"Something Got At Them"

Part 2

I go into the trails to set up railings and fix bridges, with a big project last spring putting stairs up to the top of Burntside Hill south of Prent, near Minnesota HW1, a long road that will take you through the deep North Woods north of Lake Superior. On Burntside Hill the county was making a new stopping point for hikers, with picnic tables and benches at a lookout spot cleared the year before.

Access up top was by foot only, so it was a sweaty day. I remember that I dropped my end of a bench on my left boot after something swooped down and grazed the back of my head on one trip from the pickup truck at the hill's base. Two cold lines swept across my scalp, back to front, and it must have been the look on my face that made Harold laugh. He's a big squat guy with a curly ginger beard but premature baldness, part time forest-ranger, full-time drinker. I think Harold was bald at thirty in some old pictures, though now he's a man in his fifties.

Was, but I'm writing in order.

With my toes all accounted for he said it was an grey owl with a nearby nest that had swiped me. It was early afternoon, but I was inclined to believe him: he was out here all the time. Harold was an ATV junky as well as a ranger, and there are trails north of Lake Lacy that go pretty far in, up to the Superior National Forest. I didn't go far from Prent back then. The job only had me putting in benches, railings, little bridges, and signs on the closer trails, but there are a whole bunch more that the old-timers and the reservation-folk use.

Yes, I remember now: after the owl talk, we moved on to the crow talk, and that's how we got to the gut piles.

"The owls will swoop anyone who gets too close to a nest," he mused. "Makes sense - this is the back way up the hill, where it's normally quiet. They've been shoved down here with the crows swarming them up near the Misquah Hills. Old Paul told me he saw a huge mob of them filling the sky, probably chasing after a poor great horn."

"Why are there a bunch of crows up there? Is there some landfill?"

"Gut piles," he said, wrinkling his nose. "Bunch of the hunters were leaving them out up there."

I asked, "What's that?" and Harold suddenly grinned. He liked to be gross, liked to find city people he could bother, and I think he made friends for that reason. 

"When hunters clean a kill out in the woods and don't clean up, they leave a gut pile. It's all useless bits: sliced intestines, antler velvet, hooves sawed off and scattered about. Smells wonderful. I almost drove into one," he said, going into a gross Harold story.

When he stopped relishing all the muck and yuck he went on to tell me that the gut piles were out in the open for the crows because the hunters had had a secret dumping spot in some hole down in a cave, but it had started overflowing. An underground stream that had carried the offal away had dried up, or maybe they had clogged it with so many moose and deer parts, now mashed together into something like that industrial pink slime that makes hotdogs.

I don't faint at the sight of blood but I'm not known for my iron stomach, so I mostly focused on the bench and the job while Harold Lefler jabbered, lifting and leaning wood as directed. Burntside Hill's owl infestation became clear when he pointed out pellets on our way back down.

Harold's over-descriptive word on that nastiness was all I heard about it that spring. An old bridge was being fixed down south that June - some kids on an ATV had broken it on a wild ride through the trails, I think - and that was when everyone else put their heads together on the nastiness.

Whoever it was who went down into the little stream from the split in the old bridge hadn't landed in running water, but into something that at first looked like dirty soap. I saw it while doing the first measurements: it was a fatty, oily scum that bubbled and formed yellowish suds on the banks of the stream. When the wind died down it started to smell, and it almost seemed to make a low brown mist rising from the top of the foam, full of swarming motes that gave me a headache. The stream didn't babble or gurgle, but silently oozed south from its polluted source, which Paul McCausland told me was underground when I talked about it later.

"There are all kinds of caves and pits up there around the National Forest, and where you were is one of the exits," old Paul told me, just a two weeks before they took him away to a hospital in Duluth.

We were drinking in Hugo's Bar in Prent, a small joint tucked between the convenience store and a garage. I was clean that day while Paul drank for two, and now that I look back I don't think I saw Paul eating anything in those last few weeks. Considering what happened, I now have to pick up on any detail that might have been something.

He had a black eye from walking into a door and I think this was the first day that he bit the glass. He had been a hale outdoorsman in his sixties only a few years prior, with lined tanned skin and a permanent wincing smile, preferring a canoe to an ATV, but when I remember him on that night now he looked ninety years old, and pale, and almost ... caving in in places.

"So whoever's dumping could be anywhere on the map?"

"Oh yeah, that exit collects for a big stretch. Some geology student was up here thirty years ago, made a map. I say he got less than half of it. You can go into many of them, they're big."

"Really?"

"Sure Jack. None of it's for public knowing though. Dumb city people already get hurt enough out here. They found a bunch of bones back in ... would have been '83, I think. Your pal Harold wouldn't know, but the old rangers could tell it: hunters went there in the winter, a storm got really bad, so they went in and started a fire. It would have been very warm, would have been painless. It was see-oh."

"Huh?"

Some of the former Paul was still there, giving me a wincing smile. "Carbon monoxide, Jack."

"Damn."

"Something got at them before they were found, it was just bones," Paul muttered. He didn't tell gross stories like Harold - I think in his healthy days he liked to scare the kids, just to make them careful. "Caves go deep, a bunch of things go down there in the winter ..."

He bit the glass shortly after that. He seemed to be absent-mindedly chewing on it, and it suddenly snapped. That night he apologized to Mike, a skinny mop-haired young man keeping us watered, one of Hugo's sons. I remember now that Paul's lips looked chewed up too, like chapped winter lips in early summer.

A few weeks later Paul was in Hugo's bar and he started to eat his glass. He snapped off a big piece and just started crunching, chewing and swallowing. Didn't make a sound, I heard, and he didn't cry. He went to Duluth in an ambulance and I heard they opened him up to find rocks, twigs, and other colors of glass. They said he lived through that first operation, but after that the rumors dried up. They didn't seem to be allowing too many visitors.

Even before Paul McCausland left Prent with a gut full of glass, my mind was already churning like an uneasy stomach. I'd think about that cave full of slaughtered leftovers, collecting guts from all those acres. Making a big wad of them down there in the dark, making the water smell and go soapy, and though I've never been particularly imaginative I was kept up more than one night by the idea of just how it must smell down there, how it would make a man gag and croak if he ever stuck his head in, how it could never be cleaned out. That awful smell was popping out here and there at Paul's exit points, but it had been strong underground longer, filling all the caves.

And the silliest part of my fascinated thinking was this: what if the caves kept going like he said? And what if some of them went down, and what if the godawful smell went down and down until it woke up something ...

Something got at them before they were found.

Ugh. Campfire nonsense. But the idea was harder to not think about at night.