For YOU Crypto Types

[Ninurta]

It's late here, so maybe tomorrow I'll tell another tale of the unknown. Can't say it was a bigfoot, or a panther, or what it was, because I never saw it. I know I have my own explanations for it that don't involve bigfoot or the supernatural, or even ABC's, but other folks differ in that opinion. Either way, nothing was seen, so it's anyone's guess...

Fascinating and thank you.
Yes please for your further tale!

Alrighty then!

The night before I turned 51, I decided to walk to work, just to see if I still could. It was about a 15 mile walk, and the temperature was 96 degrees F at 10:00 in the evening when I set out. Since it was hot as the hinges of hell, and I wasn't used to walking for distance any more, I gave myself plenty of time to get there, as I had to be at work at 7 AM the next morning. I figured 9 hours was plenty of time to cover a measly 15 miles. When I was used to walking, I could cover anywhere from 3 to 5 miles an hour, depending on the variable factors like terrain and temperature, so it should have been a 3 to 5 hour trip, when I was in shape for it, which I wasn't.

At the time, I was living in Burlington, NC, the same place I lived when we had our phone conversation. I walked along roads, going south to where I was working. After about an hour, I was out of the city and into the country. Traffic thinned out considerably. Whenever I got the urge, I'd take a 10 minute break to sit and catch my breath. About 1 AM, I was half way to my goal, and decided to take another break - which breaks were getting longer as the journey progressed. I wasn't young any more, y'know?

So on that break, I was sitting there beside the road, in total darkness, just mindin' my own business, which was catching my breath again at the moment. The road I was on ran through the woods at that point, and it was as black as a banker's heart. The road ran through a gully of sorts there, a wooded depression in the ground running roughly east and west, the road running south. While I was sitting there, I heard a noise in the woods.

Now, sound carries better in the night time, so things are easier to hear. It probably has something to do with the normal daytime noises being asleep, and of course being out in the country again, without the traffic noise, helped a lot. This noise sounded like someone beating a tree with a 2x4, which is a curious sound to hear in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a Thursday night/ Friday morning. I sat and listened to it for a while, but it was just a regular beat-beat-beat with breaks in between bouts of it. I have since heard that bigfoot does something called "wood knocking", which it could have been, or it could have been what I thought it was at the time, just a drug-addled teenagers out beating trees. Arguing against that is the location. Most of the drug-addled teens could not have found their way out of the city, and it makes no sense for one to go out into the black just to beat on trees, but then again most drug-addled teens won't be making any sense during their addled phase, now will they?

Another peculiar property of night time in the woods is that the woods echos, making sounds difficult to pinpoint. From the sound of it, this tree-beating was about 150 yards to my west, but it could have been anywhere in that direction, due to the echo factor. The only thing I can say for sure is that it came from a roughly 20 degree wide cone in that general direction, actual distance indeterminate.

So I listened for 15 or 20 minutes, the whole time this knock-knock-knock-pause-knock again was going on. Never did figure out for sure what it was, but bigfoot never crossed my mind. Drug-addled teen or crazy person was what I was thinking. Eventually, I got up and moved on, never having identified what it was.

So I kept slogging along, taking breaks as the fancy struck me. In the Flatlands, it doesn't cool down as much at night as it does here in the hill country, meaning that it stayed hot all night, and the breaks got longer. By 5:30 or 6 AM, it was light enough to see, and I was out of the woods, still one or two miles from my goal. I was out of the woods by then, passing through open farmlands, most lying fallow and getting covered in weeds and brush. Out in one of the brushy fields, there was an "island" of trees, 70 or 80 yards to my north, as the road I was on was running east by that time.

As I was approaching the stand of trees along the road, getting ready to be abreast of it as I passed, there was the gawdawfullest blood-curdling "scream" that came from that direction. It raised the hackles on my neck - I've not heard anything like it, neither before nor since. It got my attention, and I stopped and looked, trying to identify the source of it. I figured it had to be some kind of bird that I was unfamiliar with, and probably a big one, so I ought to have been able to find it. I've heard foxes, bobcats, coyotes, wolves, and all manner of birds of prey, and it was none of those.

Whatever it was, it screamed twice more while I stood there trying to find it, and I never did see what it was. No birds took flight, no critters too to foot getting away, so whatever it was out-waited me waiting on it to make a move. I had to get to work, so I moved on after a few minutes, none the wiser of what it was screaming, or why it was screaming. there was no flight, no commotion of fight, no running away, nothing that indicated what or exactly where it was, although I had the distinct impression that it was in that grove of trees, and it was screaming at me. There was nothing else around that I could see to scream at.

I made it to work with 20 minutes to spare, time enough to get rested up for work.

I still don't know what either of those sounds were. I didn't see a thing to identify them by. A bigfoot researcher would insist that it was a bigfoot, maybe following me. I don't believe I'm interesting enough to follow for miles, and especially not through a hot night by a hair-covered creature. I believe the sounds were generated by two different things, and it was just coincidental that I heard them on the same night. The wood knocking gave a definite vibe of some sort of human agency, although I suppose "human" could be a matter of some debate if one were inclined. The screams were probably some kind of really, really big bird, or possibly a panther/ mountain lion - that's not out of the question. A few years earlier, I had watched a black bear run through the middle of Greensboro, NC, about 20 miles to the west by northwest of that location, in the middle of the day. I questioned my sanity that day, 'cause bears don't roam cities, but all was well when I saw a news report that evening remarking on the remarkable presence, complete with video of it.

If a black bear can roam city streets, I see no reason to believe that a mountain lion can't roam country fields, despite the fact that they are not supposed to exist there. Bears are not supposed to exist in Greensboro, either, despite the news reels, but there it was.

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A Red Fox barking in the night time sounds a little bit like the recorded noises in the video, but not exactly. Wild turkeys can also make similar noises, but not exactly. I think those sounds were generated by a person trying (poorly) to imitate something else with the help of a "mechanical device" like a blade of grass, an elm seed, or a turkey call. There are also some party-favor noise makers that make noises like that.

On a side note, my sister told me last week that one of the county deputies told her that they had released 25 wolves and 25 mountain lions at the top of the mountain here, in the ongoing effort to re-populate or "re-wild" this area. That's also where the (re-populated) elk hang out around here, some traveling as far away as the top of the hill here where I live, but in all directions from the top of the mountain.

25 wolves I can see - they are pack animals, and would probably break into 4 or 5 packs after release, but 25 mountain lions is a stretch, an exercise in lunacy if they really did that. A mountain lion, just one, has a range of about 20 or 25 square miles, and they are solitary animals. Releasing 25 of them all at one point is a recipe for disaster, especially to the mountain lions. Most would not survive to find their own range. The elk herd is getting bigger, doubling some years, but it's still not big enough to support that many predators, especially not if they are trying to grow the herd in order to draw in hunters to increase the local economy. Therefore I have my doubts about the tale, but it's possible. people sometimes do stupid things.

I believe they have released wolves here before, as 3 or 4 years ago I and that same sister saw one, a BIG one, just before 8 AM one morning at the top of the mountain. It was about 5 feet long from the tip of it's nose to the root of it's tail, and was definitely a wolf. I know the difference between wolves and coyotes, and this was no coyote, despite the fact that the coyotes around here interbred with wolves when they were on their way east to repopulate this place. A standard gray wolf is about 3 or 3 1/2 feet long from the tip of it's nose to the root of it's tail, and a big one might go 4 feet long in that dimension - they one we saw was HUGE by those measures. Still, we saw it, and that tells me that they may have released wolves here before, and if so there is nothing to keep them from doing it again.

... and on life goes.

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