I don’t do a lot of camping. My friend Jack is the complete opposite. He’s the adventurous type. Mountain climbing, camping, rowing, you name it the guy has done it. He likes to be close to nature and I don’t know anybody who could blame him. It’s beautiful when you’re out there. I just would rather do anything else than go out into nature.
I live a sheltered life. I got a nice house in a protected suburb, a cushy job as an assistant manager, and my favorite hobby is falling asleep by the pool listening to 80s hits. The only real stress I have in my life comes from my family. Almost every day I get a call from one asking for a lift, or money, or to borrow something of mine I know they won’t return - and if they do it won’t be in one piece.
I wouldn’t mind it if they were the kind of family that respected me and showed appreciation, but they almost always demanded that I do something and insulted me when I failed to deliver. But, it was family and it became a routine for me.
I only bring this up because I need you to understand my frame of mind before I went with Jack. I work with this clunky software where if you mess anything up, it screws the whole project. It’s also slow as hell, so it was already a rough day. When I was at my most frustrated, I received a ping on my phone.
It was my family, more specifically my aunt, who was giving me hell for some bullshit her son did. The incredible mental gymnastics she had to do to end up blaming me was just that - incredible. By the end of the day, I was toasted. My brain was this swirling gray mass of mushroom soup. I was driving home thinking about how I had to go through it again the next day when the Bluetooth car phone started ringing - Jack was calling.
“Hey, man,” I sighed over the phone.
“I just got second-hand depression from that sigh,” Jack told me. “What the hell happened?”
I went on a little rant. I kept it brief because I didn’t want to bore him with my problems. The summary was enough anyway.
“You know what you need…a vacation,” Jack said.
“The weekend is almost here. I will chill out then.”
“I mean a real vacation. An escape from an asshole family and work you’ve hated since day one. You’re not going to get any less stressed by staring at a TV or wandering through the same concrete neighborhoods.”
“You’re pep makes me want to hug the corner of that building with my car.”
“I’m serious. You’ve got vacation days, use them after times like this. Escape, man. I know just the place.”
And five minutes later, Jack convinced me to go camping with him. I called my boss to inform him that I was taking a couple of vacation days and set myself up for a four-day weekend in the forest.
“Jack, we’ve been walking for an hour,” I told him. “How much longer do we have to carry a tent and a small kitchen before we get there.”
“It would go a lot faster if you didn’t count every minute,” he said over his shoulder.
He brushed his long brown hair out of his face. I was glad to see that he was sweating as well. The guy may have been fit, but he was still human. He must have seen my smile or heard my soft chuckle because he looked at me. When our eyes met, he knew what I was smiling about. We both wheezed our little laughs and took a breather.
The spot he was talking about didn’t seem so special. There were a lot of trees and dead orange leaves, but very few bushes and low-hanging branches. I asked him what was so great about it, but he just told me to help him set up the tent. It took as long as I expected to get the tent up and make a fire - too long.
It was dark and we were staring at a pot of soup cooking over the flames. Jack was wearing this big grin on his face while he looked at the fire My eyes kept darting to the trees and looking beyond them. The dark blue finally settled into pitch black and it felt like we were sitting in a windy void.
I heard a distant chittering of…something. A bird? Some kind of bug?
“Soups up,” Jack said suddenly. My heart skipped. “You got the rolls?”
“Yeah…they’re a little squished though. That thermos was heavier than I thought.”
“Just how I like ‘em.”
“Hey, Jack, what was that sound just now?”
“Squirrel. There are also a few bats in this region, so if you hear squeaking or something flying a little close to the tent…well, it’s probably that.”
Jack was the first to fall asleep. I stayed up, despite my best efforts, trying to gauge how far away certain sounds were and what they belonged to. I wasn’t scared, but it was a different experience for me. I just, I don’t know, some things you linger on more than others when recalling memories, and those sounds were one of them.
In the morning, I woke up to the smell of bacon and eggs. When I did fall asleep, I slept like a rock. Looking at my phone, I saw it was almost 8 am. Warm light poured into the tent and when I stepped out, my breath was taken away.
The orange of the leaves that covered the forest floor had turned into a golden carpet in the morning light. Even the shadows had this warm, rich orange to them.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
I looked over at Jack. He was stirring a pan of scrambled eggs with a wooden spoon. He didn’t look anywhere near as happy as me, which on a trip designed for him, seemed unusual. I dropped my smile.
“What’s up with you? This is amazing,” I said, gesturing to the forest.
“It is…but I don’t hear anything.”
“Well, you can hear me.”
“I mean, I don’t hear any birds…insects, animals, nothing.”
“Maybe they finally went to sleep,” I grumbled.
“At least the birds should be up. They go crazy in the mornings.”
“So…what are you worried about? What does that mean?”
Jack shrugged and looked at me. It was like he was trying to find the right words to say, but I knew that ‘look’ better than most. It was usually the look my family gave me when delivering bad news, but this time it seemed genuine.
“There might be a predator in the area,” he said.
I looked all around. The spot had another plus - you could see farther without the hills and bushes. I didn’t see anything, but I kept looking while I spoke to him.
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked. “Pack up and slowly make our way back to the car or do we run for it?”
“Neither. It’s probably passing through the area. We will know when we hear the birds again. Just keep your eyes open for now and eat your breakfast.”
I trusted him enough to take what he said as fact. I was also hungry enough to not care too much about a predator in the area, so I enjoyed my food. We ate in silence and just spent our time watching all around. It was only after I had eaten that I noticed how loud the silence really was. I couldn’t hear more than a few creaks of bending trees.
It was in that silence that my imagination had all the tools it needed to construct all sorts of possibilities. Bears, wolves, maybe a wild cat like a mountain lion. Those things blended in well, I knew that from the posters in the camping store.
When your mind is devising a nightmare, your body can sometimes tense up without you knowing it. Mine tensed up in such a way that my breathing got weird. I looked at Jack. He was shaking a canteen - empty.
We decided that sticking around was only making the feeling worse and that we would walk to the river instead. Even with my fear in my heart, or perhaps because of it, I was keen to get the hell out of the area. Whatever it was could rip our tent and stuff to pieces, I didn’t care. As long as I wasn’t in the sleeping bag that it shredded, I was happy.
“Don’t we need to filter this water?” I asked, dipping my hand into the ice-cold river.
“It’s moving mountain water,” Jack said. “Isn’t much in it that can harm you, and the filter built into the cap will take care of that for you.”
“I was wondering why this bottle you made me buy was so damn expensive,” I said.
We heard birds and other animals, so we were pretty relaxed again. We were also banking on the idea that the predator would move on by the time we got back. We put a pin in it and just tried to enjoy the morning, discussing the possibility of fishing even though we didn’t bring any fishing equipment.
I had almost completely settled when I noticed something in the dark waters.
It was pale with a cool hue thanks to the water. I didn’t know what to make of it at first, cocking my head to the side as if the different angle would help me understand. The object twisted and it was only when it had completely spread out and floated to the top of the waters that I realized it was a body.
“What the fuck?” Jack saw it too.
“D-Did somebody…drown?” I asked, the cold feeling filling me. “Is that person..?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, immediately taking action and walking alongside the river after it.
I followed close behind him. We sometimes looked at where we stepped, but that didn’t stop us from stumbling as we saw the figure twist and turn with the water. There was something wrong with it. The person didn’t wear any clothing and their body was deformed.
It drifted close enough to the shore that Jack could reach one of the limbs. With a disgusted face, he grabbed an ankle and quickly pulled it, dragging the corpse onto the shore. He was quick to release it and wipe his hand on his jeans. The two of us looked down at it, mute and disturbed.
The body itself was scrawny, but the head was slightly large. The fingers appeared normal at first, but the way they curled in on each other it was like it had far too many joints. As for the head itself, the eyes were two dots, the mouth no more than a slit. Not a single hair on its head either, making the flesh seem even more puffy.
“Jack…I…we need to call somebody,” I told him. “This guy has been in the water a long time. His flesh is waterlogged.”
“Like…just his head? No…this guy isn’t…I mean look at his…”
“What?”
“Between his legs.”
I couldn’t see what he was talking about, but when I moved over to where he was standing, I saw something that definitely wasn’t on any anatomy poster I saw in a doctor’s office. I don’t know how to describe and quite frankly, I don’t want to. I studied the face again and tried to comprehend how its nose could be so sunken, or the eyes so small…but when I decided that’s just how it looked I realized what Jack realized.
It wasn’t human.
The inky dots that were its eyes seemed fixed on the sky, its small mouth agape and unmoving. It looked sad and we looked like a pair of fish staring at it. I don’t know how many minutes of silence passed before we realized it was just that quiet. There weren’t any birds or insects. By the time it finally registered, our thoughts were interrupted by the crunch of leaves under a large foot.
Turning around, we saw a large brown bear lumbering from the treeline towards the river.
I don’t think I ever realized how large bears could get. I guess I could only ever compare it to the mooses I saw in the Brother Bear movie, but I’ve never seen a moose either. It was huge. It had more muscle in one of its limbs than I had in my entire body. A walking, clawed tank. And it was looking right at us.
“Okay…easy now,” Jack said, speaking half to the bear and half to me. “Don’t look it in the eyes. Do exactly as I say and we will be fine, okay?”
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me nod, so I squeaked a yes. One paw was all it would take to crush me. Could I outrun a bear? Research after the encounter told me ‘no,’ but it was definitely on my mind.
“Back away slowly, don’t turn your back on it,” Jack said in a calming tone. “Say something, man. Talk to it calmly.”
“I don’t want to speak to it,” I said, trying to match his tone. “I’m barely keeping it together.”
“Just keep backing away, you’re doing fine. Stand tall, don’t shrivel up now. We’re in hot water, not cold.”
“Fuck, man.”
We had backed up a significant distance. The bear itself had slowed down a lot. I tried to keep from looking at it directly, but whenever it looked away, I couldn’t help myself. Bears have almost human-like lips. It had them pursed as if sighing, looking up towards the trees across the river. It didn’t see us as a threat and this thought was helping. I fed into it, whispering little things like “It’s going to be okay” and “Nothing to it, you’re doing great.”
“Yes, you are, man,” Jack said. “Now, let’s just hang around here for a moment. See if it will leave us alone before we head back to camp.”
It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but Jack took up a spot beside a tree and waited. I did the same and we continued to watch the bear as it walked over to the pale corpse we found. It sniffed at it like a dog and with bated breath, we watched as the inevitable happened.
The bear leaned down and bit into the side of the creature. We saw the teeth dig into the skin, we saw inky blood. It was horrific, but it got so much worse when the creature started to yell and writhe in the bear’s maw. It had this broken yell, much like a chirrup or buzzing insect. Its legs kicked out, and its hands flailed, but the bear didn’t stop.
It placed its paw on the creature’s head, pinning it to the ground, and pulled.
The flesh snapped like rubber when it was torn apart. The head was completely removed, the scream had ceased, yet the body continued to squirm. It clutched the bear’s head, trying to pull open the jaw, but the bear continued.
I felt sick to my stomach. Even when torn to pieces, parts of the creature still lived and acted as if they were still a part of one whole. The head itself was half-pressed into the ground, the dark eyes unable to look anywhere except in our direction. The tiny mouth was moving, still screaming but without anything to fuel it.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said to Jack.
Without a word, I turned around and left. Jack followed after. We made our way right back to camp, packed up, and began the walk back to the car. We encountered nothing more. No more bears or pale…human-like…things. We just drove home.
Right now, I wish I could give you more, but at the same time, I’m glad that I have no more to share. I am happy enough to let this story become something that just happened. I would be happy if the thoughts going through my mind to be put on paper here were the last thoughts I have of it, although I know that is never going to happen.
The last thing Jack ever said about it was that it could have been a lot worse. It was lucky that we didn’t get hurt. Yet, seeing that deathless mauling…it fucked me up for months. My thoughts, my sleep, everything. It’s one of those images that are burned into your eyes, so every time you blink see a flash of it.
I see its face. I see its hand grabbing and releasing the dirt as if that would save it. I know it’s messed with Jack too though. I don’t think he’s gone camping in a long time. I know I never will, but for him, it’s something far more important. To change his life like that…yeah, it’s got to him.
And after some half-hearted attempts to learn more, we still don’t know what we found in the river.