Hunters Claim They Killed a Sasquatch in the Canada Wilderness – Bigfoot Encounter Story
Hunters Claim They Killed a Sasquatch in the Canada Wilderness – Bigfoot Encounter Story
His name is Ellis Warick. He’s sixty-one now, and he is the only one who came back.
There were five of them who went up into the Caribou backcountry of British Columbia in October of 1998, northeast of Quesnel, in the drainage above the Cottonwood River where the logging roads give out and a man has to walk the rest on foot. Gordon Pike, forty-four, the outfitter who knew the country best. His brother Terrence, thirty-nine. Vaughn Ashby, fifty-one, a welder out of Prince George who’d bought a new rifle and wanted an excuse to use it. Isaac Ren, twenty-six, the kid Gordon was breaking in. And Ellis.
Four of them are dead. Ellis is the fifth. He will tell you exactly what they did and exactly what came for them. When he is finished you can decide for yourself whether he is a lying old man or whether something should be left alone in the deep timber where they live. But he wants the important part said first—the part he has carried for twenty-seven years.
They killed something up there, and it was a child.
They did not know that when the trigger was pulled. They found out after. And everything that happened to them for the next four days happened because of it.
It started ordinary. That is the part Ellis says nobody believes. It started like every hunt. Gordon ran a small outfit—moose and bear mostly—and that October he had a stretch of unclaimed timber he wanted to scout for the next season. He asked Ellis along because Ellis could shoot, keep his mouth shut, and did not complain about weather. Terrence came because Gordon told him to. Vaughn came for the new rifle. Isaac came to learn.
They drove two trucks to the end of a decommissioned haul road and walked the last six miles with packs. They made base camp on a bench above a creek where the timber opened just enough to see big spruce—old-growth fir with trunks a man could not get his arms halfway around. The kind of forest that swallows sound. You talk in there and your voice does not carry. It stops a few feet from your mouth like the trees take it.
The first two days were nothing. They glassed slopes. They saw fresh moose sign and a lot of bear scat and one grouse that Isaac missed twice. Ordinary.
But there were things Ellis noticed and did not say, because you do not say them. Saying them makes you the man who says them.
The second evening the birds quit early—not the way they quiet at dusk, but all at once in the afternoon, like a hand had come down over the whole basin. One minute the timber was full of the ordinary racket of jays and chickadees; the next it was not, and it stayed that way. Ellis sat by the fire that night listening to a silence that had no business being there in a living forest.
He noticed a smell near the creek one morning—wet dog and rot, and something under it, sweeter, that he had no word for. Vaughn smelled it too and said it was a bear carcass somewhere upwind. They left it. But the wind changed twice that day and the smell stayed with them both times, which is not how a carcass works.
The third morning Ellis found the print. In the mud at the creek edge, longer than his boot by a hand’s width, five toes and a heel, pressed deep—deeper than his own weight pressed. He stood looking at it a long time before he stepped around it and said nothing. He told himself it was a bear that had slipped, the front and hind track landing together the way they do. He was good at telling himself things. He has had twenty-seven years of practice.
That same afternoon Isaac came back from filling water bottles white in the face, saying there was something across the creek watching him. Tall, dark, not moving. When he looked straight at it, it was just a burned snag. When he looked away, it was a shape again. Gordon laughed and told him the woods play tricks on a tired mind.
But that night the rocks started.
Just one at first. A single stone thrown from the dark beyond the firelight, landing in the middle of camp between the tents. Not thrown at them. Thrown to land among them so they would know it had been thrown. They all heard it come down. They all looked at each other. Nobody said the thing they were thinking. Gordon said it was a squirrel dropping a cone. But a cone does not weigh two pounds and does not come in flat and hard from forty yards out of a black forest.
Ellis did not sleep well after that. But he told himself things. And in the morning the sun came up and the birds were back for a while and they went hunting, because that is what they had come to do. Telling yourself things is easier in daylight.
The kill happened on the fourth day in the last hour of light.
They were strung out along a game trail on a north-facing slope, spread maybe forty yards, still-hunting into the wind. Gordon on point. Isaac behind him. Ellis third. Vaughn. Terrence at the tail.
Gordon stopped. Fist up. Everyone froze.
Ahead of him, downhill in a pocket of alder and young spruce, something was moving—dark, low to the ground or crouched. It was pulling at something. They could hear it: a wet tearing sound and a soft high sound over it that Ellis did not understand at the time and understands now and wishes to God he did not.
Gordon thought it was a bear on a kill. A black bear feeding. Dangerous to walk up on. He made the call to take it.
He raised his rifle.
The thing in the alders stood up.
It stood up on two legs. It kept standing. It went up and up past bear height, past any height that made sense—seven feet and then more. It turned its head and it was not a bear.
Ellis saw the face for less than a second in that failing light. Broad. Flat. A heavy shelf of bone over the eyes. Wide flat nose. No muzzle. No snout. A face too much like a man’s and too far from one at the same time. Rust-dark hair. Skin the color of wet ash where the hair thinned at the cheeks. And it was holding something against its chest.
Gordon fired. Ellis does not think he decided to. He thinks Gordon’s body did it. The thing was huge and close and it turned toward them fast and the rifle went off and the sound in that dead-quiet forest was like the world cracking in half.
The thing dropped. Folded down into the alders and did not get up.
For a second none of them breathed.
Then Isaac started walking toward it. Gordon grabbed him. They all went down together in a knot, rifles up, hearts going like hammers.
It was down. It was dead. Gordon’s shot had taken it high in the chest and it had died fast.
They stood over it in the last gray light and none of them could take it in. It was enormous. Lying down it was longer than any of them was tall and thick through the chest and shoulders in a way no bear is thick. And the arms—the arms were the thing. Long and heavy and ending in hands. Real hands. Five fingers. A thumb. Calloused pads worn smooth. Dirt under the nails.
The smell came off it in the cold. That wet-dog rot they had chased around all week. And under the smell, close now, was something almost like a person—sweat and skin. That was the thing that turned Ellis’s stomach. That it smelled partly like them.
Gordon was saying something over and over, some word Ellis never made out. Isaac had his hand over his mouth. Vaughn had backed away and would not come closer.
And then, in the crushed alders beside it where it had fallen, something moved.
The small one.
This is the part Ellis has never told the same way twice, because there is no way to tell it that makes it bearable.
The thing Gordon killed had been feeding, yes, but it had not been feeding alone. It had a young one with it—half its size, maybe less. Same broad face. Same dark hair, thinner, softer. The proportions all wrong the way a child’s are wrong compared to a grown thing. And the young one was hurt. Ellis does not know if Gordon’s bullet had passed through and struck it, or if it had been sick or hurt some other way before they ever came. He knows it was lying on its side making that soft high sound he had heard—the sound he had thought was a bird—and that its breathing was wrong and that its eyes were open and moving.
Isaac wanted to help it. The kid, twenty-six years old, wanted to do something for it. Gordon told him to get back. Vaughn was saying they had to leave—right now. Terrence just stood there with his rifle pointed at nothing, shaking.
And the small one died while they stood there arguing about it. It took a few minutes. Then it went still.
Nobody said anything for a long time. The light was almost gone.
And in the silence, from somewhere out in the dark timber all around them on three sides, something began to answer.
Not a howl. Ellis has heard wolves. It was not that. It was a long low sound that came up out of the ground itself, it felt like. And it was joined by another, and then a third, from different directions spaced around them in the dark. They were not moving closer. They were not moving away. They were just letting the men know they were there.
Gordon said they needed to get back to camp. His voice was not right. And then he made the decision Ellis has gone over ten thousand times in twenty-seven years—the decision that killed four men.
Gordon said they were taking the big one out. He said nobody would believe them without it. He said this was the thing men spent their whole lives looking for and it was lying dead at their feet and they were not going to walk away and have it be a campfire story. They would rig a travois and drag it to camp tonight and figure out the rest in the morning.
Vaughn told him he was insane. Leave it. Leave both of them and walk out in the dark right now and never come back.
But Gordon was the one who knew the country, and Gordon was the one whose word they followed, and the sun was down, and they were four miles of black timber from the trucks.
In the end they did what Gordon said.
They cut poles. They rigged a drag. And in full dark, with those long low sounds spaced all around them in the trees, they started hauling a dead giant back toward their tents.
That was when the four days started.
They got it to camp near midnight. It took all five of them and it nearly broke them. The body must have gone four hundred pounds and it did not drag clean. It caught on everything. And the whole time they worked, those sounds stayed with them, keeping pace, never close enough to see.
They got it into the little clearing where the tents were and dropped it by the fire ring and stood there wrecked and sweating in the cold. And Gordon—God help him—wanted a picture. He had one of those little disposable cameras, the yellow cardboard kind. He wanted a picture before morning, before anything could happen to the body. Proof.
He got Isaac to build the fire up. He knelt down behind the thing in the firelight and had Vaughn take it. Ellis can still see him: down on one knee behind that huge dead body, grinning, his hand coming up, and in the last frame throwing up two fingers behind its head like a kid on a school trip. A peace sign behind the head of the thing they had killed, whose child they had left dead in the alders four miles back.
The camera flashed.
And out in the dark all around the clearing, everything went completely silent.
The sounds stopped—all of them at once. Ellis has been in quiet places. He has never been in a quiet like that. It had a pressure to it. It sat on the chest.
Isaac started to say something. Vaughn told him to shut up in a whisper. And they all stood there in the firelight in the middle of a silence that was worse than any noise.
It held for a long time—minutes—and then something hit the edge of camp.
It came from the tree line out of the black and it hit one of the standing dead spruce at the edge of the clearing so hard the whole tree shuddered and dropped a shower of dead needles. They all went down flat. Nobody saw it. They heard it hit and heard it move off fast—a heavy crashing gait—and then quiet again.
Then it came from the other side and did it again. A different tree. The same tremendous impact, like a man swinging a truck.
They were circling the camp. Testing. Hitting the trees at the edge of the firelight where the men could hear it and feel it and not see it.
The five of them spent that whole first night back to back around the fire with their rifles, a ring facing outward, and the things worked the edges of the camp until almost dawn. It went in waves. There would be a stretch of that awful pressing silence—ten minutes, twenty—where they would start to think maybe it was over, and then it would start again from a new direction. A tree struck. A rock thrown in. Once a long slow dragging sound circling the whole camp just outside the firelight—something being pulled through the brush around and around them. And they never saw what, and they never saw who pulled it.
Rocks came in three times that first night, thrown from the dark. One the size of a fist that landed in the fire and kicked up a fountain of sparks and made them all flinch and swing their rifles at nothing.
Around two in the morning Vaughn swore he saw one of them. He was facing the downhill side and brought his rifle up and did not fire. Afterward he could barely describe it—only that it had been standing between two trees just past the light, tall as the low branches, watching the fire, watching them, and that when he looked at it directly it had stepped back into the dark without seeming to move its legs at all. He said it was like the tree it stood beside just took a step. Vaughn was not a man who talked like that. He welded steel for a living and did not have that kind of talk in him. Hearing it come out of him scared Ellis more than the rocks did.
And then, near the end of the night, they did the thing Ellis believes was meant to break the men. And it nearly did.
They started making the men’s voices.
It came out of the dark from the tree line in Terrence’s voice, calling Gordon’s name, clear as anything. Gordon’s own brother’s voice out of the black timber calling to him.
Gordon came up off the ground with a sound Ellis has never heard a grown man make. Vaughn tackled him before he could run into the trees after it.
Then it came again from a different direction. The same voice. The same name.
And then a third voice joined it that Ellis swears was his own, saying words he had said earlier that day, thrown back at them out of the dark from three directions at once.
They held Gordon down. They put their hands over his mouth. And the voices worked the tree line until the sky began to go gray, calling to them, trying them. And then, as the first real light came, they stopped all at once—the way the birds had stopped on the second evening.
The things did not rush them. They did not need to. They wanted the men to understand something, and by morning the men understood it completely.
They were not going to be allowed to just walk out.
There is one thing from just before dawn that Ellis had never told anyone until now, because he says it is the truest measure of what they were up against.
The fire had burned low and none of them would move to build it up, because building it up meant stepping to the edge of the light where the wood was, and none of them would do that. So it burned down and the dark came in closer. And in the last of the coals Ellis saw one of them.
It came to the very edge of the dying firelight across the clearing and it crouched down there low and it looked at the body. Not at the men. At the body. At the big one lying by the fire ring that they had dragged in. It crouched there in the dark at the edge of the light and looked at its dead for a long time, and it made a sound very low that Ellis felt in his chest more than heard, and he understood that he was watching something grieve.
He was watching grief.
And then it looked up from the body and looked at the four huddled men by the coals. And there was nothing in that look Ellis has words for. And it stood and went back into the dark without a sound.
That was the last thing that happened before the gray came.
Ellis has thought about that crouching shape every day for twenty-seven years. He thinks it was the mother. He thinks they killed her child in the alders and her mate by the fire ring—or her child and her sister, or whatever they are to each other. He does not know their kinds. But he knows grief when he sees it, and he saw it, and he understood in that moment that no plan of theirs was going to matter at all.
In the gray first light Gordon made a plan, and it was a good plan, and it did not matter.
They would leave everything—the body, the camp, all of it. They would take their rifles and water and move fast down the drainage to the trucks six miles away and drive out and never speak of it. And if the story died with them, then it died. Gordon had changed overnight. The peace sign was gone out of him. He just wanted them alive.
They broke into a fast walk down the game trail in the dawn, five men close together, and they made it about a mile and a half before the things took Terrence.
Nobody saw that either. That is the thing about them. You almost never see it happen.
Terrence was at the back. They were moving through a thick patch of young spruce, single file, and there was a sound behind them—one short sound—and when they turned, Terrence was not there. His rifle was on the trail. There was no blood. There was nothing. He was just gone, and the timber on either side of the trail was moving high up, branches swaying where nothing should reach, moving away from them and taking whatever quiet thing had come and gone.
Gordon screamed his brother’s name into the trees until his voice broke. Nothing answered.
They could not go after him. That is the part you cannot understand, Ellis says, unless you have stood there. They could not go into that timber after him. They would have been going in one at a time into the exact thing that had just taken a grown man off a trail in the middle of four other men without one of them seeing it.
Vaughn got them moving. They left Terrence’s rifle where it lay and went on down the drainage faster now—not walking, moving in a kind of controlled panic—and the timber moved with them on both sides, high up, keeping pace, patient.
Ellis says the middle of that day was when he understood what they were dealing with, and understanding it was worse than not knowing.
They did not hide. That is the thing. In the middle of the day, in the open light, they let the men see them a little at the edges. A dark shape would move through the timber a hundred yards off, upright, too tall, matching the men’s pace on the ridge above them, and then it would be gone, and then it would be there again on the other side. There were several. They traded places. They walked the men down that drainage the way men walk a deer to a stand—always at the edge of sight, never once closing while the light was good. And they wanted to be seen, because being seen and being unable to do anything about it broke something in each of the men a piece at a time.
Vaughn stopped being able to talk. He just moved, and his eyes went everywhere, and his hands shook on his rifle. Gordon kept looking back the way they had come—back toward his brother—and Ellis watched the hope go out of him a little more with every mile, because they both knew Terrence was not somewhere behind them waiting to be found. And the young man Isaac kept apologizing. That is the detail Ellis cannot forget. He kept saying he was sorry over and over, quietly, to nobody, as they walked. Ellis does not think Isaac even knew he was doing it. He thinks some part of the kid had understood before the rest of them what they had done in those alders, and it was leaking out of him—this apology to the things in the trees—as they walked down toward the creek where the things would take Vaughn.
They lost Vaughn at the creek crossing that afternoon.
The trail dropped to the creek and there was a log crossing—a big old windfall spanning the water—and they went over it one at a time because that was the only way. Gordon crossed. Isaac crossed. Ellis crossed.
Vaughn was on the log halfway when it came up out of the creek bed below him.
That one Ellis saw.
It came up out of the alders and the deadfall along the water so fast that “fast” is not the word. It was just suddenly standing where it had not been. Enormous. Dark. Wet to the waist. And it took Vaughn off the log with one arm the way a man takes a cat off a fence. Vaughn did not even finish shouting. It went back into the timber on the far bank with him, and the brush closed, and that was all.
They ran. The three who were left just ran down the trail away from the creek and they did not stop until Isaac fell and could not get up and they had to stop. They were maybe three miles from the trucks. It was late afternoon. There were three of them. And they finally understood all the way down that the things were not chasing them.
They were hurting them. Spacing them out and taking them at the crossings and the thick places one at a time at their leisure, whenever they chose, and choosing to make it slow because of the child.
Ellis knew it then and knows it now because of the small one in the alders. This was not hunting. This was a reckoning. And they were in no hurry at all.
The three of them tried to talk it through in the last of that afternoon. Gordon had gone somewhere far back in his own head after his brother, but he came out of it enough to think, and what he thought was that they had to change the pattern. The things were taking them at the crossings and the thick places, so they would avoid the crossings and the thick places. They would stay in the open where they could see. They would not go single file. They would move three abreast, touching, no gaps for anything to fill.
It was a good plan—the plan a smart man makes. And it did not matter, because the things had already thought further ahead than the men could think.
There was only one way down the last of that drainage, and it did not care about their plan. The country funneled. It always funnels. That is why they choose the country they choose. The open ground ran out and the timber closed in and there was one line down through it, and they had to take it three abreast for a while and then two and then, at the talus, one, because a man cannot climb through boulders three abreast. The things knew the ground and the men did not, and the ground was on the things’ side.
Isaac hurt his ankle in the talus going through the rocks in the failing light. Went down hard between two boulders and could not put weight on it. And that decided where they would spend the night, because they could not carry him and run. So they would not run. They would fort up in the rocks and hold.
And that, Ellis thinks now, is exactly where the things had been steering them all along.
Isaac died that night, and Ellis tells it plainly because the kid deserves that.
They had gotten into a jumble of boulders as the light went—a talus slope where big rocks had come down off the ridge—and they wedged themselves into a gap between two of them where nothing could come at them except from the front. Gordon and Ellis put themselves at the mouth of the gap with the rifles and put Isaac behind them because he was hurt and because he was the youngest. And Ellis thinks they both, without saying it, wanted to save the kid.
They came in the dark. They came at the front of the gap straight at the rifles. And this time the men shot. Both of them. They emptied their rifles into the dark at things they could barely see—huge shapes—and Ellis knows they hit them. Knows he hit at least one because it made a sound he still hears. And it did not stop them. And it did not even slow them.
And while the men were shooting at the front of the gap, one of the things came over the top of the boulders from behind and took Isaac out of the space between them before either could turn in time.
He had time to say one thing. He said Ellis’s name. Just his name, once, a question, like he could not believe it was happening. And then he was gone, up and over the rocks, and the sound of him stopped a little way off in the dark.
Gordon and Ellis did not speak for the rest of that night. They sat in the gap in the rocks with empty rifles and a terror Ellis has no words for, and they waited to die, and the things let them wait.
Gordon and Ellis made it to within sight of the trucks the next morning—the fifth day—and that is where the things took him.
They came down the last slope and Ellis could see the trucks through the trees, two hundred yards off, sitting there ordinary in the gray morning at the end of the old haul road. And he remembers thinking they were going to make it, both of them—the two who were left. That is the cruel part. The things let him think it.
They had come down off the talus in the first gray light, not speaking—past speaking—two men emptied all the way out. They had reloaded from what was left in their pockets, a few rounds each. Not that it mattered. Not that the rounds had ever mattered. And they had walked the last stretch toward the trucks in a silence that was almost peace, because Ellis thinks they had both stopped believing they would live. And there is a kind of quiet that comes when you stop believing that.
And then, through the trees, there were the trucks. And Gordon made a sound—half a laugh, the first sound like hope Ellis had heard from him in days. And something in Ellis answered it, some animal thing that started to believe again.
That was the cruelty of it. That the things gave them that. That they let them see the trucks and start to hope before the last of it.
There was a blowdown across the trail—a big fir that had come down—and they had to go around it, and there was really only one way around, through a thick screen of young growth. And Gordon went first.
Ellis heard him go around the root wad. Heard him make a sound—small, cut off, not even a shout, just a breath with something in it. And when Ellis came around the root wad three seconds behind him, Gordon was gone. And there was one boot on the ground, laces still tied, and the timber above was swaying and settling like something very large had just gone up into it, high into the canopy, unhurried.
Then the branches went still, and the forest was quiet, and Ellis was alone.
He stood there alone, two hundred yards from the trucks—the last man—and nothing came for him.
That is a thing Ellis needs you to understand.
Nothing came for him.
He walked the last two hundred yards to Gordon’s truck in the open, in plain sight, waiting every step to be taken, and he was not taken. He got to the truck and the keys were in Gordon’s pack and he did not have the pack. And he got out again and walked back toward the root wad to look for it. And he still was not taken. And he found the pack on the trail where Gordon had dropped it and the keys were in it. And he walked back to the truck a second time and got in and started it and drove out.
They let him go.
Four men, and the things took four men one at a time at the crossings and the thick places over four days and four nights. And Ellis they let walk out in the open to the truck twice on purpose.
Ellis has spent twenty-seven years understanding why. And here’s what he believes. And you can believe it or not.
They wanted one of them to live. They wanted someone to carry it out. They wanted the story told—not so that anyone would come and find them. They are far past our finding. But so that men would know. So that the next five men who walk into the deep timber with rifles and a disposable camera would have heard somewhere that there are places you do not go and things you do not do, and that the deep old forest keeps its own accounts and settles them in its own time and forgets nothing.
Ellis was the message. He believes that is the only reason he is alive.
He drove out that afternoon and did not stop until he hit pavement. And he does not remember most of the drive. He told the first person he could find—a woman at the lodge on the highway—that four men were still up there, that they had gotten separated, that someone had to send people. And then he sat down on the floor of her office and could not get up.
The search went on for eleven days. They put men and dogs and a helicopter into that drainage. They found the base camp, the tents, the gear, the drag marks where the men had hauled something heavy in the dark, and the fire ring. What they did not find was any body. Not the four men, and not the thing that had been killed either—the big one they had dragged in and photographed. Because by the time the searchers reached the camp it was gone from the fire ring, dragged back out into the timber, taken home. All that was left was a wide flattened place in the needles and a dark stain. And that smell, which two of the searchers reported and neither could name.
They asked Ellis a great many questions. He answered almost none of them truly. He said they had gotten separated in the dark, that he had heard the others and then not heard them, that he had found the truck and gone for help. A man who tells the truth about a thing like this does not stay a free man for very long. And Ellis understood that even sitting on that office floor. So he lied. And he has lied about it for twenty-seven years until now.
Four men vanished in the Caribou backcountry in the fall of 1998, and it went down as a hunting party lost to weather and terrain. The search found the camp and the gear and no bodies, because there are never any bodies. And after a while it stopped being news.
The families still write to Ellis some years. He does not answer. There is nothing he could put in a letter that would not sound like the ravings of the man who came back when four better men did not.
He has the photograph—the one Vaughn took. Gordon on one knee behind the thing in the firelight, two fingers up, that grin on his face. It is the only proof Ellis has, and it proves nothing. And he had never shown it to anyone until now, and he is fairly sure it will be called fake within the hour. And he has made his peace with that.
He is an old man now. He does not go into the woods anymore. He has not held a rifle in twenty-seven years.
People ask him—the few he has ever told—why he thinks it was that particular kill, why that hunt, when men shoot bears and elk in that country every fall and walk out fine. And he tells them the truth, which is that he does not think it was the killing. Men kill things in the woods and the woods lets them. He thinks it was the child. And he thinks it was the photograph. He thinks if they had left both of them in the alders and walked out in the dark that night the way Vaughn begged them to, they would all be alive—all five old men now with a story they would never tell.
He thinks what could not be forgiven was that they knelt down behind the dead and grinned and threw up two fingers and let a camera flash in their faces. He thinks there is a line even for them, even in that ancient country. And the men walked across it grinning, and the things made sure the one they let live would know exactly which line it was.
And on quiet nights, at the edge of sleep, Ellis still hears that soft high sound the small one made—the sound he thought was a bird. And he understands now that it was crying. And he understands that they heard a child crying and posed for a photograph.
And he does not expect to be forgiven for that. Not by them. Not by God. Not by the four men he walked out and left in the timber.
Real or fake, you decide.
But there is one more thing Ellis has never said out loud until this telling, and it is the reason the story cannot end here.
Three years after he drove out of that drainage, in the summer of 2001, a man named Royce Adler rented a cabin on the Kenai side of things, up a spur road in the coastal forest, and fired one shot into a clearing where four of them were waiting. He lived through six days of what came after. He made it out of a glacial river that should have killed him. And when Ellis finally heard that story—quietly, at the edge of things, the way these stories find each other—he recognized the same patience. The same accounting. The same deliberate choice to let one man carry the weight out.
Ellis does not know if the things that took Gordon and Terrence and Vaughn and Isaac are the same as the ones that held Royce inside that cabin for six days. He does not know how far their country stretches, or how many of them there are, or whether they speak to each other across the mountains. He only knows that the photograph is still in a drawer in his house, and that some nights he takes it out and looks at Gordon’s grin and the two fingers and the dark shape behind them, and he wonders how many other men are walking around with the same knowledge locked behind their teeth.
And he wonders what happens when the next five walk in.
Because the forest keeps its accounts. And the accounts are not finished.
