I Found HUMAN BONES – Then BIGFOOT Hunted Me & Attacked My Friend (He Can’t Speak Now)

Permission to Leave

Chapter 1: The Rock and the Officer

I was sitting across from Wildlife Officer Hendris in the Clearwater County Fish and Game office on October 19th, 2024, when he asked me to describe what I saw. I told him the truth: I didn’t see anything. I heard it breathing. The sound came from maybe fifteen feet behind me while I was crouched by the creek, and when I turned around, there was nothing there but trees and that feeling in my chest like ice water spreading through my veins. That was the moment right before the rock hit the Douglas fir next to my head. I’m not talking about a pebble. It was a rock the size of a bowling ball that hammered bark off the trunk and left a crater I could fit my fist into.

.

.

.

Hendris wrote something down and asked if I’d been drinking. I told him I hadn’t touched alcohol in three years. He asked if I had any proof—photos, videos, tracks, hair, anything. I had to sit there and explain that when something that big is throwing rocks at you from the timber, you don’t stop to take pictures. You run.

He asked me to start from the beginning. So I did. I watched his eyes drift toward the clock twice in the first ten minutes. He’d already decided I was either lying or crazy. The thing is, I’m neither. My name is Cole Tanner. I’m thirty‑four. I’ve been bowhunting since I was twelve. I work as a diesel mechanic in Lewiston. I can tell a deer track from a dog track in my sleep. I know these woods. My father taught me to hunt these mountains before he died. I’ve spent twenty‑two seasons in the backcountry without incident. That’s why nobody believed me when I came back from the Clearwater claiming I’d been hunted by something that shouldn’t exist.

The trip started normal enough. I’d taken a week off during archery elk season and picked a drainage system about forty miles northeast of Pierce, Idaho, where I’d seen good sign the previous spring. Remote country, accessible only by a Forest Service road that eventually narrows to something barely wider than a game trail. That isolation was what I wanted. I loaded my truck on September 28th with my bow, my tent, food for six days, and that familiar anticipation that comes with a tag in your pocket and the smell of fall in the air. I had no idea I was driving toward the worst week of my life.

Chapter 2: Bones in the Creek

The drive took about four hours, the pavement giving way to rougher dirt and gravel as I climbed. The sky was overcast; we’d had an unusually wet September. The forest looked darker than normal—the kind of dark that feels soaked into the bark. Douglas fir and western red cedar crowded close on either side of the road, trunks black with moisture, branches heavy with moss. I passed two pickups heading out and one Forest Service truck parked at a trailhead. By the time I reached my spot near Waitas Creek, I hadn’t seen another human in over an hour.

When I killed the engine, the silence hit me. Not just quiet—silence. I sat there a moment, listening to it, before climbing out. The campsite was one I’d used before: a small clearing fifty yards off the creek, a fire ring built from river stones, a flat patch for my tent. I set up camp the way my father had drilled into me—stake the tent right, keep your gear organized, don’t rush. By the time I had everything squared away, the light was fading. I built a small fire more for company than heat, ate a pouch of freeze‑dried beef stroganoff, checked my maps, waxed my bowstring, and listened to the creek run over stone. Water over rock has always calmed me. It’s older than we are, indifferent to whether we’re there or not.

I woke the next morning to nothing. No dawn chorus. No squirrel chatter. Just the creek and my own breathing. That should’ve been my first warning. Instead, I made coffee, told myself the silence was coincidence, and focused on the hunt. I left camp at first light, following a game trail that paralleled the creek, climbing hard, stopping every fifty yards to glass the hillside and listen. Bowhunting means getting within forty yards of your target; it’s a game played on the animal’s terms.

That’s when I started seeing the bark. Several trees along the trail were stripped in long vertical gouges at about eye level, exposing bright cambium beneath. The damage looked fresh, the edges still weeping sap. I ran my fingers along one set of gouges and froze. The spacing was wrong for bear claws. If anything, it matched the spread of a hand. Fingers. I took a quick photo and texted it to my friend Ray Michaels, a guide out of Orofino. Ray knows these mountains like other people know their living rooms. If he’d seen it before, he’d tell me what it was. The message sent. No reply. Spotty service up there; I wasn’t surprised.

I pushed higher toward a saddle between two ridge lines where I hoped elk would be feeding. The silence followed me. The woods felt…off. Every time I stopped, I had the sense that if I just turned a little faster, I’d catch something stepping behind a tree. Nothing moved. Nothing called.

Around nine, I hit the creek proper, a narrower cut where the water ran clear over smooth stones. I was looking for a place to cross when I saw the bones. Tangled in an exposed root system on the far bank, half submerged, pale as driftwood. At first I thought winterkill—deer or elk washed down and wedged during spring melt. I waded in without thinking, boots taking water, heart rate picking up for reasons I couldn’t name.

Up close, I knew immediately they weren’t elk. I’m no forensic expert, but I’ve cleaned enough animals to know mammal bones. These were human. Portions of a rib cage, a femur, and a skull with the lower jaw missing. The skull was cracked across the crown, a sharp fracture that hadn’t been softened by weather. No clothing. No wallet. Nothing to tell me who this had been or how they’d ended up face‑down in a mountain creek.

The smart move would have been to mark the spot, hike back to my truck, and drive straight to town to report it. I did half of that. I took a series of photos from different angles, logged the GPS coordinates, and pulled out my phone to dial 911. No service. The bar I’d had twenty minutes ago was gone. I tried anyway. Nothing. Standing there in cold water with my boots soaking and the skull staring up at me from the roots, I realized I was alone with this and had no way to call anyone.

That’s when the forest went truly silent. The creek kept running. Everything else…stopped. It felt like pressure in my ears, like the woods were holding their breath. And in that pressure, I felt something watching me, not like an animal watches but like a person does—focused, considering. I turned slowly, scanning both banks. Nothing but trunks and shadow. The hair on my arms stood up anyway.

Movement flickered between fir trunks on the eastern slope. Just a shadow at first, something dark passing behind the trees. Then it stepped sideways. I saw fur, dark reddish‑brown, matted. I saw shoulders far too wide, a form too tall and too fluid to be a bear rearing on its hind legs. It moved with a certainty that said it had always belonged there and I had not.

I froze. Every survival instinct screamed at me to run, but running from a predator is how you trigger a chase. So I stood in the creek, water biting through my pants, bow hanging useless in my hand, while that shape watched me from sixty yards up through the timber. It didn’t advance. Didn’t call. It just watched. And in that watching, I felt evaluated the way a butcher evaluates stock—weight, condition, effort required. Then it melted back into the trees with a silence that was impossible for something that size.

I stood there shaking, knowing exactly what I’d seen and knowing it couldn’t exist.

Chapter 3: The Night of Rocks

I don’t clearly remember crossing the creek or climbing back out of the drainage. My next clear memory is of standing beside my tent with my bow in my hands, shaking so hard I could hear my teeth click. My phone showed no service. My GPS still worked, a little blue dot floating in a sea of contour lines. I sat on a log by the cold fire ring and tried to reason myself out of what I’d seen. Bears stand. Bears move strangely. Bears look bigger than they are when you’re scared. Maybe I’d let a shadow and my own nerves turn an ordinary encounter into something else.

But what I couldn’t reason away was the feeling—the sense of being studied, weighed. There was an intelligence in that stare I couldn’t map onto any animal I’d ever hunted.

I almost packed up and left right then. I should have. Instead, the stubborn part of me dug in. I’d taken time off. I’d spent money on tags and gas. I’d found what might be a missing person. I told myself I’d stay one more night, try to get cell service from higher ground in the morning, then report the bones and the sighting. It seemed reasonable. Looking back, it was the decision that nearly got me killed.

I spent the afternoon making camp tighter, smaller. I moved my tent closer to the fire ring, breaking the “sleep away from your food” rule. I gathered more wood than I needed, stacking it within easy reach. I checked my bow a dozen times, set three broadheads aside where I could grab them fast. When the light bled out of the trees, I built my fire higher than I normally would have, feeding it until it roared three feet tall, throwing wild shadows into the forest.

For a while, the night felt almost normal. A distant owl called. Something small rustled through the brush. The creek kept its steady mutter. Underneath it all, though, was that same invisible weight, that sense of eyes just beyond the fire’s reach.

Sometime around midnight, a sound snapped me awake: a heavy impact and wood splintering somewhere to the north, back toward the creek. A rock on a tree. I sat up, bow already in my hands, heart racing, listening. The forest fell silent. Ten seconds. Twenty. Then another impact, closer—this one maybe fifty, seventy yards out. The bark splitting sounded like a gunshot.

I fed more wood into the fire with hands that weren’t steady and stepped just beyond the circle of light, arrow nocked, eyes straining. The third rock hammered a fir trunk at the edge of my clearing. I heard it whistle through the air before impact, an ugly, fast sound.

Rock throwing. I’d read about it in the kind of stories I used to roll my eyes at. Bigfoot tossing stones at campsites. I thought it was either exaggeration or bored people scaring themselves. In that moment, with my ears ringing and my nerves screaming, it stopped being theoretical. Bears don’t throw rocks. Elk don’t throw rocks. People do. Whatever else was up here with me, it had hands and enough brains to use tools.

I shouted without thinking, voice cracking. “I’m armed! I’ve got a weapon! Show yourself!” The words felt ridiculous the second they left my mouth. The forest responded with more silence. No answer. No movement. Just pressure.

Then, finally, the sound of something big moving through brush to the east, pushing away rather than in. Branches snapped under weight. The noise receded. It left.

I didn’t sleep. I spent the rest of the night with my back against a tree, fire high, bow across my lap, watching the darkness and waiting for dawn. When it finally came, weak gray light seeping through the canopy, I’d already made up my mind. I was leaving. Elk weren’t worth this.

That’s when I saw the tracks.

Chapter 4: Tracks and Trees

They were in the damp earth near the creek, forty yards from where I’d spent the night. Massive impressions, at least eighteen inches long, seven wide at the ball. Five distinct toes in each, no claw marks. The heel registered deeper than the rest, as if whatever made them walked heel‑first, upright. I measured the stride with my rangefinder. Nearly five feet from heel to heel.

I’ve seen bear tracks a hundred times. These weren’t bear. I photographed them, though some part of me already suspected what would happen to those photos, and I followed the line of prints. They circled my camp in a loose loop, staying in the trees, never closer than fifty yards. It had paced around me while I sat by my fire, stopping at different points like a sentry making rounds. Watching. Measuring.

I didn’t follow the tracks past the creek. I went back, tore down my camp with shaking hands, crammed everything into the truck bed, tossed my bow onto the passenger seat, and fired up the engine. As I reversed down the little spur road, the forest threw one last warning at me. From up the drainage, maybe a quarter mile away, came a vocalization that made my skin crawl—a low, rising howl that climbed until it scraped at my teeth, then cut off mid‑pitch. Rage and warning rolled into one sound. The silence afterward felt like a promise.

I drove out, gravel spitting from my tires, eyes flicking to the rearview over and over as if I expected to see something loping down the road behind me. Nothing appeared. The woods just stood there and watched me go. And I had this irrational, persistent feeling that I wasn’t escaping. I was being let go.

I made it about six miles down before my truck died. No sputter. No warning lights. One second the engine was running rough but steady over washboards; the next it cut out completely. The dash went dark. The power steering locked. I coasted to a stop in the middle of the road, heart thudding.

I tried the ignition. Nothing. No click. No dome light. Battery terminals were tight, no corrosion. Fuses looked fine. Under the hood, everything looked normal. The truck was just dead.

On a logging road with no cell service, six miles from the main Forest Service road and forty from town, that’s the last thing you want. My choices narrowed fast: stay with the truck and hope someone else came through before dark, or start walking. Help might be a day away if I stayed put. The thought of waiting there while something watched me from the timber turned my stomach. I grabbed my pack, my bow, my GPS, and started walking.

The first few miles weren’t bad. The road wound downhill, the trees opening here and there to show valleys and distant ridges. Birds had resumed calling; squirrels scolded from branches. On the surface, everything looked ordinary. Underneath, that sensation of being followed grew by the yard.

Every few hundred yards I stopped and turned, scanning the road, the trees, the ditches. Nothing. Then, somewhere around mile three, I came around a bend and nearly walked under a structure.

Two young firs leaned over the road, and between them, woven together at about seven feet off the ground, was an arch of snapped branches. Fresh breaks, bright green wood, bark still damp. Someone—or something—had gathered them and built this little gate right across the road. Some of the branches had that same spiral bark stripping I’d seen near the creek.

Hunters don’t spend their time making art installations in the middle of nowhere. The Forest Service doesn’t build things like this. I walked around it, giving it more space than it deserved, feeling like I’d just stepped around a landmine.

A mile later, another structure. Bigger. An X of thick branches lashed between two trunks, ten feet tall, impossible to miss. I didn’t stop. I didn’t take photos. My pace picked up. The feeling of being funneled narrowed my throat.

That’s when I started seeing the eye shine. It was just a flash at first—two pale points reflecting my own movement from deep in the trees off to my left, at a height that wasn’t right for deer. When I stopped, the eyes vanished. When I started again, they reappeared ahead and to the right, as if something had leapfrogged my position without making a sound. The logic part of my brain told me that was impossible. The older part didn’t care. It only knew I was being watched from multiple angles by the same unblinking gaze.

My temper snapped, briefly outshouting my fear. “Show yourself!” I yelled into the trees. “You want to scare me? Come do it where I can see you!” My voice bounced off trunks and died. The eyes winked out. The forest went still. And I immediately regretted every word.

I’d covered maybe four and a half miles when the tree fell. Not a snag breaking on its own—this was a living fir, thirty, forty feet tall. The sound came in three stages: a sharp crack at the base; a wild, rushing roar as the crown smashed through branches; and then a ground‑shaking impact as it slammed across the road fifty yards ahead of me. I’d glassed that stretch of road minutes before. That tree had been standing.

It now lay crossways, trunk thick as a refrigerator, crown blocking every foot of road in a tangle of limbs. Getting through would take ten minutes and a chainsaw I didn’t have, or a detour through the dense timber on either side. The detour would drop my visibility to ten feet. I stared at it, heart hammering, and knew it hadn’t just “fallen.” It had been put there. For me.

Then I saw it. Beyond the fallen fir, between two standing trunks, a shape like the one by the creek, only closer. Reddish‑brown fur, shoulders too broad, arms too long, head too small. It stood in the shade at the edge of my vision, unmoving. Watching. Waiting to see what I’d do.

I chose the only direction that wasn’t blocked or toward it. I ran sideways into the forest.

Chapter 5: Herded

I’ve never crashed through timber like that in my life. Branches whipped my face. Salal clawed at my legs. My pack snagged on a deadfall; I ripped it free without slowing. Silence and stealth didn’t matter anymore. Survival did. Behind me, in the trees, something enormous moved in parallel. It didn’t bother with sneaking either. Every step was a crash, a stomp, as if it wanted me to hear exactly how big it was and how close it could be if it chose.

I broke back onto the logging road two hundred yards past the fallen tree, lungs burning, ankle twisting on loose rock. I didn’t stop. I ran down the center of the road, GPS bouncing in my pocket, phone dead weight in my hand. Every instinct screamed at me not to look back. If I saw how close it was, I knew I’d freeze.

Eventually my body rebelled. My legs gave out, dumping me onto the gravel. I lay there on my back in the middle of the road, chest heaving, vision tunneling at the edges. When I finally forced myself to look, nothing was there. No looming shape. No glowing eyes. Just the road curving away and the trees standing silent.

The crashing sounds had stopped sometime during my sprint. It could have closed the distance. It hadn’t. Once again, I hadn’t escaped. I’d been allowed to.

I pushed on. A mile or so later, the road T‑boned into the main Forest Service route—wider, rutted from recent traffic, blessedly familiar. I stepped onto it like I’d just crossed a line between worlds. I had maybe two more miles to the highway. My body hurt—ankle swollen, shoulder scraped, lungs raw—but adrenaline and the thought of asphalt kept my feet moving.

Somewhere behind me, deep in the trees, something screamed. The same low howl rising into a piercing note that made my teeth ache, more distant now but unmistakable. It rolled across the ridges, bounced back, and died. I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to. That sound would be with me forever.

Two miles later, a white pickup appeared on the road ahead, moving slow, engine growling. I’ve never been so glad to see a truck. I waved my arms like an idiot. It rolled to a stop. The window came down, and there was Ray, beard and all, staring at me.

“Jesus, Cole,” he said, climbing out. “You look like hell. What happened to you?”

I told him. Everything. The bones. The shadow. The rocks. The tracks. The tree. The chase. I watched his face go from concern to that tight, skeptical look I was coming to know too well—and then, slowly, to something else. Recognition.

“You’re not the first,” he said quietly when I finished. “Let’s get you to town. We’ve got some things to talk about.”

Chapter 6: Erased

Ray drove me to Pierce, then to the clinic in Orofino. A nurse cleaned the scratches on my face and wrapped my ankle. They wanted to keep me for observation. I refused. I needed my own space. By the time Ray dropped me at a motel in Lewiston, promised to check in the next day, and left, I felt more empty than relieved.

That night, sleep came in brief snatches. Every time I drifted off, I saw white bone in roots, a shadow between fir trunks, teeth‑aching screams. When I woke at eight the next morning, I had three missed calls from Ray. I called him back.

“They found your truck,” he said. “Fish and Game went up to check on the bone site. Your rig started right up. Battery’s fine. Alternator’s fine. They drove it down themselves. Think you panicked and flooded it or something.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “That truck was dead.”

“Yeah, well. That’s not the only thing. They went to the creek. No bones. Nothing. Searched the area. Came up empty.”

The world tilted. My stomach went hollow. “They were there, Ray. I held that skull. I have photos—”

I opened my phone gallery. The series from the creek was gone. The waypoint I’d saved was still on my GPS—but the note field was blank. Every scrap of evidence I’d collected had simply…vanished.

Ray was still talking. “Look, they’re closing it out as unfounded. Deputy says you did the right thing reporting, but without remains, there’s nothing to investigate. You should come pick up your truck. And Cole…they’re starting to look at you like you might have a problem.”

I drove back up, collected my truck from impound, endured the looks that said idiot or liar, and drove home in silence. Something—or someone—had removed the bones, erased my photos, scrubbed my notes. Either I was losing my mind, or there was an active effort to wipe the slate clean.

A few days later, I went back. I told myself I just needed to see the creek again, confirm that I wasn’t imagining things. I approached from a different trailhead, came at the drainage sideways, followed my GPS to the spot.

The roots were there. The water was there. The bones were not. No disturbed soil. No drag marks. No sign scavengers had been at work. It was like they’d never existed. I searched for two hours, working outward in circles. Nothing.

As I was about to give up, I saw another structure blocking a narrow game trail—a woven lattice of branches and small logs. Hanging from the center of it was my GPS unit.

My GPS. Same scratches in the plastic. Same faded strap. I’d had it in my truck when I left on the 30th. I’d used it on the drive home. I sure as hell hadn’t hung it in the woods.

Hands shaking, I took it down and turned it on. A single waypoint was saved: LEAVE, pinned at my current location, with a fresh track log leading back toward the road. My stomach dropped. This wasn’t random. It was deliberate. It was a message.

I ran. Crashed through brush. Sweat cold on my back. I didn’t stop until I was in my truck again. When I checked the GPS that night in my apartment, the waypoint and track were gone. Wiped.

Days blurred. I stopped sleeping. Every car backfire sounded like a rock hit. Every glance at a tree line made my chest tighten. The authorities—Fish and Game, the sheriff—nudged everything neatly into the “hunter panicked, misinterpreted, false report” box, dusted off their hands, and moved on. I tried to join them. I failed.

Then, on October 13th, I got a text from an unknown number: a photo taken from above of my truck parked on that logging road. In the corner of the frame, barely visible, was a curve of something dark that might’ve been a branch. Might’ve been an arm.

I texted back: What do you want?

The reply came thirty seconds later.

TO BE LEFT ALONE.

My hands went numb. Someone knew what had happened up there. Someone had eyes in the trees. Someone had my number.

I wrote back: Who is this? No answer. Calls to the number went to a dead recording. Reverse lookup turned up nothing. The number was a ghost.

That night, another text: just coordinates. My stomach turned. I recognized the location: same drainage, not far from my camp. I texted back: Why would I go there?

This time the answer came in seconds.

YOUR FRIEND.

Chapter 7: Permission

I called Ray. No answer. Called his wife. Nothing. Called his business line. Straight to voicemail. It was 11:30 p.m. by then. I sat on my couch staring at the numbers on my screen and felt something like resignation settle over me. If I did nothing and something happened to him, I’d never forgive myself. If I went, I knew what I might be walking into.

I picked up my keys anyway.

I drove through the night, the highway unspooling under my tires, my mind replaying every bad decision I’d made since the bones in the creek. I hit the logging road around four a.m. and parked half a mile from the coordinates. The darkness under the trees was absolute. I went in with my headlamp and my bow, the air so still it felt like a held breath.

The clearing appeared out of the black like a stage under a dim spotlight. In the middle sat Ray’s truck, driver’s door open, headlights still on, beams cutting weird angles through the mist. The engine was cold. His jacket lay on the passenger seat. His phone sat on the dash with fifteen missed calls from his wife. No Ray. No blood.

The first rock hit a tree behind me, splintering bark. I spun, arrow up. Nothing. The second hit Ray’s rear windshield, spiderwebbing glass. I dove behind the truck, adrenaline roaring, knowing without being told that I was being driven away from the road and toward the forest. Another choice: sprint for my own truck and leave Ray, or go toward whatever had him.

I went into the trees.

The woods swallowed my headlamp beam. Movement kept pace on both sides—heavy, deliberate steps. The smell hit me: wet fur, musk, a sour organic funk. I called Ray’s name until my throat hurt. Somewhere ahead, something answered—not with words, but with the sound of branches giving way.

I stumbled into a smaller clearing and almost tripped over him. Ray sat slumped against a tree, eyes open but unfocused, breathing shallow. No obvious injuries, just a vacancy that scared me more than any blood could have. I grabbed his shoulders, shook him, called his name. Nothing.

Then the shadows at the edge of the clearing compressed into shape.

Eight feet tall at least. Reddish‑brown fur matted with dark patches. Shoulders like a wall. Arms hanging past the knees. Head slightly forward, eyes catching my lamp and flaring gold for an instant. It stepped just far enough into the light that I could see its outline clearly, then stopped.

Behind me, in the trees, I heard more movement. Not one. Several. We were surrounded.

I stood, putting myself between Ray and the creature, bow in my hands though I knew an arrow wouldn’t matter. “I’m taking him,” I said, voice shaking. “We’re leaving. We won’t come back. You can have this place. Just let us go.”

It tilted its head, like it was trying to make sense of my noise. Then it made a sound—low, deep, not quite a growl, not quite anything I had a word for. I didn’t understand the language, but I understood the answer: no.

Shapes moved at the edges of the clearing, huge and quiet. A rock slammed into my shoulder, spinning me, dropping me to a knee. Pain exploded down my arm. Another rock struck my back, driving air from my lungs, making the world flash white. I collapsed next to Ray, gasping, everything inside me screaming.

Then, just as suddenly, the impacts stopped. The pressure receded. Their footsteps, heavy and terrible, moved away into the trees. They’d made their point. They’d demonstrated what they could do. They’d decided, again, not to finish it.

I don’t remember getting us out of that clearing, or back to Ray’s truck, or the drive down the mountain. My next clear memory is of the lights of St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, EMTs asking questions I answered with lies about a bear, because the truth had already failed me once. My shoulder was dislocated. My ribs were bruised. My back was a line of purple where the rock had landed. Ray’s body had no clear wounds, just a mind that had retreated somewhere I couldn’t reach.

He doesn’t speak to me now. Won’t return my calls; told his wife he doesn’t want to see me. The official reports say “possible bear encounter,” “hunter panic,” “psychological trauma.” The bones are still officially “unsubstantiated.” The structures don’t exist. My photos and GPS logs are gone. The texts have vanished from my phone. Every time I’ve tried to anchor this in physical reality, something has reached in and erased it.

So I’m left with this: my memory, my scars, and the certainty that something in the Clearwater National Forest watched me, hunted me, and decided I wasn’t worth killing. Officer Hendris closes his notebook and thanks me for my statement. He suggests counseling. Maybe a break from hunting. He doesn’t say he believes me. He doesn’t have to. I can see that he doesn’t.

I walk out into the October sun and sit in my truck for a long time before turning the key. Somewhere behind the line of distant hills, there’s a drainage feeding Waitas Creek where a skeleton once rested in roots and then didn’t. Where rocks flew and trees fell for reasons the official reports will never admit. Where tracks bigger than any bear’s pressed deep into the earth and then were washed away.

I don’t hunt anymore. I sold my bow. I jump at sudden noises. I sleep with the lights on. Sometimes I get the urge to drive back up there, to stand at the mouth of that logging road and stare into the trees, just to prove to myself that it’s real. I never do. That permission I was granted—to leave, to live—is the heaviest thing I own. I don’t know if it was mercy or contempt. I only know it was a choice, and it wasn’t mine.

This is my testimony. Believe it or don’t. The forest doesn’t care. The thing that watched me doesn’t care. It will still be up there after this page is forgotten, still watching, still deciding who gets to leave and who doesn’t.