Just Creepy: Scary Stories - 3 True Skinwalker Horror Stories That Will Ruin the Woods for You

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

3 True Skinwalker Horror Stories That Will Ruin the Woods for YouLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:25:25 Story 200:45:08 Story 3Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries:►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories #skinwalker💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th.

Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at Yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. I need to say this up front. I don't tell this story to convince anyone of anything. I know what happened. My cousin Marcus knows what happened.

The scars on his back and shoulder confirm what happened. Whether you believe any of it is your business. This was October of 2019. I was 26. Marcus was 28. We'd been hunting together since we were teenagers, mostly White Tail in the Ozark National Forest out in Northwest Arbor. Arkansas. Our family had a cabin about 40 minutes south of Boxley Valley, tucked back on a private

road that dead ended into about 900 acres of unmanaged timber. It wasn't a nice cabin. It was a one-room plywood box with a tin roof, a wood stove, and two cots. No running water, no electricity. You packed in everything you needed, and you packed it all back out. We'd been going there every fall for years. Never had a single problem. The work. The first thing that ever happened was Marcus stepping on a copperhead in 2016. And even that wasn't a real emergency because the snake didn't strike. It just slid off under a rock and we moved on. So I want to be clear about something.

I was comfortable in those woods. I knew the terrain. I knew the sounds. I knew what a bobcat screaming at two in the morning sounds like. And I knew not to panic when I heard it. I'd spent enough nights out there that the dark didn't bother me, not in any real way. That changed on the second night.

We got up to the cabin on a Thursday afternoon, probably around 3.30. Weather was cool but not cold. Low 50s during the day, mid-30s at night. Leaves were turning but hadn't dropped yet, so the canopy was still thick enough to cut out most of the sunlight once you got about 200 yards into the trees. We unloaded the truck, stacked firewood on the porch, hung our food bags from the bare wire, and set up inside.

standard routine Marcus cracked two beers and we sat on the porch and watched the light fade There was nothing unusual about that first evening We ate canned chili heated on the wood stove Talked about work Played cards by lantern light And turned in around nine

I fell asleep fast Slept straight through Friday morning we were up before dawn We split up the way we always did Marcus took the south ridge Where he had a climbing stand about 20 feet up a big white oak overlooking a natural funnel between two draws. I went north, about a mile and a half from the cabin, to a ground blind I'd set up the year before, near a creek

crossing. We agreed to meet back at the cabin by noon if neither of us got anything. I didn't see a single deer that morning. I saw squirrels. I saw a red-tailed hawk pull something out of the tall grass on the far side of the creek. But no deer, not even tracks. That was unusual for that area, especially in mid-October. That creek crossing was a highway for whitetail most years. I'd seen as many as 12 deer passed through in a single morning the season before. But that Friday, nothing. I hiked back to the cabin around 11.30.

Marcus was already there, sitting on the porch with his boots off. He said the same thing. No deer, no sign, no tracks, no droppings, nothing. He said the woods felt empty. I remember him saying that. The woods felt empty. At the time, I just thought he meant quiet. We ate lunch, talked about whether the deer were moving later in the day because of the warm

temps, and decided to go back out that afternoon and sit until dark. I went back to my blind. Marcus went back to his stand. I sat in that blind from about 1.30 until sunset. I heard a turkey once. Off to the east. That was it. No deer.

No movement at all. When the light started to go, I packed up and headed back. Marcus was already at the cabin again when I got there. He was inside this time, wood stove going, door shut. He was sitting on his cot with his rifle across his lap, which was odd because we always unloaded and cased our rifles the second we got back. That was a hard rule our grandfather had drilled into us. I asked him what was wrong.

He didn't answer right away. He was picking at the cuticle on his left thumb, which was something he did when he was working through a thought. Then he said something had followed him back from the stand. I set my pack down and asked him what he meant. He said when he climbed down from the stand at dusk, he heard footsteps behind him. Heavy footsteps.

He assumed it was a deer finally, so he stopped and turned around. Nothing. He waited a full minute. Nothing moved. He started walking again, and the footsteps started again, same pace, same distance behind him. He stopped again, the footsteps stopped. He turned around,

nothing. He said this happened four times over the course of about a quarter mile. Every time he stopped, the sound stopped. Every time he turned to look, there was nothing there. But on the last time, just before he hit the clearing near the cabin, he said he heard something he couldn't explain. He said it sounded like his own voice, about 50 yards behind him in the trees, saying his name, just his name, once, Marcus, in his voice. He said he didn't stop that time. He walked straight to the cabin, went inside, shut the door, and sat down. I want to be honest about my reaction. I didn't believe him. I didn't say that because Marcus wasn't someone who made things up for attention, but in my head I figured he'd heard a bird or the wind or his own echo off the ridge.

Sound does strange things in those hollows. I've heard my own footwork. I've heard my own foot steps bounce back to me from a rock face and thought someone was walking parallel to me in the trees. It's disorienting, but it's explainable. I told him it was probably nothing. He nodded, but he didn't uncase his rifle that night. He leaned it against the wall next to his cot, loaded. We ate dinner. We didn't play cards. We turned in early. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. I don't know exactly what time. My watch was in my pack and I didn't check it. The wood stove had burned down to coals, so the cabin was dark except for a faint orange glow from the stove door. Something was outside.

I could hear it moving around the cabin. Slow, careful steps on the dry leaves. It circled once, then stopped near the back wall, right behind where my cot was. I could hear breathing, not panting, not snorting, just slow, steady breathing, close to the wall. I thought it was a bear. That was my first and only thought. Bear. We'd seen black bears in those woods before, and they sometimes came around the cabin if they smelled food. But our food was in bear bags, 30 yards from the cabin, hung on a wire

between two trees. There was nothing to smell. The breathing stopped. The footsteps started again, circling around to the front of the cabin. I heard them come up the two porch steps. One step, then the second step. Then they stopped, right in front of the door. I sat up. Marcus was already sitting up on his cot. I could just barely see the outline of his head in the stove light. He was facing the door.

Neither of us said anything. The door handle moved, not fast, not like something was trying to force it. Slow, like someone was testing it, seeing if it would turn. It didn't. We had a bolt latch on the inside, a simple slide bolt that you couldn't open from outside.

The handle stopped. Then something knocked on the door. Three knocks. Spaced out. Patient. I want to describe the sound more carefully, because this is the part that mattered. Those three knocks didn't sound like an animal.

An animal doesn't knock. A bear will scratch or push or slam its weight into a door. A raccoon will rattle and claw. Those three knocks sounded like a fist against wood. Controlled. Even. Marcus whispered two words, don't answer. I wasn't going to. But I need you to understand the feeling in that cabin. It wasn't just fear. It was the kind of fear that comes with confusion, the kind where your brain is trying to run through explanations and coming up empty. We were

miles from anyone. There was no one else on that road. No one knew we were there except Marcus's wife and my mom, and neither of them would have driven out at night without calling first. and there was no cell service out there anyway. The knocking didn't come again. Whatever was on the porch stood there for a long time. I could hear the boards creak under its weight, small shifts, like it was adjusting its stance. Then it stepped off the porch and walked back into the trees.

I didn't sleep after that. When the first gray light came through the window, I got up and opened the door. I stood on the porch and looked at the ground. There were footprints in the dirt at the base of the door. of the steps. They looked human. Bare feet, five toes, heel and ball clearly pressed into the soil, but they were wrong. The proportions were off. The toes were too long. The foot was too narrow. And the stride between the prince, from where the thing had walked from the tree line to the porch,

was too wide. I'm six one. My natural walking stride is about 30 inches. These prints were spaced at least four feet apart, and they were in a straight line. one foot directly in front of the other, heel to toe. I showed Marcus. He looked at the prince and didn't say anything for about ten seconds. Then he went back inside and started packing his bag. I said we should stay. I said it was probably someone messing with us,

maybe a local who knew the cabin was there and wanted to scare us off. I didn't believe that, but I said it because I didn't want to leave. That feels stupid now. Marcus shook his head. He said we were leaving. He said what he'd heard the night before, his own voice calling his name, wasn't something a person does. He said whatever was out there knew his name and could sound like him, and that was enough. I argued with him, but not for long.

The truth was I was scared too. I just didn't want to admit it, because admitting it meant accepting that something was actually happening that I couldn't explain. We compromised. We'd stay one more night. If anything else happened, we'd leave first thing in the morning. Marcus agreed, but he wasn't happy about it. We didn't hunt that day. We stayed close to the cabin.

We split and stacked more firewood. We boiled water from the creek and topped off our jugs. Normal busy work, but neither of us went more than 100 yards from the porch. Around four in the afternoon, I was sitting on the porch cleaning my rifle. Marcus was inside organizing gear. The woods were dead quiet, no birds, no insects, no wind. That silence wasn't normal. There should have been jays and crows at that time of day, at minimum.

There was nothing. Then I heard something moving in the tree line, about 60 yards out, just past where the clearing ended and the timber started. I looked up, there was a deer standing at the edge of the trees. That should have been a good thing. That's what we were there for. But something about this deer was wrong. and I knew it instantly, before I could even articulate what I was seeing.

It was standing broadside to me, head turned in my direction, completely still, and it was looking at me, not in the way a deer looks in your direction when it senses something, that alert frozen posture with the ears forward and the tail half raised. This deer was standing with its body relaxed, and its head turned all the way around to face me, and it was looking at me the way a person looks at you from across a room. I stared at it. It didn't blink. It didn't flick an ear. It didn't stamp or snort. It just stood there, perfectly still, watching me with an expression I can only describe as aware. Then it smiled. I know how that sounds. I know deer can't smile. But the corners of its mouth pulled back and its lips separated, and I could see teeth that were too large and too flat and too even, and it held that expression while it stared at me. I dropped it. the cleaning rod. I didn't pick it up. I stood up and back toward the door. The deer didn't move. It just kept watching me with that wrong face. I got inside and shut the door. I told Marcus

what I'd seen. He didn't argue. He didn't ask if I was sure. He just nodded and said, okay, we're leaving in the morning. I looked back through the window. The deer was gone. That night we kept the wood stove loaded and both lanterns burning. We pushed one of the cots against the door as a brace. We sat across from each other with our rifles and we didn't talk much. There wasn't a lot to say. We both knew what we'd agreed to, and we both just wanted to make it through the night and get down the mountain. The sound started around midnight. First it was the footsteps again, circling the cabin, slow, steady, the same patient movement as the night before, around and around, sometimes pausing near a wall, sometimes

continuing without stopping. It circled eight or nine times before it stopped. Then it was quiet for maybe 20 minutes, long enough that I started to think it had left. Then I heard Marcus's wife, her name was Dana, and I heard her voice clear as anything, coming from maybe 30 feet outside the cabin, calling Marcus's name. Marcus, baby, come outside, I need help, something happened. Marcus went white. He gripped his rifle so hard his knuckles lost all color. He looked at me, I looked at him. That's not her, I said. I know, he said.

She called again, same words, same voice. But there was something off about the cadence, like someone who had learned the words phonetically without understanding what they meant. The emphasis was wrong. The pauses were in the wrong places. Marcus, baby, come outside. I need help.

Something happened. Then it tried my name. David. It's Dana. Open the door. Marcus is hurt. I have never in my life felt the kind of cold that went through me when I heard that. It wasn't temperature.

It was something inside me, something deep and old and instinctual, some part of my brain that recognized a threat my conscious mind didn't have a category for. It wasn't Dana. Dana was in Fayetteville, 40 miles away. But the voice was perfect. Every detail of it was right. The pitch, the slight rasp she got when she was emotional, even the way she said Marcus with the accent on the first.

syllable. It was her voice, but it wasn't her. We sat there and listened to it cycle through phrases for almost an hour. It used Dana's voice. It used Marcus's voice. Twice. It used a voice I didn't recognize. Deeper, older, speaking words I couldn't make out. Around one in the morning it stopped talking. Then it hit the cabin. Something slammed into the back wall so hard the whole structure shook. The lantern on the shelf fell and shattered. Marcus yelled and grabbed for it, burning his hand on the hot glass. Something hit the wall again harder, and I heard the plywood crack. A third hit.

I could see the wall bowing inward from the impact. Whatever was outside was strong enough to break through. Marcus was on his feet. I was on my feet. We had our rifles up, but there was nothing to aim at, just a wall buckling inward. The fourth hit punched a hole, not a big one. Maybe the size of a softball. But I could see through it into the dark.

outside, and in that half-second of looking through the hole, I saw something that I will never forget for as long as I live. An arm came through the wall, it was long and thin, and the skin was dark and stretched tight. The fingers were too long, and they bent in the wrong places, not at the knuckles where human fingers bend, but at odd intervals, like the bones inside were shaped differently. The hand reached inward and swept sideways, grabbing at the air, searching. Marcus fired, the sound, in that small cabin was deafening. He put around through the wall about two feet above the arm, and something outside screamed. I need to talk about that scream because it's the thing I still hear when I wake up in the middle of the night. It didn't sound like an animal. It didn't sound like a

person. It sounded like both at the same time, layered on top of each other, one voice high and shrieking and the other low and guttural. It came from a throat that wasn't built the way throats are supposed to be built. The arm pulled back through the hole. We heard crashing in the brush, heavy, fast, moving away from the cabin and up the ridge to the east. Then silence. Marcus was shaking. I was shaking. There was a hole in the back wall of the cabin with cold air pouring through it and around the edges of the hole. On the splintered plywood, there was a dark smear. I didn't touch it. I didn't look at it closely, but it was wet and it wasn't sap. We pushed the other cot against the back wall, stacked our packs behind it, and sat in the

middle of the room with our rifles pointed at the two compromised spots, the door, and the hole. Nothing else happened for the next three hours. At 4.30, the first bird started calling, a whippoor will, then a cardinal. Then the jays and crows woke up and the woods sounded normal again. We waited until full light. I need to slow down here because the next part happened fast, and my memory of it comes in pieces. At first light, we grabbed our packs and our rifles and went for the truck. We left everything else. The cots, the stove, the food bags, all of it. We didn't care. The truck was parked about 80 yards from the cabin, at the end of the road where the gravel turned to dirt. We made it maybe 50 yards. It came from the right side, from the timber uphill.

I didn't see it clearly. I've gone over this hundreds of times in my head, and I've done. I I still can't give you a clean description because it moved too fast and my brain refused to process what it was seeing. It was tall. It ran on two legs, but its body was bent forward and its arms were long enough that its hands were near the ground. The skin was grayish brown and it didn't have fur, or if it did the fur was so thin and patchy that it just looked like mottled skin.

The head was wrong. The proportions were wrong. Everything about it was wrong in a way that made my vision. vision swim, like my eyes were trying to focus on something that wasn't supposed to exist. It hit Marcus from the side, full speed. He went down hard, and the thing was on top of him before I could even raise my rifle. I heard Marcus screaming. I heard fabric tearing. I saw those long fingers digging into his jacket and into the skin underneath. I didn't aim. I couldn't. Marcus was tangled up with it, and I was terrified of hitting him. I did the only thing. I did the only

thing I could think of. I ran forward and swung my rifle stock first into the side of its head. The impact jarred my arms all the way up to my shoulders. It felt like hitting a tree trunk, dense, solid. The thing's head snapped sideways and it made a sound, not the scream from before, but a short, choked grunt, and it released Marcus and rolled off him. It was on its feet faster than anything I've ever seen move. It was standing maybe six feet from me. I could smell it. Rot and copper and something acidic underneath, something that burned the inside of my nose. It looked at me. The face was narrow and long.

The eyes were set too wide apart and they reflected the early morning light with a faint yellowish sheen. The mouth was open and I could see the teeth, and they were not deer teeth, and they were not human teeth. They were something else entirely, jagged and uneven and too many of them, crowded into a jaw that seemed too long for the skull it was attacked. to. It stood there for maybe two seconds, looking at me. Then it dropped to all fours and it ran. It went up the hill and into the trees and within three seconds I couldn't see it, and within five seconds I couldn't hear it. Marcus was on the ground. His jacket was shredded across the back and right shoulder. There were four deep lacerations running diagonally from his right

shoulder blade down to the middle of his back. They were bleeding heavily. The cuts were clean and deep and evenly spaced, like something had drawn four parallel lines across his skin with a very sharp blade. I got him up. He could walk. He was in shock, but he could walk. I half carried him to the truck, put him in the passenger seat, and drove down that mountain road faster than I've ever driven anything in my life. I took him to the emergency room in Harrison. They cleaned and stitched the wounds, 18 stitches total across four lacerations. The doctor asked what happened. Marcus said he fell on a barbed wire fence. The doctor didn't believe it. I could tell by the way he looked at the wounds that he knew barbed wire doesn't leave marks like that, but he didn't push it.

That was six years ago. I went back to the cabin once the following spring. I went during the day, alone, which was probably the dumbest thing I've ever done. I told myself I needed to see it in the daylight. I needed to look at the hole in the wall and the footprints, and prove to myself, that it had really happened. The cabin was destroyed, not damaged, destroyed. The walls were torn apart. The tin roof was peeled back and crumpled. The wood stove was flipped on its side. The cots were bent and twisted and dragged out into the yard. It looked like something had come back and ripped the place apart out of anger. In the dirt around the cabin there were tracks, dozens of them. Some looked like the barefoot prints I'd seen before, long and narrow with the strange toes.

Others didn't look like anything I could identify. They were circular, about the size of a dinner plate, with no toes, no claws, no defining features, just round depressions in the soil, like something had been walking on the ends of stilts. I left. I drove back down the mountain, and I never went back. Marcus still has the scars. Four white lines across his back, perfectly spaced, perfectly straight. He doesn't talk about what happened unless he's not.

I bring it up, and I've learned not to bring it up. His wife told me once that he still wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes. She said he sits up in bed and stares at the bedroom door and won't look away from it until the sun comes up. I get it. I do the same thing, but here's what I keep coming back to. Here's the thing that sits in my head and won't leave. When that thing was standing six feet from me, after I'd hit it with the rifle, after it had released Marcus and gotten back on its feet, it looked at me. It looked at me, and it didn't attack. It could have. It was fast enough and strong enough to kill both of us, and I believe that completely. But it looked at me, and it chose to leave. I don't know why, and I don't know if I want to know,

because the only explanations I can come up with are all worse than not knowing. Either it wasn't afraid of me, and it let me go because I wasn't worth the effort, or it wanted me to leave. It wanted me to go back to the world and carry what I'd seen with me. It wanted a witness. We sold the land the following year. I don't hunt anymore. I go to the range sometimes and I keep a rifle in my closet, but I haven't been in the woods since that spring when I went back to see the cabin. I don't miss it. I used to love those woods more than almost anything in my life. The quiet, the cold mornings, the way the fog would sit in the hollows at dawn. I loved all of it, and now I can't think about any of it without seeing that face, those teeth,

that arm reaching through the wall, some places don't belong to us. I think that's the thing I learned. We go out there and we act like it's ours, like we're at the top, like nothing in those trees is smarter or faster or more dangerous than we are. And that's true almost everywhere, almost all the time, but not always and not there. I worked for the Bureau of Land Management for three years, from 2016 to 2019. Most of that time I was stationed in southern Utah, out of a small field office near Canab. The job was land surveys, fence inspections, water source monitoring, cattle allotment checks,

unglamorous work. You drove a government truck down bad roads, walked a lot of empty ground, took notes, and drove back. Some days you didn't see another point. person from sunup to sundown. I liked it. I grew up in Provo, and by the time I was 23, I was tired of people and noise and concrete. The BLM job gave me what I wanted, quiet, space, red rock, and sage, and sky. I spent most of my shifts alone, and I preferred it that way. My name is Tyler. I was 25 when this happened. The area I need to talk about is a section of land south of the

Vermillion cliffs, near the Arizona border. If you've been there, you know what it looks like. Flat desert broken up by sandstone formations, deep washes, and mesa edges that drop off without warning. The vegetation is sparse, juniper, pinion pine, rabbit brush, and a lot of nothing.

In the summer it's brutal. In the fall, and winter it's beautiful in a way that makes you feel very small and very temporary. There was a service road out there, an unimproved two-track that ran about 14 miles from a locked BLM gate off House Rock Valley Road south, toward a series of stock tanks near the Perea Plateau. I drove that road maybe twice a month to check water levels in the tanks

and inspect a stretch of fence line that was always getting knocked down by elk. It was routine. I'd done it dozens of times. This was the first week of November, 2018. I left the field office around 6.30 in the morning, drove south on 89, turned off onto House Rock Valley Road, unlocked the BLM gate and started down the service road. I had my usual gear, water, lunch, clipboard radio, first aid kit, and a 22 pistol I carried for snakes, though by November most of the rattlesnakes were dend up and I wasn't worried about them.

The drive-in took about 45 minutes because the road was rough and I kept my speed under 20. I got to the first stock tank around 715. Water level was fine. I checked the float valve, took my readings, wrote everything down, and moved on to the second tank, about three miles further south. The second tank was low. The float valve was stuck, which happened sometimes when sediment built up in the pipe. I spent about an hour and a half cleaning it out and getting water flowing again.

By the time I finished, it was close to nine. I washed my hands in the overflow, ate a granola bar, and drove the last four miles to the fence line. I want to describe the area around the fence line because the geography matters. The fence ran east to west along the top of a shallow ridge. North of the ridge, where I was, the terrain was open and flat. You could see for miles. South of the ridge, the ground dropped into a wide basin studded with juniper and pinion. The basin was maybe a mile across, and on the far side it was bounded by the base of the Perea Plateau,

a wall of pale sandstone that rose about 800 feet straight up. The basin was lower and greener than the surrounding desert, because water collected there. It was good habitat. I'd seen mule deer, elk, coyotes, and once a mountain lion down in that basin. I parked the truck at the fence line and got out. The morning was cold and clear. No wind, no clouds.

I could hear a raven somewhere to the east but nothing else. I started walking the fence, heading west. The first quarter mile was fine. Posts solid, wire tight, no damage. Then I came to a section where the top two strands of wire had been pushed down, and the posts on either side were leaning. Elk damage. I'd fixed this same section three times in the past year.

I dropped my pack and started pulling out fencing tools. That's when I noticed the smell. It was faint at first, something dead, not unusual out there. Animals die in the desert all the time, and in the dry air they don't decompose the way they do in humid climates. They desiccate. They dry out and shrink, and eventually they're just leather and bone. But fresh kills still smell, and this smelled fresh. I looked around but didn't see a carcass.

I figured it was downhill in the basin, probably a deer that a lion had taken, and I went to work on the fence. It took me about 40 minutes to reset the posts and restring the wire. By the time I finished, the smell was stronger, a lot stronger. It had gone from noticeable to aggressive, thick enough that I was breathing through my mouth, and it had changed. It wasn't just rot anymore. There was something chemical in it, something sharp and sour, that reminded me of the smell of a burned-out electrical panel, organic decay and something else. something that didn't belong. I stood up and looked south, down into the basin.

There was something standing in the junipers about 300 yards below me. I want to be careful about how I describe this, because at 300 yards, through scattered trees, details are hard. I didn't have binoculars that day. I'd left them in the truck because I was only walking the fence line and didn't think I'd need them. So what I saw was a shape. Upright, tall, standing motion.

motionless between two junipers in a way that could have been a dead snag or a fence post or a dozen other things But it wasn't any of those things I knew that immediately because I'd walked this fence line enough times to know every dead tree and every post in that basin and this shape was new I watched it for about 30 seconds it didn't move I told myself it was a hiker maybe someone from the vermilion cliffs wilderness area who'd wandered off trail that would have been on you usual, but not impossible. I raised my hand and waved. It didn't wave back. It didn't move at all. It just stood there. I lowered my hand and kept watching. The smell was getting worse. My eyes were starting to water from it. I picked up my pack and my tools and decided to head back to the truck. I could come back to finish the fence inspection another day. Something about the situation was

making me uncomfortable in a way I couldn't pin down, and I'd learn to trust that feeling. I turned and started walking east along the fence, back toward the truck. I got maybe 200 yards before I stopped and looked over my shoulder. The shape was closer. I hadn't heard it move. I hadn't heard footsteps or branches breaking or rocks shifting, but it was closer. What had been 300 yards was now maybe 200, and it wasn't standing between the junipers anymore. It was standing in the open, on the slope below the ridge, in a patch of bare dirt with no cover around it. I could see more detail now. It was tall, well over six feet. The proportions were wrong in a way that my brain kept trying to correct, kept trying to fit into a category it recognized. The limbs

were too long. The torso was too narrow. It was standing upright on two legs, but the way it stood wasn't right. The knees were bent slightly the wrong direction, or the legs were were jointed in an extra place or something. I couldn't tell exactly what was off, only that it was off. It was pale, not white, a dull, waxy pale, the color of old tallow, and it was naked, or at least it wasn't wearing anything I could identify as clothing. I started walking faster. I didn't run because the terrain was uneven, and I was carrying tools and I didn't want to fall. But I walked as fast as I could, and I kept looking back. Every time I looked, I looked back, it was closer, and it was still silent, no footsteps, no sound at all.

It moved in the gaps between my glances, and I couldn't catch it in the act of moving. Every time my eyes found it, it was standing perfectly still, but it was always closer than the last time. I dropped the fencing tools. I didn't make a decision to drop them. My hands just let go. I kept my pack because my radio was in it, and I kept the 22 on my hip. The truck was maybe 300 yards ahead.

I could see it parked at the fence line, right where I'd left it. 300 yards. I looked back. It was at the top of the ridge. It had covered the slope and was standing on the flat ground now, maybe 150 yards behind me. I could see its face. I don't want to describe its face. I have to because it matters, but I don't want to.

The face was too flat. The features were compressed, like someone had taken a normal face and pushed everything. toward the center. The nose was barely there. The mouth was wide and closed. The eyes were large and dark and set far apart and they were locked on me. But the thing that made my legs go weak, the thing that made something inside my chest seize up and go cold, was the skin on the face. It was moving, twitching, rippling, the way the surface of water moves when something is swimming just beneath it. The skin on that face was shifting and running. rearranging over the bones underneath. And for a fraction of a second I saw a different face

under the first one. Something longer. Something with a muzzle and teeth. I ran. I ran and I didn't look back. I covered that 300 yards in a dead sprint, pack slamming against my spine, 22 bouncing against my thigh. I got to the truck, threw open the door, threw my pack across the seat, got in and turned the key. The engine started. I slammed it in drive and punched the gas, and the truck fish-tailed on the loose gravel before the tires caught, and I started moving. I drove. I drove fast, too fast for that road. The truck bottomed out on ruts, and the steering wheel jerked in my hands, and I heard rocks hitting the undercarriage, and I didn't care. I watched the rearview mirror. I watched the road ahead. I watched the mirror

again. For the first two miles, I didn't see anything behind me, just dust and empty road and sage. Then I came around a curve and had to break hard because there was something in the road, a coyote standing in the middle of the two-track facing me. I stopped the truck about 30 feet from it. The coyote didn't move. It just stood there, looking at me through the windshield. Coyotes are skittish. In three years of working in southern Utah, I'd seen hundreds of them, And every single one had run the moment it saw a vehicle. They don't stand in roads and stare at trucks. It doesn't happen.

This one was standing in the road and staring at my truck. It was big for a coyote. The fur was patchy and uneven, thick in some places and almost bare in others. Its posture was wrong. Its back was arched too high and its head was held too low, angled upward to look at me, and its mouth was slightly open. The smell hit me even through the closed windows. The same smell from the fence line.

Rot and that sharp chemical burn. I honked the horn. The coyote didn't flinch. It didn't move. It didn't blink. Then it did something that made me grip the steering wheel so hard my fingers went numb. It stepped to the side of the road. One step, two steps.

Controlled, careful steps. Placing each paw with a precision that coyotes don't have. And it kept its head turned toward me the entire time. tracking me, maintaining eye contact. It stepped off the road and stopped. It stood in the sage about 10 feet from the edge of the two track and watched me. It was letting me pass. I gave it as much room as the narrow road allowed and drove past it. As I went by, I looked at it through the passenger window. It was standing there in the sage, perfectly still, watching me go. Its eyes were wrong. I could see that up close. The irises were too big.

and they were the wrong color for a coyote. They were pale, almost yellow, almost the same waxy color as the thing I'd seen on the slope. I floored it. I drove the remaining 12 miles to the BLM gate without stopping. I unlocked the gate with shaking hands, drove through, locked it behind me, and didn't stop again until I hit the paved road.

I went to the field office. I sat in the parking lot for about 15 minutes. I was sweating through my shirt, even though the temperature outside was maybe 50 degrees. My hands were trembling. I could still smell that smell even though I knew it wasn't there anymore. I went inside. My supervisor, Gary, was at his desk. He asked me if I was okay. I must have looked bad because he asked twice. I told him what happened. I told him all of it, the shape in the basin, the way it closed distance without making a sound, the face, the coyote. Gary listened.

He didn't interrupt. When I finished, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes and sighed. Then he told me something that changed the way I thought about the three years I'd spent working that land. He said I wasn't the first person to report something on that service road. He said a contractor who'd been hired to survey a section near the Perea Plateau in 2014 had called the office in a panic and refused to go back. He said a rancher who ran cattle on an allotment in that basin,

had pulled his herd out a year early in 2015 and never gave a clear reason. He said another BLM employee, a woman named Kristen, who'd transferred to a different office before I started, had reported hearing her own voice calling to her from a wash near the second stock tank. She put in her transfer request the same week. Gary said he'd never put any of it in an official report because he didn't know what to file it under. He said the Kaibab Payut Reservation was less than 20 miles north. and that he'd spoken informally with a tribal liaison who told him, without going into detail, that the area around the southern vermilion cliffs had a reputation.

The liaison said his people didn't go there after dark, and they hadn't for a long time. Gary asked me if I wanted to be reassigned to a different survey area. I said yes. He processed the paperwork that afternoon. I worked for the BLM for another eight months after that. I never went back to that service road. Another employee took over my route, a guy named Paul who'd been with the agency for over a decade. I didn't tell Paul what had happened because Gary asked me not to. He said he didn't want to spook him.

I disagreed with that decision, but I wasn't in charge. Paul worked that route for about six weeks before he came into the office one morning and told Gary he wouldn't be going back. He didn't explain why. He didn't file a report. He just said he was done with it and he wanted a different assignment. I tried to talk to Paul about it once, in the parking lot after work. I asked him if something had happened out there.

He looked at me for a long time without saying anything. Then he said four words. You've seen it too. I said yes. He nodded. He got in his truck and drove away. We never talked about it again. I left the BLM in June of 2019.

I moved back to Provo. I work in commercial property management now. I sit in a climate-controlled office, and I look at spreadsheets, and I go home when the sun is still up. I think about that service road more often than I should. Not in a curious way. Not in the way you think about a mystery you'd like to solve. I think about it the way you think about a car accident you walked away from. The awareness that you came close to something irreversible,

and the knowledge that the only reason you're still here is because it decides, decided to let you be. I've done a lot of reading since then. I know what most people would call what I saw. I know the word and I know the stories and I know the theories. I also know that the Navajo and the Paiute and other nations in that region don't talk about these things casually, and they don't appreciate outsiders treating their beliefs as campfire entertainment.

So I want to be respectful about that. I'm not going to speculate on what it was. I'm going to tell you what it did. It watched me, it followed me. It closed distance without making a sound. It wore a face that wasn't its real face. It put itself in my path in a body that wasn't its real body. And when I looked into the eyes of that coyote on the road, I saw the same intelligence

I'd seen in the eyes of the thing on the slope. One mind, two shapes. That's what I know. The thing I keep coming back to is the coyote stepping aside, letting me pass. There was nothing stopping it from standing in that road. road, nothing stopping it from making me get out of the truck. If it had stayed in the road, I would have had to stop. I would have had to make a choice, get out and move it, or sit there and wait. It chose to step aside. It chose to let me leave. I don't think it did that out of kindness.

I don't think it was afraid of me or my truck or my 22 pistol. I think it did it because it had already accomplished what it wanted. It wanted me to know it was there. It wanted me to see what it could do. It wanted me to understand that I was in its territory and that my fences and my stock tanks and my service roads meant nothing. I was tolerated, nothing more. Every few months, I pull up a satellite image of that area on my computer. I zoom in on the service road and I follow it south, past the gate, past the stock tanks, down to the fence line, and the basin and the base of the plateau. From above, it looks empty. It looks like. It looks like. It looks like, like nothing, red dirt and green dots of juniper and pale stone.

But I know it's not empty. I know something lives in that basin, or under it, or around it. Something old and patient and aware. And I know that every person who goes down that road is seen long before they see anything. I left my BLM jacket and my field notes and my 22 at the office when I quit. I kept one thing, a photograph I took from the ridge on a different trip, months before any of this happened. It's a wide shot of the basin at sunrise,

the plateau glowing orange in the early light, fog sitting in the low ground, junipers casting long shadows. It's one of the most beautiful photographs I've ever taken. I keep it in a drawer, I don't hang it on the wall, I don't look at it often, but I keep it because it reminds me

that the most dangerous places are usually the most beautiful ones, and that the reason they're beautiful is because they haven't been tamed. They don't belong to us. They belong to whatever was there first. And whatever was their first is still there. I took a ranch hand job the summer after I dropped out of college. This was 2015. I was 20 years old, broke, and didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. A friend of my dads named Harlan owned about 4,000 acres of grazing land in the high desert north of Dulce, New Mexico.

And he needed someone to help him through calving season in summer rogling. The pay was 1,200 a month plus room and board. The room was a single wide trailer behind the main house. The board was whatever Harlan's wife Connie put on the table, which was usually good. I said yes because I didn't have a better option. If you don't know where Dulce is, it's a small town on the Jicorilla Apache Reservation in the far northern part of the state, close to the Colorado border. The land up there doesn't look like what most people think of when they think of New Mexico.

It's not red desert and cacti. It's high elevation, 7,000 feet and up, with rolling hills covered in sage and grass, thick stands of ponderosa pine on the ridges, and deep arroyos that fill with water in the monsoon season, and go dry the rest of the year. It's cold in the winter, it snows. The summers are warm during the day and cold at night, and the sky is so big and so dark after sunset, that the Milky Way looks like a physical object hanging about. It's also isolated.

Harlan's ranch was about 20 miles north of town on a dirt road that branched off the highway. The nearest neighbor was a jicarilla family named Bitsili, and their place was seven miles away. You could drive for an hour in any direction and not see another vehicle. I arrived in early April. Harlan picked me up at the bus station in Farmington and drove me out. He was in his late 50s, lean, sun damaged, quiet. He didn't talk much on the drive. He pointed out landmarks and told me where property lines were and explain the daily routine.

Wake up at five. Feed the horses. Check the cattle. Fix whatever needed fixing. Eat dinner. Go to bed. He did tell me one thing on that drive that I didn't understand at the time. We were about five miles from the ranch, driving through a stretch of open grassland with no trees and no structures, just fence posts and wire and empty country.

He slowed the truck and pointed to a cattle gate on the left side of the road. It was a standard metal ranch gate, five bars, chain and padlock. Behind it, a two-track trail ran south into a shallow valley and disappeared over a rise. He said that gate stays locked. He said I was never to open it, never to go past it, and never to walk the fence line south of it after dark. He said it like he was telling me where the fire extinguisher was. Matter of fact, no drama.

I asked why. He looked at me for a second, then looked back at the road. He said there was nothing down there I needed to see. That was all he said about it. The first two months were fine, hard work, but I liked it. Calving season was intense. I'd never delivered a calf before, and the first time I had to pull one, I was up to my elbows in the cow and convinced I was going to kill it.

I didn't. The calf came out slick and steaming and stomach. started breathing and the cow turned around and licked it and that was that. I delivered 11 calves that spring, lost two. Harlan said that was a decent ratio. By June the calves were up and moving and we started rotating the herd into the summer pastures. This meant long days on horseback, pushing cattle through gates, checking water troughs and riding fence. I got comfortable, I got strong.

I stopped thinking about college and started thinking maybe I'd do this for a while. Connie was kind to me. She was Jikaria, born and raised on the reservation. She was quiet like Harlan, but warmer. She cooked big meals and left plates wrapped in foil on the counter for me when I came in late. She had a garden behind the main house, where she grew squash and beans and green chili. She called me me, which I knew enough Spanish to know meant sun, and it made me feel welcome in a way I hadn't expected.

They had a dog, a big blue healer named Captain. Captain went everywhere with Harlan during the day, riding in the back of the truck or running alongside the horses. At night, Captain slept on the porch of the main house. He was a good dog. Calm, obedient, smart the way healers are. I mentioned Captain because he was the first one to tell me something was wrong. It was late June.

I was eating dinner in the main house with Harlan and Connie. The windows were open because the evening was warm. Captain was on the porch. Halfway through the meal, Captain started growling, not barking, growling. Low, steady. The kind of sound a dog makes when it sees something it considers a serious threat. Harlan put his fork down and listened. Connie stopped eating.

We all sat there for about ten seconds listening to Captain growl at something outside. Harlan got up and went to the door. He opened it and looked out. Captain was standing at the edge of the porch, stiff-legged, hackles up, staring south, toward the cattle gate. Harlan stood in the doorway for a long time. Then he called Captain inside, shut the door, and locked it. He came back to the table and sat down. Nobody said anything. Connie started clearing plates. Harlan ate two more bites, pushed his plate away, and told me I should head back to the trailer and stay inside for the night. I asked if everything was okay.

Johnny answered before Harlan could. She said everything was fine and I should go. I went back to the trailer. I locked the door because the way they'd reacted made me feel like I should. I read for a while and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up because Captain was barking, not growling, barking, frantic, panicked barking, the kind I'd never heard from him before. It went on for about 30 seconds, then it stopped. Then I heard the front door of the main house slam, then silence. In the morning, Harlan was already out with the horses when I came to the house. Connie was in the kitchen. I asked about Captain. She said Captain was fine. He was with Harlan. She said sometimes animals get spooked by coyotes. I'd heard plenty

of coyotes by then. They howled most nights. Captain ignored them. He'd been a ranch dog his entire life. Coyotes were background noise to him. Whatever he'd been barking at it wasn't a coyote. I didn't push it. Over the next few weeks, I started noticing things. The cattle didn't graze south of a certain line. I realized this gradually, over the course of several days of riding. The summer pasture extended a long way to the south, all the way to the fence line near the locked gate, but the herd clustered in the northern half. They had access to good grass in the southern section. The water troughs down there were full, but the cattle stayed north. If I pushed a group south, they'd drift back within a day.

I mentioned it to Harlan. He said cattle are creatures of habit. He said they find the ground they like, and they stick to it. That was true, generally. But I'd moved cattle enough by then to know that they'll follow good grass and good water, and the southern section had both. The second thing I noticed was the sound, or the absence of it. On still nights when the wind died down and the sky was clear,

the coyotes would start up around nine or ten. They'd howl from all directions, north, east, west, but never from the south. I listened for it over the course of a week, paying attention to where the sound was coming from. The coyotes howled from three directions. They never howled from south of the gate. It was like there was a line drawn across the land, and everything with instincts knew not to cross it. The third thing was Connie. caught her standing at the kitchen window one evening, looking south. She was holding a bundle of dried sage in one hand, and her lips were moving. She wasn't talking to me. She wasn't talking to anyone in the room. She was saying something quiet and repetitive, and when she noticed me

watching, she stopped and set the sage down and went back to cooking as if nothing had happened. I wanted to ask. I almost did several times. But there was something about the way both Harlan and handled it, the way they closed the subject down without ever officially opening it, that made me understand it wasn't my place. The thing that changed everything happened on a Friday night in mid-July, Harlan and Connie had driven to Farmington for the weekend. Connie's sister was in the hospital, nothing serious, gallbladder surgery, but they wanted to be there. Harlan told me to keep an eye on the herd, feed the horses morning and evening, and stay close to the house. He said, it the same way he'd said the thing about the gate. Straight. Simple. No explanation offered.

Captain stayed with me. The first night was fine. I fed the horses, eight leftover enchiladas from the fridge, sat on the porch with Captain and watched the stars. The coyotes howled to the north and west. Captain yawned and put his head on his paws. I went to bed around 10. I woke up at 147. I know the exact time because I checked my phone. Captain was at the trailer door. He wasn't barking. He wasn't growling. He was whining. High, thin, steady whining. The sound a dog makes when it's scared. Not aggressive. Scared. I got out of bed and went to the door. I put my hand on Captain's back and I could feel him trembling. His whole body was vibrating. I listened. At first I didn't hear anything. Just silence.

Not even insects, which was strange because in July the crickets and cicadas were loud enough to hear through the walls. Then I heard footsteps. They were coming from the south, coming up the road toward the house. Slow, even footsteps on packed dirt. Two feet, a walking pace, steady. I thought it was a person. That was my first and only thought. Someone was walking up the road toward the ranch.

Maybe a hiker who'd gotten turned around, or someone whose vehicle had been. broken down on the highway. It happened. Not often, but it happened. I opened the door. Captain bolted past me, but he didn't run toward the sound. He ran the other direction. He went around the back of the trailer and I heard him crawl under the main house porch into the crawl space where he sometimes hid during thunderstorms. He was gone. I stood in the doorway of the trailer and looked south down the road. The moon was about three quarters full and the sky was clear, so visibility was decent. I could see the road stretching south, pale gray in the moonlight, straight and flat for about a quarter mile before it curved around a low hill.

The sage on either side of the road was silver and still, no wind. The footsteps were getting closer. I could hear them clearly, measured, unhurried, confident. The sound of someone who knew where they were going. I called out. I said hello. I said this is private property. I asked if someone needed help.

The footsteps stopped. The silence that followed was total. No crickets, no wind, no coyotes. Just my own breathing and the blood in my ears. Then a voice answered. It said my name. Tyler. It was Harlan's voice. I recognized it immediately. The tone, the cadence, the dry rasp he had from decades of breathing dust. It was Harlan. But Harlan was in Farmington. Harlan was 70 miles away. I'd watched him drive off that morning with Connie in the passenger seat. I didn't answer. The voice came again. Tyler, come down here. One of the heifers is in the ditch, exact words, exact phrasing, exactly what Harlan would say if a heifer had gotten stuck in one of the drainage ditches that ran along the south road. He'd said something almost identical to me in May, and I'd gone down with a rope and we'd pulled the heifer out together. But something was wrong with the way the voice carried. Sound behaves a certain way at night, in open country. It travels far, and it bounces off terrain features, and you can usually

tell roughly where it's coming from, and how far away it is. This voice sounded close, too close, like whoever was speaking was standing just past the curve of the hill, maybe 200 yards out, but the footsteps had been further away than that when they stopped. The voice was coming from a spot the footsteps hadn't reached yet. I went back inside the trailer, I shut the door, I locked the it. I pushed my cot against the door. I sat on the cot with my back against the wall, and I picked up the 20-gauge shotgun Harlan kept in the trailer for raccoons and skunks. The voice called again. Tyler, I need your help. I didn't answer. It called again maybe five minutes later. Same words, same voice. But the inflection was slightly different. The emphasis had shifted. The stress was on

the wrong syllable, like someone was experimenting with the sentence, trying different ways to say it. It called four more times over the next hour. Each time the phrasing was a little different, a little more wrong. By the last time, it didn't sound like Harlan anymore. The voice was still Harlan's. The raw material was the same, but the rhythm had fallen apart. The words came too fast or too slow. The pauses were in the wrong places. It sounded like a recording being played back at the wrong speed. Then it stopped. I sat in the trailer with the shotgun across my knees and I listened. Nothing, just silence. Then the footsteps started again, closer now, not on the road anymore, on the dirt around the house, coming toward

the trailer, slow. One step, then another, then another. They stopped outside my door. I was holding the shotgun so tight my fingers were cramping. I had it aimed at the door, which was a thin piece of hollow core wood that would stop absolutely nothing. I was sitting maybe four feet from whatever was standing on the other side. I could hear breathing, slow, wet breathing, not through a nose, through a mouth. I could hear saliva clicking in the back of a throat, a throat that sounded too deep, too wide. Like the airway behind the voice was bigger than it should have been. I could smell it.

The same smell every person in these stories describes, the one that I didn't understand until I experienced it myself. wrought and musk and something acidic and burnt. It came through the gaps in the doorframe and filled the trailer. The door handle moved. It turned about halfway, stopped and turned back. Then it turned again. Then it stopped, and something pressed against the door. Not hard, gentle, testing. The way you'd lean against a door to see if it was latched. The cod I'd pushed against it shifted half an inch. I racked the shotgun. The sound of a pump action cycling is one of the most recognizable sounds in the world, and I did it on purpose. I wanted whatever was outside to hear it. The pressure on the door stopped. The breathing stopped. Silence. I sat there for a long time,

maybe 20 minutes, maybe an hour. I lost track. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. Then, from outside, somewhere close, I heard something that I think about every single day. Laughter, not Harlan's voice this time, not anyone's voice I recognized. It was a high, thin laugh, almost a giggle, but stretched out and distorted, like it was coming from a mouth that wasn't shaped right for laughing. It lasted about three seconds, then it stopped, then the footsteps, moving away, south, back down the road, getting fainter and fainter until they were gone. I didn't move until sunrise.

When the light came, I opened the door. I stepped outside with the shotgun and looked around. The ground around the trailer was hard-packed dirt, the kind that doesn't take prints well. But near the door, where the previous days watering from the garden hose had softened the soil, there were marks. They weren't footprints exactly. They were impressions, longer than a human foot. narrower. The toes, if they were toes, had dug into the dirt and left deep furrows, like whatever was standing there had been gripping the ground. There were four marks,

not five, four toes, spaced too far apart and curved inward. I took a picture with my phone. I still have it. The photo doesn't look like much. It looks like marks in dirt, which is what it is. But I know what made them, and I know those marks weren't there when I went to bed. captain under the porch. He came out when I called him, but he wouldn't go to the south side of the house. He stayed on the north porch and he didn't stop shaking until mid-morning. Harlan and Connie came back Sunday evening. Connie's sister was fine. They pulled in around seven, and Harlan found me sitting on the porch of the main house. I told him what happened. I told him every detail. The footsteps, the voice, the handle, the breathing, the laugh. He listened the way Gary listened

in the other story you might have heard, the way men of a certain type in a certain part of the world listen when you tell them something like this, without surprise, without disbelief, with the tired recognition of someone hearing confirmation of something they already knew. When I finished, he nodded. He called Connie over. He said something to her in a language I didn't understand, and she looked at me and then looked south and then went inside without saying anything. Chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more,

can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox, Anabacholinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before

injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizzyness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or Nourgherg's disease, Myasthenia Gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit Botox Chronic Migraine.com, or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. Harlan sat down next to me.

He was quiet for a while. Then he talked. He said his family had owned this land for three generations. His grandfather had homesteaded it in the 1930s. From the very beginning, his grandfather knew that the southern section was different. The cattle wouldn't go there. The horses wouldn't go there.

The dogs wouldn't go near the gate. His grandfather had tried to graze that section for two seasons and lost six head of cattle, not to disease or predators, they just disappeared, no carcasses, no drag marks, no blood gone. His grandfather went to the Bitsili family, who'd lived on the adjacent land for much longer, and asked them about it. What they told him was enough to make him fence off the southern section and never set foot in it again. Harlan's father continued the practice. Harlan continued it after him. I asked what the Bitsillies had told his grandfather. Arlen shook his head. He said it wasn't something you talk about at night. He said the jiccarilla

and the Navajo had words for it, but the words themselves carried weight, and speaking them was like opening a door you couldn't close. He said the only important thing was this. Don't go past the gate. Don't walk the fence after dark. Don't answer if something calls your name. And never, under any circumstances, go looking for it. He said the last part looking right at me. He said people who go looking for it don't always come back, and the ones who do come back don't come back right. I stayed through the rest of the summer. I kept working. I did my job.

I never went near the gate. I never walked south after sunset. On the nights when I heard footsteps on the road, and there were three more times before I left, I stayed inside, and I didn't look out, and I didn't answer. The last time was in late August, two nights before I left for good. The footsteps came up the road around two in the moon. morning. They stopped about 50 yards from the house. Then I heard something I hadn't heard before. It was crying. Soft hitching sobs, the kind a child makes. It was coming from the road, right where the footsteps had stopped. It cried for about 10 minutes. Then it stopped. Then it laughed.

The same laugh I'd heard in July, high and thin and wrong. Then the footsteps went back down the road, and that was the last time. I left on a Thursday morning. Harlan drove me to the bus station in Farmington. We didn't talk much on the drive. When he dropped me off, he shook my hand and told me I'd done good work. Then he said one more thing. He said he was glad I hadn't opened the door. I asked him what would have happened if I had.

He said he didn't know. He said his grandfather's brother had opened his door one night in 1951 and walked out into the dark and they found him the next morning a half mile south of the gate. He was alive. He could walk and eat and breathe. But he never spoke again. Not a single word for the remaining 22 years of his life. He just sat and stared south and didn't speak. I got on the bus. That was 11 years ago. I live in Denver now. I have a normal job and a normal apartment and a normal life. I don't go camping. I don't go hiking. I don't spend time in isolated places. When friends suggest road trips through the Four Corners region, I say I

I'm busy. I've driven through New Mexico twice since then, both times on the interstate, both times during the day, both times without stopping. I still have the photo of the marks outside the trailer. I've shown it to a few people. They see what I see. Four long gouges in soft dirt, curved inward, too deep and too far apart to be a dog or a coyote or a bear. Nobody has ever been able to tell me what made them. Nobody except Connoburn. I called her last year after Harlan died, heart attack in his sleep. 71 years old, I called to offer condolences, and at the end of the conversation, I asked her about the marks. I told her I still had the picture. I asked if she knew what had made them.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said something I'll carry for the rest of my life. She said, of course she knew. She said everyone who lives on that land knows. She said the reason nobody talks about it isn't because they don't know what it is. It's because talking about it is how it finds you in the first place. She said Harlan never should have told his grandfather's story out loud with me sitting right there. She said that's why it came to my door three more times after the first night. She said once it hears its nature spoken in the presence of someone new, it gets curious. She told me not to call again. She told me not to say the word. She told me to Forget the ranch.

Forget the gate. Forget the road. I said okay. Then she said one last thing before she hung up. She asked if I'd been dreaming about it. I had. She said that's how it starts. She hung up.

I don't know what she meant by that. I don't know what starts or where it goes or what comes after the dreams. I've been dreaming about that road for 11 years. The same dream. I'm standing at the cattle gate in the dark and I can hear footsteps coming up from the south. And the gate is unlocked and so. swinging open, and something is walking toward me and I can't move. I wake up before it gets to me, every time. I wake up just before I see it, but every time I have the dream, it gets a little

closer, and I wake up a little later.