Evening. I appreciate you taking my call. My name's Earl, calling from Durango, and I've been meaning to share this for a long time now. See, my grandfather worked the timber camps in southwestern Colorado back in the early 1900s. The San Juan Mountains. Rough country between Ophir Peaks and Lizard Head. He passed in '74, but before he went, he told me stories that I've never been able to shake. Stories the lumberjacks used to tell each other late at night in those shanties. Most folks today, they call them tall tales. Fearsome critters, they called them. Made-up monsters to scare the greenhorns. But here's the thing. My grandfather wasn't the type to make things up. Worked timber his whole life, practical as they come. When he told me about what they saw in those mountains, he wasn't laughing. He wasn't winking at me like it was some joke. He was dead serious. And the story he told me most often, the one that stuck with him until the end, was about something they called the Slide-Rock Bolter.
Now, the way my grandfather described it, the Bolter was like nothing that belonged on dry land. He said it looked like a whale. A massive, whale-like thing with an enormous head and these tiny, beady eyes. The mouth on it ran all the way back past where its ears would be, like a sculpin, he said. Just this huge gaping maw full of teeth. Gray or brown, depending on who you asked. Blended right into the rock. But the strangest part was the tail. It had this divided flipper tail with these enormous hooks on the end. Like grappling hooks. And the men said it would use those hooks to anchor itself to the very top of the steepest ridges in the mountains. The thing only lived on the steepest mountainsides. Forty-five degrees or steeper. Anything less and it couldn't hunt the way it needed to. That's what they said. It would just hang there, motionless, for days at a time. Watching. Waiting.
The way it hunted, that's what gave the men nightmares. See, the Bolter would hang up there on the ridge, watching the gulch below. Watching for tourists, mostly. Rich folks from back East who came out to see the mountains, wearing their fancy jackets and carrying their guidebooks. The creature could see them coming from miles away with those little eyes. When it spotted prey, it would lift its tail, unhook itself from the mountain, and just let gravity do the rest. It came down like a toboggan, my grandfather said. And here's the part that got me. They said it drooled this thin, oily grease from the corners of its mouth as it slid. sounds exactly like a landslide - Tom' Skid grease, they called it. Lubricated its belly so it could move even faster down that slope. By the time you heard it coming, you were already gone. Scooped right up into that massive mouth. And the momentum, it would carry the thing right up the next slope where it would slap its tail over another ridge and wait for the next meal. Whole parties of tourists were reported gulped at one swoop. Just gone. And that's the thing, nobody ever found the bodies.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]