"Something Got At Them"

Part 3

There was a big fight about it down at the county seat. Some PR-minded headsman said it wasn't really pollution, it wasn't like heavy metal or bloody radiation, so it didn't have to be reported like everything else.

The park rangers were stepping up their game - or maybe just doing their job, though I only knew Harold and what he told me about the rest. That dumping spot up in Misquah Hills with the gut piles summoning the crows was adjacent to the hole in the ground that he knew about, and with time and effort there were other holes in the deep woods that other rangers knew about, also being used by the hunters for concealed dumping, in and out of the park, in and out of season. Like poor Paul had said, there were entry and exit points for streams all over the map, with many of the old rangers only keeping them on mental maps until now.

With pen on paper, they were all in a damn line on that old geology map. For years the region's hunters had been polluting the same underground stream with the offal of their killings, clogging their dump holes one by one. By now they were probably all dammed together in one spot near the exit I had visited, making the slow stream of dirty soap. With Paul gone I was getting most of my rumors from Harold and Mike Brimson at his dad's bar.

It was July, summer was hot and loud with cicadas, and Prent seemed crankier than normal. Or maybe 'clumsier' is the better word. Mike always seemed to have one hand wrapped up in bandages that month. He'd say that he had cut it on a glass. One of the rangers patrolling for signs of illegal hunters and dumping spots drowned in a lake up in the park, but Harold said the guy had been a loner and this might have been a suicide. Two different cars wiped out signs and railings on the nearby roads, giving me patchup work. I'm not a hunter or an all-day hiker but I don't mind being outdoors, even when the bugs are flying - for some reason mosquitos almost never bite me.

While rangers and headsmen started working on getting a story straight on the dumping problem and trying to get names, some intrepid journalist starting posting sensational videos online about his journeys and 'discoveries' in the Minnesota North Woods. Few facts, lots of claims, lots of exclamation points in titles, and lots of shaky-cam. I don't think the kid was a day over twenty-five years old, but he was going deep in the woods on his own and talked in a whispery voice in the one or two clips I looked at.

I thought it was silly bullshit myself - maybe a little Blair Witch homage, someone on the hunt for dogman or sasquatch. What a lot of city people don't know is that is often damn fun to grow these tall tales for outside consumption. Mike said the kid was picking up a lot of nonsense from all over the internet and the backwoods alike, that Minnesota was just his latest stop, so few of us cared. Everything was five minutes of blurry speculation.

But the kid's online hits exploded at the end of July, when he put up a thirty-minute video and apparently dropped his whole whispery, dramatic persona. Without that fake voice he sounded about fifteen years old, and scared, or so Mike told it. He used his real name, Keith Docherty.

The video got pulled before I could take a look, since apparently it included footage of a man drowning. That's against some policies, I should hope.

Harold's old loner, the drowned ranger, had been an Iraqi war vet named Carl Babbit. Babbit had caught Docherty futzing around in the wilderness and scared him out of his wits, scared him out of the North Woods for good. Mike said that Docherty showed scratches on his arm in the pulled video, and told most of the story from home, with the forest camera footage shaky as ever and limited to the end, when the kid had been trying to record this crazy bastard attacking him. Instead, he'd spied Babbit shaking and shuddering on the shore of a small lake at a distance, rubbing his face against trees. According to Docherty (according to Mike, playing a game of telephone) Babbit had rubbed one side of his face pure red.

"That's just how he said it Jack. 'Pure red'. I thought the little puke would puke." Mike was trying to play it cool, and failing. I had Harold breathing heavily on the barstool next to me listening to all this.

Instead of spotting the little puke and charging, Babbit had meandered down into the shallows of the lake, and the camera had caught him going under. So now there were asking questions about this drowned ranger. Was he really thought to be suicidal? Why hadn't this been reported immediately? What state was the body in, and what the hell could have been wrong with him?

"Jesus, that little fucker!" Harold roared afterward. I'd never seen him so mad, or known that anything could make jolly, gross Harold furious. "He's making a fucking story out of Carl! Trying to call him a ... what, a goddamn zombie? That little internet shit!"

Mike cringed, like the rest of us in Hugo's, not correcting that read of things. His expression was just readable through his long hanging hair as he leaned over his bar, looking like he thought of disagreeing, but then thought better of it.

Of course Harold's view made a lot of sense, I thought - instead of a mysterious stranger disappearing or dying in the urban legend, here's a real name and place and date. Lends credibility. But now, with the video unavailable, it was quickly becoming a source of wild speculation, with any crank's claim about it impossible to directly refute.

Prent has never and should never had gotten any attention from anyone. We've never resorted to 'official' rumors of a mothman or a bunch of strange lights in the sky, but now the claims were buzzing from the lips of outsiders with so many likes and followers. Even blurrier pictures and poorer stories, some obviously fake or adapted from other legends, starting circulating online to make the locals laugh or scowl. A monster in the caves was the core of it. There were no local legends like that, since the caves were virtually unknown until the polluted stream had hit the news, so now the cranks were furiously trying to find something to explain these 'sightings' and 'disappearances', some constellation to make from all these dots.

Someone eventually mentioned the hunters and their bones in the cave from 1983, and said it was one of many. Dumping so much animal refuse into the caves might have forced something to the surface for air, and a few online experts had my silly notion of the smell waking something up. Paul McCausland himself was named as disappeared from the hospital in Duluth, and did that mean a government coverup? Ah, that went beyond campfire nonsense, that was tinfoil hat nonsense, and I didn't waste my ears on any of that talk that August.

That fall, when the deer and dogs changed, my ears had time to waste.