| My wife of thirty-four years passed away in 2015 from cancer. I was lost as to what to do with my self. I had taken early retirement to have more free time to help with my wife’s condition so after she left I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and not a lot of money after paying as much as I could towards medical bills. A friend of my wife’s invited me to come and stay the summer with her and her husband in Colorado (we lived in Missouri outside of Springfield) that I would enjoy the outdoors and the chance to get away from everything and anything to do with cancer or medical stuff would be just what the doctor ordered. Pun intended of course. They were incredibly nice people to make the offer. He is Tom and she goes by “Sis”. They live in the area of Durango Colorado and he is a retired Marine. Sniper division. I’m sure he would explain that differently but it still makes my point. The guy used to be a sniper for the military and because what he did was so dangerous they retire you out at an age less than forty with a nice monthly income and the right to claim you have done your share. Sis on the other hand was clearly a hippie with one of those can-never-get-me-down attitudes. They had started their family life a little later than most but still had two beautiful girls to be proud of; Taylor (ten) and Tone (twelve) and now being retired at an early age, Tom will enjoy the freedom to spend his time with his girls without the burden of financial concerns which plague most fathers in modern times. Tom’s farm was obviously one that you would expect to find in the hands of someone who didn’t really know how to ranch or farm but did have the kind of income that would allow them to own one. He had a half dozen cattle on a fenced eighty acres that I couldn’t help but wonder if it was enough to support the six cows which were grazing there. Later that night Tom would disclose he had a bull with those six cows but that something had happened to it and he didn’t know if it was predators or rustlers or perhaps it had found a way through the fence and was still lost out there. In any case the animal was gone leaving no clue as to what happened to it. The disappearance hadn’t been that long ago. I arrived at their place mid-afternoon the first week of June. I brought with me a tent that I fashion off the back of my 2013 Honda Pilot. The back of the vehicle seats are all laid down allowing for me to have a comfortable bed in place and the tent part coming off the back allows me to have inside its confines a chair and small table for eating. I also have a compact little stove that I can use to cook if I so desired. A mesh window backed by mosquito netting allows me to see out the backside. It is completely adequate for my purposes. I figured to do some trout fishing and some hiking to get the old bones some exercise because at this point you have to take into consideration quality of life. While I am too old to be terribly interested in staying around at the same time however if I am going to be around I want it to be with the best quality of life possible. To ensure a quality of life one must understand one of the truest facts in nature. If you do not use it you will lose it. As grieving and sad as I might have been I still understood that to be true. I got settled in and things went along without a lot of incident but at night I would hear some strange sounds that I was sure were coming from an animal or more likely animals but I couldn’t place what was making the sound. It was remindful of a wolf’s howl but this was shorter, deeper and I didn’t like putting it this way, but the only word I could find that truly fit was the word evil. The damn thing sounded evil. I mentioned it to Tom one afternoon while helping him drop off a few bales of hay to the cattle. Tom stopped unloading the hay and looked at me and said so you hear it too? I was dumbfounded. Hell yes I hear it too. Who isn’t hearing it? The answer was even more confusing. He said they had the sheriff out on more than one evening to listen to the sound. This before their bull came up missing. He said the cattle had been uneasy and it seemed to have started about the same time as the howling, if you wanted to call it that. I couldn’t help but think of the last word I had thought I would use to describe the sound. Evil. I shook it off in order to not miss any of his story. Now keep in mind that Tom is ex-marine and a sniper on top of that; so that would, one would think, buy a little extra credibility with law enforcement. I mean anybody who knows anything would tell you that this guy isn’t going to be easily spooked. The sheriff was just a few years from retirement so obviously he had seen a thing or two in his time also. All that figured into the mix it should have been a party of testosterone just foaming at the mouth to get out there and find out what was making that noise but Tom said they had only heard it a couple of times when the sheriff claimed it was just coyotes. That they sometimes sounded like that when a bitch was in heat during the summer months. His claim made no sense but he was loaded up and gone before Tom could stop him. Understand the females in Tom’s life were scared. Sis explained it quite eloquently one night just before the howls were expected to start. She said they were no longer uneasy, or a little worried. She said they were scared. The two daughters shook t heir heads in agreement. Tone, the oldest of the two, brought up a point that had actually been at the back of my mind the last few days. Which was that the howling sounded closer of recent. That night was no different and it did indeed sound like it was getting closer than the previous night. The fourth of July was an especially hot night that summer. I mean for as early into the season as things were. That night shortly after the sun had set we relaxed outside sitting in lawn chairs watching the horizons periodically glimmer with the promise of fireworks being enjoyed somewhere in the distance where apparently they were not fearful of a forest fire. When you’re in the middle of nowhere it doesn’t take a lot of light for it to be visible for a very long ways. We were too far to ever hear the fireworks or for that matter to even be able to see them clearly but you could definitely see the horizon light up when they went off. The moon was beginning to climb high enough into the above sky to make it possible to distinguish shapes in the vicinity surrounding our lawn chairs. Taylor and Tone were playing hostesses slipping in and out of the house bringing us grown ups different things to snack on while keeping our drinks fresh. The air was warm with just a slight breeze from the west. We talked about when my wife was alive. Sis brought up several adventures or endeavors the two of them had enjoyed over the years. We covered just about all the good years and then the subject was changed before allowed to drift into the area of cancer and the sadness it brought with it. Along about midnight the howls started and the first one sounded so close I almost fell out of my chair when it happened. The girls and Sis excused themselves and went inside. Tom and I stayed and after about half an hour the howls stopped or at least I noticed they weren’t coming as often any more. Another half hour passed and there was no longer any howls. I’m unsure if it showed on me but Tom looked visibly more comfortable but of course it could have been the drinks catching up with him too. I don’t know if it was me or him that fell asleep first but I do know he was there when I woke up and I am still not sure if I woke myself up when I screamed or if I screamed after I woke up from having bumped into such a solid living piece of flesh so unexpectedly. I don’t know if you have ever been in the dark and run into someone or something that is greatly stronger, sturdier and is more than twice your size but I can tell you it is extremely humbling not too mention it can scare the hell out of you. Especially if you have just woke up and have been scared into moving before you look where you are going. That was exactly what happened to me. I came up out of that lawn chair like I was on fire. Maybe I had been dreaming of whatever it was that was making those howling noises and I guess I thought it had me. I came up out of that chair and all this data hit my brain in the split-second it took me to wake up, come up out of that lawn chair, and immediately run into something that was clearly flesh and bone but that had enough bulk behind it to be able to brush off my running into it like it was nothing. There was the immediate strong, gamey odor of a wild animal. I could hear its wet, deep breaths above my head as I bounced backwards and down toward the ground. I felt the tiny shockwaves created by its hooves nervously stomping the ground while at the same time hearing a tail whip through the air and slap against something solid. Then a sudden short but very powerful snort made itself heard as I then felt a rush of hot air upon my upper face and forehead. I made myself look upwards at whatever it was that was breathing so heavily upon my being, expecting at that moment to see a flash of teeth just before they clamped around my throat sending me to be with my dear dead wife. Apparently Tom was not doing any better because although I couldn’t see him (which was odd because I should have been able to see him but something was blocking my view of where I knew him to be); I heard him scream and then the sound of what I suspected was him exiting his lawn chair and then I heard a thud followed by a lesser thud and it was then that I could see Tom. He was also on the ground. Suddenly it all became all too clear. Our attack had come from his cattle. Somehow while we slipped off to sleep they had figured out how to get past the gate separating their pasture from the house. Then they just walked up and joined us. When I had jumped up I ran immediately into one of the cows which put me on my ass. Somewhere in this mix was when I had screamed, and when Tom had screamed, and the cattle; well they just stood around being cattle. It wouldn’t be until the following day that we would discover the cattle had not found a way to open the gate to come up to the house. They had simply went through the barbed wire, knocking down a section of the fence that apparently was in their way. Or that they had knocked down in order to get away from something. The next couple of weeks that passed a curious circumstance had developed. The cows refused to stay out in the pasture. They would stay there until it started to get dark and by no later than midnight every night: they would inevitably knock down the barbed fence and come up and hang out with us sitting in the lawn chairs. The howling never stopped although some nights it was much clearer and therefore I suspected was much closer to us than on other nights but nothing ever came uf it except for the uneasiness it created with the females and the cattle. Everything seemed to change at once taking on a much darker, evil atmosphere on the first of August when I found their bull. It was a disgusting mess of blood, torn flesh, the stink of decay and the worst of it all was, the animal was still alive. It wasn’t what you would call alive except by the most technical of terms. You see its tongue and most of its mouth were missing. So it could not make any noise. I could see all four of its legs had been broken. Three of the four had been eaten down to the bone. The fourth it layed upon. It had been largely disemboweled and both eyes were gone. The top part of its mouth was still in tact but the lips had been torn away leaving it with a permanent crooked smile. The crooked due to the slanted way the animal’s head was laying against the ground. You could see its body lift with every breath it struggled to complete. I was about three miles from Tom’s place, Trying to save some time I was walking towards a creek that I had been trout fishing during the day since I had arrived back in June. As time had passed I was having to travel further down (or up) the creek in order to find better fishing and this day I was intended to go further down stream than I had been before. I decided to travel as the crow flies towards the spot I had in mind instead of following the path of the creek. So I was walking over territory I had not covered previously and that was when I came upon the bull. It had been dragged into an area where three scrub trees worked to hide the animal’s body. There were tracks everywhere but all were just heavy enough to be visible but it was clear that none were deep enough to try making a cast of them like you see them do on tv when they are investigating bigfoot encounters. There was one bit of what I guess you would call evidence that not only stood out but it flat out terrified me. On the side of the bull’s neck was a very clear print made in blood, of a hand-claw combination that was long and thin and gave the appearance of some very intimidating claws. When I saw that I began looking around as it dawned on me that whatever did that to that huge, incredibly strong bull, was still out there. Possibly watching me at that very moment. It was well into the afternoon by the time the Sherriff, Tom and I arrived back at where I had found the bull. Thank mercy the poor animal had finally expired at some point while I was on my way back to Tom’s place. I thought I was going to puke if when we arrived the animal was still breathing. I hadn’t taken notice when I was there by myself but now that the three of us were looking around it was an even stranger circumstance than I had originally thought because upon second glance I became aware that there should have been some serious scavenging going on during the past days or perhaps even weeks. If what we had been hearing was coyotes then why didn’t it look like they had been enjoying the buffet? Even an amateur outdoorsman that has spent only a short amount of time in the wild knows that if something dies the scavenger crew shows up almost immediately and when they are done there are body parts strung for miles in all directions. Yet this was anything but that. It looked like whatever had been eating on the bull had done so right where it lay. Who could guess how long the poor animal had been in such condition? Obviously it hadn’t been like I had found it for the entire time it had been missing. Still it was only about three miles from home. If it had been healthy enough to call out when it realized it was lost from the heard; we most likely would have heard it at some point. I told the sheriff that I didn’t know about coyotes, although I had never heard of them doing it, but that I did know that wolves were notorious for chasing an animal until it was so exhausted it couldn’t go any further and then feasting on it while it was still alive. The sheriff acknowledged my statement but said nothing. The three of us looked around a while longer and then the sheriff put his hands on his hips, looked at Tom and asked him what he wanted to do with what was left of his bull? Tom said might as well let the animals have what was left since they had already gotten away with the deed. I couldn’t help but notice a visible relief come over the sheriff’s face when Tom decided to leave the bull where it lay therefore allowing us to leave the area before the sun had completely set. Once we were all back in the sheriff’s SUV and on our way back to Tom’s place the sheriff said something I will never forget. He started out by saying that we were probably going to consider him a coward after hearing what he had to say but that he didn’t care as long as his conscious was clear that he had done all he could to prevent us, or any of Tom’s family from being hurt … or worse, by what he was about to tell us. He stopped the vehicle at the end of Tom’s driveway and put the thing into park. Then he turned to us looking each of us in the eye and began by saying he had been a cop all his life and most of that time was spent right where we were now, and that not all of what he had seen in his time was stuff he could make publicly known because if he had there was a highly likely chance he wouldn’t be there today to tell his story because he would have been laughed out of the state. He said way back when he was first starting out he had a sheriff that made it a point to take any rookies under his command to ride along with him for the first week to two weeks. He said with him it was no different. The sherif took him to investigate a wife-beating, a break-in and several other very routine incidents which a rural police officer can expect to encounter while on the job. Then one night during the grave yard shift came a call about a disturbance at a local rancher’s place being bothered by what was reported to be a big wolf. The sheriff was completely on edge as they drove out to the ranch and just before they got there he stopped the squad car and told the rookie that this was probably a big nothing but that just in case it turned out to be a very serious circumstance that no matter how strongly he felt he should pull out his weapon and start shooting; not too, and only if his life was in direct jeopardy was he to unholster his weapon or to show any aggression towards what they might encounter. A deputy was waiting where the road faded into a path. He was holding two horses which he traded to us for the squad car. The deputy was instructed to wait for us to return. Then we started out on horseback following the bloody trail. Bullets won’t kill them. The sheriff said this so out of the blue that I wasn’t sure if he was saying that to me and Tom or if he was saying his sheriff had said that to him. Then I realized it was a blanket statement that had been said to him and now he was saying it to us. He went on and we listened. He told us how they had tracked a wounded cow through the night with almost no trouble because of the amount of blood the animal was leaving mixed with the track created by its body being dragged across a terrain which he said got rougher and rougher so that they could no longer track using the horses they were on which he said was okay with him any way because the animals were acting so uneasy. Well they followed this easy track of this big cow that was being dragged through a terrain that had begun climbing up and the ground was a dangerous combination of loose rock and tough old scrub brush wherever it had been able to take hold. As a rookie and being twenty years younger than his sheriff he said it was on him to lead the way up the hillside. Suddenly they heard growling from up ahead and also from a flanking position. The sheriff stopped their progress and said okay this is what I had hoped it wasn’t going to be; and we need to back up right now and get out of here. It was too late though. Right then something came out of the darkness that terrified me. It was at least seven feet tall and had the face of a dog or wolf but it had shoulders like a man, wider than a man in fact, and it stood on two legs. It had fangs that showed as it snarled at us and the stench surrounding it was unbearable. It was the stench of death. Before I could even think to draw my pistol the sheriff reminded me very curtly not to pull my weapon unless all else had failed. Together we backed away from that scene and as soon as we had backed away far enough I could no longer make out any shapes in the darkness; we heard the growls and snarls and chomping of bites being made. I don’t know what would have happened if I had chosen to ignore the sheriff and had drawn my gun but when we got back to what passed as civilization he told me that he had once seen things go very badly concerning these creatures. He said he was pretty sure bullets would not kill them or if they could even be killed? He said they were not around all that often and that they would not go out of their way to hurt people but at the same time wouldn’t hesitate if someone got in their way. Exactly how he knew all this wasn’t shared with me but I got the impression that these were conclusions he had made and apparently had decided the best way to handle the situation was to let them have whatever they wanted as long as it never came to human life. The sheriff went on to say that over the years there had been incidents which led him to believe that these creatures might have been behind it all but that he followed the advice of his mentor and just chose to not investigate too closely whenever something that came up started to point towards the dog creatures. We had many questions of course. Where did they come from? What was their endgame? Why did he think bullets wouldn’t kill them? Tom was especially adamant about wanting to know if anyone had ever really tried to fight them? On the other hand I was interested in whether they had ever proven to actually hurt anybody? That maybe they were just misunderstood. While I am voicing my theories of them possibly being non-violent I am thinking in the back of my mind about the word evil and how it just seems to keep finding a way to fit into the scenario. The sheriff didn’t hurry this time around. He patiently addressed all our questions to the best of his ability to answer. He concluded by saying that it was just his opinion but he thought these creatures were of some sort of special order, that as mentioned he wasn’t sure they could be killed. Maybe they were from another world, or as some claim another dimension. Perhaps this was just a stop-over for them as they travel from one world to another. He said he suspected this because of the fact that when they were around it was very apparent due to the violent means they took their prey. He said he couldn’t see them carrying on in such manner on a regular basis because it would gather too much attention. He thought the same was true if they were migrating but staying in this world there would be a map of violent animal and possibly human killings that would be certain to catch the eye of the authorities but nothing like that had ever come up. However every once in a while with no thyme or reason as to when it will happen; but it does happen and then they are gone. You ever tried to communicate with them? I asked the sheriff as he dropped us off at Tom’s house. The sheriff’s reply was one I won’t ever forget. He said he didn’t think these were the kind of creatures with which deals were made but at the same time he felt there was an understanding that was of the most fragile kind. To put it in short: we don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with us. Its not that one side is afraid of the other. Its more like that both sides realize there would be no clear winner and a lot of losers on both sides. So they have just chosen to not cross each other’s path but obviously the creatures do not consider livestock as being off-limits. That could prove problematic in the future but for now its still just one bull. I’m sorry it had to be yours. A few days went by without incident and I began to think that the creatures had moved on but then came the howling again. Once again the cattle were pushing past the barbed wire in order to congregate up around the house. Then one morning Tom noticed one of the cows had been wounded on one of its back legs. Tom became enraged and said he had enough. That he was going to find out whether those things could be killed or they were going to kill him. Tom made Sis and the girls pack up and go stay with her mom. They protested but in the end he made them see that they were a liability if they stayed. I kept quiet through it all but just before they left Sis came to me and begged me not to leave Tom here alone and so I agreed. There was a lot of hugging and tears and well when you’re involving females you know there is going to be drama. Finally we watched as they drove down the driveway and then Tom turned to me and said lets get prepared. Tom’s place sits down in a valley and on three sides of it are the tops of taller elevations which cause the late day shadows to come earlier than one might expect and it can get spooky long before the sun has actually set. The ground is covered in what I suppose would pass as being prairie grass which largely goes unattended with the exception of what the cattle graze, which is a lot but they do leave areas (for whatever reason) that grow taller than the rest of the pasture. These areas make for excellent hiding spots for anything that might seek to be hiding out in the pasture. Even more so during the late afternoon when the shadows are quick to find accommodating circumstances. On this day all that seemed to be multiplied by a hundred fold. Tom brought out his old sniper outfit which I must admit was intimidating. He had a rifle and a pistol plus a canteen and a good size knife. He was carrying some type of make up and a small mirror and he began to smear the stuff on his face and neck until that part of him matched the rest of the suit. By the time he left the house the shadows were long and dark, and he almost seemed to just disappear among them once he got out into the pasture. I was alone. Tom had left me the shotgun which I grabbed up because all of the sudden I FELT alone. I don’t mind admitting I was a little spooked too. Everything seemed abnormally quiet and I was wanting to find something to do with myself to take my mind off the surrealness of the evening. Then I heard the first howl of the night come across the valley and it motivated me to taking a precaution of my own invention. I couldn’t get my mind off the sheriff saying that bullets wouldn’t kill them. That was a very uncomforting statement to hear. So I began to think of what else might work as a defense in case bullets did fail. Given the short amount of time I had to work with; and the resources available to me; the best I could come up with was to keep a quart of gasoline next to me and a lighter I knew I could count on. I went inside and poured myself a big drink of some of Tom’s best whiskey and came back out and set it down next to my quart of gasoline and made myself comfortable in the lawn chair. Earlier t hat day Tom and I had once again fixed the barbed wire fence where the cattle had learned to come through. As soon as the howling had started the cows started drifting up to the spot they always come through and sure enough they pushed their way through again and came lumbering up to where I was sitting in the lawn chair. Big pets is what they were and I found it noble of Tom to choose to fight to keep them safe. He was out there, somewhere, ready to take on whatever the world would send. I wondered if what the sheriff had said about bullets not being able to kill them, was on his mind? How could it not be? Then again, some people had their mind’s so set in what they believed to be true; that it would be impossible for them to conceive of a situation where the conventional approach would not work. I supposed that someone who was a sniper for the military would be one of those kind. Something told me this particular time might prove to be the exception to the rule. What could I really do though? The best I could think of was to do what I was doing. And to be quite frank if I wasn’t so old, so depressed about having just lost my wife, I probably wouldn’t have been doing that much. I probably would have left with the women saying they aren’t my cattle and even if they were I am not sure I would stay. As it was however I figured I really didn’t have a lot to lose. If I survived then I’d have a good story to tell … and then at some point I would die … most likely from some sort of illness that was painful and long-lasting … or I could stay and if I didn’t survive the night then I went out quickly and didn’t have to endure the indignities which all old people ultimately face. I mention all this because it will help to explain why I did the crazy shit that I did, when it became clear that Tom was in mortal danger. The majority of the night nothing happened except the howling. As predicted the cows had come up and surrounded me in my lawn chair. There was no sound, or sign of Tom or what he could be up to: but I figured he was out in the pasture crawling around in that sniper outfit. Every once in a while I would shine the flashlight out over the pasture but I never saw anything to give away his position. Whenever I heard the howling it seemed to come from the direction where I had found the bull. This would be an area adjacent to Tom’s property, and actually there is a section of land between Tom’s and where I found the bull. So it sounded like if there was trouble that it was beyond the pasture where Tom was most likely to be hiding. Another thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was the way I had found the bull. Its ugly permanent grin made by the upper mouth being still in tact while the flesh had been torn away. The most disturbing part of it all being that the animal was still breathing and he could see its body heaving up and down ever so slightly as each heart beat struggled to follow the one before. The way the legs had been not only broken but literally eaten down to the bone. It was completely beyond this world the way that bull lay there on its side with its three legs broken and facing the opposite direction they should be if in normal condition. That awful sticky wet sound that the animal made as it tried to grasp one more breath and then would exhale sounding like for certain that was the last breath it could muster. Only to struggle through the whole scenario again and then again. I guess I was lost in that awful thought when a human scream brought me back to the fact that I was sitting in a lawn chair with a glass of whiskey between my legs, cattle standing around me stinking as cattle do, so I am surrounded by their gamey scent and from beyond that, somewhere out there in the darkness, came the scream of a human being. Of course I knew it was Tom. As soon as I had put all this together in my mind, came the explosions of his rifle being fired rapidly. Then I could hear Tom swearing profusely about his leg being broken and how he’d kill all you mofos etc. As this was happening I had sprung out of the lawn chair and grabbed up the quart of gasoline I had next to me and I ran with shotgun in one hand and quart of gasoline in the other towards where I had heard Tom. It wasn’t until I had ran probably half the way to where Tom was that I realized I had left my flashlight with the lawn chair and now I was basically running blind into the pasture towards where I had last heard Tom cry out. When I reached Tom I could see his flashlight was laying on the ground out in front of where Tom was laying back on his side and he was holding one leg and trying to backup using his one good leg. Out of the light from the flashlight which was mostly just illuminating the patch of grass in front of where it lay, I could still make out at least two figures in the darkness that were very tall and very much looked like they had a wolf or German Shepard-like shaped heads and very muscular bodies. They had their faces in a snarl so I could see their big fangs. As I came up on all this at a full run I then began to try to stop my momentum and realizing I wasn’t going to be able to do that successfully, I just threw that quart of gasoline across so that it would cover both of those things and maybe another one if it was there where I couldn’t see it and at the same time I dropped the shotgun and fished out my lighter. It didn’t let me down. I threw the lit lighter and the place lit up revealing there was in fact three of them and now all three were on fire and running away from us. There wasn’t time to see where they went because I was busy putting out the fire I had created. I didn’t want a forest fire. Then it was all about getting Tom to the hospital. I was afraid to leave him in the pasture alone even for the short time it would have taken me to get to my pilot and drive back out there and Tom was in agreement so he and I made our way back to my Honda in what I am sure was a very painful distance for him. It was a rather scary distance too because there wasn’t going to be any easy way for me to get him back to the car and drag along the flashlight plus the guns so in the end we took the flashlight and the shotgun. Remember he emptied his rifle and I didn’t bother to stop to discuss which weapon might be our better bet and if it was the rifle we had to stop and reload it. So I just grabbed the shotgun, the flashlight and got Tom leaned over on me and that’s how we got out of the pasture. Needless to say the adrenalin was in heavy flow and I doubt either one of us has a complete timeline of the walk out. I know I just seem to remember it in flashes. As I drove him to the hospital Tom told me he had been staking out the pasture and had actually worked his way from the back of the pasture up to where I found him. All without incident or sighting. He said he never did see them coming despite being in a perfect position. He said he was okay one minute and the next something had hold of his leg and twisted it so that he couldn’t get his body to react in time to prevent the breakage. He said then he grabbed the rifle and started shooting. He didn’t know how he could have missed and wasn’t sure that he had. All the same none of them looked any worse for the wear when I arrived on the scene. That was why I threw the gas instead of opting for the shotgun. I think it may have saved both our lives. I don’t know if those creatures are from another world or dimension or whatever but apparently they don’t like being set on fire any more than we do. Tom survived and returned home a few days later. He was actually released from the hospital that next day but Sis’ folks put him up until he insisted in going home. By then I had already spent a couple of nights there by myself without incident. There wasn’t even any howling. The first night back I was very much on edge but the cows didn’t come up despite my having not fixed the fence from when they last came through. The sounds of the normal wild life returned. Something I hadn’t really noticed was missing until it came back. Crickets chirped so loud the first night I had trouble getting to sleep because of them. Whatever curse that had fallen upon the area was gone. For now. I couldn’t help but wonder what the coming summer months would hold for my friends but that was a year away so I let it go. In case you’re wondering I did stay in touch with Tom and Sis and to this date nothing like that has ever happened again. Its probably not the case but I still like to think that maybe my setting a couple of them on fire was enough motivation to skip right on past this world and keep heading for whatever horrible place that is their destination. | |