Move Over Bigfoot, Here Comes Sheepsquatch

[sofa king]

18. Well...

I don't know for sure that it was a bear up on that mountain, because all I saw was the eyeshine and my imagination filled in the details with a 3000 pound Kodiak waiting to knock me off the mountain with a single paw (as far as I know, nobody has seen a Kodiak in WVA... yet). It was probably just a possum in a tree--by then I'd been riding for at least eight hours and was still four-and-a-half from home, and I'd almost died a hundred times and I was soooo cold and wet, and broke and hungry--and, I later realized, probably dehydrated, because being soaking wet for twelve hours made me forget to actually drink water.

I kept the knife and I still have it, I think. For years I never touched it, and for weeks afterwards I checked the sparse local news available on the Internet for any missing persons reports from that area, which I did not see.

I was going to write a series of articles about that trip, because it was so amazingly strange every inch of the way, but we gave up on our magazine before I finished the series. I may still have the one article I wrote somewhere, electronically saved. If I find it, I'll post it here for you.... Nope, the sad little netbook it was on is dead, so I guess it's gone for good now.