Raven,
I thank you again for posting these missives. I'll resume where we last let off:
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About this time one of my cousins organized a walk around some nearby ponds. This fellow worked years as a mountain Search and Rescue professional. He specialized in aiding in with helicopter rescues, lowering emergency toboggans down rock faces, ski and rope work on steep slopes. He’s an unbelievably fit young fellow. I remember him training for his job by running up end down our mountains holding a raw cabbage in one hand and carrots in another. He’d go up and down half a dozen times eating these raw vegetables.
Let’s call him Rick. Rick took us to a remote section of the forest where he’d found a tree structure.
To anyone that has not seen one of these let me describe: Imagine ten or so tree trunks, stripped of their branches and leaned against each other into a sort of a pyramidal Japanese wood puzzle. They are a koan almost, of massive trunks that support themselves unexplainably.There’s a sort of poetic mystery about how it was assembled. Everything rests on another limb, the final support is suspended in air, a massive heavy log dangling off the ground.
Teenagers did this? Impossible. We had a conversation like, “To put that one in place someone would have to do x y and z first, but no . . . wait, that isn’t possible, this piece had to have gone down first . . . wait, that’s impossible because this is holding up that.” And so on. I have a definitive theory on how these are made and their purpose, but would like to hear from your subscribers.
Now hear this. Although I was at this location with a brother and four close relatives, to this day not a single one remembers the trip, even less the tree structure. Not a one. I’ve been back to them many times, “Hey remember that day . . . the pyramid of tree trunks? “ but they don’t remember a thing. It’s as if some external force removed their memories of this event.
Around this time I was having a lot of what I call “Magic Bear” sightings, particularly when out fishing, I’d catch sight of a bear at long distances across a clearing or beaver meadow. The posture and movement was something different, like a bipedal being running on all fours. I remember demonstrating to my son, how a hominid might fake being a bear very easily, especially if it had longer arms. The magic bear I saw seemed a lot bigger, and way faster, than any bear we have in the area.
When we were many years younger about ten of us kids took rods and creels down to the stream. The older kids had fly rods, and the youngsters all had worms. It’s hellishly challenging fishing because alder bushes are everywhere. Fly fishing there is a real art. Nevertheless, in a fairly short time we caught a mountain of small trout. My younger brother was worm fishing from the bank, and was left to guard the large creel holding everybody's catch. He set the creel behind him, and though he never moved from his fishing spot, when he turned around the creel was still there, but the trout inside it were all gone.
We first reasoned a bear or a raccoon had stolen the fish. Then my brother was blamed. Everyone agreed he had dumped them into the river. After all when you do the math of either eating or transporting upwards of twenty-five ten inch trout, how does a four-footed creature do that while escaping notice? I mean kids were all over that section of stream. A bear would have been seen or heard.
Now I realize our Sabe saw a free trout meal. After all we were kids. We’d be back fishing another day.
About the same period, I began to hear distant yells, across the lake, and from distant mountainsides, long high pitched screams that seemed too voluminous for any sort of cat and definitely not coyotes or wolves. The Adirondacks do harbor a coyote-wolf hybrid. Its howls are different than the high pitched yips coyotes make.
One early morning in bed asleep with my wife, something slapped the side of our camp loudly just below our bedroom window, and uttered some words that sounded Japanese. I do speak a little Japanese, and loved samurai films, and often imitated Toshiro Mifune talking tough. I first experienced this as the rude end of a dream, but then I realized it was real, and happening just outside. When I heard the Sierra Sounds recording on the web. I realized this was their language, or, as the case may be, one of their many languages.
As young kid growing up in this location, our family compound was so remote, and cut off from technology that we had to evolve other ways to entertain ourselves without electricity.
After the sun set and grownups lit oil lamps and candles and sat around to play cards, kids of most ages gravitated towards games of capture-the-flag, or kick-the-can for the youngest ones, then later, dark night contests of escape-and-evasion for the older teenagers. Long evenings of dashing about in the woods and bushes were punctuated with parents calling younger ones in to bed. The older team players remained on the field in near total darkness. We combined our knowledge of how to track game with ways of moving noiselessly, disguising oneself with ferns or grasses, etc. these were all techniques we really enjoyed as kids. A few cousins who had returned from the military contributed to our lore of ‘escaping and evading’.
One thing I learned early on is that if one stays well hidden and camouflaged, there’s no way anyone will see you. I got used to the little ones trying to catch sight of me. My technique was to do a massive flanking run through the woods, and seize the enemy's flag from the rear, seeking cover behind the many scattered buildings. I tell you this as background so you get a sense of what else was going on.
We all know what it’s like to sense another person just around the corner, any corner. This basic instinct is written about in scientific journals. We all have that sense, some have developed it more than others. I know when a noisy eight year old cousin is around a corner and out of sight. All humans have that sense.
I honestly wish I had a dollar for the number of times that deep stinky smell hit me just as I was closing in on the other team’s flag. I was sensing another creature which magically I could never catch sight of. One summer, this happened in a pursuit around the exterior porches of a relative, and the smell was so powerful the following day I went to that cousin and informed them they had a sewage leak. And often when I grabbed the flag, I learned later that other team members were off chasing me in the bushes where they’d heard a noise. Over time, I realized the game was rigged.
Now I realize the Sabe children played with us every summer, perhaps trying to see how much they could influence our contests.
In the early 1960’s our family built an access road over the property. This put an end to years of riding the train. This expansion destroyed a lot of trees. While I cannot speak to experiences our road builders may have had directly, I do know that one summer morning my first cousin and his buddies, all relatives of 16 to 19 years of age, were upbraided by their parents for vandalizing the road construction equipment.
The kids admitted they had indeed started the tractor, a big Cat bulldozer, but said they only drove it a few feet then turned it off. But what of the sand put in the gas tanks? What of the ripped out spark plug cables?
My cousins denied all this very soberly, and I believed them, but they were grounded for a month. Had something else seen the kids messing around, and decided to take advantage?
Overhearing these conversations made me realize the incredible value of individual testimony. I believed my older cousins. Yet they were being blamed just as my younger brother had been blamed for dumping a load of fresh trout. Testimony is so precious. There’s a sacred contract with existence on this earth in what we tell others, and making up a lot of bunk just isn’t productive. Most people, and I underline the word most, are 100 percent honest.
Similarly, when our girl cousins came back from an overnight sleepover they claimed their brothers had been sneaking up on them in the night and breaking trees. Get a life! We hadn’t. They even claimed we called them by name and that they recognized our voices!
In the late summer of 2014 after I saw the massive footprint, I was driving back to Connecticut. Along on our road I passed my father’s first cousin. An elderly geologist and hunter, he stood at the side of the road holding his 30-30 lever action in a very alert manner. When my car surprised him he looked like he was ready to pull up and shoot. Clearly something had made him tense. The date was early September not hunting season. I asked him what he was doing with his rifle so close to the camps, off season. We have clear rules about not discharging rifles within distance of our buildings.
"What’s up?” I was not trying to upbraid him. I was curious. Was he experiencing some of the same phenomena? He was a very direct man, a geologist, but also very honest. So he didn’t answer. I knew in my gut he felt threatened by something.
His lakeside home was just down the mountain from a pond that is higher in elevation. Let’s call it Charm Pond. He hunted there every fall, on the side of that mountain, and, like my father had reported being stalked as he hunted the area. His wife confided to my mother, “You know Donald was followed by something when he was hunting. It really upset him!” She’d just fret a bit then let go of the topic. All who heard it drew a blank.
Now I'll retell the oldest piece of lore from our family settlement. In the 1860’s a man who used to guide for my great great grandfather, had been hunting on Charm Pond Mountain. He shot a buck and was dragging it back to the lake when he heard a massive scream behind him. He redoubled his efforts, then heard another roar. Then practically running to the lake, he threw his buck into his boat and stepped off into the lake. Just as he did so a creature jumped into the lake chest deep, and screeched at him.
We’d always ask my Grandfather, “Well, what was it?” My grandfather’s reply was always the same, “Not sure. They say it was a panther.” Story over.
Now I recognize every detail, so decidedly Sabe. The huge scream, threatening behavior at the lakeshore, and the total sense of terror.
Was the old guide trying to conceal a life changing experience, from his employer? Had he been specific my grandfather might not come as often to hunt. Local populations need to conceal the reality of these beings from their clients. It’s survival, and it happens, to this day. The political pressure to keep Sabe secret to protect local tourism is tremendous.
Years of missing puzzle pieces suddenly resolve into focus, all at once.
If one passes through life, making dismissive apologies for this or that, along with excuses that explain mysteries according to commonly accepted frameworks of knowledge, then something ‘paranormal' could bite you on the nose and you’d never accept it. Most people have taken note of something unexplainable at some point during their lives. But they let the forces of time wear those memories down.They let time erode the documentary prescience of their own experiences.
We doubt ourselves. We all do it. We are our own victims of thought-erosion. I realized work was needed on topics I didn’t understand and not to waste effort on things I did. We're dumbed down, by the simple act of rehearsing the same patterns, believing a narrow reality that is only a tiny fraction of the whole. Most of what we consider real, is in fact due to faith. The piers of science are secured in the mud of religions past.
By rehearsing that fallacious picture, we block off an ability to tune to another reality. I’d only document the unexplained, and not waste time reconfirming the well-known. As soon as I did this I was put in tune with missing puzzle pieces.
Answers came.
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In June of 2006. I drove cross across country to visit friends in different states. One friend, let’s call her Light Girl, lived in Tulsa Oklahoma. Light Girl and I decided to explore Arkansas, and canoe along the Buffalo River.
The Buffalo River cuts through many soft stone bluffs. It’s spectacular country, ridges line both sides of the river. What’s more, one can see caves in the cliff faces along the way. Some no doubt were kept and maintained as dwellings, at some time in the past, and at minimum served as winter dwellings for bears and foxes. During the spring the Buffalo’s current plunges wildly through canyons and ledges of rock. There are sandbars along the turns where one can camp.
We were dropped at the head of the navigable river and agreed to meet our canoe rental guy downstream after a two days of downstream paddling. On the first night Light Girl and I camped, without incident on a sandbar. We did not see any poisonous snakes though we were warned they sometimes crawl onto the sand at night.
On the second day, which was the main paddling day of our journey, I noticed a number of large trees blown across the river. The water was moving fast, so we had to pick a line under the fallen trunks in a manner that was safe and didn't hang us up on the branches. As we cleared the first tree, we noticed another coming up that was leaning out over the water, but hadn’t yet collapsed. I told Light Girl, who was paddling from the bow, to be quiet as we went under, since half-fallen trees can collapse suddenly,. Even a noise can cause them to topple.
We zoomed beneath, then seconds after we cleared it, there was a loud crash. I turned around and the tree we had just canoed under was floating in the water. That spooked us both, big time.
We met our canoe rental guy who took us back to our car. He said he had rattlesnakes in the burlap bag in the back of his pickup, so we all squeezed in front. I think he just said that so he could sit close to Light Girl in the front. When we got out she gave him a mouthful! “You're a redneck pervert." She lit in to him big time. Light Girl spoke dialect perfectly.
Light Girl and I decided to camp one more night in the area, so we picked one of the State Forest sites along the river. We were the only people in the place, literally. We chose a camp site, pitched tent and started a fire.
After an evening meal, cooked over one of the ready made fire pits, Light Girl and I turned in. We were dog tired. The sounds of the forest seemed pretty typical. Plenty of insects, barred owls, screech owls.
Early in the morning I suddenly heard voices in the area around the fire pit. The language sounded strange . . . like someone blubbering their lips and speaking Japanese at the same time. Who was that? Then suddenly, very suddenly, I felt a hand reach beneath the fabric of the tent and under my sleeping hip, like it questioned if someone was inside. The being grunted then went away.
I remember lying in my sleeping bag and suddenly wondered if the creature I heard, also made the tree crash behind us in the water.
Light Girl remembers nothing
Regards,
Postmark Winter Owl
