To call it ‘the woods’ or ‘the wilderness’ is really underselling how alone you are out here. The sky is bigger when it’s not obscured by treetops. The nights–and really, even the days–are darker. The dust in the atmosphere against the angle of the sun leaves everything in a permanent haze. You could walk two hundred miles without hitting a road, and even then, it might be three days before you ever see a vehicle.
The signs of human civilization are rare. If you get far enough north you won’t even see powerlines in the distance, and for snipe hunting, being miles away from anything electric or electronic is almost a prerequisite–people with digital cameras or cell phones almost never see them, which might contribute to why it’s so difficult to get a picture of them. It’s thought they can sense and actively avoid electromagnetic fields. It’s also said they will not go anywhere near fire.
So you don’t bring a cell phone, but even if you do, it had better be a satellite phone because the nearest tower is hundreds of miles away.
For over half of the year, the main driver of the boreal forest’s animal ecology is snow. People think of it as an extension of the ground, but for small animals it becomes a protective blanket shielding them from predators. As the ground releases heat, they can make tunnels beneath the snow, while their larger predators are stuck patrolling atop the snowpack.
Snipes rarely leave their caves during winter–while their fur makes them better adapted to the cold and snow, they hate leaving footprints and dislike being visible against the blinding whiteness, which endures even at night.
Signs of human activity are incredibly rare–you wouldn’t come here without a purpose and being almost anywhere else is more favorable for survival. The lands where we hunt snipe are technically tribal land. I’m not sure if they purposely avoid us, or if this place is outside of their hunting range, but I’ve never seen another person up here.
You might think there would be an advantage in hunting snipe with a partner or a group, but what we’ve discovered is that hunts with more than one person have never been successful. Traveling in groups must make too much noise or create so much disruption to the snipe’s area that they are able to tell immediately that humans are nearby.
They say the easiest job in the world is working in the complaint department at a parachute packing plant. Well, during my first (and only) snipe hunt, my parachute didn’t deploy properly–it only opened about halfway, enough to slow my fall but not enough for me to be able to control my landing, and I ended up landing hard on my shoulder. This may have saved me, because I spent that first day fashioning a brace for my arm and huddling beneath a big tree, and when I went to the first cave site I had marked on my map the next day, I saw three freshly-killed deer carcasses near the mouth of the cave, torn completely apart by what I’m assuming was a bear.
The boreal forests are home to black bears, grizzlies, and the occasional polar bear, and an encounter with any of them has the potential to end your trip pretty quickly. You might think that bringing a powerful gun along for protection would be the answer, but regular guns are not standard kit for a snipe hunt.
In the 1970’s, a British farmer did a study where he dressed like a scarecrow and wandered out into his field carrying a broom with a hollowed-out handle. The first day, the crows ignored him, but on the second day, he concealed a shotgun within the broom, and the crows immediately scattered. He repeated the experiment several times, and the outcome was always the same. Because the gun itself wasn’t visible, it was reasoned that there were unconscious changes in his behavior when he was carrying a gun.
So we don’t bring regular guns on snipe hunts on the off-chance that the animals notice and start behaving strangely and tip off the snipe to our presence. We do bring a tranquilizer rifle with darts strong enough to knock an elephant into a short coma, but we’ve found that the crows don’t avoid us when we carry these.
I investigated the area around the deer carcasses and I noticed a few oddities: none of the flesh was actually eaten, no scavengers showed up to snack on the bodies, and the area of the massacre was dead quiet.
But the tracks leading up to the site were definitely bear tracks, and I didn’t see any signs of a snipe, so I moved onto the next cave on my map.
You parachute into the forest because snipe have an excellent sense of smell and unmatched hearing. The fifty-mile hike you make off a road will create a constant stream of noise, rhythmic leaf crunches and twig snaps and coughs and sneezes, which a snipe will hear like an alarm clock during your entire approach. By parachuting in at midday and only moving around while the sun is high in the sky and snipes are sleeping deep in their caves, you can more effectively mask your sounds and they won’t have a scent profile built up for you.
As for the smell, and there’s no delicate way to put this, but to animals we absolutely reek. They can smell us before they can see us. To cover your scent enough to not immediately alert a snipe to your presence, you douse your hair, your clothes, and your gear in red fox urine and rub everything with moose droppings.
One thing in our favor is that snipes themselves are fairly pungent, so this leaves them a little bit noseblind to smells they would be used to.
Reeking of fox piss and crawling around on my hands and knees looking for snipe tracks near the mouth of the second cave I marked on my satellite map, I thought back to where my snipe-hunting career began: trying to join the United States Air Force.
They make you take a test called the ASVAB, a three-hour test of general knowledge. I had this idea I would be a fighter pilot, and taking the test didn’t disabuse me of that fantasy–it was actually not difficult at all.
I’d heard that you needed to do better than the bottom one-third of everyone who took the test to get accepted, and when I got my results I had mixed emotions: I scored in the 98th percentile–higher than almost all of the other applicants, but I was also rejected from joining not just the Air Force, but any branch of the military.
The recruiter, who, hours earlier was so eager to get my signatures was suddenly aloof and didn’t want to answer my questions.
“But isn’t a high score a good thing?”
“Generally, yes, but it looks like some combination of your score and background triggered a red flag.”
“My background? I’ve never gotten in trouble in my life!”
“I know, I saw your background check. It’s some psychological thing. Unfortunately, that’s all I know. Good luck.”
And for the next week I was dejected. I found myself in a bar two towns away from home which was just seedy enough to not check IDs and after two beers, a blonde woman in her 30s sat down next to me.
“I know about your test,” she said.
“What?”
“Your ASVAB test. I just want you to know it wasn’t the score so much as which questions you missed. People who miss those particular questions while getting the other ones correct tend to fall into a certain…profile. People with this profile are liabilities in the regular military, but they also have the potential to serve their country in other, less ‘decorated’ ways.
“Are you saying you want me to join the CIA and become a spy?”
She laughed so hard she coughed a sip of beer back into her bottle.
“You’re a kid from a hick town in a flyover state, not Jason fucking Bourne. You’d be caught out immediately. You’d get eaten alive.”
“Okay, so what do you want me to do?”
“You’d be a terrible spy. The CIA isn’t the right place for you. But you’re also not far off. There’s a program, it’s not tied to any of the alphabet-soup agencies, it’s not a line item in any congressman’s budget, but you would be well compensated and you would be helping your country more than some pilot picking off MiGs.”
“Go on.”
“Have you ever been hunting?”
I had not. The next three months were intense, I was sent to different kinds of training but none of it was military, none of it was official. I was given a fake name and warned not to mention the ‘program’. They told me to pretend I was studying conservation law enforcement to prepare for a career as a park ranger.
I went to survivalist training first–four weeks of building shelters out of sticks, making fires out of straw and flint and pine needles, identifying which mushrooms and berries were safe and which ones would put you in the hospital. We learned to identify animal tracks, animal noises, and animal patterns-of-life. They taught us which water was good to drink and which water would make you sick. They taught us how to move in a way that would alert the dangerous animals so they would stay away from you. They taught us how to move silently so the prey animals wouldn’t.
The next training was combat training. I took two-week classes in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo. Angela, the woman who recruited me, told me that the program preferred martial arts which didn’t focus on kicking, that kicking wasn’t practical in real life-or-death fights.
I must’ve been thrown a hundred times. Every bone ached, every muscle radiated white hot pain. I chipped two teeth and broke my nose, but somehow, I survived. I was by no means a fearsome opponent, but I guess I’d learned enough to hold my own in a street brawl.
With the second cave being a bust, my mental montage of fighting scenes was interrupted by something unexpected: a pile of stones.
There were maybe a dozen flat stones, each the size of a hand, arranged in a circle maybe two feet in diameter. In the middle of the circle were three stones stacked on top of each other at the outer edge, like they were denoting a direction.
Incidentally, this was the direction I was heading for the third cave. I looked around for paths or broken twigs, but there were none. The rocks, on closer inspection, were weathered and moss-covered. Whoever placed them was long gone.
I was overcome with a sudden sense of uneasiness. I hadn’t heard a single sound since the first cave, hadn’t seen a squirrel or heard the buzz of a mosquito. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath. My sore shoulder suddenly felt fine. Despite the surprisingly hot summer sun, I stood frozen, genuinely concerned my heartbeat would be loud enough to alert every predator in a dozen miles of my location.
And then I heard it: it sounded like two big rocks being knocked together. Against my better judgment, I walked toward the source of the noise. In the distance, I could see what looked like a white-tailed deer buck banging its head against the trunk of a giant fir tree. I pulled out my nocs to get a better look and immediately regretted it, I saw the white of its skull and an eyeball dangling from its eye socket. As suddenly as it began, it gave up the attack and trotted away, its irregular step cadence making me uneasy.
There are an estimated thirty-two thousand caves in western Canada, with over ninety percent of them entirely unexplored. Thousands of miles of dark corners for snipes to hide in.
Scientists don’t believe it’s possible for us to have unidentified large predators because they are thinking systematically–they look for bones, for food sources, for dens and burrows. The way they think, rightly, a bird with a 20-foot wingspan would show up on radar next to airplanes, and because we don’t see them they must not exist. Colossal squids made themselves known to us by attacking whales long before we ever caught one.
Snipes break the pattern because they don’t want to be found, they actively and intentionally avoid us. We pushed snipes backwards across the continent the same way we pushed Native Americans back as we expanded. When snipes bury their dead, they bury them deep at the base of a tree and bury another carcass a few feet above it. Scientists are not expecting animals to take calculated measures to avoid detection.
But they’re still living things. They’re not invisible, they’re not magic. This becomes readily apparent to me as I see my first faint footprint maybe thirty feet away from the mouth of the third cave. The eerie atmosphere has slightly abated, as I look up to the treetops to see dozens of crows silently watching me.
The footprint looks oddly…human. But larger. It’s almost twice the size of my own foot.
I know what you’re thinking, but we don’t use the B-word. We don’t use the S-word, either. We don’t think of them as ‘cryptids’ and we don’t come here hoping to take back pictures and body parts as trophies to end up on spooky late-night shows.
“What is the point of these snipe hunts?” I asked her.
Angela adjusted her bra in the mirror. “It’s a test. A trial by fire. Not just of your ability to subdue a mythical animal, but to prove to us that we can send you to any remote corner of the world and you can carry out a near-impossible task with little-to-no direction and make your way back home.”
“What is the purpose of ‘the program’?”
“Seal Team Six exists to take out high-profile targets with the world watching. The Green Berets carry out high-stakes military missions. Our snipe hunters clean up messes. They solve problems that can’t otherwise be solved: an oligarch blocking an important initiative, a cartel capo dumping young, pretty teachers dead in the street.
“You won’t be sent to silence political dissidents. If you get an assignment, you can rest assured the world will be better off when you’re finished.”
I blinked a few times, absorbing this information. I must not have seemed convinced.
“Do you know why ninjas are depicted as wearing black?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Real ninjas didn’t wear black. They dressed like peasants, like merchants, like the house staff. In kabuki theater, the stagehands who moved the props around between scenes would wear all black so the audience would ignore them. And then in one kabuki play, one of the ‘stagehands’ stabbed a protagonist and the audience was absolutely dumbfounded. The gimmick was copied to the point it became the main way to portray ninjas.
“But we’re not sending you out to wear black and stab people. We’re sending you to dress like a utility worker and shoot a blow dart in a window to make it look like a genocidal general had a heart attack.”
I scan the ground for another footprint and I find it. Most of their prints are covered by leaves. The prints aren’t giant feet pressed into bare soil, they’re small saucers a few millimeters deep in grass. After following what could only be called a path in the loosest sense, I find a stream with clear, running water. Bushes nearby, which should have blueberries, are bare.
I think I may have found my spot. I see a small cliff about a hundred feet away and spend 10 minutes walking around to find a path to the top. At the top of the cliff are a pair of bushes and a tree and I begin to prepare my nest.
Snipes almost never leave their caves until the sun is well and truly gone. During my walk, I had managed to find a few reasonable-looking mushrooms and some cranberries and I eat them before taking a quick nap. On a snipe hunt, you don’t bring your own food as the smell of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or a Slim Jim would alert snipes and other animals of your presence almost immediately, not to mention the alien noises associated with the packaging.
I wake up to see fireworks, lightning, a nuclear blast, but there’s no bang, no thunder. After a few seconds I realize I’m seeing the aurora borealis. I knew what it was, but in all the excitement of the hunt it had not crossed my mind I might encounter it on this trip.
I roll over and begin assembling my weapon. It’s a tranquilizer gun, but it’s built and used like a sniper rifle. I train the sight on the spot near the river where the footprints indicate the beast gets its water. In the moonlight, I have better visibility than I anticipated and I wait for the creature to appear.
An hour passes. And then another hour. The moon is obscured by a cloud, and when the cloud passes, I see it–the snipe.
Its most obvious feature is its size. But the second thing I notice isn’t its dull fur or its lanky arms–it’s the way the thing moves. It should be crunching leaves and twigs and knocking down branches, but it doesn’t. It moves like a shadow. Its fur has this dull translucency that seems to at once repel and camouflage itself with what little light there is. It stoops over the water and I line it up, preparing to take the–
Something whooshes past my head and the tree behind me explodes into giant splinters of wood. A boulder the size of a gas grill slides to rest against the split trunk of the tree only a dozen feet from me. I hear what sounds like the angry honking of a dozen geese, but the honking you would imagine a goose would make if it were the size of a horse. Another large rock sails over my head and thuds into the ground maybe six feet from me. I’ve read about people in these situations being paralyzed by fear, but I’m already up and running. Dozens of rocks of various sizes land behind me, one hits my leg, but thankfully it was one of the smaller ones and I’m not hobbled enough to stop.
I realize that, in my arrogance, I made a few miscalculations. I didn’t expect the snipe to hunt me back, nor did I expect there to be, like, a lot of them. The rocks keep sailing, but they are all over the place. I make it to the treeline and roll down a hill, crawling under a bush maybe forty feet into the woods. Once my eyes adjust to the darkness, I look toward the moonlight at the edge of the forest, scanning the silhouettes of trees for moving shadows, but I don’t see them.
One minute becomes five minutes, five minutes become an hour. I relax my grip on the rifle and breathe normally again when I hear the snap of a twig just a few feet away from me. I brace myself for a heavy impact, but what I see in the weak fingers of daylight isn’t a snipe–it’s a deer, this time a doe, with large chunks of flesh missing from its rear and what’s more, it’s walking on two legs. Its movements are uncoordinated, every step is a wobble. It walks like a thing inhabiting a deer’s body without a prior understanding of the fundamentals of deer locomotion. Its eyes are lifeless, its purple tongue sagging from the corner of its mouth.
I hold my breath, not wanting to draw its attention. For some reason it scares me more than the boulder-tossing beasts. Eventually it leaves my line of sight, traveling in the same direction as the one-eyed buck. I imagine a mass exodus of zombie deer converging on some terrible corner of the map.
I need a new plan. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I have no idea how to get what I came for now that it’s me against a whole group of these things.
I go back to my sniper’s nest to survey the damage, but the boulders are gone. The ground is still pocked with tiny and not-so-tiny craters, but the rocks nowhere to be seen. Looking at the split tree and knowing the general direction the first big rock came from, I walk to the spot the creature must have launched it from. Indentations in the grassy ground indicate a creature even larger than the one I saw at the river.
I make my way back to the cave, taking care to walk quietly. Near the mouth of the cave I see almost a dozen sets of tracks of various sizes.
Beginning to have the outline of an idea, I walk a half mile back to an overgrown field and begin collecting as much dry grass as I can carry. I grab twigs and leaves, and begin piling it at the side of the entrance to the cave.
Once I’m satisfied with my efforts, I retreat to a solitary tree in the middle of a large field about a mile from the cave. From this spot, nothing can approach me without crossing open field, and even with their muscles, I don’t think a snipe can hurl a boulder this far.
I nap through the height of the afternoon, and awaken feeling, well, not refreshed but a tiny bit better. I head to the part of the stream where the creatures get their water, but on opposing bank. With an hour of effort and a few nicks and scrapes I’m able to find enough berries and a few mushrooms to stave off the worst of my hunger.
As the sun begins to retreat behind the horizon, I begin to climb the large hill housing the cave housing the creatures. This time I pick my spot about fifty feet above the mouth of the cave, lining up my shot at the path they would take when they emerge.
Over the course of the next few hours I spot several more contorted deer perambulating north like the others, presumably to the opening in the top of the hollow earth to throw themselves in.
Once the shadows are long and blended together, I see them. The snipes file out, looking around cautiously, swinging their long arms to offset their long strides. I count seven of them. The last one is smaller, maybe only two thirds the size of the others–I lock this one in my crosshairs and squeeze out a shot.
Several things happen at once: the creature doesn’t howl in pain before it drops, but the thunk of the dart immediately stops the other snipes in their tracks. They all align their hollow gazes at the source of the shot…me.
I strike a match and light two torches as I run forward, half sliding down the steep hill. They stand frozen, unsure whether to charge me or to flee at the sight of the flames. As I reach the mouth of the cave, I toss one of the torches at my pile of dry grass and wood scraps and it begins to swell into a healthy bonfire. This finally causes the beasts to edge backwards, and finally, to retreat.
I waste no time in descending upon the incapacitated snipe. I drop the torch a few feet away from my target, pull the syringe from my pocket, remove the cap, and jab it into the creature’s thigh. It takes about fifteen seconds to fill the syringe with blood, but each of those seconds feels like an hour. I scan the treeline nervously, the protective fire having the downside of making anything moving outside its range all but invisible to me in the darkness.
The scissors are a special tool specifically for this operation, titanium surgical scissors with extremely sharp blades. I cut two locks of fur, make sure the vial of blood is secure, and pick up the torch and the tranquilizer rifle.
As soon as I take a few steps from the sleeping creature, I see the first rock fly from the shadows, arcing towards my head. I duck to dodge it and backtrack to the bonfire as more rocks begin flying.
I make a left at the mouth of the cave and, for a split second, in the inky black of the cave I catch a glimpse of several pairs of eyes reflecting the light of the fire. Shaken, I sprint back towards the open clearing. Wired on adrenaline and what I’m starting to suspect was at least one hallucinogenic mushroom, the absurdity of my predicament dawns on me.
As I break into the open field, I realize I haven’t heard the thud of a thrown rock in minutes, but I see shadows emerging from the trees in every direction. I brace myself for the end, but it doesn’t come. After perhaps a minute, the dozens of shadows resolve into the shapes of silent, shambling deer.
I’m frozen, unable to turn back and unwilling to move forward. I stare, wide-eyed, as the undead herd drags itself past me, ignoring me in favor of whatever silent, eldritch siren song is calling them home.
I drop my torch at the lone tree and spend the rest of the night running, jogging, scrambling due west, jumping at every snap of a twig or cracking of a leaf, but I don’t see the creatures again. The eventual sunrise allows me to consult my laminated map.
It takes me a day and a half of hiking to hit a road, that thin layer of asphalt separating the ethereal from the mundane. As I walk north, I keep track of the infrequent distance markers, and eventually, I see a sign: Wrigley - 26 kilometers. From the sign, I count a hundred and fifty paces back into the woods and I see a stump. Digging at the base of the stump with my hands, I find a rusted metal lunch box bearing the smiling faces of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Inside, there’s a U.S. passport with the face of someone who looks somewhat like me and a wad of American fifty-dollar bills. I place the vial of snipe blood and one of the locks of hair in the lunch box and bury it again. Looking around the area, I find a black trash bag with a pair of reasonably clean jeans, a t-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt. I peel the sweaty, dirty clothes off my skin and swap them for the clean ones.
Walking along the road, after a few hours I hear the rumble of a big truck–a big rig carrying a dozen giant tree trunks. I don’t even have to wave down the driver, he slows to a stop as if expecting me.