Shapes into Legends

Ragged boots fell with crashes as loud as cymbals in the otherwise quiet forest. Morning dew slid from the leaves and dripped softly onto the face of a weather-beaten man. He rubbed the sleeve of his jacket over his forehead but it too was damp from many rainy nights.

When Ian first imagined this trip, he saw himself looking tough - like a survivalist in a movie: chiseled, muddy face and sinewy muscles protruding from a shirt torn in all the right places.

In reality, he looked feral.

He was indeed muddy, but it was uncomfortable and cold. His usually patchy facial hair had grown thick and as scratchy as the bramble he pushed himself through. And he was hungry.

He checked the traps he had laid out for rabbits and squirrels but they had only caught one sickly-looking black rat.

“Better than nothing,” He shrugged.

He made quick work of the rat. Skinned and gutted, then turned over the fire for a quick and unsatisfying meal, and yet he still set aside some meat from the hindquarters. He wrapped them in a cloth and placed the pieces in his backpack. He had set many more traps around here, the small ones for food turned up less than fruitful, but he was much more excited to check the large ones. Those he set up to catch his true target.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Ian said aloud. He walked a mile stretch investigating one trap after another and frisking the leaves for signs of life passing through.

Each of the large traps was empty and unsprung. The bait from one of the traps was missing, but whatever took it hadn’t been heavy enough to set off the trap.

“Probably a raccoon." He said with a huff. "Very unlikely to be Mothman with as large as the sightings indicate it would be."

Ian pulled one of the legs of the rat he had stashed in his bag and used it to replace the missing bait, then sullenly marched back to his campsite.

He sat uncomfortably on a rock next to his tent, stretched his tight back muscles, and settled with a pile of documents he carried with him. Paper after paper of evidence and testimony to sightings in the area of the unexplained.

Ian was a cryptid hunter. Though, he imagined that this was no different from being any other kind of hunter. The process - as he understood it - was to camp out in the area of a confirmed sighting, be quiet, be patient, and be smart.

He continued reading in the calefaction of the fire. None of the Mothman sightings had been during the day so he had nothing to do now but to wait until the sun set again.

—

The weeks he had spent out here watched the summer nights turn cold, and the Fall storms roll in. Those wet, windy nights were even more miserable than the cold ones.

This evening, however, was clear and the colors of early twilight painted the arcadian sky. Ian bundled up, grabbed his lantern, and pushed out into the woods again.

“Where does the Mothman hide when the winter comes?” Ian wondered. “It would be too hard for it to hide when the leaves have fallen. He wouldn’t camouflage in the snow. Does he hibernate?”

If that was the case, he needed to find the cryptid soon, or else he’d have to wait until the spring.

Ian couldn’t bear thinking about returning home empty-handed - without a shred of new evidence to show for himself. Would his mother say ‘I told you so’? Would his friends from the FindTheTruth.com forums think he was a failure? How would he face the people who thought he was crazy?

He had to shake the thought from his mind as he continued. His eyes adjusted to the lowering light, and he took slow, careful steps on the patchy forest floor. Walking softly, listening carefully, honing in on every slight movement that graced the corners of his lantern light, it all made him feel like a predator prowling through the night.

He stopped to take in the forest when he heard the sound of claws on bark. He swiveled his light toward a tree, eyes darting around the shadows of the looming conifers. His heart was pounding and that predator feeling faded when his instincts kicked in.

It was just a ring-tailed cat climbing a tree. Not what he was looking for, but this was the first time he’d ever seen one outside a zoo. He put a checkmark next to it on a mental list of local wildlife. Nights like this were when he saw raccoons, coyotes, and bobcats. Their eyes glowed at night, making them look as supernatural as any of the creatures that circled on the forums he frequented.

He kept walking, but the unidentifiable sounds and unintelligible shapes around him twisted in his rattled mind. He imagined something large and intimidating following softly behind him, uncurling its claws inches from his neck, but it seemed to hide as soon as he turned around with the lantern.

Suddenly, an eerie screech echoed around him.

He stopped in his tracks as a chill went down his spine. All he could see around him was blackness when the screech called out again. It sounded as if it was in front of him, but he couldn't hear anything else that would give him more clues. No crunch of feet on the ground. No scratching of nails on bark.

He started to walk again. Propelled forward by the idea that this could be the monster he was searching for. Every time the screech pierced his ears the sound got louder and his pace became faster. Lifting his lantern as he pushed through the thistle, he spotted a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness.

Suddenly, the ground fell out from under his foot. He found himself sliding down the side of a steep gully. Branches and thorns caught his clothes and skin as he slid, the lantern slipped from his fingers and rolled through the dirt along with him. He hit flat ground, splayed on his back at the base of the gully, and the first thing he processed was a shooting pain in his ankle.

Another screech brought him back. It came from above him now and through the deep beryl branches, he saw a figure. It was tall, black, and lanky, looming above him with those maddening glowing eyes. Pitch black jagged lines jutted from its back. Were those wings? Claws? A supernatural void of light?

He scrambled to grab the fallen lantern a few feet away and swung it around to illuminate the figure.

He froze there.

What he saw before him was nothing more than a ragged tree and a nesting barn owl. It bobbed its head and screeched another eerie warning to stay away from its home. Ian’s mouth was agape as he put the pieces together.

Owls fly silently to stalk their prey at night, their eyes are large and round and shine with even the smallest amount of light. Barn owls make a particularly unpleasant sound, just like the one Mothman was described to make.

“Is this is what I’ve been chasing?!” He chuckled through his shock. “Shadows and echos?”

He lowered the lamp and sat in disbelief. The fading adrenaline made him steadily aware of the pain in his ankle. He tried to stand, but his legs gave out and sent him rolling onto his back where he lay defeated.

He had sold everything he owned to be here, survived for weeks off of scraps while sleeping on the cold, hard ground. All for what?

Now, he was laying in a ditch with a torn jacket and a twisted ankle, beneath an angry barn owl and a clear, dispassionate sky. The stars were bright tonight and he could see all the mercurial shades of the Milky Way. He looked to the constellations, tracing imaginary lines with his fingers and thinking about the figures they supposedly represented. Funny how the human mind could turn these shapes into legends.

—

A week later, Ian had packed up his tent and moved in with his mother in the city. He set up a newly refurbished computer and connected it to the internet. He pulled up a browser window, hovered his mouse over the search bar, and paused. A small part of his brain begged him to go to LinkedIn, to start chasing a real job, but it was overpowered. When his fingers moved again, they typed FindTheTruth.com.

A lot had happened on the site while he was gone. A few of the other cryptid enthusiasts he had gotten to know had messaged him to make sure he was okay. It was unusual for him to go weeks without posting and they had become concerned. He looked through the forums at a new UFO picture and an outing of an account of a Loch Ness Monster sighting that the original poster now admitted was fake.

He scrolled down and encountered a thread posted a few days ago that claimed to be a new sighting of Mothman several hundred miles East of where he had been. The poster claimed that he and his wife had been driving on the highway at night when they saw a large black figure that flew through the forest alongside their car. He read the whole post and all the comments with a furrowed brow. He typed a response:

“Nothing in this post provides solid evidence that this was the Mothman. A black figure in the forest at night could be anything from a bear to an optical illusion. Please don’t post such flimsy anecdotes and come back when you have pictures.”

He hit the ‘post’ button with a smug sense of satisfaction. Then he returned to the list of other threads and continued scrolling until he was all the way back to the posts he saw before he left. He refreshed the page and clicked on a brand new post with evidence of a satanic cult meeting in the employee break room of a nearby arcade.

“This is compelling,” He said. “I need to investigate this.”