The first time it hit the trailer door, I thought the steel had split.
The hit was hard enough, it shook dust out of the seams above our heads.
Ray and I were locked inside a little roadside office, staring at the door handle as it
moved, rotating back and forth, while something outside kept pushing and pulling on the door.
We knew a few things for sure by that time.
First, that wasn't a bear out there.
And if we stayed in that trailer until the generator died and the lights went out, we weren't
getting out at all.
That night it was just me and Ray.
We were in Washington, finishing up on a washed out section of Mountain Road where half the
uphill lane had washed away after a stretch of hard rain.
We'd been on Mountain Road jobs alone after dark before.
It was never the ideal plan, but sometimes it happened for different reasons.
We'd been up there for three days, moving Phil, setting pipe and rushing to shore up
a bad section before a storm was due to roll in that night.
We drew the short straws, so to speak, among the crew.
While the rest of the crew was gone, it was just the two of us up there to finish a few things
up.
We stayed to move equipment around, park, chain, and cover what needed it, then locking
sight boxes and closing up the work trailer.
We were checking along when it was like someone turned up the lights on the mountain.
It went from dusk to pitch black in about two minutes.
It was a combination of the sun, just dipping behind the ridge and the dark storm clouds
beginning to roll in over us.
But we still had a bit to do, so I walked to the panel and I hit the generator switch to
light things up.
The generator light went out over the road, the excavator, the compressor and our stacks
of orange barrels.
But beyond that was nothing but timber, steep ground, and darkness.
I had worked with Ray a long time, and he'd been at this kind of work several more years
than me.
It always impressed me with how unimpressed Ray was with everything.
He was the last to get worked up, mad, or rattled.
But if he did, you looked out because you knew it was for a good reason.
Right then Ray was busy with a clipboard in one hand, a flashlight in the other, and he
was checking off the list, asking me about things as he went along.
He latched the side box on the compressor, he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
The chain on the tamper.
"Yeah," I said.
He checked off a few more things and he said, "Well, good, let's get out of here."
It was the best thing he'd said to me all day.
The day's end meant going to the motel in town, but it was better than on-site trailers,
which we've had to do before.
I was coiling the last of a rope when I heard brush breaking up on the slope.
It was the sound of something heavy coming through.
It was loud and fast, then it stopped.
I looked up hill into the dark.
Ray looked up too and said, "Ehh, probably a bear."
I nodded.
Yeah, that made sense.
We'd been seeing bear signs all that week.
Big marks on trees up and down the road.
A few hundred over-tree saplings found a torn-up coolor at the nearby pull-off.
I mean, after all, this was mountain country and bears did live here.
I finished that coil and started another when it happened again.
A sudden burst and hard movement through brush.
It didn't sound like something walking steadily.
There was this big rush again.
It went longer this time, and it stopped abruptly.
We both looked up the slope.
Ray shrugged and he said, "Yeah, okay, let's get this done."
I picked up the bucket of miscellaneous things I'd been collecting to put up, while Ray picked
up another clipboard with papers from a folding table outside the work trailer.
I was on the small porch deck and held the door open for Ray, who had his hands full of
clipboards and a flashlight.
I stood back with the door open and let him in.
As he came in, the generator lights were opposite of us, throwing long shadows over the gravel.
After that gravel, maybe twenty feet past, was the timber line and the slope up where we
heard the brush breaking noises.
I was just about to step in and close the door.
When I saw something move at the low timber line, just where the generator lights didn't
light it up.
I stopped, blinked, squinted, and looked hard again.
It was dark out there, but there's different kinds of dark, different shades of it.
Sometimes you can look in the dark and see something move, something of just a different
shade of dark.
And that's what happened.
I saw something a different kind and shade of dark rise up.
It straightened up and stood dead still.
I think the hairs on the back of my neck were bristling and poking into my collar.
I'd looked for another second, and I could almost make out a shape.
Ray, I said slowly, never taking my eyes off the dark shape.
"Hmmm?" he said.
He was inside busy sorting papers into the slots on top of the filing cabinet.
I didn't know what to say, so I just pointed, and I said his name again.
From my side view I saw Ray look up, looking kind of annoyed, and he took the few steps
over to the doorway and looked to where I was pointing.
He didn't see it at first because, after a second, he asked, "What are you pointing at?"
Then it moved, taking two big steps, crossing about half the distance up to the gravel,
well into the ambient cast of light spread from the generator's lights.
It was still probably thirty feet or more from where we stood, but that was too close
for me.
We both knew what was coming at us.
You see one, you have to be stupid to say you don't know what it is.
It was a size that's hard to write about, and makes seem real.
It was eight feet tall at least.
Just like a big gorilla in terms of size and looking rounded around the ribs, the head
was large and sat, jetted out on the shoulders, but I didn't see a neck.
It was like the head was sat down, and flowed out to the edge of the shoulders.
Ray smacked my shoulder and said, "Inside."
I was already there, my friend, closing the door behind me through in the bolt.
The trailer was a small half-size trailer, just meant to be a small, mobile working office.
There were two small windows on the front, on either side of the door.
There were no windows on the back.
But at each end of the trailer there was a small rectangular window that sat high on the
wall, mostly meant to be used for ventilation.
Doubtful, a six-year-old could have made it through those windows.
That's how small they were.
Other than that, the door had a small diamond shape to paint and glass in it, maybe eight
inches square.
It's enough to look through to make sure you weren't going to knock someone out when
you opened the door.
And that's the other thing.
The trailer was so small, the door opened out, not in.
I looked out.
The area where I had seen movement was visible if you stood just a little to the side, and
looked sideways and long ways outside.
I did that, and it was standing at the gravel, very visible, looking at the trailer.
It was looking right at me.
Yeah, we'd both heard the stories, me and Ray, but we'd never believed them.
That's crazy talk is what we used to say.
Or we would look at each other and raise our eyebrows and say, "Somebody had too many
drinks or was imbibing in something else."
And they clearly imagined it.
Well, I'm here to tell you, we had not done any of those things, and we were not imagining
it.
The other thing I want to say about is the weight of it.
At least it could have been was 800 pounds.
Its size is part of that guess, but the other are the muscles.
Muscles weigh a lot more.
It might have been closer to the thousand pound mark.
This was very solidly built, and that's a lot of weight when it's standing eight feet
or more.
I looked hard, but couldn't make out any kind of a face, of course I knew it had one.
And I could tell by the head positioning in the shoulders which way was looking.
It turned a bit, and I caught a flash of something.
Let's call it eye shine.
It was there, then it was gone.
Just two little flashes, a few inches apart, and almost eight feet up.
Ray was at the small window on the other side of the door doing what I was, looking down
long ways outside.
"Jesus Christ," Ray said, slow and soft.
It kept standing out there looking like it was waiting for something, or maybe it was thinking.
Maybe it was making some kind of a decision.
I don't know.
Now someone could have offered me millions of dollars, and I wouldn't have stepped one foot
outside that trailer right then.
Same time, I didn't exactly feel safe with nothing but thin metal of the trailer between me and
it.
I had a scary thing come to me while I watched it.
I knew it was smart.
It thinks, and it weighs things up.
I know that, because while I watched it, I saw it turning and looking around.
It was looking at the different light locations, the front of the trailer.
It was looking where the excavator was, down to where our pickup trucks were, which was
about 50 feet down from the trailer the other way.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot of distance, but it is when there's a big old big foot outside.
But it took a few steps down the gravel, and then I couldn't see it anymore.
Ray ran and stood on a folding chair to look at one of the small, high side windows.
He said it had walked far enough.
It could look at the back of the trailer.
He saw it physically take a look down the back side of the trailer.
Then it walked back to almost where it had been.
But now it took a few more steps into the light.
I knew for a fact there was no cell signal out there.
If you wanted to signal, you had to go higher up on the ridge.
We had a radio, but that was really no help.
It was a small two-way type of radio setup that only went out to a couple miles, so probably
no one near enough to hear us.
We tried it anyway.
We got nothing back.
When it came back from looking down the back side of the trailer, it walked closer, and
it came right up under the generator lights.
It was now maybe 15 feet from the door.
In the light the hair on it looked uneven and messy and clumpy.
The arms looked like logs hanging from its shoulders, and I saw the hands hanging low
and open.
They looked like they could grip a watermelon and crush it the way we would crumple up a
piece of paper.
I could make out the face a little more now, but not much other than I could see the darker
eye area and the light where it hit the jaw and the lip line.
I could see the very end of the nose, which looked flat and big on the face.
It took another slow look around again, and then it looked right at the trailer.
I want to say a couple strange things here.
Ray and I agree on a couple things.
First, it was definitely doing like a reconnaissance mission around the trailer, making sure we were
alone or that nothing else was going to interfere, that there wasn't another exit for us.
That was really what we believe.
The second thing is, when it stepped around and it started to look at the trailer from
15 feet, Ray and I are both absolutely convinced it was looking at us.
I mean, I felt that it was staring solely at me, and Ray thought it was staring only at
him.
I will say, either way, that stare had the hair standing up all over me.
There was something intimidating in its posture, and you could think I'm crazy, but I think
there was something else and it stared us.
Ray rummaged a ground and grabbed a road flare from one of the shells, and he popped open
the cap.
"What are you doing?" I asked him.
If that thing comes through the door, it's getting a mouthful of this," he said.
"I looked around, and I thought about it."
"Yeah, sure.
We had some tools in the trailer."
"But none of the heavy ones that might have helped us."
Those were outside in the tools trailer down the way.
I'd hick-felt safer in that big caged excavator, but for all I knew, it could rip the cage
right off from the seating area.
But I felt maybe I might have been able to battle it with the big equipment.
"Yeah, crazy thoughts."
"But it was a crazy moment."
I grabbed a flare too, because, well, maybe it was a stupid idea, but it was the only one
we had.
We boasted back, waiting.
This lasted maybe five or six seconds, and I had to look.
I had to know where it was.
I looked out the window that Ray had been looking out earlier.
I just pulled two blind pieces apart to look out, and I didn't see anything at first.
It was just pitch black out there.
But no, no, it wasn't.
That danged thing was standing right at the window, looking in at us, blocking all the
light.
I thought those blind snapped back quick.
I jumped about ten feet in the air.
Ray was asking, "What?
What?"
I told him it was right there at the window.
We quickly turned off all the lights inside the trailer.
Yeah, we should have done that first, but for some reason it just didn't occur to us to
do that.
We got the lights out, and then we felt the trailer sort of tilt, maybe an inch or two.
The metal steps in the little square porch outside creaked.
It was pushing on the trailer.
That trailer was on wheels, and everything had been blocked and secured, so it didn't
move, but it wasn't permanent.
It was pushing on it, broadside.
I don't mean some kind of a hard shove, but it was gently pushing, just testing, seeing
if it could.
All I could think of was the trailer being shoved over on its side.
Now sometimes in stressful situations, your mind will throw up something funny or weird,
and that happened to me right then.
The funny thought I had was, if it was on the other side, pushing the other way, in the
way the wheels would have moved, and it managed to break the locks, the straps, and the wheel
locks.
Well, we'd probably go rolling right on down quite a ways.
Then we'd go right off the side where it slopes down in the road curves around the mountain.
My funny thought?
Well, I remembered suddenly the kids in the old movie, the Apple Dumbling Gang, where they
were in an old mine cart that cut loose and went down the side of a mountain.
But this wasn't some funny kids' movie from the 1970s, and I didn't think I would survive
it unscathed, quite like they did.
I know.
What a weird thing to flash through my head in that nanosecond.
But I remember thinking that I have no idea why, to this day I couldn't tell you.
Now when it started pushing on the trailer, we were both starting to yell out things like,
hey, stop!
Then it really was rocking the trailer.
Just like it was trying to figure something out, how best to get at us.
Then it started pushing on the window, whether by design or accident, just as it was pushing
on the trailer.
But it didn't take much, and that window popped.
It didn't break so much as kind of bow inward.
The plexiglass or lexan or whatever, just bowed and popped right out of the frame onto
the floor.
Talk about cheap construction.
That trailer was nothing more than aluminum foil and some plastic bits.
Now that seemed to surprise the big foot.
But in maybe a second or two, it put its arm in there and started to reach around.
It was grabbing papers, the edge of the desk, anything it could touch.
Now we had backed up away from it all the way to the opposite wall, and we didn't have
much that we could hit it with, and still keep our distance.
Ray scooted over and got the folding metal chair that he had been standing on previously
to look out the window.
He folded it back up, and he started whacking at the long arm with that hard metal chair.
He was whacking with everything he had.
He was actually jumping up a bit to come down harder with each hit.
He got three or four good hits on it, and then the hand or the arm was pulled back
outside.
Then it was mad.
It slammed the whole trailer, and it made an awful sound while doing it.
You could tell it was mad, frustrated, and maybe a bit hurt.
The trailer was rocking now for sure.
Then it was going around the entire trailer, hitting, shoving, grunting, making weird noises.
It circled the trailer.
I guess maybe looking for another way to get it us.
It must have learned some kind of lesson about windows, because it didn't go for another
one.
But the trailer inside was trashed.
Everything had been knocked off the walls.
Things had been thrown around.
Papers everywhere.
Now this craziness went on for a while.
It would circle the trailer, sometimes hitting and pushing.
Then it would stop for several minutes, kind of a retreat.
You would go and be quiet.
And if we dared look out, it would be right there, and it would start all over again.
And the whole time, if I looked down the other way, there sat our trucks at the larger gravel
area, there sat freedom.
Now me and Ray, we were both thinking the exact same thing.
We had to get to a truck.
Fifty feet.
Fifty feet, I kept saying to myself, maybe less, maybe more.
If we don't hear anything for a good half hour, I'm making a run from my truck, Ray said.
I nodded because I was thinking the same thing.
And you know what?
I feel even worse than terrible for saying what I'm about to say.
But my follow-up thought was, if we both went, at least one of us should make it to a truck,
unless…
And a thought struck me.
"Hey, there's only one of them, right?" I whispered.
Ray looked at me.
And in that look I could tell, he was having the exact same thoughts.
We weren't positive, there was only one, but we were hoping.
Ray unfolded the metal chair again and stood at the end window to look out, ready to jump
down if the thing was too close.
"There's nothing out there," he said.
"Between us, we were hatching plans where we would run with all the road flares, lighting
them as we ran, throwing them at the big foot to slow it down if it came near."
The big issue was, we knew the generator powering the lights, would run out of fuel, probably
in an hour, maybe two tops.
We weren't exactly sure how much diesel it had.
We only had so much time to have light to help us get to our trucks.
So it was kind of urgent.
We're whispering about that in those kinds of plans.
When a hit on the door shook everything, me included.
I thought for sure the door would have crashed in, but it didn't.
All we could do was stand back, pray, and watch.
We both had the flares ready.
We were staring at the door when the door handle started moving.
Slow it first, back and forth, then it started jiggling and moving faster, while something
was pulling and pushing on the door.
Now this is where I will always say, "Rae has got some really big balls.
I mean huge."
"Rae cracked a flare."
Red fire exploded in his hand, filling the trailer with a savage crimson light and thick
chemical smoke.
Rae stepped up to the door window and held it up.
I saw part of the bigfoot's face and the red light outside.
Only part of its face fit in the window.
One eye, a big brow, and I caught the nose and just the top edge of the mouth.
I saw it for a split second, then it backed away from the door.
I all know about Rae, but I was pretty shook up, no lie.
Rae edged to the window that had been pushed in a few moments before and tossed the flare
outside.
We waited.
There was nothing but silence.
This went on for maybe twenty minutes.
Our window of light with the generators was getting shorter and we both knew it.
Rae went to the window and looked out, then to the door, then to the skinny windows at each
end of the trailer.
"I don't see it," he said.
But neither of us trusted that it wasn't right out there.
I looked out everywhere, but I couldn't see it either.
"I say we just go," Rae said.
We looked at each other, and I nodded in agreement.
I lit flares for both of us as Rae tried to open the door.
But I say try and it took a bit of heaving.
It was now pretty warped in the frame, and the lock was now misaligned.
It took some effort, but we got it open.
I gave Rae a flare, and with the last look we both took off running out of the trailer.
All I could think of was, "Don't fall, don't fall, don't fall, don't skit on the gravel,
stay upright, stay focused on the truck."
Fifty or sixty feet really isn't far, but I will tell you, it might as well have been
a couple miles away.
That's what it felt like.
Both of our trucks flashed as we hit our key fobs, and then my heart hit the gravel,
because I heard gravel behind me crunching.
It was coming right after us.
I turned and threw my road flare.
For just half a second, I saw the big foot lit up by the red light as it went backwards,
and smacked the big foot right in the chest.
The flare bounced off and fell to the ground.
I kept running, and I'm going to tell you something else truthful.
I haven't peed myself since I was a tiny kid, but I just about did when I turned, and
saw just how close that big foot was.
Rays truck was closer than mine.
He threw his flare, and he got his door open, and was inside the truck while I was going
around the back trying to slide in between the two to get into mine.
I was opening my door when two things happened at once.
Rays truck started up, and his whole truck slid sideways then on the gravel, almost pinning
me to my truck.
But thankfully I had just gotten in.
I fired up my truck, and was trying to put it in reverse.
When I saw Rays was trying to do the same, the problem was that the big foot had now pushed
Rays truck sideways right onto mine.
I laid on my truck horn and so did Rays, and I tell you the big foot did not like that.
He laid off Rays truck just enough so we could back up and floor it out of there.
I was in the lead, and Rays told me later he saw gravel pepper that big foot when he peeled
out of there.
Must have hurt bad, he said, because the big foot held up his arms, was turning away, and
he made a horrible screaming sound.
Now that made sense, because I heard that scream as we drove away.
I didn't know till later that it wasn't from frustration at losing us, but at getting
a face and body full of gravel spray.
Our contractor had booked us all in at the same motel.
Let me tell you.
We were both shook up when we got there.
There were a few of the guys doing their own little bit of tailgating we'll call it when
we pulled up.
I had already decided I wasn't going to say anything, at least not that night, and I was
pretty sure Rays was of the same mind.
I just wanted to go to my room.
But then one of those guys piped up and made some wise cracks about how lazy we are and
how long it took, and it's a good thing the rain had held off.
Well, a few more jokes followed.
Rays wheeled back on those guys, the one in particular, and he dragged him out of that truck
and told him what's what.
Now the thing is, if I had done that, those guys would have bombed me with jokes and they
would have bullied me forever.
But not Rays, because Rays is another story.
Every crew of guys has that one old salty guy that's part rot wiler and part pit bull.
He's the one you don't mess with.
And what he says goes, even if he isn't the boss, that was Rays.
Rays had serious, let's call it, street cred on our crew and several others we've worked
on.
So when Rays said what happened, I'm not going to say they believed us, but they believed
him a lot more than they ever would have believed me.
Groups of men really do run on higher arches, and I don't care what the pay slips around
there said, everyone's position might have been this or that, but Rays was top dog.
But I don't think anyone really believed anything until the next morning when they saw
the warp door and all the other things just as we had described.
This was nowhere to be had, of course, nothing concrete, nothing identifiable as a print
in the gravel.
But most of the dirt all around had been compacted too hard for prints there too.
And for all the big talk from some of those guys, not a single one of them was wanting
to go up into the timbers to look for prints or anything else that might be up there.
Me and Rays took our time getting there that morning.
We didn't want to show up there as the first ones for a lot of reasons.
Yeah, truth be told, there was a lot of fallout from that, but it doesn't matter.
We both still have our jobs.
What last thing?
Rays truck had some huge dents on the driver's side where the big foot had been pushing and
ramming his truck.
Luckily, a body guy was able to pop most of them right out.
You'd have trouble finding those spots now.
Anyway, just call me Stu.
Or better yet, call me Rays' good friend.
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