by Watt Key
But Stanley was crazy. Were these things worth dying for? Nobody said anything about having to die for them.
My thoughts kept going in circles, and, despite how I’d arrived, I was soon right back where I started.
I’ve got no life back home. My parents are missing, probably dead. People think I’m crazy. There’s only one way out of this. Get proof these creatures exist. Then you can worry about living.
I stood and began pulling my clothes out of the backpack and spreading them on limbs to dry. Then I set about making camp beneath an oak tree just above the ledge. The slope of its trunk created enough high ground for me to get out of the mud, and the thought of having the tree at my back gave me comfort. I stabbed some sticks into the dirt for uprights and ran more sticks over them to create support for my roof. Then I draped the poncho over it and cut a few palmetto fronds for a floor.
It was late afternoon when I sat under the shelter and ate one of the few packages of peanut butter crackers I had left.
* * *
As the sun slipped low in the trees, I watched the spring. There was something hypnotic about the way the water boiled and rolled and trickled gently into the creek. When darkness fell the air grew chilly, and I began to shiver. I got my jacket and lay down and pulled it over me. Soon it was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.
It’s one thing to walk alone on a highway at night or paddle a boat down a river. There’s usually at least a little skylight, and the space around you gives you a sense of safety. You can see things coming. You can imagine an escape. It’s another thing entirely to be curled up in a ball with a cheeping, pulsing, dark swamp pressing in on you from all sides. The fear smothers you. It’s so dark an animal could have its snout inches from your face and you’d never know it until you felt the breath of the thing on your cheeks.
I heard noises on all sides of me: owls, frogs, whip-poor-wills, whistles and screeches, scratching and thumping. Never had I felt so strongly that I was somewhere I wasn’t meant to be. I was as out of place as a deer crouched in a city alley. Maybe I was hidden for now, but it was only a matter of time before I was discovered. And then I was at the mercy of the things living here. I wanted to cry out, but I knew there was no one for miles. And just the thought of my voice echoing through the night terrified me. The thought of shining the penlight terrified me. But the thought of being alone, so absolutely alone in the world, was enough to make me feel like I was going insane.
* * *
I passed out some time that night, mentally and physically exhausted. When I opened my eyes, I saw leaves before me, dappled in soothing sunlight. I heard the trickle of the spring and squirrels fussing and birds calling from deep in the jungle weave of hammock. Then the entire memory of my perilous situation came flooding over me. But it was much easier to take in the daytime. And knowing I’d survived the most horrible night of my life helped me to stay calm and circle through all my options again. Of course, I ended up just where I’d started.
Finding these things is your only way out.
So I sat up and ate a can of Vienna sausages while I formulated a plan.
* * *
I assumed the land would continue getting higher south and southeast of me. Somewhere in that direction was also my way out of the hammock and back to civilization. I would start exploring that way and try to find signs of Bigfoot.
I left my poncho and backpack and set out above the spring with only my knife and another package of peanut butter crackers. The giant cypress loomed far overhead, their branches filtering the sunlight into slivers falling across the palmetto and ferns. I pressed through the underbrush for close to a hundred yards, scanning my surroundings for any sign of the ground sloping up. But everything seemed flat in all directions.
* * *
On that first day I didn’t venture far from the spring. And I didn’t find any signs of Bigfoot. I don’t think I really expected to. Something told me that even though Stanley was crazy, some of the things he said were true. Most of all that I was going to have to put in my time before I had any chance of seeing these creatures.
For supper that evening I sat under the shelter and ate the last of my peanut butter crackers. I had one can of Vienna sausages left before I was completely out of food. I got up and walked over to the spring and knelt beside it and drank the cool water. Then I stared down at the gar. I think I had been counting on them all along. With a little ingenuity I was sure I could figure out a way to get to them. They looked so easy. Like grabbing fish out of an aquarium. The fact I’d have to eat them raw didn’t worry me. I’d had sushi before, and I didn’t expect they would be much different.
I sat up for a while thinking of ways to catch the gar and studying the night sounds. I was still uneasy in the dark, but I wasn’t completely helpless like I’d been before. Everything I heard, Dad had described to me on at least one of our hunts together. The squalling of a raccoon. The echoing call of a barred owl. The cheeping of tree frogs and the electric buzzing of cicadas. There was nothing I didn’t recognize. And nothing I suspected was Bigfoot.
20
The next morning I ate the last of the Vienna sausages for breakfast. Then I walked to the spring and studied the gar. I tried to count them and got to thirty-three before their movement caused me to lose track.
At least thirty-three. A fish per day gets me at least thirty-three days.
After a little searching I found a cypress limb that was long and straight and about the thickness of a broomstick. My Swiss Army knife had a short saw blade that I used to cut the limb. Then I whittled one end to a point and waded into the spring. The fish were quicker than I expected and easily dodged my jabs. It took me nearly an hour to finally stab one. I felt it jiggling at the end of the spear for a second before it slipped off again.
I need a barb.
Fortunately the fish was mortally wounded. As it grew weaker the spring boil drove it toward the surface until I was able to grab it and pull it out. I flipped it onto the ground behind me, careful to avoid its dangerous-looking teeth. Then I turned and sat there staring at it, swelling with confidence. I guessed it weighed close to five pounds. That was plenty of food for a day or more.
I didn’t need the fish right away, so I got a thin stick, sharpened one end of it, and punched it through the gills. Then I submerged the gar in the creek and stabbed it to the mud. I reasoned the other gars couldn’t get to it, and the spring water would keep it cooler than a refrigerator. The only thing I worried about was a raccoon or some other scavenger finding it, but I hoped the fact it was underwater would keep it hidden.
Clean water and fish. Thirty-three days.
Now I had food and didn’t have to worry about digging and eating worms. I set out to do my research that day with new optimism.
* * *
I walked farther into the hammock that morning but found no broken trees or shelters indicating anything like a Bigfoot. Everywhere I went the swamp looked the same, more mud and endless tangles of green. On my way back for lunch, I felt foolish for even looking.
These things aren’t something you go out and find. They’ll find you when they’re ready. When you’ve earned it.
I retrieved the gar out of the creek and sat with it on the ledge. I made a slit down its belly, pulled out the intestines, and tossed them into the creek where they would wash away. I had helped Dad gut fish a few times before, but he had always cut the fillets. Remembering what I’d seen him do, I cut behind the gills and sliced along the backbone. My knife blade wasn’t long enough to do a very good job, but I managed to remove a fillet without wasting too much. I did this to both sides, tossed the leftover carcass, and washed the meat in the spring.
I cut a small sliver of the gar and set it on my tongue. It certainly tasted like raw fish. I reminded myself of the tuna sushi I’d eaten and began to chew, imagining the taste was no different. The meat was soft and a little sticky and smelled and tasted much stronger than tuna. But it wasn’t too
bad. I swallowed and put another slice into my mouth.
* * *
I ate the entire raw gar for lunch. The taste of it stayed in my mouth, and for the first time in days I missed having a toothbrush. But I felt the energy of it immediately, and something about the clean, pure, uncooked meat I’d obtained with a spear made me feel that much closer to my goal.
In some of the BSO reports I’d read, people mentioned the creatures hitting trees with large sticks to communicate. After lunch I went in search of a suitable branch to whittle into a club. Not far from the spring, I found a cypress limb that had been broken off by another falling tree. It was still fresh and green and just the right size for what I wanted. I sawed away a four-foot section and took it back to the ledge. I spent the rest of the afternoon stripping the bark and tapering one end down until it was shaped like a baseball bat.
On one of our walks, Dad had told me about eating the root of palmetto. He said it tasted like artichoke. So just before dark I dug up one of the plants with my knife and cut off the root. I shaved away the outer layer to reveal the palm heart. It was only as long and thick as my little finger, but it tasted good and I was encouraged to have at least one other thing to eat besides raw gar.
I spent the last minutes of daylight resharpening my knife blade on the limestone ledge. Then I took the bat and withdrew into the shelter. I sat against the tree with it in my lap and stared over the spring as darkness fell. The hammock was soon alive with its usual night sounds, which didn’t intimidate me nearly as much. I gripped the bat, optimistic about using it to call the creatures but also feeling a newfound sense of security.
* * *
I sat there without moving, staring out from under the shelter into the grainy darkness, waiting for the moon to come up. I reasoned Bigfoot was more active at night, like most other predators. About nine o’clock I saw the top edge of a quarter moon peeking above the hammock canopy. Then, slowly, it rose into the night sky, casting the refuge in a faint bluish light.
At ten o’clock I crawled out of the shelter with the bat. I walked around the back side of the oak tree and stood there for a moment, listening and contemplating what I was about to do. Then I raised the bat and hit it lightly against the trunk. The night sounds lowered for a moment as the creatures around me ducked away at the strange noise. I listened but heard nothing unusual. I hit the tree again, harder this time, the loud crack traveling across miles of emptiness. And I imagined somewhere out there, they were listening.
21
I stopped searching for the creatures and stayed at the shelter. I ate raw fish and palmetto and lay around under blue skies and rain, watching the spring and the trees and the fall breezes rustling the canopy. I had dreamy thoughts of my parents. Sometimes I thought I heard their voices in the breeze, and it reminded me of places and times I’d been with them. And afterward I cried quietly to myself, poisoned with loneliness.
Every night I made four or five wood knocks after the hammock had slipped into deep darkness. In the daytime there was little sound, except for the gurgling spring. I felt the rest of the world drift away from me, like it was something I would never be part of again. Sometimes I spoke out loud just to hear my voice. I wasn’t hungry, but I felt myself slowly starving, like it didn’t matter if I ate or not. Like no matter how long the food lasted, I had come there to die, and meanwhile there was nothing to live for except to make the wood knocks and hope these things showed themselves. And even then, I was no longer sure what I would do if that happened. I seemed to have forgotten what finding these things was going to fix.
As the days continued to pass, I grew physically weaker, but my senses grew stronger. The different bird calls and insect noises and animal feeding habits became so predictable that I didn’t even need my watch to tell me what time of day it was. I could forecast the weather by detecting subtle changes in the temperature and moisture and breezes. I could taste the wetness of the air and feel the thickness of it as I breathed it in.
I began to smell the smallest of things I’d never thought carried an odor. One day I was sleeping by the spring and into my nose flowed a scent like dirt with a sprinkling of black pepper. Before I even opened my eyes, I knew I was about to see a bullfrog inches from my face.
Even the plants had their own unique scent. The palmetto had more of a sour smell and the fern more bland. The cabbage palm smells of lilies, the cypress a sweet balsamic, the sweetgum like apples, and the oak a heavy, smoky smell. And all of this mixed together to form the general aroma of the air, which varied with the breezes.
Another day I looked at my reflection in the spring and saw what looked like a stranger. His cheeks were hollow-looking, and his eyes were sunken and blank. The skin was blackened with smudged dirt and sap, and his hair was scraggly and stiff. I looked at my hands and saw my fingernails, caked with dirt and grime. My clothes were torn and stained and barely clung to me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d changed. I couldn’t remember thinking at all about being clean. The word seemed to have no place here. Like books and radios and paintbrushes. Clean didn’t have anything to do with life and death.
I felt the stitches on my face and tugged at the sutures. This time there was no pain. I used my knife and my reflection to cut them and pull them from my skin. When I was done I ran my hand over my face and felt the puckered edges of the scars. I didn’t care if they eventually went away or not. It didn’t seem to matter.
* * *
I was out there two weeks before something strange happened. It was close to ten o’clock at night. I had made a few wood knocks but, as usual, had heard no reply. I was sitting in front of the shelter, bat in my lap, watching the tops of the cabbage palms swaying gently against a sky of endless stars. Most of the time, in addition to the other night sounds, I heard owls calling in the distance. But despite the usual insect chatter going at full volume, the owls were silent. For some reason I decided to try to call to them to see if I could get a response. I cupped my hands around my mouth, lifted my chin, and gave my best imitation of a barred owl.
Whoo whoo-whoo whoo—whoo whoo—whoo whoooo.
Within seconds I heard what sounded like an owl call back to me. The response was distant and faint but unmistakable. Then I called again. A moment later I got another response, but this time it was much closer. Close enough that I could really hear it. Then an eerie feeling slipped over me, a feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the sound. I’d heard the owls for so many nights that their calls were burned into my memory. This call was too loud and deep and guttural. Almost as if it were not an owl at all, but a large man trying to imitate one.
I quickly slipped back into the shelter and sat there, facing my doorway, clutching the bat. I realized that now even the insects had gone silent. There was no sound except for the spring. There had been the initial shock of my realization, but now a slow upwelling of fear crept through my body. The fear of a heavy, unseen presence stalking me. And I sat quietly trembling for what must have been an hour, hearing and seeing nothing. Until the insect chatter finally rose again, and I sensed I was alone once more.
* * *
Although the owl-calling incident was terrifying, I suspected I’d finally made first contact. But it took me all of the next day to commit to trying it again. I had to keep reminding myself that despite my fear, no harm had come to me. Above all else, making contact with the creatures was what I had come to do. If I couldn’t face them, I might as well quit it all and return home no better off than when I’d left. And I wasn’t ready for that.
For two more nights I made the owl calls. I got no response, but I sensed they were out there. I think now they had been there all along, watching me grow weaker by the day. I began to know when they were nearby. Imagine you are alone in a dark forest with a radio playing the night sounds of crickets and frogs and tiny birds cheeping in the brush. Then imagine someone slowly turning the radio down until there is no sound at all except the soft bubbling of a spring beside you.
That’s when I knew they were close. But I also felt their closeness. The fear of them rose in me as if long ago these things had hunted men and their presence still aroused some primeval alarm.
The next time they responded to my calls, I knew there was more than one of them. I heard three distinct owl imitations from different directions. The closest one couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away. As usual the night had gone silent, and fear began to smother me. Yet this time, when I crawled into the shelter, I thought I heard something grunt behind me. I listened and breathed deeply, trying to get past my fear and take in the scent of the thing—the acrid stench I’d read about on the BSO website. But I smelled nothing except the heavy green and rot of the hammock.
I decided not to imitate the owl the following night to see what would happen. The creatures still came. And continued to come for another two weeks without me calling at all.
Sometimes I thought I saw dark shadows moving on the opposite side of the spring. I certainly sensed and heard them. I listened to their grunts and the snapping of twigs. Other nights I felt and heard nothing. The swamp sounds played at full volume, like the creatures weren’t there at all, gone perhaps miles away to other parts of the Refuge.
During the day I found their footprints circling the perimeter of the spring. They were just like I’d seen on the internet—imprints of humanlike feet, broad and mostly flat with a distinctive crease in the middle. Some of them were as much as twenty inches long.
