BIGFOOT Throws a GIANT ROCK and CRUSHES a CAR on the Road! The Video SHOCKED Everyone
Chapter 1 — Cedar Falls Doesn’t Scare Easily
I used to say I didn’t believe in monsters. I still say it, sometimes—usually out of habit, usually in daylight. But the conviction doesn’t hold at 3:00 a.m. when the old house settles and every creak sounds like a footstep testing the floorboards. In those hours I don’t think about ghosts or campfire legends. I think about the mountains. I think about Cedar Falls. And I listen, despite myself, for the sound that started all of this: two stones struck together, slow and deliberate, like a signal meant for someone who already understands.
.
.
.
My name is Marcus Webb. I’ve been a deputy with the Cascade County Sheriff’s Department for eight years, and before that I served four years in the Army—two in Afghanistan. I don’t bring that up to impress anyone. I mention it because fear is a tool in my line of work: you learn to feel it without obeying it. I thought I knew the shape of panic, the limits of what the world could throw at a person. I was wrong. Not because I saw something that made me weak, but because I saw something that made my training feel small.
Cedar Falls is the kind of town the modern world forgets exists. It sits in a narrow valley in the Cascade Range, forty miles from the nearest city with more than one stoplight. Timber built it, timber fed it, timber kept it standing through economic crashes and bad winters. The mountains around us are thick with Douglas fir, hemlock, and cedar so old they look like they remember names we’ve lost. Cell service comes and goes like a fickle spirit. Radios work until they don’t. If you need help in the wrong place, you’re often talking to nobody.
I grew up here, left, came back. The isolation used to feel like protection—like a green wall holding the outside world at a distance. Looking back, I understand the darker truth: isolation also means fewer witnesses, fewer resources, and more time for something to do what it wants before anyone even knows there’s a problem.
The first call that mattered came on a Tuesday in late September. Dispatch patched through Victor Reyes, the night foreman at Cascade Timber Industries’ Eastern Operation. Reyes didn’t sound drunk or hysterical. He sounded like a man trying hard to keep his voice steady while something behind him refused to cooperate. Sheriff Brennan was tied up with an accident on Highway 20, so it landed on me.
I drove up Route 14 into the mountains. The road switchbacks hard and climbs three thousand feet in less than ten miles. Headlights cut tunnels through the dark. A deer watched me pass with reflective eyes. A black bear ambled across the pavement like it owned it. The radio crackled with static as I climbed higher, as if the mountain itself were chewing on the signal.
Site 12 looked like every logging operation at night: sodium vapor lights turning everything a bruised orange, machinery lined up like sleeping animals, the forest massed beyond the cleared perimeter like a patient crowd. Reyes waited outside the office trailer with a cigarette he wasn’t enjoying. His hands trembled when he dragged smoke into his lungs. That alone tightened something in my chest. Logging men are not generally fragile.
“Thanks for coming out,” he said, grinding the cigarette out under his heel. “I know it sounds stupid, calling you for vandalism. But you need to see this.”
He led me past the equipment line to a skitter—yellow, massive, built to drag felled trees like they weigh nothing. Deep scratches scored the paint along one side. They were too high, too clean, too evenly spaced to be bear. Reyes aimed his flashlight at the ground. The mud beside the machine held impressions that didn’t belong there: footprints, twenty inches long, sunk deep as if the earth had tried to swallow them. Five toe marks. A broad pad. Something like an arch. Human-shaped in all the wrong ways.
I told myself the word hoax because it was the closest thing to sanity. But hoaxes have human laziness written into them. They don’t travel miles into gated logging sites. They don’t leave prints that look heavy enough to crack the idea of your world.
“There’s more,” Reyes said, and the way he said it made my skin tighten.
At the edge where the clear-cut ended and the untouched forest began, several hemlocks had been stripped of bark eight to twelve feet above the ground. Exposed wood gleamed pale under the flashlight. Deep parallel gouges marred the trunks, not like claws but like fingers—wide spacing, controlled pressure, the kind of damage you’d expect from a machine, not a living thing.
“Crew won’t work nights anymore,” Reyes said quietly. “Half of them want to quit. Last night someone threw rocks at the security lights. Not pebbles. Boulders. And we found one in the road that had to weigh two hundred pounds. No tracks, no equipment marks. Just… sitting there like it was carried.”
I photographed everything, took measurements, wrote my notes like writing could turn it into something manageable. I promised increased patrols and told Reyes we’d treat it seriously. But as I drove down that mountain, I couldn’t shake the sense that “seriously” wasn’t going to be enough for what we were brushing up against.
In town, old-timers at Miller’s General Store liked to tell stories about abandoned camps in the 1930s, about “mountain guardians” that walked upright, about places crews refused to work no matter the pay. I’d always filed it under folklore—the kind of stories men tell when the whiskey is warm and the night is long. That night, for the first time in my life, the folklore felt like a warning that arrived late.
Chapter 2 — The Crash That Wasn’t an Accident
Two nights later the call wasn’t about equipment. It was about a missing person.
Danny Cho was a mechanic, thirty-two, married with a young daughter. He left his shop around midnight and didn’t make it home. His wife called at 1:00 a.m. and by 1:30 every available deputy was out searching the route like we could comb the dark into obedience.
We found his truck at dawn.
Sheriff Tom Brennan and I were driving Forest Service Road 2847 when we saw tire tracks veer off the pavement toward the guardrail. Morning fog threaded through the trees like smoke. Sunlight speared down in bright shafts, beautiful enough to feel obscene. The truck had crashed through the rail and rolled sixty feet down the embankment, coming to rest against old-growth cedars. Metal and glass glittered across the slope. The driver’s side was crushed inward like a fist had closed around it.
What stole the breath out of me wasn’t the wreck itself—it was what surrounded it.
Boulders littered the hillside: basket-sized stones and larger ones that would’ve taken machinery to move. They weren’t scattered randomly. They formed a rough semicircle around the truck, a deliberate barrier like a fence line drawn in rock. Between the boulders ran those same footprints—huge, human-shaped, sunk deep into the soft forest floor as if whatever made them carried enough weight to impress the earth itself into remembering.
Brennan whispered something under his breath that wasn’t prayer and wasn’t profanity, but a mix of both. He was sixty and close to retirement, and I’d never seen him lose composure. That morning he looked like a man staring at a door he’d hoped would stay shut.
We called emergency response. They used the jaws of life to extract Danny. He was alive, barely—fractures, internal injuries, concussion—but alive. When the medics rushed him to the hospital in Bellingham, I stayed behind to document the scene. I photographed boulders, footprints, dents on the truck’s roof that didn’t match a roll-over. I found impact craters on the pavement where rocks had struck hard enough to crack asphalt. Whoever threw them had done it with precision. Whoever threw them had aimed.
By late afternoon the recovery crew had hauled the truck away. I was alone on the hillside, packing up my camera equipment, when the forest went quiet.
Not the normal quiet you get when the wind pauses. This was the kind of silence that feels imposed. Birdsong died. Even the faint rustle of small animals vanished. The air pressed against my ears like depth underwater. Then I heard it: the slow, rhythmic sound of two stones being struck together. It echoed through the trees, impossible to pinpoint, as if the valley itself were making the noise.
My hand went to my service weapon. I scanned the forest. Nothing moved. The sound continued for thirty seconds, then stopped, leaving a silence so complete it felt like a dare.
I didn’t report the stone-striking. I didn’t report the massive shadow I thought I saw glide between two cedars as I reached my patrol vehicle. I told myself I was tired. Stress does strange things. Trauma makes patterns out of chaos. But that night I slept with every light in my apartment on, like electricity could hold back what the mountains had decided to remember.
Danny regained consciousness three days later, and Brennan and I drove to Bellingham to take his statement.
Hospitals are built to feel safe. Clean floors, bright lighting, steady beeps that suggest control. Danny looked small in the bed, wrapped in bandages, bruised purple and yellow, traction holding his leg like a threat. His wife Rachel sat beside him, exhausted beyond tears. When Danny saw us, relief loosened something in his face.
“You have to believe me,” he rasped, and the desperation in his voice was worse than any scream.
Brennan told him to take his time. Danny swallowed hard, then described a cold drop inside the cab—instant frost on the window, breath fogging despite the heater. He described the first boulder hitting the road in front of him, cracking asphalt. He swerved and more rocks followed, not random, not falling—thrown. Forced. Herding him toward the guardrail like a predator steering prey.
“I saw it,” Danny whispered. “Up on the ridge. Silhouetted against the sky. Huge. Taller than any man, broader than a bear. It moved along the ridge keeping pace with my truck, and it was throwing those boulders like baseballs.”
He said one rock crumpled his hood. Another crashed through his passenger window, spraying the cab with glass. The last one was the worst—not because it hit harder, but because he saw the intent.
“It picked up this boulder,” Danny said, voice breaking. “Four hundred pounds, easy. And it… it aimed. Like it calculated the angle. Then it threw.”
The impact lifted his wheels. He spun. He rolled. When the truck stopped, he was pinned, barely breathing. Then he heard footsteps descending the slope—heavy, deliberate. He couldn’t reach his phone. He could only listen.
“It came to the window,” Danny whispered, staring at something I couldn’t see. “There was a gap. I could see out and it could see in. It crouched down and its face… God help me. It looked almost human, but not. Dark hair, broad features. And the eyes weren’t animal. It was thinking. Evaluating me.”
He said it reached toward the truck, then stopped, made a low rumbling sound like communication, and stood up and walked away. After that came the stone-striking again—like a signal concluding the act.
When we left the hospital, Rachel’s eyes followed us. She wanted the comfort of a medical explanation: concussion, hallucination, trauma. I couldn’t give it to her. Brennan couldn’t either. We’d seen the evidence. We knew Danny’s story didn’t live entirely in his head.
Driving back to Cedar Falls, Brennan finally spoke. “My grandfather told me stories,” he said, staring at the road. “Places crews wouldn’t work. Equipment moved. Camps abandoned. Smart companies learned to avoid certain areas.”
“You think we pushed too far?” I asked.
“I think,” he said slowly, “we’ve been sharing these mountains with something for a long time. And we finally stepped where we weren’t welcome.”
The word hung between us without being spoken. Sasquatch. Bigfoot. A name too small for what it implied.
By the time we reached the substation, Linda had stacked messages like a warning wall. Hikers heard vocalizations. A farmer found his cattle pressed against a barn, trembling. Another logging crew refused to work after seeing shapes moving in the trees.
“It’s like the whole town has gone crazy,” Linda said, worry tightening her face.
Brennan told her to set up a community meeting in the high school gym. “And Marcus,” he added, “compile everything. Every report. Every photograph. We have to address this head on.”
That night, I spread evidence across my kitchen table like a ritual: footprints with stride lengths of six to seven feet, tree damage, witness statements, rocks placed with intent. The question wasn’t whether something existed in the mountains. The question was what it wanted—and what it would do if we answered wrong.
Chapter 3 — The Gymnasium Roared Back
The meeting drew almost the entire town. Families packed the bleachers. CTI workers clustered near the doors as if they might need to leave fast. Business owners filled folding chairs on the basketball court. Anxiety thickened the air until it felt like sweat.
Sheriff Brennan stood at the microphone with me and Deputy Susan Martinez at his sides. He spoke carefully, choosing words like stepping stones across thin ice. He described the incidents as “unknown wildlife activity,” outlined safety measures: curfew for minors, restricted trails, buddy system after dark. He showed photographs—enough to prove something, not enough to ignite hysteria.
But Cedar Falls is not naïve. We’ve lived long enough with the mountains to recognize when a man is circling a truth.
Thomas Whitfield, the hardware store owner, stood up and said what everyone was thinking. “Sheriff, you’re dancing around it. We’re talking about Sasquatch. My family’s been here four generations. We’ve heard the stories. Whatever’s out there isn’t just wildlife. It’s intelligent. It’s territorial. And it’s angry.”
A murmur of agreement rolled through the crowd. Brennan raised his hands for calm, still trying to steer the narrative toward caution rather than provocation. Before he could answer the shouted questions—Are you bringing hunters? The Army? What’s the plan?—the gym lights flickered.
Once. Twice. Then steadied.
In that half-second of dimness, people shifted nervously. I felt the hair on my neck rise as if my body had recognized something before my mind could name it. Then we heard it.
A roar—deep enough to vibrate the building’s metal roof, so powerful it seemed to shake the air itself. It started as a low rumble and climbed into something that didn’t sound like bear or cougar or any animal I’d ever tracked. It ended in sharp barks that echoed across the valley as if the mountains were answering back.
The gymnasium went dead silent. Hundreds of people frozen in the aftermath of a sound that didn’t care about our skepticism. Parents pulled children close. Men who worked dangerous machinery every day looked pale and young.
Brennan’s voice, when it came again, stayed steady by sheer will. “That,” he said, “is why we stay calm and work together.”
But I watched the crowd and saw calculation bloom. Some were already planning to leave town. Others were planning to push back. A few wore the bright-eyed curiosity of people who think danger makes a better story than safety.
Afterward, in the emptying gym, Martinez said quietly, “This is going to get worse.”
“It’s going to make people stupid,” I replied. “And stupid gets people killed.”
Brennan stared out the high windows at the mountain silhouettes. “I’m calling in state help,” he said. “Fish and wildlife. Maybe academic experts. We need information, fast.”
As if to punctuate his words, the call came again from the mountains—then another, and another, from different directions around the valley. Three distinct voices. Communication. Coordination.
Not one creature.
A population.
The next morning I volunteered for reconnaissance up toward Cedar Ridge. Brennan didn’t like the risk, but he understood the necessity. I assembled a small team: Martinez, who had wilderness EMT training; Dr. David Park, a wildlife biologist who arrived overnight; and James Whitfield, Thomas’s son, a local who knew mountain trails like lines in his palm. We carried firearms, and at Park’s insistence, tranquilizer equipment—though privately I wasn’t sure a tranquilizer would do more than insult something capable of hurling boulders.
We hiked at dawn. The sky was clear in that crisp September way that makes the world look sharpened. Yet the forest was eerily quiet. No bird song. No squirrels. Only our steps and the occasional snap of twig.
Two hours in, we found stripped trees again, bark peeled at impossible heights, grooves too finger-like to dismiss. Park photographed everything, muttering about dexterity and strength and territorial marking. Then, around noon, we reached a clearing that stopped us cold.
The ground was cleared of undergrowth in a circular space fifty feet across. Large stones formed a rough ring around it, each one too heavy to be placed easily. In the center was a pile of bones—deer, elk, maybe bear—arranged with deliberate structure. Surrounding trees held patterns where bark had been removed in geometric designs: circles, lines, stick figures, marks that felt like language hovering just out of reach.
“A gathering site,” Park whispered, reverence in his voice. “Organization. Symbolic thinking. This is culture.”
James turned slowly, eyes wide. “My grandmother talked about places like this,” he said. “Salish stories. Sacred sites. Mountain folk rituals.”
I knelt by the bone pile, and my stomach dropped when I saw what didn’t belong there—objects mixed among the bones. A tarnished watch. A key ring. A belt buckle. A wallet, weathered but intact enough to open.
The driver’s license inside was legible despite water damage: Robert Chen, forty-seven, Everett, Washington.
I knew the name. Chen had gone missing five years earlier. Another “lost hiker.” Another story that ended with shrugs and condolences and the mountain keeping what it took.
“We document everything,” I said, voice tight. “Photos. GPS. Catalog.”
We worked in tense silence until the sensation arrived—the unmistakable prickling awareness that we were being watched. Martinez’s hand drifted toward her sidearm. Park kept glancing toward the treeline. James whispered, “We should go.”
Then we turned and realized we weren’t alone.
Five figures stood at the forest edge, silent as the cedars. Massive. Upright. Watching with an intensity that pinned my lungs. The largest—leader, even my instincts knew it—stood directly in the path back down the mountain. Eight and a half feet tall, maybe more. Shoulders like a wall. Dark matted hair. A face that, despite its nonhuman structure, wore an expression I can only call thoughtful.
Park began to raise his camera. The leader’s head swiveled toward him with controlled speed, a clear message without aggression: No.
Park lowered the camera instantly.
The leader lifted one massive hand and pointed at our weapons. Then it pointed at the objects we’d collected. Then it pointed down the trail.
The meaning was unmistakable: leave the weapons, leave the artifacts, and you can go.
Martinez whispered, “We can’t. That’s evidence.”
The leader picked up a rock the size of a bowling ball and hefted it casually. No threat needed. The strength was the threat.
“We’re leaving everything,” I said quietly, and my voice sounded strange in my own ears. “Back away slowly. Hands visible.”
We set down our guns with exaggerated care and returned the wallet and items to the bone pile. I hated it. Every law enforcement instinct screamed that evidence mattered. But the older instinct—the one that keeps you alive—understood the negotiation we’d been offered.
As we backed toward the trail, the leader did something that shattered any remaining excuse of “animal behavior.” It touched its chest, then pointed at the clearing, then swept its arm to encompass the mountains. Mine. Then it pointed down toward the valley. Yours.
A border.
A treaty.
We retreated. We didn’t run. Running turns you into prey. But we didn’t dawdle either. The hike down was fast, fueled by adrenaline and the unspoken knowledge that the mercy we’d been granted had limits.
At the trailhead, Martinez asked the question that tasted like ash. “What the hell do we report?”
“We report contact,” I said. “Intelligence. Territoriality. Communication. And an ultimatum.”
Park looked pale, his scientific detachment cracked open. “That changes everything,” he murmured. “Everything we know.”
Driving back to town, I felt the world tilt. If we weren’t alone in these mountains—if a people lived up there with culture and language and borders—then Cedar Falls hadn’t been built in isolation. It had been built beside someone else’s home.
Chapter 4 — Lines Drawn in Stone
Sheriff Brennan listened to our report with a grim silence that felt like weight. When I finished, he leaned back and stared at the ceiling as if the answer might be written there.
“So,” he said slowly, “we’ve been living next door to an intelligent nonhuman population, and they’ve told us to stay out of their territory.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you lost all physical evidence.”
“We were given a choice between evidence and our lives, sir,” I replied. “I made the call.”
Brennan nodded once. “Right call,” he said, though it didn’t sound like comfort. “Now we’re in an impossible position.”
He wasn’t wrong. How do you protect a town without causing panic? How do you tell a timber company to abandon profitable high-elevation operations without proof? How do you stop the inevitable thrill-seekers from turning a fragile boundary into a hunting ground?
As if the mountain wanted to answer, Linda transferred a call: an incident at CTI site 7. We arrived to find heavy equipment moved in ways that mocked physics. A bulldozer pushed fifty feet. A log loader turned around. A fuel truck placed on top of cut logs balanced like a child’s toy. No tire tracks. No machinery marks. Just footprints—many of them, suggesting coordinated work.
Robert Miller, CTI’s CEO, stood staring at the perched fuel truck with a face stripped of corporate certainty. “What are we dealing with, Sheriff?” he demanded. “Don’t tell me bears or vandals.”
Brennan glanced at me, then chose the truth with the careful force of a man snapping a branch he wishes would bend. “We have evidence of a large intelligent primate species in these mountains. Territorial. Your upper operations have encroached.”
Miller’s face tightened, then shifted through disbelief into something like reluctant recognition. “You’re talking about Sasquatch,” he said, voice low.
“I’ve seen them,” I answered. “This isn’t folklore.”
Miller stared again at the fuel truck, then pulled out his phone and made a call that changed Cedar Falls’ economy in a single sentence. “Shut down all operations above four thousand feet,” he said. “Effective immediately.”
The shutdown hit town like a hard winter. Reduced hours. Layoffs. Fear of mortgages and grocery bills. But the alternative—continuing and risking lives—was unbearable. The valley’s mood shifted from panic to wary adaptation. People learned which trails to avoid. Kids learned not to wander past certain markers. Hunters talked quieter. Hikers traveled in groups. Nobody laughed at old stories anymore.
Dr. Park stayed, careful with his words in public and meticulous in private. His research took on a deliberately boring title—something about “large primate behavioral patterns”—but the work itself was extraordinary. He recorded the stone-striking sounds and studied them for structure. He cataloged rock arrangements and tree markings. He built a database that began to resemble a dictionary, not of words but of intent.
And the incidents changed. The violence—or what we’d interpreted as violence—decreased. Displays of strength became rarer. When boundaries were respected, the mountain quieted.
Then spring brought something none of us expected.
A teacher called me to the elementary school. A seven-year-old girl named Lily Henderson—daughter of a logging foreman—had brought a woven cedar-bark basket to show and tell. It was filled with fresh huckleberries. Lily said she’d found it on her porch that morning. Her house backed right up to the forest.
Inside the basket was a piece of birch bark scratched with crude but deliberate pictographs: a small stick figure beside a larger one, a circle of dots—berries—between them. A gift. A message.
When I asked Lily what happened, she wiped her eyes and said she’d seen something big outside her window the night before. “It seemed nice,” she whispered. Then she admitted she’d left her own drawing on the porch—her family smiling beside a big hairy creature. She’d written, Please don’t make us leave.
The forest had answered a child’s plea with fruit and a note.
It was the most hopeful—and unsettling—thing I’d seen since the beginning.
From there, more stories followed. A lost hiker found carefully stacked rocks leading back to a main trail. A hunter with a broken leg woke to find his dropped whistle placed beside his sleeping bag, as if someone wanted him to survive his own mistake. The pattern emerging wasn’t “monster.” It was judgment. Restraint. Something like ethics.
That realization changed our approach. I proposed formal boundary markers—not fences, which would read as hostile, but cairns and carved posts in agreed-upon locations, designed with input from Park, the local tribal council, and CTI. On our side, a simple human pictograph. On theirs, a handprint symbol based on casts we’d taken of tracks. A shared language of borders.
The first marker went up in May. When we returned two days later, fresh prints led up to the cairn. They’d examined it. They’d left their own sign: a stone placed carefully on top, smaller stones arranged around it. A reply in rock: We understand. We accept.
Over the next month, every marker gained similar additions—stones, feathers, once a perfectly preserved deer skull placed with a solemnity that felt like ceremony. As the network grew, incidents in town dropped nearly to zero. When someone accidentally crossed a boundary, they found warnings: bones arranged in lines, bark stripped in sharp patterns, the stone-striking sound that said plainly, Turn back.
And slowly, cautiously, Cedar Falls learned what it meant to live next to a people we’d pretended couldn’t exist.
Chapter 5 — The Signal Answered
With hostility reduced, curiosity took its place. Some residents wanted proof for the outside world. Others wanted to keep the secret, terrified of what would happen if trophy hunters and thrill-seekers flooded the valley. We struck a fragile balance: enough documentation for serious research and safety planning, not enough publicity to invite exploitation.
I became something I never trained to be: an unofficial liaison between communities. I patrolled boundary markers, investigated sightings, and learned to read the signs left behind—what was a warning, what was a routine marker, what looked like an attempt at communication.
One late summer evening, I checked a boundary marker at the north edge of town. The sun was sinking and the forest was turning black in the spaces between trees. That’s when I heard the stone-striking—close.
Three strikes. Pause. Two strikes. Pause. Three strikes. Repeated exactly three times.
It sounded deliberate, like an opening line.
My hand drifted toward my sidearm out of old habit, then I forced it away. I was on my side. I had no reason to act like a threat. My heart hammered anyway.
I picked up two stones near the cairn and struck them together, copying the pattern: three, pause, two, pause, three. The sound felt absurdly small in the huge evening air.
Silence.
Then a new pattern from the trees: two strikes, pause, four strikes.
My mouth went dry. I answered: two strikes, pause, four strikes.
The silence stretched, heavy as held breath. Then something stepped into view at the treeline—not approaching, not crossing, simply making itself visible. It was large but not the largest I’d seen. Perhaps female, perhaps young; I had no real way to know. It stood sixty feet away in the fading light, dark hair blending into the forest as if it belonged there in a way we never could.
It raised one hand, palm forward—an ancient gesture of greeting and peace.
I raised my hand in return.
For thirty seconds we stood like that, two beings from different worlds acknowledging each other across a boundary built from stone and fear and hard-won respect. Then it turned and vanished into the trees as silently as it had appeared.
I drove back to the substation with my hands shaking on the wheel, not from terror exactly, but from the sheer weight of what it meant. We had exchanged a signal. We had greeted each other. Not as predator and prey. Not as myth and believer. As neighbors.
That night, for the first time since the incidents began, I turned off all the lights and slept in the dark. Not because I thought the mountains were safe, but because I finally understood something I’d had backward from the start.
Monsters aren’t defined by size or hair or the fact that they move in the treeline when you’re alone. “Monster” is the word we use when we want permission not to understand, permission to fear without thinking, permission to destroy what we can’t explain. Whatever lived in those mountains was not a monster. It was a people defending home, drawing lines, showing restraint, sometimes—astonishingly—showing mercy.
Cedar Falls still hears the stone-striking at night. Sometimes it’s a warning. Sometimes it’s just presence, a reminder. I listen now differently than I used to. I listen like someone who knows the mountains aren’t empty, and never were. And when I lie awake in the dark hours and the house creaks and groans, I remind myself of the one truth that holds steady: we are not alone, and the only way to survive that knowledge is respect.
