There was a point in my life I had to decide I would stop waiting for a partner to go on grand adventures with and go out into the world by myself. I’ve been on plenty of trips with friends and those are some of my fondest memories, but as we’ve grown older, and they’ve started families it becomes more and more difficult to organize a trip like that. I decided a couple of years ago I would have to overcome the nightmarish conjuring of my imagination in the dark woods and take treks into the great wilderness with just my dog. I had always envisioned laying with the love of my life under the towering pine trees staring at the stars, but life doesn’t always work out that way.
I’ve always been afraid of the dark. I believe, whole heartedly, that a fear of the dark is an incredibly natural response to have and most people, whether they admit it or not, are scared of the dark on one level or another, and this is especially true for those with vivid imaginations. How is it that a person can stare into absolute blackness and not be at least unsettled by what could be hiding there. I tell you all of this to say that I spent more money and packing space on flashlights and lanterns and LED collars for Lola than most people probably would. I packed solar powered, battery operated, and rechargeable lights. I packed a 12,000 lumen spotlight that connected straight into my car and in case you don’t have an obsession with flashlights, that’s a shit load of lumens. Then Lola and I were off to Big Bend.
I understand Big Bend is not the pine tree sanctuary I spoke of in my fantasy of being under the stars but it was close to where I live and I figured it was a good litmus test for adventures into the dark woods. Also, Lola absolutely loves the water. When I got Lola from the shelter back home they told me she was a lab mix. That is probably technically true but she has more pit-bull in her than lab. I guess a part of me knew that when I was signing the paperwork but she already had me wrapped around her tiny paw. Now she was close to a hundred pounds and built like a brick shithouse.
There are places in Big Bend you are allowed to camp close to the river as long as you have a permit and so Lola and I parked in our spot about 30 yards from the river and set up camp. I got the charcoal grill going, set up some lanterns, put the seats down in my Subaru to make the bed, put various lights in designated places so I was not very far from one at any given point in time. Lola mostly swam.
When night started to fall, I could feel myself getting nervous. I was convinced that if I could make it through one night out here, I could make it through one night anywhere. I roasted a couple of hot dogs for dinner. I served Lola her food, but she refused to eat it until mine was gone. She was chewing away messily at her bowl, and I was cleaning up. No quicker way to attract wildlife to you than leaving our food out for them to smell. I could still hear Lola chewing when something brushed my elbow from behind. Now I admittedly had long sleeves on and there was a breeze but let me be abundantly clear… something brushed against me elbow. I whipped around to see Lola staring at me from the front of her food bowl. Whatever it was that touched me had caught her attention too, but distracted by the food, I’m sure, she didn’t notice until it was too late. She didn’t bark, she didn’t growl, she just stared. By the time I tracked her eye line to the left of me, whatever it was had ran back into the brush. I know this for a fact because I heard it run away, dead foliage cracking from under it.
If the mind, as we established earlier, will make up outlandish things in the dark, whatever it will do to keep itself from embarrassment is beyond even that. As I put out the fire out in the charcoal grill, I used to make dinner, I convinced myself with great conviction that what had touched my arm was just a lizard, maybe even a bird that I hadn’t noticed so close to me. I should have noticed Lola stopped eating her food. I should have noticed how restless and uncomfortable she was while we could have made it out in the daylight. I see that now.
If you’ve ever had the displeasure of being out in the desert at night when the coyotes run, then you know exactly what it sounds like when a pack of them get close to camp. The best way I can describe it is imagining a group of girls screaming in the distance. Then imagine within about 15 seconds those screams go from sounding like they are hundreds of feet away to sounding like they have completely surrounded your camp. As unfortunate as it was to hear it the first time, I at least knew what I was hearing that first night at camp. I got Lola and myself into the back of the hatchback and locked the doors. Coyotes aren’t particularly dangerous by themselves but in a group, they could have hurt us. All the lights I had set up were on and gave me comfort. The Coyotes would have to brave the light to take anything from camp. I figured they would get spooked and move on.
The howling stopped all at once. I looked out of the windows and still caught reflections of their eyes in the darkness beyond my many lights. They weren’t gone, just staring. Straight across from the back of the Subaru I noticed rustling in the brush. At first, of course, I thought it was one of the coyotes. I could only make out that it was the same size as they were, and its head was white. As it came further towards me, I could see it’s head was not that of a coyote at all. Or at least not that I could see. Whatever it’s face looked like was covered by a mask. No, not a mask, a skull. There was the skull of a young calf over a body that was unnaturally crawling an all fours. It looked human, or at least ape like. It crawled slowly around the camp coming up to each light and turning it off. It knew how to use some of the switches, but if it couldn’t figure it out it just put the light on the ground and smashed it. Lola should have been barking, there was a fiend in our camp, but she wasn’t. We were both breathing hard staring out of the window.
After there was only one light remaining the creature turned its attention to the car. It stood straight up on its hind legs and walked slowly towards the car. It investigated the window. It looked straight at me only the condensation on the glass between us. It was close enough that I should have been able to make out some eyes behind the black pits of the calf skull, but there was nothing, only dark. The creature slapped it’s open palm against the glass and let out a hideous scream. It repeated slapping the window over and over again, becoming more animated with it’s screams. I clawed back towards my dog who was now barking loudly at the commotion. The creature seemed desperate to get inside, like I had something it needed. And then it stopped.
The creature slinked back into the middle of the camp, never taking it’s gaze from the back of the car. It put it’s hands up and the coyotes started screaming even louder than before. It stayed there staring until it reached for the last light. It grabbed the light and smashed it into the ground. I jumped to the front seat and tuned the car on. I switched it into drive and slammed the gas pedal, hoping, praying that I would avoid the river and find the road. As soon as I felt the dirt under the tires turn into asphalt I finally looked into my rearview mirror. The creature was still standing there with its hands in the air. The coyotes were swarming it. That was the last glimpse I got before I stopped looking back.
I only stopped driving when the sun came up. Lola and I got the campground with a bunch of people in each direction, and I was comforted enough to breathe and close my eyes, but I’m still shaken up. I wrote this down so I could tell the people inside about what happened. The small chance they would believe me might save somebody else from what I had just gone through, or worse. As I made my way down the path to the front office I stopped and looked at the map because something caught my eye. On the National Park map, on the river bend where I had just run from, was a sticker that had clearly been placed there by someone other than the park services. It was a sticker of a longhorn skull and on the forehead were the words “HUNT. DON’T SCAVENGE.”