by Andrew Gille
I’m not sure if it was 80’s action movies or the games or what, but the kid really got into guns. This was another thing his father had no interest in. He and your aunt Elaine always hated guns, and they never had any in their house. So what do you think that did to Colin? Guns became fascinating and exciting to him, and I held the keys to being able to experience real firearms as well. We’d go out shooting, and he was never the greatest shot, but he loved everything about them, even cleaning them. He volunteered to help me clean my entire collection one weekend. We took every single gun apart, and my firearms had never been more spotless.
I didn’t really have anyone else to hunt with back then so I asked him if he wanted to go hunting with me. It was like pulling teeth to let my sister take him for his first hunt. She always hated it, and it required guns, and she had never understood the appeal. Well, finally I got her to allow him to take hunter’s safety, which was actually taught in school back then. I think they shot targets at school and everything. I’m sure they don’t allow that anymore, but we went on his first hunt, and I could see the excitement and interest drain from him. He liked shooting, he liked the idea of getting meat and maybe a hunting trophy, but he was impatient and seemed bored with the whole process. He came up to Otsego for about 10 years, and he shot a pretty nice twelve pointer once, but I that was the extent of his hunting success. He was much more excited to show me the new guns that he’d purchased and take me to the range and fire hundreds and hundreds of rounds. Sitting in a tree waiting to shoot one time just didn’t get him excited like it does for you and I Scott. You’re a much better and a much more successful hunter than he’ll ever be because he lacks something you’ve got which is a passion for hunting and patience.
Toward the end, he was always trying to find a technical solution to get better at hunting instead of just doing the things he needed to do. The scope he had on this trip is one example, but he also built that adult treehouse out there, and he talked about installing a system of microphones and cameras on our property. I would not let him do that. I didn’t need him looking at me from some iPad connected to spy satellites to see me taking a piss on a tree after too many Pabst Blue Ribbons. I told him I’d shot dozens of deer in our woods without Big Brother’s surveillance system and he could too if he just listened to me. The next year, he gave me some excuse about not being able to make it. Diane showed me a picture he’d posted on some website eating dinner with some Timberwolves Cheerleader at a restaurant in Saint Paul, so I knew he just didn’t want to hunt, it wasn’t pressing business that was taking him away.
I think that took away the one person he felt understood him. I think he had this idea that I was just as into technology as he was. I had the Amiga, and since I understood a lot and explained a lot to him back then, I think he thought I was some sort of technophile like him. Later in the 90’s he’d come over and talk about 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics Cards and Pentium Processors, and I would just glaze over. I actually still had the Amiga at the time, and I didn’t get a new computer until he bought me a Pentium III machine in 2002. I don’t think he understood that I was a guy who enjoyed the simple life. We kind of butted heads on installing electricity at the cabin and then he had it connected to the Internet via some sort of dish that he put on a massive mast. He enthusiastically showed me how it worked on his iPhone 2, and I don’t think he understood why I didn’t think it was the greatest thing like he did. When I was in Otsego, I wanted to unplug and enjoy a life more like the one my Grandpa Charles led. For him, bringing Internet out to the woods was some sort of triumph over nature, and he enjoyed reading the news on his iPhone 2 while he was in the last real tree stand he hunted from.
I think with this trip he was seeking to mend whatever had happened in the past and bring us together again. However, he should have talked to me, and I’d have told him to pick something else that we could both enjoy. I tried to impress upon him that his dad didn’t feel that way about him, but he was adamant that the guy was hyper-critical and didn’t like him.
Maybe he’d created this image of Tim that molded him into a hard driving, overly critical, disapproving father. That wasn’t true of his dad any more than it was true that I was some kind of consumer electronics fanatic. However, maybe to drive all that success and to keep motivated to do the things he did in his everyday life, he needed his father to be the image he had created. Maybe it made a nice figure in his subconscious to rail against. I wasn’t sure, but I was getting sleepy and carrying the conversation was making me more miserably tired.
###
I drifted off and awoke to the deep breaths of Colin who had also fallen asleep. We hadn’t set up a watch because I’d fallen asleep too abruptly so I couldn’t really be mad at him.
There was enough of a moon out that night to cast shadows through the trees into the snow, the night was hazy, almost foggy and quiet. As Colin breathed audibly next to me. Once again, after I thought I had it together when I finally felt that I was the strong one, disturbing sounds and visions assaulted my senses.
I heard the snow crunch in the rhythm of bipedal steps. I saw hulking figures lurking in the trees. I had the sensation that I was being watched, being stalked by a predator who did not see me as the top of the food chain. I heard a low growl and more crunching. I caught the smell of wet earth and animal piss. I contemplated whether waking up Colin would help keep him from being killed by whatever watched us or just create noise that would draw its attention and prompt its strike.
I held the Savage 99 in my hands, I slowly worked the lever back to rack a bullet into the empty chamber. I heard the cartridge click out of the drum and into the chamber, it sounded like thunder, and it startled me as my heart beat with increasing speed again. Shadows moved, crunching through the snow, eyes peered out of the darkness, caught by the glimmer of the moonlight. Yellow, squinting at us, sizing us up. The dark forms seemed to shift shape, a tiger at once, then a bear, then a bipedal hominid. I stared into the trees trying to identify what preyed upon us.
As I squinted into the darkness, I hear a loud crash behind me. If I had a bullet in the chamber, I’d have fired it right through my sleeping bag or maybe even my foot. I spun, letting out a pained noise, not a scream, not a shout, just a strange vowel sound as I could not get the air out of my throat to make any sort of comprehensible sound of alarm.
As I looked behind me, I saw that snow had fallen from one of the branches of the tree, and the remnants made an almost sizzling sound as they poured the flecks of crystal that glimmered in the moonlight to the ground. I racked my bullet fully into the chamber and spun 180 degrees turning my attention back to where I had initially heard the noise. Now, no sound at all reverberated through the air. I heard nothing, not even the wind an owl or bird of some sort hooted distantly and then nothing again. Now so silent, so quiet, I was aware of only the sound of my heartbeat, the blood rushing through my ears.
Terrified for a moment, my head shot in Colin's direction. He still lay there, his chest rising and falling but there was no sound except a high pitched whine. Almost like the Emergency Alert System on the Russian television. I’d lost my sense of sound, and the terror of not being able to hear what stalked us in the woods only made it more awful. I clawed at my ears desperately trying to clear them and stop the high pitched whining noise. I shook Colin attempting to wake him up, but he seemed to be more than sleeping, he seemed unconscious, maybe dead.
Then, unable again to trust my senses, I saw a man peer from behind the trees. His face was not human, thick and furry. His massive, thick hands, grabbed the bark of the tree and his head looked around it, then popped back behind it as if he feared us. I raised the gun and looked under the Swarovski scope through the iron sights, but in the millisecond that the Swarovski blocked my vision and I switched to the iron sights, I’d lost him.
Suddenly the ringing stopped, I heard a sucking sound in my ears, almost like the final drops of liquid through a drain and then my hearing returned.
; “Mason!” A voice called to me.
I turned my head, I could see to squinting, sleepy eyes looking at me in the moonlight. Colin had woken up.
“What’s going on?” He asked, and I remembered that a second ago I’d been violently shaking him.
“I don’t know, I see something,” I said.
Colin made a half-hearted attempt to sit up and slammed his head back into the snow in the mummy bag.
“Just go to sleep, if something wants to eat us out here you aren’t going to stop it anyway,” Colin mumbled.
The fatalism was actually comforting, I couldn’t argue with that. Afterward, the wind picked up slightly and drowned out the strange noises coming from the forest. I fell asleep and awoke to a bright, warm sun shining on my face.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Walk to the Snowmobiles
I HEARD BIRDS chirping in the trees, and the sun warmed my face, the only part of me exposed to the air. Water dripped from the melting snow on branches as I emerged from my bag, even with as sweaty as I’d become from sleeping in the mummy bag, I still felt warm, it had to be in the mid to upper 30s. It seemed like a day that would not test our survival skills as we walked back to the snowmobiles. I had confidence that this would be the day we would get out of this situation. This would be the day we’d get back to the cabin and find Anatoly there asking us where we’d been or giving us the story of what had happened to him during the freak snowstorm.
I looked to my right and Colin was not there. I never even panicked because I saw his footprints leading perhaps 30 yards away. He stood motionless looking down. At first, I thought he might be taking a piss, but I saw that he wasn’t moving, just standing there staring down. I called to him, and he did not answer.
I left my mummy bag on the forest floor and began walking over to him in the knee-deep snow calling his name. He did not move or acknowledge my words.
When I got to him, I saw a look of fear transfixed on his face. He looked down on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw only snow, but when I turned my head and looked directly at the forest floor, I saw what troubled him.
Massive footprints, human-like, from a bipedal creature, circled the area. They seemed to concentrate by trees, and it looked like there were more than one of these creatures who these tracks belonged to.
“Colin, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Our tracks are there,” he said somberly, “We walked through here on our way to make camp…these weren’t here then.”
I swallowed, he was right, when we’d walked through here yesterday, the tracks were not there, sometime during the night it appeared that two to three creatures of some type had come within 30 yards of our camp. They’d attempted to hide behind trees and made a quick retreat, running through the snow with a gait that was far too spread apart to be a human being.
Something had been watching us last night.
“When did these get here?” Colin asked his voice quivering.
“Whatever made those came last night, they stalked us, got close. It is almost like they were on a reconnaissance mission,” I said.
“You saw these things?” He asked his face a strange shade of white I’d never seen before.
“No, I didn’t see them, but I heard them, and I could smell them,” I explained, telling the truth.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” He asked his voice quivering, he appeared to be shaking.
“I did, you had a rather flippant attitude about all of it. Strangely, I found that comforting and I went to sleep after hearing it,” I said.
“I don’t remember that, why wouldn’t you tell me this?”
“Colin, you have me very confused right now, I don’t know what is real. You have confounded me into thinking I might be seeing things, succumbing to the dementia that strikes everyone in our family. Losing my ability to discern reality from hallucinations. I don’t really know what to believe anymore. I don’t trust my ears or my eyes,” I said exasperatedly at him once again.
“If you saw and heard these things, your ears and eyes are working,” he said.
I laughed, “Look, I don’t know what is going on, for a while, I thought you might be messing with me. I thought we might be on a hidden camera show,”
“Like Punk’d?” he said.
“I don’t know what that is, but yes, like Candid Camera,” I said.
“This isn’t a joke, if it is I’m not in on it,” he said.
“I kind of have that figured out now, your terror is as real as mine, you aren’t that good an actor, I saw ‘Full Blood Moon,’” I said.
He laughed, which I was glad about, I’d never talked to him about his role in that film. I assume he did not exactly get it on the merits of his acting but rather on his relationship to the lead female actress. At any rate, it seemed to somewhat snap him out of the fog of his terror.
“No, this is real Mason. These footprints are real, those things are real.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure this isn’t an elaborate scheme to kill you? I saw your friend at the mansion. He’s as powerful as you get in this country, he is one of the most powerful people in the world. You don’t get that way without pissing some people off. Is someone trying to kill you? Are these things we think are snow monsters really some Chechnyan psyops team sent to kill you to send a message to your friend? Or is it your friend who wants you dead? Are these a Spetznaz psyops team trying to kill you for money, or to keep something quiet, anything like this possible?”
“No, he wouldn’t want to kill me. He just wouldn’t, “ Colin said in a tone that made me think that he was going through any possible scenario in which his incredibly powerful friend would want him dead,
“You sure? Haven’t you ever heard that In Soviet Russia president assassinates you!” I said quoting a popular Russian reversal meme.
“No, he wouldn’t,” was Colin's final answer.
What about your security detail, are they hiding in the trees or following us?”
“No.”
“I thought that was what was going on at the mansion,”
“I could have been, they stayed at the mansion. There’s no place for them to go at the cabins and I thought it was too remote for them to be of any need anyway. This was one place I thought we’d be safe from the people who want to kill me,”
“Yes, it is a pretty safe assumption that anyone who wants to kill you would just wait for an easier time than trying to do it here.”
Ok, well, these tracks go off in the direction we need to go, do we still try to get to the snowmobiles?” I asked.
“Yeah, yes, we need to get there,” Colin said his voice still shaken.
I gathered my mummy bag and quickly packed everything away. I didn’t want to be here any longer and the faster we got to the snowmobiles, the faster we could get out of here and get home.
We started back to the machines, and every so often the massive footprints would intersect with our path. I wondered what they knew that we didn’t and why their prints did not follow ours although we seemed to be headed in the same direction.
“I’m really sorry Mason,” Colin said as we walked through the snow back to the area we thought we had parked the snowmobiles.
“For what?” I asked.
“For getting you into this,” Colin said with a solemn look on his face and his head to the ground, “This was supposed to be fun, this was supposed to be the best trip of your life.”
“If we get out of this, it will be the most incredible trip of my life,” I told him.
“I just wanted to have a great time like we used to, like when we played Black Crypt all weekend that one time. We just don’t do things like that anymore,” he said, the statement confirmed everything I thought about this trip.
“Colin, you didn’t need to take me all the way to Russia to hang out with me. Is this what you wanted to do? If we had shot two of the biggest bears in Russia and the premier had given us the Russian Hunting award, would that have been fulf
illing to you?”