There is a ghost town high up in the Montana mountains, not far from Yellowstone. Few people know about it. The only road in and out fell into disrepair long ago. To get there requires an intermediate climbing skillset. It can only be attempted when conditions are warm and dry, which around here amounts to a window of a couple of months each year.
My grandfather spoke of it once. The story lacked detail, the particulars lost in the fog of memory, and Pop was never one to embellish once his recollection failed. It was a story he heard as a boy. Of a silver mine up in the mountains. Of a creature that called the forest home. It was no bear. It was no wolf. Whatever it was refused to share the land with the miners and the fledgling town built to support them. What followed was a massacre. The survivors abandoned the town and never returned.
Last summer, Taylor and I hiked and camped for a week within Yellowstone National Park. We lucked out with the weather. We went off grid and loved every minute. The last night, beside a whispering fire, we promised we would do it again. As the firmament above turned about the north star, I told her about the ghost town. She breathed the story in. That’s where we would go.
A harsh winter is rendered tolerable by the promise of spring. It was the summer, though, that held my attention. A long break from school and a week in the mountains. It is a rare treat to do precisely what you most desire. The warmth of the sun brought with it an unbridled giddiness. The wait was almost over.
We drove as far as we could, winding our way up between mountains stripped of the white caps of winter and smeared with green and blue and brown. Taylor rolled the car to a stop on the shoulder of a lonely dirt track. The crisp mountain air tempered the warmth of the sun. We shouldered our packs and climbed.
What is left of the ghost town, as far as we knew, did not amount to much. The rangers fingered it on a map, though none had been up there. The location was an inherited knowledge.
My grandfather could only guess as to the whereabouts. It’s up there somewhere, he had said. When I told him our plans and that it was his story that inspired our destination, a smile gave way to pensiveness. He told me to be careful. I told him not to worry.
The spruce trees thinned the higher we climbed. We scrambled up a rocky shoulder and Taylor checked the map. We were making good ground. If luck fell on our side we would get there by sunset. An impassable chunk of vertical rock face led to a detour that cost us a couple of hours. It would have to be tomorrow.
We camped in a clearing with a view of our destination across the plain. In the distance the trees huddled together as if against the cool night air and obscured the ‘x’ on the map. I wondered what we would find. There was a good chance little remained. Perhaps a few stumps where a rudimentary wooden house once stood. We turned our attention to the sky and watched for shooting stars and agreed it didn’t matter.
Taylor woke me in the dead of the night. The half-moon hung low over the mountains. Her whispered words came out in bursts. My groggy brain took its time assembling them into something coherent. She had heard something. The crack of a tree branch, sharp and loud as if it had been snapped like a twig.
And now there was a light. In the pale, silver glow of the moon, I followed her outstretched hand. Hanging just above the horizon, a yellow light flickered. It gave the impression of a candle burning in a window. Except out here there were no windows and no one to burn a candle. I could only offer vague solutions. An optical trick played by some atmospheric anomaly. A hunting group around a campfire, though this was not a usual place for such things. Whatever it was, it lay far enough away to pose no danger. What neither of us said is that it lay in the direction of our travel. We lay back down. For a time I opened my right eye at intervals to check if the light remained. It did. And then I slept.
We barely spoke in the morning and set off in the direction of the ghost town. I was anxious to uncover a mundane explanation for the light we saw the night before. The remains of a campfire, or some hermit living alone up in the mountains. The way Taylor kept her eyes on the trees ahead told me she was thinking the same.
We entered into the thick patch of forest. The trees grew close and blocked the sun. Stray branches scratched at our bare legs. The ground undulated and I found myself instinctively following it down and soon I was disoriented. Taylor took out the map and the GPS. Inexplicably, the GPS gave no signal and she turned her attention to the map.
I ventured forwards until my boot stubbed against something solid. After a glance down I jumped back. A wooden stake driven into the hard earth. It had cracked about a foot above the ground and whatever once had been above I could only guess at. But then more emerged from between the trees. To my left a clearing full of them. Wooden crosses arranged haphazardly, dozens of them.
I called out to Taylor, my voice thin and small.
I stepped through the cemetery, careful not to step on the ground directly in front of any cross, an old superstition difficult to kick. The crucifixes were rudimentary, simple planks of wood. Some were overtaken by rot, others preserved well enough to read an inscription across the horizontal member. Names and dates. The congregation in the back corner contained no less than six, all with the same date. December 7, 1891.
The massacre of my grandfather’s story, I thought.
Probably cholera, Taylor said, voicing her own explanation.
If there is anything left of that town, we must be close. Beyond the cemetery the spruce thinned and the ground rose. We crested the slope and there it was. The remains of the town stood on a plateau of hard earth. A few of the wooden houses remained as complete structures, the timber warped and cracked and bleached the colour of the ground. A few more were relieved of roofs and parts of walls leaving a fragile relic of what had been. My eyes swept up the sloping mountain beyond where a rusted red limb of mining equipment poked above the rocks.
Taylor approached the closest house and pushed the door. The gentle force tore the door from its hinge and it slapped against the dirt interior of the house. Needles from the surrounding spruce littered the floor. She ventured inside. I lingered on the outside and examined a pair of grooves in the timber siding. Weather had worn the edges. I ran my fingers down them and wondered what could have made such marks.
This is cool, Taylor said. She was right.
Some of the houses contained old tables and chairs and bed frames left behind before the move back down the mountain. We found little else save a lone glass bottle half-buried in the ground.
We dumped our gear beside the house closest to the cemetery and set about scaling the rock in the direction of the mining equipment beyond. We found a crude staircase cut into the rock and powered to the top.
What remained of the mining equipment amounted to an A-frame with a bucket on rails to extract the dirt and a few abandoned picks. A shaft cut into the earth and was soon swallowed by darkness. We could only guess at the depth.
I scrambled up a slope beyond and sat on a small rock platform with a lookout over the valley below, my legs dangling over the side. In the distance the mountains looked blue. We lingered there for a time, until the sun kissed the peaks to the west. Tonight we would camp at the ghost town, and we would stay a few days.
The first sign of trouble was my red windbreaker lying on the ground beside a half-collapsed house at the back of the ghost town. When we left, the windbreaker was packed tight into my backpack. Something had messed with my bag. It wouldn’t be the first time. Squirrels or birds had done it before, but I was sure the windbreaker was deep down in my bag. It would take a persistent squirrel to get to it. A second option had my heart thumping. A bear.
Our gear was a mess. Our clothes and sleeping bags were strewn across the ground. The small gas burner was upturned. My backpack had two parallel tears running top to bottom. I ran my hand over them like I had the two grooves in the siding on the house. This was no squirrel.
Taylor picked up her black pan and turned it in her hand. She showed me. One side buckled inwards. Taylor gripped it and pulled at the metal to bring it back into shape. It did not budge.
A bear, I said. It had to be.
I fumbled in my bag for the canister of bear mace. My muscles tensed and my hands worked frantically until I found it, stored where I had left it. At least we still had that.
We searched the ground and looked for bear tracks. The tell tale wide paws and grouping of front and back legs together. I found a depression in the ground. I hovered my foot above the footprint, my shoe dwarfed in comparison. And no second print. Whatever came into our camp did so on two legs and at the base of those two legs were extraordinary feet.
It can’t be true. Someone is messing with us.
Taylor inspected the print. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it.
I looked west and the sun was already gone, the sky turning a shade of orange at the horizon. Light would fade fast. We had few options. Whatever it was that had been here was not here now. We had planned to camp outside under the stars, but with something stalking the forest, we rolled our sleeping bags and mats inside one of the houses. At least it provided some semblance of security.
We did not risk a fire. Darkness overwhelmed the light quickly and completely. Clouds rolled in from the west at nightfall. A light breeze carried a faint hint of moisture. The forecast had warned of possible storms. I stuck my head out one of the windows and aside from a blurred smudge of the moon through the clouds, the sky gave no light.
We were on edge. Inside the house it was a deep, pitch black. I set the canister of bear mace beside my pillow, periodically palming it to make sure it was still there. Every crack and rustle from the forest had us twitching and turning our ears to the sound. I buried my head between my knees and wondered how I could tolerate the hours left until morning.
I apologised to Taylor for suggesting we come out here. She laughed it off. We’d get through it and have an amazing story to tell. Her voice trembled.
I don’t know what time I fell asleep. When I woke it was still dark and my pillow was wet. Light rain made a gentle rapping on the roof. A hole in the roof let through a small drip. I dragged my sleeping bag over to a dry section of floor. In the distance thunder rumbled, low and ominous. Then something else, closer. A crack from the forest. Not a twig, but something more substantial. And then a growl, low and deep. I shook Taylor awake.
In the darkness we listened. Nothing. Had I dreamed it? No, I couldn’t have. There was something out there. Should we risk turning on the torch? No. We had to be quiet. I closed my hands around the bear mace.
The drumming on the roof intensified. The drip, drip of the leak in the roof turned to a constant dribble. A flash lit up the sky and on its heels a clap of thunder that shook the flimsy structure we had chosen as our protector.
The door flew open. I let out an involuntary scream. In the strengthening wind the door flapped back and forth, rapping on the wall. I froze in place, fear rendering my muscles useless. Taylor made a rustling beside me and I guessed she was moving for the door. Another flash of lightning confirmed my guess, the silhouette of Taylor fumbling in the dark for the door. She used the brief moment of light to gather her bearings and gripped the door. A second flash followed the first and through the doorway a figure emerged. Big and black, it was no bear. In the moment of light it looked stationary, but my imagination soon put it in motion, lumbering for the open door.
Shut the door, I yelled.
Taylor clapped shut the door and a deep growl mixed with the thunder.
Help me, Taylor screamed.
Her voice shifted my brain into gear. I jumped up and scrambled forwards and fell into the door. I braced my legs and pressed my shoulder against the old and cracked timber.
Did you see it? I asked.
Yes.
What was that?
I don’t know.
Guilt flooded my brain. It had been my idea to come out here. I had pushed for a second summer in the mountains. Taylor could have joined her college friends in Mexico. This trip had been, at least in part, a sense of duty for her.
I thought of the cemetery and the dozens of graves. The six on a single day. The scratch marks on the house made by a powerful hand. The stories were true, at least in the important details. Something lived up here. Something that did not care to share its home with humans.
Taylor’s voice cut through my thoughts.
Should we run?
No. Run where? We had to stay together.
The creature pushed at the door with such force I felt about as big and strong as a toddler. We pushed back and the door slammed back into place. The timber pinched at my shoulder. I felt with my hands and found a split in the wood. The door would not hold much longer. Through the torrent of rain the creature snorted and spat, its hot breath penetrating the crack in the door and blowing over my neck. It pushed a second time and that was enough. We fell to the ground, fragments of the splintered door clattering to the floor around us.
I landed heavy on my right side, the canister of bear mace spilling from my grasp and rolling away into the darkness. I crawled after it, feeling in the dark and expecting at any moment to be lifted in the air by my ankles. Behind me Taylor screamed. It had her.
Finally, the edge of my index finger hit the cold steel of the canister. I fumbled it into my hands and stood. I saw nothing in the darkness. The rain beat on the roof and the wind howled and the creature snarled and in among it all I found no compass. I prepared to fire the mace in random hope and hesitated a second, enough for a jagged fork of lightning to illuminate the sky.
The animal held Taylor close to its chest in the corner of the room. I jumped a single step and as the world went dark again I sprayed and hoped. The creature wailed in pain and Taylor thudded to the ground at my feet. Heavy footsteps sloshed on the sodden ground outside the house and then stopped. He wasn’t gone yet.
I stepped out into the rain. The water logged ground saturated my woollen socks. The rain fell thick and cold. A freezing wind sucked the warmth from my body. I listened. I waited. I shivered. The first dose may not have sent it fleeing to the forest, but a second might. Where was the lightning? Was the storm spent?
A hand gripped my bicep. It pulled me close. Lightning lit up the sky. My face was inches from his. Eyes eerily human. A thick mat of black hair soaked from the rain.
With my free hand I pushed the canister to his flat nose and sprayed. He threw his hands in the air and lifted me clean off the ground. For a moment I felt weightless and then came crashing back down. Soggy footfalls faded into the distance. It was gone.
We huddled in the back corner of the house until daybreak. With the rising of the sun, the rain turned to drizzle and finally stopped. We kicked at the fragments of the splintered door. Outside, several vague footprints pressed into the mud, partially destroyed by the rain.
We gathered our things and began the walk home. The crosses standing in the cemetery hammered home that we had been lucky.
Before commencing our descent down the shoulder of rock I turned and looked back up the slope. In the gloom a lone light shone on the hill where the ghost town and the cemetery stood. Not a welcome light, but a warning.