Mini Stories

The Creature

He had hunted and hiked and led backpacking trips through these woods for 20 years, and he had never seen an animal like that. At first glance, it resembled a man, stood tall and strong atop the ledge that hung over the path. He stared at the man, wanted to know how and why he was there all by himself. He told the group he was leading to wait, started walking toward the man. Up the unused path and to the ledge. The path was rough, hard to walk on.

He tripped, scraped his knee and roughed up his hands. His head popped up at the sound of a twig snap and the crumple of leaves, the man was gone. He looked around, left, right, down, and up. He saw him, yet he didn't believe it. Up. He was up.

A creature he had never seen before was above him, hovering. A man, the man, but not a man. It had huge wings, big ole black things that beat so hard they sounded like a copter. He stared at it, tried his best to get a real good look at this creature before him. But before the image could really set in his head, it was gone, left no trace that it was there beside the broken twig.

The ranger sat there, in the mud and bramble, stared at the spot that the creature once occupied. He was frozen, confused, and scared as to what that thing had been. Was it real? Did he really see it? He would've written it off as a hallucination, a trick of the heat. Yet he knew it wasn't, because no more than two feet in front of him sat one single, large, black feather.