb your legs through neoprene waiters in twenty minutes. I'm telling you about myself and about the river because I want you to understand that I know this place. I've been fishing the Jacks River for fourteen years. I've made this trip at least twenty five times. I know every pool, every riffle, every boulder, every logjam between the trailhead and my camp. I know where the big brown trout holds under the hemlock root ball a mile above camp. I know where the rainbows stack up in the tail out below the waterfall two miles downstream. I know this river, every corner, every surface, every feature in its place. In April of 2023, the river was different. Something was in it that I'd never encountered before, and by the second night, I was running down the trail in the dark with blood all over my hands and no intention of ever coming back. I drove up on a Wednesday morning, April 12th, took Highway 2 25 north out of Dalton, then cut east on gravel forest roads to the Alakulse Valley trailhead. The drive takes about an hour and 15 minutes from my house. I parked at the trailhead around eight. There were no other vehicles in the lot, which is normal for a Wednesday in early April. The Kohutta doesn't get crowded until May. I loaded my pack, tent, sleeping bag, pad, cook kit, water filter, food for three days, headlamp, first aid kit, rain jacket, a change of socks, and my fly fishing gear. Five-weight rod and a tube strapped to the outside of the pack. A small chest pack with my fly boxes and tippet and nippers. Total weight was about 40 pounds, which is heavier than I'd like, but manageable for six miles of relatively flat trail. The hike in followed the river. The Jacks River Trail is not maintained to any real standard. The Forest Service does some brushing, but the wilderness designation means no power tools and no real trail crews. So you're dealing with blowdowns, washouts, and stream crossings that change every year, depending on what the spring floods did to the river bed. The first mile was easy. Good trail, gentle grade. The river running about 50 yards to my left through the trees. The forest was beautiful. Big hardwoods. White oak. Tulip poplar. Hickory. Just starting to leaf out. That pale green haze that you get in the southern Appalachians in early April when everything is waking up. Dogwood blooming white in the understory. Trillium on the forest floor. The crossing started about a mile and a half in. The trail crossed the river at a shallow riffle and I waded across. The water about knee deep and cold through my boots. I wasn't wearing waders for the hike. I'd put those on at camp. My boots would dry by the fire tonight. By the third crossing, my feet were numb. The water was colder than I expected for April. I've crossed the Jacks dozens of times in spring and the temperature varies with rainfall and snowmelt from the higher elevations, but this was noticeably cold. My feet ached by the time I climbed out of the water on the far bank. I reached my camp around noon. The bench was just as I'd left it the previous October, flat, shaded by hemlocks, with the fire ring I'd built years ago from river stones still intact. The river ran about 30 feet below the bench, visible through the trees. I could hear it clearly, a steady rush that I've fallen asleep to more times than I can count. I set up camp, tent on the flat spot, pack under the hemlock where it would stay dry if it rained, firewood gathered from dead falls nearby. I ate a sandwich and drank some filtered water and then rigged up my rod. Five weight, nine foot with a tapered leader and a size 14 elk hair caddis, standard dry fly for the jacks in April. I walked upstream from camp following the river. The plan was to fish the first mile or so above camp, hitting the pools and the pocket water where the fish would be holding. The river above camp runs through a narrow section where the valley walls close in and the water picks up speed, cutting through small gorges and dropping over ledges into deep plunge pools. The fishing is best in the pools. You cast above the lip, let the fly drift over the drop, and the trout come up from the dark water below to take it. The first thing I noticed was the fish. Not the catching of fish. I wasn't catching anything, which was strange. April on the Jacks River is reliable fishing. The bugs are hatching, the water temperature is right, and the fish are active and feeding. I've never been skunked on the Jacks in April, but I worked through four good pools in the first half mile without a single strike. Not a rise, not a flash, not a follow. I changed flies twice, went to a pheasant tail nymph under an indicator, then to a small black woolly bugger, and still nothing. I stopped at a deep pool below a ledge and watched the water. This pool always held fish. I'd caught trout here on every trip for years. I stood on a boulder at the tail of the pool and looked into the clear water. The pool was empty. No fish. I could see the entire bottom, sand and gravel and dark rock, six feet deep in the center, and there was nothing in it. No trout, no chubs, no sculpin on the bottom, no crawdads tucked under the ledges. The pool was vacant. I stood there for a while, confused. Fish don't just leave a pool. They hold in pools because the depth and the current breaks give them shelter from predators and access to food. A pool like this one, with a ledge at the head and a boulder strewn tail out, should have held four or five trout minimum. But it was empty, sterile. I moved upstream to the next pool. Same thing, clear water, perfect structure, no fish. And the next, and the next. I fished upstream for about an hour and a half, covering a mile of river, and I did not see a single fish, not one. Every pool was empty, every run was empty. The river was flowing clean and cold, and there was nothing alive in it. That had never happened before, not here, not on any river I'd ever fished. Even in bad conditions, wrong temperature, wrong pressure, muddy water. You see fish. They might not eat, but they're there. They don't disappear from an entire mile of river. I reeled in and walked back to camp. I figured the fish had moved. Trout will relocate during high water events or temperature changes, and maybe a cold snap had pushed them downstream into deeper, warmer pools. It happened sometimes. I'd fish downstream in the morning and find them. I cooked dinner over the fire, instant mashed potatoes and a can of chili, which is my standard backcountry meal because I don't care about food when I'm fishing, and watched the daylight fade. The evening was mild, mid-fifties, the river sounded right. A barred owl started up across the valley around 730, that eight-note call bouncing off the hollow walls. Peepers were singing from a wet area up stream. Normal spring sounds, normal spring evening. I turned in around 9. I lay in my tent listening to the river and the peepers, and I fell asleep fast. Thursday morning I was up at 6. The air was cold, upper thirties, maybe low forties, and there was frost on the rain fly. I built a fire, made coffee, ate a granola bar, and put on my waders, neoprene chest waders, the kind that keep you dry and warm from the chest down. I rigged up my rod with a pheasant tail nymph and headed downstream. Downstream from camp, the river widens and slows. The pools are bigger and deeper, and the runs between them are long and flat with gravel bottoms. Good water, reliable water. I fished the first pool below camp and caught a rainbow trout on the second cast, small, maybe seven inches. But it was a fish, and after yesterday's empty water, I was relieved. I caught three more in the next pool. All rainbows, all small, all healthy. They fought hard and their colors were bright. The pink stripe vivid, the spots clean and dark. Normal fish. The river felt right again. I started to relax. Whatever had been going on upstream yesterday was localized. The fish were here. They just moved. About half a mile below camp, I came around a bend and found the first one. A trout. A big one. Thirteen or fourteen inches. A brown trout, which is unusual for the Jax River because the browns here rarely get above ten. It was lying on a flat rock at the water's edge, on the river left bank. Not in the water. On the rock. Out of the water. Dead. I waited over and looked at it. The fish was fresh. The eyes were clear. The gills were still red. The body was firm. It had been dead for a few hours at most. There were no marks on it that I could see. No wounds, no bites, no fungal patches. It looked healthy except for the fact that it was dead and on a rock. Fish end up on rocks sometimes. A heron drops one. An otter leaves a half-eaten carcass. A mink pulls one out and gets spooked. But those fish have marks. Puncture wounds from a beak, tooth marks, missing chunks. This fish was intact, untouched, laid out on the rock on its side with its mouth closed and its fins flat against its body. I picked it up. It was stiff but not frozen. I looked at it for a moment and then set it back down. Weird but not alarming. Fish die. Things happen. I kept fishing downstream. I caught two more small rainbows and missed a strike from what felt like a bigger fish in a deep run. The morning was good. Sunny, warming up. Bugs starting to hatch on the water. Small caddis and a few mayflies. A quarter mile below the brown trout, I found another one. This one was a rainbow about 11 inches, lying on a flat rock on the river right bank. Same presentation. On its side, intact, no marks, mouth closed, fins flat, fresh, dead. I looked at it for a long time. Two dead fish on rocks, a quarter mile apart, both intact, both placed on flat surfaces at the water's edge. Fish don't crawl out of the water and lie down on rocks. They don't arrange themselves neatly on flat surfaces and die. Something had taken these fish out of the river and put them there. But what puts a fish on a rock and doesn't eat it? Herons eat what they catch. Otters eat what they catch. Mink, raccoons, bears, they all eat the fish. They don't carry them to a flat rock and set them down whole and walk away. I stood in the river and looked at the banks on both sides. The forest was thick, hemlock and white pine on the slopes, with laurel and dog hobble in the understory. The ground was covered in dead needles and leaf litter. I scanned the tree line for movement, for an animal, for anything that might explain why two dead fish placed neatly on rocks a quarter mile apart. Nothing. The forest was still. A Carolina wren sang from somewhere in the laurel. The river ran. I was alone. I kept moving downstream. I was fishing less now and watching the banks more. Three hundred yards below the rainbow I found a third fish. Brown trout, ten inches on a flat rock, river left. Same condition. Fresh, intact, undamaged, placed. Then a fourth, about two hundred yards further. Rainbow nine inches. Same thing. Then a fifth. I stopped fishing. I reeled in my line and walked the bank scanning ahead. The fish were appearing at semi-regular intervals along the river. Every two hundred to three hundred yards, alternating banks, each one on a flat rock, each one fresh, each one whole. I found seven fish total over about a mile and a half of river. The last one was the biggest, a brown trout over fifteen inches, which would be the largest brown trout I'd ever seen from the Jacks River. It was lying on a broad flat rock at the head of a deep pool, positioned with its head facing upstream, its body straight, its tail and fins spread flat against the stone. I stood over that fish and my hands were shaking, not from cold, from the understanding that was forming in my head, the one I'd been pushing away since the second fish. Something was catching trout from this river, big trout, healthy trout, trout that had been alive within the last few hours, and placing them on rocks along the bank in a line, not eating them, not damaging them, arranging them, in a pattern. And the pattern led downstream, deeper into the wilderness, further from the trailhead, further from my truck. I turned around and walked back to camp. I spent the afternoon at the bench. I didn't fish. I sat by the fire ring and thought about the fish and tried to come up with an explanation that didn't make my stomach clench. The best I could manage was a die-off, some kind of toxin or disease event that was killing fish, and the current was depositing them on rocks along the bank. It happened sometimes. Agricultural runoff, chemical spills, sudden temperature changes. The fish could have died in the water and been carried to the bank by current and wave action. But the Jacks River is in a wilderness area. No agriculture, no industry, no roads near the water. The headwaters come straight off the Cahutta Ridgeline, as clean as any water in the southeast. And wave action doesn't place fish on flat rocks with their heads facing upstream and their fins spread flat. Current pushes dead fish into eddies and log jams. It doesn't arrange them. I thought about leaving. I had two more days of food and I could pack up and be at the trailhead by dark. But the trailhead was six miles south, which meant twenty-something river crossings. And I didn't want to wade the Jacks River twenty times after what I'd seen. I'd be in the water up to my waist, in the river where the fish were dying. I decided to stay one more night and leave in the morning. I'd get an early start, cross the river at the shallow spots where the water was no more than knee-deep and be at my truck by noon. One more night. The evening was quiet. I built the fire up and cooked dinner and watched the last light fade from the valley. The river ran below me. The same sound it always made, steady and constant. I could see the water through the trees, dark now, the surface catching the last gray light from the sky. At about 7.30, something happened on the river that I couldn't explain. The sound changed. The Jack's River makes a consistent sound, the rush and gurgle of moving water over rock. I've listened to it hundreds of nights. I know its rhythms, its tones, the way it rises and falls with the wind and the temperature. What I heard at 7.30 was a break in that sound. A disruption. A heavy splash, upstream, maybe a hundred yards from camp. Not a fish jumping. This was much louder. A deep, concussive sound. The sound of something heavy hitting the water, or something heavy coming out of the water. It echoed off the valley walls, and then the river sound closed back over it and it was gone. I stood up and faced upstream. I couldn't see the river from camp. The trees blocked the view. But I could hear it. The normal sound had resumed. Nothing else. No follow-up splash. No crashing in the brush. No animal sounds. I sat back down. My heart was going fast. Twenty minutes later, the same sound. This time from downstream, about the same distance. A heavy single concussion from the river. Water displaced by something large. Then silence. Then the river sound returning to normal. I sat by the fire and I didn't move. The splashes didn't come again. The peepers started up around eight. And the barred owl called from across the valley. And the night sounds filled in around me, and everything was normal, except for the cold feeling in my chest that had nothing to do with the temperature. I went to my tent at nine, but I didn't sleep. I lay on my back with my headlamp and my knife, and I listened to the river. The peepers went quiet around ten thirty, which is normal. They wind down as the temperature drops. The owl called a few more times and then stopped. The river was the only sound. At some point, I must have dozed off because I jerked awake to a sound I didn't immediately recognize. It was close, not at the river, close to camp, a wet sound, heavy and wet, a dragging, sliding sound, moving across the ground somewhere between my tent and the fire ring. I held still and listened. The sound moved slowly from my left to my right, which meant it was going from the upstream side of camp toward the downstream side. It lasted about ten seconds and then stopped, then a softer sound, a placing sound, something being set down on a hard surface, a quiet, careful contact, weight being transferred gently onto rock, then nothing, silence, the river. I didn't open my tent, I didn't look outside. I lay there and I gripped the handle of my knife and I waited. Five minutes, ten, nothing else happened. I didn't sleep again. Friday morning, I unzipped my tent at first light, maybe 6.15. The sky was gray, the forest was wet with dew, I could see my breath. I stepped out and looked around, the fire ring, the hemlock, my pack under the tree, everything where it should be, except there was a fish on the fire ring, a trout, a big brown trout, at least 14 inches. It was lying on the flat top stone of my fire ring, centered on its side, head facing upstream, fresh. The eyes were clear, the body was firm, no marks, no damage, a healthy, perfect fish, taken from the river and placed on the stones of my fire ring while I slept 30 feet away. I stared at it. The stone it was resting on was damp. There was a wet streak on the ground between the fire ring and the river bank. A trail of moisture and river sand, about 8 inches wide, running in a straight line from the water's edge up the slope to the camp. Something had come out of the river, crossed 30 feet of ground, and placed this fish on my fire ring. The wet trail had no footprints in it, no tracks of any kind. The ground on the bench was a mix of packed dirt and hemlock needles. And while it was soft enough to show a boot print, there were no prints in the wet trail. Whatever had carried this fish from the river to my camp had not left tracks. The only mark was the wet streak itself, a continuous damp line left by something wet from the river that had dragged or slid across the ground, leaving moisture but no foot impressions. I packed my camp in eight minutes. I didn't take the tent down properly. I just pulled the stakes, collapsed the poles, and stuffed the whole thing into the compression sack without folding it. I crammed my sleeping bag and pad into my pack, grabbed my rod tube, and left everything else. The cook kit, the water filter, the extra food. I left it. I left the fish on the fire ring. I headed south on the trail at a jog. The first river crossing was about a quarter mile from camp, a wide, shallow riffle, maybe knee deep. I stopped at the bank and looked at the water. I didn't want to go in. I had to cross the river more than 20 times to reach the trailhead. Every crossing meant wading in. Every crossing meant being in the water up to my knees or my waist or my chest. In the river where something was catching fish and carrying them onto shore and placing them on rocks. In the river where something had come out of the water in the dark and walked or crawled or slid up to my camp and left a fish on my fire ring. I stepped in. The water was cold and fast over the gravel bottom. I waded across in 10 seconds, the current pushing against my shins and climbed out on the far bank. Nothing happened. I kept moving. The second crossing was deeper, thigh deep in the center with a stronger current. I waded in and pushed across, my boots slipping on the smooth rocks. Halfway across, I felt something touch my left leg. I froze. The touch was light. A brush against the outside of my left calf just above the boot. Brief, soft. It could have been a branch in the current. It could have been a leaf or a piece of bark carried by the water. I looked down. The water was clear enough to see the bottom, gravel and sand, my boots, the current bending around my legs. Nothing else that I could see. The touch came again, same leg, higher, above the knee, firmer this time. A pressure that held for a second and then released. Not the current, not debris. Something in the water, touching my leg, and I couldn't see it. I lunged for the far bank. I took three big steps through the thigh-deep water, splashing, stumbling on the rocks, and hauled myself up onto the bank. I turned around and looked at the river. The pool where I had been standing was calm. The current ran smooth and unbroken. Nothing surfaced. Nothing moved. The water was clear and I could see the bottom and there was nothing there. I stood on the bank, breathing hard, water streaming off my legs, and I looked at the river and I didn't understand. I'd felt something. I'd felt it clearly. Pressure against my leg, through the fabric of my waders. Something solid, something that had reached out and touched me in the water and then was gone. I started walking again, fast. The trail stayed on the east bank for the next half mile and I didn't have to cross. I covered the ground quickly, almost running, my pack bouncing on my back, and my rod tube banging against tree branches. The next crossing was unavoidable. The trail ended at a steep bank where the river curved against a rock wall, and the only way forward was a cross. The crossing was wide, 40 feet, and deep in the center. I could see the bottom and the shallows near both banks, but the middle section was dark. Deep water, four feet, maybe five. The current was moderate but steady. I stood on the bank for a long time. I looked upstream and downstream, trying to find a shallower crossing point. There wasn't one. The rock wall on the east side ran for a hundred yards in both directions, and the only place where the west bank was accessible was here. I stepped in. The water rose over my boots, over my shins, over my knees. The gravel bottom gave way to smooth rock and my feet slipped. I caught myself and kept waiting. The water reached my waist, my chest. It was cold and the pressure of the current was constant against my body, pushing me downstream. I kept my feet wide and my center of gravity low, and I moved sideways, step by step, toward the far bank. In the center of the river, in the deepest part, the bottom dropped away. My foot went down and there was nothing there. No rock, no gravel, no bottom. Just water, deep and cold, and my boots swinging in empty space. I lurched forward and my other foot slipped off the ledge and I went under. The cold hit me everywhere at once. My head went below the surface and the current took me. I tumbled, my pack pulled me down and sideways. I kicked and my foot hit rock and I pushed upward and got my head above water. I gasped. The current was carrying me downstream, bouncing me off rocks, spinning me. My rod tube came loose from the pack and disappeared. My hands grabbed at anything, rocks, the bottom, the current itself. And my palms and fingers raked across the quartzite. Then something hit me from below. An impact against my lower back, from underneath driving me upward, hard. My body lifted in the water. My chest and shoulders came up above the surface. And I was shoved forward, not by the current, by something under me. A force, concentrated, pushing upward against my back with enough strength to lift a hundred and ninety pound man in a loaded pack out of the water. I went forward and down, face first into the shallows on the west bank. My hands hit the gravel bottom, and my face hit the water, and I scrambled. Hands and knees, crawling, pulling myself forward through the shin-deep water onto the bank. I dug my fingers into the wet sand and the rocks, and I dragged myself out of the river and onto dry ground. I lay there on the bank for maybe thirty seconds, coughing, bleeding from my hands. Both palms were torn up from the court-site, deep abrasions across the heels of both hands and the undersides of my fingers. My right knee was throbbing. Blood ran off my hands in thin streams and dripped onto the sand. I rolled over and sat up and looked at the river. The pool was still. The current ran through it smooth and dark and steady. Nothing broke the surface. Nothing moved beneath it that I could see. But at the head of the pool, where the river poured over the ledge into the deep water, something was happening. The surface was disturbed, not splashing, bulging. The water was swelling upward in a mound, displaced by something large just below the surface. The mound moved upstream, against the current, slowly, and then it flattened and the surface went smooth and the pool was just a pool again. Whatever had hit me from below had gone back upstream, against the current, under the surface, without ever breaking the water. I got to my feet, my hands were shaking and bleeding and my whole body was vibrating from the cold and the adrenaline. I picked up my pack, which was still on my back, the straps digging into my shoulders. I started walking. I crossed the river eleven more times before I reached the trailhead. I crossed fast, at the shallowest points I could find, never in water above my waist. Every crossing, I expected to feel the touch on my leg or the impact from below. It didn't happen. I crossed clean every time. And by the fifth or sixth crossing, I was moving on autopilot, my body doing the work while my mind stayed locked on the image of that water mound moving upstream against the current. I reached the trailhead at eleven forty five. My truck was there, no other vehicles. I threw my pack in the bed and got in and sat there with the engine running and the heater on full blast, bleeding on the steering wheel, looking at the trailhead and the river trail disappearing into the trees. I drove home. I cleaned my hands at the kitchen sink with soap and hydrogen peroxide and wrapped them in gauze. The cuts were ugly, but not deep enough for stitches. They'd heal on their own. I sat on my couch in wet clothes and I stared at the wall, and I tried to make sense of what had happened in the Jacks River drainage. I went back three weeks later, not to fish, not to camp. I went back because I needed to see the river in daylight from the trailhead and confirm to myself that it was just a river, that the things I'd experienced had explanations, the missing fish in the upper pools, the dead trout on the rocks, the splashes, the thing on my fire ring, the touch on my leg, the impact from below. I needed to stand at the bank and look at the water and tell myself that rivers are rivers and fish are fish, and nothing in a trout stream in North Georgia has the size or the strength or the intent to shove a grown man out of the water from below. I parked at the trailhead on a Saturday morning in early May. There were two other trucks in the lot this time. The weather was warm and the hiking season was picking up. I walked down the trail to the first river crossing, about a quarter mile in. I stood on the bank and looked at the water. The river was beautiful, clear, cold, running clean over the court site. I could see the bottom. I could see three trout holding in the current break behind a boulder. Small rainbows, five or six inches, their bodies flickering against the gravel. Normal, alive, the fish were back. I crouched on the bank and watched them for a while. They held in the current, facing upstream, their tails pulsing to hold position. One of them darted to the surface and took something, a bug, an emerger, and dropped back to its station. Feeding, healthy, normal. I looked downstream. The pool below the riffle was deep and green. I could see the bottom in the shallows, but the center was dark. Deep water, the kind of water I'd been swimming in when something hit me from below. I looked at the pool for a long time. The surface was smooth. The current ran through it and curled against the far bank and continued downstream. Nothing moved below the surface. Nothing disturbed the water. Just a pool in a river and a forest in the mountains. I stood up and walked back to my truck. On the drive home, I stopped at the Cahutta Wilderness ranger station in Chatsworth. It was a small office, mostly unmanned, but there was a woman behind the desk, a forest service employee, maybe 50, with a name tag that said R. Donovan. I told her I had been fishing the Jacks River in mid-April and had noticed some unusual fish kills. I asked if there had been any reports of die-offs or water quality issues in the drainage. She checked her computer and said no. No reports, no water quality complaints. She asked what I'd seen. I told her I had found dead trout on rocks along the river, about seven of them over a mile and a half stretch, all intact, no visible cause of death. I told her I'd also noticed that the upper pools near my camp were completely empty of fish. She wrote it down and said she'd pass it along to the fisheries biologist. Then she asked me something that made the hair on my arms stand up. Were the fish arranged? I looked at her. What do you mean? Were they placed on the rocks in any particular way? Heads facing upstream, that kind of thing? I didn't answer for a few seconds. Yeah, I said, they were. Heads upstream, on flat rocks. She nodded. She wrote something else down. She didn't look surprised. Has someone else reported this? I asked. A fisherman reported something similar last spring, April of 22. Same stretch of the Jacks River, same thing. Dead trout placed on rocks along the bank. And a group of backpackers found a fish on a rock near their camp in 2019. On a rock that was about 50 yards from the water. They reported it because they couldn't figure out how a fish got that far from the river. 50 yards? That's what they said. Was there ever an explanation? She looked at me for a moment. The fisheries biologist went in and did a survey. Water quality was fine. Fish populations were normal. He didn't find any dead fish on rocks. He wrote it up as an isolated event, possible otter activity. Otters don't carry fish 50 yards from the river and leave them whole on rocks. She looked at me again. Longer this time. No, she said, they don't. I thanked her and left. I sat in my truck in the parking lot and looked at the mountains rising to the east, the forested ridges climbing toward the Cahutta Crest, and I thought about R. Donovan's face when she asked me if the fish were arranged. She hadn't been surprised. She'd been confirming something she already suspected. This had happened before. Not once. Multiple times. Over at least four years. Something in the Jacks River was catching fish and carrying them out of the water and placing them on rocks along the bank in a pattern. And the Forest Service knew about it and had no explanation and had written it off as otters. I don't fish the Jacks River anymore. I fish the Tocoa Tailwater now, which is a put-and-take trout stream that runs through a state park with a parking lot and a bathhouse, and families having picnics on the bank. The fish are stocked rainbows that come out of a hatchery truck every two weeks and have no idea what a natural insect looks like. It's not the same. It's not even close. But the water is shallow, and the banks are mowed, and there are people everywhere, and nothing in that river has ever put a fish on a rock or touched my leg or hit me from below. I think about the Jacks River every day. I think about the wet streak on the ground between the river and my fire ring, eight inches wide with no tracks. I think about whatever made that streak, something that came out of the river and moved across thirty feet of ground and placed a fish on my fire ring and went back to the water without leaving a single footprint. Something that moved across dry land by sliding or dragging or crawling in a way that doesn't leave prints. Something wet and heavy and silent. I think about the touch on my leg in the crossing, light, then firm, curious, testing. I think about the impact from below, the force that lifted me out of the water. I weigh a hundred and ninety pounds. My pack weighed forty. Whatever hit me from below moved two hundred and thirty pounds of weight upward through water with a single push. That's not a fish. That's not an otter. That's not a beaver or a snapping turtle or any animal that lives in a southern Appalachian trout stream. I don't know what's in the Jacks River. I don't have a name for it, and I'm not going to guess. I know it's strong. I know it catches fish. I know it places them on rocks and patterns along the bank. Heads upstream, intact, undamaged. I know it can leave the water and cross dry ground without leaving tracks. I know it's been doing this for at least four years, probably longer, and I know the Forest Service has no explanation for it and isn't looking for one. My hands healed. The scars are there, rough, white patches on both palms and the undersides of my fingers where the court site tore the skin off. My wife asked what happened, and I told her I slipped on the rocks while waiting, which is true as far as it goes. I didn't tell her what made me slip. I didn't tell her about the fish on the fire ring or the thing that touched my leg or the water that moved upstream against the current after it threw me onto the bank. There are some things you don't tell the people you love, because telling them means asking them to be afraid of something they can't see and can't fight and can't understand. I carry that alone. It's better that way. Heavier, but better. If you fish the Jacks River, and people do every spring every summer, good people with fly rods and waders and a love for wild water, watch the rocks along the bank. If you see a trout on a flat rock, fresh, whole, undamaged, with its head facing upstream and its fin spread flat, get out of the water. Get out of the water and get back to the trailhead and don't cross the river again. Because something put that fish there and it's still in the water and it knows you're standing in it.

Speaker 2:
[40:03] Amazon presents Jeff vs. Taco Truck Salsa. Whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habanero? More like habaner, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon.

Speaker 1:
[40:42] My name is Cody, I'm 19. I dropped out of senior year at Stearns High School in Millinock at last November because I was sick of it, and my dad didn't care one way or the other as long as I paid rent. I've been working since, bagging groceries at the Hannaford, stocking a tractor supply, three months pouring concrete pads for cell towers down near Bangor. None of it paid much. Last April, my uncle Lenny offered me a job on his logging crew, small outfit. Just him and two other guys cutting timber on private land for some land owner out near Greenville. The kid they had before me quit because his girlfriend got pregnant. Lenny needed a body to run fuel and water and chainsaw parts to the guys on the cut. He said he'd pay me 140 a day cash plus food. I said yes before he got the whole offer out. That's how I ended up five miles off the Golden Road in the North Main Woods last spring. And that's why I'm writing this. I'm not going to tell you I'm a tough guy. I'm not. I'm five foot nine and I weigh a buck sixty, and I got winded carrying a bar oil jug up a slope on my second day. But I grew up in Millinocket, which is a town that eats people who aren't tough, so I know the woods. My dad took me grouse hunting since I was eleven. I've been around chainsaws and skidders my whole life. I wasn't green, just small and young and broke. I'm writing this because last April something happened out there that I haven't been able to let go of. The three other guys on that cut won't talk about it. I tried to bring it up with Uncle Lenny at Thanksgiving, and he got up and walked out of the room and didn't come back till dessert. So it's on me to say it out loud, or on paper, whatever this is. Here's what happened. The crew was three guys plus me. My Uncle Lenny, 52, runs the outfit, owns the skitter and the forwarder and both chainsaws, been cutting timber in Maine since he was my age. He's my dad's older brother, and he's always been good to me, which is why I was even on the crew because there were probably guys more useful than me he could have hired. The other two were Bud and Travis. Bud was 45, wiry, missing half his left ring finger from a chainsaw kickback 10 years back. He was the best cutter Lenny had, lived in East Millinocket and had three daughters. Quiet guy, nice, but you had to earn it. Travis was 29. He ran the skitter, loud, tattoos up both arms, wife and a little girl at home. He was new on the crew, only been with Lenny six months, and he'd already had two fights with Bud over stupid stuff. But he could skid logs faster than anyone Lenny had ever worked with, so Lenny kept him. We drove up on a Monday morning, April 24th. Lenny owns a beat up F-350 with a steel rack and a plow mount that he takes off in April. We loaded food, jugs of water, extra fuel, cots, a wall tent, a propane stove, and enough gear for a week. The job was on private timberland about 90 miles northwest of Millinocket. I don't want to say exactly where because I don't want anyone going up there, but I'll say it was off the Golden Road, which is a 96 mile private logging road that cuts through the North Main Woods. The Golden Road is something you have to see to understand. It's a gravel highway in the middle of nowhere. Trucks hauling logs run on it 24 hours a day during the cutting season. There's no fuel, no food, no houses, no cell service, no nothing for the whole length of it. Just woods on both sides. Millions of acres of private timberland, spruce, fir, birch, some hardwood in the lower spots. The biggest piece of wild country in the eastern United States. We turned off the Golden Road onto a private lane that Lenny had the key to. Gate with a combination lock. The lane was worse than the Golden Road. Potholes a foot deep. Washouts from the spring runoff. One section where you had to drive through two inches of standing water for about a hundred feet. Lenny's truck handled it. Mine wouldn't have. We drove about five miles in before the lane ended at a turnaround. There was a clearing maybe a hundred feet across where Lenny had skidded in his equipment the week before. The skidder was parked under a tarp. The forwarder too. Both machines had been pulled off the main cut because of the weather. We set up the wall tent at the edge of the clearing, put three cots in it, ran a tarp over a folding table for a kitchen, and had camp set up by noon. The first afternoon we walked the cut. Bud led. Lenny and Travis followed. I tagged along. The cut was about half a mile into the woods from our camp, up a gentle grade through mixed forest. Lots of white spruce, some balsam fur, good timber. The boundary was marked with orange flagging tied to trees every thirty feet or so. I asked Lenny who the landowner was. Guy named Mullen, he said. Wendell Mullen. Owns about four thousand acres up here. Family land. Been in his family since eighteen something. He cut it before? Lenny shook his head. Not in a long time. He's selectively harvesting it now because his kids don't want it. Wants to take out the mature stems before they rot. He's paying good. That's all he said about it. We walked the flagged boundary, got our bearings, and went back to camp. Bud and Lenny wanted to start cutting the next morning at first light. That night, Travis cooked steaks on the propane stove, and Bud drank a single beer, and Lenny drank three, and I drank two because Lenny said I could. The night was cold. Maine in April is not warm. It probably dropped into the upper 20s after the sun went down. The fire we built was a small one in a pit Lenny dug with a shovel. We sat around it wearing car hearts with the collars up, and the cuffs tucked into our gloves. The woods around us were quiet in the way Maine woods are quiet in April. No peepers yet. Too cold, too early. No owls that I heard. Just the wind in the tops of the spruce, and once in a while a tree creaking from the temperature change. Normal stuff. Nothing worth mentioning. I went to sleep in the wall tent around 10. I shared it with Bud and Travis. Lenny slept in his truck because, he said, he snored and he didn't want to keep us up. I think he also just wanted his own space. Lenny's not the type to bunk in with the crew. I fell asleep fast. I woke up once, maybe two in the morning, because Travis was up and unzipping the tent. You okay? I said. He was gone maybe five minutes and came back and zipped the tent up and lay back down and didn't say anything else. I went back to sleep. In the morning, I asked him if he'd slept all right. He said, yeah. Then he said something that I remember now, but didn't think much about then. He said, I thought I saw a deer last night. Out past the equipment. But when I looked again, it was gone. Deer are sneaky, I said, which is a stupid thing to say, but I was 19 and I was tired. He nodded, didn't say more. We ate breakfast and went to the cut. Tuesday was the first real day of work. Bud and Lenny had their chainsaws going by 6.30. Travis was in the skitter pulling logs out of the cut and stacking them at the landing. My job was to keep everyone fueled and watered and to run tools back and forth as needed. It was steady work, not hard, but steady. I was on my feet all day carrying jugs and gas cans and wrenches. The cut was going well. The trees were clean, no rot, no cat face, good straight stems. Lenny seemed happy. Bud was quiet like always, but he was moving fast, dropping trees with a precision I'd never seen before. Travis was loud and cussing in the skitter and getting the logs to the landing as fast as Bud could cut them. Around 2 in the afternoon, I was walking back to camp to grab a 5-gallon jug of chainsaw gas when I saw the first pile. It was at the edge of the cut, just past the orange flagging about 20 feet into the uncut woods. I saw it because I happened to look that way. If I'd been looking straight ahead, I would have walked right past. It was a pile of bones, not a scattered pile, a stacked pile. The bones were arranged into a small mound, maybe 2 feet high, made of what looked like deer bones. I could see the legs, the ribs, the pelvis pieces. Some of the bones were old and white. Some were fresher, still had bits of sinew on them. A skull sat on top of the pile, white-tailed doe. The antler sockets were empty, a female, no antlers. I stood there looking at it. I've seen a lot of deer kills in the Maine woods. Coyote kills, bobcat kills, car hits that got dragged off by scavengers. None of them looked like this. Coyotes scatter bones. Scavengers leave a mess. This pile was compact, neat. The bones were stacked on top of each other in a way that you'd have to do with your hands. I walked back to where Bud was cutting and waited for him to finish a stem. He let the tree fall, looked at it, and then killed the saw. Hey, I said, there's a pile of bones off the cut line, back about 40 yards. Whose bones? Deer, I think. It's stacked up, like somebody put it there. He pulled off his hearing protection. Show me. I walked him back to the spot. He looked at the pile for about 30 seconds. His face didn't change, but I noticed his shoulders did. They came up a little. Tight. Hunter, he said. Guy takes a deer, dresses it out, cleans the bones and stacks them. Trophy thing. Some guys do it. Out here? Could be from years ago. The ribs still have meat on them. Bud looked at me. He didn't answer. Bud. Don't worry about it, Cody. Get back to work. He walked back to his saw and started it up. I stood there for another few seconds looking at the pile, and then I went and got the gas jug and delivered it, and I didn't mention it again that day. But that night at camp, I watched Bud. He didn't eat much. He looked at the woods past the equipment a lot. Lenny noticed too. Lenny and Bud had words and low voices over by the trucks before we sat down. And after that, Lenny was quieter than usual. Travis didn't notice any of it. He told a long story about a fight he got into at a bar in Brownville last winter, and Lenny half-listened, and Bud stared at the fire, and I ate my chili, and I watched them all. Wednesday morning, I woke up at 5. It was still dark. I had to pee, so I got up and unzipped the tent. Our camp was in the clearing, the tent, the cook tarp, the two big machines under their tarps on the far side. Lenny's truck parked near the tent. I stepped out and walked about 20 feet from the tent to relieve myself behind a spruce. When I turned around, I saw something at the edge of the clearing. I'm going to describe this exactly as I remember it and not add anything. It was on the far side of the clearing, past the equipment, right at the treeline, about 40 yards from me. It was low to the ground, maybe 3 feet tall at the shoulder. It was four-legged, or that's what I thought at first. The shape was wrong, too long, too many sections. The light was gray and pre-dawn and I couldn't make out details. But the silhouette was unmistakable. It was drinking, or eating, from something on the ground. I didn't move. I didn't yell. I stood there with my zipper halfway up and watched it. It lifted its head. I saw the outline of its head against the slightly lighter sky behind the trees. The head was not the head of a bear, not the head of a moose, not the head of a deer. I can't tell you what it was the head of. It was long and narrow, and the proportions were not right for anything I know. It turned. It looked at me. I felt it look at me. I couldn't see its eyes, but I felt the weight of its attention in my chest. Then it went back into the trees. Not fast, not slow. It moved smooth and low between the trunks and was gone. I stood there for maybe 30 seconds. I don't know. Time was funny. Then I walked back to the tent, zipped it closed, crawled into my sleeping bag, and lay there until I heard Bud get up at 6. When we were eating breakfast, I thought about telling them. I thought about how it would sound. I thought about Travis laughing. I thought about Lenny's face. I didn't tell them. I went to work like normal. Wednesday was when things started going sideways. Travis lost a chain on the skitter around 9. He walked back to camp to get a spare. He came back 20 minutes later with a weird look on his face. Lenny, he said, Did you move my jacket? Lenny shook his head. Bud? Nope. Cody? No. I left my jacket on the cot this morning. Red Carhart, it's not there. Did you take it off somewhere else? Lenny said. I haven't been anywhere but the skitter. I left it on the cot. I know I did because I almost grabbed it, and then I thought it was going to warm up. Lenny straightened up. All right, we'll find it later. Somebody moved my jacket. Travis, we'll find it later. Travis went back to the skitter cussing. Bud caught Lenny's eye, and they had a look between them that I wasn't supposed to see, but I did. An hour later, I walked back to camp to grab another bar oil jug. I looked for the jacket out of curiosity. I didn't find it in the tent. I didn't find it on the table. I didn't find it in the truck. I walked around the whole perimeter of the camp looking for it. I found it hanging from a branch about 12 feet up a spruce tree at the edge of the clearing. Red Carhart. No mistaking it. It was draped over a branch by one sleeve, the rest of it hanging down. Twelve feet up. Nobody in camp could have put it there without a ladder, and we didn't have a ladder. I stood under the tree and looked at it. I looked around. The woods were quiet. The sky was gray. It was maybe 50 degrees and the wind was out of the west, and the tops of the spruces were moving a little. I walked back to the cut and I got Lenny. You gotta come see something, I said. He came with me. He didn't ask questions. I think he already knew. We stood under the spruce. He looked up at the jacket. He looked at me. He looked up at the jacket again. Huh, he said. That was it. Huh. He had me go back and get Bud. Bud came and stood with us and stared up at the jacket for about a minute. Then he and Lenny stepped away and had a conversation I couldn't hear. It went on for maybe five minutes. I saw Bud shake his head twice. I saw Lenny look up at the jacket again and then at the sky and then at Bud. They came back over. Climb up and get that, Lenny told me. Me? You're the lightest. Just shinny up and knock it down. I climbed. Spruces are bad trees to climb. The branches are brittle and the sap gets everywhere and the needles scratch your face. I got up about ten feet and reached the branch where the jacket was hanging. The branch was a lower one, an old dead limb about two inches thick that was angling down. I grabbed the jacket and pulled it off and let it drop. As I was climbing down, I saw something on the trunk of the tree, scratches, four of them. Running vertically up the bark on the side of the trunk, I was coming down. Each one was deep enough to expose the light inner wood under the bark. They were parallel, evenly spaced. They went up past where I'd been climbing and kept going up into the tree further than I could see from my position. I dropped the last six feet to the ground. There's marks on the tree, I said. Bud was already looking. He walked around the trunk and studied the scratches. He ran his finger along one of them. His finger came back with a little bit of resin on it, fresh. The wood had only been exposed recently. Bear, he said, but his voice wasn't confident. Bear wouldn't hang a jacket up there, Lenny said. No. They picked up the jacket. Travis' red car heart, they turned it over. There was a tear along the back, a long one, running from the collar down to about the middle of the back. The fabric was pulled apart, not cut, torn, with the edges frayed. Lenny folded the jacket. We don't tell Travis, he said. Lenny, not yet. We walked back to camp. I carried the jacket. Bud was quiet. Lenny was quiet. I was a 19-year-old kid, and they were treating me like someone who needed to keep it together, so I kept it together. We hid the jacket in Lenny's truck cab under the passenger seat. When Travis came back to camp that evening, we told him we hadn't found it yet. He cussed about it for 10 minutes and then forgot about it when Lenny opened a bottle of Jim Beam and passed it around. That was Wednesday night. Thursday, I woke up and I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be at the Hannaford Bagging Groceries. I wanted to be anywhere else. I got up anyway. I made coffee on the propane stove. I ate a piece of bread with peanut butter on it. I went to the cut and I worked. At around 11, Lenny called Bud and Travis over and said we were shutting down for lunch. We walked back to camp, the four of us, and sat on stumps and ate sandwiches. Lenny didn't say anything for a while. Then he cleared his throat. Boys, I got to tell you something. Travis looked up from his sandwich. About what? About this cut. Wendell Mullen told me when I took the contract that there was an old family homestead on the property, foundation, and a chimney. He said to stay at least 300 feet away from it when we cut. Family sentimental thing, he said. Okay, Travis said. So where is it? That's the thing. I thought it was farther south. I looked at his map and I thought we were a good 500-600 feet from it. But I walked the line this morning before you guys were up. And I think the old place is about 200 feet north of our boundary, which means we're closer than he wanted us to be. Bud was watching Lenny carefully. Why are you telling us this? Travis said, because I want us to move the boundary. I want to pull the cut line back another 150 feet from the north side. We'll lose some stems, but we'll still have a decent volume. Travis made a face. Why, if we're not cutting into the homestead, what's the problem? Lenny didn't answer right away. Bud spoke up, because Lenny said he'd stay 300 feet. So we stay 300 feet, okay? It's his contract. Travis grunted. Whatever, you're the boss. We moved the flagging that afternoon. It was slow work because we had to re-measure from the homestead site, which meant finding the homestead. Lenny led us to it. He'd been there already. I figured out later. He knew exactly where it was. The old homestead was about 200 feet into the woods from our previous cut line. It was nothing much. The stone foundation of a small house, maybe 20 feet by 20 feet, and part of a chimney still standing at one end. The stones were covered in moss. Birch trees were growing out of the foundation. The chimney had collapsed at the top and the rubble was piled around the base. It had been abandoned for a hundred years, easy, maybe longer. There was a root cellar, or what had been a root cellar, at one end. The entrance was a collapsed hole in the ground, mostly filled in with leaves and dirt. You couldn't see into it. The hole was maybe three feet across and angled down into the earth. I stood near the chimney and looked at the root cellar hole. I had a feeling I didn't want to put words on. I just didn't want to stand near it. Bud was at the far corner of the foundation looking at the stones. He bent down and picked something up, held it in his hand for a second. Then he put it back where he found it. I walked over. What did you find? Nothing. Let me see. He hesitated then stepped aside. There was a small pile of stones on top of the foundation corner. Not the old foundation stones, smaller ones, arranged in a shape, a rough triangle about the size of my palm, with one stone stacked on top of two others, fresh, not mossed over. Put there recently. I looked at Bud. Cody, he said, stop looking around. Let's go back and remark the line. We remarked the line. We moved the whole boundary back 150 feet. Lenny was right. We lost some stems, but the new boundary was 450 feet from the foundation instead of 200. Better margin. At dinner that night, Lenny made a phone call. He had a satellite phone, not a cell phone, a real sat phone that he kept in the truck for emergencies. He walked off into the woods with it. Bud and Travis and I sat at the table and ate. I could hear Lenny's voice in the distance, but not the words. He came back after about 10 minutes. He put the phone on the table. Who were you talking to? Travis said. Wendell Mullen, the land owner. Yeah, what for? Lenny looked at Bud. Bud looked back at him. Some understanding passed between them. I was checking about the contract, Lenny said. Nothing important. Travis rolled his eyes. Y'all are weird today. Lenny poured himself a drink. I went to bed. I didn't sleep much Thursday night. I kept thinking about the thing I'd seen in the clearing Wednesday morning. The way its head turned. The way it moved into the trees. I thought about the jacket 12 feet up. I thought about the scratches on the trunk. I thought about the triangle of stones on the foundation. I was still awake at about 2 in the morning when I heard the noise. It was coming from outside the tent. It was a low sound, a vibration more than a noise. It lasted maybe 3 seconds, stopped, then started again. It wasn't close. It was coming from back in the woods, maybe 100 yards out. Bud stirred in his cot. He sat up. You hear that? He whispered. Yeah. Travis was snoring. He hadn't heard anything. The sound came again, longer this time. It had a quality to it I can't describe. It wasn't a growl. It wasn't a call. It was a sustained vibration, something big making a low rolling sound. Bud got out of his cot and moved to the tent door. He unzipped it slowly, just enough to look out. He was still for a long time, maybe two minutes. Then he zipped the tent back up and came over to my cot. Stay in your bag, he whispered. Don't get up for any reason. What is it? I don't know, but we're leaving in the morning. Don't tell Travis yet. Just stay in your bag and go to sleep. He went back to his cot. I lay there with my eyes open for another two hours. The sound came four more times over that period. Each time it was a little closer. Then it stopped and didn't come back. I finally fell asleep somewhere around four. Friday morning, 5.45. Lenny woke us up by banging on the tent pole. Get up, we're packing. Travis groaned. What? We got two more days. Change of plans, get up, we're loading out. Travis sat up. His hair was sticking up and his eyes were bleary. Why are we loading out? Did something happen? Wendell canceled the contract. He canceled. Last night, I just got the message on the sat phone. He's paying us out for what we cut and we're going home. That's stupid. Why would he? Travis, pack your stuff. Lenny's voice had a tone I'd never heard before. Travis shut up. We packed. It took us till about 10 to get the camp broken down and the equipment loaded. The skitter and the forwarder had to be driven back down the lane to the Golden Road, which took time. Lenny and Bud drove the machines. Travis drove the F-350 with me in it. I was glad to be in the truck and not in the woods. We were halfway back to the Golden Road, Lenny in the lead on the skitter, and us in the truck behind him, when Travis stopped the truck. Hold on, he said. What? I left my good knife at camp. It was on the table. I gotta go back. Travis, it's a knife. Get another one. It was my dad's. I'm not leaving it. It'll take me ten minutes. Lenny's gonna... Lenny won't even know. Sit here. I'll be back in ten. He got out and started jogging back up the lane toward camp. I sat in the truck. I waited. Ten minutes went by. Then fifteen. Then twenty. I got out of the truck and walked up the lane toward camp. It was a mile or so back. The lane cut through spruce and fur. The trees closed in on both sides. It was maybe eleven in the morning and the sun was out, but the light didn't make it through the canopy well. I walked about half a mile before I heard him. It wasn't a scream. It was a yell. A short, loud shout cut off in the middle. It came from up the lane, from the direction of camp. Maybe four hundred yards ahead. I ran. I ran up the lane. My boots hitting the mud. My hat coming off at some point and me not stopping to grab it. I ran and I called his name. Travis. Travis. I rounded a bend in the lane and I saw him. He was on the ground. He was on his hands and knees in the mud. He was crawling toward me, toward the trucks. Something was behind him. I'm going to try to describe this and I'm going to fail because I couldn't see it clearly. The light was bad. The trees were thick. And I wasn't looking straight at it. I was looking at Travis. But I saw it in my peripheral vision and I saw it turn when I came around the bend. It was in the lane. It was big. It was low. The same shape I'd seen in the clearing on Wednesday morning. It was on Travis or just off him. One of its, I don't know what to call them, appendages. One of its appendages was touching his leg. He was dragging himself away from it on his hands and knees. When I came around the bend, it pulled back, fast. It went off the lane into the trees on the uphill side. The branches moved and the undergrowth moved, and then it was gone and the woods were still. I ran to Travis. He was bleeding from his right leg. There was a long tear in his jeans from the back of his knee down to his ankle, and blood was soaking through. But he was moving. He was conscious. He was cussing, repeating the same word over and over. I got under his arm and lifted. He was heavier than me by 50 lbs, but adrenaline is a real thing, and I got him up. We started down the lane toward the truck. He was limping hard. He kept looking back over his shoulder. It had me, he said. It had me. Cody, it had me. Don't talk, just walk. I was at the tent. I grabbed the knife. I turned around and it was in the door of the tent with me. In the door. I got past it and ran. It hit me from the side out in the lane. It had my leg, Cody. I was on the ground and it had my leg and it was pulling me. You fought it. I had the knife. I stuck it. I stuck it right in its, I don't know what, its head or its side. I stuck it and it let go for a second and I ran. And then it got me again. Then you came. We got to the truck. I got him into the passenger seat. I got in the driver's side. I'd never driven an F-350 before, but I'd driven my dad's Dakota and it couldn't be that different. I put it in drive and started down the lane as fast as I could go without bouncing off the ruts. We caught up to Lenny and Bud at the gate on the Golden Road. They'd just finished loading the skitter onto the low boy. Lenny saw us coming and saw Travis through the windshield and his face went white. We got Travis to the hospital in Greenville. The doctors said he had deep lacerations on his right calf and thigh. The wounds were parallel, four of them, about six inches long, about two inches apart. Like something had grabbed him with one hand and dragged it down his leg while it pulled. The cuts were deep, but they missed the artery. He got forty-three stitches. He told the doctors he'd fallen into a piece of equipment. A rake attachment on a bulldozer, he said. They didn't believe him, but they stitched him up anyway. I sat in Lenny's truck in the hospital parking lot while Bud waited inside with Travis. It was just me and Lenny. It was dark. It was maybe nine at night by then. We'd been there for hours. Lenny was smoking a cigarette. He didn't smoke normally. He'd bummed it off a guy in the parking lot. Cody, yeah, I want to tell you something, and I need you to not tell anybody, your dad especially. Okay. He took a long drag. When I talked to Wendel last night on the sat phone, I asked him about the homestead. I told him we'd moved the cut line back, but weird stuff was happening. I told him about the jacket and the bones. I asked him what was up with his family's land. What did he say? He said his grandfather built that house in 1891, lived in it for two years and then moved out. Family doesn't talk about why, but there's a rule on the Mullen land that's been passed down for four generations. You don't cut within a thousand feet of the old place. You don't hunt within a thousand feet of it. You don't go in after dark ever. You respect it. Respect what? He didn't say. But he said that when he gave me the contract, he should have been clearer about the distance. He said he figured 300 feet was enough. He said he was wrong. Jesus. He said his grandfather's brother disappeared near the old place in 1893. They never found him, just found his boots in the yard of the house, and a piece of his jacket on the chimney. And he still owns the land? His family still owns it, just leaves that section alone. He says there's about 200 acres around the homestead that nobody in the family has walked in 60 years. He finished his cigarette. He flicked the bud into the parking lot. I'm not taking any more work from Wendell Mullen, he said. And you and me and Bud and Travis are not talking about any of this. Okay, you understand me, Cody, nobody. I understand. He nodded. We sat there in the truck. After a while, Bud came out of the hospital and said Travis was going to be fine and the hospital was keeping him overnight for observation. Lenny drove us home to Millinocket. It took three hours. Nobody spoke the whole drive. I quit the logging crew a week later. I told Lenny I wanted to try something indoors. He didn't argue. I think he was relieved. Travis healed up. He's got scars on his right leg that he tells people are from a job site accident. He's still working for Lenny. Bud too. They never talk about the Millincut. I've seen Bud at the Hannaford a couple of times and we nodded each other and that's it. I went back to the tractor supply job. I'm still there. Eight months in, I make decent money and I don't have to go into the woods. I've thought a lot about what I saw in that clearing Wednesday morning. I've tried to fit it into an animal I know. I can't. It wasn't a bear. It wasn't a moose. It wasn't a wolverine or a fisher or a cougar, though cougars aren't even supposed to be in Maine. It had too many sections. It moved wrong. The head was long and narrow and the body was long and low and there were too many joints. That's all I can say. I've thought about what Travis said about stabbing it with his knife. He still has the knife. He cleaned it with bleach that same night in the hospital sink, but there's a stain on the blade near the hilt that won't come out. Dark red brown. He won't throw the knife away. He also won't touch it if he can help it. He keeps it in a drawer in his garage. I've thought about Wendell Mullen's great uncle, the boots in the yard, the piece of jacket on the chimney. 1893. A hundred and thirty years ago. Whatever is in those woods has been there a long time. I don't think it's from the homestead. I think the homestead was built too close to it. I think Wendell's grandfather figured that out in 1891 or 92 or 93. And he moved his family out, and the family has been respecting that thousand foot boundary ever since. They know. They just don't talk about it. Rural Maine is full of things people don't talk about. I still hunt grouse with my dad in the fall. I still drive out to the lakes near Millinocket and fish for bass in the summer. I haven't stopped going into the Maine woods. The Maine woods are my whole life, but I don't go past a certain point anymore. I don't go deep. I stick to places with roads and camps and other people. I don't cut timber, and I don't work anywhere near the Golden Road. I won't even drive on it. I think about the bone piles sometimes. The stacked deer bones just outside the flagging. I think they were markers. I think whatever lives in those 200 acres makes them. I think it puts them at the edges of its territory as a warning. And I think Wendel's family knows that, and I think they've seen the bone piles for four generations. And I think that's why the rule exists. We crossed a line. We didn't mean to. Lenny didn't know the rule, not really. And he didn't ask. Wendel didn't explain, or didn't explain enough, because there are some things you don't say out loud to a contractor because they think you were crazy, and they wouldn't take the work. So we went in, and we cut close to the old place, and the thing in those woods let us know. It moved Travis's jacket. It scratched a tree. It left a marker on the foundation. It made noises at our camp at night. And when we didn't leave fast enough, it came for us. We got out, all four of us, alive. Travis with a bad leg. The rest of us with some stories we won't tell. That's not nothing. That's better than Wendel's great uncle did. I don't know what's out there. I don't want to know. I'm writing this down because if you ever get offered a job cutting timber on private land in the North Main Woods, and the land owner tells you there's a spot you can't go near, I want you to take him seriously. Take him really seriously. Ask him the distance, double it, triple it. Don't cut a stem within a mile of whatever he's telling you to avoid. Because some land owners up here are telling you the truth. They've just been telling it for so long, and so carefully, that it doesn't sound like the truth anymore. It sounds like a weird family thing. A superstition. An old story. It's not. It's a rule. And the rule is there because people died making it. Don't break it.