I want to start out by saying I’m not a cop, I’m not a park ranger, I’m not some bigfoot hunter that would just run off into the woods for nothing. I don’t live in a farmhouse with a shotgun under my bed for the coyote sounds some people just decide are skinwalkers.
I’ve been hiking for as long as I could walk. My dad taught me what specific birds looked like, and then what they sounded like. Even now, there’s a shelf five feet high in my living room stocked with nature books. I knew the differences between local species of woodpeckers before I was eight.
I’ve been a wildlife researcher in Wyoming for… maybe seven years now? I’m a young guy, kind of baby faced, so I get odd looks a lot when I’m out with all the equipment. It’s rural here. Mostly livestock. Quiet, apart from when everyone drives up to Cheyenne for the rodeo every year. I can’t go anymore, saw a horse break its leg during the “wild” horse race and I never really got over it.
Sorry, I… am kind of distracted. I had to fill up jerrycans for my truck the other day, and my mind is so all over the place even the station’s cashier noticed.
It feels really far away, what happened to me. Five days ago. I went into a private swathe of forest on the edge of a lake, all owned by some group of enterprising millionaires wanting to build some of those stupid cabins you see on TV with the marble counters despite the “rustic” goal. Distracted again. Anyway, I was out there because they found six dead elk within one week.
One week. This property is big, but it’s not that big. There are wolves in Yellowstone— not here, and they obviously wanted to know if there was some big fuckoff bear starting to kill for sport. Some of the rich hunters that rented weeks during the season would be angry, too, if bulls they’d been following on trail cams got eaten before they could be stuck up above the fireplace.
The first carcass they marked was 3/4 of a mile in. I’m an alright navigator, sometimes have trouble getting places but I’m good at following markers on my way out. I’m pretty visual. It was late morning, maybe ten. I wasn’t going to be an idiot and let it get dark.
The first body told me it wasn’t a bear. I didn’t know what my opinion really was yet, or if I ever had one. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an elk, or someone posing with a dead one, but they’re… big.
This one had an almost cartoonish impact imprint in the pine needles, like those craters asteroids leave in movies. Like it’d been tossed diagonally toward the ground really hard.
It was a cow, on her side, split from where her jawbone ended at her neck all the way down. Between both front legs, down her gut, stopping after her back legs. I noticed almost immediately when (what do you do? You know. Examine, poke it with a stick) I put my gloves on and took a closer look that whatever it was had almost cleaved her in half, maybe six inches to spare. The cut was sharp, I’ve never seen anything like it. Right through her sternum the smoothest I’d seen anything like that. With the shoulder-high gloves on I examined her internally, propping the upper of her front legs up. Her heart and her liver were missing.
It scared me. I think I was trying to rationalize it. I got there and saw her, no blood on the ground, with two missing organs, and guts all neatly in place like they’d been put back when…
Yeah. I just told myself it was poachers. When I got to the second carcass, a bull elk, it started to change my mind.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been around something decaying or had a mouse die in your house. It doesn’t take a lot of flesh to make something stink, you can empty your pool filter too close to the house and still smell the bugs.
Neither of them stunk. At all. At the bull I noticed what I hadn’t at the cow. There were no flies. His liver was missing like hers, and though I had trouble leveraging his leg up and got kind of frustrated I found his heart was missing too. The injuries were the same.
Dead, stone cold dead. I’ve been around a lot of animals that have died in some way or another. Nothing had ever chilled me to my goddamn bones like this did.
I was on the way to the third one when I was attacked. I never got to see the third one or the remaining three, because I ended up having to drive to the clinic after. I’m going to try to give this as much detail as I fucking can remember, because I swear I’m not crazy.
There were these two rocks with a hiking trail between, the path worn by both animals and people. The rocks went up maybe ten feet on either side, each about the width of how my truck is long with a couple feet between them and the path. I remember thinking I needed to try spikes for my boots because the pine needles this time of year got pretty slippery in places where they were thick.
I didn’t hear anything really notable. I crushed a pinecone under my boot, and then it was on me.
It looked like something I’d imagine would crawl out of a cave, in the body. Slim. Bipedal, but with digitigrade hind legs. It came out of nowhere, and it was so quiet.
You’re going to ask me how I even noticed all of that— and it’s because it jumped down from the rocks to land in front of me. I was almost out, and there was a lot of ground behind me to cover. One step back, and it pushed its back foot at me. Not all that fast, not a blow, just the way someone would reach for a handshake. It had hooves, and I smelled burnt hair.
I remember now those videos from that martial arts style where you can do “one inch punches” and… yeah.
It felt like a car hit me in the chest. Like I’d taken a hit from a bighorn ram. It crushed the breath out of me and I flew backward. The forest floor broke my fall, and by the time I gasped in air and focused it was staring me directly in the eyes.
Its skin wasn’t white. Not really. Translucent. I could see its veins and arteries, pulsing beneath, in the rhythm of a heartbeat pushing so quickly. It was maybe shock, maybe fear that kept me still with it down on all fours like that. I don’t think it was breathing. We were so close that I could see the blood vessels in its eyes.
It was larger than me, larger than an elk. Moose sized. As big as a fucking full-size van. Its head was a foot wide, maybe more, gaunt and shaped like a bison skull. The skin was stretched over it so tight it looked like it’d rip, its nostrils long slits that went maybe halfway up its head. The eyes that looked into mine were large, with no fleshy eyelid— and when it finally blinked two clear lids came in from the outer edges of its eyes. Its scleras, besides the blood vessels (red, like us) were so white. Everything’s got a little color in its eyes, but this was the whitest white I’d ever seen. There wasn’t an iris— and its pupil was just… clear. Like when they take a photo of the back of your eye at the eye doctor. It felt like I was seeing the inside of its skull and it—
Fuck. Sorry. I’m trying to be rational and not get all shivery and supernatural with it.
It just stared. I’d worked with dogs when I started my career with animals. It was instinct, maybe… wanting it to be done quick or trying to calm it like I’d talk to dogs with my body language. I tilted my head up and to the side, went limp, closed my eyes.
It felt like two hours before it moved. It probably was five minutes.
I opened my eyes when I heard it rustle, but didn’t move. It brought up its front foot arm I guess, stood up a little higher, and that’s when I understood.
It looked like it had fucking scythes on its hands. A palm shaped like ours, one finger joint, then these claws a foot long. three of them and a thumb that had no claw at all. I thought I almost knew it’d cut me in fucking half and I’d be gone, but it moved so slow. It brought that hand up, took one of its four fingers and dragged that claw down from my collarbone.
I was wearing a canvas coat, with a sweatshirt, and thermals underneath. It started to split me. I moved my head, like watching a car crash, as it sliced through all of my clothing and down into my skin like air. Not like butter, like air. it cut maybe a half-inch into me. Adrenaline is a fucking drug, I’ll tell you that. It stopped two inches below my belly button, and then it turned and started to walk away like nothing had happened at all.
Just moseying, as I sat up a little and started to really feel it. It’d turned away from me, stood up tall. The horns it had reminded me of five pronghorns spliced, not quite antlers, and now I saw it had floppy bald ears like a pig. I could see where every vertebrae in its body pushed up against the skin, the definition of every muscle like a shaved horse on every steroid. With its skin that clear, it almost blended and reflected the colors around it. I laid there and watched it go until I couldn’t see it anymore, toward the lake. I think I heard a boat motor.
I didn’t even care. When managed to get on my feet I fucking ran. There was paracord in my truck, and I put my jacket on backwards and tied it around me to put on some pressure while I drove to the tiny medical clinic. My brain gets a little spotty right before that.
Quiet town, nobody kicked by a horse today, so I got in and the doctor (Jen, I’ve known her since I moved here. Older lady) got to me immediately.
I remember that she took the jacket off and went kind of pale, looking at…
There wasn’t any blood. I could see my flesh split perfectly down the middle. In the mirror on the wall above the sink in the exam room I saw how well it was centered between the bumps of my collarbones.
She told me they’d bandage it, and I just basically sat there in some kind of shock and let them move me around. I don’t even remember the drive there, or home. It reminded me of autopsy cuts in TV shows with two less lines, and higher.
Jen’s an old soul. Her family’s been in this state longer than any I can think of. She’s thirty but greying at the temples. Down-to-earth. She’s sweet, and very logical, and is tired as hell of telling people bigfoot doesn’t live out here when they find out she’s a local and ask.
It terrified me when in that empty waiting room, escorting me out, she told me in a low voice that I’d better go out see the Joneses, because their livestock guardian dog had died. She had this look on her face when she said it, patting my back, and just said “Mhm. A bear.”
It reminded me of that tone someone uses when someone else says something they don’t believe. Patronizing. “Ohh, it was a bear. Sure.” just like that. I wanted to throw up.
I don’t know if she knew. I just left. I feel like I’m being pulled into something terrifying. I’ve been looking at apartments in Portland all night. I’ve been trying to draw the thing like I used to with animals back home but I just can’t get it right. I feel like Jen is trying to get me to look into this. I barely know her, but she looked at me like she knew everything about me.
Help, I guess? What do I do?