from A Ghosthunter's Journal by Mason Winfield

IV

I’d agreed to a mid-November signing at a small book-and-gift- shop in the valley thirty minutes from Sandy Stefan’s home. I was planning on stopping by Sandy's big old farm house in mid-afternoon, but was running late as usual, and by the time I arrived in her vicinity I still had to get in my workout. I decided to take a run in the woods.

I didn’t know the trails around Sandy’s home and couldn’t afford to get lost, even off-schedule, so I found a hilly stretch of logging path that took about two minutes to get up, and did it a bunch of times - what I call a body-workout, not a head-one. One can become the other sometimes, but those long “big-sky” tours on just the right days are the ones you live for. I took my cross-country ski poles with me. I would be glad of it.

The carbide tips - plain affairs without baskets, made for roller- skiing on the roads - clacked behind me on the rocks and dirt with each push-off timed to a stride, I reflected on the recent Bigfoot reports from this immediate region, and couldn’t help recalling that the national image of the big fellow varies from reclusive veggie to moody savage. Hunters stormed in their cabins, prospectors trapped in valleys, and even lonely campers dismembered figure in the accumulated lore. Great images to keep you company in the dimming woods.

It looks dorky, but running with poles like that gets the arms involved and raises the heart rate nicely. It also takes weight off my chronically bad feet, which, by the mid-1990s, were so beat up from years of sports that I couldn’t run hard enough normally to get a workout. If time was limited and a run it had to be, that was the choice. I’d been plugging away at it for about ten minutes when some crows stormed up fifty feet away. My heart rear-ended my ribs; those wings sound like breaking bones. I was glad to know instantly what they were, but what made them take off? I was developing that nasty feeling of being watched.

Whenever I passed a certain spot about the midpoint of my course the bushes rustled, and I sensed a big dark body crouching behind them. I recalled the many calm, credible people over the years who had reported impressions of “things” in the Western New York woods - big lumpish forms, exactly as a Bigfoot should look at the distances reported. I’d had impressions like that many times myself, and made absolutely nothing of them. I’m used to the woods. Around twilight stumps and bushes at different depths around you can look animate when you jerk your head. I couldn’t fight my own sensation, nevertheless, that something was stalking me, ranging out from that bush alongside me just out of sight for the first fifty feet of my curving course in either direction. It was always back waiting for me as I passed that spot on the return swing, following me again within reach until it saw me stop and come back.

It was pretty oppressive, leaving car and road behind each time and winding back up into the dimness toward that clump of bushes behind a maple. I was beginning to dread it. By my tenth up, I fancied that whatever was there had sensed that this would be its last chance to make a move. Sure enough, as I passed the fated spot for the last trip down, something broke one of the branches as if it were pulling it aside for a spring. I snarled and dropped into a karate crouch, raising the poles like twin prongs, announcing that this potential dinner felt militantly indigestible.

Ski poles are hardly weapons, though running with them, I fear no dog. I can pop the tips up to business-level in a thought, and the straps give excellent leverage for thrusts in any direction. Still, the metal point of each basketless tip is about half an inch long, unlikely to stick further in a heavy onrushing body or even to catch and splinter the pole into something really lethal. I glared down the long fiberglass shafts at the crouching form I imagined in the bush, filled with the adrenaline of righteous anger. I even staggered them. If a monster grabbed the pole in nearest reach, the other was going into its throat. Would serve it right for interrupting a law-abiding run.

Something was waving above the apparently crouching form, and I snatched a glance upward. Intestines swayed from a branch ten feet up. They had to be from an animal, though they looked big enough to be human. I cursed sourly. I was almost glad I didn’t see them earlier; might not have finished my workout. I side-stepped down the trail, as angry as I was afraid. Hearing no pursuit in the thick leaves and trees, I relaxed and ambled normally the last hundred yards. The feelings came back as I unlocked the car, at that point most vulnerable.

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