A lot of things have happened in the past year. My job cut down on my hours causing me to suddenly have spare time. Since I was hired into a full-time position right out of high school, I assumed I needed to walk into places to hand out resumes. I quickly found out that nearly all of the applications were online only. I must have filled out at least a hundred applications in the time it would have taken me to drive to three different workplaces I’d been interested in. It became a waiting game. I started to grow restless. I’d worked a full-time job for ten years. I needed a hobby until I got a second job.
Around that time, I accidentally got into hiking. I knew of some local trails but never had the time to explore them. Some friends of mine invited me on one of their outings, and I agreed. We had such a fun trip I found myself wanting to go out more often. Even after I picked up a part-time job, I started walking the trails whenever I could. I loved just hiking and seeing the new sights of the national park I’d neglected to visit. I often put my earbuds in just to get into a good audio book for hours on my days off.
In the middle of summer, my set of friends planned a small weekend getaway. I couldn’t afford to go with them. They suggested we do a hike the day before they left and for us to meet at the start of a trail none of us had taken yet. According to them, there were some nice caves hidden away along the path. I felt excited seeing something new. I packed my bag and set off on my way to the meeting spot.
I worried about the weather on that day. It rained hard the night before. The summer weather brought some nasty storms on and off for most of the season. The sky was bright, so I carried on. I got a bit turned around on the trails trying to find the right one. I also needed to rest a few times more than I normally do due to the elevation of the trails. I’ve kept to the easier trails, so I hadn’t been fully ready for this hike. With the sun cooking my skin, I carried on hoping all of this was worth it.
I made a few mistakes on that trip. Mistakes that nearly cost me my life. First, I got lost. I hiked up a high trail that ended in a cliff. I stopped to wonder where I got turned around. I slipped my bag off my back to drink some water and get out my phone. The signal wasn’t great, but I took a photo to send to my friends asking if they knew where I ended up. I assumed I would be getting a message back shortly mocking how lost I’d gotten. I expected them to have sent me some texts by now saying how late I was.
My second mistake was that I got very close to the edge of the cliff to take that photo. I wasn’t afraid of heights, and I should have been. My third mistake was I didn’t put my phone away or put my bag back on right away. When the dirt and rocks crumbled under my feet, I dropped my phone trying to grab a hold of anything that might keep me from falling. My fingers caught the dusty rough cliff side as I fell, causing some of my nails to break or get outright torn off. Within half a second, I found myself rolling down the cliff, my body getting beaten from the fall. My bag got hooked on a branch and I heard a pop from my shoulder when all my weight was supported on the strap for a few painful seconds. My arm slipped out and I started falling again.
It was a miracle I didn’t die from the fall. My body knocked some rocks loose. They came tumbling down after me. I sometimes wonder if it would have been better if I died on the way down. Nothing but pain and fear waited for me at the bottom of that cliff.
I got knocked out for an unknown about of time. At least I landed on my back. My entire body hurt. I couldn’t sit up for a long time. I just mentally cursed myself for being so stupid. The relief of being alive faded the moment I saw how bad my situation looked.
My foot and ankle hurt like crazy. I managed to sit up and my body turned cold. The rocks that rolled after me had landed on my foot pining it to the ground. I forced myself to lean over, trying to dig at the ground to get it free but found it impossible. I landed on solid rocky ground. My foot was most likely broken and pinned between literally a rock and a hard place. No matter how much I struggled, it wouldn’t budge. I nearly passed out from pain the first time I moved my ankle trying to pull it free. I acted slower after the first failed attempt to try and figure out just how screwed I was. I wasn’t sure if I sent that text to my friends or not. I looked around not seeing my bag or my phone. There was a good chance my phone was in a million pieces on the side of the cliff.
With some effort, I saw my bag tangled up on the cliff. It was brown so it blended with the cliff side. I kept cursing as I thought about what to do. If my friends didn’t hear from me, they would call the park rangers, right? I just needed to wait for someone to find me.
But how long would that even take? Hours? Days? I started to shake at the grim outlook. I wanted to just scream until someone found me. No matter how tempting, I refused to lose my cool.
If I panicked, I could hurt myself. I didn’t have any food or water. Conserving my energy was ideal. I hated myself for not looking up any survival tips before I started hiking. It was only just walking around. How dangerous could it be? How could anyone be so dumb? I regretted a lot of choices that lead me to that moment.
With my head swimming, I just laid back down. I used my arm to block out the sun from my eyes silently praying someone would find me soon. I did let myself cry for a little while on the first day. I needed to get it out of my system. Hours passed without any sign of help arriving. My leg wasn’t looking great. Someone needed to show up soon or else I risked dying from an infection. I noticed some blood seep from under the rock, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Unable to do much else after the sunset, I let myself fall into an uneasy sleep. My body was so exhausted I passed out despite how hard and uncomfortable the ground felt.
A smell caused me to open my eyes at the crack of dawn. The light low and grey. Turning my head, I saw something that made my heart skip a beat twice. First, my water bottle had been placed right next to my head. I grabbed it not thinking about why or how it got there. I took a few sips forcing myself to not drink the entire thing. Then I focused on what woke me up. The sight caused my heart to nearly stop.
A few steps away from me was a pile of something that took me a few seconds to clue in. A heap of small dead birds with their heads twisted off sat already starting to rot. I gagged but kept my water down. My stomach hurt from hunger and then twisted from nausea. My head started to swim with fear.
Who killed so many birds and why did they put them next to me? How did I not wake up to the sound of someone moving around? And why didn’t they help get my foot free? I had too many questions and no answers. I almost considered an animal of some sort killed the birds, but an animal would not have brought my water bottle over. My fear would not go down. Someone had been there that night. Instead of helping they left a strange warning. Was it a warning? If so, why leave some water? Did they drug or mess with my bottle in some way?
The sun came up giving me enough light to look around for footprints or any signs of another person from the night before. My heart sank when I didn’t see my bag caught on the cliff side. Someone had definitely taken it. Unable to help myself, I screamed out for help with only a slight echo answering back.
At spent the second day making no progress in freeing my foot. I wasted some water trying to see if it might make the rock slippery enough to pull my ankle free. At least it was cloudy that day. By the end of the day, my exposed skin was red. If it wasn’t so cloudy, I would have had some serious burns by then. My throat hurt from thirst and my stomach twisted from the smell of the dead birds that cooked in the sun all day. I thought people could live a few days without water, but in the direct sunlight, I would sweat out what I had drank. An infection from my broken and cut-up foot might not be fast enough to kill me before dehydration did.
I fell into an uneasy sleep a few hours after sunset. My entire body was in pain and my hope slowly fading. To keep sane, I kept thinking of the food I wanted to eat once I got back home. If I was rescued, I wanted to eat an entire cheesecake. Maybe two. The simple goal was enough to ease my nerves to fall asleep.
That night I found out who left the dead birds. A small noise woke me. I reached over in the dark to my water bottle for a small sip and to my shock found it full. It also felt cold. I drank down the fresh water not caring about how it got there. I needed to live first, then worry about who refilled it and yet didn’t fully rescue me.
The sound that woke me came again. I’d completely forgotten about it because of the freshwater. I sat up to try and find the source of the sound. At first, I thought my mind was just playing tricks on me. Then, a soft voice came.
“Hey…”
The single word faintly echoed through the rocky area. My mouth opened to respond but I froze when my eyes landed on the source of the sound.
A dark shape sat on a branch of a tree in the distance. It looked like a person wearing a furred poncho sitting like a frog. The hood of their handmade coat over their head made their face look pitch black. What nearly gave me a heart attack was a set of glowing red eyes set in that dark face.
“Heeeyyy…”
The voice came again from the person. No, it wasn’t a person. After looking at them for a bit longer I noticed the exposed dark arms looked too long and thin. The hands with extremely long fingers tipped with claws. It might be saying a single word, but that didn’t make it human. The voice was almost normal and sounded lazy.
I tugged at my foot trying to get it free. I could not be out here with this thing watching me. A flash of pain went right up my leg. I moved my ankle in a bad way. The pain was almost enough to make me pass out. I got dizzy and needed to go back down. My body shook from so many emotions and stress.
That single word came, almost sounding concerned.
“Heeey?”
I refused to respond to it. Unable to help myself, I passed out again. I prayed that what I saw watching me had only been a nightmare.
I woke up again a little after sunrise. My strength fading from being outside in the elements for so long. At least the pile of dead birds was taken away. A single dead rabbit in their place. Next to my newly refilled water bottle sat something that would have been useful if it wasn’t broken. My cell phone broke into a few pieces on the way down the cliff. Each piece had been neatly organized together. I no longer could pretend that creature was a nightmare. Something watched me in the night trying to be useful in it’s own way.
Something scratched my arm when I moved, so I turned my head to find a branch with some leaves still attached. I wondered what that was doing there. When the sun came up, I figured it out. I was able to stick the branch in a crack in the ground and hide under the small bit of shade it provided. My already sunburned arms hurt like hell. My face stung from sweat and burns. I couldn’t stop myself from drinking the entire bottle of water that day. My stomach hurt like hell from only drinking the past two days.
A fever set in from an infection on that day. I didn’t have much longer, I knew that. I needed a knife or a sharp rock to free myself in the most gruesome way possible. I considered if I could even cut off my foot. I could just die from blood loss in the process. If I died, at least I wouldn’t need to be stuck in this heat.
Near the end of the day, thunder signalled a storm rolling in. At first, I felt happy about the rain. The storm clouds blocked out the sun and a downpour started. Soon I became soaked, the hard wind cutting down right to my bones. I shivered on the cold hard ground unable to do anything. I didn’t even have the strength to make another attempt to free my foot. I went in and out of sleep for a few hours. My fever growing due to the rain.
My eyes cracked open in the dark. My chest was so heavy I could barely breathe. The sound I didn’t want to hear came, but it was far too close.
“Hey.”
I lifted my head to see the creature from the night before sitting on my chest. The glowing red eyes squinted in a smile. I saw dark teeth shining in the night. Too many teeth for that face. My mouth opened to respond but I found my tongue too heavy. The thing reached out a long arm to take my water bottle. With some issues, it twisted off the lid. With one large hand, it lifted my head enough to let me drink. Most of the water spilled out around my mouth and I coughed hard for a few minutes.
The fever tore through my body and my skin burnt to hell. Even the pain of my broken foot took the backseat to a pounding headache. I wondered why this creature was keeping me hydrated and yet it didn’t try to get my foot free.
The thing got on all fours over top of my body to slowly shuffle back. Those red eyes never left my own. It stopped with its head by my thigh. The head sideways, and large smile clear in the dark. A large hand landed on my knee causing a wave of pain to shoot through up to my brain. I knew what this thing was asking. We didn’t need to speak the same language to understand each other. It still spoke one last time to confirm the request.
“Heeeeyyyyyyy….”
The mouth hovering over my thigh, the other hand wrapping around my upper leg. My choices were to die in the next few hours from an infection and exposure or give into this monster’s demand. I braced myself the best I could. With a trembling heartbeat, I nodded.
“Ok.” I said in a cracked voice giving permission.
The thing let out a happy sound. The mouth opened so wide it nearly reached the monster’s hidden ears. Countless needle-thin teeth quickly came down on my leg ripping through my jeans and into the flesh underneath. I screamed but didn’t have the strength to fight it. I only stayed awake to see the second bite. The pain shut off my brain and I thankfully fell into a dark nothingness I expected to never wake from.
But I did wake up. Weak but alive, my eyes opened to a hospital room. The recovery took a very long time. I was told I had been found in a strange way. A pair of hikers had been going down a trail when they saw an oddly shaped figure drag my body into the middle of the path and then run off into the woods. They never caught up to the figure and after seeing my condition focused on getting me help.
I was missing my entire left leg. The doctors had no idea how I survived it being removed in my condition. They said I should have died from the shock and blood loss. They all said it looked as if some sort of animal chewed it off.
I told the police what happened the best I was able. Turns out when I didn’t meet my friends, they just assumed I got busy and forgot to send them a message saying I wasn’t going to meet them that day. They then went on the trip, so no one realized I was missing. At least my job sent the police by my place as a wellness check when I didn’t show up for a shift. They were in the process of starting a missing person report when I was found.
They didn’t believe I saw a creature, and I admitted to them I didn’t want to believe it either. The stress may have made me see things. The police assumed if I did see someone, then it would have been some person living in the mountains messing with me. But that didn’t explain my leg. They shrugged that off saying some sort of animal got to it and the person who found me did the right thing by getting me to a place where I would be found.
The Police knew some unhinged people lived in the woods. They thought I got lucky to make it home alive. And they recommend I get better friends.
I keep thinking back to that night. The missing leg is a constant reminder. I know it wasn’t some sort of natural animal that took my leg. There is a creature humans haven’t unidentified yet living in those woods.
I can only hope others don’t make the same mistakes I did. If you are going out in the national parks, please be careful. Make sure people are aware of where you’re going and when you’ll be back. Stick to trails you know well and pack an emergency kit to always keep with you. Nature is something not to be taken lightly. I was stupid and paid the price.
As helpful as that creature acted, I really don’t want it to get another meal from a human. Just be careful out there.