The Hairy Truth

You’re breathing too loud.

Not an insult—just an observation. After a few decades listening to you swarm my woods like wheezing bagpipes in boots, I’ve learned your rhythms. You call it “stealth hiking.” I call it dragging civilization uphill and begging it to go feral.

Hi. I’m the problem. Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Skookum. The Fuzzy Convincing Blur. Pick a name that makes the hashtags bloom. I live here. And no, I don’t smell like onions and wet dog—that’s your jerky fighting your bug spray.

Tonight’s troupe of cryptid theater majors: three regulars and a guest star.

Night-Vision Ryan: pores glowing like bioluminescent fungus, narrates everything in a whisper that could wake a moose.

Mountain Karen: tactical ponytail, spreadsheet for a soul. Thinks the forest should file a permit before making sounds.

Sticks: carries—brace yourself—sticks. Believes tree-knocking is our version of texting. (Sometimes true. Mostly percussion therapy.)

The Podcaster: limited-edition ballcap, swagger like he bought a franchise on mystery, vocabulary heavy on “viral.”

They stage their camp in a meadow where elk nap and where, once upon a long melt, a glacier paused to catch its breath. Headlamps carve pale tunnels through the mist. Someone smears peanut butter inside an old jar to cradle a GoPro. Someone else piles jerky in the clearing like they’re baiting a god with convenience food.

I’m already above them, perched on a nurse log so feathered in moss it remembers being an ocean. Breath steady. Joints easy. My mother taught me to be the space between big sounds. If you hear us, she said, you’re not listening right.

But sometimes it’s more fun when you do.

Act One: Props and Promises.

I slide down-slope through vine maple and shadow, patience wrapped around me like fog, and plant a footprint beside a meltwater puddle: midtarsal break kissed into soft silt, toes splayed, heel angled as if I’d slipped with a burden. I press with my knuckles for depth, sprinkle two needles, and roll a pebble to script a small stutter-step. Art matters.

Back up the ridge, Uncle Axle—my cousin with hands like drum mallets and a humor streak darker than nurse log hearts—finds a hollow cedar and thumps a single, cathedral-deep BOOM. The note rolls downhill like distant thunder under quilts.

Sticks stiffens as if the sky just proposed. “Contact,” he whispers, which in hunter means panic responsibly.

Mountain Karen orders a perimeter sweep. Ryan whoops—a sound shaped like apology and owl sneeze. The barred owl three trees over mutters amateurs and gives me a look that says, this is your circus.

I give them the echo they want: a crisp, round knock with a willow stick against a maple scar, then a second knock, farther right, from a stump shaped by fire and rain and our patience. Their heads swivel like lured trout.

They lay a glowstick near the tracks and do their dance—tape measure, photos, whispered reverence for my fake stride. I could sign it for them. I don’t. You learn more from puzzles than from answers, and puzzles are kinder than bullets.

Greatest Hits, Vol. 1.

While they argue about “angle of ingress,” I ghost to their trail cam, squat behind its little glass eye, and photobomb with exactly half my face. Tip of brow ridge. Fringe of fur. One amber glint. I hold for two heartbeats and leave the frame with a smile big enough to start a religion.

At their cooking tarp, I turn a row of utensils upside down, balance a spoon across a mug like a tightrope walker, and re-tie a bootlace around a camp chair leg. Consider it enrichment. If you come to my home to be entertained by rumor, I’ll give you theater.

They call for twenty minutes: whoops, moans, coyotes in a choir, one of them trying a “female wail” he learned on the internet. A coyote does us all a favor and corrects his pitch with heckling.

Act Two: The Huff.

I take in a slow lungful and let a low huff curl out of the dark behind them—no roar, not a cheap jump, but a foghorn buried in fur. It rolls their spines like a cold finger. Ryan stumbles and smacks the bait bucket. The peanut-butter camera spins under a fern and records the most cinematic moss you’ve ever not seen.

The Podcaster, who arrived late to avoid carrying anything heavy, saunters in with a flashlight and a smirk. He tells Ryan to “sell the fear.” He tells Karen to “smile more” because thumbnails. He confiscates Sticks’s best hickory like he plans to autograph it. He says, “If this goes viral, we’re golden,” as if gold grows here. The only gold we grow is maple leaves at first frost. The only thing viral is certainty.

He wants a show. Fine. We’ll do a show.

Interlude: Why We Prank.

People imagine we prank because we’re mean. We prank because you’re never your best self when you’re hunting, because attention is a kind of muzzle when applied with finesse, because laughter shifts blood from trigger fingers to bellies. We prank to keep you harmless. We prank because a mystery you can’t hold is safer than a trophy you can.

Also: it’s fun.

Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.

The rock toss: from the very edge of my reach, I arc a small stone so it plops into the creek just uphill of their listening station. Splash carries better than whispers. They scramble upriver and I pad past them downriver, amused.

The circle walk: I lay tracks that loop back on themselves, two strides forward, one backwards, one sideways onto a log that ends in midair. When Karen maps them, her eyes narrow with respect. “He’s toying with us,” she says, and I grin because she’s right and she still used he.

The invisible buffet: I slip into camp and rearrange their food, tucking beef jerky into a pocket of bark two feet from the bait, leaving pinecones where protein bars used to be. I don’t steal. I curate.

The night knock fugue: Uncle Axle and I practice a three-part knock pattern—near, far, near—that convinces Sticks our tribe outnumbers them ten to one. (It does. In percussion.)

The Podcaster narrates bravado and edits in real time with his mouth. “Guys, I’m feeling serious activity. The energy is… electric.” The energy is caffeine and ego. But his audience will like the tremble in his voice, and I’m not here to ruin his business model. Not directly.

They finally sleep, tangled in nylon cocoons and day-old anxieties. I consider drafting a manifesto on their hand-sanitizer bottle in fir pitch. Instead, I stage Act Three.

I crack the bait jar, replace peanut butter jerky with a smooth river rock the color of old heartwood, seal it with the same smear so the lid sings familiarity, and ease it back under the fern. I balance the Podcaster’s hat on a low branch where morning will find it, angle a stick teepee near the trail like a child’s secret, and unspool a length of fishing line across a game path, chest high, snag-worthy. Then I drag a fallen branch through dew to leave a mysterious groove cutting diagonally across my planted tracks. The clue that doesn’t belong is the one they always love most.

Dawn bleeds into the huckleberries. Thrushes write a novel about it. A far train sings through the river bend and the fog lifts its curtain one careful inch.

I knock once—clean, hollow, theatrical.

They unzip like popcorn. Sticks trips on the invisible line and mummifies himself in it. Karen files orders through clenched teeth. Ryan aims a camera already fogged by his breath. The Podcaster yelps, “Hat! My hat!” then pretends he didn’t.

Sticks spots the prints and does a dance I cannot improve upon. Karen kneels with the tape measure and, despite herself, smiles. Ryan whispers, “Midtarsal break,” like he discovered feet.

Then the Podcaster smears the moment with “Hoax.” Hoax, hoax, hoax—your favorite spell when wonder scares you. He kicks the balanced rock and declares, “Classic staging.” He accuses Sticks of faking it “for clicks.” Sticks goes white with a sudden bad childhood. Karen bristles. Ryan tries to buffer with science words. They spiral.

I throw a whoop—not the mocking kind, the long, round, summer-night kind that rides air like it remembers being wolf. Uncle Axle answers with a rolling, heartbeat drum. The sound stitches the trees together and for a breath the forest is one big chest, rising.

Sticks cries; not sobs—tears of relief, like a held note finally released. Karen’s eyes flicker between doubt and thrill. Ryan scans for thermal anomalies and catches his own armpit. The Podcaster sucks his teeth and says, “My audience won’t buy this,” as if truth is a product line.

That’s my cue.

I step into a shaft of new sun on a span of creek rock and let myself be seen.

Not a parade, not a roar. Just height and shadow and the long line of a creature that chose not to go extinct because it learned patience. Six beats. Seven. Long enough for Ryan to catch a frame that will later be called intriguingly inconclusive. Long enough for Karen to curse softly. Long enough for Sticks to whisper a thank you to whatever he prays to in the woods.

I raise one hand and click my fingers once—stone kissing steel. Then I am gone, stitched back into green by the same thread that made me.

The show ends not with a scream, but with a laugh—the Podcaster’s forced, the others’ real. Ryan opens the bait jar for a triumphant reveal and out tumbles the river rock. He stares, then snorts, then laughs until it’s a cough. Karen tries not to. Fails. Even Sticks manages a strangled giggle, the kind a man learns only after he’s believed in something ridiculous for so long it finally believes back.

They pack early. They carry away hair tuft, muddy photos, bruised pride, and a pocket of morning they’ll pretend was bravado. They’ll cut the footage to make themselves seem brave or dumber, whichever sells. They’ll argue in the comments with strangers who weren’t there but know everything. They’ll come back. They always do. I’m counting on it.

Interlude: Things I Like About You.

Here’s the secret I never tell in knocks or huffs or dragged clues: I like you. Not all of you. Some of you have small fires where your eyes belong and leave cans like you think aluminum composts. But the ones who come back with notebooks and wonder? Who apologize to a stump before they hit it, in case someone’s listening? Who sit in the dark and admit they’re scared, but listen anyway? I like those.

When I was young (you call that “terrifyingly large teenager”), I walked clearcuts at night and collected what you dropped: a mitten stiff with forgotten cold, a broken compass, a love letter with the names scratched out, a faded photo of a dog who probably had a better name than you gave the mountain. I’d bring them home. My mother would turn each thing over with two fingers and say, This one aches, or, This one will go on. She told me the old names for us—the ones from before the internet put us in a zoo of pixels. The People Under the Pines. The Long Shadows. The Tall Cousins. Every name a way to say: you are not alone.

But you want proof, and proof keeps trying to punch the mystery out of things. So I build you better puzzles. I take your hat and give you a rock. I let you see me for exactly one beat longer than your skepticism, and I watch the parts of you I like light up.

The truck groans away over the ruts. The forest tucks the empty into itself. Birds hold a staff meeting. A squirrel informs the understory of everything at once. Mist burns off the meadow and the mosquitoes start writing their petty little editorials.

The prank is done. Curtain’s down.

I slip through cedar shade to the creek. The air smells like trout and cold stone—the clean metal of glacial breath. On a long-fallen log, where the bark has sloughed into a velvet the color of old tea, an old man sits and fishes.

He wears his hat low; not the Podcaster’s crown, a sun-soft felt. Lines map his face like riverbeds. His hands are steady in the small ways that mean a life out here: knot sure, wrist knowing the weight of current before it shows. He doesn’t startle when I step out of the brush. He never does.

We met years ago when he was younger and I was a rumor. He left sardines on a stump without looking back and went to fix a fence that didn’t need fixing. I watched him work until his breath matched the creek’s. He talked to the river the way my mother talked to wind. There are people the forest tolerates. A few the forest favors. He ranks.

For a heartbeat, I consider it: a splash to rattle his line, a roar to christen the morning in cheap theater. Habit is a gravity. But the night’s laughter is still ringing in my ribs and I want a different ending.

I sit beside him. The log groans under my weight, shifts a fraction, then settles. Water licks the stones. A thrush sings the part of the day that would be lost without witnesses.

He glances up, eyes bright under the brim, mouth tugged into that sideways grin men get when they’ve lived long enough to make peace with the ridiculous.

“So,” he says, voice a dry leaf with a chuckle under it, “was it a good prank, kid?”

He calls me kid. He always has. The first time, I almost barked a laugh hard enough to knock a limb down. I’m three of him tall and could carry his truck uphill for sport. But I like the way it sits in the air, the way it erases the spear-point edge in human questions. Kid says we’re in on something together.

I reach into the pouch of fur at my side and bring out a small thing polished smooth by my hand: a battered compass with a cracked face, lost to the meadow years ago and found again by a patient eye that doesn’t care for straight lines. It doesn’t point north anymore. It points to whoever is holding it. Useful, in its way.

I set it next to his tackle box. He looks at it like a man looks at a photograph of a dog he buried on a bright day. The river pulls at his line with the curiosity of water.

He nods once, the way he always does, as if the world just clicked into place for a second. He doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t need to.

We sit like that a while. A dragonfly patrols the air with excellent manners. A cloud confers with a ridge and decides to pass. Somewhere upstream, a doe tests the shallows and decides her ankles can take it.

He speaks again, not looking at me. “You rattled ‘em good?”

“Good” is too big a word for one human syllable, but I rumble a yes that he feels through the log more than hears.

He smiles. “Don’t let ‘em catch you.”

I pinch a salmonberry off a cane and drop it into his palm. He sniffs it—habit—and eats it in two teeth. The juice makes a brief sunset at the corner of his mouth. He wipes it with the back of his hand and leaves a stain there that will look like paint later.

We don’t speak the same language. Not really. His words are rocks in a creek; mine are the water around them. But he has always understood me. Which is better than translation.

Far off, Uncle Axle thumps a contentment I can hear in my knuckles. The old man’s rod tips once, twice; he sets the hook with a wrist flick I wish I’d filmed for Sticks. A flash of silver, a brief argument with gravity, and then the river keeps its citizen. We both watch the empty line sing. He grins wider.

“Sometimes the almost is the whole point,” he says.

He could be talking about fish. He could be talking about me.

We sit until the sun climbs and the mosquitoes file their last complaints. I stand first. My shadow passes over his boots and he doesn’t flinch. He tilts his hat without looking and says, “Go on, kid. Give ‘em another story.”

I step back into fern shade, stitch myself into green seam by seam. Behind me, the river rehearses the line it’s known since ice learned to walk. Ahead, the day is full of people who will come searching with sticks and cameras and needs they haven’t named.

You’ll come. You always do. Bring your thermals and your whoops and your faith in gadgets and thumbnails. I’ll be there with props and patience, your hairy stagehand, building you ridiculous second acts so you don’t ruin the ending.

And when you finally pack your lights and drive home with laughter steamed on the windows, I’ll stand in the ruts and watch your taillights go red at the firs. I’ll taste the dust and think of all the names you’ve given me and all the names you haven’t learned yet. I’ll think of the old man and the compass that points at whoever holds it, and I’ll hope it points him to the same log tomorrow.

We don’t speak the same language, not really.

But he has always understood me.