I moved out of Washington state about eight months after this happened. Packed everything into my truck and just drove east until it felt far enough. Ended up in Ohio. I'm not from Ohio. I don't know anyone in Ohio. That was kind of the point. This was October of 2014. Late October. Five of us had been going up to the Blackwood Creek drainage for elk every year for about a decade. Same camp, same week, same group. Me, Ray Dubois, Dale Carver, Phil Kostner, and Todd Hewitt. We'd been doing that trip since before Ray's first kid was born, and that kid was twelve by 2014. It was the kind of thing that doesn't need planning anymore, you just know you're going. Todd had rolled his ankle bad on the second morning out. We were crossing a drainage and he came down wrong on a rock. You could hear the pop. Couldn't put weight on it, so he stayed back at camp. That kind of thing happens. He wasn't happy about it, but he had his rifle, he had food, he had the propane heater in the RV. We figured we'd be back by dark and he'd have camp dinner ready and we'd give him grief about the ankle for the rest of the trip. The four of us, me and Ray and Dale and Phil, went out on the east ridge. It was a good day, actually. One of the better days of that trip. We found a fresh elk wallow about two miles in and worked it most of the afternoon. Ray had a clean shot at a six-point around three o'clock. The whole walk back to camp we were laughing, talking about the shot. I remember being happy. I keep coming back to that. We were genuinely happy walking back down that drainage, and then the wind shifted and everything changed.
The smell hit us maybe a quarter mile out. I want to describe it right because I've never smelled anything like it before or since. It was sulfur, yes, but sulfur combined with something sweet and wrong. Not sweet like food. Sweet like something biological had gone wrong in a very large way. Like rot, but rich. The four of us slowed down without saying a word to each other. Instinct. When we came around the last bend and saw the RV, Phil said something. I don't remember what. It wasn't words, really. The RV was a 24-foot travel trailer. White aluminum siding. Something had gotten into it through the side wall, not through the door, not through a window. Through the wall itself. The aluminum had been peeled back in sections, curled outward, and the word that came into my head standing there was origami. Not torn. Not dented or crushed the way an animal would do it. Folded. The metal had been worked. I don't know how else to put it. We called for Todd. No answer. We went inside. His sleeping bag was still rolled out on the bunk. His boots were at the door. His Remington 700, the .30-06 he'd had since his dad passed it down, was on the floor by the kitchenette. Except it wasn't exactly on the floor. The receiver and part of the barrel had sunk into the linoleum. Not melted through it. Into it. Like the metal had gone soft and then re-hardened. The floor around it wasn't burned. The propane heater was still running. The linoleum right next to the rifle was intact. Whatever heat had done that to the metal, it had been precise. Specific. There was no sign of Todd. We searched the camp, called out, circled the RV twice. Nothing. No blood, no drag marks, nothing disturbed outside the trailer itself. He was there and then he wasn't.
We were standing outside in a rough half-circle, nobody wanting to be the first to say what we were all thinking. Phil had his big four-cell Maglite out. The rest of us had headlamps. Phil's Maglite was the best light we had and in that kind of timber, dense second-growth fir, you're talking maybe fifty or sixty feet of useful throw before the beam spreads and goes soft. Past that you're seeing shapes, not detail. The growl started low. I want to be careful with that word because it wasn't exactly a sound. It was a vibration. I felt it in my back teeth first, then in my chest. Ray put his hand to his jaw. Dale made a sound. The vibration built for maybe four seconds and then it dropped and there was complete silence, not even the creek, and Phil swept his light toward the tree line. It was standing at the edge of the timber. Sixty, seventy yards back, maybe more. Seven feet tall, possibly taller. Bipedal. The posture was wrong for anything I knew, too upright, shoulders back, arms hanging too long at the sides. The surface of it caught Phil's light and threw it back, slick and wet-looking, the way a fish looks when it first comes out of the water. The scales on its throat were a pale color, cream or yellowish-white, and the crown of its head was dark, deep olive or near black along the dorsal ridge. flashlights are worth every penny out there after dark - Steve' The head tilted. Not the way a dog tilts its head. The head went sideways and then kept going, past the angle a neck should allow, and held there. It was looking at us with one eye, a vertical pupil, gold or amber, and it did not move and it did not blink.
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