| It was near sundown. The perfect time for when the sasquatch are suppose to come out and play. If there was any truth to the many rumors and gossips that reached my ears over the years then I should have some luck. What I planned to do was to hunker down right where I was at, which was a position close enough to the road that I could find my way over to it even if the world was completely black and I had no flashlight of any kind. Of course that wasn’t the case. I had two flashlights, in case one quit working. I turned on the app and began to listen in the ever dimming light for anything that might sound like chatter. The only practical use of my new app was when I used it to talk to a set of twins who had a language they had all to their own. It took it almost half a day but it did at the end manage to translate what they were saying. Just as impressive was it was able to reply to them. The night came and after several hours of not hearing much of anything, which perhaps I should have seen as a sign in itself, but it didn’t occur to me why there were no other sounds in the night. I had fell asleep after hours of sitting there with nothing happening. I woke up the next day stiff, but basically unharmed. Fog all around me in the early morning hindered my ability to see my SUV from where I had fell asleep. It wasn’t until I was in the drive-through of Mickie Dees, that I became aware my translator app had actually recorded something. It could replay for me what it recorded but it would not even be able to take a guess as what was said until it had some time. Depending upon how complex the language was, it should be able to provide a translation if it had enough data. I was playing it back to myself when I arrived at the pickup window for my food. I got some very strange looks because the language sounded like a series of grunts from a deep voiced old man who might have been angry or perhaps just impatient. After getting my food I drove all the way back out to where I had slept the night before. Whatever had been recorded on my app had to have been very near me because it came in very clear. Or I should say they came in very clear. There were two separate creatures making those grunts. If a gun were put to my head and forced to choose, I’d guess it was a male and female couple, or maybe an adult male and an adolescent or teen-aged male. I say that based on the fact one had a slightly deeper sounding grunt than the other. I wouldn’t know until the app had managed to translate their chatter. The fog was starting to lift despite the fact it was becoming an overcast day which is not unwelcome in this part of Oregon in the middle of the summer months. As I searched the area around where I had slept I could not believe I had slept out there while something, two somethings in fact; did whatever it is they did while I slept like a baby. It is so unlike me to fall asleep in such a circumstance that I would have made myself get up and go back to my vehicle if I had any sort of a clue I might doze off. It was so unlike me in fact that I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe something was done to me to cause me to fall asleep. There was the rock that I had sat down on. Upon approaching the rock I began to feel uneasy. Like I was being watched and that it was very close. Twice I spun all the way around trying to catch whatever it was that had eyes on me. Nothing spotted despite an athletic effort the only thing left for me to do was to finish my look around for any sort of tracks and then would come my favorite thing for the day. Get the heck out of there! I didn’t just feel like that there was something or someone watching me, it felt more like there was an army of ninjas out there with me. One behind each and every tree. I didn’t dare try to test that theory for fear it would prove correct. Being summer it was of course naturally hot but I was sweating profusely. I hadn’t sweat like that since being back at home in Missouri where the humidity could reach 85 or 90 percent on days after a rain. This was not nearly as much a response to the heat as it was to the feeling I could not shake that I was surrounded by a team to which I did not belong and that was wearing a uniform to which I could never grow enough to make fit. next page |  |