Our Camera Caught Multiple Bigfoots on Our Property—Sasquatch Didn’t Care About Your Skepticism, and Now I Can’t Sleep

What the hell is that—Bigfoot? Oh my god, he’s digging. He’s actually digging one of the graves. You won’t believe what happened outside Skykomish back in late October of 2019. I still don’t. I haven’t slept the same since that night. I went out for owls and came back with a memory I can’t shake loose. An old logging cemetery. A shape too tall to fit between the stones. Hands moving the earth in slow, deliberate scoops like it had done it a hundred times before. A deep huff behind my neck that told me not to turn. My camera was rolling. My legs were shaking. I don’t know if that thing was digging because it was hungry or because it was looking for something buried long before me. By morning, I had footage I can’t post anywhere. Not because I’m scared of what people will say, but because some things feel too real to share. I’ve held on to it for years and now I’m sending it to you. Not for clicks or fame, but because people need to know what’s out there.

On that video, you can see it. A smear on the tent mesh where something pressed its face close. Close enough to fog the fabric with its breath. I still don’t know what the hell I filmed that night or if what I saw was even real. But I know what I felt and it wasn’t human. I’ll start with this: I’m not a thrill seeker. I don’t go looking for ghosts. I film the woods. That’s it. I was forty at the time. I ran a small channel where I posted videos about trail skills and wildlife. A couple thousand folks watched. It paid for gas and boots. Nothing fancy. I camp alone because I like the quiet and because a camera hears better when no one’s talking. The Cascades feel like home. Moss, cedar, the kind of damp that gets in your bones. I grew up two valleys over. My older cousin went missing when I was a teenager. Vanished on a weekend hike. They never found him. People in my family don’t talk about it. We all just got quiet in different ways. Mine was the camera.

So that week I drove an old forest service road past town until the gravel broke into potholes and grass. There’s a cut through the locals used to get wood. It passes an old cemetery from the logging days. Nothing grand. Ten or maybe twelve headstones, some tilted, some sunken. No fence, no sign. Most folks don’t know it’s there. A guy at the bait shop pointed it out years ago when I was looking for frogs to record. He said it was a piece of history, then added real casual, “Don’t go there after dark.” He laughed when he said it like it was a joke, but he didn’t meet my eyes after.

I wasn’t there for scares. Late October is good for recording owls. The first frost brings them low. My plan was simple: hike in by late afternoon, hang two audio recorders, a trail cam at knee height, set my small tent in the trees, and get some night calls. Next morning, pack up. One night only. It drizzled the whole drive. I remember the smell of wet fur. The road narrowed and the turnoff showed as two muddy ruts curving into brush. I parked by a rotting stump and killed the engine. It was quieter than it should have been. No chainsaws, no dogs, just a faint drip of rain dropping through layers of needles.

I walked in with my pack and tripod. The ground had that slick feel like you could skate if you let your weight go. Leaves stuck to my boots. I found the cemetery without trying. The headstones were pale against the ferns. Names half gone. One read “Avery” and a year ending in 18-something. Another leaned like a loose tooth. A cedar had pushed up one corner of the plot. Its roots looked like knuckles coming out of the earth. I set my tent twenty yards back, out of sight. I told myself that was so I wouldn’t step on anything, not because I was spooked. I put an audio recorder on a small tripod near the stones, another in a tree facing downhill toward the creek. The trail cam went on a sapling pointing across the cemetery at chest level. I don’t bait. I don’t leave food. I don’t do anything to change the place. I just watch and listen.

While I worked, I kept smelling dirt. Not the clean loam after rain—heavier. When my shovel bites in the clay, it smells like that. There was a breeze that would lift the damp off my jacket, then drop it back. I told myself the smell was from the roots. The ground dips and swells out there. Water moves weird. Maybe something had slid, exposing dark soil. By dusk, the mist came in soft and low. The trees held a lot of water from the week, and it fell in little patters. I cooked on the stove—plain rice and a can of soup poured in. Bird calls faded off. One coyote yipped way out, and then there was the long hold of quiet that always comes before night when the forest feels like it’s inhaling and waiting. I checked the time on my phone and lost signal. No bars. It didn’t bother me. It rarely does.

I sat by the tent with the camera on a tripod pointed through the trees toward where I knew the stones were. I zoomed until the marks on the closest one looked ghost pale and sharp. Just a static shot to layer with the audio. Fog moved like breath across the lens. I pulled my jacket tighter even though the cold wasn’t deep. It was the kind that finds your wrists and neck. At full dark, owls started up further down the valley. Good sound. I recorded notes in a little notebook. I wrote “wet leaves, sulfur smell” and put a question mark after it. Sometimes wetlands burp that smell. It wasn’t strong, just a thin, sour thread in the air when the breeze hit a certain way.

Around nine, I heard the first thump—not a branch falling. I know that sound. This was low and hollow, like someone dropped a fifty-pound sack of grain from shoulder height onto soft ground. Then a pause, then another, not regular. I stood and clicked off my headlamp and let my eyes adjust. The camera saw more than I did. I leaned in and watched the tiny screen. Nothing, just softness. I listened. Another thump, closer. I swallowed the urge to call out. That’s a rule: let the woods announce themselves, don’t answer.

I took the handheld cam off the tripod and slid into the trees, keeping my steps slow so I wouldn’t crunch every twig. My breath sounded loud in my ears. As I came to the edge of the cemetery, I saw it—steam, a little coil of it rising from the ground around one of the stones like a sheet of breath. At first, I thought it was the lamp from my phone catching fog, but I hadn’t turned it on. I could smell that heavy earth smell again, stronger now. Metal and wet clay.

Then I heard it. Not a thump. The sound of dirt being moved. The first time you hear a shovel bite and lift, you know it for life. It was that rhythm—drag, lift, toss. I dug latrines a hundred times. I know that sound through trees. “Hey,” I said before I thought. It came out like a whisper. It sounded wrong in the quiet. I bit it back and stepped behind a cedar. The sound stopped. I held still until my calves shook. Something moved on the far side of the stones. A dark shift. I saw the shape of a shoulder rise above a waist-high mound. I raised the camera and clicked record. I didn’t think my hand did it.

There’s a certain wrong size that your brain rejects for a second before it lets you see. This was that. The shape was too tall to fit where it was standing. When it straightened, its head was above the line of the tallest stone by two heads more. It stood with dirt sliding down from its elbows. One arm hung longer than I expected, hand below the knee. The body didn’t look like a body. It looked like a piece of the forest peeled up and given weight. Dark, wet. Something about the way the shoulders rounded and the head sat forward. No clear neck. The whole thing was just mass.

I didn’t say bear, not even to myself. Bears move different. They tip and roll like they’re thinking with their nose. This thing uncoiled slow, like it had all the time and all the quiet. Then it stood and breathed. I heard the breath the way you hear wind through a culvert—deep but not loud. I smelled the sulfur sour again and underneath it a rot that wasn’t full rot, not dead animal. An August rot, more like something was pulled up from where it should stay. Clay rich and wrong. The camera shook in my hand. I didn’t want to blink. My eyes watered and I blinked anyway. When I opened them, the shape had stepped forward. Now it was between two stones. I saw it crouch and set one hand down, fingers splayed like a person might if they were about to push themselves up from the floor. Only these fingers looked thick and blunt, dark with clotted dirt packed in.

It reached down into the ground like it was kneading bread. I heard that drag-lift-toss again, but I didn’t see a shovel. It was the arm. It was scooping full cuts of earth and moving them with a smooth roll of shoulder and back. Each toss landed with that same heavy sack thud. Something in my head said, “Make a sound. Spook it off.” Another voice, older, said, “You don’t want it to know where you are.” I listened to the second one. It kept digging. The grave. It was a grave. And I hate saying that. The grave took shape. The earth around it looked blacker, wetter, like it had held water. I had the thought that graves hold colder earth longer, and that’s why there was steam. I told myself that because I needed a reason while I watched a thing that shouldn’t exist do a human job that shouldn’t be done.

There was a soft hiss and then something like a wooden snap. It had hit board. That sound is in me now. Dry wood giving under wet weight like a brittle rib, like a cheap coffin plank that had waited years for this one night to break. I gagged very quietly with my mouth closed. The thing didn’t flinch at the snap. It leaned in and put both hands down as if it were bracing. Then it pulled. When it pulled, I saw the line of its back change under the hair, like two thick cables running from shoulder to hip. It didn’t jerk or strain. It just pulled and something cracked. The smell that came up then made my eyes burn. I took one slow step backward. The cedar I’d been standing behind had a shallow root flare and my heel slid. I caught myself with my free hand and my palm landed on wet bark. I didn’t make a sound or I thought I didn’t, but a crow woke somewhere near and gave one single call.

The thing stopped. It lifted its head just enough that I saw the faintest catch of light in its eyes. Not red, not anything movie-like, just a wet shine the way animal eyes catch light. I went still in a way that didn’t feel like me. It didn’t look around like a deer would. It just paused. The forest went very dead. I realized my heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. My hands felt numb, but the camera still pointed. The red record light was a pin on the side of the screen. I put my thumb over it to hide it. I don’t know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for my legs to shake again.

Then it did something I didn’t expect. It huffed. Not a grunt, not a scream, a short, deliberate huff like a person trying to fog a mirror. Then it went back to pulling. I started to cry. Not out loud, just tears running because my body wanted an outlet and didn’t get one. I breathed through my nose in tiny sips and swallowed them when they reached my mouth. I remember thinking clear as a bell: I can’t save anyone here. I don’t know why I thought it. No one was waiting to be saved, but it felt like a ritual was being broken open, and my being there made me part of it.

When it finished opening the hole, it reached in and vanished to the shoulders. I heard wet leather sounds and then something heavy came up. Not a body—wood. A piece of board with nails that were mostly rust curling out like old teeth. It set that aside, then reached again with both arms and dragged something smaller. A bundle of rotted cloth. It was careful, and that surprised me. Careful like a person who has done a job a lot and knows the easiest way not to break what’s left. The bundle came apart in its hands. I saw a thin slither of white catch the light and then drop. I saw it tilt its head in a way that reminds me of a dog sniffing a puzzle and I froze again.

There was no sound for a long beat. Then it made another huff, gentler. It set the bundle down on the grass beside the hole like it had weight that mattered. I should have left. I know that I should have backed up while it was busy, but my legs had another plan. I stayed because my mind grabbed onto one idea like a lifeline. I’m recording this. If I have this, then I can make sense of it later. You tell yourself that when you don’t know what else to do; you put a job in front of you like a shield.

It didn’t look up. It did something that changed everything for me. It lifted one handful of dirt and poured it over the bundle like a person covering a sleeping child with a blanket. Only a handful. Then it stopped and sat back on its heels. It put one hand flat on the earth next to the hole and held it there. Not a human hand, not with fingers that long and thick, but the gesture was human enough that my chest hurt. It stayed like that for a long time, quiet, head low. I thought I heard a sound come out of it, low and wide, the kind of sound you feel in your ribs more than hear. Not a word, a tone.

It started filling the hole after that. Fast, efficient. Scoop, toss, press. I watched the earth rise back up. It made a little mound and patted it at once, heavy, like sealing it. I couldn’t breathe right then. The idea clicked into place. It wasn’t stealing from the dead. It was doing something to the grave. Fixing it, checking it, moving it. My brain overloaded trying to label it. It stood taller than anything I had stood this close to in my life. I saw wet hair hanging in clumps. I saw the thickness of its wrist. Something white clung to its forearm and I realized it was mold from the wood. It shook its arm and it flew off in a wet sheet.

Then it lifted its head and looked past the stones into the trees. I thought it was looking at me. I felt that heat go through me, that drop out like when you miss a step in the dark. But it wasn’t. It was looking beyond me. Something moved in the brush off to my left. My whole body pivoted to follow without me wanting it to. And I caught a smear of dark like a person crouching low. Eye shine. Two points. Not as high, not as solid. And then a small sound, not a cry, a thin questioning whine. My skin went cold. There were two—or more. A smaller one or something younger. It sniffed and shifted a step, leaves whispering. The big one made a sound that I might call a click if it wasn’t so heavy. Not with its tongue. Deeper. The small one stopped dead. I didn’t move, not a tendon. I didn’t blink.

The big one turned not toward me, but to the small one. It took two strides that were slow and deliberate and put one hand down where the small one had been. I heard no fuss, just a slow exhale, and then the brush settled. The small one moved away. The feeling in the air changed a little, like a tension wire loosened. I had a thought that this was a lesson. Show the little one what not to touch. Teach them something about the ground. I wanted to laugh, not because it was funny, because it was this insane blend of normal and wrong. A big thing and a small thing in the woods at night, simple as deer, and also this scene with a grave. My brain looked for a crack to escape through. None offered itself.

Then, without warning, everything shifted. The big one stepped past the stones and into the trees. Not toward me, but close enough that if I leaned, I could have touched the shoulder. I smelled it fully. Wet hair, dirt, that sour note, and something like turned earth in winter. It didn’t look at me. I know that because I would have died if it had. I think it knew I was there. I don’t think it cared yet. It moved with the confidence of something that only fears a very short list of things. I wasn’t on that list. It passed into the brush to the left and I lost it except for the sound of branches sliding across wet hair.

Then I heard the smallest of snaps. A twig given up under heel and then nothing. The quiet didn’t hold, though. Not this time. A second later, I heard a sound that I can’t name right. It was a breath but wrong, like a breath being forced through a tight space. The way a pump squeals, it played up my spine like a zipper. The small one had circled or another one had moved. Whichever it was, I saw a shape low, no more than four feet tall, dark as a boulder. It half stood, and I saw the curve of a head and a shoulder. It sniffed the air twice quickly. It made a low, curious noise, and stepped toward the stones. My chest tightened so hard it hurt. I thought like a kid: Don’t let it see me, please.

It didn’t. It stepped sideways instead and crouched by the edge of the new mound. It reached one small hand out and touched the dirt the way a child touches a cake when it isn’t theirs. Gentle but claiming. The big one was there in a blink, a dark wall between the small one and the mound. And it made that deep click again. The small one backed up, sat on its heels, and stayed. Lesson.

I must have been breathing shallow for too long because my vision fuzzed a little, the way it does when you stand too fast. I put the back of my hand against the tree to steady myself. Bark crumbled and made a tiny sound like sand in a dish. The big one turned its head, not toward me, but to the space right of me. It listened for a whole long five heartbeats. My teeth hurt from clenching. Then it turned back to the small one and moved them both off the cemetery path and into the trees in three big steps. Slow, tucked, controlled. It was like watching a set of heavy curtains being drawn aside and then let go. When they were gone, the forest sound didn’t come back. That was wrong. After a bear passes, the crickets kick on. Birds argue. The whole place shakes off the hold. This time it stayed dead and pressed.

My throat felt raw. I should have packed my gear and left right then. Instead, I crept forward. I don’t know why. What did I think I would find? I just know that doing nothing felt like drowning. The mound looked new. That’s a stupid sentence, but it did. The dirt was a shade darker and clumped. There were four marks where big fingers had pressed. No footprints I could see—well, the ground was too littered with needles and wet leaves, and what I could make out looked like someone had dragged a burlap sack. The steam rose a little from the center of the mound, thin like a teakettle left to simmer.

I pointed the camera. I whispered, “This is not real.” Hearing my own voice was a mistake. It made me a person again when being a pair of eyes had been easier. I wiped my nose with my sleeve and took a step around the far side where the board had fallen. I told myself I would just pick up the board and set it out of the wet. I know how that sounds—disrespectful, dumb. I was trying to balance some equation in my head. If something was opened, something should be closed. Even if I didn’t understand the rules, I took the edge of the board with two fingers. It was lighter than I thought and it flexed. Mold smeared on my thumb. I tried not to gag and failed.

That’s when it hit me. Not a hand, not a body—a sound. Close behind me in the trees. So close I felt the air shift across the back of my neck. One single exhale. Not hot, just present. Thick, like a big animal letting out a breath through its nose at arm’s length. I didn’t turn. Every part of me went animal and dumb and old. My arms pulled in. My shoulders rose. I made myself small. I put the board down the way you put a sleeping baby down when the floor creaks and your life hangs on the sound it makes. I waited for a touch that didn’t come. I waited for teeth or hands or to be carried. Nothing came. The breath did though. One more, slower. Then the brush in front of me moved, pushed aside by something I couldn’t see through the dark, and I felt more than heard heavy footfalls slide past me to my right.

I stayed folded. My eyes watered into my lashes and blurred my view. I followed the shape in the space between trees, the way you watch a dark cloud move across darker clouds at night. It was the big one. It had circled back. Maybe it had never left far. It walked right past me and stopped at the edge of the mound. It put its hand down in the same place it had before, flat on the earth. The small one was behind it somewhere. I heard a tiny click. The big one huffed and then it turned its head and looked over my shoulder, not at me, but into the trees behind me and made a sound I felt in my gut like a low drum. The small one answered with a soft rumble that could have been a throat clearing. They shuffled and moved as a pair away from the cemetery like a current slipping off a rock.

When the sounds were gone, my knees gave out. I sat down hard in the wet and didn’t care. My hands shook. The camera was still rolling. I set it down in my lap and stared dumbly at the little red light. Fifteen minutes of footage, then twenty. My mind did math badly. I thought stupid things. Will the battery hold? Did I pack extra SD cards? Where’s my headlamp? Why is my mouth so dry? Why does the air taste like coins? Eventually, I stood slow as someone standing up in a church after the final hymn, and I backed away. The tent glow through the trees looked like a ghost lantern. I got there, crawled inside, and zipped it shut with fingers that wouldn’t obey. I turned on the little lantern and set it low. I held my camera in both hands like a wounded animal and debated whether to turn off the red light. I didn’t. I left it rolling on my chest, pointed at the ceiling, which was stupid, but it felt like evidence you can set down. Something that proves to the person you are in the morning that what happened at night happened.

I listened hard. I heard nothing for a long time. Nothing but the soft drip and way out, a truck on a highway that sounded like thunder. I thought that put the world back in place. I believed for a second that other people existed and that there were lights somewhere and coffee and a cashier at a gas station yawning. That picture saved me. I fell asleep. Don’t ask me how. The body shuts down sometimes. It picks for you.

I woke to a different quiet. Anyone who spent time alone in the woods at night knows the difference. The plain quiet is empty. The held quiet is full. This was held. The light from my lantern was out. The tent felt cold. My breath fogged when I exhaled and I saw it drift. My camera was no longer on my chest. This didn’t register as wrong until I reached for it and hit my own jacket. My hand padded the sleeping bag, the pile of extra clothes, the little notebook—no camera. I went very still, the way people go still when they wake up and realize the front door is open. I tried to swallow and my throat clicked. I unzipped the bag with two fingers. The sound was deafening. I turned my head slowly and looked at the spot where I had set my tripod bag. It was there, half unzipped. The little zipper pull was turned to face me. I hadn’t left it like that. I don’t leave anything with the teeth open. It’s a stupid habit from living with mice in my first apartment.

The tent zipper, the outer one I saw then, had a damp smear on it, long and narrow. You know how your fingers look when you’ve been in dishwater too long? Imagine that passing across fabric. That’s the picture my brain made without my permission. I didn’t touch anything for maybe a minute. Then I reached down, barely breathing, and felt under my hip. Cold rectangle. The camera. It had slid under me in the night. That’s what I told myself. It had to have. I didn’t think about how it could have slid with the weight of my body on it. I didn’t think about the zipper smear. I didn’t think about anything but the relief of feeling that plastic and metal.

I clicked it on in my bag, body curled around it so the screen glow wouldn’t show. The last clip was still rolling, battery at one bar. The timeline said it had recorded for forty-seven minutes after I closed my eyes. I scrubbed through with my thumb. The footage was pointed at nylon for a long time, dark, then a pale smear when my breath fogged the ceiling. Then a shape passed across the pale—not a hand, not light, a shadow, but not from outside. It moved in the wrong direction for that. I paused it and stared. I put my ear to the speaker and turned the volume up to max. I heard breathing that wasn’t mine. Mine had a little whistle on the inhale. This one didn’t. It was full and even closer than I was to the mic. Once, very, very softly, you can hear the sound of a fingertip dragging along nylon. That dry zip sound. I shut it off. I covered my eyes with my palm and pressed hard.

I thought about sitting all night like that until the sun came up. I thought about yelling. I didn’t. I did something dumb but simple. I reached to the zipper of the tent, paused, slid it up two inches, and peeked. The world outside was flat dark. Not city dark, tree dark. My headlamp was off. I turned it on with my thumbnail and set it to the lowest setting. A tiny circle of light. It fell on the foot of the tent and caught a line of wet. I followed the line with the light up to the mesh. There, right where my head would be if I was lying down, the mesh had a bulge outward. Not a tear, just bent like something had put a face there and pushed very gently, testing the weave.

I turned the light off and sat with my face in my hands for a long time. When I finally unzipped the flap and slid out, nothing moved. My breath made smoke. A crow called once and quit. I did a slow circle with the headlamp at knee height, the way rangers taught me to look for sign. I saw the line where something had brushed the side of the tent and left damp. No clear prints, just that drag look in the needles as if a big weight had gone down on its knuckles like a gorilla might. The smear led toward the cemetery. I didn’t follow it.

Here’s where I tell you what the worst was. People hear this kind of story and they expect blood. They expect a scream and a body. That’s not what happened. I’m here. I walked out of that place at first light when the fog was lifting and the cedar smelled more like Christmas than grave. I packed in a rush I didn’t show on my hands. They shook, but they did what I told them. I took the recorders, the trail cam, my tent. I left the little pile of moldy board where it was because I couldn’t make myself touch it again.

The worst was not a body. The worst was realizing I had been tolerated. That is a sharp, small knife to live with. There is something in those trees that knew I was there. That walked around me. That put its breath on the back of my neck. That reached a hand or something like one against my tent while I slept—and it let me go. Not out of kindness. Not because I was special. Because I was a mosquito. You don’t bother to slap when you’re busy with something that matters.

I drove to the ranger station because I thought I owed someone a report. I didn’t walk in with a wild story. I asked if there had been disturbances at the old logging cemetery. The ranger on duty was a heavyset guy with a gray mustache. He looked at me over his glasses like he’d been expecting a quiz. He said, “You don’t want to mess around out there.” He said it without any drama. I asked him if he’d had vandalism. He said, “People knock stones over sometimes. We set them up when we can.” I told him someone had dug. He took that in without moving his face. He asked, “Bear?” I almost said yes just to give both of us an out. An older man in a green sweater was sitting on a bench by the door. He had that look old loggers have—big hands with scar lines like maps. He said without looking at me, “Sometimes they fix what the weather takes.” The ranger gave him a look. The old man didn’t see it. He was watching the window like an empty TV.

The ranger said to me, and he chose his words the way people choose stones to step on in a river: “You should be careful where you point a camera.” That was it. No forms, no notes, no night search. He didn’t ask me for the footage. He didn’t want to know more. Or he did and he already knew it.

I went home and I did what I do. I dumped the footage onto my computer. I lined it up with the audio from both recorders. I put headphones on and I listened to the night again. The recorders picked up the drag-lift-toss clean as a metronome. The trail cam got nothing but fog until the battery died around 9:30. The handheld got the dark shapes at the edge of the cemetery, the smear of movement, the lean of a tall shadow. Enough to ruin my own peace, not enough to make a believer out of someone who didn’t want to be.

I edited a cut that night. I didn’t post it. My finger hovered over the upload button for a long count. I thought about my cousin. I thought about the old man at the station. I thought about what I would be inviting toward me by stepping over whatever line I’d somehow skirted. I saved the file. I named it “October Skykomish Graves.” I moved it to an external drive. I put the drive in a box at the back of my closet behind a stack of winter socks I never wear.

For a week, I didn’t sleep well. I would lie down and hear the sound in my head of a hand dragging across nylon. I would wake up with my breath caught and my chest hurting like I’d been holding it too long. I kept smelling dirt, heavy and wet. I took three showers one night and still smelled it when I lay down. I didn’t go back to the cemetery. I didn’t go near that road. I updated my channel with an old hike from summer. People asked for the owls and I said the weather had shifted.

Then one afternoon, a knock on my apartment door. Two short taps and then one long. I opened it to find no one in the hall, just an envelope taped to the door. No name. Inside was a single photo—not printed from a phone, developed, glossy. It showed a stand of trees and between them the edge of a field with old stones. It took me a second to place it. It was the same cemetery but daytime. The angle was a little different. The mound was there and a bouquet of dead flowers, very old, lay on one of the stones. On the back of the photo in block letters, someone had written, “Leave it.”

I took that letter to the ranger station and set it on the counter. Different ranger that day. Younger, sharp haircut. He didn’t know what to do with it. He said it might be a prank. I agreed and took it back. I kept it in the same box as the drive. A month later, I moved apartments. I didn’t change towns, but I changed the side of town and the floor. I don’t know why. I told myself the sun came in better on this side.

Sometimes at night, I wake up and my chest is tight and my mouth is dry and I reach blindly for my camera like it’s a teddy bear. And when my hand doesn’t find it, I panic for a second. Then I remember that I put it in a drawer by the bed and I relax. I get up and stand at the window and watch the empty street. The cars of my neighbors hold still like sleeping animals. A cat might run by. A coyote might trot the sidewalk with that narrow look. I breathe until the world feels ordinary again.

I think about going back a lot. Some days that thought is almost like a pull in my stomach. Curiosity is a kind of hunger. I can dress it up as closure, but that’s not true. There isn’t closure. There is only knowing, and there is a price for knowing. The worst happened in a different way than people think. It wasn’t claws or blood. It was a mirror.

Something looked at me without looking at me, and I understood my place in a food chain I had forgotten I belonged to. It wasn’t top or middle. It wasn’t even listed. It was footnote. Also present, one man with a camera. I told this story once before to a friend. He listened and at the end he didn’t ask for proof. He asked me one question that stuck. He said, “What do you think it was doing?” I opened my mouth to say digging, because well, it was. Only that wasn’t the right answer. After sitting with it this long, I think it was protecting or checking or counting or honoring. None of those words fit right. But I can’t shake the way it put its hand on the ground like you would on a shoulder. That gesture lives in me. I see it when I close my eyes. I hear the huff. I feel the air move past the tent wall.

There’s one more thing, and I saved it for last because it sounds like the part you’d skip if you didn’t believe the rest. A week after the envelope, I played the audio back again because I like to punish myself. Near the end, after the digging stopped, the recorder by the creek picked up something faint. It wasn’t the click I’d heard, but close. A soft, low, rhythmic sound like someone humming when they think they’re alone. It went on for thirty seconds. I put headphones on, shut my eyes, and listened. It wasn’t music. It wasn’t random. It had this rise and fall like conversation. And in the middle of it, barely there, a smaller sound answered once and then stopped. I pulled the headphones off and put my face in my hands and I cried like a kid finally letting go after holding it together too long.

I haven’t gone back. I don’t plan to. When I drive through Skykomish now, I keep my eyes on the center line. If I stop for gas, I don’t look at the ridge beyond the trees. People in town still talk about cougars and bears. And sometimes a stranger will joke about Bigfoot and everyone will laugh because that’s what people do in daylight. Two or three folks won’t laugh. They’ll look down while they smile and change the subject to weather. If I catch their eyes by accident, there’s a flicker there that I know. It’s a look of someone who has been tolerated.

You want an ending? I do, too. I want the kind where the ranger calls and says they found something and it explains everything. I want a burial record, a storm, a person with a shovel, a bad prank. What I have is this: a night, a smell, a sound, and a line of wet on a tent wall where something pressed the mesh, gentle as a hand, checking if a sleeping child is still there. You don’t have to believe me. I don’t tell this to convert anyone. I tell it because it won’t let me be quiet. A thing stood in a graveyard in the Cascades in late October and used its hands. It knew exactly where to dig and exactly when to stop. It taught a smaller one not to touch. It let me walk out of there. It put its breath behind my neck and it did not take me. That’s not mercy. That’s order. And I think in the way the world is built and stacked and layered, I was shown my rung.