Something Else In The Woods

So this one is a little different.

Same woods, different thing in them.

Wade was hunting elk alone in the Selway country of Idaho in the first week of October, 1994, out of a spike camp he packed in on two horses a day and a half from the trailhead.

He'd hunted that drainage four seasons running.

He knew where the wallows were and where the bulls bedded in the heat of the day, and he'd set his camp in the same little bench of lodge pole he always used, a flat spot above a creek with grass enough for the horses and a dead snag he'd been cutting firewood off of for years.

The first two days were ordinary.

He bugled at dawn and got answers from a long way off and spent the afternoons glassing.

On the third morning, he'd worked a bull for two hours in the timber above camp, a good one by the sound, and had gotten close enough to hear it raking a tree before the wind swung and it went quiet and stayed quiet.

He wrote that he'd thought about that afterward, that the bull had shut up around nine in the morning and he hadn't heard an elk make a sound in that drainage for the rest of the day, which in the first week of October is strange.

He spent the afternoon on a knob above the creek with the binoculars and saw nothing moving, not an elk, not a deer, not a grouse.

He came back to camp a little before dark and fed the horses and made supper.

On the third evening, he was sitting by the fire with a cup of coffee after dark, and he noticed that the creek sounded wrong.

He wrote that it took him a minute to understand what he was hearing.

The creek was still running, but the sound of it had flattened out, the way a radio sounds when somebody turns the treble all the way down.

He said he sat there with the cup halfway to his mouth, trying to figure out what had changed.

And then the horses started.

Both of them were tied on a high line between two trees about 40 yards from the fire.

They'd been quiet all evening.

Now they were pulling back against the lead ropes hard enough that he could hear the rope creaking on the trunk.

And one of them, the gelding, was blowing through his nose the way a horse does when there's a bear in the wind.

Wade got up and took the flashlight and the rifle and walked over, and the horses were both facing the same way, uphill, into the timber, with their ears pinned forward.

He put the light up the slope and didn't see anything but trunks.

He stood with them a while, talking to them, and they settled a little, and then he saw the light.

It was up the drainage, above the creek, maybe a half mile off and maybe 300 feet above the ground, and the way he described it was a point of white light that was too steady to be a star and too low to be an airplane, and it wasn't moving.

He said his first thought was somebody else's camp on the far ridge, except there was no ridge there.

So this one is a little different.

Same woods, different thing in them.

Wade was hunting elk alone in the Selway country of Idaho in the first week of October, 1994, out of a spike camp he packed in on two horses a day and a half from the trailhead.

He'd hunted that drainage four seasons running.

He knew where the wallows were and where the bulls bedded in the heat of the day, and he'd set his camp in the same little bench of lodge pole he always used, a flat spot above a creek with grass enough for the horses and a dead snag he'd been cutting firewood off of for years.

The first two days were ordinary.

He bugled at dawn and got answers from a long way off and spent the afternoons glassing.

On the third morning, he'd worked a bull for two hours in the timber above camp, a good one by the sound, and had gotten close enough to hear it raking a tree before the wind swung and it went quiet and stayed quiet.

He wrote that he'd thought about that afterward, that the bull had shut up around nine in the morning and he hadn't heard an elk make a sound in that drainage for the rest of the day, which in the first week of October is strange.

He spent the afternoon on a knob above the creek with the binoculars and saw nothing moving, not an elk, not a deer, not a grouse.

He came back to camp a little before dark and fed the horses and made supper.

On the third evening, he was sitting by the fire with a cup of coffee after dark, and he noticed that the creek sounded wrong.

He wrote that it took him a minute to understand what he was hearing.

The creek was still running, but the sound of it had flattened out, the way a radio sounds when somebody turns the treble all the way down.

He said he sat there with the cup halfway to his mouth, trying to figure out what had changed.

And then the horses started.

Both of them were tied on a high line between two trees about 40 yards from the fire.

They'd been quiet all evening.

Now they were pulling back against the lead ropes hard enough that he could hear the rope creaking on the trunk.

And one of them, the gelding, was blowing through his nose the way a horse does when there's a bear in the wind.

Wade got up and took the flashlight and the rifle and walked over, and the horses were both facing the same way, uphill, into the timber, with their ears pinned forward.

He put the light up the slope and didn't see anything but trunks.

He stood with them a while, talking to them, and they settled a little, and then he saw the light.

It was up the drainage, above the creek, maybe a half mile off and maybe 300 feet above the ground, and the way he described it was a point of white light that was too steady to be a star and too low to be an airplane, and it wasn't moving.

He said his first thought was somebody else's camp on the far ridge, except there was no ridge there.