Written in the style of an entry to Nance, at the Buckeye Bigfoot site, but I'm not really going to send it to her!
As I mentioned, I didn’t admit the whole thing to any soul with ears.
A year passed with no further meetings with any large hairy citizens of the forest.
Now, in the neighborhood where I grew up there were things like old tar paper shacks rotting away among the second growth timber. Maybe some lumbermen or early settlers or some other unknowns had lived in these places. There were several such relics in my remote neighborhood.
As small children, we had been warned away from such places. Could be dangerous, parents said. The floor might be rotten if you went inside, or the ceiling might fall on your head. There could be old wells too, and you might fall in and drown alone down a deep hole in the forest! Nobody said a word about anyone living in these rotting structures. There was not a ghost of a thought of such a thing, even to paranoid mothers.
When we became teenagers, we knew enough not to go telling everything we did when we were out for the day. Back then, kids ran around outside all day. We almost always made it home alive. That’s a joke. Of course, not having mobile phones with us all the time, we were on our own, more or less.
The polite fiction was that we went to our friends’ houses and visited and played in the yard or took walks on the country roads with our dogs or maybe rode bikes a little further afield. Sometimes we said we had been watching TV at a friend’s house.
So, on the day I’m talking about my little brother, who was a brat of about 12 years old said to me, “let’s go see what’s in that shack the furthest out, not the close one.”
I said, “oh come on, we went in there years ago. Won’t be anything new, now will there?”
“I never got to go,” said baby brother. “It’s not fair. You went with Larry and Jeff. I bet Mom doesn’t know that!”
What could I do? I walked him down the block, around the corner, and into the deeper part of our familiar forest playground.
We tore our way through knee height blackberry vines covered in thorns. Got scratched up pretty good too. If there had ever been a path, it was gone the way of all unused paths. There were massive stumps, the ghosts of trees long since felled. Alder trees of a foot and a half in diameter in their trunks crowded close together.
The sunlight was filtered through the canopy, almost green in color. Forest birds trilled once in a while. The bird I am thinking of sounded like water running, sort of.
When we got to the shack it looked even worse than the last time I had seen it. The roof sagged in. The shingles were roughed up and rotting. The tar paper on the exterior hung in shreds. Does everyone know what a tar paper shack is? Long ago people used to build the walls with 1x8 boards, and being broke, they would nail black tar paper on the exterior. It was not pretty, but lasted for a while, and kept out the wind somewhat.
I knew from past excursions that this shack consisted of two rooms. The bathroom had been an outhouse. Another nice place to fall into a hole, thanks Mom.
The wooden steps were still there, but didn’t look like we had better step on them. The door was actually slightly ajar. My brother looked around for something for us to climb on, which turned out to be a section of log. He threw it through the old steps, breaking them apart. Then he set the section on its end, and we stepped into the cabin.
How can I picture this for you? There is an odor to such wooden buildings when they are going back to nature. A dry characteristic moldy scent. The roof had not completely failed yet, so it was dry inside.
Remembering Mom’s warnings about rotting floors we stepped carefully, trying to only step where there were nails, so as to stay on the joists under the board floor. It was like a game, but the nails were hard to see. In the kitchen a piece of old linoleum printed in some garish floral design lay loosely like a rug. The rusted remains of a cookstove lurched in a corner with a broken stovepipe pointing at the ceiling. There were some bits of broken furniture which might have been a small table and a couple of chairs at one time. There was nothing very interesting in the kitchen.
In the front room, there was a pile of stuff which must have been a bed. I remembered that there had been an old bed with a nasty old striped mattress on it. Now, it was pretty dark in that room, with no lights and actually no windows either, but the bed looked different this time. There seemed to be more bulk to it. I was confused.
“It looks different,” I told my brother, Dan. “I wonder if somebody tried to live here?” I said.
Dan decided that the best way to check it out was to poke the pile of stuff on the old bed. He had been carrying a branch around as a sort of all purpose poking tool. So, he went over there and poked the pile real good and hard.
Well, Nance, in that moment our lives changed. Regret, sure. Fear. Yep!
The “pile” on the bed sat up. Ye gods! It was alive! It was big, like a horse or something, but this was no horse or bear or anything we knew.
He was covered in long salt and pepper colored hair, like six inches long! He must have been 8 feet tall. It’s hard to say because he was sitting. A smell you can’t even imagine drifted over to us as we stood there in total shock, frozen to our places on that old floor.
His eyes were open, and I swear they were red and had light behind them, like the brake lights on the rear of a car! His face was broad and looked like he thought he had just had dinner delivered. He practically licked his chops! His mouth must have been six inches wide and was full of black and broken teeth. I know this because he opened it and laughed a hideous high giggle.
That’s the way it seemed to us at the moment, right before we flew out of the door and stumbled down that makeshift step.
Just as Dan hit the berry vines with me right behind him, I heard a voice call out from the shack!
“Hey! Come back!” it said in a kind of strangled, garbled yell.
Right!
Could he have really been speaking a bit of English? Or was I in so much shock, that I just heard it that way.
In any case, this excursion was not reported to parents either, or anyone else. Though, we did warn other kids to stay away. I must say that kids tend to take other kids' sober warnings seriously. I think they must have, because no kids around our block turned up missing. We all grew up and lived our lives.
That’s it, Nance. It’s as true as I know how to make it!
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